Authors: Stephen Jay Gould
Rocks of Ages (11 page)
E
VERY SCHOOLCHILD KNOWS—OR AT
least knew before contemporary “political correctness” deep-sixed the good admiral full fathom five—the story of brave Christopher Columbus, who discovered America against a nearly universal conviction that he would sail right off the edge of a flat earth instead. This silliest and most flagrantly false of all tales within the venerable genre of “moral lessons for kiddies” provides the best example I know for exposing the harm done by the false model of warfare between science and religion—for we can trace the origin of the myth directly to the formulation of this model by Draper and White. Perhaps the generalities of the preceding section provide enough fuel to carry this particular argument for NOMA, based on proving the falsity of the opposite “warfare” model. But, as an essayist at heart, I believe
that the best illustration of a generality lies in a well-chosen and adequately documented “little” example—not in a frontal assault on the abstraction itself (a strategy that can rarely proceed beyond tendentious waffling without the support of interesting details).
1
We all know that classical scholars established the earth’s sphericity. Aristotle’s cosmology assumed a spherical planet, and Eratosthenes actually measured the earth’s circumference in the third century
B.C
. The flat-earth myth argues that this knowledge was then lost when ecclesiastical darkness settled over Europe. For a thousand years, almost all scholars held that the earth must be flat—like the floor of a tent, held up by the canopy of the sky, to cite a biblical metaphor read literally. The Renaissance then rediscovered classical notions of sphericity, but proof required the bravery of Columbus and other great explorers who should have sailed off the edge, but (beginning with Magellan’s expedition) returned home from the opposite direction after going all the way round.
The inspirational, schoolchild version of the myth centers upon Columbus, who supposedly overcame the calumny of assembled clerics in an epic battle at Salamanca between freedom of thought and religious dogmatism.
Consider this version of the legend from a book for primary-school children written in 1887, soon after the myth’s invention (but little different from accounts that I read as a child in the 1950s):
“But if the world is round,” said Columbus, “it is not hell that lies beyond that stormy sea. Over there must lie the eastern strand of Asia, the Cathay of Marco Polo” … In the hall of the convent there was assembled the imposing company—shaved monks in gowns … cardinals in scarlet robes … “You think the earth is round … Are you not aware that the holy fathers of the church have condemned this belief … This theory of yours looks heretical.” Columbus might well quake in his boots at the mention of heresy; for there was that new Inquisition just in fine running order, with its elaborate bone-breaking, flesh-pinching, thumb-screwing, hanging, burning, mangling system for heretics.
(Some of the quotations, and much of the documentation, in this section come from an excellent book by the historian J. B. Russell,
Inventing the Flat Earth
, Praeger, 1991.)
Dramatic to be sure, but entirely fictitious. No
period of “flat earth darkness” ever occurred among scholars (no matter how many uneducated people may have conceptualized our planet in this way, both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval religious scholars accepted the earth’s roundness as an established fact of cosmology. Ferdinand and Isabella did refer Columbus’s plans to a royal commission headed by Hernando de Talavera, Isabella’s confessor and, following the defeat of the Moors, Archbishop of Granada. This commission, composed of both clerical and lay advisers, did meet at Salamanca among other places. They did pose some sharp intellectual objections to Columbus, but no one questioned the earth’s roundness. As a major critique, they argued that Columbus could not reach the Indies in his own allotted time, because the earth’s circumference was too great. Moreover, his critics were entirely right. Columbus had “cooked” his figures to favor a much smaller earth, and an attainable Indies. Needless to say, he did not and could not reach Asia, and Native Americans are still called Indians as a legacy of his error.
