CHAPTER II
Isidore’s Relation to Previous Culture
It has been shown that by a combination of circumstances, geographical, political, and religious, Spain in Isidore’s day was more fortunately situated than the remainder of western Europe. Conditions there were ripe for an expansion of intellectual interest beyond the narrow bounds to which the growth of religious prejudice and the uncertainties of life had reduced it. In this expansion, in which it was Isidore’s part to lead, it was inevitable that the chief element should be an attempt to re-appropriate what had been lost in the preceding centuries, and to adapt it in some measure to the changed conditions of life and thought which had arisen.
Isidore’s relation to previous culture must, therefore, be examined. It appears certain, although perhaps it cannot be proved, that he was completely cut off from that world of thought, both Christian and pagan, which was expressed in the Greek language. The tradition of wide linguistic learning which was attached to him after his death and has not been questioned until recent times, has really nothing to rest upon.[42] Isidore himself does not claim a knowledge of Greek, and he seems to have relied on translations for whatever his works contain that is of Greek origin.[43] He nowhere quotes a Greek sentence, and since the Etymologies and others of his works are practically made up of quotations, it seems strange that he did not do so if he had resorted at all to Greek authors. The detached Greek words, and the Greek phrases that occur rarely in his works, are practically all given as derivations of Latin words; and when it is remembered that such detached words and phrases had been extremely common in Latin literature for centuries, it becomes plain that their use by Isidore does not necessarily indicate that he had a reading knowledge of Greek. His case is similar to that of many intelligent persons of the present day who are able to trace words to Latin and Greek roots without being able to read these languages.[44]
What aspects, then, of the Latin literary tradition, which alone has to be taken into account, are of importance as giving an understanding of Isidore and his works?
To him, no doubt, the literary past seemed to be filled chiefly with the succession of Christian writers from Tertullian to Gregory the Great. These, starting out with a religion to which a primitive cosmology was tenaciously attached, were really engaged in amalgamating with it the less hostile items of the Graeco-Roman intellectual inheritance. Men like Augustine were occupied in de-secularizing the knowledge of their times; that is, in reshaping it so that it should fill a subordinate place in the religious scheme and so support that scheme, or at least not be in opposition to it. Orosius’ feat of reshaping history so that it was subservient to religion, is a good example of what was going on in every field. Such secular knowledge as was allowed to exist was brought into more or less close relation to the religious ideas that dominated thinkers, and whatever could not be thus reshaped tended to be rejected and forgotten. The nearest approach to an exception to this is found in the subjects that had formed the educational curriculum of the Greeks and Romans. These offered robust opposition to de-secularization; and though they were attenuated to almost nothing, they succeeded in maintaining their separate existence. This process of de-secularization was about complete by the time of Cassiodorus; in him we have an intellectual outlook that recognizes, outside of the religious scheme, only the seven liberal arts.[45]
On the other hand, there was the pagan literary tradition, which owed all the value that it possessed to contact with Greek culture. Except in the field of legal social relations, the Romans made no original contribution to civilization. They had no proper curiosity concerning the universe, and so could do no thinking of vital importance concerning it. Anything approaching scientific thought in the modern sense was absolutely unknown to them. Therefore, while most of their writers were prosaic and secular in their habit of mind and free from mystical leanings, the intellectual possession of the Romans was not of the close-knit rational character which would have enabled them to resist successfully the avalanche of Oriental superstition which descended on the Western world in the centuries after the conquest of the East.[46] Secular thought in the Roman civilization was thus doomed to undergo a process of decay.
The branch of pagan Latin literature which throws most light on the character of Isidore’s Etymologies is the succession of encyclopedias which constituted so conspicuous a feature of literary history under the Empire. The chief writers in this field, in order of time, were Varro, Verrius Flaccus, the elder Pliny, Suetonius, Pompeius Festus, and Nonius Marcellus. While the motives and causes that impelled them to their task were doubtless many and intricate, consideration of a few paramount influences by which they were affected will explain much of the character of their work, and will indicate the origin of the main peculiarities of Isidore’s encyclopaedia.
In the first place, it is in these encyclopaedias, which profess to cover the fields of literary scholarship and natural science, that the intellectual decline most clearly reveals itself. They may be regarded on the one hand as representing the successive stages in the decay of the intellectual inheritance, and in them we may trace the way in which the array of ordered knowledge was steadily losing in both content and quality. Viewed, on the other hand, as a totality, and considered with reference to the impulses that led to their production, they are again symptomatic of degeneration; they stand as the most thorough-going example of the epitomizing tendency which permeated Roman thought and which evidenced its decline. Written as they were by the intellectual leaders of their day, they represent a curious reversal of the modern situation, since where the leaders in the modern expansion of thought have devoted themselves to specialized inquiry, those of the Roman empire gave their attention to compiling and arranging the whole body of knowledge rather than to extending it at any point. The conditions of their time drove them to generalize rather than to specialize.