Justified True Belief

(●) The bishop who wrote down what the ancient world knew, because he could see the books going. + Imagine a man who looks along the shelves of his cathedral library and understands, with complete clarity, that these are the last copies. The Roman schools that produced such books have closed. The trade routes that brought writing material from Egypt have been cut. A volume now lasts exactly as long as somebody is willing to copy it out by hand, and fewer people can. What would you do with the twenty or thirty years you had left? Isidore of Seville decided to make one book that held as much of it as he could get in. He called it the Etymologies, because he filed everything under the origin of the word for it, on the conviction that a word remembers something true about the thing it names (T2). It runs to twenty books and something like four hundred and fifty chapters, moving from grammar and rhetoric through arithmetic, music, astronomy, medicine, law, Scripture, the church, God and the angels, human beings, animals, the sky, the earth, buildings, stones, farming, war, ships, clothes and the things in a kitchen. He wrote it by reading everything he could reach and copying out what mattered, and he left it unfinished when he died. It worked, which is the surprising part. For the next eight hundred years the Etymologies was the book a European library had if it had almost nothing else, and it is commonly reckoned the most copied book of the Middle Ages after the Bible itself. A handlist made in the twentieth century, which is simply a bare catalogue of the surviving copies, counted almost twelve hundred medieval manuscripts of it. Several classical authors, moreover, are known to us only because Isidore quoted them before their own works disappeared. He is often called the patron saint of the internet, a title floated in the late 1990s and repeated ever since, though Rome has never formally declared it; the joke has a point, since he really did try to put everything in one searchable place.

(●) c. 560 AD: He was born into a family of Cartagena, the youngest of four children the church would remember by name. + Cartagena sits on the south-east coast of Spain, a harbour town that had changed hands more than once in living memory: the armies of the eastern Roman emperor had taken that stretch of coast back from the Gothic kings who ruled most of the peninsula, and had done it only a few years before Isidore was born. His father Severianus came from there, and no early source says whether the son was born in the old harbour town or in Seville after the family had already gone west, so the handbooks print both. His mother is called Theodora in later sources, which is as much as can safely be said about her. There were four children in that household, and the unusual thing is that the church remembers every one of them. Leander, the eldest, became bishop of Seville. Fulgentius became bishop of Astigi, the modern Écija. Florentina became a nun, and a later tradition credits her with the oversight of forty convents, which is the sort of round number that grows in the telling. Isidore was the youngest. At some point the family left Cartagena for Seville, close to three hundred miles west across the peninsula into the valley of the Guadalquivir. Why they went is not recorded in any source close to the event, though the wars over that coast are the obvious guess. What matters for the rest of the story is that the move put the family inside the Catholic church of a kingdom whose rulers were not Catholic.

(●) c. 570s AD: His parents died while he was still a boy, and his eldest brother raised him. + The one thing the early sources actually tell us about Isidore’s childhood is that his parents died young and left him in Leander’s care. Leander was a monk before he was a bishop, and he seems to have raised his youngest brother the way a monastery raised a boy: by putting him to work on the books. There is a story, repeated in a great many pious retellings, that the boy hated the work, ran off, sat down by a well, noticed the grooves the bucket-rope had worn into the stone rim, understood what patience does to hard things, and went home to his lessons. It is a good story. It also appears centuries after his death and has nothing earlier behind it, so it is best filed as a legend the Middle Ages liked rather than as anything Isidore remembered. What can be said from the evidence is drier and more useful. Isidore later wrote textbooks in the seven liberal arts, which is what the late Roman world called the standard course of general education: grammar, rhetoric and logic first, then arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy. Nobody writes a textbook in a subject he was never drilled in. Somewhere in Seville, under Leander or under a teacher Leander chose, he was drilled.

