Flat Earth
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Wikipedia-Article "Flat Earth"
The notion of a Flat Earth refers to the idea that the inhabited surface of the Earth is flat, rather than curved (see Spherical Earth).
It is commonly assumed that people from early antiquity generally believed the world was flat, but by the time of Pliny the Elder (1st century) its spherical shape was generally acknowledged. At that time Ptolemy derived his maps from a curved globe and developed the system of latitude and longitude (see clime). His writings remained the basis of European astronomy throughout the Middle Ages. The common misconception that people before the age of exploration believed that the earth was flat entered the popular imagination after Washington Irving's publication of The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1828.
A few early Christian writers questioned and even opposed Earth's sphericity on theological grounds. With the astrolabe, Arab astronomy reached Europe in the 11th century, and by the 1100s at the latest, the geocentric model had supplanted it in the minds of the learned people of Europe. This did not settle, however, the question of whether the antipodes were inhabitable, or even reachable.
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Antiquity
Belief in a flat Earth is found in humankind's oldest writings. In early Mesopotamian thought the world was portrayed as a flat disk floating in the ocean, and this forms the premise for early Greek maps like those of Anaximander and Hecataeus.
By classical times an alternate idea, that Earth was spherical, had appeared. This was espoused by Pythagoras apparently on aesthetic grounds, as he also held all other celestial bodies to be spherical. Aristotle provided physical evidence for the spherical Earth:
- Ships actually recede over the horizon, disappearing hull-first. In a flat-earth model, they should simply get smaller and smaller until no longer visible, assuming that light travels in a straight line.
- Travelers going south see southern constellations rise higher above the horizon. This is only possible if their "straight up" direction is at an angle to northerners' "straight up". Thus the Earth's surface cannot be flat.
- The border of the shadow of Earth on the Moon during the partial phase of a lunar eclipse is always circular, no matter how high the Moon is over the horizon. Only a sphere casts a circular shadow in every direction, a circular disk casts an elliptical shadow in most directions.
The Earth's circumference was estimated around 240 BC by Eratosthenes. Eratosthenes knew that in Syrene (now Aswan), in Egypt, the sun was directly overhead at the summer solstice. He used geometry to come up with a circumference of 252,000 stades, which, depending on the length of the stadion unit, is within 2% and 20% of the actual circumference, 40,008 kilometres.
During this period the Earth was generally thought of as divided into climes, with frigid climes at the poles and a deadly torrid clime at the equator. Beyond the torrid clime were the antipodes (people living on the opposite side of a spherical Earth, with their feet faced against ours).
Lucretius was opposed to the concept of a spherical Earth, because he considered the idea of antipodes absurd. But by the 1st century, Pliny the Elder was in a position to claim that everyone agrees on the spherical shape of the Earth (Natural History, 2.64), although there continued to be disputes regarding the nature of the antipodes, and how it is possible to keep the ocean in a curved shape. Interestingly, Pliny as an "intermediate" theory considers also the possibility of an imperfect sphere, "shaped like a pinecone" (Natural History, 2.65)
The Early Church
There is evidence that the round Earth was accepted by many Christians. For example, Emperor Theodosius II of the Byzantine Empire placed the globus cruciger (which depicts the Earth as round) on his coins.
However, the antipodes (thought to be separated from the Mediterranean world by the uncrossable torrid clime) were difficult to reconcile with the Christian view of a unified human race descended from one couple and redeemed by a single Christ. Consequently, some of the Church Fathers questioned their existence and even the roundness of the Earth. Saint Augustine (354-430) wrote:
- "Those who affirm [a belief in antipodes] do not claim to possess any actual information; they merely conjecture that, since the Earth is suspended within the concavity of the heavens, and there is as much room on the one side of it as on the other, therefore the part which is beneath cannot be void of human inhabitants. They fail to notice that, even should it be believed or demonstrated that the world is round or spherical in form, it does not follow that the part of the Earth opposite to us is not completely covered with water, or that any conjectured dry land there should be inhabited by men. For Scripture, which confirms the truth of its historical statements by the accomplishment of its prophecies, teaches not falsehood; and it is too absurd to say that some men might have set sail from this side and, traversing the immense expanse of ocean, have propagated there a race of human beings descended from that one first man." (De Civitate Dei, 16.9)
Augustine denied the antipodes, not the round Earth. However, the phrase "even should it be believed or demonstrated that the world is round" suggests that he was skeptical of the round Earth, and perhaps even that many others were as well.
