Guess What, The Earth is Spherical

In the past year I have come under the opinion from my reading that people in the middle ages were not half as stupid as they get credit for. If you read a little bit of history about the middle ages, you will find that most history writers paint the mediaeval people as the most ignorant fools that you could imagine. You will hear things such as, "the middle ages' society was backward because of too much importance on religion" (from a Chinese textbook). Or you will read things about the church burning heretics that dared suggest that the earth doesn't have four corners or that the sun doesn't orbit the earth.

Then such historians will then speak of the renaissance as if it were a magical rose arising ex nihilo out of the world's sleeve, not considering that the middle ages was the stem from which bloomed the flower of the renaissance. They don't usually take the time to discuss why the renaissance bloomed out of the context of a Roman Catholic Europe instead of some other place that did not have the supposedly darkening influence of the church.

I suppose that this sort of mentality comes from two sources, Secularism and Protestantism. Secularism, since it took over dominance on Western culture from Christianity, has almost always scoffed at religious belief and religious believers. This is part of the reason that most Secularists so thoroughly misunderstand it. Richard Dawkins' attitude that theology is the study of nothing, since there is nothing to study, explains his ignorance of the topic.

Protestantism in the Reformation made a complete break from Roman Catholicism, and since then they have generally speaking had a mutual dislike. However, when Protestants sympathize with secular writers' view of history simply because they both dislike Catholics, Protestants are shooting themselves in the foot. Protestants need to realize that much of Roman Catholic doctrine is similar to their own and that if they are saying that Catholic doctrine did only harm to Europe socially and philosophically, then they are putting their own belief in a bad light too.

What lead me to think of all of this was something I read recently that confirmed what I had heard: that the mediaeval church actually did not believe in a flat earth. I was reading Augustine's The City of God, Book 16, Chapter 9 "On whether we are to believe in the Antipodes." In this chapter he says he does not believe that people could live on the other side of the earth because people could not have taken a boat across such a vast ocean. (He obviously hadn't heard of the Bering Strait.) Nevertheless, though he did not believe that people lived on the other side of the world, he did believe that the world was spherical. He says, "But they do not remark that, although it be supposed or scientifically demonstrated that the world is of a round and spherical form, yet it does not follow that the other side of the earth is bare of water; nor even, though it be bare, does it immediately follow that it is peopled."

Something I read this morning about the Venerable Bede confirmed this again. He was one of the first ones to write a history of the English people. Besides his history, he also wrote many commentaries on the Bible and some works of his observations of nature. From the latter works, we know that Bede too in the 8th century knew that the earth was round and furthermore had some idea of latitude.

It seems that the middle ages were not the dark ages because of any darkening influence of the church. Rather it seems that the middle ages are dark to the secular man because he is willingly ignorant of them.