h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The new pope gave a 'traditional urbe et orbe' speech tonight. 'To the city and the world'. Anyone know just how traditional this is? And, given that 'orbe' suspiciously like 'orb' in English, does this imply that the RC church has always known the Earth is round?

So, what's the real story?

I can't speak for the theological side, but flat-world theorists did always at least suspect the world to be a 2D circle (hence 'round') as opposed to a hexagon or whatever.

B

Just as Master B says - where an orb is a sphere in English, it's actually a corrupted form of the Latin, since orbis means circle or ring (or just 'world' in fact). The Ptolemaic model, in which the world is flat and circular and surrounded by various celestial spheres, was the Church's model up until ... it decided it wasn't.

Another translation of 'orbe' would be disc, by the way. Pratchett fans take note!

Yeah, but...
If the world was surrounded by a sphere, wouldn't it make more sense that the world itself was a sphere as well? I'm sure the Greeks had figured out that the world was a sphere around 200BC, or maybe before.

Sorry, yes - Ptolemy's own model does have the earth as a sphere at the centre of spheres. Here's a very nice picture of it from 1542:

http://www.luminarium.org/encyclopedia/medievalcosmology.htm

The medieval Church, on the other hand, liked to keep things a bit simpler (for the laity at least) and was, at times, pretty resistant to spherical models. Confusions arose from the fact that representations of the spheres were themselves 2D, so you could still have a disc-like earth at the base of hemispheres surrounding it. I can't find a picture right now, but I seem to remember it was something like a snow-shaker: flat at the bottom with a dome over the top. And no snow.

>>I'm sure the Greeks had figured out that the world was a sphere around 200BC, or maybe before<<

Sorry, spot on again. Aristotle said so. Actually, if Aristotle said so, Aquinas must have said so. So the Church ...

I'm going to shut up now.

But 'orbe' is nice and ambiguous in this respect: could be flat, could be spherical. So if the Church did want to maintain that the earth was flat, it could do so. Could still do so.

Oh and one last thing: 'urbe and orbe' also means 'the city and everything around (i.e. orbiting) the city'. Not just the earth as the centre of the universe, then, but Rome as the centre of the earth. Now I do remember medieval maps making a point of that.

Modern Roman maps feature the 'Via Gran Raccordo Annulare' (sp??) - like a Roman M25 - named because it takes about a year to circumnavigate

Look, the Church NEVER thought the Earth was flat. Their objection to Columbus sailing off to get to India and China was that they knew the Earth was too big and it'd take him longer than his supplies could hold out for. And they were completely utterly right. It's not their fault they didn't know the Americas was in the way. The whole 'The Catholic Church thought the Earth was flat' thing was invented in America in the 1800's, seemingly by Washington Irving in his book about Columbus. Heck, it makes a fantastic story. And much less embarrassing than living with the fact the country was discovered by an idiot who couldn't do simple maths. But it's WRONG.

And that embarrassing thing with Galileo? Well, yes, the Church felt it was very important that the Earth (spherical) should be in the centre of the Universe and everything should revolve around it and Galileo was proving that it wasn't and things didn't.

So one all to Church versus Science.

Yes - I have heard this, and it appears very plausible. It is quite probable that the allegation that the church taught that the world was flat is a distortion - a catchy straw man to focus aggression against the church.

However...

Theology seems to talk a lot about the fight between good and evil - two opposed, almost balanced forces; and in that sense it talks about Heaven and Hell. Heaven appears to be above us, Hell below us, and Earth - human existence - has to make its choice between both. Heaven is the clouds and the stars; Hell refers to fire and sulphur, the underworld, the deep chasms. We can go either way. In this model, surely the idea of a flat Earth is implicit? Heaven: an infinite realm of stars, Hell an infinitely deep place of torture and despair. If the Earth is a globe (as it is), then Hell is so miniscule in the sense of things as to be completely unimportant. Heaven is above us, below us, everywhere ,stretching out as far as the imagination will allow us. Hell is just the interior of a tiny ball of rock.

Theology is full of references to Heaven and Hell - "He descended into Hell", "He ascended into Heaven", "on Earth as it is in Heaven". Nowadays we are taught to think of Heaven and Hell as metaphors or metaphysical entities rather than real places, however in the past they were literally accepted as existing in reality (probably not just in the past either).

I would accept that the Flat Earth theory as a myth if only for the preponderance of such assumptions regarding heaven and hell. People accepted them as existing in reality, one being above us, the other being below us. This belief was promulgated by the Church. Surely, implicit in that teaching must have been the assumption of a flat earth?

Have you ever seen a map of Dante's Cosmology from the Divine Comedy, Woodpigeon? It is based on the fact that the Earth is at the centre of the Universe, but the Earth is Spherical. Hell is a pit within the Earth, with Satan at the very bottom at the centre of the Earth and therefore furthest away from Heaven, and Heaven is outside the sphere of Earth, its atmosphere, the orbits of the moon, sun and planets, the fixed stars etc. Almost like the 'standard' model of an atom. Heaven therefore surrounds the Earth on all sides but it 'up' for everyone on Earth, and Hell is 'down'. So no Flat Earth needed at all. Let me repeat that. To a person standing on the Earth, the centre of the Earth is DOWN. There is absolutely no rationale for a flat earth.

