Synonyma (Synonyma de lamentatione animae peccatricis)
The Synonyma of Isidore of Seville is a two-book spiritual meditation written as a dialogue between a soul in distress and Reason, its counselor. The title refers less to its subject than to its method: the work is composed according to the laws of synonymic parallelism, a technique that multiplies equivalent expressions—near-synonyms, parallel clauses, repeated variations on a single thought—so that the same idea is stated, restated and unfolded from several angles. This manner is not ornament but instrument: the piling up of equivalent words gives the argument both insistence and emotional weight, and it governs the whole work from the lamentations of the first book to the counsels of the second. The treatise is also transmitted under the title given in many manuscripts, Synonyma de lamentatione animae peccatricis (“on the lament of the sinful soul”), and sometimes as Soliloquia, since it presents the soul speaking, as it were, alone with reason.
Prologue and dialogue form
The work opens with a short prose prologue in which the author introduces his undertaking and its dialogic shape. Thereafter the text proceeds by alternating speeches: the soul (or man) speaks in his own person, and Reason answers, corrects, consoles and instructs. The exchange is not a debate between equals but a therapy: the suffering party voices his condition, and Reason diagnoses and treats it. In the manuscripts the speakers are marked simply as ratio and anima (or homo), and the second book in particular is dominated by Reason’s continuous discourse, into which the soul’s brief replies and petitions are set.
Book I: the lament and the desire for death
The first book presents the soul weighed down by the misfortunes that oppress it and by the consciousness of its own sin. In long, cumulative series of synonymous phrases it sets out its misery, its fears and its weariness, until under this burden it comes to desire its own death and to regard dying as preferable to enduring. This is the crisis from which the dialogue takes its rise.
Reason then intervenes. Her first task is not to argue doctrine but to raise the sufferer’s courage: she checks the despairing impulse, forbids the wish for death as a flight rather than a remedy, and sets before the soul the possibility of pardon. From there she begins to lead it back along the right path, turning it from the contemplation of its own wretchedness toward repentance and the pursuit of perfection. The first book thus moves between lament and correction, with the soul’s complaints repeatedly answered by Reason’s appeals to hope, to the mercy of God and to the soul’s own dignity and destiny.
Book II: the therapy of Reason
In the second book Reason continues and completes this spiritual therapy, now supplying positive counsel for the conduct of the Christian life. The instruction addresses the resistance to temptation—notably, in the commentary of the work’s own manuscript tradition, the temptation of impurity—and then ranges over the practices by which the soul is strengthened and advanced: prayer, vigilance or watchfulness, mortification, and the disciplined pursuit of heavenly goods. The movement is from the healing of the wounded soul to the formation of the soul that has recovered, and the two books together form a single ascent from despair through penitence to the desire of God.
The work closes in prayer. The final movement is a petition in which the soul, instructed and steadied by Reason, turns directly to God; the surviving explicit of the Latin text ends with an affirmation of God’s worth set against the soul’s own life, sealed with an Amen. The dialogue thus terminates not in argument but in devotion, the soul’s speech having been trained from complaint into prayer.
Character of the work
The Synonyma is a moral and ascetical treatise rather than a work of doctrine or exegesis. Its subject is the inner life of the individual soul—sin, grief, despair, repentance, temptation, discipline and hope—and its mode is exhortation. Its language is saturated with Scripture, and its moral teaching is built out of the patristic and monastic inheritance available to Isidore, whose borrowings are extensive and whose handling of his sources is one of the work’s notable features. The style is rhythmic and incantatory rather than classical: the synonymous amplifications produce a prose that is meant to be felt as much as followed, and they make the treatise unusually intimate in tone, so that the reader is drawn into the sufferer’s own voice before being led out of it by Reason’s counsel. Structurally the work is simple—two books, a prologue, an alternation of two speakers, and a concluding prayer—but the simplicity is deliberate, since the whole force of the piece lies in the patient, repetitive rephrasing of a small number of central convictions: that misery is real, that pardon is possible, and that the soul is made for a good beyond itself.
Compunction and the last things
The Synonyma is not content merely to soothe the despairing soul; it sets its grief within the horizon of repentance. The lament is cast as compunction—sorrow that is allowed to become self-knowledge—and Reason’s replies direct that sorrow toward confession, amendment, and the mercy of God. The soul is repeatedly asked to consider the fragility of the present life and the reality of death and judgment, so that its attachment to passing goods is loosened and its desire is redirected to the eternal. The treatise thus carries a strong contemptus mundi strain, but it is not mere pessimism: the fear of judgment is held together with the promise of pardon, and the whole dialogue is ordered to the soul’s conversion.
The work’s significance is accordingly ascetical and formational. It does not aim to settle speculative questions but to shape the affections and speech of the penitent. The synonymous style, by lingering over the same truth in many forms, both expresses the obsessiveness of grief and drills the soul in the language of hope; the reader is meant to pass through the sufferer’s voice and come out on the side of Reason. In this respect the Synonyma stands as a compact handbook of penitential spirituality: it joins lament, moral instruction, and prayer into a single movement, and it treats the reform of the soul as a matter of learning to speak rightly to God.
