lee_merrill

Like when medieval people were thinking it might be a sphere? It wasn't a figure of speech until Columbus made his trip?

God uses human language? Indeed, he does, and he speaks in words that people will understand.

So no one in those days knew what a view would be like from a high mountain. Eh?

You all really need to put more thought into your posts, here, I would say.

This then means Scripture teaches this?

I don't speak for Irenaeus, I only say we need not conclude the earth is taught as being flat in Scripture.

Isaiah 40:22 He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth...

So it can't be both four-corners and square, and also a circle.

Isaiah 24:18 The floodgates of the heavens are opened, the foundations of the earth shake.

This first is clearly poetical, the latter then, most likely too, and similarly with various other expressions, such as the ends of the earth, and its corners.

aa5874

Well, why did Copernicus write a book to Pope Paul III explaining that the earth is not flat? Why did the Papal authorities ask Galilileo to recant and condemn him for his theory on the movement and shape of the earth?

Copernicus wrote his book to Pope Paul III, explaining the earth was not flat, almost 100 years before the trial of Galileo, yet his book did not make any difference to the Papal authorities. Galileo was put under house arrest and was asked to confess his errors.

If as you claim that the scriptures does not support a flat earth, can you point me to a Pope, in the Middle Ages, who clearly articulated that the earth is completly round using the scripture to support that claim?

Johnny Skeptic

Message to Lee Merrill: If the Bible does not say that the earth is flat, did it convince ancient people that the earth is round?

Jehanne

And, he has to explain why Cosmas was never declared to be a heretic or even "in error" by the Church, East or West. If his theology was thought to be wrong, the early Medieval Church would have condemned it and him.

lee_merrill

Because the matter was doubtful? This is not clear in Scripture.

The question was as I recall the movement, not the shape.

Again, this is not clear in Scripture, the Bible does not really address this point. So I think I need not look for this type of statement, any more than I need look for plate tectonics arguments from Innocent III with exegesis from II Kings.

I'm not informed about Cosmas, I haven't read every post here, but I think I have presented my view and my defense of it, so maybe we'll leave it at that, since it seems the other folks arguing on the side of Scripture have left it at that too.

aa5874

Good point. And Cosmas had the flat-four-corner earth theory that some say was never propagated in the scriptures, therefore there should have been some type of trial or at least a condemnation or a recantation by Cosmas for writing contrary to scriptures by order of Papal authorities.

Stange enough, it is not Cosmas that is arrested and put under house arrest, but Galileo, one thousand years later.

lee_merrill

Um, the shape of the earth is not theology, and again, it's not clear in Scripture, so some opinion of a flat or round earth was a matter of opinion then, fine, either way. According to Scripture.

Johnny Skeptic

I am not aware of anything that is clear in the Bible about anything that is important. The creation story is unverifiable, as are most other important claims in the Bible, including that there was a global flood, that there were ten plagues in Egypt, that there was an Exodus, that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, that Jesus was born of a virgin, that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and that Jesus' shed blood and death remitted the sins of mankind. Even if Jesus rose from the dead, that is not useful evidence for Christians because all that that has to with it power, not character. The same goes for God's supposed ability to predict the future. The conflicting accounts of the events at the tomb are a mess. The two different deaths of Judas are ambigious and confusing at the least. If Jesus really rose from the dead, no one knows how many, if any people saw him. None of the supposed miracles that Jesus performed are reasonably verifiable. Today, millions of Christians disagree as to what constitutes a miracle healing. I am not aware of any good reasons to believe that it was any different back then. The anonymous Gospel writers almost always wrote in the third person, not in the first person. They almost never claimed that they saw Jesus perform miracles. They almost never revealed who their sources were.

Most of all, since there is sufficient evidence that God is corrupt, he cannot possibly be the God of the Bible because the Bible says that God is loving, good, and merciful.

What you need is evidence, not assertions, and in typical fashion you don't have any. All that you have are uncorroborated speculations and guesses. If the very same quality of evidence said that God planned to send everyone to hell, there is no way that you would accept it and promote it, which proves that your beliefs are built upon emotions and perceived self-interest, not upon logic and reason.

