St Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636), a Spanish bishop and the patron saint of the Internet, was one of the most learned men of the West in his day – and for a thousand years one of the most quoted.
Fans: Leonardo da Vinci, Petrarch, Alcuin, Bede.
He is best known for “Etymologies” (633), an early encyclopedia, a “work of very mediocre intelligence” according to C.S. Lewis. It summed up Isidore’s 16 other books, making it an outline of his knowledge of the world. It featured a good understanding of Latin, half-understood Greek science and Christianized Roman learning.
“Etymologies” became one of the standard reference books of the Western Middle Ages. It listed everything an educated person of the time would or should know. Like that the Earth is not flat.
The book starts out with what became known as the trivium and quadrivium:
- trivium: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic.
- quadrivium: mathematics, geometry, music, astronomy.
He and Cassiodorus pushed to make this the course of study at schools.
He knew that the Sun was larger than the Earth, and that the Earth was larger than the Moon.
On the other hand, he believed in unicorns.
On the whole, though, he is better than, say, Pliny the Elder, who wrote an even earlier encyclopedia some 500 years before.
Time, for Isidore, goes from Creation (-5199) to the 17th year of Heraclius (626), the Byzantine emperor. But he does not date years before and after Christ, but “of the Caesars”, the year Augustus took over Spain, 38 years before Christ.
The world goes from the Gorgades (Cape Verde islands) to Seres (China), but there is another part of the world:
“across the Ocean, unknown to us. It is in the south in the sun’s burning heat.”
As if he were talking about Brazil.
Isidore’s book often came with a T-and-O map of the world: the world as a circle with Asia as the top half, Europe and Africa as the bottom half, making what looks like a T inside an O. East was “up” and Jerusalem stood near the centre.
Isidore’s private library was large. Above the main door it said:
“Here are masses of books, both sacred and secular.”
Some of what seems to have been in it, listed here chronologically (authors in red were also in Augustine’s library):
- -300s Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates
- -200s Plautus, Naevius
- -100s Old Testament, Ennius, Terence, Lucilius
- -000s Virgil, Cicero, Varro, Lucretius, Sallust, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Cato, Afranius
- +000s Persius, Lucan, Martial, Pliny, Columella, Josephus, Strabo
- +100s Juvenal, Galen, Suetonius, Soranus of Ephesus, Tertullian, Aulus Gellius
- +200s Origen, Lactantius, Solinus
- +300s New Testament, Eusebius, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Jerome, Servius, Donatus
- +400s Augustine, Paulus Orosius, Nonius Marcellus, Macrobius, Capella
- +500s Cassiodorus, Boethius, Breviary of Alaric, Gregory the Great
- +600s
Isidore succeeded his brother as bishop of Seville and carried on his work of converting the ruling Visigoths from Arianism to Catholicism. Arians believed Jesus was neither God nor man but something in between. Much of what we know about Goths comes from Isidore.
St Isidore’s Day: April 4th.
– Abagond, 2015.
See also:
- encyclopedia
- Augustine’s library
- In Isidore’s library:
- Byzantine Empire
- AD (Anno Domini)
- “Europe is a continent”
524
Why was he made a saint? So far he just sounds like an intellectual/scholar.
LikeLike
Patron saint of the internet. Why is he the patron saint of the internet? That is funny to me.
LikeLike
I am guessing because of his hunger for learning and knowledge.
LikeLike
On the other hand, he believed in unicorns
I believe everyone, especially intelligent people who usually have overactive imaginations anyway, has personal beliefs that defy logic and reason.
Maybe he was mistaken?
The strangest part has to be the fact that ancient scholars believed that unicorns were real. While this is true of other mythical creatures, unicorns are unique in that they aren’t from mythology. For example, ancient people might believe that a Pegasus, the winged horse of Bellerophon, was real because there was a specific myth that spoke of him. The unicorn, on the other hand, has no such myth, so where does the belief in unicorns come from?
Some historians speculate that ancient carvings depicting bulls or goats may have something to do with it. Those creatures both have horns, but obviously they have two horns while the unicorn only has one. The carvings in question, though, show the animals depicted from a perfect side-view, which makes it appear that the creature had a single horn coming from its forehead.
This theory is furthered by the early depictions of unicorns having goat-like cloven hooves and beards. This very well could be where the legends began.
http://www.gods-and-monsters.com/unicorn-myths.html
Wouldn’t be the first time someone labored under a false belief. It doesn’t diminish his intelligence to me, but it does make him more interesting.
Who wouldn’t want unicorns to be real? Even though they’re anatomically impossible.
I know with fairies, dwarfs, lilliputians, and the like, Charles Bonnet Syndrome could be the cause. It’s very easy to misperceive or hallucinate, especially if you’re visually or hearing impaired. Many intelligent people are both of those things( John Milton-blind, Beethoven-deaf) so if people trusted someone’s opinion because they excelled a something, if those people seriously said that little tiny people or horses with horns on their head existed no one would question them or disbelieve them.
Besides….who seriously wouldn’t want unicorns to be real?
LikeLike
It would be interesting to know more about this, ie., what the West knew about the lands between Africa and Asia and the rest of the world knew.
Also wondering if there is any etymological connection between Seres and the word that 19th century Westerners used to describe people from China (Celestial).
LikeLike
Certainly he has been made the patron saint of the internet because his “Etymologies” played the same role in his time that the Wikipedia plays nowadays:)
Isydore was not the only Catholic intellectual and scholar made Saint. Bede the Venerable, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas were another ones.
Despite the criticism of C.S.Lewis, “Etymologies” was not a mean achievment, they were writen in the epoch called “Dark Ages”(cca. 550-750 AD) when knowledge and learning were in sharp decline in the West and were revived only during the epoch of Charlemagne(reigned 768-814). During 550-750 there was very little intelectual curiosity, monks in remote benedictine abbeys mostly were satisfied with reading, meditating and commenting the Bible and the works of St. Augustine.
LikeLike