comments: “Whewell pointed to the culprits … as evidence of a medieval belief in a flat earth, and virtually every subsequent historian imitated him—they could find few other examples.”
I own a copy of Lactantius’s
Divinae institutiones
(Divine precepts), published in Lyons in 1541. This work does indeed include a chapter titled
De antipodibus
(On the antipodes), ridiculing the notion of a round earth with all the arguments about upside-down Australians, etc., that passed for humor in my fifth-gradeclass. Lactantius writes: “Can there be anyone so inept to believe that men exist whose extremities lie above their heads
[quorum vestigia sint superiora quam capita] …
that trees can grow downwards, and that rain, and snow, and hail go upwards instead of falling to earth
[pluvias, et nives, et grandinem sursum versus cadere in terram]?”
And Cosmas did champion a literal view of a biblical metaphor—the earth as a flat floor for the rectangular, vaulted arch of the heavens above.
Purveyors of the flat-earth myth could never deny the plain testimony of Bede, Bacon, Aquinas, and others—so they argued that these men acted as rare beacons of brave light in pervasive darkness. But consider the absurdity of such a position. Who formed the orthodoxy representing this consensus of ignorance? Two minor figures named Lactantius and Cosmas Indicopleustes? Bede, Bacon, Aquinas, and their ilk were not brave iconoclasts. They constituted the establishment, and their convictions about the earth’s roundness stood as canonical, while Lactantius and colleagues remained marginal.
Where, then, and why, did the myth of medieval belief in a flat earth arise? Russell’s historiographic work gives us a good fix on both times and people. None of the great eighteenth-century anticlerical rationalists—not Condillac, Condorcet, Diderot, Gibbon, Hume, or our own Benjamin Franklin—accused early Christianscholars of believing in a flat earth, though these men scarcely veiled their contempt for medieval versions of Christianity. Washington Irving gave the flat-earth story a good boost in his largely fictional history of Columbus, published in 1828—but his version did not take hold. The legend grew during the nineteenth century, but did not enter the crucial domains of schoolboy pap or tour-guide lingo. Russell did an interesting survey of nineteenth-century history texts for secondary schools, and found that very few mentioned the flat-earth myth before 1870, but that almost all texts after 1880 featured the legend. We can therefore pinpoint the invasion of general culture by the flat-earth myth.
Those years also marked the construction of the model of warfare between science and religion as a guiding theme of Western history. Such theories of dichotomous struggle always need whipping boys and legends to advance their claims. Russell argues that the flat-earth myth achieved its canonical status as a primary homily for the triumph of science under this false dichotomization of Western history. How could a better story for the army of science ever be concocted? Religious darkness destroys Greek knowledge and weaves us into a web of fears, based on dogma and opposed to both rationality and experience. Our ancestors therefore lived in anxiety, restricted by clerical irrationality, afraid that any challenge could only provoke a fall offthe edge of the earth into eternal damnation. A fit tale for an intended purpose, but entirely false because few medieval Christian scholars ever doubted the earth’s sphericity.
In the preceding section, I traced the genesis of the warfare model of science and religion to the influential books of Draper and White. Both authors used the flat-earth myth as a primary example. Draper began by stating his thesis:
The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the
I own a copy of Lactantius’s
Divinae institutiones
(Divine precepts), published in Lyons in 1541. This work does indeed include a chapter titled
De antipodibus
(On the antipodes), ridiculing the notion of a round earth with all the arguments about upside-down Australians, etc., that passed for humor in my fifth-gradeclass. Lactantius writes: “Can there be anyone so inept to believe that men exist whose extremities lie above their heads
[quorum vestigia sint superiora quam capita] …
that trees can grow downwards, and that rain, and snow, and hail go upwards instead of falling to earth
[pluvias, et nives, et grandinem sursum versus cadere in terram]?”
And Cosmas did champion a literal view of a biblical metaphor—the earth as a flat floor for the rectangular, vaulted arch of the heavens above.
Purveyors of the flat-earth myth could never deny the plain testimony of Bede, Bacon, Aquinas, and others—so they argued that these men acted as rare beacons of brave light in pervasive darkness. But consider the absurdity of such a position. Who formed the orthodoxy representing this consensus of ignorance? Two minor figures named Lactantius and Cosmas Indicopleustes? Bede, Bacon, Aquinas, and their ilk were not brave iconoclasts. They constituted the establishment, and their convictions about the earth’s roundness stood as canonical, while Lactantius and colleagues remained marginal.
Where, then, and why, did the myth of medieval belief in a flat earth arise? Russell’s historiographic work gives us a good fix on both times and people. None of the great eighteenth-century anticlerical rationalists—not Condillac, Condorcet, Diderot, Gibbon, Hume, or our own Benjamin Franklin—accused early Christianscholars of believing in a flat earth, though these men scarcely veiled their contempt for medieval versions of Christianity. Washington Irving gave the flat-earth story a good boost in his largely fictional history of Columbus, published in 1828—but his version did not take hold. The legend grew during the nineteenth century, but did not enter the crucial domains of schoolboy pap or tour-guide lingo. Russell did an interesting survey of nineteenth-century history texts for secondary schools, and found that very few mentioned the flat-earth myth before 1870, but that almost all texts after 1880 featured the legend. We can therefore pinpoint the invasion of general culture by the flat-earth myth.
Those years also marked the construction of the model of warfare between science and religion as a guiding theme of Western history. Such theories of dichotomous struggle always need whipping boys and legends to advance their claims. Russell argues that the flat-earth myth achieved its canonical status as a primary homily for the triumph of science under this false dichotomization of Western history. How could a better story for the army of science ever be concocted? Religious darkness destroys Greek knowledge and weaves us into a web of fears, based on dogma and opposed to both rationality and experience. Our ancestors therefore lived in anxiety, restricted by clerical irrationality, afraid that any challenge could only provoke a fall offthe edge of the earth into eternal damnation. A fit tale for an intended purpose, but entirely false because few medieval Christian scholars ever doubted the earth’s sphericity.
In the preceding section, I traced the genesis of the warfare model of science and religion to the influential books of Draper and White. Both authors used the flat-earth myth as a primary example. Draper began by stating his thesis:
The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the
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