Columbus and the Flat Earth Myth

 

One of the most common myths about Christians is that Medieval Christians believed the earth was flat. This myth is a complete fabrication. There is no evidence that Christians ever believed the earth was flat. How this lie was invented and promulgated is interesting and instructive.

The myth that medieval Christians believed in a flat Earth was made up by storyteller Washington Irving (The legend of Sleepy Hollow, etc.).  It first appeared in  A History A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, published in 1828.  There is no record of it before that date.

Background

Christopher Columbus had trouble getting funded for his voyages. People were generally skeptical of his ideas. At that time, everyone believed that the earth was a sphere. They also had an accurate estimate of how big it was. Let’s take a look at a map of the world.

If you sail west from Europe, you must cross the following: Atlantic Ocean, North America, Pacific Ocean. To reach China from Spain, you must travel about 12,500 miles. There was a problem; the ships of Christopher Columbus were not provisioned for 12,500 miles. He, along with his crew, would die of thirst and starvation.

Christopher Columbus thought it was only 2300 miles to China, but his maps were faulty. He was using the work of Italian astronomer Paolo Toscanelli, who also defended a westward route to Asia and in 1474 sent a letter to King Alfonso V of Portugal. He also transcribed it, along with a map, and sent it to Columbus. Here is Toscanelli’s map from 1474.

A modern version of Toscanelli’s map. The Americas are depicted in light blue

The land areas of North and South America are in light blue but were not on the original map. As you can see, Toscanelli cut out the entire Pacific Ocean. ‘Cippangu’ is the name for Japan, and ‘Cathay’ is China. Columbus relied on the accuracy of Toscanelli’s map, but it was extremely inaccurate. He thought he could sail quickly to China. In fact, while the Spanish did not know about North and South America, they did not believe the distance was as short as Columbus thought. Columbus did not have enough food and water to sail to China on his voyage; had he not made landfall, he and all his men would have died. It was luck, not skill, that he made landfall on San Salvador. Instead of a journey of 12,500 miles (the actual distance) Columbus thought it was only 2300 miles!

Irving’s Story

Columbus’ proposed voyage met with resistance from the learned men of Europe. He was in touch with the leading capitals, including Spain. The Spanish Monarchs referred the matter to the confessor to Queen Isabella, Hernando de Talavera. Talavera called a rather informal council together at the university city of Salamanca, which had one of the leading universities in Europe. He called several others, trying to resolve the dispute. The one at Salamanca was immortalized by Washington Irving.

Irving dramatized Columbus’ meeting with the council at Salamanca. He converted it from an inquiry to determine whether Columbus’ voyage was feasible into a battle between ignorance vs. knowledge. It was the enlightened young Columbus against the forces of darkness.

Irving’s story was ‘pure moonshine’, to quote one historian.  Irving let his imagination roam freely.  The meeting came complete with inquisitors and hooded theologians.  They all, according to Irving, believed the Earth was flat. Irving’s description of the meeting qualifies as historical fiction. In fact, none of the members of that council thought the earth was flat. They knew it was a sphere.

Obviously, Irving’s story was successful, in that it became widely quoted in history textbooks. One fact we should remember is that what happens in the mass media matters. Irving’s story of a valiant young rationalist, fighting for truth against the dead hand of tradition, resonates with people. The much more common story – that a young person, concluding that tradition is wrong, makes a fool of himself and perhaps gets himself killed – never appears in the popular media. In fact, had the Americas not been in the path of Columbus’ voyage, he and all of his men would have died. The traditionalists were correct, but Columbus was lucky and lived on to become a hero.

This illustrates the power of the Dark Ages myth. The public readily believed anything, no matter how implausible it was, because of the myth of the Dark Ages followed by the Renaissance. Irving’s story was really a microcosm of that larger myth.

It is very difficult to remove a myth like this once it is believed. This is one reason why pop culture matters. Historians have been debunking this tale since 1920. Despite that effort, a movie, Christopher Columbus, from 1949 repeated this tale, as did a 1963 cartoon on Christopher Columbus by the Disney studios. This and other products of the pop culture are arguably much more influential than academics.