Virtually all major Christian scholars affirmed our planet’s roundness. The Venerable Bede referred to the earth as
orbis in medio totius mundi positus
(an orb placed in the center of the universe) in the eighth century
A.D
. The twelfth-century translations into Latin of many Greek and Arabic works greatly expanded general appreciation
of the natural sciences, particularly astronomy, among scholars—and convictions about the earth’s sphericity both spread and strengthened. Roger Bacon (1220–1292) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) affirmed roundness via Aristotle and his Arabic commentators, as did the greatest scientists of later medieval times, including Nicholas Oresme (1320–1382). All these men held ecclesiastical orders.
So who, then, was arguing for a flat earth, if all leading scholars believed in roundness? Villains must be found for any malfeasance, and Russell shows that the great English philosopher of science William Whewell first identified major culprits in his
History of the Inductive Sciences
, published in 1837—two far less significant characters, including the reasonably well known church father Lactantius (245–325) and the truly obscure Cosmas Indicopleustes, who wrote his
Christian Topography
in 547–549. Russell comments: “Whewell pointed to the culprits … as evidence of a medieval belief in a flat earth, and virtually every subsequent historian imitated him—they could find few other examples.”
I own a copy of Lactantius’s
Divinae institutiones
(Divine precepts), published in Lyons in 1541. This work does indeed include a chapter titled
De antipodibus
(On the antipodes), ridiculing the notion of a round earth with all the arguments about upside-down Australians, etc., that passed for humor in my fifth-grade
class. Lactantius writes: “Can there be anyone so inept to believe that men exist whose extremities lie above their heads
[quorum vestigia sint superiora quam capita] …
that trees can grow downwards, and that rain, and snow, and hail go upwards instead of falling to earth
[pluvias, et nives, et grandinem sursum versus cadere in terram]?”
And Cosmas did champion a literal view of a biblical metaphor—the earth as a flat floor for the rectangular, vaulted arch of the heavens above.
Purveyors of the flat-earth myth could never deny the plain testimony of Bede, Bacon, Aquinas, and others—so they argued that these men acted as rare beacons of brave light in pervasive darkness. But consider the absurdity of such a position. Who formed the orthodoxy representing this consensus of ignorance? Two minor figures named Lactantius and Cosmas Indicopleustes? Bede, Bacon, Aquinas, and their ilk were not brave iconoclasts. They constituted the establishment, and their convictions about the earth’s roundness stood as canonical, while Lactantius and colleagues remained marginal.
Where, then, and why, did the myth of medieval belief in a flat earth arise? Russell’s historiographic work gives us a good fix on both times and people. None of the great eighteenth-century anticlerical rationalists—not Condillac, Condorcet, Diderot, Gibbon, Hume, or our own Benjamin Franklin—accused early Christian
scholars of believing in a flat earth, though these men scarcely veiled their contempt for medieval versions of Christianity. Washington Irving gave the flat-earth story a good boost in his largely fictional history of Columbus, published in 1828—but his version did not take hold. The legend grew during the nineteenth century, but did not enter the crucial domains of schoolboy pap or tour-guide lingo. Russell did an interesting survey of nineteenth-century history texts for secondary schools, and found that very few mentioned the flat-earth myth before 1870, but that almost all texts after 1880 featured the legend. We can therefore pinpoint the invasion of general culture by the flat-earth myth.
Those years also marked the construction of the model of warfare between science and religion as a guiding theme of Western history. Such theories of dichotomous struggle always need whipping boys and legends to advance their claims. Russell argues that the flat-earth myth achieved its canonical status as a primary homily for the triumph of science under this false dichotomization of Western history. How could a better story for the army of science ever be concocted? Religious darkness destroys Greek knowledge and weaves us into a web of fears, based on dogma and opposed to both rationality and experience. Our ancestors therefore lived in anxiety, restricted by clerical irrationality, afraid that any challenge could only provoke a fall off
the edge of the earth into eternal damnation. A fit tale for an intended purpose, but entirely false because few medieval Christian scholars ever doubted the earth’s sphericity.
