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The Myth of the Flat Earth
by Jeffrey Burton Russell |
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Presented before the American Scientific Affiliation
Conference August 4, 1997 at Westmont College
How does investigating the myth of the flat earth help teachers
of the history of science?
First, as a historian, I have to admit that it tells us something
about the precariousness of history. History is precarious for
three reasons: the good reason that it is extraordinarily
difficult to determine "what really happened" in any
series of events; the bad reason that historical scholarship is
often sloppy; and the appalling reason that far too much
historical scholarship consists of contorting the evidence to fit
ideological models. The worst examples of such contortions are
the Nazi and Communist histories of the early-and mid-twentieth
century.
Contortions that are common today, if not widely recognized, are
produced by the incessant attacks on Christianity and religion in
general by secular writers during the past century and a half,
attacks that are largely responsible for the academic and
journalistic sneers at Christianity today.
A curious example of this mistreatment of the past for the
purpose of slandering Christians is a widespread historical
error, an error that the Historical Society of Britain some years
back listed as number one in its short compendium of the ten most
common historical illusions. It is the notion that people used to
believe that the earth was flatespecially medieval
Christians.
It must first be reiterated that with extraordinary few
exceptions no educated person in the history of Western
Civilization from the third century BC onward believed that the
earth was flat.
A round earth appears at least as early as the sixth century BC
with Pythagoras, who was followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and
Aristarchus, among others in observing that the earth was a
sphere. Although there were a few dissentersLeukippos and
Demokritos for exampleby the time of Eratosthenes (3 c.
BC), followed by Crates(2 c. BC), Strabo (3 c. BC), and Ptolemy
(first c. AD), the sphericity of the earth was accepted by all
educated Greeks and Romans.
Nor did this situation change with the advent of Christianity. A
fewat least two and at most fiveearly Christian
fathers denied the sphericity of earth by mistakenly taking
passages such as Ps. 104:2-3 as geographical rather than
metaphorical statements. On the other side tens of thousands of
Christian theologians, poets, artists, and scientists took the
spherical view throughout the early, medieval, and modern church.
The point is that no educated person believed otherwise.
Historians of science have been proving this point for at least
70 years (most recently Edward Grant, David Lindberg, Daniel
Woodward, and Robert S. Westman), without making notable headway
against the error. Schoolchildren in the US, Europe, and Japan
are for the most part being taught the same old nonsense. How and
why did this nonsense emerge?
In my research, I looked to see how old the idea was that
medieval Christians believed the earth was flat. I obviously did
not find it among medieval Christians. Nor among anti-Catholic
Protestant reformers. Nor in Copernicus or Galileo or their
followers, who had to demonstrate the superiority of a
heliocentric system, but not of a spherical earth. I was sure I
would find it among the eighteenth-century philosophes, among all
their vitriolic sneers at Christianity, but not a word. I am
still amazed at where it first appears.
No one before the 1830s believed that medieval people thought
that the earth was flat.
The idea was established, almost contemporaneously, by a
Frenchman and an American, between whom I have not been able to
establish a connection, though they were both in Paris at the
same time. One was Antoine-Jean Letronne (1787-1848), an academic
of strong antireligious prejudices who had studied both geography
and patristics and who cleverly drew upon both to misrepresent
the church fathers and their medieval successors as believing in
a flat earth, in his On the Cosmographical Ideas of the Church
Fathers (1834). The American was no other than our beloved
storyteller Washington Irving (1783-1859), who loved to write
historical fiction under the guise of history. His
misrepresentations of the history of early New York City and of
the life of Washington were topped by his history of Christopher
Columbus (1828). It was he who invented the indelible picture of
the young Columbus, a "simple mariner," appearing
before a dark crowd of benighted inquisitors and hooded
theologians at a council of Salamanca, all of whom believed,
according to Irving, that the earth was flat like a plate. Well,
yes, there was a meeting at Salamanca in 1491, but Irving's
version of it, to quote a distinguished modern historian of
Columbus, was "pure moonshine. Washington Irving, scenting
his opportunity for a picturesque and moving scene," created
a fictitious account of this "nonexistent university
council" and "let his imagination go completely...the
whole story is misleading and mischievous nonsense."
But now, why did the false accounts of Letronne and Irving become
melded and then, as early as the 1860s, begin to be served up in
schools and in school-books as the solemn truth?
The answer is that the falsehood about the spherical earth became
a colorful and unforgettable part of a larger falsehood: the
falsehood of the eternal war between science (good) and religion
(bad) throughout Western history. This vast web of falsehood was
invented and propagated by the influential historian John Draper
(1811-1882) and many prestigious followers, such as Andrew
Dickson White (1832-1918), the president of Cornell University,
who made sure that the false account was perpetrated in texts,
encyclopedias, and even allegedly serious scholarship, down to
the present day. A lively current version of the lie can be found
in Daniel Boorstin's The Discoverers, found in any bookshop or
library.
The reason for promoting both the specific lie about the
sphericity of the earth and the general lie that religion and
science are in natural and eternal conflict in Western society,
is to defend Darwinism. The answer is really only slightly more
complicated than that bald statement. The flat-earth lie was
ammunition against the creationists. The argument was simple and
powerful, if not elegant: "Look how stupid these Christians
are. They are always getting in the way of science and progress.
These people who deny evolution today are exactly the same sort
of people as those idiots who for at least a thousand years
denied that the earth was round. How stupid can you get?"
But that is not the truth. ?
Reprinted with permission of the author.
Jeffrey Burton Russell is Professor of History, Emeritus, at the
University of California, Santa Barbara. Besides UCSB, he has
taught History and Religious Studies at Berkeley, Riverside,
Harvard, New Mexico, and Notre Dame. He has published seventeen
books and many articles, most of them in his special field,
history of theology. He is most noted for his five-volume history
of the concept of the Devil, published by Cornell University
Press between 1977 and 1988. He would prefer to be most noted for
two more recent books. Inventing the Flat Earth (1991), which
shows how nineteenth-century anti-Christians invented and spread
the falsehood that educated people in the Middle Ages believed
that the earth was flat, and A History of Heaven: The Singing
Silence, Princeton University Press (1997), a study of the
history and meaning of heaven in Christian thought from the
beginnings to the time of Dante.
TSS
March
- April 2005 The Sabbath Sentinel
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