(●) 589 AD: His brother presided at Toledo while a Gothic king renounced Arianism, and Spain stopped being two churches. + For most of a century the Visigoths had ruled Spain as Arians over a population that was not. Arianism is the teaching, named for Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria, which is to say one of the senior clergy of that city, that the Son of God is the first and highest of all creatures rather than God in the full sense: made, not begotten, and not of one being with the Father. The bishops who met at Nicaea in 325 condemned it, and it had never gone away for all that, and among the Goths it had become something close to a national badge. So a traveller crossing Spain in those years would have found two churches, two sets of bishops and two baptisms in one country, and would have had to know which one he was walking into. Then King Reccared converted, and in May of 589 the Third Council of Toledo made the Catholic faith the faith of the kingdom. Leander of Seville presided over the assembled bishops and preached the closing sermon, which means that the man who had raised Isidore was standing at the front of the room. Isidore himself was roughly twenty-nine, old enough to understand exactly what he was watching: a division that had run through every town in Spain closed in a single session, by a king who could have kept it open and had every worldly reason to. Everything Isidore later did assumes that settlement. His confidence that the bishops of Spain could legislate together, his sense that a kingdom and a church might share one project, even his readiness to write a book for a king, all rest on a unity that was less than a generation old when he inherited it.

(●) c. 600 AD: He buried Leander, took the see of Seville, and held it for about thirty-six years. + Leander died on 13 March, in either 600 or 601, and the brother who had raised him took his place. A bishop’s see is his chair, and by extension the whole district that answers to it, so to take the see of Seville was to become answerable for every church in the south of Spain and for the clergy who served them. Isidore was about forty. Ildefonsus of Toledo, writing within a generation, says he held the office nearly forty years; counting from 600 to his death in 636 gives thirty-six, which is close enough that he was plainly rounding up. What he inherited was more than a diocese. Leander had known Gregory the Great personally, from the years when both men were in Constantinople on their churches’ business, and Gregory had dedicated his enormous commentary on Job, the Moralia, to his Spanish friend. That friendship put Seville in direct correspondence with Rome, and it put Gregory’s books on Isidore’s desk, where they stayed: the Sententiae, Isidore’s own manual of doctrine and morals, is quarried out of the Moralia more than out of anything else. The letters that survive from his episcopate are formal and give away almost nothing personal, but they show a man constantly consulted, by bishops, by clergy, and by kings. In November of 619 he presided at the Second Council of Seville, where a Syrian bishop of the party called the Acephali, the "headless ones" who held that Christ has only one nature and not two, argued his case in front of the assembled bishops. The acts of the council record Isidore answering him out of the fathers until he gave way. It is the one scene from his working life where we can hear him arguing rather than compiling.

(●) c. 613 AD: A king asked him what an eclipse was, and he answered with a book. + King Sisebut, who reigned from 612 to 621, was an unusual monarch: he wrote Latin verse himself, tolerably well, and he wanted to know things. He asked his bishop about the sky, and Isidore wrote him De natura rerum, "On the Nature of Things": the days and the seasons, the courses of the sun and moon, eclipses, thunder, the rainbow, the winds, the sea. What is striking is what he declines to do with the opening he is given. An eclipse in that world was widely read as an omen, usually of a king’s death, and a bishop writing to a king who had asked him about the sky had every opportunity to say so. Isidore instead explains that the sun goes dark when the moon passes in front of it, and the moon goes dark when it passes into the shadow the earth throws. Sisebut liked the book enough to write a poem back about eclipses, which is preserved with it. Not everything from that reign reads as well. In about 615 Sisebut ordered the Jews of his kingdom baptized by force. Isidore recorded it in his History of the Goths and passed judgment on it in one sentence: the king had zeal, but not according to knowledge, for he compelled by power those whom he should have summoned by the reasoning of faith. The phrase is Paul’s, from Romans 10:2, and Isidore meant it as Paul did. Eighteen years later he would preside over a council that wrote that very principle into canon law, which is the church’s own rulebook for itself, and then, in the very next breath, went back on it.

