| #### 5. SPANISH CATHOLICISM AND ST. ISIDORE OF SEVILLE, 589-711 |

| #### #### The hundred years that follow St. Gregory's great effort, the years between his death and the appearance of the next outstanding European personality, Charles Martel, are years that see an interesting diversity of development in the Catholicism of the new Western realms -- Italy, Gaul, Spain, England and Ireland now begin their national history. #### In Spain, from the moment of the conversion of the Arians (589) the Church had a unique position in the national life. It was, very evidently, the only source from which unity could come. So far there had been in Spain two laws, one for the conquering Visigoths, the other for the "Romans." The Church, on the other hand, had never made any distinction between the two races. The kings, henceforth, regularly employed the clergy in the service of the administration. The church councils, now held regularly, and meeting year by year in all the great cities turn by turn, were attended also by the royal officials. Civil business was transacted there as well as ecclesiastical. They became national councils in a very real sense, and a final court of appeal. The Church, with its permanent, stable, objective law and teaching, was all the more important since the monarchy of the Visigoths was elective -- a political weakness whose ultimate effect was to leave Spain an easy prey to such an organised despotism as the Arabs were, at this time, developing. Church and State in Spain tended to become one thing. It was the king who summoned these national councils, and the decrees passed by the bishops about religious matters became thereby the law of the land. The Church of Visigothic Spain, not unnaturally, was one of the first to produce a body of canon law, the famous collection Hispana. The Spanish Church was well organised. The sees and the metropolitans, too, were grouped round the primatial see of Toledo, and the primacy of Toledo was a reality. It was, for example, the primate who, in concert with the king, nominated all the other bishops. #### Relations with Rome, if always good, were very interrupted. Spain was more and more at the end of the world. The route by land lay through the territory of the Lombards and Franks and little ordered security, while the sea route, since the Arab advance, was no less dangerous. Certainly the mention of Rome in the affairs of Spain is rare during all this time (604- 715). Only eight letters survive of whatever correspondence passed from Rome to Spain. There is one of Honorius I urging the bishops to show greater eagerness in religious matters, and not to be dumb dogs who never bark. There are the letters of Leo II communicating the decisions of the General Council of 680, and two letters of Benedict II (684-685). To Pope Honorius the Council of Toledo, in 638, sent an official reply protesting the virtue of the bishops. To Benedict II's first letter, also, a Council of Toledo (the fourteenth) sent a reply which the Primate of Toledo, Julian, composed. The pope found his letter -- an acceptance of the condemnation of Monothelism -- unorthodox in its expressions and desired him to correct his words. This Julian did -- with none too good a grace. #### The isolation of the Spanish Church, the long severance of relations with Rome, the civil importance of the bishops, the royal interference in their nomination, were, it has been suggested, beginning to tell. A new spirit of national self- sufficiency was developing. #### The greatest figure of this Spanish Catholicism of the seventh century is the Bishop of Seville, St. Isidore. He was the brother, as well as the successor, of St. Gregory's friend St. Leander who had played so important a part in the troubles that preceded the great reunion of 589. Leander died in 600 and for the next thirty-six years Isidore ruled in his stead. He had been a monk before his appointment and, as a bishop, he composed a monastic rule. One of its characteristics is a most rigorous insistence on the obligation of the enclosure. The monastery is to have but one door and it is to be well guarded. The monks are to renew annually their vow of poverty. The abbot, three times a week, is to preach them a homily, and the monastic day opens with a distribution of manuscripts for the community to study. This last prescription is what we should expect from St. Isidore, for he was the one scholar of his age. To his contemporaries he seemed the equal of any of the Fathers, as the early writers now begin to be styled, and if he never makes any show of original thought, and quotes very often only at second-hand, it is certain that his erudition was really very great. Never had the authority of the Fathers, as a witness to tradition, stood higher, and-it was in the collection, from their writings, of texts to illustrate and prove particular doctrines that St. Isidore excelled. The philosophical presentation of Catholicism he ignored entirely. Like every Latin writer of the previous two centuries he makes St. Augustine's teaching on the Trinity his own, though he makes no mention of the work of Boethius that was to influence in centuries to come the great medieval scholastics. It is St. Gregory he follows in his teaching that the origin of the human soul is unknown, but that it is in no way corporeal. He accepts the teaching of the council of 529 that grace is necessary for man's very first movements towards God, and that his free will is of itself incapable of sustained and lasting moral good. In the other great controversy which survived from St. Augustine's intervention, he follows St. Augustine faithfully. Predestination is absolute, and independent of God's foreknowledge of merits and faults, Who is "just to those whom He rejects, merciful to those whom He chooses." Children who die unbaptised expiate in hell the guilt of original sin -- another Augustinian influence without even St. Augustine's apologetic adjective that makes the prospect almost inviting. It is St. Augustine again whom he follows in his explanation of man as redeemed from the power of the