The Flat-Earth Problem

Cosmas may have been a joke for some in his time, but he was not considered delusional. And a lot of people — both influential and otherwise — shared his mistaken worldview.

It’s easy to laugh at Cosmas today, but it’s a close call: Copernicus’ model of the Solar System came to be generally accepted only in the 18th century. Was the delay a disaster? It depends on your point of view. Who needed to know what the shape of the earth might be or where it might be located in space? Astronomers and navigators. And they were a select few. Ideologues are irrelevant.

In the 17th century, Cyrano de Bergerac was still able to poke fun at “flat-earthers” in The Other World, episode 7: “An Apple a Day....” And the note to “at the antipodes” recalls how, in the 8th century, St. Virgilius theorized that the world was round but had to recant in order to be named archbishop of Salzburg.

In the 15th century, “flat-earthers” were still around, but the most serious doubts about Columbus’ plan to sail to Asia were raised by “large-earthers.” They reasoned, with Eratosthenes (ca. 276-194 BCE), that the earth was a lot larger than Columbus thought. If Columbus had realized that they and Eratosthenes were right, he might have reconsidered his expedition.

It doesn’t matter what the shape of the earth really is; it’s the way one thinks about it that counts. It never occurred to Cosmas and the other “flat-earthers” that they could not prove whether the earth was round, flat or some other shape. Even if they hadn’t heard of Eratosthenes, they could have admitted they didn’t know. Instead, they let tradition and superstition do their thinking for them.

Authoritarian literalism works very well for rule-makers, power-grabbers, and those who just want to be told what to think. And that poses a problem: the mindset was fundamentally opposed to ancient and early modern science. And it still is; the ancient world was not so long ago and not so far away.