They started for the Indies and found
America. They diagnosed evil and hanged old women. They thought they
could grow rich by always selling and never buying. A caliph, obeying
what he conceived to be the Will of Allah, burned the library at
Alexandria.
Writing about the year 389, St. Ambrose stated the case for the
prisoner in Plato's cave who resolutely declines to turn his head. "To
discuss the nature and position of the earth does not help us in our
hope of the life to come. It is enough to know what Scripture states.
'That He hung up the earth upon nothing' (Job xxvi. 7). Why then argue
whether He hung it up in air or upon the water, and raise a
controversy as to how the thin air could sustain the earth; or why, if
upon the waters, the earth does not go crashing down to the bottom?...
Not because the earth is in the middle, as if suspended on even
balance, but because the majesty of God constrains it by the law of
His will, does it endure stable upon the unstable and the void."
[Footnote: Hexaemeron, i. cap 6, quoted in _The Medi?val Mind_,
by Henry Osborn Taylor, Vol. i, p. 73.]
It does not help us in our hope of the life to come. It is enough to
know what Scripture states. Why then argue? But a century and a half
after St. Ambrose, opinion was still troubled, on this occasion by the
problem of the antipodes. A monk named Cosmas, famous for his
scientific attainments, was therefore deputed to write a Christian
Topography, or "Christian Opinion concerning the World.
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