Flat Earth?
Behind the falsification
June 9, 2023
by
Fr. Frédéric Weil, SSPX
https://laportelatine.org/formation/apologetique/la-terre-plate-les-dessous-dune-falsification
No, the falsification we're about to discuss doesn't come from NASA, but concerns the tenacious yet false idea of a Platist* Middle Ages, and the ideological underpinnings of this myth.
[Note: "Platist, Platiste, Platism, Plat, etc. all refer to "flat-earthism." The French word "plat" means "flat," and is where the word "plate," like the dish, comes from - SJ]
The recent coronation of Charles III gave us an image that looked like something out of a history book: the new King Charles III holding in his hand the insignia of royal power, including the cruciger orb, i.e. the sphere surmounted by a cross, symbolizing the Earth redeemed by the Cross of Jesus Christ. This orb is very old. It was used throughout the Middle Ages, particularly in depictions of Christ holding the orb in his hand or under his feet. The orb features a hemisphere divided into three parts to reflect the three continents known at the time. The fact is that the Earth was represented as a sphere long before America was discovered. This should raise questions about an extremely widespread myth, namely that "in the Middle Ages, people thought the Earth was flat". We hear this from journalists, intellectuals and ministers like Marlène Schiappa and Claude Allègre, and even from historical films, history books and school textbooks, even recent ones. In a 2022 broadcast of "C Jamy", sponsored by the famous Jamy Gourmaud, the speaker asserted: "In the 15th century, at the time of Christopher Columbus, many people thought the Earth was flat. They based themselves on what the Bible [image of Saint Thomas Aquinas] said, but Christopher Columbus didn't believe it for a second." [1] And if we consult the barometer of mainstream thought, namely ChatGPT, it tells us, "In the Middle Ages, people generally thought the Earth was flat [...] Scientific theories about the shape of the Earth, such as those developed by the ancient Greeks, were known, but they were often considered controversial or heretical by the Church." [2] Hence we see that the supposed medieval platism is associated with the Catholic faith, which would have dogmatized this naive idea based on the Bible against the knowledge of the pagan Greeks. But it's already been several decades since studies have unequivocally shown that this is a myth [3].
Countless proofs
Aside from the iconographic argument, all it would take to put an end to the myth of medieval platism is to open a few scholarly books by Catholic ecclesiastics from this vast period. We know that Christopher Columbus based his daring venture on an unfinished work by Pope Pius II († 1458), the Historia rerum ubique gestarum, which the explorer had annotated. In the very first lines of this encyclopedic work, Pius II states: "Almost everyone agrees that the shape of the world [4] is spherical [rotundam]; the same is true of the Earth". In the same work, the Pope discusses the measurements of the Earth's circuмference by Eratosthenes (3rd century BC) and Ptolemy (2nd century). Christopher Columbus had also annotated a work by Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly († 1420), the Imago mundi. In it, the learned cardinal discussed the radius and volume of the terrestrial sphere, climatic zones as a function of latitude, and the poles. His logical conclusion, for example, was that "those living at the Pole would have the sun above their horizon for half the year, and continuous night for the other half"[5], a remarkably accurate statement. Pierre d'Ailly was inspired by the Traité de la Sphère by Nicolas Oresme († 1322), bishop of Lisieux and adviser to Charles V. The title of the work is sufficiently evocative. The same Oresme drew inspiration from an eponymous work, the Traité de la Sphère by the English monk Jean de Sacrobosco († 1256), which was a great pedagogical success that was republished, supplemented and commented on for several centuries. At the same time, St. Thomas Aquinas, in the very first pages of his Summa Theologica, wishing to show that the same conclusion can be reached by different paths, illustrates his point as follows: "Thus, for example, the astronomer and the physicist demonstrate the same conclusion: that the earth is round" [6]. It's a truism accepted by the various scientists of the time. At the turn of the 2nd millennium, Gerbert d'Aurillac († 1003), who was elected Pope under the name of Sylvester II, created a terrestrial globe and, like many doctors of the time, commented on Macrobius [7] († 400), who asserted sphericity. Add to this Saint Bede the Venerable († 735), who tells us that "The Earth is similar to a globe", Saint Isidore of Seville († 636), who speaks of the "terrestrial globe" in his famous Etymologies, Boethius († 524), who evokes the "rounded mass of the Earth" [8], Saint Gregory of Nyssa († 395), who describes an eclipse by projecting the "spherical shape" [9] of the Earth onto the Moon, etc. [10]. Of course, ancient cosmology also asserts an immobile Earth at the center of a closed spherical cosmos, but these errors are taken over from the Greeks.