A few authors directly opposed the round Earth. Lactantius (245–325) called it "folly" because people on a sphere would fall down. Saint Cyril of Jerusalem (315–386) saw Earth as a firmament floating on water. Saint John Chrysostom (344–408) saw a spherical Earth as contradictory to scripture. Severian, Bishop of Gabala (d. 408) and Diodorus of Tarsus (d. 394) argued for a flat Earth. Cosmas Indicopleustes (547) called Earth "a parallelogram, flat, and surrounded by four seas" in his Christian Topography, where the Covenant Ark was meant to represent the whole universe. Saint Basil (329–379) argued that knowledge about Earth's shape was irrelevant.
Several of these writers are not thought to have been influential in the Middle Ages due to a scarcity of references to their work in mediaeval writings. Different historians have argued either for very high (e.g. Andrew Dickson White) or very low (e.g. Jeffrey Russell) influence. White's work is not taken seriously by modern historians of science because of his serious historiographic flaws including using a fictionalised history of Christopher Columbus as a source.
The Middle Ages
Early Middle Ages
Europe's view of the world between 600 and 1000 is difficult to determine because of the general scarcity of records from that time and the primitive cartography: most medieval mappae mundi served as indices of geographical terms rather than navigational aids. Our best evidence comes from the writings of theologians:
- The 6th century Egyptian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes of Alexandria in his Topographia Christiana argued on theological grounds that the Earth was flat, a parallelogram enclosed by four oceans. It is likely that this description was intended to humorously illustrate what not to do when engaging in Biblical Exegesis, rather than a true model for the earth.
- Bede (d. 735) wrote that the Earth was round, and clearly indicated that it was round in the sense of a ball or sphere, rather than a flat disc.
- Vergilius (d. 784) thought "that beneath the Earth there was another world and other men, another Sun and Moon." Saint Boniface (d. 755) accused Vergilius of "teaching a doctrine in regard to the rotundity of the Earth, which was 'contrary to the Scriptures.'" (Catholic Encyclopedia). Pope Zacharias decided that "if it be proved that he held the said doctrine, a council be held, and Vergilius expelled from the Church and deprived of his priestly dignity."
- Isidore of Seville (Etymologiae, XIV) taught that the Earth was round, but shaped like a wheel, apparently thinking of a flat Earth. However, Isidore refused to take a clear position on the matter, preferring to report other philosophers' opinions, and he also admitted the possibility of the antipodes' existence. Isidore's wheel analogy continued to be used by authors clearly favouring a spherical earth, e.g. the 9th century bishop Hrabanus Maurus who compared the habitable part of the northern hemisphere (Aristotle's northern temperate clime) with a wheel, as it were imagined as slice of the whole sphere.
Of course, it was probably the priests in the pulpits, not the few noted intellectuals, who defined public opinion, and as they left no records it is difficult to tell what awareness the wider population may have had. However the symbolism of the orb (Globus cruciger), used in imperial regelia from the fifth century onwards, presupposes that at least the political establishment (which at that time was generally not literate and drew its world view precisely from such visual symbols) could relate to the concept of a spherical world.
Later Middle Ages
By the 11th century, Europe had learned of Arab astronomy, and abundant records suggest that any doubts that Europeans had had in earlier times were generally eliminated. The most important and widely taught theologian of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), believed in a spherical earth. In addition, Dante's Divine Comedy portrays the earth as a sphere. Hermannus Contractus is among the earliest Christian scholars to estimate the circumference of the earth with Eratosthenes' method.
