But with all this Antoninus now and then gives us glimpses of a larger world. In Jerusalem he meets Æthiopians "with nostrils slit and rings about their fingers and their feet." They were so marked, they told him, by the Emperor Trajan "for a sign."
In the Sinai desert he tells us of "Saracen" beggars and idolaters; in the Red Sea ports he sees "ships from India" laden with aromatics; he travels up the Nile to the Cataracts and describes the Nilometer at Assouan, and the crocodiles in the river; Alexandria he finds "splendid but frivolous, a lover of pilgrims but swarming with heresies."
But far more wonderful than the practical jumble of Antoninus Martyr is the systematic nonsense of Cosmas, who invented or worked out a theory and scheme of the world, a "Christian topography," which required nothing more than a complete disuse of human reason. His assurance was equal to his science.
It may have been his voyage to India, or his monastic profession, or his study of Scripture, or something unknown that made him take up the part of a Christian Aristotle; in any case he felt himself called into the field to support the cause of St. Augustine against infidelity, and to refute the "anile fable" of the Antipodes. Cosmas referred men back to Revelation on such matters, and his system was "demonstrated from Scripture, concerning which a Christian is not allowed to doubt." Man by himself could not understand the world, but in the Bible it was all clear enough. And from the Bible this much was beyond dispute.
The universe is a flat parallelogram; and its length is exactly double of its breadth. In the centre of the universe is our world surrounded by the ocean, and by an outer world or ring where men lived before the Flood. Noah and his Ark came over sea from this to the present earth.
To the north of our world is a great hill, like the later Moslem and older Hindu "Cupola of the Earth," which perhaps was Cosmas' own original. Round this the sun and moon revolve, making day and night as they appear or disappear behind it.
The sky consists of four walls meeting in the "dome of heaven" over the floor on which we live, and this sky is "glued" to the edges of the outer world, the world of the Patriarchs.
But this heaven is also cut in two by the firmament, lying between our atmosphere and that "New Heaven and New Earth wherein dwelleth Righteousness"; and the floor of this upper world is covered by the "waters that be above the firmament"; above this is Paradise, and below the firmament live the angels, as "ministers" and "flaming fires" and "servants of God to men."
The proofs of this are simple, mainly resting on some five texts from the Old Testament and two passages of St. Paul.
First the Book of Genesis declared itself to be the "Book of the Generation of the Heaven and the Earth"—that is, of everything in the heavens, and the earth. But the "old wives' fable of the Antipodes" would make the heaven surround and contain the earth, and God's word would have to be changed "These are the generations of the sky." For the same truth—the twofold and independent being of heaven and earth—Cosmas quotes the additional testimony of Abraham, David, Hosea, Isaiah, Zachariah, and Melchisedek, who clenched the case against the Antipodes. "For how indeed could even rain be said to 'fall' or to 'descend,' as in the Psalms and the Gospels, in those regions where it could only be said to 'come up'?"