Subject: Re: [HM] Flat earth fallacy
From: Kim Plofker (Kim_Plofker@Brown.edu)
Date: Wed Feb 23 2000 - 18:44:14 EST
Robert Schadewald of (I think) the University of Minnesota made the
following comments available in a discussion of medieval flat-earthism
at
http://www.sfu.ca/philosophy/swartz/flat_earth.htm
> Lactantius, Cyril of Jerusalem, and Diodorus of Tarsus have been
> correctly cited by others as flat earthers. I could name many more,
> some minor figures, some major (John Chrysostom, for example, and
> probably Basil of Caesarea). Flat earthism seems to have been
> uncommon among the Latin Fathers (Tertullian seems to have been one
> exception). Among the Greek Fathers, the Alexandrians tended to
> interpret scripture allegorically, and they likewise could accept
> sphericity without a problem. The Antiochene theologians, however,
> originated the grammatical-historical interpretation of the Bible
> beloved by modern fundamentalists, and I can't name a single one of
> them who endorsed sphericity but several who condemned it. The Old
> Syrian Church seems likewise to have been hostile to sphericity.
> (Jeffrey Burton Russell's treatment of the Fathers' views on the
> shape of the earth is no more reliable than Andrew Dickson White's,
> though he castigates White for inaccuracy.)
>
> Contra Russell, who portrays Cosmas Indicopleustes as a weird
> latter-day (c. 548) innovator, I think Cosmas (who wrote in Greek,
> not Latin) preserved a minor but interesting tradition. He says in
> his book that he learned his system from the man who later became
> Bishop Catholic of all of Persia (head of the Nestorian Church).
Russell's emphatic claim that virtually no educated person in the middle
ages believed that the earth was flat may be something of an overstatement,
therefore. Apparently, the spherical-earth theory occupied a similar
position to that of most geology and evolutionary biology today: that is,
it was an accepted part of mainstream scientific thought and non-controversial
among most of the learned, but a number of educated people (and probably a
higher proportion of the non-learned who did not publish their views) felt
compelled to reject it on theological grounds. The idea that Church
authorities in the Renaissance would have quarrelled with Columbus or Galileo
for believing in a spherical earth, however, seems totally indefensible.
Michael Lambrou's post makes an interesting point:
> The main example, in the Byzantine world, being Cosmas
> Indicopleustis (= Cosmas who sailed to India). I am writing from memory
> now, but I recall he lived during the 6th century AD. His book "Christian
> Topography" was widely read. There he says that earth was flat and that
> there was a large mountain right in the middle: He explains nightfall
> by having the Sun going behind this mountain periodically.
This is very similar to the ideas of a couple of the pre-Socratics
around the sixth or fifth century BCE, Anaximander and Anaximenes, in which
the sun and other planets circle above a flat earth and periodically "set"
behind a big mountain. (It's been suggested that this theory might reflect
cosmological ideas from Mesopotamia, about which the purely computational
Mesopotamian astronomy gives no clue.) Interestingly, the cosmology of the
Indian Puranas (unlike the Indian astronomical tradition, which maintains
the earth's sphericity) has the same sort of setup, and I wonder if that
could be an intermediate source of Cosmas' scheme (it's hardly "Christian"
topography,though!).
With best wishes,
Kim Plofker
Department of the History of Mathematics
Brown University
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