The fact that the Elucidarius (c. 1120), an important manual for the instruction of low order clergy in the middle ages, explicitly refers to a spherical earth supports the contention that the spherical shape of the earth was also common knowledge outside scholarly circles. Likewise, the fact that Bertold von Regensburg (mid-13th century) used the spherical earth as a sermon illustration shows that he could assume this knowledge among his congregation. The sermon was held in the vernacular (i.e. German as opposed to Latin), and thus was not intended for a learned audience.
However, as late as 1400s, the Spanish theologian Tostatus disputed the existence of any unreachable antipodes[1].
Modern times
During the 19th century, the Romantic conception of a European "Dark Age" gave much more prominence to the Flat Earth model than it ever possessed historically. The widely circulated woodcut of a man poking his head through the firmament of a flat earth to view the mechanics of the spheres, executed in the style of the 16th century cannot be traced to an earlier source than Camille Flammarion's L'Atmosphere: Météorologie Populaire (Paris, 1888, p. 163) [2]. The woodcut illustrates the statement in the text that a medieval missionary claimed that "he reached the horizon where the earth and the heavens met", an anecdote that may be traced back to Voltaire, but not to any known medieval source. In its original form, the woodcut included a decorative border that places it in the 19th century; in later publications, some claiming that the woodcut did, in fact, date to the 16th century, the border was removed. Flammarion, according to anecdotal evidence, had commissioned the woodcut himself. In any case, no source of the image earlier than Flammarion's book is known.
Russell, a professor of history at Santa Barbara who has written widely on mediaeval religion, heresy and witchcraft, explored the issue in Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians. Russell claims that the Flat Earth theory is a myth used to impugn pre-modern civilisation, especially that of the Middle Ages in Europe. Today essentially all professional mediaevalists agree with Russell that the "mediaeval flat earth" is a nineteenth-century fabrication, and that the few verifiable "flat earthers" were the exception.
As of the beginning of the 21st Century, there remain populations within rural cultures which, unexposed to technological civilisation, consider the world to be flat. With no long-distance communication requirements or other technological endeavours, their beliefs appear to suffice.
From a European perspective, Portuguese exploration of Africa and Asia in the 15th century removed any serious doubts, and Ferdinand Magellan's circumnavigation any remaining ones. The myth that Christopher Columbus's sailors feared they would fall off the edge of the world is false: they were understandably uncertain about a voyage into the unknown, and were also worried that food supplies would run out. In fact Columbus did not provide sufficient supplies to reach China or the East Indies, his original destination, and if America had not existed then those on the voyage might have died of starvation, as he believed the Earth to be a lot smaller than it is now known to be; about the size of Mars, in fact.
Some Christians in England and United States tried to revive Flat Earth thinking in the 19th century. When Joshua Slocum arrived in the Transvaal Republic during his solo circumnavigation of the world, President Kruger berated him, telling him "you don't mean around the world; it is impossible! You mean in the world!"
Modern people who do not accept the spherical Earth and base this opinion on Scripture do not represent a continuing school of Biblical exegesis, although some small groups such as the Flat Earth Society in the USA work hard to keep the concept alive, and [3] have claimed a few thousand followers. Charles K. Johnson ran the Flat Earth Society from his home in California until he died in 2001.
Notes
- Note 1: It was against this theory that George Best wrote his chapter entitled "Experiences and reasons of the Sphere, to prove all parts of the worlde habitable, and thereby to confute the position of the five zones" (A True Discourse, 1578).
See also
- Islam and flat-earth theories
- Antipodes
- T and O map
- Hollow earth
- The Discworld series, written by Terry Pratchett
- The Flat Earth Society
Further reading
- Inventing the Flat Earth, Jeffrey Burton Russell, Praeger Paperback, 1997, ISBN 027595904X; see his summary
- Andrew White, The Warfare Of Science With Theology (1896)