Many Christians do not think this is very important, but it is. Try evangelizing someone who believes all Christians are stupid. We do not know how many young people fell away from the faith because of this myth, but it is probably a substantial number.

One other thing needs to be said. Irving was a Protestant writing about an event in a Catholic country. It is no coincidence that Catholics are portrayed as ignorant and hide-bound in Irving’s story. Anti-Catholic bigotry was endemic in America at that time, and there is a residue of it today. It is a mistake. Propaganda and lies attacking other Christians inevitably damages all of Christianity. We should cease all bigotry toward our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Propagating the myth

The fact that Washington Irving was pushing this story meant it had wide circulation with the public, but that would not necessarily guarantee wide acceptance in academic circles. Academics think of themselves as above-it-all. How – and why – did academics come to believe this myth? The short answer, as we will see, is that Secular Humanist academics deliberately pushed it, and that they knew it was a lie.

The man who realized the propaganda value of the flat earth myth was Antoine-Jean Letronne in his On the Cosmological Ideas of the Church Fathers (1834).   Letronne is described as ‘anti-clerical’, i.e. he was a Christophobic bigot. Letronne found two early church fathers as fall guys:

1. Lactantius (c.245-325) was born and reared in Africa as a Pagan before converting to Christianity. As a convert, he completely rejected the Greek philosophers and their conclusions– including the spherical earth.  He finally concluded the earth was flat because it could not have antipodes (land areas on the other side of the world).  He thought humans would live upside-down there.  He was not widely heeded and eventually was proclaimed a heretic.
2. Cosmas Indicopleustes was a 6^th century merchant. He traveled widely (Indicopleustes means ‘sailor to India’).  He wrote of his travels and historians find his writings to be a very useful window into a world that has disappeared.  He wrote that the earth was flat but had almost no influence.  Everyone else believed the earth was a sphere.  Later in life he became a hermit.

Cosmas was attacked by John Philoponus (490-570) in his own time and was more or less forgotten until he was dug up by the Humanists.  He wrote in Greek.  He was first translated into Latin in 1706 and into English in 1897.  His writings were not known in Western Europe during Medieval times.

Letronne knew of other writers, much more influential than these two, who believed the earth was a sphere. Here are three of them:

• Augustine (354-430) – Probably the most influential theologian in Catholicism
• Venerable Bede (672-735)– Distinguished Medieval English Monk
• Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) immensely influential Medieval philosopher and theologian.

These are men of wide prestige and knowledge. It is inconceivable, unless you are a Christophobic bigot, to think that Medieval Christians believed the earth was flat. If a Medieval monk such as Bede believed the earth was a sphere, it is certain that every educated Christian believed it also. Letronne wanted to damage Christianity and he succeeded.

Unfortunately, Letronne had plenty of help from other Secular Humanists. The biggest aid was John W. Draper (1811-1882) a staunch opponent of Christianity. His The History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1873) was influential in propagating the idea that religion and science were at war. Truth is the first casualty of war. In that book, he perpetuated the myth of the flat earth. The basic framework of Draper’s thesis has never been undone in the popular mind, even though his facts are wrong. We have had 150 years of Secular Humanists calling us stupid and ignorant. It’s time to reclaim our heritage.

Sources:

Russell, Jefferey Burton, Inventing the Flat Earth and Modern Historians, 1991, Praeger, Westport, CT.

Very thorough book by a history professor which goes over the entire story of how people came to believe that Medieval Christians believed in a flat earth. It has the full story, which I have condensed here.

Links

Here are some links to Wikipedia:

Christopher Columbus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus

Paolo Toscanelli

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_dal_Pozzo_Toscanelli

You can also find entries for all of the other people in this post, including:

Cosmas Indicopleustes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmas_Indicopleustes

Lactantius

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactantius

St. Augustine of Hippo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo

Venerable Bede

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bede

St. Thomas Aquinas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas

There is also a ‘flat earth myth’ entry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth