Sin and crime in the "Sentences" of Taio of Zaragoza: the content and the sources of the concepts

The purpose of the article is to define the terms describing sin in the "Sentences" of Taio, a bishop of Zaragoza in the second half of VII century. To achieve this goal I tried to find the sources of Taio's concepts and to analyze the ways of citing and interpreting them. I selected some Latin words with an interesting sense (peccatum, delictum, iniquitas, vitium) and tried to compare meanings of them. My main source was "Sentences", a treatise wrote by Taio, a very readable book in the early medieval Europe. The "Sentences" contain five books. In the first, the author talks about God and the angels, in the second - about those who dedicated themselves to the service of God. The third book deals with various types of sacraments, as well as examples of the main Christian virtues. The fourth book, on the contrary, is devoted to various kinds of sin, the fifth deals with crimes, trial and justice. I also used the texts those had an enormous influence upon Taio: I mean "Moralia" of Gregory the Great and "Sentences" of Isidore of Seville. Taio adopted the ideas of Gregory and Isidore concerning the sin and its kinds. My conclusions could make clearer the sense of Latin words. "Peccatum" is a common world to describe the sins. Taio tried to do a hierarchy of sins and crimes. He divides the sins into graves and lights, secrets and overts. Every unwept sin, every sin without repentance pull the other sin, more grave and horrible, and in the end it is a web of sins, but a poor sinner cannot recognize it. The other synonims of "peccatum" are terms "vitium", "delictum" and "iniquitas". We use to translate "vitium" as vice. It means in "Sentences" seven cardinal vices, as greed, lust, anger, envy, despondency, gluttony and arrogance. "Delictum" is quite similar to "peccatum", they are getting muddled just in Antiquity, but usually "delictum" is more light sin or it is only bad thought. In the end "iniquitas" is injustice. Taio's ideas are not original at all; he took it over "Moralia" and Isidore's "Sentences". His originality consists in using and combination of two main works. He took a form and structure from Isidore's treatise and filled it by Gregory's ideas and examples. However, his "Sentences", with their relatively small volume and distinct structure became the source by which the ideas of Gregory the Great, expressed in "Moralia", were widely spread both in the Visigothic Kingdom and generally in medieval Europe.

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