Antipope Innocent II

You can rest assured that while studying medieval history for the last 25 years I did manage to pick those rather basic snippets of information up.

Yes. And? He wasn't a heretic, as we've agreed. The fact remains that he was obscure in the East and unknown in the West.

I started this thread so I think I'm fairly clear on what it's about. And it isn't about "the early Christian Church prior to Augustine". It's about the Western Church after Augustine - 500-1500 AD. That's what the word "medieval" in the title means. If you want to have some other discussion about some other period, go start your own thread.

Jehanne

Well, we have been having two different conversations and have been arguing about two different things! I don't think that anyone here is disputing the fact that theologians such as Bede and Aquinas believed in a spherical Earth. But, clearly, if we define the Middle Ages as beginning with the Fall of Rome, then the belief in a flat-earth was "alive and kicking" well into the high Middle Ages. It was only later into the Middle Ages that theologians began to abandon the concept. But, as was clear with the citation of Copernicus' work, the correct geometry of the Earth was not known to all, and it was clearly acceptable, in the Church's eyes, both East and West, to both believe and teach that the Earth was flat, as such a view was completely compatible with Holy Writ, and was, indeed, the dominant viewpoint of the early Christian Church, and especially the first-century Church.

Antipope Innocent II

I've been talking about the topic of this thread.


Angelo Atheist did, though he's vanished from this thread, which is hardly surprising.

"Clearly"? Okay - it was argued for in the high Middle Ages by who, exactly?
Crap. It had been totally abandoned centuries before.

Utter garbage. The citation of Copernicus' work showed nothing other than the fact that the guy who posted that quote didn't have a clue what it meant or its context and purpose. No-one was of the opinion that the Earth was anything other than round in the Sixteenth Century and all Copernicus was doing was starting the discussion of the movement of the Earth with an historical overview of former ancient Greek ideas about its shape and then a summary of why it was known these were wrong. He wasn't doing this to refute any Sixteenth Century defenders of these erroneous early models because no such Sixteenth Century defenders existed.

Nor had any such defenders existed since around the Fifth Century. So your statement that "it was clearly acceptable, in the Church's eyes, both East and West, to both believe and teach that the Earth was flat" is baseless nonsense. There was noone teaching this in the Middle Ages, so what the hell are you basing your assertion on?

I love the way people on this thread are continuing to talk about how it's "clear" that the flat earth idea was A-okay in the Middle Ages without noticing that they have consistently failed to come up with any medieval flat earth defenders.

Jehanne

No one. I wrote that "the belief in a flat-earth was 'alive and kicking' well into the high Middle Ages..." Yeah, sure, no repeatable theologian was advocating a flat-earth after Cosmas, but the belief itself almost certainly survived! Then, as now, there was a disconnect between what the popular culture thought and what academics taught and believed. From the time of Cosmas on, no one was ever censored, excommunicated, or ever tortured and/or burned for "holding and believing" that the Earth was flat. If you look in Denzinger's Sources of Catholic Dogma, you will find literally thousands of condemnations of theological error from the Council of Nicea on. Not one of those errors is for a condemnation of teaching the idea that the Earth was flat. Cosmas taught it, and he was never condemned or even censored. St. John Chrysostom explicitly taught the idea, and he was canonized and later declared a "Doctor of the Church", in the 13th-century!

You act like the belief was here "one day" and disappeared the very next. The belief in a flat-earth was abandoned, gradually, over the course of centuries, well into the Middle Ages. Again, you cannot point to a single example of where the Catholic Church, either East or West, condemned or even censored an individual from the fifth-century on for teaching or believing that the Earth was flat. Not one Pope, not one Church council, not one bishop.

andrewcriddle

It is very possible that many simple illiterate people in the high Middle Ages believed that the earth was flat. Such people believed many things of which the official church strongly disapproved.

What you seem to be suggesting, however, is that belief in a flat-earth remained significant in the high Middle Ages among rather more educated people, (eg literate Latin speaking people who had not gone to University), and that the failure of the official church to condemn past writers such as Cosmas was either a cause or a result of such continued belief in a flat-earth.

If that is what you mean could you provide evidence ?

Andrew Criddle

lee_merrill

A word in your ear--these discussions are interminable, when people resort to assertions, and refuse to acknowledge supported points made by those with the other view, and (if this goes on long enough) claim victory because the prolonged exchange indicates a solid counter-argument.

Best wishes
Lee

P.S. Speaking of wishes, I would hope to disagree with you on another topic! I like discussing with folks who have good insight, and have substantial knowledge in the areas of interest.

