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CHAPTER 3

Isidore of Seville

Anti-Judaism and the Hermeneutics of Integration

Like Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville is often considered one of the last of the Latin church fathers. He, too, “was a true bridge-builder between early and late medieval times, a bridge-builder also between the Germanic and Roman nations”;¹ and, much as Gregory did, Isidore contributed directly to the developing idea of the Jew in early medieval Christendom. Yet Isidore undertook this responsibility deliberately, with a determination that rendered anti-Jewish polemic more of a critical aspect of his scholarly opus than it had been for Gregory's or for Augustine's. Not since Tertullian had a Latin churchman compiled a treatise of Adversus Iudaeos doctrine as extensive as Isidore's De fide catholica contra Iudaeos (On the Catholic Faith against the Jews),² which proved popular and influential for generations to come, both within and beyond the confines of Christian Spain.

Isidore's writings echo numerous motifs of Augustine's anti-Jewish polemic—and his doctrine of Jewish witness—including the exegesis of Psalm 59:12 (“Slay them not”), the resistance of the Jews to religious assimilation in pagan (especially Roman) antiquity, and the Jews' function as the desks (scriniaria) of Christians in a properly ordered Christian world.³ A principal investigator of Isidore's anti-Judaism has rightly acknowledged his debt to Augustine, Jerome, and others, suggesting that “it is the great bishop of Hippo that was, indisputably, Isidore's model and inspiration” and that the De fide in particular demonstrates “this tendency of assimilation from the oeuvre of Augustine.”⁴

Nonetheless, although Isidore may have relied heavily on the works of his predecessors, the zeal with which he attacked the Jews and Judaism exceeded that of all earlier Latin fathers. Castigating the Jews more harshly than did Augustine, Isidore challenged the disingenuousness of the error that caused ancient Jewry to crucify Jesus,⁵ and that which led contemporary Jews to reject Christ and Christianity:

Denying Christ, the son of God, with nefarious disbelief, the Jews—impious, hardhearted, incredulous toward the prophets of old, and impervious toward those of late—prefer to ignore the advent of Christ rather than to acknowledge it, to deny it rather than to believe it. Him whom they accept as yet to come, they wish not to have come. Him who they read will rise from the dead, they do not believe to have arisen. Yet thus they feign not to understand these things, for they know that they have been fulfilled through their own sacrilege.⁶

Quicunque eos ita perdiderit, septem vindictas exsolvet, id est, auferet ab eis septem vindictas, quibus alligati sunt propter reatum occisi Christi, ut hoc toto tempore, quod septenario dierum numero volvitur, magis quia non interiit genus Judaeorum, satis appareat fidelibus Christianis, sed solam dispersionem meruerint, juxta quod ait Scriptura: “Ne occideris eos….” Hoc revera mirabile est, quemadmodum omnes gentes quae a Romanis subjugatae sunt, in ritum Romanorum sacrorum transierint…; gens autem Judaeorum sive sub paganis regibus, sive sub Christianis, non amiserit signum legis…. Sed et omnis imperator, vel rex, qui eos in suo regno invenit, cum ipso signo eos invenit, et non occidit; id est, non efficit ut non sint Judaei.

Unlike the mature Augustine, for whom the doctrine of Jewish witness went hand in hand with a literal—and deliberately not typological—reading of biblical history, Isidore has here interwoven the Augustinian interpretation of Psalm 59:12 with an allegorical/ typological understanding of the story of Cain. See also ibid. 8.7, col. 236: “Quid est enim hodie aliud gens ipsa, nisi quaedam scriniaria Christianorum, bajulans legem et prophetas ad testimonium assertionis Ecclesiae, ut nos honoremus per sacramentum, quod nuntiat illa per litteram?”

