Thinking and Speaking Well--Looking at Isidore of Seville

I was a teacher (college/law school), pastor and litigation attorney for more than 20 years before I began to develop this web site. In those two decades I earned my money, so to speak, by words. Words were my currency. I had to learn how to present a case persuasively, to be concise, clear, humorous, generous in speech and, in general, able to have appropriate words for many situations--often at the drop of a hat. Just as an athlete must discipline him/herself for a life of production "on the field/court," so I had to take significant steps to try to be in top form in communicating. As I look around the world at age 55, I notice many things, but among the most arresting to me is how poorly we communicate our meaning to each other. Scholars and lawyers are often the worst culprits here; worst because they/we ought to know better. But they/we descend quickly to the nether regions of obscurity, in-house lingo, or inability to set the context properly so that our remarks will be clearly spoken and understood. Words, that gift which ought to lessen the gap between people, often immure us in soundproof rooms.

Just as people who are physically out-of-shape sometimes try to show off on the athletic field, before pulling a muscle or otherwise embarrassing themselves, so many people try to enter into the world of verbal give-and-take without having exercised themselves properly, without having developed vocabulary, ability to analyze what is said, knowledge of when and where to ask questions, and, indeed, how to pose questions. With the advent of the Web, we have no system for weeding out infelicitous speech or flabby statement. Unless you decided to discipline yourself to try to say things well or properly, you become as tied in verbal puzzles as the proverbial Gordian Knot.

Getting to My Point

Examples of verbal infelicity are, like the spirits expelled from the Gadarene demoniac, Legion. I have had to stop students over the years who said, "He gave the money to her and I," or "I could of done better if I studied more." I stopped them not so much because I need to have everyone obey the verbal rules of English, but because I told them that if they started speaking like this, they wouldn't get a job in the kind of law firm they desired. The economic argument hit home stronger than any kind of exhortation to "be better" or "improve yourself."

I am constantly on the search to improve myself in many areas, among which are verbal expression and broad knowledge acquisition. In the last few weeks I have come across an author that is on no one's "top 10" list, but who wrote a book in the early-mid 7th century that tried to sum up all knowledge available at the time. Part of that knowledge was grammatical or rhetorical knowledge.

The book, called the Etymologies, is the crowning work of a long career of Isidore, Bishop of Seville (d. ca. 735). Thanks to the tireless work of a team of scholars, this 400+ page work has just been translated into English for the first time (Cambridge UP, 2006). In this and the following few essays I want to bring you into the heart of this encyclopedic work, with special emphasis on Isidore's treatment of grammar and rhetoric.

On Encyclopedias and the Seven Liberal Arts

There were no such things called encyclopedias in Isidore's time; indeed the word encyclopedia only appeared for the first time in a 15th century communication. Yet the concept of universal knowledge, or compendiums of what was known to learned people, was alive and well in the Roman world and gradually came to fruition in the early Middle Ages. While some look at the period of the early Middle Ages as a "dark" period of mindless scribal copying or wars between various groups of Goths, I increasingly look at this period as a time of consolidation--where the knowledge from the Greek, Roman and early Christian past was systematized and put into a form which would provide the pattern for learning for the next several hundred years. The concept of the "liberal arts," those seven disciplines that should be the occupation of a "free" person (the root meaning of liberal), consisting of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) and the quadrivium (mathematics, music, geometry and astronomy) was described first by Martianus Capella in his early 5th century work "On the Wedding of Philology and Mercury and of the Seven Liberal Arts." Though many scholars speak of the 'bizarre' expressions in this work, it was of great importance in fixing the nature of the medieval educational system.

There was some debate before Martianus, however, about the nature of what one might call the "basic studies" one should undertake in order to be an educated person. Indeed Varro, a late contemporary of Cicero, and other Roman scholars suggested that medicine and architecture also be included in any basic curriculum. But by the time of Martianus those two disciplines had fallen in people's estimation or, differently said, had become looked at more as "crafts" than as "disciplines," and so the "seven liberal arts" became the foundation of the medieval education system.

On to Grammar and Rhetoric

Isidore's encyclopedic Etymologies consists of 20 books, the first three of which cover the "liberal arts." He then has books on medicine (Book IV) and law (Book V) before turning to "sacred" history and study. Book VI deals with the Scripture and liturgical feasts; Books VII and VIII speak of God, angels, monks, clerics and others. Book IX covers languages of nations as well as royal and military terminology. Book X is on certain terms in alphabetical order. Then he turns to the traditional field known as "natural history" or "natural philosophy." Human beings are treated in Book XI, with animals in Book XII, the elements (heavens, air, water, etc.) in Book XIII, earth in general in Book XIV, cities and rural areas in Book XV, earthly materials in Book XVI, agriculture in Book XVII, wars and instruments of war in Book XVIII, ships, ropes, nets, iron workers and construction of buildings in Book XIX and, finally, in Book XX, tables, foods, drinks and ingredients for food. It is, as you can tell a veritable cornucopia of knowledge.

But since I have language "on the brain" these days, I propose to look more precisely at his treatment of grammar and rhetoric in Books I and II. Since he derives much of his work on rhetorical terms/devices from the 4th century North African grammarian Aelius Donatus, I will devote the next few essays to understanding Aelius' rhetorical terms. It will put us in good stead for learning how to speak and think well in our day.

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On Thinking, Writing, Speaking Well First Essay

On Thinking, Writing, Speaking Well
First Essay