WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Cloud of Witnesses: St. Isidore of Seville

Episode Date: June 15, 2026

Join Dominic and Marc as they discuss the life and writings of St. Isidore of Seville. 

Welcome back to Cloud of Witnesses, where we share the stories of the saints who helped shape the church. I'm Dominic Toronto. And I'm Mark Ayers. And today we are recording on Mondi Thursday evening. We've both just come back from our respective services. And we are going to talk about someone who's very interesting, who I hadn't looked at or studied a lot before this episode, St. Isidore of Seville. Yeah, what a guy to go over during Holy Week, so influential to, the way in which we study the faith.

Called by many historians, the last scholar of the ancient world, this guy is just such a bridge from then until now. Without his etymology, I mean, we just wouldn't know so much of what we know about ancient Christianity. So appropriate that on Holy Thursday, we are celebrating this guy,

and I can't wait to talk about him. Yeah, so as is our usual custom, Mark will start with the brief biography of him, and I'll go over some of his works. So without further ado, Mark, take us, lead us into this. All righty. Well, Isidore was born in New Carthage, around the year 560. New Carthage, also called in his time Cartago Spartaria, which is now Cartagena, Spain. So if any Spaniards are listening, you'll recognize that town.

His family was noble. They were Roman, of course, but they were nobles. His father was named Severanius, and his mother was Theodora. Isidore's noble family was a part of the movement that was trying to bring the Visigothic kings from Arianism to Catholicism. So at the time, the Visigoths had been converted to Christianity, but to Aryan Christianity, which is causing a lot of problems in the church. So they were trying to bring them back into full union with the rest of the Christian world.

Just for a little bit of context. This is the late 6th century. That's right. Aryanism had been sort of denounced at the Council of Nicaan 325, but despite that, it still took a long time to sort of fully tamp it out. Obviously, St. Athanasius, the Great, was exiled from his archbishopric several times for trying to defend Orthodox Christology. And a lot of sort of continental Europe, especially the sort of the Visigoths, were Aryans as opposed to Catholics. And Hispania was one of the last major provinces. of the Roman world where Aryan ideas still reigns supreme. So this was a, this was a movement that had a lot of weight around it.

Yeah. All of his siblings ended up becoming saints. His elder brother was the Archbishop of Seville immediately before Isidore. His younger brother was also a bishop in Astigi, and his sister was a nun who allegedly ruled over 40 convents, and 1,000 consecrated religious. So he comes from a very highly religious family. He received his elementary education

at the Cathedral School of Seville, the first school of its kind in Spain. Okay. And at this school, he was taught the trivium and the quadrivium, the classical liberal arts. Which, of course, we... We love here at Haysman College, yes.

He quickly mastered classical Latin as well as a little bit of Greek and Hebrew. Upon the death of his brother, Leander, of Seville. on March 13th, 600 or maybe 601, Isidore succeeded to the Sea of Seville as Archbishop. Okay. On his elevation to the Episcopate,

he immediately constituted himself as the protector of monks. It's unclear whether he was a monk himself. Several of his siblings were monastics, but whether or not he himself was, he very greatly esteemed the monks and saw appropriately, I would argue, that the monastic institutions were critical in maintaining culture,

civilization and deepening of the Christian faith in an area. In a time where there was a great sort of tension between the remaining Roman institutions that were still kind of floating around, I mean, this is about 100 years after the true kind of collapse of Roman political rule in the area. So a lot of the subsystems were still in play. And there was a tension between that and the new barbarian culture, which of course was Germanic, which had come down. And Isidore spent a lot of time trying to bring these two cultures together into a united nation. Okay.

Primarily through religious sources. He is widely celebrated as essentially eradicating Aryanism in Spain and completely stifled the new heresy of acephali from arising at all. He defeated it at its source. Okay. A lot of his success has to do with the fact that he greatly valued education. Using Seville as sort of a nucleus for this, he promoted educational institutions. He brought Aristotle into the common curriculum of the Spanish education long before the Arabs studied Greek philosophy extensively. Okay, that's interesting. Yeah, so... A lot of sort of the revival of Aristotelianism in the West is sort of attributed to to Muslim and Arab translations of Aristotle from Arab, from the Greek into Arabic.

And so, you know, obviously the West knew about Aristotle a little bit before that, and this is sort of one of the figures who is sort of pre-Muslim importation of Aristotle into the West. They did. And in fact, Spain will end up becoming a sort of locus for education in this kind of ladder. half of the early Middle Ages, if you will. There's a lot of emphasis placed on the University of Paris as we get into the high Middle Ages, but a lot of the work comes from Spain. You know, Justinian first gets rediscovered extensively. His Justinianic codes first get taught extensively in Seville later on. And much of that groundwork and foundation can be attributed to the work of Isidore.

Okay. As I mentioned earlier, Isidore was a big protector of the monasteries. And at the time, there was a lot of outside ecclesiastical kind of overreach happening to monasteries where bishops would kind of go outside their purview and try and get the monks to do this or that. And he protected them by saying any ecclesiastic who tries to meddle with monastery internal works will be anathema. Okay. Which is pretty severe.