(●) 633 AD: He presided over every bishop in Spain, and the council put a school in every bishop’s house. + On 5 December 633 the bishops of Spain met in the church of Saint Leocadia in Toledo, with King Sisenand present and Isidore’s name heading the signatures. He was in his seventies. The Fourth Council of Toledo is the largest and most consequential of the Visigothic councils, and its fingerprints are on Spanish church life for the next century. A council of that kind issued its decisions as numbered rulings called canons, and the canons of 633 range over most of what a church does. They unified the liturgy, so that the same order of service was used from one end of the kingdom to the other. They laid down how a king was to be chosen and what was owed him. And canon 24 ordered that the younger clergy of a diocese were to live together in one house under a senior cleric of tested character, who was to be their teacher in doctrine and the witness of how they lived. That last provision is easy to skim past and hard to overvalue. It meant that every cathedral in the kingdom was now supposed to run a school, and the one Isidore already kept at Seville was the working model. Later writers describe that school as teaching Greek and Hebrew as well as law and medicine; the canon itself says nothing so grand, and since Isidore leans on Latin translations wherever Greek is involved, the description is likelier to be the admiration of a later century than a timetable. The council also passed a long block of canons about the Jews of Spain, and those are the part of his record that will not go quietly.

(●) 636 AD: He died on 4 April with the Etymologies unfinished, and his pupil cut it into the twenty books it has had ever since. + A cleric named Redemptus, who was there, wrote down how it went. Isidore knew he was dying. He had himself carried into the church of Saint Vincent, where two bishops put a penitent’s sackcloth on him and ashes on his head. He prayed aloud and asked God’s pardon for his sins, received the body and blood of Christ, and asked the people standing there to pray for him. Then he forgave every debt anyone owed him, gave away the money he still had, and went home. He died four days later, on 4 April 636, and was buried between his brother Leander and his sister Florentina. The Etymologies was on his desk and unfinished. He had begun it at the request of Braulio, bishop of Zaragoza, who had been his pupil and who spent years writing to ask when he could have it; parts of it were already in circulation as school texts before the author died. So the book came to its editor the way a house comes to a buyer with the scaffolding still up. Braulio took the manuscript, cut a work its author had marked off only by headings into the twenty numbered books it has carried ever since, and attached to it a catalogue of everything Isidore had written, which is why we know what the corpus was at all. Four hundred and twenty-seven years later, in 1063, his remains were carried north to León and laid in the church that still bears his name.

What He Taught

(T1) Writing is how a people refuses to forget. + Everyone knows the small version of this. You write the milk on a list because you will not remember the milk. The note on the fridge is doing something your memory cannot be trusted to do, and it does it for as long as the paper lasts. Isidore lived in the century when the paper stopped lasting. Papyrus came from Egypt, and Egypt had gone; parchment was made from animal skins and was expensive; the Roman schools that turned out copyists had closed one after another. A book in his world was not an object you owned but a process somebody had to keep performing. Stop copying, and in two generations the thing is gone as though it had never been written. So when he defines a letter of the alphabet, he does not define it as a mark for a sound. He defines it as a way of holding a thing down. Letters are signs of things, he says, and their power is that they speak the words of absent people without a voice: they come in through the eye instead of the ear. Things are fettered by letters so that they cannot escape through forgetfulness. That is the whole programme of his life in one image, and it is why a busy bishop spent his last years copying other men’s sentences into one enormous file rather than writing something original of his own. He was not trying to say something new. He was trying to stop something old from escaping.

(Q) "Letters are signs of things, symbols of words, whose power is so great that without a voice they speak to us the words of the absent... The use of the letters was invented in order to remember things. For things are fettered by letters in order that they may not escape through forgetfulness." + Source: Isidore, Etymologies I, 3, 1–2 (Brehaut translation, 1912). He is at the very start of the whole encyclopedia, in the chapter on the ordinary letters that elementary teachers are occupied with, and he stops to say why they matter at all (T1).

(T2) Find where a word came from and you stand nearer to the thing it names. + An etymology is simply the origin of a word: where it came from and what it meant before it meant what it means now. "Disaster" comes from an old phrase for a bad star. "Salary" comes from salt, which is what a Roman soldier was once partly paid in. Most of us enjoy this the way we enjoy trivia, as a decoration on top of the real knowledge. Isidore thought it was the road in, not the decoration. If you want to know what a river is, he says, notice that flumen comes from fluere, to flow. If you want to know what a man is, notice that homo is from humus, the ground he was taken from. He believed that words carry the reason a thing was named, and that the reason a thing was named is usually something true about the thing. So he built his whole encyclopedia on that principle, and filed all of human knowledge under the words for it. You might think, "That cannot possibly work, and half of those derivations must be nonsense." A good deal of it is. Isidore himself allows that some names were given by whim and have no etymology to find, and he cheerfully offers derivations from opposites, so that a shady grove (lucus) is named from shining (lucere) because it does not shine. That is a pun doing the work of an argument, and modern linguistics has undone a great many of his guesses. But notice what the method assumes, because the assumption outlasted the guesses. It assumes that the world is ordered, that human speech about it is not arbitrary noise, and that a patient reader can therefore work backwards from the name to the nature. That is not a claim about grammar. It is a claim about a world that was made rather than one that happened, and it is why a bishop could think an encyclopedia was a religious act.

