Isidore of Seville

PL 83, col. 209B

Datec. 630PlaceSevilleTraditionlatinVerseGenesis 1:1

English

'In the beginning God made heaven and earth.' The Beginning is Christ, as he himself answered in the Gospel to the Jews when they questioned him: 'I am the Beginning, who also speak to you' (John 8:25). In this beginning, therefore, God made heaven — that is, the spiritual, who meditate on and seek heavenly things; and in him he made the carnal also, who have not yet laid aside the earthly man.

Fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt · cc-by

Latin

In principio fecit Deus coelum et terram. Principium Christus est, sicut ipse in Evangelio Judaeis interrogantibus respondit: Ego principium, qui et loquor vobis (Joan. VIII, 25) . In hoc igitur principio fecit Deus coelum, id est, spirituales, qui coelestia meditantur et quaerunt; in ipso fecit et carnales, qui necdum terrenum hominem deposuerunt.

PL 83, col. 209B · pd

Notes

What the Christological reading becomes once it is settled: not an argument but a premise, and one that immediately turns ecclesial. Isidore states 'the Beginning is Christ' flatly, with John 8:25 and no discussion, and then reads heaven and earth as two kinds of Christian, the spiritual and the carnal. The Glossa's Mystice paragraph on this verse does the same thing in the same words four centuries later. Isidore's Quaestiones announce at the head that the historical sense has been read and the spiritual is what they are for, so the absence of argument is a genre, not a lapse.

In the Son

Threads

→ echoes · Ambrose
'Principium Christus est', with John 8:25 attached and no argument at all. What Ambrose offered as one limb of a vel and Augustine as one of three readings has become a premise from which the allegory starts.
← parallel · Glossa ordinaria (school of Laon)
The Glossa's Mystice paragraph reads heaven and earth as those who bore the image of the heavenly and those who grew proud and bore the earthly; Isidore's Quaestiones read the same two words as the spiritual and the carnal in the Church. Same allegory, same verse, five centuries apart, and the Glossa does not name him.