Flat Earths And Fake Footnotes: Reconsidering the History of Science and Christianity (Part One)

[God] died from a bad case of the twentieth century.

                                                     --James Morrow[1]

 I remember quite vividly the first representation of Columbus that I was taught; like the glimmering icons of the Orthodox church, his portrait was given to us less a man, and more a thin veil through which the portentous light of Enlightenment found quite early access to key into the world.  Against the stubbornness of a backwards society, Columbus was a man, so it was said, singularly convinced of the world's rotundity, and to settle this geometric bet he set sail.  

Behind his lambent form was the pitch abyss of a thousand years of Medievalism, ignorant--or deceived by Priests' wooden reading of "the four corners of the world" in scripture.  It was from this morass that Columbus strode forward resolute, now tinged with the sort of heroic loneliness American mythology devours.  It was a breathtaking tale; both because of his resolution in the face of such astounding religious ignorance, and because my young mind fascinated upon the uncanny image of a horizon line of waters churning over that last, vital edge.  

Impatient with the details of the lesson, I daydreamed, and wondered how the waters refilled themselves if they kept foaming over the abyss.  I pictured far below us another flat earth, only upside down, whose waters likewise keeled over the edge, but from our vantage they plunged up to us, as our waters plunged downwards to them, in a sort of eternal emptying and refilling.  And in between both worlds, perhaps, a few frantic-looking animals, perplexed at falling over one of the edges and at their current transitive state, legs still churning in the air like so many cartoon characters, waiting to see which way the strange currents would take them.  Quietly, my fifth grade self cursed Columbus for wrecking this wonderful fairytale I just invented.

It turns out, however, my fairytale was not shipwrecked by the truth, but was merely supplanted by another fable.  As Jeffrey Burton Russell puts it in his book-length study on the myth of the flat earth: “in reality, there were no skeptics [of a flat earth].  All educated people throughout Europe knew the earth’s spherical shape and its approximate circumference.”[2]  C.S. Lewis (who, we sometimes forget because of his popular fiction and apologetic works, had an actual day-job holding the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge) wrote in his survey of the Medieval period: “Physically considered, the earth is a globe; all the authors of the High Middle Ages are agreed on this. … The implications of a spherical earth were fully grasped.”[3]  

The list of who knew this is so vast as to constitute essentially every educated person for the last two and a half millennia: Aristotle, Plato, The Venerable Bede, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Eratosthenes, Ptolemy, and on and on.  In fact we have a record of five authors who did not believe in a spherical earth, but no one liked them much anyway.  Lactantius was condemned for many of his views, and the other main contender, Cosmas Indicopleustas, was completely unknown until he was rediscovered in 1706: “No medieval author knew Cosmas, and his text was considered an authority of the ‘Dark Ages’ only after its English publication in 1897!” says Umberto Eco.[4] A question thus emerges: how did the myth of the myth of the flat earth, start?

In a remarkable piece of detective work, Jeffery Burton Russell traces the emergence of the myth through history.  We cannot follow all of his footsteps here, but he traces it back in its first form to Copernicus, who likened those who did not believe the earth rotated around the sun to Lactantius, “though Copernicus was careful not to blanket either ancient or medieval Christianity with Lactantius’ error.”[5]  The real perpetrator comes with a man named Washington Irving (1783-1859). Irving’s work was the Da Vinci Code of its day: he was writing fiction with historical research thrown in, in order to satirize his distaste for pedantic historians.  “Irving knew how to use libraries and archives, and the public was fooled into taking his literary game as history.”[6]  

In this work, a very artful and elaborate account of Columbus standing before the Inquisitors attempting to convince them of his journey appears.  Where they cite scripture, Columbus recounts facts.  The account is hard to resist, “but it is a fabrication.” He wanted to turn Columbus into a mythical figure, “the hero of a romantic novel, or an epic modern Odysseus or a Faust … or an American Adam, the First Man of the New World …”  Irving’s work was a sensation, but its intent, it seems, lost on everyone. 