(Q) "A knowledge of etymology is often necessary in interpretation, for, when you see whence a name has come, you grasp its force more quickly. For every consideration of a thing is clearer when its etymology is known." + Source: Isidore, Etymologies I, 29, 2 (Brehaut translation, 1912). The chapter that gave the book its name. In the sentence before this one he defines etymology as working out the force of a word by interpreting it, and notes that Cicero had called the same thing notatio, a marking-out (T2). In the sentence after, he concedes that not all names were given according to the nature of the thing, and that some therefore have no etymology to find.

(T3) History is what somebody saw. + There is a difference between the account a witness gives of a traffic accident and the version going around the street an hour later, and everybody feels the difference without being taught it. The first is somebody saying what he saw. The second is somebody saying what he heard. Isidore builds that distinction into the definition. The Greek word historia, he says, comes from seeing and coming to know, and among the ancients nobody wrote history unless he had been present at what he described. His reason is plain and a little blunt: we understand what we see better than what we pick up by hearsay, and what is seen gets told without lying. Christians inherited the distinction and have leaned on it hard, because the claim at the centre of the faith is a claim of exactly that kind. Luke opens his Gospel by saying his account comes from those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning (Luke 1:1–4). John opens his first letter by insisting on what was heard, seen with the eyes, looked upon and touched with the hands (1 John 1:1–3). That is not a religious experience being reported. It is testimony, offered in the register Isidore is describing. Isidore did not keep his own rule, though, and he knew it. His Chronicle and his History of the Goths cover centuries he could not possibly have watched, and he put them together out of earlier books, which is exactly the thing he holds apart from history proper a few chapters later when he separates history from annals. Annals are the year-by-year records a writer compiles of what happened before his time, one entry to a year, taken on somebody else’s word. By his own definition that is what most of his historical writing is. He was a librarian working in an age with almost no witnesses left in it, and the standard he stated was higher than the one he could meet.

(Q) "For among the ancients no one wrote history unless he had been present and witnessed what was to be described. For we understand what we see better than we do what we gather by hearsay. For what is seen is told without lying." + Source: Isidore, Etymologies I, 41, 1–2 (Brehaut translation, 1912). He files history under grammar, and gives the reason in the next clause: whatever is worth remembering is entrusted to letters (T1, T3).

(T4) The heavens are there to be studied, and a man’s future is not written in them. + Open a newspaper and you may still find the two things side by side: a page about a spacecraft, and a page telling Capricorns to expect a difficult week. We keep them apart without thinking about it. Isidore had to do the separating himself, in a world where one respectable science covered both. He draws the line in a single chapter. Astronomy, he says, deals with the turning of the heavens, the rising and setting and motion of the heavenly bodies, and where their names came from. Astrology is partly natural and partly superstitious. The natural part is the part that describes the courses of the sun and moon and stars and the regular succession of the seasons, and that part he keeps: it is how you know when to plant and when Easter falls. The superstitious part is the part that casts nativities, which is to say draws up a chart of where every heavenly body stood at the hour a particular child was born, distributes the twelve signs of the zodiac among the parts of a person’s body, and reads a character off the position of the stars at that birth. That part he rejects. He goes further than the label. He denies the working assumption of the whole business, which is that the planet called Mars has anything to do with war or the planet called Venus with love. Those are names men gave, and the names carry no power. It is a sharper piece of reasoning than his century usually managed, and it cuts the ground out from under the horoscope entirely. Where he stops short has to be said plainly, though, or the praise turns into flattery. He still thought astrologers sometimes foretell truly, and he accounted for it by a partnership with evil spirits rather than by any power in the stars; and he counted the wise men who came to Bethlehem among the astrologers. A man can see a principle clearly and still not carry it the whole distance, and that is what happened here. He got the principle right and did not follow it all the way down.