It is obvious that God did not inspire the writing of the Bible. If he did, he would have given everyone a copy. Why else would he have inspired it if that is not what he intended to do?

lee_merrill

Johnny-of-a-hundred questions! Well, I think we're about done addressing the matter in this thread, so ... blessings,
Lee

Antipope Innocent II

Maybe you haven't heard about it, but it's pretty basic stuff to anyone who's studied the history of medieval philosophy and science. You can find a discussion of this doctrine of Augustine's and its impact on the medieval attitude to ancient "authorities" in Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages, pp. 36-37 and David C. Lindberg The Beginnings of Western Science pp. 150-51.

Er, this is not a "claim" - it's basic undergraduate stuff on the development of thought in the western world.

Yes, that's the nature of the survival of manuscripts in the pre-printing era. The loss of knowledge in the lead up to and aftermath of the fall of the Western Roman Empire was immense. Even before the Fall education levels in the Western Empire had been declining, particularly literacy in Greek. In the Sixth Century Boethius and Cassiodorus began a concerted effort to translate major philosophical Greek works into Latin, which is how many Platonic and some Aristotelian works were preserved into the early Middle Ages. A few others were preserved in Ireland, where - rather strangely - Greek literacy was maintained in monastic communities there long after it had completely died out in the rest of Europe. But huge amounts of texts were lost in the upheavals of the early medieval period. With successive waves of Avars, Vikings and Moors assailing western Europe from all sides for several centuries and the total collapse of the Roman education infrastructure, this is hardly surprising.

When things stabilised, by the late Eleventh Century, education began to revive and the full extent of what had been lost became clearer. There had been earlier attempts to revive things and to recover works which had been lost (mainly under Charlemagne and Otto I in the Holy Roman Empire and under Alfred in England), but it wasn't until the Twelfth Century that there was a concerted effort to seek out works which had been lost. Scholars like Gerard of Cremona travelled to places like Spain and Sicily and taught themselves Arabic and Hebrew to translate lost Greek works preserved by Muslim and Jewish scholars into Latin and bring them back to the new universities which were springing up in Europe.

This is now referred to as the Twelfth Century Renaissance. It didn't have the pretty paintings of the later Renaissance, but it was the period in which there was a sudden and highly significant revivial of ancient learning in the West. Newly rediscovered works by Aristotle, in particular, had a massive impact on Western philosophy in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, but works of science by Ptolemy, Euclid, Galen and - yes - Archimedes found their way back into Western Europe in this period.

We can thank William of Moerbeke for bringing Archimedes back to the West - he spent the whole of 1269 translating just about all of Archimedes work into Latin for the first time.

And why were these medieval clergymen doing all this? Because the Western religious tradition had long since followed Augustine's doctrine of "the gold of the Egyptians". They believed God was rational and therefore the universe could be apprehended by reason. Therefore anyone could apply reason to the understanding of the universe and most of those who had done so in the past happened to be non-Christians. The fact they were pagans didn't change the universe or their apprehension of it. Thus Aristotle gets studied in medieval universities and we find Plato and Muslim philosophers carved alongside Jewish and Christian thinkers on the walls of medieval cathedrals.

Exactly. The debate was not about whether there was a southern hemisphere - everyone knew the Earth was round so that wasn't questioned. The debate was whether the southern hemisphere was inhabited. This was because ancient Greek geographers believed the tropics got steadily hotter as you approached the equator to the extent that the equator was actually impassable. If Eden had been in the northern hemisphere, as it was believed, then the descendants of Adam and Eve could not have passed the equator and populated the southern hemisphere. Therefore, by a piece of typically medieval fusion of Biblical and pagan scientific "authorities", the southern hemisphere must be uninhabited.

Except by the Thirteenth Century enough medieval European travellers in Asia had passed the equator and worked out that the Greeks had been wrong. These debates about "the antipodes" were misunderstood by amateurs in the Nineteenth Century and are the reason the myth about the "medieval flat earth" arose in the first place. This is what happens when people without any background in ancient and medieval thought try to interpret writings they don't understand, especially if they come to these writings with presuppositions and an anti-Church agenda.