Anathema, they will be cast out, they'll be cut off. Yeah. So that's a pretty, that's a pretty severe and very strong protection of the monasteries there. Isidore presided over and attended several very influential synods in Spain, the first of which would be the second synod of Seville in November 1619. During the reign of King Sisybud, a provincial council was held where eight other bishops attended all from the ecclesiastical province of batica in southern spain this council was brought about to counter the aforementioned heresy of acephali which essentially without you know

getting too much in the weeds denies the council of calcedon and in that way is a break from the orthodox line of christianity he presided over the third senate of seville which dealt with a conflict over a bishop that had allegedly been wrongfully deposed, and also a concern over Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity, which, if you know anything about Spanish history, is a concern that will continue to remain around. But this synod, unfortunately, we don't have the records for that. Those have not been passed down to us. We do know that it happened, and we know generally what it was about. The biggest council is the fourth national council of Toledo. All bishops of Spain attended to this one, and it was begun on the 5th of December 633. Through his influence, this council promulgated a decree which commanded all the bishops to establish seminaries in their cathedral cities, along the lines of the cathedral school at Seville. The decree prescribed the study of Greek, Hebrew, and the liberal arts, and encouraged interest in law and medicine.

The authority of the council made this education policy obligatory upon all bishops. bishops of the kingdom of the Visigoths. It did also grant a lot of power to the king. The church bound itself in allegiance to the king, and interestingly, this council does not mention the Bishop of Rome, which actually is something that you can see in other documents from around this time. And there is actually a debate that can be had as to whether allegiance to the bishop of Rome is implied by the simple issuing of such a letter.

Sure. Or whether that was not a topic that was on their mind. Isidore died on the 4th of April 636 after serving more than 32 years as Archbishop of Seville. His most lasting and most important work is his etymology. This is the thing that really is most important that we get from him. It is the reason why he is called a doctor of the church. why he is called, again, the last true scholar of the ancient world.

He was the first Christian writer to try to compile a suma of universal knowledge. And Dom, if you want to talk about this? Yeah, so just a little bit about sort of the veneration and celebration of St. Isidore of Seville. He's only canonically celebrated in the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. But yeah, so you mentioned his etymologies in Latin etymologiae. this is just an insanely huge undertaking because as you mentioned

like yeah he literally tried to compile everything known 20 volumes 448 chapters yeah it's I mean if you think the suma theologia is big and this is enormous it took you know a very large part of his work

of his life to to write this and what's interesting is it's not like a theological work. Obviously, he looks at this through an explicitly Christian sort of framework. And, you know, in book eight, he does sort of exclusively, specifically cover religion, Christianity, Judaism, various heretical sex, sort of talks about the magi. But this, this work isn't a, from the beginning, a theological work. It's mostly just a compilation of different secular authors. It's an encyclopedia. Yeah, right.

Yeah. So it's, you know, it's definitely an interesting work you should go check out. Yeah. It really is just kind of a reference novel, really. As I mentioned, a lot of ancient authors whose works have since been lost we only know of through this book. Interestingly, though, this book may also be the reason we don't know about them because in the Middle Ages, the etymologiae was so highly regarded the sections of the work. that he took were considered to be the best sections and the Christian scholar need go no further. Yeah.

Everything you need to know about the ancients that has to do with Christian morality or Christian sociology or whatever you want to do, all of their valuable literature has already been compiled by Isidore. So no need to hold the original text around. Yeah. So it's an interesting, it's an interesting little dilemma there. we may never truly know the true extent of these authors, but perhaps the most invaluable and impressive text

from the early Middle Ages. Yeah. But that is not the text we're going to be looking at today. Today we're going to look at his chronicon, which is sort of a brief history that he writes. And I do mean, like, it's a world history, starting from creation, but the whole thing is just,

just 122 paragraphs and none of them are very long. He starts off this work by sort of mentioning some previous historians who had sort of undertaken to write histories mentioning Eusebius of Cessaria, sort of one of these individuals. And he, again, sort of seeks to write an entire history of the world. He breaks it down into six ages. And I'm just going to sort of walk through what all these ages are. So the first age of the world is from creation down to the flood. And for him, this first age is from, you know, beginning of the world all the way to the year 2,242.

So he reads the chronologies in Genesis as history, which, yeah, which, you know, a lot of times sort of in discussions of young earth, old earth, creationism. The text that we focus on is Genesis 1 and 2, maybe even 3. Yeah, like what is a day? Exactly. For like that is a debated question. So like St. Augustine says, hey, you know, this is all sort of happening instantly in the mind of God. The author is just writing this down for us to sort of parse through. And then there are some who say, no, it was some, you know, patristic fathers who say, no, it really was. six days. So St. Nisidore says it was six days. His first paragraph, he goes, God created everything in six days. On the first day, he fashioned light. On the second, the formament of heaven. On the third, the land and the sea. On the fourth, the stars, on the fifth, the fish and the birds. On the sixth, the animals and the beasts of burden. And finally, the first man, Adam in his image. So he does read Genesis 1, one and two, the creation

story as historical. God made it in six days. Remember, like, this is not a commentary on the book of Genesis, this is a history. So for him, he's reading Genesis as history. And he moves on to the Second Age of the World. For him, this is from Shem down to Abraham. The second age of the world ends in 3,184. When he talks about the Tower of Babel, I hope this was really interesting. This is paragraph 9. He says, Eber at age 134, Borpeleg, in whose time the Tower of Babel was built, and the division of languages was affected. The height of this tower is said to have stretched four miles starting out wide and becoming narrower so that the immense weight might be more easily sustained.