The underside of the myth
All this could be dismissed as unimportant. After all, Christians can save their souls whatever form they attribute to the Earth. But isn't the main point that life expectancy has plummeted to a frightening 85 years, whereas in the Middle Ages it was the hope of eternal life? Certainly, but what interests us here is not the shape of the earth or the science of ancient times, but the origin of contemporary myth and what it tells us about our times. For a long time, this myth has served as a ready-made formula for ridiculing the supposed silliness of a Christian period condensed under the reductive term "Middle Ages". Now, this supposed "obscurantism" is turning against the myth's propagators, all the more so as access to knowledge is incomparably better today than it was in the days before the printing press. It's easy to dispel the myth of medieval platism, when in the Middle Ages it took considerable energy to preserve the knowledge of the ancients. In a salutary book published in 2021, La Terre plate, généalogie d'une idée fausse [11], two academics trace the origins of this tenacious myth. Should we be surprised to discover that the main author of the myth is none other than Voltaire?
Lactantius and Comas
There is some evidence to support the myth, in particular the Christian apologist Lactantius († 325), who is the only Western exception in favor of a flat Earth. But his opinion was not followed by anyone, and he was never counted among the Fathers of the Church. In the East, we find a certain Cosmas Indicopleustes († circa 550) who wrote a Platist Christian Topography. This illustrious unknown, whose very name is uncertain, seems to be a Greek-speaking merchant from the Nestorian schism. The first Latin translation of his Topographie dates back to 1707. Need we add that he was totally unknown in the medieval West? Yet Voltaire cites Lactantius and Cosmas as representing the position of all the Fathers: "The Fathers regarded the Earth as a great vessel surrounded by water; the bow was to the east, and the stern to the west". [12] This fails to provide a basic context for the transmission of ideas. With such an amalgam, we could just as easily say that the 3rd millennium is platitudinous, judging by some of the videos on the Internet: that's taking a marginal thesis for the norm. Even today, it's not uncommon to see Cosmas cited as the reference he never was.
The question of antipodes
In The City of God, Saint Augustine says that those who assert the existence of antipodians [13], i.e. inhabitants of the opposite side of the Earth, should not be believed, as this theory is based on uncertain conjecture rather than conclusive evidence. Saint Augustine demonstrates an empirical requirement that could hardly be reproached to him, and which has nothing to do with the shape of the Earth. Yet Voltaire concluded that the great Doctor of the Church denied the Earth's sphericity! Voltaire also states that "Alonso Tostado, bishop of Avila, at the end of the 15th century, declares, in his Commentary on Genesis, that the Christian faith is shaken if one believes the Earth to be round". However, if you open the book in question, you will immediately discover Voltaire's lie, for this bishop speaks of the "spherical Earth", or "our hemisphere" [14]. On the other hand, Tostado believes, like Saint Augustine, that the antipodes are not inhabited. Pierre d'Ailly, in the work cited above, describes the various theories on the inhabitation of the antipodes as "opinions". This is a far cry from dogma. It was to this marginal question of "antipodians" that Columbus's exploration provided an answer. The legend of a Christopher Columbus who broke the Platist dogma on the reef of experience was then created, especially in a biography by Washington Irving, which contributed greatly to the myth.
Is the Bible Platist?
In the court of Platism, Voltaire of course calls Holy Scripture into the dock. He writes with characteristic venomous irony: "The just respect for the Bible, which teaches us so many more necessary and sublime truths, was the cause of this universal error among us. We had found in Psalm 103, that God spread the sky over the Earth like a skin" [15]. Certainly, if we want to extract an admission of platitude from Scripture, we can always place this preconceived idea on a verse that fits it so well or so badly [16]). The opposite is also possible, since the Vulgate regularly refers to the Earth as "orbis", which we would readily translate as "globe" [17]). But rather than engage in these sterile debates, let's remember the well-known Catholic principle that Scripture must be read in the light of the Magisterium and the Fathers. But Voltaire is not a Father of the Church. Instead, let us turn to the remarkable wisdom of Saint Basil of Caesarea († 379):
Physicists who have treated of the world, have spoken much about the figure of the earth, they have examined whether it is a sphere or a cylinder, whether it resembles a disc, and whether it is rounded on all sides, or whether it has the shape of a van, and whether it is hollow in the middle; for such are the ideas which the philosophers have had, and by which they have fought one another[18] : For my part, I will not despise our formation of the world because the servant of God, Moses, did not speak of the figure of the earth, nor did he say that its circuмference is 180,000 stadia [19]; because he did not measure the space in the air into which the shadow of the earth extends when the sun has left our horizon; because he did not explain how this same shadow, approaching the moon, causes eclipses. Because he has kept silent on these points which - being useless to us - are of no interest to us, shall I depreciate, by comparing them to the foolish wisdom [of the world], the teachings of the Holy Spirit? Or shall we not glorify Him who, far from amusing our minds with vanities, willed that all should be written for the edification and salvation of our souls? It seems to me that, failing to understand this, some have tried, by alterations of meaning and figurative interpretations, to attribute a borrowed depth to the Scriptures. But this is to be wiser than the oracles of the Holy Spirit, and, under the guise of interpretation, to introduce personal thoughts into the text. Let us take [these oracles] as they are written.
