tends up to the first solid vault or firmament, where live the angels, a main part of whose business it is to push and pull the sun and planets to and fro. Next he takes the text, "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters," and other texts from Genesis.[1] To these he adds the texts from the Psalms, "Praise him ye heaven of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens,"[2] casts that outburst of poetry into his crucible with the other texts, and, after subjecting them to sundry peculiar processes, brings out the theory that over this first vault is a vast cistern containing the waters. He then takes the expression in Genesis regarding the "windows of heaven"[3] and establishes a doctrine regarding the regulation of the rain, which is afterward supplemented by the doctrine that the angels not only push and pull the heavenly bodies, to light the earth, but also open and close the windows of heaven to water it.
To find the character of the surface of the earth, Cosmas studies the table of shew-bread in the Tabernacle. The dimensions of that table prove to him that the earth is flat and twice as long as broad. The four corners of the table symbolize the four seasons.
To account for the movement of the sun, Cosmas suggests that at the north of the earth is a great mountain, and that, at night, the sun is carried behind this. But some of the commentators ventured to express a doubt here. They thought that the sun was pushed into a great pit at night, and was pulled out in the morning.
Nothing can be more touching in its simplicity than Cosmas's closing of his great argument. He bursts forth in raptures, declaring that Moses, the prophets, evangelists, and apostles, agree to the truth of his doctrine.[4]
Such was the fortress built against human science in the sixth century, by Cosmas; and it stood. The innovators attacked it in vain. The greatest minds in the Church devoted themselves to buttressing it with new texts, and throwing out new outworks of theologic reasoning. It stood firm for two hundred years, when a bishop—Virgilius of Salzburg—asserts his belief in the existence of the antipodes.
It happened that there then stood in Germany, in the first years of the eighth century, one of the greatest and noblest of me—St. Boniface. His learning was of the best then known; in labors he was a worthy successor to the apostles; his genius for Christian work made
- ↑ Genesis i. 6.
- ↑ Psalm cxlviii. 4.
- ↑ Genesis vii. 11.
- ↑ See Montfaucon, "Collectio Nova Patruni," Paris, 1706, vol. ii., p. 188; also, pp. 298, 299. The text is illustrated with engravings showing walls and solid vault (firmament), with the whole apparatus of "fountains of the great deep," "windows of heaven," angels, and the mountain behind which the sun is drawn. For an imperfect reduction of one of them, see article "Maps," in Knight's "Dictionary of Mechanics," New York, 1875. For still another theory, very droll, and thought out on similar principles, see Mungo Park, cited in De Morgan, "Paradoxes," 309. For Cosmas's joyful summing up, see Montfaucon, "Collectio Nova Patrum," vol. ii., p. 255.
