Gulf, also visiting India and Ceylon. His travels enabled Cosmas to collect a large store of information respecting not only the countries he visited, but also the more remote lands whose merchants he met. Weary of the world and its gains, he resigned his occupation as a merchant, and, embracing a monastic life, devoted his leisure to authorship, enriching his writings with descriptions of the countries he had visited and with facts he had observed or learned from others. He was no retailer of travellers' wonders, and later researches have proved that his descriptions are as faithful as his philosophy is absurd.
His Christian Topography (12 books) is his only work which has survived; the last book is deficient in the Vatican MS. and imperfect in the Medicean. The work was not all published at one time, nor indeed originally planned in its present extent; but gradually grew as book after book was added by him at the request of his friends, or to meet the objections of the opponents of his theory.
The proximate date, A.D. 547, for the earlier books is afforded by the statement (lib. ii. 140) that, when he wrote, 25 years had elapsed since the expedition of Elesbaon, king of the Axiomitae, against the Homeritae, which Pagi ad ann. dates A.D. 522. The later works were written about 13 years subsequently. Near the end of lib. x. he speaks of the recent death of Timotheus, patriarch of Alexandria, A.D. 536, and mentions his heretical successor Theodosius, A.D. 537.
The chief design of the Christian Topography is "to confute the impious heresy of those who maintain that the earth is a globe, and not a flat oblong table, as is represented in the Scriptures" (Gibbon, Decline and Fall, c. xlvii. § i. note i.). The old objections of the Epicureans are revived, and the plane surface is not circular as with Thales, but a parallelogram twice as long as broad, surrounded by the ocean. Its length from E. to W. is 12,000 miles; its breadth from N. to S. 6,000. The parallelogram is symmetrically divided by four gulfs; the Caspian (which joins the Ocean), the Arabian (Red Sea), the Persian, and that of the Romans (Mediterranean). Beyond the ocean, on each side of the interior continent, lies another land, in which is the Garden of Eden. Here men lived till the Deluge, when Noah and his family crossed the intervening flood in the Ark, and peopled the present world. The rivers of Paradise he supposes to run under the sea, Alpheus-like, and to reappear in our earth. The Nile is the Gihon of Eden. The whole area is surrounded by lofty perpendicular walls, from the summit of which the sky stretches from N. to S. in a cylindrical vault, meeting similar vaults at either extremity (lib. iv. 186, 187). Our author divides this huge vaulted chamber into lower, second, and third stories. The dead occupy the nethermost division; the middle compartment is the home of the living; the uppermost, that of the blessed. Heaven is divided from the lower regions by a solid firmament, through which Christ penetrated—and that is the Kingdom of Heaven (lib. iv. 186‒188). The vicissitudes of day and night are caused by a mountain of enormous bulk, rising at the N. extremity of the oblong area. Behind this the sun passes in the evening, and reappears on the other side in the morning. The conical shape of the mountain produces the variation in the length of the night; as the sun rises higher above, or sinks down towards the level of the earth. Eclipses are due to the same cause. The round shadow on the moon's disk is cast by the domical summit of the mountain (lib. iv. 188).
The views on cosmography thus propounded, absurd and irrational as they appear to us, were those generally entertained by the Fathers of the church. Pinning their faith on the literal meaning of the words of Scripture according to its traditional interpretation, they deduced a system which had for them all the authority of a divine revelation, any departure from which was regarded as impious and heretical. The arguments by which Cosmas supports his theory are chiefly built on isolated passages of Scripture, as interpreted by the early Fathers. Some, however, are drawn from reason and the nature of the case—e.g, the absurdity of the supposition of the existence of antipodean regions, inasmuch as the beings on the other side of the world must drop off, and the rain would fall upwards instead of downwards; while the supposed rotatory motion of the universe is disproved by the disturbance that would be caused to the repose of the blessed in heaven by their being perpetually whirled through space. Cosmas denounces as heretics those who, following the false lights of science, venture to maintain opposite views, and speaks in terms of strongest condemnation of "men who assume the name of Christians, and yet in contempt of Holy Scripture join with the pagans in asserting that the heavens are spherical. Such assertions are among the weapons hurled at the church. Inflamed by pride as if they were wiser than others, they profess to explain the movements of the heavens by geometrical and astronomical calculations" (lib. i. Prolog.). One of his strongest arguments in support of his plan of the universe is drawn from the form of the Tabernacle of Witness, which the words ἅγιον κοσμικόν (Heb. ix. i) warrant him in considering to have been like Noah's Ark, expressly constructed as an image of the world.
The subjects of the 12 books are: (1) Against those who claim to be Christians, and assert with pagans that the earth is spherical. (2) The Christian hypothesis as to the figure and position of the universe proved from Scripture. (3) The agreement on these points of the O.T. and N.T. (4) A brief recapitulation, and a description of the figure of the universe according to Scripture, and a confutation of the sphere. (5) A description of the Tabernacle and the agreement of the Prophets and Apostles. (6) The magnitude of the sun (7) The duration of the heavens. (8) Hezekiah's song, and the retrogression of the sun. (9) The course of the stars. (10) Testimonies of the Fathers, including 11 citations from the Festal Epistles of Athanasius, and other important Patristic fragments. (11) A description of the animals of India, and of the island of Ceylon. (12) Testimonies of heathen writers to the antiquity of Holy Scripture.
Setting aside the absurdities of his cosmographical system, Cosmas is one of the most