Homilies on the Hexameron, h. IX.
St. Augustine makes a similar point about the movement of the stars:
Never does the Gospel put on the Lord's lips words like these: "I am sending you the Paraclete to teach you the course of the moon and the sun." Jesus Christ wanted to make Christians, not mathematicians. In these matters, men only need the teachings given to them in schools.
Against Felix the Manichean, l. I
Is the Church "spheristic"?
The Church has not affirmed platitude any more than it has affirmed rotundity, because it affirms nothing on the subject. All the Fathers, theologians and popes who affirm that the Earth is spherical do not base their thinking on faith, because they believe it to be silent on the subject. They systematically refer to "philosophers", "physicists" and "mathematicians". They give arguments drawn from reason and observation: the Earth's shadow on the Moon during eclipses, the ship's mast disappearing after the hull, or the new stars appearing on the horizon during voyages. This is an important point, because the myth sought to imply that faith was exclusive of science. The believer would have been inclined to seek the truth in faith alone, without leaving any gaps for reason. But this is not the way the Church thinks. The Church Fathers were only concerned to reject the idea of the eternity of the world conveyed by ancient cosmology. Modern cosmology will not hold this against them.
The inertia of a falsification
All these elements may be misleading to the uninitiated, but they are unlikely to impress a somewhat serious historian. The first propagators of the myth were the most culpable. But once the first falsifications had passed, those who followed repeated the Voltairean catechism, driven by a blind faith in progress, without a critical eye, and over time, the falsification repeated thousands of times took on the value of established historical truth. Michelet, who deserves the title of novelist more than historian, obviously took up this fable, among many others. It was also extended by Antoine-Jean Letronne, who held the history chair at the prestigious Collège de France in the 19th century [20]. Over time, an author like Arthur Koestler got it wrong, even though he helped demystify the Galileo affair [21]. There's even a 2015 book claiming to "shatter myths" that conveys a slightly mixed version of it [22]. At first, this myth was propagated mainly by anti-Catholic circles, but over time it quickly came to fool Catholics.
Later elements were added, such as old maps, sometimes exhibited as proof of medieval platism. But to take flat maps as proof of platism is a confoundingly silly argument, which would have us classify the creators of Michelin maps or the designers of Google Maps among the platists on the grounds that they represent the Earth's surface flat. As for the cross-sectional representations, which could constitute real proof, they are not taken from medieval manuscripts but are contemporary productions designed to illustrate the myth! Myth thus becomes the creator of its own "evidence". It's self-perpetuating.
The origins of contemporary platism
Ironically, the origins of today's Platist phenomenon can be traced back to the 19th century, shortly after the "Enlightenment", to the rise of rationalism within a utopian socialist community. Around 1839, Samuel Rowbotham, secretary of the short-lived Owenist-inspired Manea Fen utopian community [23], carried out experiments on the Bedford River, concluding that the Earth was flat. He wrote a pamphlet entitled "Astronomie Zététique" (1849) to defend his strange conclusion, using his "zetetic" method [24] based on reason alone. He later produced a more substantial work (1881), adding a few biblical passages interpreted in a very personal way, appealing neither to the Fathers, nor to Cosmas, nor to the Middle Ages, and certainly not to the magisterium, since he was a Protestant who did not seem to be attached to any denomination. His ideas were later taken up by a Protestant sect, the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church, which is obviously not Catholic despite its name, and then by the famous Flat-Earth Society, which continues to this day.
