Isidore of Seville on Spiritual Reading

Why is it so crucial to nourish our Christian spirituality, our life of prayer, by spiritual reading? Isidore of Seville was a bishop in seventh century Visigothic Spain, where a beautiful synthesis of the theology and monastic wisdom from the Greek East and Latin West was underway. Isidore saw it as his task to pass on whatever spiritual wisdom he could from the gradually fading classical world, and wrote many works in his attempt to instruct his people on the importance of the Tradition. He was not worried about originality as so many modern people are, but in many ways was quite the opposite, happy to distill and pass on for a new audience the wisdom he had inherited.

Isidore of Seville

Among his less well known writings is a work entitled Book of Maxims, and here are some quotations from that useful compilation:

If a person wants to be always in God’s company, he must pray regularly and read regularly. When we pray we talk to God; when we read God talks to us. All spiritual growth comes from reading and reflection. By reading we learn what we did not know; by reflection we retain what we have learned.

As Isidore stresses, reading is not just for ourselves, but brings with it responsibility; it equips us for a life of Christian service:

The conscientious reader will be more concerned to carry out what he has read rather than merely acquire knowledge of it. For it is a less serious fault to be ignorant of an objective than it is to fail to carry out what we do know. In reading we aim at knowing, but we must put into practice what we have learned in our course of study.

Finally, if we wish to read not just for knowledge, but the more important goal of wisdom, our reading must be joined to prayer and attentiveness to God’s will and his grace:

Learning unsupported by grace may get into our ears; it never reaches the heart. It makes a great noise outside but serves no inner purpose. But when God’s grace touches our innermost minds to bring understanding, his word which has been received by the ear sinks deep into the heart.