The Jews of Isidore's own day displayed malice toward Jesus “as if they emitted a fetid odor”; and, like the ignorance feigned by Cain concerning the whereabouts of his brother Abel, Isidore concluded that “the denial of the Jews is false.”⁷ Isidore considered the dispersion and subjugation of the Jews in exile not so much a means to facilitate their testimony on behalf of Christianity, but more a desideratum unto itself, at least until the Jews should convert to Christianity.⁸ Affirming the allegiance of the Jews to Antichrist,⁹ he joined Gregory the Great in applauding Christian efforts to expedite this conversion, and he expressed particular concern for the baptism and Christian upbringing of Jewish children. The conversion of the Jews, Isidore believed, would soon bring Christian history to its long-sought fulfillment.

We shall return in due course to these Isidorean deviations from Augustinian precedent, but I mention them at the outset to illustrate the complexity of Isidore's role in our story. Well ensconced in patristic tradition, on one hand, Isidore's anti-Jewish polemic contained little (if any) argumentation or biblical exegesis that was new; one can appreciate its logic and significance only by situating it within the Augustinian tradition. His aforecited allegations of Jewish duplicity notwithstanding, Isidore agreed in the final analysis that the Jews crucified Jesus because they failed to recognize him for what he really was. Referring to Jeremiah 14:7, Isidore wrote, “For when he says, ‘we have sinned against you,’ he represents the persona of the Jews, who sinned against God when they crucified him as he came in human form…. Thinking that this was just as it seemed, they killed the man, as if he could not save them.”¹⁰ On the other hand, the unusual extent of Isidore's anti-Jewish hostility demonstrates how widely applications of that Augustinian tradition might vary. An evaluation of the Isidorean phase in the career of Christianity's hermeneutically crafted Jew thus depends heavily on an overall estimation of Isidore himself, his cultural program and ecclesiastical leadership, and the Isidorean Renaissance that bears his name.

Seldom does scholarly understanding of a historical period depend so heavily on like or dislike for its leading personage as it does in the case of Isidore and the cultural climate of seventh-century Spain. Many scholars of early medieval history have criticized Isidore for his rampant plagiarism, for the crudeness of his attempts to assimilate the teachings of classical literature into a Christian curriculum, or for the nai'veté with which he portrayed Visigothic Spain as the legitimate, more competent successor of imperial Rome. Theodore Mommsen, who edited Isidore's historiographical works for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, lamented the negligence and inexperience that characterized Isidore's treatment of historical sources.¹¹ An early-twentieth-century biographer deemed Isidore's work as an encyclopedist “a mass of confusion and incoherence” and his scholarship a “pseudo-science” of subservience to religious authority.¹² A generation later, M. L. W. Laistner noted that Isidore “made no original contributions either to theological thought or to secular learning.”¹³

More recent investigators, however, have evaluated Isidore's achievements with greater sympathy.¹⁴ They have praised his efforts not simply to compile but also to integrate and to unify the numerous, typically fragmented, and often contradictory strands of classical learning that a long-decadent Roman civilization had bequeathed to barbarian Europe. They have highlighted the thoroughness of Isidore's search for diverse sources of knowledge, the relative open-mindedness of his attempt to preserve ancient culture in an avidly Christian environment, the conciseness of his style, the constancy of his concern to transmit and apply received knowledge within an educational framework. Laistner's summary judgment to the contrary, one can, in fact, discern novelty and inspiration in Isidore's scholarly activity, especially during the reign of King Sisebut (612–620), no doubt the most cultured and perhaps the most capable of the Catholic Visigothic rulers. Consistent with his hope to free Catholic Spain from external and internal enemies alike, Sisebut warred against Byzantines and other groups with strongholds on the Iberian Peninsula; he maintained the battle of the church against heresy; and, critical for our story, he ordered that all Jews in his kingdom convert to Christianity.¹⁵ Significantly, these years of his rule brought Isidore's literary career to a climax.¹⁶ They saw the composition of his major encyclopedic works—the Etymologiae (Etymologies), De natura rerum (On the Nature of Things), and Sententiae (Sentences)—which he dedicated to Sisebut and/or wrote at the king's behest. These same years witnessed the initial completion (that is, in their original versions) of his historical treatises, including the Chronicon, a universal chronicle of world history, and the Historia Gothorum, a history of the Goths, Vandals, and Suevi in Spain.¹⁷ Such correspondence between Isidore's literary creativity and the Hispano-Catholic program of Sisebut's monarchy buttresses Judith Herrin's notably favorable appraisal of the “Isidorean inheritance”:

