Luke to prove that antipodes
are theologically impossible.
At the end of the sixth century came a man from whom much might be
expected--St. Isidore of Seville. He had pondered over ancient
thought in science, and, as we have seen, had dared proclaim his
belief in the sphericity of the earth; but with that he stopped. As
to the antipodes, the authority of the Psalmist, St. Paul, and St.
Augustine silences him; he shuns the whole question as unlawful,
subjects reason to faith, and declares that men can not and ought
not to exist on opposite sides of the earth.[105]
Under such pressure this scientific truth seems to have disappeared
for nearly two hundred years; but by the eighth century the
sphericity of the earth had come to be generally accepted among the
leaders of thought, and now the doctrine of the antipodes was again
asserted by a bishop, Virgil of Salzburg.
There then stood in Germany, in those first years of the eighth
century, one of the greatest and noblest of men--St. Boniface.
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