In the preceding section, I traced the genesis of the warfare model of science and religion to the influential books of Draper and White. Both authors used the flat-earth myth as a primary example. Draper began by stating his thesis:
The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compressing arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other … Faith is in its nature unchangeable, stationary; Science is in its nature progressive; and eventually a divergence between them, impossible to conceal, must take place.
From the measured tones of this statement, Draper descended into virulent anti-Catholicism and a near proclamation of war:
Will modern civilization consent to abandon the career of advancement which has given it so
much power and happiness … Will it submit to the dictation of a power … which kept Europe in a stagnant condition for many centuries, ferociously suppressing by the stake and the sword every attempt at progress; a power that is founded in a cloud of mysteries; that sets itself above reason and common sense; that loudly proclaims the hatred it entertains against liberty of thought and freedom in civil institutions …
Then has it in truth come to this, that Roman Christianity and Science are recognized by their respective adherents as being absolutely incompatible; they cannot exist together; one must yield to the other; mankind must make its choice—it cannot have both.
Equally uncompromising statements of war issued from the other side, as in this proclamation from the First Vatican Council:
Let him be anathema …
Who shall say that no miracles can be wrought, or that they can never be known with certainty, and that the divine origin of Christianity cannot be proved by them …
Who shall say that human sciences ought to be pursued in such a spirit of freedom that one
may be allowed to hold as true their assertions, even when opposed to revealed doctrine.
Who shall say that it may at times come to pass, in the progress of science, that the doctrines set forth by the Church must be taken in another sense than that in which the Church has ever received and yet receives them.
Them’s fighting words indeed. But remember that these fulminations from both sides reflect the political realities of a particular time (as discussed on
this page
–
this page
), not the logical necessities of coherent and unchangeable arguments. Pio Nono’s stark proclamation rightly angered scientists, but it also brought great sorrow to liberals and supporters of science within the Church. Moreover, as documented in
chapter 2
(
this page
–
this page
) for recent papal attitudes toward human evolution, the Catholic Church has since abandoned this confrontational position, born of a specific set of historical circumstances, and has warmly embraced NOMA.
Draper extolled the flat-earth myth as a primary example of religion’s constraint and science’s progressive power:
The circular visible horizon and its dip at sea, the gradual appearance and disappearance of ships in the offing, cannot fail to incline intelligent
sailors to a belief in the globular figure of the earth. The writings of the Mohammedan astronomers and philosophers had given currency to that doctrine throughout Western Europe, but, as might be expected, it was received with disfavor by theologians … Traditions and policy forbade [the papal government] to admit any other than the flat figure of the earth, as revealed in the Scriptures.
Russell comments on the success of Draper’s work:
The History of the Conflict
is of immense importance, because it was the first instance that an influential figure had explicitly declared that science and religion were at war, and it succeeded as few books ever do. It fixed in the educated mind the idea that “science” stood for freedom and progress against the superstition and repression of “religion.” Its viewpoint became conventional wisdom.
White’s later book also presents Columbus as an apostle of rationalism against theological dogma. Of Cosmas Indicopleustes’ flat-earth theory, for example, he wrote: “Some of the foremost men in the Church devoted themselves to buttressing it with new texts and
throwing about it new outworks of theological reasoning; the great body of the faithful considered it a direct gift from the Almighty.”
Both Draper and White developed their basic model of science versus theology in the context of a seminal and contemporary struggle all too easily viewed in this light—the battle for evolution, specifically for Darwin’s secular version based on natural selection. No issue, certainly since Galileo, had so challenged traditional views about the deepest meaning of human life, and therefore so contacted a domain of religious inquiry as well. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Darwinian revolution directly triggered this influential nineteenth-century conceptualization of Western history as a war between science and religion. White made an explicit connection (quoted on
this page
) in his statement about Agassiz (the founder of the museum where I now work, and a visiting lecturer at Cornell). Moreover, the first chapter of his book treats the battle over evolution, while the second begins with the flat-earth myth.
