Speaking of investigators, he said, "It is not through ignorance
of the things admired by them, but through contempt of their
useless labour, that we think little of these matters, turning our
souls to better things." Basil of Caesarea declared it "a matter
of no interest to us whether the earth is a sphere or a cylinder or
a disk, or concave in the middle like a fan." Lactantius referred
to the ideas of those studying astronomy as "bad and senseless,"
and opposed the doctrine of the earth's sphericity both from
Scripture and reason. St. John Chrysostom also exerted his
influence against this scientific belief; and Ephraem Syrus, the
greatest man of the old Syrian Church, widely known as the "lute
of the Holy Ghost," opposed it no less earnestly.
But the strictly biblical men of science, such eminent fathers and
bishops as Theophilus of Antioch in the second century, and Clement
of Alexandria in the third, with others in centuries following,
were not content with merely opposing what they stigmatized as an
old heathen theory; they drew from their Bibles a new Christian
theory, to which one Church authority added one idea and another
another, until it was fully developed.
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