SAINT ISIDORE OF SEVILLE

St. Isidore of Seville
Isidore of Seville , Doctor
Feast day: April 4




Born at Cartagena, Spain, . 560;
Died in Seville, Spain, in April 4, 636;
Canonized by Pope Clement VIII in 1598;
Declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Innocent XIII in 1722.

Saint Isidore was born into a noble Hispano-Roman family, which also produced SS. Leander, Fulgentius, and Florentina. Their father was Severian, a Roman from Cartagena, who was closely connected to the Visigothic kings. Though Isidore became one of the most erudite men of his age, as a boy he hated his studies, perhaps because his elder brother, Saint Leander, who taught him, was a strict task master.

It is probably that Isidore assisted Leander in governing his diocese, because, in 601, Saint Isidore succeeded his brother Leander to the archiepiscopal see of Seville. During his long episcopate, Isidore strengthened the Spanish church by organizing councils, establishing schools and religious houses, and continuing to turn the Visigoths from Arianism. He presided over the Council of Seville in 619 and that of Toledo in 633, where he was given precedence over the archbishop of Toledo on the ground of his exceptional merit as the greatest teacher in Spain.

Aware of the great boon of education, Isidore insisted that a cathedral school should be established in every diocese in Spain-- centuries before Charlemagne issued a similar decree. He thought that students should be taught law and medicine, Hebrew and Greek, as well as the classics. These schools were similar to contemporary seminaries.

For centuries Isidore was known as 'the schoolmaster of the middle ages,' because he wrote a 20-volume Etymologies or Origins, an encyclopedia of everything that was known in 7th century Europe. His Chronica Majora summarized all the events in the world from creation to his own time drawn from other church historians but with the addition of Spanish history. Another book completed Saint Jerome's work of biographies of every great man and woman mentioned in the Bible plus those of many Spanish notables. His history of the Goths and Vandals is very valuable today. He also wrote new rules for monasteries, including one that bears his name and was generally followed throughout Spain, and books about astronomy, geography, and theology.

While not an original or critical thinker, Saint Isidore's works were highly influential in the middle ages as demonstrated by the very large number of manuscripts of his writings. Dante mentions him in the Paradiso (x, 130), in the company of the Venerable Bede and the Scottish Richard of Saint-Victor. In fact, at the time of his death, Bede was working on a translation of extracts from Isidore's book On the wonders of nature (De natura rerum).

Isidore longed to convert the Spanish Goths, who were Arians. He rewrote the liturgies and breviaries of the Church for their use (known as the Mozarabic Rite, which had been began by Leander), and never wearied of preaching and teaching those in error during his 37 years as archbishop. He also sought to convert the local Jews, but by highly questionable methods.

This extraordinary man loved to give to the poor, and towards the end of his life scarcely anyone could get into his house in Seville, crowded as it was with beggars and the unfortunate from the surrounding countryside.

When he felt that death was near, he invited two bishops to visit. Together they went to the church where one of them covered him with sackcloth and the other put ashes upon his head. Thus clad in the habit of a penitent, he raised his hands to heaven and prayed earnestly for forgiveness. Then he received the viaticum, asked for the prayers of those present, forgave those who had sinned against him, exhorted all to charity, bequeathed his earthly possessions to the poor, and gave up his soul to God.

The archbishop of Seville was considered the most learned man of his century. Not only for the reason that the Church was able to proclaim him Doctor a short time after his death, or because he is the author of the Etymologies, but because knowledge permeated his whole being. The nexus of sanctity and learning gladdens this heart.

Learning did not turn Saint Isidore away from sanctity. Indeed, it was sanctity that surely made such a learned man of him. The saint, possessed by God, is full of gifts of the Holy Spirit; and learning is one of them. This learning, the true science which contains all other sciences, favors new discoveries and multiplies it in every domain that is approached.

Saints are most exclusively the savants of God and their private works are no less important. And savants are a type of saint because any discovery discloses something of God. The philosopher as well as the painter, the seeker as well as the poet, is a savant.

Recall another Spanish saint, John of the Cross, whose works nearly brought a contemporary philosopher to the edges of sanctity. The bird in Braque's last painting is a figure of grace. This revelation leads me to believe that the patient hand that was the means of painting could not have been anything other than that of a man on the way to sanctity. One can paint birds without making them suggest such a presence as Braque's painting does. This presence is not that of the artist, he has absolutely effaced himself; it is the presence of that which finally transcends him, the presence of God.

The most learned persons have perceived the richness, the 'odor' of sanctity. Our age may see it flower; how could it have a taste for anything else after having plumbed the depths of nothingness and despair, if, of course, it still wants something to which it can aspire. Our generation needs something solid, substantial. It is dying of weariness and thirst.

A life-giving stream is still running, all we need to do is bend down to drink it in order to renew the ancient gestures and enter humbly, without hesitation or compromise, into that which does not go out of fashion and does not age: into this Church in which today we pray to Saint Isidore, who is the patron of savants. Saint Isidore, pray for us and for them