From there Irving’s work found its way into the pages of two men who will frequently show up in our own essay: John William Draper and Andrew Dixon White, both of whom were the most responsible for propagating the images of an “eternal war” between Science and Religion.  Given that the title “Flat Earther” is still used to indicate anyone who holds dogmatically to an outlandish view in the face of science, one can imagine the sort of currency Irving’s tale had for men who wanted to portray the length of history as one of the heroic struggles of science in the face of dogmatic repression.  “[White and Draper] saw the Flat Error as a powerful weapon.”[7]  And so they shaped their histories around it. 

White, a better scholar than Draper, knew that those like Augustine and Aquinas—quite inconveniently—were in full support of a round earth.  So he painted them as unique lights, lost in the majority of Christian faith.  Yet, if your argument relies on painting Augustine and Aquinas as a “minority” in the Christian thought of the West, something has gone wrong. At one point, White cites Irving in support of the Columbus tale.  When Russell traces this citation back to Irving, he finds a footnote supporting Irving’s story for the Flat Earth and Columbus which reads in total: “Mss. Bibliot. Roi. Fr.” Though this is academic shorthand, it may as well have been a sorcerer’s incantation, for all the good it did.  Literally it reads: “manuscripts in the French royal library.”[8]  Which is to say, at this point Irving is having a laugh by saying: “somewhere in the French royal library there are unnamed documents which totally support my story.”  And yet, over two hundred years later, there, in my own fifth grade class, our textbook still repeated this fable.  Why?  As Russell puts it, in an excellent summary of what our own essay is about to look at:

Fallacies or ‘myths’ of this nature take on a life of their own, creating a dialectic with each other and eventually making a ‘cycle of myths’ reinforcing one another.  For example, it has been shown the ‘The Inquisition’ never existed, but that fallacy, like the flat earth fallacy, is part of the ‘cycle’ that includes The Dark Ages, the Black Legend [of the Inquisition trials], the opposition of Christianity to science, and so on.  The cycle becomes so embedded in our thought that it helps to form our worldview in ways that make it impervious to evidence.  We are so convinced that medieval people must have been ignorant enough to think the world flat that when the evidence is thrown in front of us we avoid it, as we might, when driving, swerve around an obstacle in the road.  Thus our worldview is based more upon what we think happened than what really happened.  A shared body of myth can overwhelm all evidence …[9]

As such the myth of the myth of the flat earth is not an isolated phenomenon, a historical quirk that can sit well alone as one of the idiosyncrasies of academic history.  Put otherwise: “Clever metaphors die hard,” as the opening line to James Moore’s seminal book, The Post-Darwinian Controversies reads.  Moore is referring in this instance to the tenacious persistence of “military metaphors” used in literature—both academic and popular—to describe the historical relationship between science and religion: “Through constant repetition in historical and philosophical exposition of every kind, from pulpit, platform, and printed page, the idea of science and religion at ‘war’ has become an integral part of Western intellectual culture.”[10] 

“One of the most remarkable developments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” concurs historian and scientist Alister McGrath, “has been the relentless advance of the perception that there exists a permanent, essential conflict between the natural sciences and religion.”[11]  “The secular public,” writes the historian of science Ronald Numbers, “if it thinks about such issues at all, knows that organized religion has always opposed scientific progress. … The religious public knows that science has taken the leading role in corroding faith.”[12]  Histories, perceived and imagined, all-too-real or otherwise, mark and inscribe day-to-day judgments with such pervasiveness that one may borrow J.L. Austin’s phrase from a different context, and note these histories are to us often “like breathing, only quieter.”[13]

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[1] James Morrow, Towing Jehovah (New York: Harvest Books, 1994), 118.

[2] Jeffery Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (Connecticut: Prager Publishers, 1997), 2.

[3] C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 140-141.

[4] Umberto Eco, “The Force of Falsity,” in Serendipities: Language and Lunacy (New York: Columbia University, 1998), 5.

[5] Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth, 70.

[6] Ibid., 50.

[7] Ibid., 43.

[8] Ibid., 96n.148.

[9] Ibid., 76.

[10] James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwinism in Great Britain and America, 1870-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 19.

[11] Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (N.L.: Doubleday, 2006), 79.

[12] Ronald Numbers, “Introduction,” in Ronald Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail, And Other Myths About Science and Religion (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2009), 6.

[13] Quoted in Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 76.