II. THE DELINEATION OF THE EARTH.
Every great people of antiquity, as a rule, regarded its own central city or most holy place as necessarily the centre of the earth.
The Chaldeans held that their "holy house of the gods" was the centre. The Egyptians sketched the world under the form of a human figure, in which Egypt was the heart, and the centre of it Thebes. For the Assyrians, it was Babylon; for the Hindus, it was Mount Meru; for the Greeks, so far as the civilized world was concerned, Olympus or the temple at Delphi; for the modern Mohammedans, it is Mecca and its sacred stone; the Chinese, to this day, speak of their empire as the "middle kingdom." It was in accordance, then, with a simple tendency of human thought that the Jews believed the centre of the world to be Jerusalem.
The book of Ezekiel speaks of Jerusalem as in the middle of the earth, and all other parts of the world as set around the holy city. Throughout the "ages of faith" this was very generally accepted as a direct revelation from the Almighty regarding the earth's form. St. Jerome, the greatest authority of the early Church upon the Bible, declared, on the strength of this utterance of the prophet, that Jerusalem could be nowhere but at the earth's centre; in the ninth century Archbishop Rabanus Maurus reiterated the same argument; in the eleventh century Hugh of St. Victor gave to the doctrine another scriptural demonstration; and Pope Urban, in his great sermon at Clermont urging the Franks to the crusade, declared, "Jerusalem is the middle point of the earth"; in the thirteenth century an ecclesiastical writer much in vogue, the monk Caesarius of Heisterbach, declared, "As the heart in the midst of the body, so is Jerusalem situated in the midst of our inhabited earth,"—"so it was that Christ was crucified at the centre of the earth." Dante accepted this view of Jerusalem as a certainty, wedding it to immortal verse; and in the pious book of travels ascribed to Sir John Mandeville, so widely read in the Middle Ages, it is declared that Jerusalem is at the centre of the world, and that a spear standing erect at the Holy Sepulchre casts no shadow at the equinox.
Ezekiel's statement thus became the standard of orthodoxy to early map-makers. The map of the world at Hereford Cathedral, the maps of Andrea Bianco, Marino Sanuto, and a multitude of others fixed this view in men's minds, and doubtless discouraged during many generations any scientific statements tending to unbalance this geographical centre revealed in Scripture.(30)
(30) For beliefs of various nations of antiquity that the earth's center
was in their most sacred place, see citations from Maspero, Charton,
Sayce, and others in Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth, chap.
iv. As to the Greeks, we have typical statements in the Eumenides of
Aeschylus, where the stone in the altar at Delphi is repeatedly called
"the earth's navel"—which is precisely the expression used regarding
Jerusalem in the Septuagint translation of Ezekiel (see below). The
proof texts on which the mediaeval geographers mainly relied as to the
form of the earth were Ezekiel v, 5, and xxxviii, 12. The progress
of geographical knowledge evidently caused them to be softened down
somewhat in our King James's version; but the first of them reads, in
the Vulgate, "Ista est Hierusalem, in medio gentium posui eam et in
circuitu ejus terrae"; and the second reads, in the Vulgate, "in medio
terrae," and in the Septuagint, [Greek]. That the literal centre of the
earth was understood, see proof in St. Jerome, Commentat. in Ezekiel,
lib. ii; and for general proof, see Leopardi, Saggio sopra gli errori
popolari degli antichi, pp. 207, 208. For Rabanus Maurus, see his De
Universo, lib. xii, cap. 4, in Migne, tome cxi, p. 339. For Hugh of
St. Victor, se his De Situ Terrarum, cap. ii. For Dante's belief, see
Inferno, canto xxxiv, 112-115:
"E se' or sotto l'emisperio giunto, Ch' e opposito a quel che la gran secca Coverchia, e sotto il cui colmo consunto Fu l'uom che nacque e visse senza pecca."
For orthodox geography in the Middle Ages, see Wright's Essays on Archaeology, vol. ii, chapter on the map of the world in Hereford Cathedral; also the rude maps in Cardinal d'Ailly's Ymago Mundi; also copies of maps of Marino Sanuto and others in Peschel, Erdkunde, p. 210; also Munster, Fac Simile dell' Atlante di Andrea Bianco, Venezia, 1869. And for discussions of the whole subject, see Satarem, vol. ii, p. 295, vol. iii, pp. 71, 183, 184, and elsewhere. For a brief summary with citations, see Eiken, Geschichte, etc., pp. 622, 623.
Nor did medieval thinkers rest with this conception. In accordance with the dominant view that physical truth must be sought by theological reasoning, the doctrine was evolved that not only the site of the cross on Calvary marked the geographical centre of the world, but that on this very spot had stood the tree which bore the forbidden fruit in Eden. Thus was geography made to reconcile all parts of the great theologic plan. This doctrine was hailed with joy by multitudes; and we find in the works of medieval pilgrims to Palestine, again and again, evidence that this had become precious truth to them, both in theology and geography. Even as late as 1664 the eminent French priest Eugene Roger, in his published travels in Palestine, dwelt upon the thirty-eighth chapter of Ezekiel, coupled with a text from Isaiah, to prove that the exact centre of the earth is a spot marked on the pavement of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and that on this spot once stood the tree which bore the forbidden fruit and the cross of Christ.(31)