Infact, a Flat Earth would be irreligious (to medieval Catholic Church) to some extent because if Hell is under and Heaven is over, half of creation would be Satan's, and that is the Manichean Heresy the Catholics persecuted the bejeezus out of (ie that Satan is as powerful and important as God). Catholic Dogma holds that Satan and Hell are part of the Ineffable Plan, and therefore Hell is contained within and part of God's creation. Also, if the Earth is Flat, does Hell stop at the edges of the Earth? does it extend out so everything below a certain line is hellish? Is Hell finite or infinite?

And the point is moot in any case, because the Church never at any point held the belief that the Earth was flat. The medieval Church really has no responsibility for the later beliefs of 19th and 20th century sects dedicated to refuting science and making laughing-stocks of themselves.

Oh, yes, just to be accurate, Dante wrote the Divine Comedy in 1306 or thereabouts, and was using standard common ideas of the Church at the time (he was the Pope's Envoy for a while, so knew his religious stuff).

Not sure I follow that.

You can have a 'below the surface' of a spherical earth just as easily (if not more easily) than a 'below' a flat earth.

Oops, simul-post with Blues Shark.

Ah. Umm. Agapanthus has explained it much better.

I'll get me coat.

Thank you agapanthus. I was making the assumption, incorrect it seems, that Heaven and Hell were perceived by the church to be two infinite equals. ("Infinite equals" - a mathematician will probably kill me for saying this).

It does beg the question, however, that our own cultural heritage seems to be littered with ideas about the fine balance between good and evil. If the Manicheans were ruthlessly purged by the Catholic Church, the Church wasn't as successful as it thought it was!

Thank YOU, Woodpigeon, for giving me a chance to dust off and display all that hard work I did as an undergrad on Church history, otherwise going to waste in the lumberyards of my mind...

And you are right, the Catholic Church made a mess of eradicating Manicheasm as it did most heresies. The fact is, they put themselves in a double bind - on the one hand, Hell is a smallish place only needed to fit a given number of sinners in (after the Last Judgement no more sinners will be sent there, so it doesn't need to be infinite). And then they thought the Earth was pretty darn huge (not being aware of just how big the Solar System was, let alone the Galaxy) and therefore big enough. And anyway, God and Heaven are more important than Satan, and so on. On the other hand, their favourite instrument to enforce compliance was terrorising the daylights out of the populace so Hell achieved huge STATUS even if officially it wasn't very big. So it was quite natural for the cultural vision of hell to be... not qute the official version, but the cultural version was a better tool for mind control, so the Church couldn't insist Hell was small or Satan unimportant, or people wouldn't be scared enough to cooperate with the Church in the matter of tithes and expensive masses for the dead and so on...

So painters painted and writers wrote and so on, and the 16th century with added science turned up and Martin Luther picked up his hammer one day... It must be said, Protestants have a different view of the case as they were less attatched to the ideas of Heaven and Hell being specific locations on this physical plane and more inclined to view them as not part of this world (oh the joys of a scientific education). But the 'up down' dichotomy was at this point irrevocably embedded in the language, and quite a few Protestant sects were very keen on hellfire and damnation (especially, ahem, this is where I put my flak-jacket on those sects whose adherents and dare I say founders weren't very educated). In the infinite reaches of the spiritual plain, Hell gets to be any size it likes and the terrors thereof eternal. Now being outside the Catholic Church, they were no longer subject to the Dogmas regarding Manicheanism and in any case were not about to agree with any Catholic ideas on anything on principle. As far as I experienced, catholic priests were always trying to tell me Hell and Eternal Punishment were somehow Good and a sign of God's Divine Providence. Protestants see Hell as something to be fought against and Satan as an unmitigated evil. But correct me if I'm wrong.

But by Martin Luther's time, no one in a position to think on the matter at length still thought the Earth was flat, just as no one with an education ever had (except possibly Vikings and they then went and had a look and found North America instead (and then lost it again...)).

Please stop giving me excuses to bang on. People will start to see through my carefully crafted veneer of 'ordinary lass' and see my real inner self of ranting knowitall of the sort who religiously watches University Challenge and spends the entire show shouting at the students for not knowing who Baudelaire was. And then I'll have no friends

This does beg the question of why did all that nasty stuff happen to Kepler & Copernicus?

Incidentally, the Ancient Greeks not only knew the Earth was round: they also managed to measure it with impressive accuracy.

Copernicus and Kepler (and Galileo) were all pointing out that the Earth was NOT at the centre of the Universe and that it revolved around the Sun. The Catholic Church believed the Earth WAS at the centre of the Universe and the Sun and everything else revolved around us. The Church were therefore very keen to shut Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo up.

Zip diddly to do with whether the Earth was flat or not.

I could if you're desperate look up all the reasons why the Church wanted the Earth to be at the centre so badly...

And on the 8th day Einstein taught us that all motion is relative and that the Earth's frame of reference could just as easily be considered "stationary" as any other. So it makes perfect sense to say that the Earth, or Rome, or even Greenwich, is the exact centre of the universe.

Unless you want to fly to the moon or anywhere else then it makes things a little more complicated because the place youre flying back to wont be there anymore

There were for many years working models that predicted the movement of the planets and sun with the earth stationary, they were just jolly complicated. Not that astronomical calculations arent anyway.

However the churches resistance to a Solar centered model of the planets did also generally supress the works of astronomers so that other facts such as the spherical earth bit was so cose to the edge of taboo that it was pretty much left alone incase anything else controversial cropped up.