My theological disagreements with Isidore notwithstanding, as a bibliophile I did appreciate the following from his Sententiae.
8.
Reading
8.1. We are made clean by
prayers, we are instructed by readings; if it is possible, both are good; if
not possible to do both, it is better to pray than to read.
8.2. Whoever wishes to be with
God forever ought to pray frequently and to read frequently. For when we pray
we speak to God himself; when we read, God speaks to us.
8.3. All improvement comes from
reading and meditating. That which we do not know we discover by reading; that
which we learn we preserve by meditating.
8.4. Reading the Sacred
Scriptures confers a double gift: it teaches the intellect of the mind and it
leads the person drawn away by the vanities of the world back to the love of
God. For, often stirred up by the words we read, we are drawn away from the
desire of a worldly life and, rising up in the love of wisdom, the more the
empty hope of this mortality becomes without value to us, the more fully
eternal hope has shone forth by reading.
8.5. The pursuit of reading has
two goals: first, how the Scriptures should be understood, and second, with
what benefit or dignity they should be spoken of. The first thing to happen is
that someone will be able to understand what he is reading, and then one will
become capable of explaining what it says.
8.6. The steadfast reader will be
more capable of putting into practice what he reads than he will be an expert
in understanding it. There is a smaller punishment not to know what you desire
than not to do those things that you know (cf. Luke 12:47–48). Thus, just as by
reading we desire to know, so by knowing, we ought to do the right things we
have learned.
8.7. The law of God holds a
reward and a punishment for those who read it. There is a reward for those who
keep it by living in a good manner; there is a punishment certainly for those
who hold it in disregard by living in an evil manner.
8.8. Everyone who strays from the
precepts of God in his actions, as often as he has been able to read or hear
these precepts of God, is confounded as reprehensible in his heart, because he
remembers that which he is not doing and is accused interiorly by his
conscience as his witness. Thus also David the prophet was praying when he
said, “Then I shall not be put to shame, having my eyes fixed on all your
commandments” (Ps 119:6). For one is seriously confounded when he reflects upon
the commandments of God by reading or hearing them, but holds them in
disrespect by the way he lives. He is held liable in his heart when he is
instructed by meditating on the commandments, because he has not done in deed
what he has learned by divine command. (Isidore of Seville, Sententiae [Ancient
Christian Writers 73; trans. Thomas L. Knoebel; New York: The Newman Press,
2018], Book III, Chapter 8)
