Saints are not only people of their time but of other times too. It’s not often that you find articles about the same person written in January 2002, ‘Searchin’ for a Surfer Saint’, one written in 1860, describing ‘the last scholar of the ancient world’, and one from 653 saying he was, “The extraordinary doctor, the latest ornament of the Catholic Church, the most learned man of the latter ages, always to be named with reverence, Isidore.”
Your browser may not support display of this image. Isidore was famous in his own day for his book in twenty volumes which covered everything he knew or could find out about. He wrote about grammar and logic, medicine and libraries, law, ecclesiastical structures and literature, theology, the Church and sixty eight different Christian sects, languages, the origin of words, anthropology, about birds and beasts, the world (he knew it was a globe), physical geography, public buildings and roads, metallurgy, agriculture, war and games, ships, houses, clothes, food, agricultural and domestic tools and, in the last volume, furniture. He wrote other books too.
Isidore became Bishop of Seville at a time when the influence of the civilisation started by Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Greeks and continued by the expansion of the Roman Empire, was beginning to fragment under the weight of invasions by the Goths and Visigoths. The machinery of government and classical learning were disintegrating. The invaders had no interest in the civilisation of the people they conquered – it had not helped them to survive, had it? The invaders, though small in number, had spread barbarism and scorn for learning wherever they went.
Isidore set out to preserve as much as he could and to pass it on. He collected the best of ancient literature and knowledge and was so successful that his work was reprinted at least ten times in the Middle Ages. In fact, his success was such that people began to ignore or even lose Isidore’s original sources and came to rely solely on Isidore himself.
Isidore was not interested in knowledge for its own sake. It was a means of preserving a Christian way of life and tradition. Various heresies and misinterpretations of the Gospel were beginning to spread in Spain. Isidore’s work was so clearly expressed and convincing that Spanish Christianity did not break up into fighting factions. Seville became a centre of learning which carried on even through centuries of Arab occupation. Ibn Zuhr, who taught the most famous Arab scholar, Averroes of Cordoba, came from Seville. It still has one of the premier universities of Spain.
Isidore wrote so that his teaching would be available to everyone in Spain. He wanted the Visigoths to know and understand the value of the civilisation they were replacing. His third book is set out as a conversation between Man and Reason. Man, i.e. the Visigoth, complains about the human condition and Reason, i.e. the Church, comforts him by explaining the advantages and disadvantages of virtue and vice. He also wrote biographies of famous Christians and about the Fathers of the Church as real life examples.
Isidore succeeded in making a homogenous whole out of the Hispano-Gothic kingdom using every tool in Christianity and education that could be brought to bear. He organised seminaries in every significant town. He made the bishops throughout Spain accountable for implementing his programme of education. His statecraft persuaded the Gothic kings to come round to his ideas of representative government founded on a well educated population. These ideas have been immeasurably valuable throughout the world.
Isidore was canonised during the Counter Reformation as an example of the power of the Church to overcome ignorance and social disintegration. He was nominated by the Pontifical Council for Social Communications as the patron saint of the Internet, hence the article in Wired Magazine in 2002.
Author: C B Whittle