Anglo-Saxon tract, giving science the form of a dialogue, occur the following question and answer: "Why is the sun so red in the evening?" "Because he looketh down upon hell."
But the ancient germ of scientific truth in geography still lived, and a hundred years after Cosmas it gets new life from a great churchman of southern Europe, Isidore of Seville, who, however fettered by the dominant theology in many other things, braved it in this. In the eighth century a similar declaration is made in the north of Europe by another great church authority, Bede. Against the new life thus given to the old truth, the sacred theory struggled long and vigorously but in vain. Eminent authorities in later ages, like Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, and Vincent of Beauvais, felt obliged to accept the doctrine of the earth's sphericity, and as we approach the modern period we find its truth acknowledged by the vast majority of thinking men.[1]
2. The Delineation of the Earth.—Every great people of antiquity, as a rule, regarded its own central city or most holy place as necessarily the center of the earth.
The Chaldeans held that their "holy house of the gods" was the center. The Egyptians sketched the world under the form of a human figure, in which Egypt was the heart, and the center of it, Thebes. For the Assyrians, it was Babylon; for the Hindoos, it was Mount Meru; for the Greeks, so far as the civilized world was concerned, Olympus or the temple at Delphi; for the modern Mohammedans, it is Mecca and its sacred stone; the Chinese, to this day, speak of their empire as the "middle kingdom." It was in accordance, then, with a simple tendency of human thought that the Jews believed the center of the world to be Jerusalem.
The book of Ezekiel speaks of Jerusalem as in the middle of the earth, and all other parts of the world as set around the holy city. Throughout the "ages of faith" this was very generally accepted as a direct revelation from the Almighty regarding the earth's form. St. Jerome, the greatest authority of the early Church upon the Bible, declared, on the strength of this utterance of the prophet, that Jerusalem must stand at the earth's center; in the ninth century Archbishop Rabanus Maurus reiterated the same argument; in the eleventh century, Hugh of St. Victor gave to the doctrine another scriptural demonstration; and Pope Urban, in his great sermon at Clermont urging the Franks to the crusade, declared, "Jerusalem is the middle point of the earth";
- ↑ For a discussion of the geographical views of Isidore and Bede, see Santarem, Cosmographie, vol. i, pp. 22-24. For the gradual acceptance of the idea of the earth's sphericity after the eighth century, see Kretschmer, pp. 51 et seq., where citations from a multitude of authors are given.
