A CHURCH TRIUMPHANT 63Origines (Etymologies or Origins), in the course of which, in twenty
books, he attempted to offer a conspectus of all branches of knowl-
edge. He provided his readers with illumination of the individual
topics considered by studying the etymology of the terms used and of
words related to them, not always with a great deal of accuracy. To
take a typical example, in the section 'On Astronomy' in Book III,
Chapter 29 is devoted to 'the world' (mundus) and it reads: The
world is what endures in the heavens and on earth, in the sea, and
the stars. It is called the world (mundus) because it is always in motion
(motus); no rest is ever allowed it.'13 This illustrates both the princi-
ples on which Isidore organised his materials, and the farfetched
nature of some of the etymologies that he and his contemporaries
relied upon. His work was fundamentally serious, for all its flaws, and
it provided an enormous storehouse of knowledge for his contem-
poraries, remaining extremely popular and influential throughout
the rest of the Middle Ages, as the enormous number and variety of
the surviving manuscripts of it testify.
Isidore sought to attain knowledge through the understanding of
words. His Etymologies, commissioned by King Sisebut but probably
not completed until the early 630s, represent but one of his ap-
proaches, albeit the most sustained, to the problem of the meaning
of words. Previously he also employed the techniques, long known to
Roman rhetors, of 'differences' and of synonyms. In his work Of
Differences and the Meaning of Words, possibly his earliest composition,
he looked at the meanings of words that were either similar in form
but very different in meaning, or those which were dissimilar in form
but identical in meaning. Thus, for example, the difference between
auspicia and auguria (Differentiae 1.6): 'Auspices are things which are
incoherent and come from beyond, whilst auguries are things which
may be consulted and followed.'14 It is typical and perhaps to his
credit that when he deals with subjects long condemned by the Church
and by civil law, Isidore introduces no Christian gloss into his text.
His approach through synonyms was quite differently conceived. This,
because of the nature of its material, is a highly rhetorical piece cast
as The Lamentations of a Sinful SouL The author, in confessing his
faults, repeats each key statement or lament as many times as he has
synonyms available to do so. Thus the work opens: 'My soul is in
anguish, my spirit is agitated, my heart unquiet ... .' (1.5) Even in this
short passage, two sets of three synonymous nouns and verbs have
been employed. This particular style was to have a considerable vogue