devil by the devil’s abuse of his power over humanity in the death of Christ. The Church is not an assembly of saints. It does not cease to be the Church because some of its children show themselves evil livers. Whoever deserts the Church turns his back on salvation. #### The close union of Church and State in St. Isidore's time leaves a very evident trace in his teaching that " as the heavenly kingdom advances by means of the kingdoms of this world, so those who, placed within the Church, conspire against its faith and discipline should be crushed by the power of the State." St. Isidore's explanation of the sacraments is Augustinian in its distinction between the rite and the grace it produces. But he adheres to a much older theory when he attributes the effect of the sacrament to the blessing previously given to the matter used in its administration. It is to the fact that the baptismal water has been duly blessed that the baptised owes his baptism. Only thus does the divine force latent in the sacrament operate. In the debated question as to the validity of heretical baptism St. Isidore, like St. Gregory and St. Leo before him, follows St. Augustine and the constant practice of the Roman Church -- the sacrament is not to be repeated, for although the heretic who receives it is not thereby cleansed from sin, he is none the less baptised. Such heretics when converted to Catholicism were, in the Spain of St. Isidore, admitted to the Church in the rite of Confirmation. Confirmation, otherwise given immediately after baptism, is an imposition of hands followed by an anointing of the forehead with chrism. [ ] Its usual minister is the bishop. Should a priest administer Confirmation the chrism he uses must have been blessed by a bishop. St. Isidore's teaching on the Holy Eucharist is slightly influenced by the Eastern theory that the bread and wine are changed in the Mass, not by the words of consecration, but at the prayer invoking the Holy Spirit's action which follows. As to the use of the Holy Eucharist, St. Augustine, in the heat of the Pelagian discussion, had taught that even children must receive It as a condition of salvation. St. Isidore, who does not follow him here, follows him in his insistence that It may be received even daily provided that the recipient is free from serious sin and motivated by religious devotion and humility. The Holy Eucharist is, again, a sacrifice that Christ Himself has instituted and St. Gregory's doctrine of the power of the sacrifice to atone for the sins of the dead finds an echo, too, in the Spanish bishop. #### Christian marriage, since it is a figure of the indissoluble union between Christ and the Church, is itself indissoluble. It was to be blessed by the priest and religious considerations had their role in the matrimonial relations. #### St. Isidore, in whose writings the Middle Ages found an encyclopaedia of human knowledge, is certainly not one of the greatest names in theological history. In the general history of the Church, however, he is more important, for he is one of the chief links between the golden age of the Fathers and that of the medieval scholastics; and he is almost the last writer for four centuries to merit the name of theologian at all. His work has this additional importance, for us, that it mirrors the belief and life of the Church on the eve of the next catastrophe to overwhelm it. #### The history of Catholicism in Spain after the century which followed the reunion of 589 is not well known to us. If it produced an Isidore of Seville, it had never a Gregory of Tours nor a Bede. There are the scanty records of Roman intervention, there are the canons of the innumerable councils, and that is almost all. The picture we construct from such materials can hardly be complete. For whatever it is worth, it shows us a Church which is in many respects a department of the State. The kings named the bishops, and, in time of crisis, the bishops lent all their religious prestige to the kings. In this sense they were patriotic enough, though we are hardly in a position to decide whether they would not have done better for the Church and for Spain by throwing their influence against the continuance of the elective monarchy. The same evils afflicted the Spanish hierarchy that are to be noted in seventh-century Gaul -- personal loose living and, above all, simony. One result of the closer connection with the State -- the closest to obtain in any of those barbarian kingdoms -- was the almost complete failure of the bishops to act independently of the king, save occasionally in political matters. We find bishops who share in plots and rebellions: we find none who come to their death through an apostolic fearlessness that rebukes the royal sins to the sinner's face. Here the Spanish episcopate apparently falls below the standard of the bishops of Gaul. The bishops suffered as the whole of the Church suffered, and the nation too, from the country's isolation. There was never a Columbanus nor an Augustine to stimulate with the vitality of difference the sluggish evenness of national piety. Nor did the Benedictine rule penetrate into Spain, in all the two centuries that lay between St. Benedict and the Arab conquest. Nation and Church stagnated together, and as they had lived so they fell. To blame the Spanish Church for the national unpreparedness is to reverse the logic of facts, for the Spanish Church was very largely what the Spanish kings had made it. It was thanks to them that it had become part of the nation, dependent on the nation, and therefore powerless to renew its life. One thing alone could have saved Spanish Catholicism and through it the nation -- effective intervention from outside. By the end of the seventh century, with Spain, Europe and the Papacy as they were then organised, this was out of the question. And it is questionable whether Spain would have welcomed it. The significant fact remains, that the first of these barbarian Christianities to fall was the state-ridden Church of what had been the least barbarian of all the western provinces of the old empire. |