Topographia Christiana / Christian Topography - Flat Earth
Stand on a hill top on a clear day, looking over the lowlands stretching away from below, there is nothing to suggest the surface of a globe. There is no appearance that the surface bends down as it recedes. Rather does it seem as if the Earth slopes up towards the horizon and as if the hill rises up in the middle of a shallow cup. When the ancients first began to think about such observations as this, and to consider the shape of the Earth, there was no obvious suggestion that they were on a globe, and, naturally perhaps, the first idea was that the Earth is a flat plain on which the mountains are creases, a flat 'firmament in the midst of the waters.'
The doctrine of a spherical round earth grew into the creed of a school when the Pythagoreans adopting it gave it a congenial metaphysical basis and made it popular with the Greeks. The sphere is the most perfect of forms; it is therefore the fittest form for the home of man; hence it is the form of the home of man. The Sophists and the Platonists as they came into influence still further pushed into ascendency the dialectic and imaginative tendencies. All of this was offensive to later Christians of that habit of mind of religious dogmatizing which fears nothing but want of faith.
It was urged that if the Earth were round, men on the opposite side would be walking with their heels upwards, that the trees would be growing with their branches downwards, and that it would rain, hail and snow upwards. All this appeared absurd, for it was not realized that the tendency to fall is a tendency to fall towards the center of the Earth. Falling was thought of as a motion in the same direction everywhere, and anything loose on the other side of the Earth, if that other side could be conceived as existing, should fall away from the surface. The most obvious account of appearances of a flat Earth was that everything tended to fall straight down to the Earth; everywhere, as far as they could tell, in the same direction; or down-ness was universal. Having once taken this view, it was a real difficulty, rightly felt, that bodies could remain on the surface at the Antipodes. They should fall down into space there just as they fall down to the surface here. There were no measurements contradicting this view, nor were there means to make the measurements.
The Papacy taught that the Bible contained the sum of knowledge, was Divinely inspired, and, consequently, absolutely infallible, from beginning to end; and the Bible most indubitably teaches that the earth is flat. No one reading the account of the Creation in the first chapter of Genesis could suppose for a moment that the writer had the faintest notion that our earth is, comparatively speaking, a tiny ball, part of a great system, and held in its relative position in space by the attraction of gravity. The story of the Flood, again, proved the belief of its author in the saucer-like shape of the earth. From the account of the Garden of Eden to that of the Ascension of Christ, all the stories of angels going to and fro, and the tale of Elijah and the fiery chariot, go to prove thai the writers believed the earth to be flat, fixed, and immovable in the centre of the universe; that heaven was another solid substance, stretched above it at no great distance like a dome, and a place inhabited by beings endowed with the power of dropping down upon the world much as a sparrow floats down from a housetop.
The Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes [the Indian Navigator], written between 535 and 547 AD, is one of the prodigies of literature. Comas’ primary objective and motivation in writing the treatise was to discredit the “false and heathen doctrine of a spherical earth”. The commercial pursuits of Cosmas carried him into seas and countries far remote from his home. Thus he relates that he had sailed upon three of the great gulfs which run up into the earth from the ocean, namely, the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, and Persian Gulf. He sailed also upon that part of the Erythraean Sea which beyond Cape Guardafui stretches southward toward the outlying ocean. When he describes the island of Ceylon and the ports, commerce, and animals of India, there can no doubt that he writes about these places from personal knowledge of them.
The boldness and perverse ingenuity with which Cosmas, from a long array of irrelevant scripture texts, seeks to construct an impossible theory of the universe can scarcely fail to astonish everyone who reads it. It made its appearance at that period in the world's history, when Christendom, fast losing the light of Greek learning and culture, was soon to be shrouded in the long night of mediaeval ignorance and barbarism. The work reflects with singular distinctness this prominent characteristic of the age which produced it; for while Cosmas, on the one hand, held the principles of the Christian faith combined with others pervading the theology then current which led to the darkening of all true knowledge, he had, on the other hand, a somewhat considerable, if inexact, acquaintance with the philosophical and scientific speculations of the Greeks. He may thus not inaptly be compared to a two-headed Janus, with one face turned to the light of departing day, and the other to the shadows of the coming night.
Cosmas, it is proper to remember, expressly disclaimed all pretensions to the learning of the schools. He pleads that from his early years he had been so engrossed in business, and had been besides so much abroad, that he had found no spare time for studying. It is essentially controversial, its professed design being to refute, from Scripture and common sense, the impious Pagan cosmography, according to which the earth is a sphere; and the center around which the heaven, which is also a sphere, revolves with all its luminaries.
According to the view of Cosmas, the figure of the universe can best be learned from a study of the structure and furniture of the Tabernacle which Moses prepared in the wilderness. This wonderful conception did not originate with himself. Some of the Christian Fathers who preceded him had entertained it in a vague and general way, believing it might be warranted by the expressions in Hebrews, ix, 23 and 24, where the Tabernacle and its contents are said to be patterns and antitypes or figures of the true. It was left to Cosmas to develop the conception and work it out into all its details.