Conclusion
It is disturbing and revealing that such a gross error is still so widespread. If such a myth could clutter school textbooks for two centuries, how many others are still lurking in contemporary representations of medieval Christianity? There's the supposed ban on dissection [25], the absurd story of the discussion of women's souls [26], the myth of the droit de cuissage that Voltaire was not afraid to attribute to the bishops [27], and so on. Reality proves even harder to find when it comes to real facts that have been mixed with myth, such as the witch-hunt, the Inquisition or the Galileo affair. All these myths took root all the more durably as they reinforced the preconceived ideas of anti-clerics of all stripes, whether revolutionary or Protestant, even as they were constantly talking about "the fight against prejudice". It is in this state of mind that we must find the main cause of these myths: we judge the medieval period to be irrational because we look at it irrationally. We project our own irrationality onto the past, the better to bolster our pride in a present deemed "enlightened" by reason: the past is "obscurantist", and we are finally "enlightened", we say with proud Manichaeism. But the "enlightenment" of the 3rd millennium is not so clear-cut: don't we see people in high places seriously questioning the advisability of placing men in women's prisons or in women's sports competitions, simply because these men have declared that they feel like women. Do we not see elected officials pleading for the preservation of the "surmulots" of Paris? Truly, our world is not right. Doesn't the loss of faith have something to do with this loss of reason? By forgetting the religious verticality that makes man reach out to God, today's Earth has lost one of its dimensions: it has become spiritually flat.
Footnotes:
1) Evan Adelinet, C Jamy, April 22, 2022. The same mistake was made by Jamy Gourmaud in another episode of the show[].
2) ChatGPT's answer to the question "What shape did people in the Middle Ages think the earth was?". Note that if you ask the more specific question "What do recent studies say about the idea that in the "Middle Ages, people believed the earth was flat?", you get a diametrically opposed answer that debunks the myth. From this we can see that this AI was "trained" with contradictory data, the majority of which repeated the myth. The first, broader question thus obtains the answer that corresponds to the majority of texts, i.e. the dominant opinion. The second question aims to direct the answer towards specific studies on this received idea[].
3) Cf. Inventing the Flat Earth, Jeffrey Burton Russel, 1991[]
4) The "world" is not the Earth, but refers to the ancient cosmology of a closed, spherical universe. Confusion between the two is common, even in the works of historians. We have made every effort to clear up this ambiguity throughout our article[].
5) Ymago mundi by Pierre d'Ailly, translated and commented by Edmond Buron, tome 1, Maisonneuve frères, 1930[].
6) ST, Ia pars, q. 1, a. 1, ad. 2um[].
7) Commentary on Scipio's Dream[]
8) Consolation of Philosophy, II, 13[].
9) "According to astronomers, in this world full of light, the shadow [on the Moon] is formed by the interposition of the body of the earth. But the shadow, according to the spherical shape of the latter, is enclosed on the rear part by the sun's rays and takes the form of a cone. The sun, on the other hand, several times larger than the earth, encircles it on all sides with its rays and, at the limit of the cone, joins together the points of attachment of the light." La Création de l'homme, Sources Chrétiennes n° 6, ch. 21, p. 181[].
10) Saint Ambrose affirms the sphericity of the "world" as well as of the sun and moon, but it's hard to find an exact mention for the Earth, as this is not the kind of question that interests the Fathers. However, his cosmology strongly assumes the sphericity of the Earth (cf. P. L. XIV, col. 133). The same is true of Eusebius of Caesarea (Collectio Nova Patrum et Scriptorum, ed. Montfaucon, t. 1, p. 460) or Saint Jerome (Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians, Trad. Abbé Bareille)[].
11) Violaine Giacomotto-Charra and Sylvie Nony, Ed. Les Belles Lettres, 2021. We have relied heavily on this work[].
12) Dictionnaire philosophique (1764), article Figure. Cf. also the articles "Ciel matériel" and "Ciel des Anciens"[].
13) The City of God, l. XVI, ch. IX[].
14) Alphonsi Tostati Episcopi Abulensis, Opera omnia, Commentaria in Genesim, Venice, 1728, p. 71-72[].
15) Voltaire has added the words "on Earth", which are not found in the verse quoted[].
16) Some invoke Isaiah (40:22) speaking of the Lord "seated on the circle [gyrum] of the Earth." But as God's seated position is clearly an anthropomorphism to be taken in a metaphorical sense, such a verse obviously cannot be relied upon to derive a literal meaning of its own. We also have this passage from a psalm: "I have strengthened his pillars" (Ps 74:4), but St. Ambrose clearly says of this passage: "We cannot consider that these are true pillars, but rather that virtue by which [God] strengthens and sustains the substance of the Earth" (P. L. XIV, col. 133[]).
