Wednesday, March 23, 2005

I see your patristics and raise you.

I am not terrifically serious about starting a "who can find the most writings of the Fathers of the Church online" contest. It is, however, a lot better than "words that start with vowels".

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

While we are scouring tertullian.org, may I offer for your enjoyment the theology of Cosmas Indicopleustes of St Catherine's in the Sinai who against all the wisdom of Classical antiquity argued that the Cosmology of the Christian universe was like a lunchbox, i.e. flat on the bottom with walls enclosed at the top by a curved lid.

Actually, when Cosmas wasn't crapping on and talking about something he actually knew about he was actually quite interesting because before he became a monk he was an Alexandrian merchant who had travelled extensively around India, Sri Lanka and Africa. I have a post about him here.

Odious said...

Those weird cosmologies can be harder to disprove than one might like, however. The Nazis, at least, took the hollow earth hypothesis seriously enough to try pointing their telescopes straight up, in an effort to spy on the U.S.

I make no claims about the validity of anything on the above-linked site. I have been unable to independently verify the story regarding the Nazi expedition.

That picture of the lunchbox universe is excellent!

jh said...

Amazing. And I always thought we lived on the outer surface.

Odious said...

But then how would the centrifugal force act as gravity?

These are all excellent cosmologies, but everyone knows that the world is carried on the backs of four elephants, who are themselves carried on the back of an enormous turtle.

jh said...

Unfortunately the centrifugal force explanation tends to break down at the poles as mentioned in the linked article.

As for the Pratchett/Hindu cosmology, I've seen stone carvings of the turtle with the four elephants in Bali. When the turtle moves it causes all manner of earthquakes so all four of its legs are bound down by snakes. As to what they are bound to nobody seems to know but some have suggested another turtle.

Odious said...

Turtles all the way down. Which leads us into one of Kant's most pleasant antinomies. You can't have turtles all the way down, but you must have something on which to stand.