Leander of Seville

Leander was born around 534 at Cartagena in southeastern Spain, into a family that produced four saints. His father Severianus was a provincial official; his brothers Fulgentius and Isidore both became bishops, and his sister Florentina led a community of nuns. Isidore of Seville, the great encyclopedist of the early Middle Ages, was raised largely by Leander after their parents died.

The family moved to Seville, where Leander became a monk and then, around 578 or 579, bishop.

Spain at that moment was ruled by the Visigoths, who were Arian, they held that the Son was made, not eternally God, while the Hispano-Roman population was Nicene. Two churches, two hierarchies, one country, and a century of resentment between them.

Leander worked on the royal family. He instructed King Leovigild's elder son Hermenegild, who converted to the Nicene faith and then, married to a Frankish Catholic princess, rose in revolt against his father. The rebellion failed. Hermenegild was captured and executed in 585, and Leander, who had been sent into exile at Constantinople for his part in it, watched from a long way off.

The exile was not wasted. At Constantinople he met the papal legate Gregory, later Pope Gregory the Great, and the two became lifelong friends. Gregory dedicated his Moralia in Job, the most widely read commentary of the Middle Ages, to Leander, saying it grew out of their conversations.

Leander returned to Seville after Leovigild's death in 586. The new king was Reccared, the younger son. Within a year Reccared renounced Arianism, and in May 589 Leander presided in effect over the Third Council of Toledo, where the king, his nobles, and the Arian bishops publicly confessed the Nicene faith and the Visigothic kingdom became Catholic. Leander preached the closing homily. It survives, and it is a sermon about joy rather than victory.

That council also carried the decision that a version of the Nicene Creed containing the word filioque, that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, be recited at Mass in Spain, a practice that spread north and eventually became one of the standing points of division between the Latin and Greek churches.

Leander wrote a rule for nuns addressed to his sister Florentina, and works against Arianism that have not survived. He died at Seville about 600 or 601 and was succeeded as bishop by his brother Isidore.

Sources: Isidore of Seville, De viris illustribus; Gregory the Great, Dialogues and the dedicatory letter of the Moralia in Job; the Acts of the Third Council of Toledo (589); the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.