Abimelech is Jesus Christ, our king, who, from the heavens above, considers our sports,
our actions of grace, our transports of joy.” 687
3d. St. Augustine — “ There is no way of preserving the true sense of the first three
chapters of Genesis, without attributing to God things unworthy of him, and for
which one must have recourse to allegory.” 688
4th. i p J erome — who, *in his commentary upon Jeremiah, enforces the allegorical
method— “ Sive Mosen dicere volueris auctorem Pentateuchi, siveEsdram ejusdem
instauratorem operis, non recuso.” 689
Let the most philosophic of many truly-learned Rabbis close the lis t:—
Maimonides — I There are some persons to whom it is repugnant to perceive a motive in
a given law of the (divine) laws; they love better to find no, rational sense in the commandments
and prohibitions. That which leads them to this, is a certain feebleness
they feel in their souls, but upon which they are unable to reason, and of which they know
not how to give any account. This is what they think. If the laws should profit us
in this (temporal) existence, and that they had been given to us for such or such a
motive, it might very well be that they are the product of the reflection and of the
intelligence of a man of genius: if; on the contrary, ft, thing possesses no comprehensible
sense and that it produces no advantage whatever, it emanates, without doubt, from
the Deity, because human thought could not lead to such a thing. One would .say
that, according to these weak minds, man is greater than his Creator; because man
(according to them) speaks and acts while aiming at a certain^ object; whereas God,
far from acting similarly, would order us, on the contrary, to do that which to ourselves
is not of the least utility, and would forbid us from actions that cannot, cause us
■ the slightest damage.” (Arabicb, ■Delldlat el Khdyereen; Hebraicb, More HebouJcBm;
“ Guide to the Strayers,” ch. x x x i.: Munk’s Translation, Paris, 1833.)
They all M i. e., the Fathers of the first centuries — attributed a double sense to the
words of Scripture, the one obvious and literal, the other hidden and mystical, which'lay
concealed as it were under the outward letter. The former they treated with the utmost
neglect;690 following St. Paul’s authority — “ For the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth
life.” — (2 Corinth, iii. 6.)
Section Cr. — C osmas- In dico p'l iu s t e s .
But, in the proportion that Hellenic learning faded in Alexandrian
schools, so patristic talent and scholarship also deteriorated. That
“ Genesis” which, by the earlier Fathers, had been ascribed to E zra
rather than to M oses, and the language of which, to more refined
Grecian intellects, appeared too contemptible for Divinity unless construed
in an allegorical sense, at length began to be accepted verbatim
et litteratim by Christian writers: the strenuousness of orthodoxy, in
any creed, increasing always in the ratio that mental culture declines.
At last, arose a Monk who, unjustly forgotten by the Church though
he be now, did more to petrify theological stolidity in Europe, for
800 years, with respect to the first three chapters of Gfenesis, than
any human being but himself—CosMAS-Indicopleustes.
“ He is,” says the learned Mr. Sharpe, “ of the dogmatical school*■which forhids all
inquiry as heretical. He fights the battle ■which has been so often fought before and since,
and is even still fought so resolutely, the battle -of religious ignorance against scientific
knowledge. He sets the words of the Bible against the results of science; he denies that
the world is a sphere, and quotes the Old Testament against the pagan philosophers, to
show that it is a plane, covered by the firmament as a roof, above which he places the
kingdom of heaven. . . . The arguments employed by Cosmas were unfortunately but .too
often used by the Christian world in general, who were even willing to see learning itself
fall with the overthrow of paganism. All knowledge was divided into sacred and profane,
and whatever was not drawn from the Scriptures was slighted and neglected; and this perhaps
was one of the chief causes of the darkness which overspread the world during the
middle ages.” 691
To comprehend the force of these observations it niay be well to preface our description
of the Topographia Christiana by a few excerpts from Matter.693
The only Christian Father whose writings evince the humblest acquaintance with Egyptian
studies, Clemens Alexandrinus, expressly says, that the “ Egyptians taught the Greeks
the movement of the planets round the sun;” and, since 1848, Egyptology can proudly add
the extraordinary discoveries of Lepsius in hieroglyphical Astronomy, which are likely
to be carried to results little expected, through Biot.693
About b. c. 603, Thales had observed an eclipse of the sun. He taught the spheroidity if
not the sphericity of the earth; he knew the obliquity of the ecliptic; knew that the moon
was illumined by the sun; and explained solar eclipses by the intervention of the lunar
disc between the earth and the sun. In the succeeding century, Pythagoras sustained the
sphericity of the earth, and its movement, with the planets, round the sun; and his disciples
Leucippus and Democritus added some acquaintance with the rotary motion of the earth
upon its axis. Eudoxus advocated similar doctrines. Now, Thales, Pythagoras, and Eudoxus,
had studied under genuine hierogrammatists in Egypt.
The' grand Stagyrite (who had not drunk of Nilotic waters) maintained the contrary>
viz., that the sun revolved around the earth. In vain did Aristarchus strive to bring science
back to truer principles. His voice was unheard for sixteen centuries. Hipparchus determined
the precession of the equinoxes, &c., during the 2d century b . c. ; but, his more important
works being lost, “ tulit alter honores;” because Ptolemy, a far better geographer
than astronomer, has not revealed what of his great predecessor’s views militated against
his own celestial dogmas. In the early part of the 2d century, after c., Ptolemy had wo-
fully retrograded from ancient Greco-Egyptian science; for he held to the absolute immobility
of the earth, and made the sun revolve around our globe. Denouncing the contrary
system as too ridiculous to merit attention, he gives his own reason for opposing it, viz. , i 1 that
one always sees the same half of the sky ” | “ The earth,” says Claudius Ptolemy, “ is not
only central, but also stationary. If it had an individual motion (upon its axis) such movement
would be proportioned to its mass. It would, therefore, leave behind it the animals
and other bodies, which would be carried into the air, — it would fly away from them, and
escape from the sk y ! No object.not fixed to the earth, no bird, could advance to the eastward
with the same rapidity as the globe ” ! Unsuspected before Newton, the laws of gravitation
and attraction could not ease Ptolemy’s perplexities.
We have seen that the older and wiser Fathers of the Church (who must have been more
or less read in the higher Grecian classics), unable to reconcile the letter of “ Genesis” with
what they well knew to be positive philosophy, had recourse, like Philo, to allegorical explanations
: which means, simply, that they disbelieved genesiacal stories as revealed in the
Septuagint, and therefore nullified them by inventing mystic hypotheses.. They sustained,
however, in their writings, no especial theory upon astronomy or geography: but, that
with which Clemens, and Origen, and Anatolius, and Synesius, and Theophilus, and even
Cyril, had refrained from meddling, was grasped, with Promethean audacity, by an itinerant
trader of the sixth century after c . ; whose temerarious zeal, when he had adopted
monastic vows, was exceeded merely by his delicious stupidity; as we now proceed to
prove. Cosmas, setting a Greek copy of if Genesis ” before him, composed, upon that poor
version’s literal language, his Topographia Christiana,694 Of Hebrew he had not an idea.