The table of shew-bread, with its waved border, represented the earth surrounded by the ocean, while its other parts and the things upon it symbolized each some object or other in the natural world. Now, as the table was twice as long as it was broad, and was placed lengthwise from east to west, and breadthwise from north to south, from this we learn that the earth is a rectangular plane which extends in length from east to west, and in breadth from north to south, and is twice as long as it is broad. The ocean, he further gives us to know, is unnavigable, and, while encompassing this earth, is itself encompassed by another earth, which had been the seat of Paradise and the abode of man until the Ark, floating on the billows of the Flood, wafted Noah and his family over into this earth. Here then the Pagans are at war with divine Scripture; but, not content with this, they are at war also with common sense itself and the very laws of nature, declaring, as they do, that the earth is a central sphere, and that there are Antipodes, who must be standing head-downward and on whom the rain must fall up.
Upon the edges of the outer inaccessible continent rest the four walls of heaven--four perpendicular planes joined hermetically to the edges of the trans-oceanic Earth, and cemented at the top by an enclosing roof, in form like half a cylinder. Its ends rest on the eastern and western sides of the world, and its sides on the north and south. These directions are determined by the Tabernacle Table, which was placed lengthwise from east to west. Here is a bit from Cosmas himself: "The Deity accordingly having founded the Earth, which is oblong, upon its own stability, bound together the extremities of the heaven with the extremities of the Earth, making the nether extremities of the heaven rest upon the four extremities of the Earth, while on high he formed it into a most lofty vault over-spanning the length of the Earth. Along the breadth again of the Earth he built a wall from the nethermost extremities of the heavens upwards to the summit, and having enclosed the place, made a house, as one might call it, of enormous size, like an oblong vapour bath. For, saith the Prophet Isaiah (xlix, 22), He who established heaven as a vault. With regard moreover to the glueing together of the heaven and the Earth, we find this written in Job: He has inclined heaven to earth, and it has been poured out as the dust of the earth. I have welded it as a square block of stone."
The earth, Cosmas relates, gradually rising up from the south, extends westward, until it culminates at last in a huge conical mountain situated somewhere in the far-away frozen north. Behind this immense cone, the sun at the close of day disappears from view, and leaves the world in darkness, until, having circled round the cone, he reappears in the east to give birth to a new day. The idea that the sun hides behind a mountain is similar to the Indian concept of Mount Meru or Sumeru, a feature of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain cosmology. Mount Meru, which is located either at the center of the earth or at the North Pole, is extremely high, and even the sun and all the planets revolve around it.
With the universe enclosed within a square box, it was no longer possible for the Sun to sink in western waters, swim under the Earth, and emerge again from the eastern sea. But forever circling the conical mountain of the world, in the arms of its carrying angel, it is hidden from a part of the world all of the time, and thus comes day and night. The length of the days and nights varies, says Cosmas, according as the Sun is close to or far from its mountain screen, and from this cause spring summer and winter, storms, eclipses, heat and cold, and such phenomena. "All the stars are created," he says, "to regulate the days and nights, the months and the years, and they move, not at all by the motion of the heaven itself, but by the action of certain divine Beings, or lampadophores. God made the angels for his service, and He has charged some of them with the motion of the air, others with that of the Sun, or the Moon, or the other stars, and others again with the collecting of clouds, and preparing the rain." Cosmas also says that men are mistaken when they say that the Sun is much larger than the Earth; that it is, in reality, very much smaller; and, by measuring its shadows at the different "climates" of Ptolemy, he concludes that the sun has the size of "two climates."
In the seventh century an ecclesiastic, one of the most eminent of his time both for virtue and erudition, taught that "the creation was accomplished in six days, and the cartli is its centre and primary object. The heaven is of a fiery and subtile nature, round and equidistant in every part, as a canopy from the centre of the earth. The highest heaven has its proper limit; it contains the angelic virtues which descend upon earth, assume ethereal bodies, perform human functions, and return." This was the Venerable Bede, and, like a good Catholic, of course, his doctrine accorded exactly with the teaching of Scripture.
Holy Writ distinctly declared for a flat earth, the centre and primary object of the creation. To rob the world of this unique position is at once to denounce the infallibility of the Scripture and the dogmas that have been raised upon it. When Columbus at the end of the 15th century proposed to reach India by sailing to the west instead of to the east, arguing that as the Earth was round, the other side might be reached either way, his opponents, holding that the Earth was flat, regarded him as a fool and a heretic.
Gradually, however, observations accumulated which could not be reconciled with the flatness of the Earth. A traveller, journeying from a mountain range, found on looking back that the mountains not only grew smaller and smaller but that they sank and at last dropped down altogether out of sight. When sailors began to go down to the sea in ships and ventured far out on the waters, the new land to which they sailed appeared first as one little peak, then as a range, and at last the whole land stood above the water. The sinking of ships below the horizon is not a proof that the earth is a globe, but it does indicate that the surface is curved. These observations were difficult to reconcile with the idea of a flat Earth, but easy to explain if it was round. The doctrine of the roundness of the Earth, then, gradually replaced the doctrine of its flatness. But there was a long fight of nearly 1000 years between the doctrines.
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