Mini-Book Review: Inventing the Flat Earth

Russell, Jeffrey B. Inventing the Flat Earth.  New York: Praeger, 1991.

This is one of those books I heard I ought to read, but took a while to find and get around to.  It’s an entry in the genre, history of ideas.  Specifically, it rebuts the idea that most Christian thinkers since earliest times thought the world was flat, and that it was Columbus who proved it wasn’t by not sailing off the edge of it.  More broadly, in removing this linchpin, he rebuts the more vague, general concept that the blind dogmatism of Christian theology has been largely responsible for resisting the progress of knowledge, e.g. revealing the roundness of the earth, soon to be followed by Galileo’s breakthrough in backing Copernican heliocentrism against the Church.

The key piece of evidence against this idea is that many leading (late) medieval Christian thinkers were Aristotelian, e.g. Thomas Aquinas, and that Aristotelian cosmology was fundamentally spherical, with earth at the centre, surrounded by a whole series of mobile ‘shells’ that carried the successive planets in their orbits about it.  It was premised on the differing ‘weight’ of the elements of earth, water, air and fire, so that the heaviest, earth, must inevitably settle to the centre.  There was no more efficient concentration of earth in the centre of the cosmos than a sphere.

Russell mentions a practical illustration of the prominence of a spherical view of the earth during the Middle Ages – kings’ orbs symbolizing their worldly dominion…in the shape of spheres.  He can cite plenty of examples of overt references to the sphericity of the earth, and shows that most actual references to primary sources come eventually down to the Latin church father Lactantius and the Eastern Alexandrian writer Cosmas Indicopleustes.  Both are authentic flat earthers, and Cosmas’ sixth-century Christiana Topographia explains the world as a rectangle on the model of the tabernacle floor plan.  It is indisputably flat earth, but what is disputable is just how widespread such a view of the world was, then and afterwards.

Russell makes these two figures seem like exceptions to the rule of a mostly better-informed Christendom, along the way conceding that the eastern father Severian was another flat-earther and that others like Basil the Great prevaricated, feeling torn between philosophy’s support for a spherical earth and apparent biblical support for a flat one.  On the other hand, philosophically astute thinkers like John Philoponus were apparently embarrassed by Cosmas’ cosmology and sought to refute it in favour of a philosophially robust Christianity.

Russell’s historical protagonists are above all the ‘creative’ C19th historical writer Irving Washington and the Frenchman Antoine-Jean Letronne (1787–1848), both filtered especially through the sceptical Andrew Dickson White, the writer who above all others established the sense of conflict between science and religion in popular culture.  The difference between Russell and those opposite is essentially that for them the church, with its vast majority of unknown opinions, is guilty of obscurantism until proven innocent, and for Russell it is innocent until proven guilty.

My sense is that the flat earth idea is mostly erroneous, as Russell proves, and that in educated circles there was no doubt well prior to Columbus that the earth was a sphere.  But I am a little cautious regarding the Eastern church in the patristic era.  Russell mentions that Diodore of Tarsus was reproved by Photius for being flat-earth, and Theodore of Mopsuestia is suspected of having viewed the world the same way.  This helps to explain Severian’s stance shortly afterwards.  I have read other Eastern and Syrian treatments where the firmament is treated very literally as a dome covering the earth, and I suspect that a flat-earth understanding may have been rather widespread in the Eastern and Syrian churches late in the patristic period.

But not so later.  The medieval church can’t be condemned for both scholasticism, which was Aristotelian, and for believing in a flat earth, because the two are mutually exclusive.

By the way, it’s a rather quick and easy read.  I recommend it.

Google Ngram Viewer as a Reception-Historical Tool

Discovered this tool – better late than never.  Ngram Viewer, showing how many times any word or phrase you specify shows up in the vast number of printed books that Google has digitized.  Let me offer you a sample of charts relevant to my doctoral research:

First, this to illustrate when discussion of Noah and the biblical Flood or ‘Deluge’ peaked in the English-speaking book world:

My interpretation would be that John Woodword’s Essay Toward a Theory of the Earth in 1695 was the big impetus for discussion here, sustained by William Whiston’s 1696 New Theory of the Earth, both coming on the back of Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth and related discussion by John Ray and others.  Moderate discussion remains consistently through about 1750, then dies off, never to reach its former intensity.

Next, discussion about Moses and a couple of minor, associated terms:

Certainly, Moses’ name came up in theories of the earth that involved a flood that was biblical in both scale and source.  But both in the deist controversy leading up to 1700 and in early deist writings, esp. Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, around 1650, Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch was the topic for debate.

Lastly, moving down to post-1800, again in the Anglophone sphere:

Three terms, Mosaic geology (green), Geology of Scripture (red) and Scriptural Geology (blue) burst onto the English book scene from about 1820, thanks in part to one Granville Penn and then a number of imitators and collaborators who in time became known as the Scriptural Geologists.  Though it’s a little controversial, I think we can still roughly call these the young-earth creationists of the early nineteenth century.  It was chiefly US writers taking on this task by the 1950s, after it was pioneered by British writers, but this attempt to explain the geological column by means of the biblical flood and natural processes before and after it, all within the constraints of a quite recent creation, had largely given way to its competitors, especially the Gap Theory, by about 1860.  But then, it did make a comeback in the 20th century!

Stay tuned – my book on the history of interpretation of the creation week up to 1860 is due out within months.  Then will be the sequel!