centering
Sure, the term meme — coined by Richard Dawkins — is overused, but that’s because it is genuinely useful. I have a particular interest in memes about our ancestors, which are usually employed in order to idealize or mock the past. As an example of the latter, take the still-quite-common belief that people in the Middle Ages, guided by Biblical literalism, believed that the world is flat — Doesn’t the Bible say something about the four corners of the earth? — and had to be corrected by Christopher Columbus and other great navigators of the Renaissance. My friend and colleague Tim Larsen was even at a church once which featured a series of apologies for bad things Christians have done in the past, and one of them was for teaching that the earth was flat.
However, this is nonsense. You can go all the way back to the seventh century and scholars like the Venerable Bede knew perfectly well that the world is spherical. The meme that medieval Christians taught the flatness of the earth was generated by a couple of anti-Christian polemicists in the latter part of the nineteenth century. And by the way, the scholar who made this scam generally known was no devout Christian: it was Stephen Jay Gould.
Here’s another example of Memes Gone Wild: in a recent review in the New Yorker of a biography of the Renaissance Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, the wonderful Joan Acocella writes of Bruno’s acceptance of Copernicus’s heliocentric theory of the solar system, and comments on the Catholic Church’s resistance to it: “the Church needed the Earth, the arena of salvation, to be the center of the universe.” It’s true of course that the Church resisted heliocentrism — and did so for an embarrassingly long time — but Acocella, like many, many other people, is wrong about the reasons.
Of course it’s reasonable to assume that the medieval cosmology placed Earth at the center of the cosmos because of its importance, but the assumption is wrong. The old Ptolemaic system is built around the idea of the “music of the spheres,” the great celestial harmony created when the planets move in their great dance — and the Earth is the only place not dancing. As C. S. Lewis put it in a long-ago attempt to correct the error that Acocella and countless others are still making, the Earth is “the point at which all the light, heat and movement descending from the nobler spheres finally died out into darkness, coldness, and passivity.”
The center of the medieval cosmos is not the most important place, but the stillest and deadest place, the place farthest from the full presence of God in the Empyrean. And if you doubt this, just read Dante’s Inferno: there the Earth is at the center of the cosmos, and what’s at the center of the Earth? Satan — who has fled there to escape as best he can from the Divine Presence that he loathes.
We moderns like the idea that medieval Christians believed that they were the most important beings in the whole cosmos, because we like thinking that our ancestors were more arrogant than we are. But come on: has anyone ever been more arrogant than we are?
No. :-)
— Julana · Nov 15, 06:46 PM · #
“The meme that medieval Christians taught the flatness of the earth was generated by a couple of anti-Christian polemicists in the latter part of the nineteenth century.”
How do I know that medieval christians believing the earth was round is not a counter-meme?
— cw · Nov 15, 08:53 PM · #
“Meme” makes people into passive meme-transmitters. While I admit that this is sometimes true, the phrases “wrong idea” or “rumor” or “unjustified belief” seem to have anthropological baggage, and furthermore don’t try to pass themselves off as empirically measurable realities…
But the point on medieval cosmology is fascinating.
— William R. Brafford · Nov 15, 10:52 PM · #
I made a meaning-changing mistake in my comment… It should say “LESS anthropological baggage.”
— William R. Brafford · Nov 15, 10:58 PM · #
“…has anyone ever been more arrogant than we are?”
Brad Pitt. Just look at him, with his shirt tucked in all tight. “Ooooh, I’m a big movie star. Ooooh, I can have any girl I want…”
Jerk.
More seriously, there are modern geocentrists. With PhD’s, yet. They even have websites, where they talk a lot about cosmic foam and rolling balls on elastic membranes and stuff. The whole thing gives me a dull ache about an inch and a half behind the middle of my forehead.
What’s interesting is the fact that they don’t really have much to say about the uniqueness of humanity or the special significance of the Earth as practical teachings to be derived from their beliefs. Not that I’m a big expert then, but to Alan’s point, modern geocentrists don’t necessarily give the immediate impression of being all that arrogant, either.
Kooky, kind of.
But not arrogant.
Not like that Brad Pitt…
— Bill · Nov 15, 11:14 PM · #
I laughed out loud (or “lol” in cyberspeak) at your last line. Very amusing post, Alan.
— Damon Linker · Nov 16, 04:40 AM · #
I thought the resistance to heliocentrism was not because of the need for the earth to be the center of the universe, but because of the need for the Bible to be literally true — for Joshua to have commanded the sun to move backward (or whatever it was). But that could have been a historical meme, too. In any case, a Christianity that had its eye on heavenly things and which preached that the earth will pass away would hardly have need for the earth to be the arena of salvation.
— The Reticulator · Nov 16, 04:41 AM · #
Reticulator – I think that you are exactly right about the reasons for resistance to heliocentrism, at least among modern geocentrics. These people are much literaler-than-thou.
Some of them even go as far as affirming that there once was an actual metallic shell over the flat world (because that’s what the language of Genesis seems to teach), but that during Noah’s time, God destroyed the shell (a barrier, holding back the waters above the earth), in order to bring about the Flood, and actually reordered the physical structure of the universe. This allows them to fly to KJV-only conferences without invalidating Scripture.
You may want to reconsider whether or not Christianity was ever supposed to have its eyes on heaven in the way that you have in mind, though. If the Earth was not intended as the theatre of redemption, then why didn’t God just start over again after the Fall? Why did he bother with all of Redemptive History? Why go through the trouble of the Incarnation? The church did reject Gnosticism, after all.
— Bill · Nov 16, 04:58 PM · #
“[G-d] actually reordered the physical structure of the universe.”
Wow. Thanks, Bill, I had no idea. Shades of the Fall of Numenor :)
— bayesian · Nov 16, 10:39 PM · #
You might note that there is nothing remotely “Ptolemaic” about the Bible, nor anything Biblical about Ptolemy, either.
— matt · Nov 17, 04:02 AM · #
There is an excellent book by Jeffrey Burton Russell (he of the multivolume series on the Devil) about the nineteenth-century origins of the “flat earth” rumor: Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (1991). He traces the rumor back to Washington Irving’s extensively-researched but all-too-imaginatively-told biography of Columbus. Think of what else we have to thank Irving for: headless horsemen, Rip Van Winkle.
cw: The difference between memes like “Medieval Christians thought the earth was flat” and memes like “Dante describes a world in which the earth is spherical” is that the former have no basis in verifiable historical sources whereas the latter can be traced back to the period during which they were supposedly believed.
— Fencing Bear · Nov 17, 04:31 PM · #
I don’t know. Seems to me our arrogance is well-founded.
Nemesis might hatch from the egg of victory, but at least we’re laying a lot of eggs.
— JA · Nov 17, 07:36 PM · #