They described the marble temples there as being unmatched in precious stones and gold and many other things that seem unbelievable. The giant Nimrod constructed this tower. After the confusion of tongues, he departed from there for Persia and taught them to worship fire. What? Yeah. This is just really interesting. And, you know, obviously, I don't think that that's an historically accurate.

assertion, but it's still like he's... I get like, you know, kind of like you said, I'm a little agnostic on the issue of young earth creationism and where they're actually giants. Yeah. Because, like my opinion is, nothing in my faith changes. Yeah. There were actually giants who were like 12 feet tall and those are the Nephilim or whatever, whatever belief you want to hold on that topic.

So I see no problem with this. Yeah. I'm also not going to say definitively that that actually happened, but that's really interesting just the way he's interpreting this passage. It makes me think of Prometheus almost. Yes. Yeah. What I think is really interesting here is

you know, it's maybe been a little bit since I've read that section of Genesis but I don't remember that being included in the account and so he seems to be he seems to be think that he's able to sort of take liberties in incorporating other

histories. Sure. Putting it together with the Bible to form a complete picture of the history of the time that they have. Yeah, kind of like explaining pagan mythologies through the lens of Genesis. Yeah, exactly. So then the second age ends in 3,184. The third age goes from Abraham all the way until David.

This third age is 940 years, which brings the third age coming to an end in the year 4,125. The fourth age is David. until the Babylonian captivity, which is 485 years, again, which brings us to an end date of 4,610. Moving on, the fifth age is from the captivity of the Hebrews all the way down to the birth of Christ. And again, he talks about Hellenist influence and then now coming Roman influence. The fifth age ends in the year 5,155. and the sixth age, which is the age that he's in right now

when he's writing this, starts at Octavian Augustus and goes all the way up to his current time. And this is by far the largest section. The sixth age takes up about almost half of his chronicon, which sort of makes sense, because the closer he is to his time, the more sort of accurate history he's able to incorporate into this. So starts

The first paragraph of this section Octavian Augustus ruled for 56 years He and his Imperium after the Sicilian War had three triumphs Dalmatia Asia and later Alexandria against Anthony From there Spain At that point having brought peace on land and sea to the entire world He closed the gates of Janus Which is a reference to the Greek god

The Roman god Janus The two heads who sort of the gate seen as a gatekeeper. Under his Imperium, the writings of Daniel were completed in 70 weeks, and as the kingdom and priesthood of the Jews was coming to an end, the Lord Jesus Christ was born from a virgin in Bethlehem of Judah

in the 42nd year of Octavian's rule. That's so interesting. I wish you had more time to do like a deeper dive of this and really get into interpretations of like, you know, Janice's gate. Exactly, yeah. But wow, I mean, this is, I had honestly, I had never heard

of this particular work of his before. No, yeah. The only work that I was familiar of him before starting research on this was his etymologies. Right. And this, I think this is sort of maybe like a micro look at what his etymologies look like, incorporating obviously scripture, but, you know, trying to take a look at the world. Yeah. And it's being, you know, incorporating pagan sources that are in, you know, harmony with, scriptural sources. And so, you know, the beginning of this, he's sort of, his, historically placing Jesus, again, in history, which is, I think is really, really cool. The Lord was crucified in the 18th year of his, i.e. Tiberius's reign. 5,229 years have elapsed

since the beginning of the world. Peter was sent to Rome against Simon Magus, also Mark the evangelist preaching. Christ and Alexandria wrote his gospel. Talks about St. Peter being crucified by Nero. And St. Peter and Paul being crucified by Nierro. And St. Peter, St. Peter and Paul being crucified by Nero, talks about, you know, Hadrian and all his effects on sort of Christian and then ends in his time. The time remaining for the world cannot be ascertained by human investigation. Our Lord Jesus Christ forestalled every question about this matter when he said, it is not for you to know times or the moment which the father has fixed by his own authority and elsewhere, but of that day, he said, and that hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven,

but the father only. Each one then should think about his own passing, as Holy Scripture says, and all works be mindful of the most recent. When therefore anyone passes away, that moment is the end of his world. Well, Mark, this was a very fun episode. Yeah, absolutely.

I'm glad I was able to learn more about St. Seville of Issa... I'm glad I was able to learn more about St. Isidore of Seville. Is there anything you want to say to our listeners before we wrap up this episode? I just want to wish everyone a great Tritium. Have a happy Easter, everyone, and we'll see you next week. Stay holy.