Many times when I'm
discussing issues of faith and science, I hear the accusation that one cannot
hold the Bible to be true and accept modern scientific findings. Usually, the
person with whom I'm conversing will assert how backwards the beliefs of
Christian society was during the Middle Ages and that we would still believe in
a flat earth had it not been for the scientific revolution brought on by the
Renaissance.
The idea that the medieval Church held to a flat earth has been
around for some time. In his popular historical text
The Discoveres, Daniel
Boorstin exemplifies the position, as he devotes a full chapter of the book,
ominously entitled "A Flat Earth Returns," to the proposition.He writes:
While Christian geographers feared the close calculations of Eratosthenes,
Hipparchus and Ptolemy, they cheerfully embellished their pious
Jerusalem-centered maps with the wildest ventures of pagan imagination. Julius
Solinus (fl. A.D. 220)… provided the standard source of geographic myth during
all the years of the Great Interruption, from the fourth till the fourteenth
centuries… Saint Augustine himself drew upon Solinus, as did all the other
leading Christian thinkers during the Middle Ages."1
Boorstin elsewhere describes the Middle Ages as "a far more remarkable act of
retreat."
2 However, the idea that all the leading
Christian thinkers during the Middle Ages feared an idea of a spherical earth is
simply wrong. For example, at the very beginning of St. Thomas Aquinas' 13th
century
Summa Theologica, this leading Christian thinker writes about the
spherical character of the earth. "For the astronomer and the physicist both may
prove the same conclusion: that the earth, for instance, is round: the
astronomer by means of mathematics (i.e. abstracting from matter), but the
physicist by means of matter itself."
3
The
interesting thing about Aquinas' use of the roundness of the earth is that he
was using the fact as an example of something well known. Thomas said that the
theologian should explore theology to find its clear truths the way the
astronomer or the physicist will use their disciplines to show the roundness of
the earth. In other words, Aquinas is using the fact of a round earth the way
the atheist would, as something no one would doubt.
By any measure, Aquinas
must be considered one of the "leading Christian thinkers during the Middle
Ages." Yet, here is Aquinas clearly believing in a round earth! This made me
curious to investigate what some other church fathers believed. Since Boorstein
brought up Augustine, I looked there next. In
City of God, Book XVI, chapter 9,
Augustine discusses possible races of men who may have escaped the Flood of
Noah. He writes:
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.4
Note that the focus here is whether there
were human survivors of the Flood. Augustine is commenting on the possibility of
antipodes—people taking a boat to the opposite end of the earth, not sailing
off of an edge. Augustine states that even if science does show a round earth,
it doesn't follow that it has people on it.
In preaching on Psalm 61,
Augustine also makes his belief known, when he comments that Christ will
"showeth himself to be throughout all nations in the whole round world, in great
glory, but in great tribulation."
5 It seems Augustine
believed, then, in a round earth. Even the fifth century father Gregory of Nyssa
taught that the earth was spherical, stating "As, when the sun shines above the
earth, the shadow is spread over its lower part, because its spherical shape
makes it impossible for it to be clasped all round at one and the same time by
the rays."
6
Gregory of Nyssa lived in the fourth
century, Augustine lived in the fifth century, and Aquinas lived in the
thirteenth. All are "leading Christian thinkers" and all believed in a spherical
earth, so Boorstin's charge itself falls flat. It simply isn't true that the
vast majority of people prior to the Renaissance held to a flat earth, and to
accuse modern Christians of doing the same is boorishness.
References
.jpg)
