The Monastic Rules of Visigothic Iberia - eTheses Repository ...

Hic solus nuntius arentia mentis nostrae saepe uiscera pascit, et uestrorum felicitate
gestorum inter raucisona spumantis sali freta, atque Oceani gurgites, et aequora inquieta
humilitatis nostrae mulcet auditus, quod Caesaraugustam uestram uestra iugis augusta
doctrina nobilitat, et florens per dies singulos uestri culminis uita tanto affluit diuinae legis
studio, quanto et bonorum operum iugi atque sedulo uallatur praeconio.
In the first instance, this long sentence, with its many clauses, is far from the parataxis
associated normally with oral language. There is also here use of words reflecting a poetic
register. Phrases such as arentia ... uiscera to mean „dried flesh, vital parts‟, 289 Oceani
gurgites, „whirlpools of the ocean‟ and aequora inquieta, „restless seas‟ all evoke classical
prose, rather than the simplicitas of many Christian writers, both because of the employment
of the poetic Oceanus and aequor, as well as the use of synonyms in lieu of a single word.
The phrase raucisona spumantis sali freta, „raucous swellings of the frothing sea‟ is also
rather poetic, both for its descriptive element, as well as the used of the poetic salum, „sea‟.
The phrase in addition employs an ABBA construction, which is not typical of spoken speech
and suggests a purposefully manipulated construction. There are other indications of
purposeful manipulation, such as the collocation of the possessive pronouns uestram uestra,
each looking to a different noun (Caesaraugustam uestram and uestra [...] augusta doctrina).
There is not space here to investigate fully the literary backgrounds of Isidore and
Fructuosus. However, the demonstration above shows that both were involved in the literary
circles of their time and were capable of writing in various registers of Latin, both higher and
lower. This is an important fact that will need to be taken into account in the analysis of the
monastic rules.
289 Compare, for example, Ovid Metamorphoses 7. 54-56, “uiscera torrentur primo, flammaeque
latentis indicium rubor est et ductus anhelitus; igni aspera lingua tumet, tepidisque arentia uentis ora
patent, auraeque graues captantur hiatu”.
125