Jehanne

The Church never condemned the idea of flat-earth because it was clear to all Medieval churchmen that many of the most prominent pre-Nicene fathers had explicitly held and taught the idea! I have never claimed, nor has anyone here, that the Medieval theologians during the time of Aquinas explicitly taught the idea of flat-earth, but it was clearly acceptable theological opinion to at least do so. And, where did the theology of a flat-earth come from? It came from the pre-Nicene fathers who got it from the first-century Church! Does anyone here dispute the fact that Paul and the Gospel writers clearly believed in a flat earth?

lee_merrill

I would refer you to a prior post of mine but I believe you already read it. Surely you should recall my reply, and at least conclude that there are people here who dispute this "fact", so-called...

andrewcriddle

Could you provide evidence that high Medieval churchmen knew that many prominent fathers had explicitly taught a flat-earth ?

(This is not a question of what Chrysostom for example actually taught, but of what the average Medieval churchman believed him to have taught.)

Andrew Criddle

DCHindley

I thing that folks are confusing issues here. Ptolemy the astronomer, who flourished around 120 CE, knew damn well that the earth was a sphere. He was not the inventor of this wild and radical idea - it had been around for a couple hundred years by his time - but simply one of the better known writers on the subject. By "better known" I mean among the educated classes, which in thie period of antiquity we are dealing with was about 5-10% of the Mediterranean region's population. Even among these folks, who were the members of the ruling classes or their top retainers with the leisure time to devote to astronomy and cartography.

For god's sake, everybody, check out some books by Otto Neugebauer, one of the foremost authorities on the history of astronomy in the ancient world.

The issue if this, from the ground observer the universe around us appears to our senses to be a flat earth with the heavens surrounding the earth like a dome. This is known as the horizon system, and there are a number of ways that ancients attempted to make sense of what they observed with the naked eye. The Astronomical Book of Enoch (Section III of the Ethiopic version, or 1 Enoch) is a good example. The sun and moon rose from one of a series of "gates" across the eastern horizon and set in one of several corresponding gates in the western horizon. The gates from which these objects rose and set changes over the course of a month, resulting in differences in length of day and night and perceived position in the sky.

The Babylonians noticed that the stars seemed to rotate across the sky at a somewhat different rate than the sun and moon and visible planets, and subdivided the heavens into regions and standardized the concept of time. They even managed to compute very elaborate tables to describe where you should find the sun or moon or planets in relation to the stars (the zodiac) at any particular point in time using tables and a method called interpolation.

Later the Greeks refined these observations and from this and other developments in physics and geometry reasoned that the earth had to be a sphere. They progressively invented the method of calculus which allowed more accurate prediction of observed positions of sun, moon and planets projected onto a sphere in the sky. The accuracy of these predictions only confirmed the idea of a sperical planet was correct. It was in response to this that attempts were made to apply these same mapping techniques that worked so well projected up onto the sky to the earth's surface as well, and early attempts were made to create accurate maps. Up to then maps had really sucked, having no real senses of scale or accurate direction. Still, they fumbled as certain considerations that we now take for granted (mainly the effect of latitude on measurements) were still to be discovered. Also, they thought of orbits as being circular, which required epicycles (orbits arounds points in orbits) to rationalize the difference between observed and computed positions of the sun, moon & planets. This was still an earth based system of understanding the universe, which was simply an outgrowth of the horizon system of understanding things.

The Ptolemaic system of the universe was the "standard" understanding among the educated folks, and it held sway for hundreds of years until Copernicus proposed that the sun was the center and the planets, including earth, rotated around it and the moon rotated around the earth. He tweaked the understanding of orbits, which were still considered perfect circles. To the naked eye, there is really no way to tell the difference between an earth at the center or the sun at the center. Sure he dedicated his treatis to Pope Paul III but there was no church reaction to the theory among Catholics until the controversy of Galileo 75 years later.

Galileo offered the proposition that the orbits were parabolae spurred by the invention of telescopes which confirmed his predictions. Pope Pius V, upset that Galileo was publishing his theory in popular and controversial publications that upset the faithful, banned the Copernican theory. Galileo furthered the flames by later presenting the theory as fact is a fictional story in which the more traditional position (roughly ptolemaic) was lampooned by a character that resembled Pope Urban VIII in name. The Pope took offense, because the theory was being represented as fact rather than threory, even after he had cautioned Galileo (who he actually knew personally) that the church could tolerate the theory if presented as a theory only. Galileo got prosecuted for this and recanted on threat of excommunication.

So what if the average peasant through the ages thought the earth was flat! Geez Louise!! Even super sleuth Sherlock Holmes was depicted as using the horizon system!

DCH