Cosmas of Indiocopleustes Christian Topography 550AD
What then can be more absurd than the Pagan doctrine that the earth is in the |xvii middle of the universe? Were it in the middle, there must be something below it as well as above it; but there is nothing below it, since we learn from Genesis that God made heaven and earth, and nothing else beyond these. Here then the Pagans are at war with divine Scripture; but, not content with this, they are at war also with common sense itself and the very laws of nature, declaring, as they do, that the earth is a central sphere, and that there are Antipodes, who must be standing head-downward and on whom the rain must fall up. Introduction, Christian Topography, Cosmas Indiocopleustes
Cosmas Nestorian? Only one passage occurs to throw some doubt on the certainty of this conclusion—-that in which Cosmas addresses Mary as |x the Mother of God, an expression abhorrent to the Nestorians. Introduction.
The Christian Topography is a production of which It may be truly said τὸ πάρεργου κρει̃ττου του̃ ἔργου. It is essentially controversial, its professed design being to refute, from Scripture and common sense, the impious Pagan cosmography, according to which the earth is a sphere; and the centre around which the heaven, which is also a sphere, revolves with all its luminaries.
Cosmas states and re-states with the most wearisome pertinacity, and holding them to be most vital verities, sanctioned alike by common sense and the paramount authority of divine Scripture, denounces again and again “those reprobate Christians who, instead of accepting them, prefer, through their perverse folly or downright wickedness, to adopt the miserable Pagan belief |xx that earth and heaven are spherical, and that there are Antipodes on whom the rain must fall up.
We have therefore conveniently divided the subject of the book into five parts. In the outset then the first part is directed against the persons referred to who have been misled, and argues that one who wishes to profess Christianity cannot be led away by the plausible [115] errors of those outside the Church—-errors which are opposed to divine scripture. For should any one choose to examine closely the Pagan theories he will find them to be entirely fictitious, fabulous sophistries, and to be utterly impossible.
Prologue
Then again, the fifth book has been written for those enquiring what the Christian theories are, and it shows that in what we have said and have represented by drawings we have neither devised fictions of our own nor invented new fables; but from revelation and from what God who created the world has ordained, have beheld the pattern of the whole world—-namely the Tabernacle prepared by Moses, which the New Testament consistently with this view has pronounced to be an image of the whole world; and which also by means of the vail Moses divided, and so made one tabernacle into two, just as God also in the beginning divided what was one region, extending from the earth to the highest heaven, into two regions, by means of the firmament; and just as in the tabernacle there was an outer and an inner place, so here there was a lower and an upper.
Book I
But should one wish to examine more elaborately the question of the Antipodes, he would easily find them to be old wives’ fables. For if two men on opposite sides placed the soles of their feet each against each, whether they chose to stand on earth, or water, or air, or fire, or any other kind of body, how could both be found standing upright? The one would assuredly be found in the natural upright position, and the other, contrary to nature, head downward.20 Such notions are opposed to reason, and alien to our nature and condition. And how, again, when it rains upon both of them, is it possible to say that the rain falls down upon the two, and not that it falls down to the one and falls up to the other, or falls against them, or towards them, or away from them. For to think that there are Antipodes compels us to think also that rain falls on them from an opposite direction to ours; and any one will, with good reason, deride these ludicrous theories, which set forth principles incongruous, ill-adjusted, and contrary to nature.
20. 1 See Cicero, Acad. Prior., 2, 39, and Plutarch, 2, 869 c., on Antipodes. Nearly all the Christian Fathers held the same opinion as Cosmas abput the Antipodes; as, for instance, Lactantius, who asks: “Est quisqam tam ineptus qui credat esse homines, quorum vestigia sint superiora quam capita?” Augustin, Chrysostom, Severianus of Gabala, Beda, were likewise anti-Antipodeans.
Book II
The Deity accordingly having founded the earth, which is oblong, upon its own stability, bound together the extremities of the heaven with the extremities of the earth, making the nether extremities of the heaven rest upon the four extremities of the earth, while on high he formed it into a most lofty vault overspanning the length of the earth. Along the breadth again of the earth he built a wall from the nethermost extremities of the heaven upwards to the summit, and having enclosed the place, made a house, as one might call it, of enormous size, like an oblong vaulted vapour-bath. For, saith the Prophet Isaiah (xlix, 22): He who established heaven as a vault. With regard, moreover, to the glueing together of the heaven and the earth, we find this written in Job: He has inclined heaven to earth, and it has been poured out as the dust of the earth. I have welded it as a square block of stone.16 Do not the expressions about inclining it to the earth and welding it thereto clearly show that the heaven standing as a vault has its extremities bound together with the extremities of the earth? The fact of its inclination to the earth, and its being welded with it, makes it totally inconceivable that it is a sphere.17 |31
Moses, likewise, in describing the table in the Tabernacle, which is an image of the earth, ordered its length to be of two cubits, and its breadth of one cubit. So then in the same way as Isaiah spoke, so do we also speak of the figure of the first heaven made on the first day, made along with the earth, and comprising along with the earth the universe, and say that its figure is vaultlike. And just as it is said in Job that the heaven has been welded to the earth, so do we again also say the same. Having learned, moreover, from Moses that the earth has been extended in length more than in breadth, we again admit this, knowing that the scriptures, which are truly divine, ought to be believed. But further, when God had produced the waters and angels and other things simultaneously with the earth and the highest heaven itself, he on the second day exposed to their vision this second heaven visible to our eyes, which, as if putting to use the creations of his own hands, he formed from the waters as his material. In appearance it is like the highest heaven, but not in figure, and it lies midway between that heaven and the earth; and God [130] having then stretched it out extended it throughout the whole space in the direction of its breadth, like an intermediate roof, and bound together the firmament with the highest heaven, separating and disparting the remainder of the waters, leaving some above the firmament, and others on the earth below the firmament, as the divine Moses explains to us, and so makes the one area or house two houses—-an upper and a lower story.
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