Flat-World
Idealists versus Round-Earth Visionaries
Sometime around
the dawn of history—so the story goes—people thought the world flat. In year 1492, a startling revelation, with
all the force of a ferocious gale, tore the flat world theory asunder. Three ships (La Niña Pinta,
and Santa
María) sailed west from the Spanish coast under the command of
Christopher Columbus, who had convinced his patrons, Isabel I of Castile and
Fernando II of Aragón, that all seas were
navigable. It was Columbus’s wager
against a long tradition of anti-antipodeans that included sources such as the
Old Testament, the eminent philosopher Plato (among others), and the not-to-be
easily contradicted authority, early Church father, and theologian St.
Augustine. How could Columbus have been
so audacious? Particularly, since St. Augustine
had flatly denied the existence of the antipodes—for to embrace the theory was a tacit acceptance that the earth was round; that there were two poles, north and
south; and to accept the findings of
Eratosthenes (276 BC[1] – c. 195 BC), who went on to become the world’s first
geographer, inventing the concepts of latitude and longitude that we still use
today, and who constructed the first models and maps based on a spherical
earth.
Nonetheless, the
antipodean rejectionists felt they had good reason to hold their position. Plato describes it in Timaeus as so:
For if there were any solid body in equipoise at the centre of the universe,
there would be nothing to draw it to this extreme rather than to that, for they
are all perfectly similar; and if a person were to go round the world in a
circle, he would often, when standing at the antipodes of his former position,
speak of the same point as above and below; for, as I was saying just now, to
speak of the whole which is in the form of a globe as having one part above and
another below is not like a sensible man.
St. Augustine revisits the arguments when he writes:
As to the fable that there are Antipodes,
that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when
it sets on us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours, there is no reason
for believing it. Those who affirm it do not claim to possess any actual
information; they merely conjecture that, since the earth is suspended within
the concavity of the heavens, and there is as much room on the one side of it
as on the other, therefore the part which is beneath cannot be void of human inhabitants.
They fail to notice that, even should it be believed or demonstrated that the
world is round or spherical in form, it does not follow that the part of the
earth opposite to us is not completely covered with water, or that any
conjectured dry land there should be inhabited by men. For Scripture, which
confirms the truth of its historical statements by the accomplishment of its
prophecies, teaches not falsehood; and it is too absurd to say that some men might
have set sail from this side and, traversing the immense expanse of ocean, have
propagated there a race of human beings descended from that one first man.
In other words,
to these men of learning and Scripture, the idea of a round earth was as
ridiculous as anything found in Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking-Glass—an
anti-antipodean book if there ever was one.
Alice’s world is flat, and not only flat, but it is a chessboard. Her movement is severely restricted; she may
move forward, backward, and laterally—she has some latitude, but no height,
breadth or depth that might allow her to escape from the game (or the Red
Queen’s wrath). Her experience is that of
pure surface with all of its reversals, paradoxes, dead ends, and cliffhangers.
So where then
did the inkling that the world might not be flat come from if not from the
Bible, philosophers and theologians? The
troublemakers—and in this case they were seen as troublemakers—were merchants,
sailors, and explorers who’d traveled far beyond the verses of Homer (remember
Achilles’ shield depicts a flat earth), Scripture, and what is known as the
up-down view of the world: Heaven above,
the earth a floating disk, and below a place you went if you were one of the
unfortunate damned. Eratosthenes has
already been mentioned. And there is
Ptolemy, who Columbus supposedly cites in his plea to the King and Queen of
Spain to fund his voyage. The notion
that the earth is a sphere is an ancient one:
it involves a long, on-going
debate between what we might call flat-world idealists and round-earth
visionaries.
Sources:
Reston, James,
Dogs of God, Anchor Books, NY 2006
Sobel, Dava,
Longitude, Walter and Company, NY 1995
Kathryn A.Kopple is the author of Little Velásquez, a novel set in 15th
century Spain.