Isidore's immense productivity, which lay at the base of all later ecclesiastical thought in Visigothic Spain, was prepared by a training in the Late Antique curriculum barely studied elsewhere in the West. It was then moulded by and directed towards local needs and conditions specific to seventh-century Spain. In particular, it was put at the service of a monarchy only recently converted to the Catholic faith after a fratricidal conflict. In these circumstances, his theories, both political and ecclesiastical, developed in a tight symbiotic relationship with Visigothic practice, both in state and church. Yet from these thoroughly Iberian roots and focus, Isidore's works were to enjoy a most remarkable destiny outside Spain.¹⁸

Hardly by coincidence, Isidore's De fide catholica contra ludaeos, itself a theological encyclopedia of sorts,¹⁹ also appeared during the reign of Sisebut. Although the impact of Isidore's anti-Judaism, along with that of his other achievements, extended throughout Latin Christendom for centuries to come, it too demands interpretation against the particular cultural and historical background that spawned it.

ISIDORE ON JEWS AND JUDAISM

Granted that hostility toward the Jews pervades much of the Isidorean corpus, and its avowedly exegetical works in particular, where ought one to commence such an analysis? Discounting several works of doubtful authenticity,²⁰ and noting the highly derivative nature of most of Isidore's biblical commentary, we turn first to the De fide catholica and then to conciliar legislation in which he played a leading role.

“Perhaps the ablest and most logical of all the early attempts to present Christ to the Jews,”²¹ Isidore's De fide catholica offers nearly two hundred quotations from the Hebrew Bible and Apocrypha in support of essential Christian beliefs. The work, dedicated to Isidore's sister Florentina, a prioress who had apparently requested her brother to instruct her in these matters, opens with a brief statement of purpose:

As to those things which have been foretold on diverse occasions in the books of the Old Testament concerning the birth of our Lord and savior as regards his divinity; his incarnation, passion, and death; his resurrection, and his [ultimate] kingdom and judgment—I thought that a few of the innumerable things should be cited for the benefit of [Christian] men of knowledge, so that the authority of the prophets might strengthen the gift of faith and might demonstrate the ignorance of the unbelieving Jews.²²

The first of the treatise's two books addresses matters of Christology: the divinity of Jesus, his incarnation, the Trinity, the milestones of Jesus' earthly career (from his virgin birth in Bethlehem into the house of David to his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension), the authority of his apostles, and his still-awaited second coming. The second book treats the implementation of the divine plan for human salvation over the course of terrestrial history: God's respective calls to the Gentiles and to the Jews, his rejection of the latter and new covenant with the former, the commandments of the law versus the sacraments, and the New Testament's fulfillment of earlier biblical prophecy. As I noted above, Isidore drew extensively from the works of earlier church fathers. Yet the structure and progression of Isidore's anti-Jewish argument are distinctive, and they will presently prove essential to an appreciation of its underlying logic.²³

As archbishop of Seville and chief prelate of the Spanish church, Isidore had ample opportunity to apply his doctrine concerning the Jews in formulating ecclesiastical policy and legislation. He presided over the Council of Seville in 624, which called for policing the Jews ordered by Sisebut to baptize their children, lest they substitute Christian children for their own.²⁴ More significantly, Isidore presided over the Fourth Council of Toledo in 633, ten canons of which concerned the Jews. Some of these decrees—forbidding Jewish ownership of Christian slaves, Jewish influence over Christians (whether through bribery or by holding public office), and Judaizing on the part of Jewish converts to Christianity²⁵—echoed or reinforced the legislation of previous church councils and Visigothic rulers. Others, however, may well afford insight into Isidore's own attitudes toward the Jews and thus warrant particular attention. Adumbrating later Visigothic discrimination against “Jews, whether baptized or unbaptized,”²⁶ the council forbade Christians of Jewish origin to hold public office,²⁷ and it underscored the gravity of the issue of proselytizing by force in three separate decrees. Reflecting the reality of Jewish survival in Spain despite Sisebut's edict of conversion, Canon 57 banned the baptism of the Jews against their will, but with several important reservations, implied and explicit:

Concerning the Jews, the holy synod has decreed henceforth to compel no one to accept the faith, because God has compassion for whom he wishes and renders obstinate whom he wishes; for not against their will should such people be saved, but with their consent, so that the semblance of justice be kept intact. Just as man, obeying the serpent of his own free will, was ruined, so a man is saved through believing—owing to the call of God's grace and the conversion of his own mind. Therefore, rather than be subdued they should be urged to convert, not under compulsion but through the power of their free will. Those, however, who were previously coerced to become Christian, as happened at the time of the most pious ruler Sisebut, for it is now a fact that they, having been admitted to the divine sacraments, have received the grace of baptism, have been anointed with chrism, and have partaken of the body and blood of the lord—they should appropriately be forced to retain the faith which they adopted, albeit through compulsion or out of necessity, lest the Lord's name be blasphemed, and the faith which they have adopted be deemed vile and contemptible.²⁸

Principled objections to forced conversion notwithstanding, the decree does not follow Gregory the Great in prescribing penalties for those who baptized Jews against their will, and it emphatically upholds the validity of those forced conversions that resulted from King Sisebut's unprecedented edict. In Canon 60 the council ordered that Jewish children be removed from their parents and raised in a Christian environment: “Lest the sons and daughters of the Jews be further entangled in the error of their parents, we decree that they be separated from their company, having been assigned to monasteries or God-fearing Christian men and women, so that under their care they learn the practice of the faith and, thus better instructed, they may make progress in both their behavior and their belief.”²⁹ And, reaffirming an earlier law of Sisebut,³⁰ Canon 63 demanded not only that children born of mixed marriages between Christians and Jews be raised as Christians but that Jewish husbands of Christian women must themselves convert to Christianity.³¹

Isidore's anti-Jewish pronouncements have evoked scholarly interest and discussion along various lines. Readers of the De fide catholica have questioned the extent of Isidore's interaction with Spanish Jewry, and they have sought to identify the intended applications of his polemical treatise. Did Isidore write this work for disputing directly with the Jews, keeping converted Jews within the church, providing catechetical instruction for the baptized children of Jews, preaching to the Christian laity, or for enlightening the Catholic clergy?³² Additionally, historians have related Isidore's polemic and legislation to their interpretation of the Visigoths' anti-Jewish policy in general.³³ What suddenly triggered such extreme hostility toward the Jews during the last 12.5 years of Visigothic rule in Spain? Did it derive primarily from the kings' personal piety and commitment to the ideals of the church or more from considerations of political expediency? Did secular or ecclesiastical leaders take the initiative in formulating these policies? As in fifteenth-century Spain, might measures against the Jews have aimed primarily to eliminate Judaizing among recent converts to Christianity? Did Visigothic monarchs wish to comply with or to emulate the anti-Jewish policies of Byzantine emperors from Justinian to Heraclius, some of whom eventually called for the baptism or expulsion of all Jews in the empire? Acknowledging the correspondence between Isidore's greatest literary productivity and the reign of King Sisebut, investigators have also debated Isidore's stance on the royal decree that Spanish Jews must convert. For in addition to the conciliar canons discussed above, the archbishop addressed the issue of forced conversion in at least four of his own works. In the Sententiae, Isidore wrote that religious belief should not be imposed by force, although it is possible that this passage antedates Sisebut's decree.³⁴ The Etymologiae and Chronicon record the conversion of Spanish Jewry under Sisebut's rule and, albeit subtly, appear to approve of the royal action.³⁵ The Historia Gothorum first notes that Sisebut converted the Jews unwisely, “for he compelled with force those whom one was supposed to bring to the faith with reason.” Yet the text proceeds immediately to mollify its indictment with reference to Philippians 1:18: “in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed.”³⁶ Weighing this evidence, some scholars have judged Isidore a supporter of Sisebut's decree;³⁷ others have stressed his opposition to the edict, at times even judging him, whether in a positive or negative sense, a humane advocate of the Jewish cause;³⁸ and still others have sought a middle ground, deeming him inconsistent and his misgivings the result of hindsight, or perhaps a reaction to the rampant Judaizing that ensued in the wake of insincere conversions.³⁹ Investigators likewise disagree concerning the significance of the anti-Jewish measures of the Fourth Council of Toledo: Although some have emphasized the harshness of this presumably Isidorean legislation, linking it to the program of Sisebut,⁴⁰ others have downplayed its anti-Jewish motivation, suggesting that the council's real antagonism pointed elsewhere.⁴¹ Finally, students of Isidore have pondered the place of the archbishop, his De fide catholica, and the Toledan decrees in the evolution of Christian anti-Judaism. In retrospect, they have stressed his reliance on and transmission of earlier traditions, judging him a master of “patristic vulgarization.”⁴² Looking forward in time, they have considered the subsequent popularity of the De fide catholica—the earliest extant work in medieval German⁴³—the impact of Isidorean legislation on medieval canon law,⁴⁴ and attitudes toward Isidore in Jewish historiography of the later Middle Ages.⁴⁵

