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the Flat Earth

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Jason
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« on: June 25, 2007, 11:48:57 pm »

The Early Christian Church

From Late Antiquity, and from the beginnings of Christian theology, knowledge of the sphericity of the Earth had become widespread.[17] As in secular culture a small minority contended with the flatness of the Earth. There was also some debate concerning the possibility of the inhabitants of the antipodes: people imagined as separated by an impassable torrid clime were difficult to reconcile with the Christian view of a unified human race descended from one couple and redeemed by a single Christ.

Saint Augustine (354–430) argued against assuming people inhabited the antipodes:

But as to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours, that is on no ground credible. And, indeed, it is not affirmed that this has been learned by historical knowledge, but by scientific conjecture, on the ground that the earth is suspended within the concavity of the sky, and that it has as much room on the one side of it as on the other: hence they say that the part which is beneath must also be inhabited. But they do not remark that, although it be supposed or scientifically demonstrated that the world is of a round and spherical form, yet it does not follow that the other side of the earth is bare of water; nor even, though it be bare, does it immediately follow that it is peopled.[18]

Since these people would have to be descended from Adam, they would have had to travel to the other side of the Earth at some point; Augustine continues:

t is too absurd to say, that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the world to the other, and that thus even the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from that one first man.

Scholars of Augustine's work have traditionally assumed that he would have shared the common view of his educated contemporaries that the earth is spherical. That assumption has recently been challenged, however.[19][20]

A few Christian authors directly opposed the round Earth. Lactantius (245–325), after his conversion to Christianity became a trenchant critic of all pagan philosophy. In Book III of The Divine Institutes[21] he ridicules the notion that there could be inhabitants of the antipodes "whose footsteps are higher than their heads". After presenting some arguments which he claims advocates for a spherical heaven and earth had advanced to support their views, he writes:

But if you inquire from those who defend these marvellous fictions, why all things do not fall into that lower part of the heaven, they reply that such is the nature of things, that heavy bodies are borne to the middle, and that they are all joined together towards the middle, as we see spokes in a wheel; but that the bodies which are light, as mist, smoke, and fire, are borne away from the middle, so as to seek the heaven. I am at a loss what to say respecting those who, when they have once erred, consistently persevere in their folly, and defend one vain thing by another;

In his Homilies Concerning the Statutes[22] St.John Chrysostom (344–408) explicitly espoused the idea, based on his reading of Scripture, that the Earth floated on the waters gathered below the firmament, and St. Athanasius (c.293–373) expressed similar views in Against the Heathen[23]. Diodorus of Tarsus (d. 394) also argued for a flat Earth based on scriptures; however, Diodorus' opinion on the matter is known to us only by a criticism of it by Photius.[24] Severian, Bishop of Gabala (d. 408), wrote: "The earth is flat and the sun does not pass under it in the night, but travels through the northern parts as if hidden by a wall".[25] The Egyptian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes (547) in his Topographia Christiana, where the Covenant Ark was meant to represent the whole universe, argued on theological grounds that the Earth was flat, a parallelogram enclosed by four oceans.

At least one early Christian writer, Basil of Caesarea (329–379), believed the matter to be theologically irrelevant.[26]

Different historians have maintained that these advocates of the flat Earth were either influential (a view typified by Andrew Dickson White) or relatively unimportant (typified by Jeffrey Burton Russell[27]) in the later Middle Ages. The scarcity of references to their beliefs in later medieval writings convinces most of today's historians that their influence was slight.

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