17) Cf. the Pentecost Introït: "The Spirit of the Lord has filled the orb of the earth [orbem terrarum]" (Wis 1:7). The Latin orbis is ambiguous in that it can mean "circle" or "sphere". It's the same ambiguity as the word "round": we speak of the "round Earth" to designate a sphere, but we also speak of a "round table" that is nevertheless flat. F. Gaffiot's Latin dictionary translates the expression "orbis terræ" as follows: "disc of the earth according to ancient ideas, for us globe terrestre". But it's clear that Mr. Gaffiot is dependent on myth. If we look at the texts of the Fathers, we see, for example, Saint Ambrose speaking indifferently of orbis lunæ and globus lunæ, which indicates that the orbis is indeed a globe (P. L., t. XIV, col. 127 and 200). In the 16th c., the scholar and poet Jean-Pierre de Mesmes did not hesitate to make this application: "It must therefore be decided that the earth's mass is round, since its shadow is round: which is what the Holy Prophets confess, calling the Earth in hands Orbis terræ." (Institutions astronomiques, chap. 18, p. 54-55[]
18) Saint Basil is referring here to the opinions of Greek philosophers, as not all of them hold to sphericity. Canon Copernicus tells us about the authors of these various opinions: "The earth is not flat, as Empedocles and Anaximenes said, nor tambourine-shaped, as Leucippus said, nor boat-shaped, as Heraclitus said, nor hollow in any other way, as Democritus said. Neither cylindroid, as Anaximander said, nor rooted in the infinite thickness of the lower part, as Xenophanes said, but absolutely spherical, as the Philosophers think." (Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium cœlestium) These latter philosophers are essentially Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle. Note that the human imagination goes far beyond the reductive duality between disc and sphere[].
19) This is the measurement given by Ptolemy in his Geography. He used the philetairian stage worth 210 meters, which gives a circuмference of 37,800 km. The real value is 40,070 km. Cf. Pierre Duhem, Le Système du monde, t. II, p. 7[].
20) Des opinions cosmographiques des Pères de l'Église, in Revue des deux Monde, t. 1, 1834[].
21) Les Somnambules, 1955. Koestler is not a historian, but he has the merit of often going back to the sources... except for the pre-Copernican period, when he takes Cosmas to be an undisputed authority[].
22) "In the early Middle Ages, the obscurantism imposed by the Catholic Church led to the idea that the Earth was flat. But Christopher Columbus' contemporaries knew that the Earth was not flat. Lydia Mammar, C'est vrai ou c'est faux? 300 mythes fracassés, Paris, L'Opportun, 2015, section Before Christopher Columbus, everyone thought the Earth was flat[].
23) Named after Robert Owen, founder of British utopian socialism. Owen saw in these communities the only way to lead a "rational" life and founded the Rational Society to promote its ideology, advocating, among other things, birth control and very liberal views on marriage. Rowbotham sought the approval of the Rational Society for his community, but was unsuccessful, although there were supporters. The community made the headlines and lasted barely two years (1839-1841), after which Rowbotham himself judged them "blameworthy and impracticable". Cf. "A Monument of Union": Social Change and Personal Experience at the Manea Fen Community, 1839-1841, John Langdon, 2012[].
24) From the Greek zeteo, "I seek". Like most of those who still use the term zetetics today, Rowbotham claims to be based primarily on experience, whereas he is more of a theorist. He did not invent this use of the term zetetics. In fact, it can be found in the Edinburgh Free Thinkers' Zetetic Society, founded in 1820 by atheist freethinkers from the lower classes[].
25) See Abbé Knittel's article: L'Eglise avait-elle interdit la dissection?[].
26) See Wikipedia's article on the Legend of the Council of Macon[].
27) The legend was taken up by Michelet. It has no historical basis, of course. Cf. Dictionnaire philosophique, Voltaire, article Cuissage: "It is astonishing that in Christian Europe the practice of having the virginity of one's vassal was for a very long time a kind of feudal law, and that at least the custom of having the virginity of one's vassal was considered a customary right. The vassal's daughter's first wedding night undoubtedly belonged to the lord.... There's no doubt that abbots and bishops took over this prerogative in their capacity as temporal lords"[].