In contrast with the soul the body scarcely deserves to be spoken of except with disparagement. Its goods are to be unhesitatingly sacrificed to those of the supernatural element in man, or rather, they are not regarded as goods at all. “It is advantageous,” Isidore says, “for those who are well and strong to become infirm, lest through the vigor of their health they be defiled by illicit passions and the desire for luxury”.[107] The present life of the body has no value; it is brief and wretched. “Holy men desire to spurn the world and devote the activity of their minds to things above, in order to convey themselves back to the place from which they have come, and withdraw from the place into which they have been cast.”[108] Thus philosophy of the supernatural culminated in asceticism.
Isidore’s supernatural world has its inhabitants, and in dealing with these he has a theology, an angelology, and a demonology; in all of which fields his ideas are more precise and clear-cut than where he speaks of the material world.
His theology is of little interest; it consists in the orthodox view of the time, accepted without a shadow of criticism. He says, “We are not permitted to form any belief of our own will, or to choose a belief that someone else has accepted of his own. We have God’s apostles as authorities, who did not themselves choose anything of what they should believe, but they faithfully transmitted to the nations the teaching received from Christ. And so even if an angel from heaven shall preach otherwise, let him be anathema”.[109]
The minor inhabitants of Isidore’s supernatural world, the angels and demons, offer a more practical interest. They represent the stage of development at which the old polytheism of the Jews had adjusted itself to monotheism, but had by no means faded out of existence. Indeed, it is plain that at this time the immediate concern of the ordinary man was with these spirits, good and bad; while between man and God there were, for the most part, only mediate relations.
The number of these spirits was very great; each place had its angel, as had each man,—and, presumably, a demon as well. The seraphim, the highest order in the hierarchy of angels, were a multitude in themselves. We may surmise that for Isidore, as for Jerome, the entire human population of the world was as nothing compared with the entire population of spirits.[110]