These scholarly discussions testify to Isidore's prominence in the history of Jewish-Christian polemic; viewed collectively, however, they also point to aspects of the De fide that recent scholarship has not adequately probed. All of these lines of inquiry relate Isidore and his anti-Judaism to strictly external referents—comparing them with earlier patristic writers and traditions, relating them to the contemporary concerns of Visigothic kingdom and church, and assessing their subsequent impact and dissemination. Neither have modern researchers explained the place of the De fide catholica in the entirety of the Isidorean corpus, nor have they subjected its contents to deliberate thematic and structural analysis. A few have reflected impressionistically on the nature of the treatise—perhaps an attempt at systematic theology, or a catechetical work structurally dependent on the Apostle's Creed, or a mystical meditation on Scripture⁴⁶—while summary characterizations of its tone have ranged from hostility to “meekness.”⁴⁷ Yet owing to Isidore's debt to his predecessors, most assessments discern no novelty in Isidore's polemic, nor do they allow for the possibility that its substance developed over time.⁴⁸ As a result of such estimations, much of the significance of the De fide catholica has remained unnoticed.

TERRESTRIAL HISTORY, CONVERSION OF THE JEWS,

AND THE ISIDOREAN VISION

A more truly Isidorean reading of Isidore might proceed from three related observations. First, Isidore composed the De fide catholica precisely at the time of Sisebut's decree that the Jews must convert to Christianity (614—615);⁴⁹ the interdependence between polemical treatise and royal edict might well extend beyond their chronological coincidence to the motivations and presuppositions underlying each. Second, and more generally, the inner logic of Isidore's literary and ecclesiastical career must be understood against the background of Sisebut's designs for the Visigothic monarchy; as in Judith Herrin's aforecited judgment, Isidore's “theories, both political and ecclesiastical, developed in a tight symbiotic relationship with Visigothic practice, both in state and church.” Both men numbered among the most learned of their generation. Both blended their interests in classical science and literature with steadfast commitments to Catholic Christianity and Visigothic Spain. In their respective, even convergent, fashions, both leaders combated the various opponents of these mutual allegiances. Deeming them threats to Visigothic hegemony and to Catholic unity, Sisebut battled against all alien elements in Spain, including Byzantines, Arian heretics, and Jews; he also authored a work of Christian hagiography as well as an anti-Arian treatise.⁵⁰ In Jacques Fontaine's words, Sisebut “understood his mission in such a way that its moral, religious, and political elements were inextricably mingled. He was thus an active collaborator in the Isidorean renaissance, which had as its aim nothing less than the reconstruction of the civil and religious life of Visigothic Spain.”⁵¹ Isidore similarly struggled against heretics and Jews, usually maintaining the policies of Sisebut, even after the latter's death. In his various encyclopedic works, Isidore undertook to endow Visigothic Spain with a viable Christian synthesis of classical culture, one that would confirm Spain's legitimacy as successor to imperial Rome, just as Sisebut sought prestige for his throne by emulating the Eastern emperors of Byzantium, even as he fought their armies in battle. Simply put, both men strove to integrate the society and culture of Spain under Catholic Visigothic rule, and at the same time to accredit that rule as the fulfillment of classical Roman and Christian traditions. Third, Isidore gave clearest expression to these shared aspirations in his two major works of historiography, his universal Chronicon and his Hispano-centric Historia Gothorum. In its original version, each of these historical accounts climaxed and concluded in the reign of Sisebut.