The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville - Pot-pourri

to establish educational centers at each cathedral city
of Spain. Bishop Braulio’s claims that the Etymologies
were written at his own request (Letter II and Renotatio)presume
a clerical motive, and Braulio’s sense of the
Etymologies’ purpose is to the point: “Whoever thoughtfully
andthoroughlyreadsthroughthiswork...willnot
be ignorant of the knowledge of human and divine matters,
and deservedly so. Overflowing with eloquence of
various arts with regard to nearly every point of them
that ought to be known, it collects them in summarized
form.” The work, then, aims to gather what ought to be
known, especially by a cleric, in a compendium.
More precisely, the form of the work indicates Isidore’s
intentions. It is written in easy Latin, in relentlessly utilitarian
prose. At the outset it presents the Seven Liberal
Arts, with an obviously propaedeutic motive. It is a
storehouse, to be sure, but it also provides a reasonably
sequential general education. The hundreds of citations
illustrate the facts presented, but conversely they exemplify
the kinds of reading, pagan and Christian, that the
Etymologies can enrich. Generally the treatment is in
continuous prose, not tables or lists, and its effort at
pleasing variation – even when the facts presented are
rather repetitive in form – implies a reader absorbing
the work consecutively, even as its careful organization
ensures access topic by topic to a reader looking for a particular
fact. In an era when the gravest dangers to Christianity
were thought to be intellectual errors, errors in
understanding what one read – that is, heresies like Arianism
– mastery of the language arts was the Church’s
best defense. Isidore’s book constituted a little library for
Christians without access to a rich store of books (it even
incorporates a good deal of material from Isidore’s own
previous books) in order to furnish capable Christian
minds.
Although a good number of statements in the Etymologies
address particular Christian concerns, such
54 Euhemerus’s utopian novel, Sacred Scripture, written around
300 bce, isextant only in fragments and epitomes. It presented the
idea that Uranus, Cronos, and Zeus were human kings whose subjects
worshipped them as gods – an idea not alien to Augustan Rome.
Christians naturally seized on the idea. For the development of the
idea of euhemerism and physical allegory see Don Cameron Allen,
Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical
Interpretation in the Renaissance (Baltimore, 1970). Examples of
euhemeristic and rationalizing interpretations of such mythological
figures as Scylla and Hydra may be found at II.xii.6 and XI.iii.28–31
and 34.
The character of the Etymologies 19
statements amount to comments by the way when theologically
incorrect ideas emerge in Isidore’s sources. The
core of the work is notapologetic but informational.
Still, we find Isidore carefully denying such superstitions
as that a turtle’s foot on board retards the progress
of a ship (XII.vi.56), or that the stars have predictive
power – “These [horoscopes] are undoubtedly contrary
to our faith, and so they ought to be ignored by Christians,
so that these things are not seen to be written
up” (III.lxxi.38). Reporting that augurs claim to predict
the future by observing crows, he remarks, “It is a
great sin to believe that God would entrust his counsels
to crows” (XII.vii.44). Isidore’s persistent response
to pagan religious belief is euhemerism, the interpretation
of pagan divinities and mythological figures as
in fact human beings wrongly elevated as supernatural
creatures by benighted heathen. 54 In his chapter on the
pagan gods (VIII.xi) Isidore begins confidently, “Those
who the pagans assert are gods are revealed to have once
been men, and after their death they began to be worshipped
among their people.” In the same chapter (section
29)herejects the tradition of interpreting the names
of the gods as expressing universal physical properties,
“physical allegory,” such that Cronos would represent
time, Neptune water. Treating the names of the days of
the week (V.xxx.5–11) Isidoregivesboth the Christian
and the pagan terms. Noting that the latter are named
from heathen gods – Saturday from Saturn, etc. – he
is careful to remind us that those figures were actually
gifted humans, but he acknowledges that these names for
days are in common use. “Now, in a Christian mouth,
the names for the days of the week sound better when
they agree with the Church’s observance. If, however,
it should happen that prevailing practice should draw
someone into uttering with his lips what he deplores
in his heart, let him understand that all those figures
whose names have been given to the days of the week
were themselves human.” We sense here both Isidore’s
theological precision and his episcopal tolerance.
The learned tradition that lies behind Isidore’s work
would lend him five schemes of organization from which
to choose. In roughly chronological order these are:
the sequential “scholiastic” order of a particular text,
as used by the scholiasts on ancient texts, and commentators
on master texts like Vergil (Servius) and the
Bible (the Church Fathers); the “encyclopedic” order
from Varro through Pliny, arranged in rational order