Isidore composed a polemic treatise on the Catholic Faith against the Jews—De fide Catholica contra Judaeos. The good bishop had nothing to add to the patristic discussion of this weighty controversy. His book is filled with quotations from Scripture. It put the matter together in a way suited to his epoch and the coming centuries, and at an early time was translated into the German and other vernacular tongues. Three books of Sententiae follow, upon the contents of Christian doctrine—as to God, the world, evil, the angels, man, Christ and the Church. They consist of excerpts from the writings of Gregory the Great and earlier Church Fathers.[126] A more original work is the De ecclesiasticis officiis, upon the services of the Church and the orders of clergy and laity. It presents the liturgical practices and ecclesiastical regulations of Isidore’s epoch.
Isidore seems to have put most pious feeling into a work called by him Synonyma, to which name was added the supplementary designation: De lamentatione animae. First the Soul pours out its lament in excruciating iteration, repeating the same commonplace of Christian piety in synonymous phrases. When its lengthy plaint is ended, Reason replies with admonitions synonymously reiterated in the same fashion.[127] This work combined a grammatical with a pious purpose, and became very popular through its doubly edifying nature, and because it strung together so many easy commonplaces of Christian piety. Isidore also drew up a Regula for monks, and a book on the Order of Creation has been ascribed to him. This completes the sum of his extant works upon religious topics, from which we pass to those of a secular character.
The first of these is the De rerum natura, written to enlighten his king, Sisebut, “on the scheme (ratio) of the days and months, the bounds of the year and the change of seasons, the nature of the elements, the courses of the sun and moon and stars, and the signs of tempests and winds, the position of the earth, and the ebb and flow of the sea.” Of all of which, continues Isidore, “we have made brief note, from the writings of the ancients (veteribus viris), and especially those who were of the Catholic Faith. For it is not a vain knowledge (superstitiosa scientia) to know the nature of these things, if we consider them according to sound and sober teaching.”[128] So Isidore compiles a book of secular physical knowledge, the substance of which is taken from the Hexaemeron of Ambrose and the works of other Fathers, and also from the lost Prata of pagan Suetonius.[129]
Of course Isidore busied himself also with history. He made a dismal universal Chronicon, and perhaps a History of the Kings of the Goths, through which stirs a breath of national pride; and after the model of Jerome, he wrote a De viris illustribus, concerned with some fifty worthies of the Church flourishing between Jerome’s time and his own.
Here we end the somewhat dry enumeration of the various works of Isidore outside of his famous “twenty books of Etymologies.” This work has been aptly styled a Konversationslexikon, to use the excellent German word. It was named Etymologiae, because the author always gives the etymology of everything which he describes or defines. Indeed the tenth book contains only the etymological definitions of words alphabetically arranged. These etymologies follow the haphazard similarities of the words, and often are nonsensical. Sometimes they show a fantastic caprice indicating a mind steeped in allegorical interpretations, as, for example, when “Amicus is said to be, by derivation, animi custos; also from hamus, that is, chain of love, whence we say hami or hooks because they hold.”[130] This is not ignorance so much as fancy.
The Etymologiae were meant to cover the current knowledge of the time, doctrinal as well as secular. But the latter predominates, as it would in a Konversationslexikon. The general arrangement of the treatise is not alphabetical, but topical. To indicate the sources of its contents would be difficult as well as tedious. Isidore drew on many previous authors and compilers: to Cassiodorus and Boëthius he went for Rhetoric and Dialectic, and made frequent trips to the Prata of Suetonius for natural knowledge—or ignorance. In matters of doctrine he draws on the Church Fathers; and for his epitome of jurisprudence in the fifth book, upon the Fathers from Tertullian on, and (probably) upon some elementary book of legal Institutes.[131] Glancing at the handling of topics in the Etymologies one feels it to have been a huge collection of terms and definitions. The actual information conveyed is very slight. Isidore is under the spell of words. Were they fetishes to him? did they carry moral potency? At all events the working of his mind reflects the age-long dominance of grammar and rhetoric in Roman education, which treated other topics almost as illustrations of these chief branches.[132]
CHAPTER VI
THE BARBARIC DESTRUCTION OF THE EMPIRE[133]