(Q) "It is natural astrology when it describes the courses of the sun and the moon and the stars, and the regular succession of the seasons. Superstitious astrology is that which the mathematici follow, who prophesy by the stars... and endeavor to predict the nativities and characters of men from the course of the stars." + Source: Isidore, Etymologies III, 27, 2 (Brehaut translation, 1912). The mathematici are not mathematicians in our sense. In late Latin the word had come to mean the professional casters of horoscopes, and Roman law had been banning them on and off for centuries (T4).

(T5) A law drawn up for anyone’s private advantage is not a law. + A council votes a new road through the edge of town. The route is defensible, the paperwork is clean, and the road happens to run past land the chairman’s family owns. Nothing illegal has occurred. Everyone in the room knows something has gone wrong anyway, and the difficulty is saying what. Isidore says it in a sentence, in the middle of the book on laws, under a heading that asks simply what a law ought to be. A law will be honourable, just, and possible. It will suit nature, and the customs of the country, and the place and the time. It will be necessary and useful. It will be clear, so that nothing lurks in its obscurity for catching people out. And it will be drawn up for no one’s private advantage, but for the common good of all the citizens. Two of those clauses are easy to walk past and repay stopping over. "Possible" means that a law nobody can keep is not a strict law but a bad one, since it manufactures guilt instead of restraining harm. "According to the custom of the country" means that a law which ignores how people actually live will be obeyed by nobody, however just it looks written down. Isidore is not describing an ideal republic here. He is telling working bishops and working kings how to tell a law from an instrument. The phrase that travelled furthest is the last one. The common good means the good held in common, the good of the whole body of citizens as such, which is precisely what a private advantage is not. Five centuries later that sentence would be sitting in the foundations of European law.

(Q) "Law will be honorable, just, possible, according to nature, according to the custom of the country, adapted to the place and time, necessary, useful, clear also, lest it contain anything in its obscurity that tends to fraud, drawn up for no one’s private advantage, but for the common good of all citizens." + Source: Isidore, Etymologies V, 21, 1 (Brehaut translation, 1912). The whole chapter is this one sentence. Two chapters earlier he had said what law can do (permit, forbid, punish) and one chapter earlier why it was made at all: so that human boldness is checked by fear of it, innocence is safe among the wicked, and the power to harm is bridled by dread of punishment.

(Q) "Histories of the heathen do no harm to their readers where they tell what is useful. For many wise men have put past deeds into their histories for the instruction of the present." + Source: Isidore, Etymologies I, 43, 1 (Brehaut translation, 1912). A short chapter on whether history is any use, and a quiet answer to a worry that ran right through the early church: whether a Christian should be reading pagan books at all. Isidore worried about it too, and says harsher things elsewhere about the poets. But when he had to decide what to do with the shelf in front of him, he copied it.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) For a thousand years, what Europe remembered of the ancient world it remembered partly through him. + Braulio of Zaragoza, who edited the Etymologies and knew exactly what he was holding, wrote the first assessment, and he borrowed Cicero’s words to Varro to do it: "While we were strangers in our own city, and were, so to speak, sojourners who had lost our way, your books brought us home, as it were, so that we could at last recognize who and where we were." Strangers in their own city is not a flourish. Braulio’s generation lived among Roman roads, Roman aqueducts and Roman law without knowing what any of it had been for. The verdict stuck, and it kept being restated by people with no reason to flatter a dead Spaniard. In 653, still within living memory of him, the Eighth Council of Toledo called Isidore the most learned man of the latter ages. Seven centuries after that, Dante put him in the sphere of the sun among the wise, naming him in a single line with Bede and Richard of St Victor (Paradiso X), which is a considerable compliment when you notice how short that line is and who else is standing in it. And in 1722 Pope Innocent XIII declared him a Doctor of the Church, a title Rome reserves for the handful of writers whose teaching it reckons of lasting use to the whole body. The numbers say the same thing less warmly. That twentieth-century handlist counted almost twelve hundred medieval manuscripts of the Etymologies, and a recent re-examination of it counts four hundred and forty-three of those witnesses copied between the seventh century and the early eleventh. It was printed in 1472, within twenty years of Gutenberg. Those are large figures, but the way to feel them is to picture one small monastery with thirty books in it: Scripture, a psalter, a service book, a rule for the monks’ day, some Augustine, and Isidore, because Isidore is where you look up anything the others assume you already know. And where an ancient author is lost, his sentences sometimes survive only inside Isidore’s quotation of them, which is the plainest possible measure of what the copying was for.

