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Chapter 2 - Geography
The Delineation of the Earth
Every great people of antiquity, as a rule, regarded its own central
city or most holy place as necessarily the centre of the earth.
The Chaldeans held that their "holy house of the gods" was the
centre. The Egyptians sketched the world under the form of a human
figure, in which Egypt was the heart, and the centre of it Thebes.
For the Assyrians, it was Babylon; for the Hindus, it was Mount
Meru; for the Greeks, so far as the civilized world was concerned,
Olympus or the temple at Delphi; for the modern Mohammedans, it is
Mecca and its sacred stone; the Chinese, to this day, speak of
their empire as the "middle kingdom." It was in accordance, then,
with a simple tendency of human thought that the Jews believed the
centre of the world to be Jerusalem.
The book of Ezekiel speaks of Jerusalem as in the middle of the
earth, and all other parts of the world as set around the holy
city. Throughout the "ages of faith" this was very generally
accepted as a direct revelation from the Almighty regarding the
earth's form. St. Jerome, the greatest authority of the early
Church upon the Bible, declared, on the strength of this utterance
of the prophet, that Jerusalem could be nowhere but at the earth's
centre; in the ninth century Archbishop Rabanus Maurus reiterated
the same argument; in the eleventh century Hugh of St. Victor gave
to the doctrine another scriptural demonstration; and Pope Urban,
in his great sermon at Clermont urging the Franks to the crusade,
declared, "Jerusalem is the middle point of the earth"; in the
thirteenth century an ecclesiastical writer much in vogue, the
monk Caesarius of Heisterbach, declared, "As the heart in the midst
of the body, so is Jerusalem situated in the midst of our inhabited
earth," - "so it was that Christ was crucified at the centre of the
earth." Dante accepted this view of Jerusalem as a certainty,
wedding it to immortal verse; and in the pious book of travels
ascribed to Sir John Mandeville, so widely read in the Middle Ages,
it is declared that Jerusalem is at the centre of the world, and
that a spear standing erect at the Holy Sepulchre casts no shadow
at the equinox.
Ezekiel's statement thus became the standard of orthodoxy to early
map-makers. The map of the world at Hereford Cathedral, the maps of
Andrea Bianco, Marino Sanuto, and a multitude of others fixed this
view in men's minds, and doubtless discouraged during many
generations any scientific statements tending to unbalance this
geographical centre revealed in Scripture.
Nor did medieval thinkers rest with this conception. In accordance
with the dominant view that physical truth must be sought by
theological reasoning, the doctrine was evolved that not only the
site of the cross on Calvary marked the geographical centre of the
world, but that on this very spot had stood the tree which bore the
forbidden fruit in Eden. Thus was geography made to reconcile all
parts of the great theologic plan. This doctrine was hailed with
joy by multitudes; and we find in the works of medieval pilgrims to
Palestine, again and again, evidence that this had become precious
truth to them, both in theology and geography. Even as late as 1664
the eminent French priest Eugene Roger, in his published travels in
Palestine, dwelt upon the thirty-eighth chapter of Ezekiel, coupled
with a text from Isaiah, to prove that the exact centre of the
earth is a spot marked on the pavement of the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre, and that on this spot once stood the tree which bore the
forbidden fruit and the cross of Christ.
Nor was this the only misconception which forced its way from our
sacred writings into medieval map-making: two others were almost
as marked. First of these was the vague terror inspired by Gog
and Magog. Few passages in the Old Testament are more sublime
than the denunciation of these great enemies by Ezekiel; and the
well-known statement in the Apocalypse fastened the Hebrew
feeling regarding them with a new meaning into the mind of the
early Church: hence it was that the medieval map-makers took
great pains to delineate these monsters and their habitations on
the maps. For centuries no map was considered orthodox which did
not show them.
The second conception was derived from the mention in our sacred
books of the "four winds." Hence came a vivid belief in their real
existence, and their delineation on the maps, generally as colossal
heads with distended cheeks, blowing vigorously toward Jerusalem.
After these conceptions had mainly disappeared we find here and
there evidences of the difficulty men found in giving up the
scriptural idea of direct personal interference by agents of Heaven
in the ordinary phenomena of Nature: thus, in a noted map of the
sixteenth century representing the earth as a sphere, there is at
each pole a crank, with an angel laboriously turning the earth by
means of it; and, in another map, the hand of the Almighty, thrust
forth from the clouds, holds the earth suspended by a rope and
spins it with his thumb and fingers. Even as late as the middle of
the seventeenth century Heylin, the most authoritative English
geographer of the time, shows a like tendency to mix science and
theology. He warps each to help the other, as follows: "Water,
making but one globe with the earth, is yet higher than it. This
appears, first, because it is a body not so heavy; secondly, it is
observed by sailors that their ships move faster to the shore than
from it, whereof no reason can be given but the height of the water
above the land; thirdly, to such as stand on the shore the sea
seems to swell into the form of a round hill till it puts a bound
upon our sight. Now that the sea, hovering thus over and above the
earth, doth not overwhelm it, can be ascribed only to his
Providence who "hath made the waters to stand on an heap that they
turn not again to cover the earth."
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