⁵² One modern reader⁵³ has suggested that Isidore thus likened Sisebut to the biblical King Solomon, the monarch, conqueror, and sage of ancient Israel who secured its borders, united its twelve tribes, built its temple to God, and enjoyed well-deserved renown for his wisdom and eloquence. Most noteworthy, then, is the place accorded Sisebut's conversion of the Jews in Isidore's histories. The Historia Gothorum lists it first among Sisebut's accomplishments. The full text of the Chronicon mentions it along with but two other achievements of the king; in Isidore's abridgement of the work, it is the only achievement mentioned.⁵⁴ Without doubt the Jews assumed vital importance in Isidore's outlook on history and in his vision of the ideal Visigothic monarchy, and this significance warrants further elaboration.

If one may link Augustinian and Gregorian constructions of the Jew to considerations of exegesis, the philosophy of history, and anthropology, the key to Isidore's distinctive ideas on the Jews and Judaism lies chiefly in the second of these—that is, in his reading of terrestrial history. Recognizing Isidore's debt to his patristic predecessors, above all Augustine, one must therefore identify the singular features of his historiography with care. Isidore's Chronicon borrowed much from Augustinian accounts of human history, and from the De civitate Dei in particular: the cardinal importance of divine providence in human affairs, the division of history as we know it into six ages, and the parallel spiritual and political dimensions of God's plan for historical development. Nevertheless, nurturing the inclination of the Spanish Orosius two centuries before him, Isidore departed radically from Augustine by elaborating an essentially monistic construction of human experience. Here one finds instructive similarity between Gregory the Great and Isidore, but Isidore's temperament and his overtly historiographic interests yielded a view of human history more positivistic than that suggested in Gregorian biblical commentary.⁵⁵

Precisely what distinguished these ideas of Isidore? Augustine had posited a fundamental distinction between the histories of heavenly and earthly cities, despite their temporary intersection in the saeculum. Gregory had excluded the saeculum from his reading of history, which, owing to his ascetic convictions, he “sketched only from a celestial perspective,”⁵⁶ drastically devaluing the experience of this world. Isidore, however, while upholding Gregory's assertion of a single and sole realm of historical development, portrayed the political events of this world as the critical manifestation of that development!⁵⁷ Providential history in the Chronicon entails the identity of divine and mundane history, inasmuch as God actualizes his design for human salvation within a terrestrial context. Mundane historical developments correspond directly with progress toward the eschaton. More than in Gregorian doctrine, and in contrast with Augustinian teaching, these developments will eventually prove the time ripe for the final redemption, and they will figure directly in the process of Christian salvation.

Lacking both the neutral political sphere of the Augustinian saeculum and the Gregorian aversion for the worldly,⁵⁸ Isidore's history reverts to a relatively simplistic, tension-free understanding of Christian empire or kingship (imperium or regnum christianum) that characterized Eusebius and other fourth-century writers, including the younger Augustine.⁵⁹ This was the Christian optimism, the do ut des (“I give so that you may give”) mentality that discerned the fulfillment of God's promise of salvation in the Christianization of Rome, against which the older Augustine's De civitate Dei reacted so emphatically.⁶⁰ Yet Isidore did not simply return to the outlook of fourth-century fathers. He borrowed from the older Augustine too, and he composed a universal chronicle of world history that was distinctive, one whose structure and style bespoke his own, early medieval worldview. The Chronicon's narration of its six historical epochs includes earthly and pagan affairs alongside matters divine and spiritual. Commencing with creation and not with Adam (as they do in Augustine's works), they betray no metaphoric correspondence to the proverbial ages in a single human's life and thus do not symbolize the spiritual growth of God's chosen people from its youth to its adulthood. Rather, they serve to depict the totality of human history as Isidore perceived it: Israel and the nations, East and West, natural and supernatural, that recorded in Scripture and that related in classical mythology—all in the same continuum. Isidore's chronology is more precise than Augustine's, his periods more carefully demarcated, and his division of political history more rigorous. Isidore dealt directly with specific kings and kingdoms, not the vast hegemonies of Assyria and Rome that one encounters in the De civitate Dei; all of them had a role to play in the divinely ordained progression of terrestrial history, from creation to the final, seventh age of glory.

Augustine, we recall, afforded minimal attention to the political highlights of the sixth age—like the pax romana—which extended from the incarnation to the present. Yet Isidore deemed the sixth age as all-important, and it, more than any other, exemplifies the special character of his chronicle. Its annals are as long as those of the five earlier ages combined, its scope entirely extrabiblical, and its history predominantly political—again, in striking contrast with the Augustinian model. As if to underscore that contrast, Isidore's sixth age begins not in the middle of Jesus' ministry but only in the wake of the brief mention of his life,⁶¹ and following the replacement of the Old Testament by the New:

Octavian Augustus reigned fifty-six years. During his reign, he celebrated three triumphs after his Sicilian [triumph]: a Dalmatian [triumph], an Asian [triumph], and, lastly, an Alexandrian [triumph for his victory] against Antony; thereafter, [he gained control of] Spain. Then, with peace achieved throughout the whole world, on land and at sea, he closed and bolted the gates of Janus. Under his rule, the sixty-nine weeks noted in Daniel [9:2.4–27] were completed; and, with the cessation of the kingship and priesthood of the Jews, the lord Jesus Christ was born of a virgin in the forty-second year of his reign. [Thereafter begins] the sixth age of terrestrial history [sexta aetas saeculi].62

Juxtaposing the fulfillment of biblical messianic prophecy and the birth of Jesus with the Augustan apogee of Roman political achievement, Isidore's record of the incarnation epitomizes his blend of spiritual and worldly history: What better a demonstration than the physical embodiment of God on earth, coincident with the pax romanal Moreover, with the triumph of Rome and the establishment of Christianity already established fact, Isidore's sixth age epitomizes the identification of Romanitas and Christianitas, yielding an uninterrupted review of pagan emperors, their Christian successors, and the Germanic rulers of Spain. Neither the conversion of Constantine (who, eventually, at the end of his life, received Arian baptism)⁶³ nor the end of the Western empire marks the end of an era in this historical narrative. Rome lacks unique soteriological import. Duly constituted kingship (regnum) survived the empire in the West, so that its fall hardly undercut the basis for historical optimism; Spanish monarchs assumed no less significance than did Roman or Byzantine emperors. Structurally, the sixth age links the incarnation and the final judgment, the first and second comings of Christ. It is Christian history, in which God's plan for the salvation of his people draws progressively closer to its full and final realization.

As the Chronicon records the reigns of Eastern and Western monarchs in succession, it highlights their victories over Jews, heretics, and Byzantine invaders of the West, those who evidently impede the realization of a properly ordered Christendom. Presumably, when these problems have been overcome, the sixth age will give way to the seventh. History will culminate in a final age of glory.

When will this final redemption occur? During Sisebut's reign, when Isidore first wrote the Chronicon, he reported the king's conversion of the Jews and at once reflected that “the time remaining in the sixth age is known to God alone.”⁶⁴ Isidore's chronicle thus concludes, it would seem, on a note of uncertainty. Yet the movement of the sixth age of history from the pax romana to Catholic Visigothic kingship, and from the incarnation—entailing “the cessation of the kingship and priesthood of the Jews [cessante regno ac sacerdotio Iudaeo- rwra]”—to the conversion of Iberian Jewry, is suggestive.⁶⁵ Marc Reydellet has elaborated: “Isidore lives in a world where all disparities seem to be conclusively reconciled: The Jews become Christians; all of Spain is reorganized around [the Visigothic capital of] Toledo. One does not mean to state that Isidore displayed a blind optimism—but simply that the great conflict of good and evil is played out within each individual. Yet in the order of collective history, the plan of God can seem to be on a course of total and definitive realization.”⁶⁶ The conversion of the Jews at the end of the sixth age heralded that realization; and, Reydellet thus has concluded, Isidore's universal chronicle “was, in the history of its genre, the only one which had a conclusion.”⁶⁷

The concerns and structure of Isidore's other major historiographical treatise, the Historia Gothorum, echo this sense of the Chronicon. In its first version, it too dates from the reign of Sisebut, and it too served as “a declaration of independence on the part of Visigothic Spain and an affirmation of its worth against the ancient [Roman] mistress of the Mediterranean world.”⁶⁸ But if the Chrorticon legitimizes Visigothic kingship in a blending of Romanitas and Christianitas that followed upon the incarnation, the history of the Goths roots its patriotic vision in the glories of Spain and the Christian character of the Visigothic kingdom it spawned: “Of all lands from the West to India, you, Spain, holy and ever-fruitful mother of princes and of nations [principum gentiumque mater] are the most beautiful. You now are justly queen of all provinces, from whom not only the West but also the East receives its light. You are the splendor and jewel of the world, a very distinguished part of the earth, in which the glorious fertility of the Getic people takes much pleasure and flourishes greatly.”⁶⁹ The panegyric of Isidore's well-known Laus Spaniae continues, but its ramifications for Isidore are already clear: Spain, mother of kings, is uniquely suited to the fulfillment of Christian historical-political aspirations. A geographical, spatial entity, Spain has nurtured the foremost Christian monarchy, much as the temporal progression of universal Chronicon's sixth age culminates in the Visigothic kingdom. For the Chronicori's emphasis on the incarnation, effecting the Christianization of human history through God's participation in it, the Historia Gothorum substitutes the conversion of Visigothic Spain and her rulers—to justify her claims to Rome's erstwhile primacy and her opposition to Byzantine imperialism. Not so much the historical Jesus of the Chronicon but Christ the king accords divine sanction to the Catholic rulers of the Historia Gothorum; his values pervade the totality of the Visigothic church—monarch and prelates, clergy and laity together—and render it the genuine kingdom of Christ (regnum Christi), the defense of the members of Christ (tuitio membrorum Christi).70

The earliest version of the Historia Gothorum reaches a natural conclusion in the career of King Sisebut:

At the beginning of his reign, leading the Jews to the Christian faith, he was zealous indeed, but not wisely so; for he compelled with force those whom one was supposed to bring to the faith with reason. But, as it is written, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed. He was, moreover, refined in his eloquence, learned in his thought, and educated, to an extent, in the sciences.

He was also renowned for his military accomplishments and victories…. Twice, in person, did he successfully defeat the Byzantines, and he conquered some of their cities for himself. He was so merciful following his victory, that he freed for ransom many from the opposing army who had been taken captive and led into slavery, and the price of the redemption of the captives became his treasure.⁷¹