The Flat Truth

“It’s a myth that Medieval people thought the Earth was flat; we know the Greeks knew the world was a sphere,” Greg Jenner tells the Radio Four audience at 18:52-18:56. Just like that. He is right, of course. But thus is kicked away a key pillar of the National Religion, as passed on in schools and pubs the length and breadth of the land. What next, that The Life of Brian never happened?

Urbi et Orbi was first delivered by Blessed Gregory X, who was Pope from 1271 to 1276. The globus cruciger is at least 800 years older than that, and added the Cross to what had previously been Jupiter’s orb. The one used at Charles III’s recent Coronation was made for his Restored namesake in 1661, but of course the form is far older. Restoration, indeed.

Not that the other side would have disagreed. Published in 1535, and still used as part of the Book of Common Prayer, the proto-Puritan Myles Coverdale had had no compunction in translating the verse that he numbered Psalm 96:10 (the numbering of the Psalms varies; another time), “Tell it out among the heathen that the Lord is King: and that it is He who hath made the round world so fast that it cannot be moved; and how that He shall judge the people righteously.”

“Fast” here does not mean “quickly”, but as in “hold fast”, nor does “cannot be moved” preclude the revolution of the Earth, but rather asserts that God has fastened it such that it could not be blown off course. Coverdale has always been known to have had his problems as a translator, yet I am not aware that this verse has ever been held up as one of them. The Psalms were probably collected in the fifth century BC, but several of them are far older even than that. In any case, the present point is that an English translator who had graduated from Cambridge in 1513 took it as a given that the Earth was round. Did the Ancient Israelites? Anyone with the Hebrew, do please let me know.

In 1514, Coverdale was ordained a Catholic priest. He was to depart from that in many ways, but not in this. Saint Gregory of Nyssa, who died in 395, describes a lunar eclipse as the projection of the “spherical shape” of the Earth onto the Moon. Through the subsequent centuries, we find “the rounded mass of the Earth” in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and “the terrestrial globe” in the Etymologies of Saint Isidore of Seville, before our very own Saint Bede the Venerable tells us that, “The Earth is like a globe.” At Jarrow. Where he died in 735.

Gerbert of Aurillac made a terrestrial globe and, as was common at the time, wrote a favourable commentary on the assertion of sphericity in the third-century work of Macrobius. In 999, Gerbert was elected Pope Sylvester II. In the thirteenth century, Saint Thomas Aquinas, in one of the first arguments advanced in his Summa Theologica, showed that it was possible to arrive at the same conclusion by different methods, since, “So it is indeed a same conclusion demonstrated by the astronomer and the physicist, for example, that the Earth is round.” Elsewhere, he taught that, “The Earth is not only round, but also small in comparison with the heavenly bodies.”

In the fourteenth century, Nicole Oresme, of whom more anon, published his Treatise on the Sphere, inspired by the work of the same name by the thirteenth-century John of Sacrobosco, who might originally have been English, Scots or Irish. That earlier treatise was republished, completed, and commented upon, for many centuries. In turn, Oresme’s Treatise inspired the Imago Mundi of Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, in which he made remarkably accurate calculations about the radius and volume of the Earth, about the climatic zones according to latitude, and about the polar regions, of which he wrote, in 1410, that, “Those who inhabit the Pole would have the Sun above their horizon for half the year, and for the other half, continuous night.”

Christopher Columbus owned and annotated a copy of the Imago Mundi. As he did of Pope Pius II’s Historia rerum ubique gestarum, which begins, “Almost everyone agrees that the shape of the world [i.e., the cosmos] is spherical [rotundam]; we agree in the same way about the Earth.” It goes on to discusses the measurements of the Earth’s circumference by Eratosthenes and Ptolemy, respectively from the third and second centuries BC. It is true that those ancient cosmologists held the Earth to be immobile at the centre of a closed sphere that was the universe, and that that error lived long after them, but neither they nor any of their successors held that the Earth was flat.

No one ever believed that, at least until the rise of modern Flat Earth Societies. The suggestion that this was the Medieval view can be dated precisely to January 1828, which saw the publication of The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, as highly fictionalised an account as one would expect from its author, Washington Irving, who also gave the world those noted works of historical realism, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, as well as popularising the use of “Gotham” to refer to New York.

I nearly fell out of my chair at 28:26 in the above link, when Dr Seb Falk of Girton College, Cambridge referred, again as if they were unremarkable, to the events of 1277, about which readers of this site have known since 16th August 2007, but about which I have been writing elsewhere since no later than 2001, at first broadly in relation to John Milton; I came across the manuscript again recently, and while the style needs work, the thesis still stands up, so watch this space.