Speaking of which ... :

It's hard to know where to begin with that tangled mess. No, Copernicus was not mentioning any "the flat earth shapes or concepts that was propagated around the 16th century" at all - he was mentioning Earth shapes etc that had been covered in the works of the ancient Greeks. No-one in the Sixteenth Century was promulgating any bowl-shaped, drum-shaped or conical earths. In this passage Copernicus is simply reiterating what everyone already knew - that these other, ancient models were wrong - and explaining one of the reasons why: "land and water press together toward a centre of gravity".

And what you think Galileo has to do with this is a mystery, since the shape of the earth was not at issue in his trial. If you want to argue that people in the Sixteenth Century were arguing for bowl-shaped, drum-shaped or conical earths, then perhaps you should produce some of these Sixteenth Century people. Because unless you do, an out-of-context quote which mentions Greeks from the Fifth and Sixth Centuries BC doesn't cut it.

There are ignorant idiots in any age and if we can still have a Flat Earth Society today then we can hardly be surprised that there were muddled and deluded people back then as well.

As far as the evidence about what the bulk of people believed, that's harder to interpret. But the bulk of evidence indicates that the idea that the Earth is round was actually quite well-known. A Thirteenth Century German collection of sermons for parish priests mentions, in passing, that the Earth is "round like an apple". The popular Fourteenth Century travellers' adventure The Travels of Sir John Mandeville relates the story of a man who travelled so far to the east that he returned to Europe from the west, having circumnavigated the globe. That story takes it for granted that its readers understand that the Earth is round. The Earth is depicted as a sphere in art and one of the symbols of royal power was an orb - symbolising power over the Earth. So the idea that the Earth was round seems to have been quite widespread as far as we can tell.

Why would they bother "condemning" a teaching that simply wasn't current?

The author of that website originally tried to debunk Jeffrey Burton Russell's book on the "Medieval Flat Earth Myth" and posted the original version of his site to the usenet discussion group soc.history.medieval asking the people there if they could spot any errors. I was a regular on that group back then and I and others had to politely explain to him that not only could we spot some errors, but he'd mangled and misinterpreted his evidence so badly that his site was virtually worthless.

In a rare display of intellectual honesty on the internet, he actually listened to us, looked at the evidence again and realised that he'd gone to the evidence assuming that the medieval Church taught the Earth was flat and then tried to find evidence to support this. With a bit of help from us he totally rewrote the site and added a preface about "the dangers of closeminded thinking".

Interestingly, he was then taken to task by some atheists of the kind who don't like the historical facts get in the way of their prejudices about Christianity and unhappy that he was debunking their myth about medieval Christian ignorance.

Ethical Atheist's new version is definitely a lot closer to the facts than the first one, but it's still got some errors and misinterpretations. On the whole though it's a good online resource on this subject.

Speaking of misinterpretatons ... :
Irenaeus says the Earth has four "zones" - the two temperate zones and the two tropics. That only makes sense if the Earth is a sphere, so how you've decided this means Irenaeus believed the Earth was flat is quite beyond me.

The Catholic Church didn't condemn him because his work wasn't known in Western Europe until the Eighteenth Century. It's hard to condemn a doctrine you don't know about. And the Orthodox Church didn't "condemn" him (why "condemn" him just for saying something about geography that's wrong? Some people here have got some very Hollywood ideas about the Middle Ages). They just said he was wrong.

That wasn't what Copernicus' book was about nor was it what that out-of-context quote is doing either. See above.

Once again - Galileo was not condemned for anything to do with the shape of the Earth. What you are saying here is plain wrong.

Popes tended not to make pronouncements about science and certainly not ones that articulated something that was widely known. I can't think of any Papal annoucements declaring that the sky is blue or grass tends to be green either. Given that the most widely-read medieval work of cosmology in the period was John Sacrobosco's De Sphaera Mundi ("The SPHERE of the World" - big enough hint for you?), the person who needs to be producing texts to prove his point is you.