(†) His account of law passed into the church’s law books and from there to Aquinas. + Canon law is the church’s own internal law, the body of rules by which it governs itself, and for most of the Middle Ages the standard textbook of it was the Decretum that a teacher named Gratian assembled at Bologna around 1140. Gratian’s opening distinctions have to settle what law is before they can sort out anything else, and the definitions he reaches for are Isidore’s, out of Book V: the division of law into natural law, the law of nations and civil law, which is to say what is right for everyone everywhere, what the nations have come to hold in common between them, and what a particular people has enacted for itself; and alongside that division, the account of what a statute is for. From there it went wherever canon law went, which is to say into the hands of everyone being trained to govern a church. Thomas Aquinas’s treatise on law in the Summa Theologiae (I-II, questions 90 to 97) quotes Isidore again and again, including the sentence in (T5). He quotes him, moreover, in the most respectful way available to a scholastic, one of the medieval university theologians who taught by raising every objection he could find and then answering it: he treats Isidore as a position worth testing. Aquinas puts Isidore’s definitions up as objections, asks whether they can stand, and then shows how they hold once the terms are made precise. A definition that has to be argued with for four hundred years is doing more work than a compliment ever could. It is worth being exact about what Isidore contributed and what he did not. He did not invent these categories; he took them from Roman jurists and from the fathers, as he took nearly everything. What he did was state them briefly enough to be memorised, arrange them so they could be found, and put them in the one book every library had. That is the service a great compiler renders, and the twelfth century could not have done its work without it.

(†) Where his own record will not bear him out: he said faith cannot be forced, then bound people to a baptism forced on them. + This is the hardest thing on his ledger, and it is his own, not something later readers did with his books. It has to be set out in the order it happened. - What he said. When King Sisebut had the Jews of Spain baptized by force in about 615, Isidore wrote the judgment into his own History of the Goths: the king had zeal, but not according to knowledge, for he compelled by power those whom he ought to have summoned by the reasoning of faith. The words are Paul’s about his own people in Romans 10:2, and Isidore is using them exactly as Paul does, of a sincerity aimed wrongly. - What the council said first. At Toledo in 633, with Isidore presiding, canon 57 says it outright: nobody is to be forced, and they are to be persuaded to convert by the free exercise of the will rather than driven. Modern scholars credit the wording of that canon to Isidore himself. As a statement of principle it is ahead of most of what Christendom would manage for another thousand years. - What the same council said next. The same canon then rules that those already baptized under Sisebut must be held to the faith they received, because they have taken the sacraments. Canon 60 orders that the baptized children of Jews be separated from their parents and brought up in monasteries or in the houses of God-fearing Christians, and canon 65 bars Jews and those of Jewish descent from holding public office. - Why the second half destroys the first. A baptism a man did not choose does not become his because he is told he may not leave it; that is the coercion of canon 57 arriving one sentence late. And taking a child out of his parents’ house to secure his religion is not persuasion by the free exercise of the will, it is the same compulsion aimed at someone too small to resist it. Isidore’s own principle, applied evenly, condemns his council, and his own sentence about Sisebut is the sentence that convicts him. Two things should be said alongside that, neither of them as an excuse. The first is that he did know the better way and used it: his two books On the Catholic Faith against the Jews, written for his sister Florentina, argue the case for Christ out of the Law and the Prophets, which is argument and not force, whatever a reader makes of the arguments. The second is that the council’s canons were a compromise with a Christian king who wanted the problem solved, and compromises of that kind are how a church with real power usually goes wrong. Isidore is not remembered here as a monster. He is remembered as a good man who wrote down the right principle and then signed the document that broke it.