Science as that term is generally understood began at Paris in 1277, when Étienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris and Censor of the Sorbonne, responded to the growth of Aristotelianism by condemning from Scripture (i.e., explicitly from revelation as apprehended by the gift of faith) 219 propositions expressing the Aristotelian versions of several of fallen humanity’s ordinary beliefs.

Those beliefs were, and are, eternalism, the belief that the universe has always existed; animism, that the universe is an animal, a living and organic being; pantheism, that the universe is in itself the ultimate reality, the first cause, God; astrology, that all earthly phenomena are caused, or at least influenced, by the pantheistic movements of the stars; and cyclicism, that every event repeats exactly after a sufficiently long time the precise length of which varies according to culture, and has already so repeated itself, ad infinitum.

In particular, Tempier strongly insisted on God’s creation of the world ex nihilo, a truth which has always been axiomatically acknowledged as able to be known only from revelation by the faith that is itself mediated by the Church’s ministry of God’s Word and Sacraments, with the liturgical context of that ministry passing on from age to age and from place to place the Revelation recorded in and as the Bible and the Apostolic Tradition of which the Canon of Scripture is part.

This ruling of ecclesial authority as such made possible the discovery around 1330, by Jean Buridan, Rector of the Sorbonne, of what he himself called impetus, but which was in fact nothing other than the first principle of “Newtonian” Mechanics, and thus of “science”, Newton’s First Law, the law of inertia: that a body which has been struck will continue to move with constant velocity for so long as no force acts on it.

Buridan’s pupil Nicole Oresme, afterwards Bishop of Lisieux, developed this discovery vigorously and in detail, around 1360. The ideas of Buridan and Oresme spread throughout Europe’s universities for three centuries, and were especially associated with Spanish Salamanca, with Portuguese Coimbra, and with the Jesuits’ Collegio Romano, now the Gregorian University.

They passed, through Leonardo da Vinci and others, to those who would formulate them in precise mathematical terms: Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Huygens, and finally Sir Isaac Newton in the conventionally foundational text of modern science, his Principia Mathematica of 1687.

Without the Christian Revelation, apprehended by the faith mediated in, as and through the life of the Church, human beings are by inclination eternalistic, animistic, pantheistic, astrological and cyclicistic; and in that intellectual condition, the scientific project is impossible. That is why science as we now understand the term never originated anywhere other than in Medieval Europe.

The reception of Newton’s Principia bespeaks a willingness, whether or not it can be identified in the work itself, to regard science as independent of the wider scientia crowned by regina scientiae, to have physics and the logical without metaphysics and the ontological, ratio unrelated to fides. This is disastrous for science, which cannot demonstrate, but rather must presuppose, the falseness of eternalism, animism, pantheism, astrology and cyclicism.

And it is also disastrous for art, because the world comes to be seen in terms of a logic newly detached from aesthetics, as from ethics. Thus, these become mere matters of taste or opinion, dislocated even from each other in defiance both of the whole Western philosophical tradition and to use in its ordinary manner a term deriving from Newton’s Early Modern age, of common sense.

In such an environment, art attracts increasing distrust as the morally evil is held up as having aesthetic, and not least literary, merit. Meanwhile, aesthetic experiences are so distinguished from everyday experiences that art is degraded to a frivolity and an indulgence. Thus, they are restricted to those who have the time and the money for it, indeed who actually have too much time on their hands and more money than they know what to do with.

At the same time, regard for the true and the good declines relentlessly in the supposedly superficial context of poor aesthetics, of literally false and bad art. Doctrinal orthodoxy and moral standards slip and slide where the liturgy and its accoutrements are less than adequately tasteful or edifying. Educational standards collapse and crime rockets in the midst of hideous architecture and décor. And so forth.

Forget, for the present purpose, Galileo, who was never imprisoned, who was never excommunicated, who died professing the Faith, the daughter who cared for whom in his last days became a nun, and so on. His error was not to say that the Earth moved around the Sun, although he could not prove that scientifically at the time; we happen to know, centuries later, that he was right, but that is not the same thing. Rather, his error was to say that the Church should teach heliocentrism as proved out of Scripture, which is in fact silent on the subject. His was not an erroneously low, but an erroneously high, doctrine of Biblical and ecclesial authority.

In the absence of scientific proof in his own age, he wanted his theory, which turns out to have been scientifically correct but which neither he nor anyone else could have known to have been so in those days, to be taught and believed on that authority, the authority of the Bible as interpreted by the Catholic Church. That, the Church refused to do. Who was on the side of science in that dispute? I think that we can all see the answer to that one. As, in the end, did he, dying as he did a Catholic in good standing.

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