Course XXV - Teaching 4: Isidore of Seville and His Relatives

Intrinsically the life of the Initiates cannot be known in his historical and geographical situation but by knowing the characteristic and strategic mission that they have performed.
Isidore of Seville’s mission is peculiar and extraordinary. He inherits an intact Christian faith on the divinity of Jesus Christ and synthesizes with short paragraphs the whole wisdom in his “Ethimologies” by legating to Christian posterity a compass with scientific orientation. The Goth Christendom is however the absolute affirmation of religion over culture and science.
In the fourth century, a thick veil extends over the whole Europe. Continuous invasions by barbarians make beings fight to save lives and food, and the sense of historic values is lost.
Isidore tries to save among so many ruins the treasure of science, by adapting it to Christian possibilities and beliefs.
In addition to it, the mission of Isidore’s family is equally important. One may say Leander is a defender of faith, and Isidore a defender of Christian science.
His father, of Greco-Roman ancestors, had migrated for political reasons from Cartagena to Seville. His mother was of Visigoth lineage; so, an Arian woman converted to Catholicism. From this marriage, Leander, Fulgence, Florentine and Isidore came into being.
In this Christian family the problem of that time would palpitate. His father, a Catholic, defends the divinity of Jesus Christ, and his mother, an Arian, tries to mitigate and humanize this divinity. If Christendom were losing the value of divinity, based on Christ, it would have lost any possibility of survival. Religion only survives if its origin is divine and non-human.
Leander is the elder and understands the definite importance of this question. So he defends at home the Catholic dogma and her mother accepts it.
He who is a good organizer at home must try to organize a people. And Leander makes this as a monk, as a priest, as a Bishop and as a Christian theologian. The fight is strenuous and hard; he understands it is a fight of to life and death and that to define it on Earth he needs to be helped by politics. Visigoth kings are Arian. So he is on the side of the rebellious Hermenegild against his father, since the former is Catholic. He knows Hermenegild is not right politically; but is Catholic and this is enough. He stands with him sufferings and exile, and when he is murdered in prison, he proclaims him a martyr. He sustains his brother Fulgence and her sister Florence, with a weak character and, after the death of the king Leovigild, makes of Recaredo, his son, the new king.
Catholicism is safe; the divinity of Christ is affirmed and his work achieved. But during these fights the science declines.
The littlest in the family, Isidore, educated by Leander, after the death of the latter, gets the Episcopal pallium, an intact faith and a steady Catholic future. But fanaticism and ignorance have destroyed and devastated the ancient science: his work is to collect pieces of the latter, give it a Christian aspect and legate it to posterity.
He tries to develop all sciences in his “Ethimologies” but his intent is unsuccessful. By synthesizing them he removes their real value; there is not a true rule but a reference point toward the very rule, as if he told to the wayfarer of Middle Ages: look, here there is a possibility, scrutinize and you will be able to find.
“Ethimologies” deal with all sciences: literature, philosophy, mathematics, medicine of which he was very fond, physics et cetera. In addition to his wisdom, Isidore is a saint. He lived in centuries when the Bishop was a monk among monks, a father among his children and a shepherd among his flock. Death did not find him aslept. Standing he ordered his monks to take him before the altar: he wanted to die worshipping the Lord that he had recognized over everything in his lifetime.