The origin of a spherical world

September 1, 2024 (updated December 20, 2024)

Pythagoras

The earliest written description of a spherical world is found in the Phaedo, which is a dialogue between philosophers written by the Greek philosopher Plato of the fourth century B.C.:

For the purposes of our investigation into the origins of the Globe, the Phaedo is a watershed: it’s the earliest extant record of anyone saying that Earth is a sphere. (Hannam, The Globe: How)

In Plato’s Phaedo we have the earliest known exposition of the sphericity of the earth. However, this does not mean that he wanted to propose a completely new conception. Close reading of the relevant texts of the Phaedo reveals that the sphericity of the earth is not treated there as a new knowledge, but rather as an accepted fact. (Couprie)

In this dialogue, Plato records his teacher Socrates as stating the following:

“Now the earth has divers wonderful regions, and is indeed in nature and extent very unlike the notions of geographers, as I [Socrates] believe on the authority of one who shall be nameless.”

[108d] “What do you mean, Socrates?” said Simmias. “I have myself heard many descriptions of the earth, but I do not know in what you are putting your faith, and I should like to know.”

“Well, Simmias,” replied Socrates, “the recital of a tale does not, I think, require the art of Glaukos; and I know not that the art of Glaukos could prove the truth of my tale, which I myself should never be able to prove, and even if I could, I fear, Simmias, that my life would come to an end before the argument was completed. I may describe to you, however, [108e] the form and regions of the earth according to my conception of them.”

“That,” said Simmias, “will be enough.”

“Well, then,” he [Socrates] said, “my conviction is that the earth is a round body in the center of the sky, and therefore has no need of air [109a] or any similar force as a support, but is kept there and hindered from falling or inclining any way by the equability of the surrounding sky and by its own equipoise [balance]. For that which, being in equipoise, is in the center of that which is equably diffused, will not incline any way in any degree, but will always remain in the same state and not deviate. And this is my first notion.”

“Which is surely a correct one,” said Simmias. (Plato)

Socrates is not proposing here a pear-shaped world or oblate spheroid, but a perfect sphere, with a surface equally distant from its center (akin to photos of the world produced by NASA and other space agencies). His sphere also happens to be situated at the very center of the cosmos, conveying further the importance of a center in these philosophies:

Harold Cherniss has pointed to the fact that here the sphericity of the earth “is expressed in a subordinate clause as the accepted fact on which depends the notion of equilibrium at the center”. . . .

. . . (3) Socrates’ argument, at 108 e – 109 a, that the earth needs nothing to support it than its ‘equiformity’ and ‘equilibrium’ presupposes its sphericity. (Couprie)

In conformity with his demands for a really philosophical answer, the solution offered by Socrates is, that the earth, being at the center of the universe, has no reason to go elsewhere. This answer clearly is meant to be opposed to solutions in physical terms, such as that the earth does not fall because it is supported by air or kept in its place by a vortex. With his solution, Socrates wants to prove that “mind is the king of heaven and earth” . . . . (Couprie)

Moreover, if Plato really had wanted to put forward the spherical earth as an entirely new theory, he could not have dispensed with some sort of proof. This is, however, completely absent in the Phaedo, as it is elsewhere in Plato’s oeuvre. The same holds for an answer to the question – which is not even posed in the Phaedo – why we (or at least our antipodes [people on the bottom or sides]) do not fall off the spherical earth. (Couprie)

These notions about geometrical forms are repeated in the legacy of an even older Greek philosopher named Pythagoras; perhaps this is the authoritative figure Socrates refuses to name in the dialogue above. Most sources agree that Pythagoras and/or his followers pioneered the spherical world idea. Pythagoras was not only a philosopher, but also a religious mystic:

. . . arguments for Earth having a curved surface were first posited during the 6th century BCE, by the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras . . . . (Sottosanti)

It was around 500 B.C. that Pythagoras first proposed a spherical Earth, mainly on aesthetic grounds rather than on any physical evidence. Like many Greeks, he believed the sphere was the most perfect shape. (“This Month in”)

Favorinus says that he [Pythagoras] was the first to call the heavens a kosmos and the earth spherical. (The Pythagorean Sourcebook)

. . . the word [cosmos] is generally used to suggest an orderly or harmonious universe, as it was originally used by Pythagoras in the 6th century B.C. Thus, a religious mystic may help put us in touch with the cosmos . . . . (“Cosmos”)

He [Pythagoras] was considered by contemporaries and later writers as a mystic - not a mathematician as he is sometimes defined in the present day - and his school was associated with spiritual salvation and miraculous revelation. (Mark)

Like Socrates and other historical figures, Pythagoras wrote nothing down, but this should not discourage us from investigating what existing testimonies about him do say. Some sources prefer to credit the later followers of Pythagoras, such as a certain Philolaus, for inventing the idea that the world is spherical, since fragments of his writings do exist. Regardless, everything points back to a distinct tradition (Pythagoreanism) that began as early as the sixth century B.C., and practitioners of this tradition often chose to exalt Pythagoras. Perceptions about Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans (his followers), whether entirely accurate or not, exerted their influence. Plato himself was quite familiar with Pythagoras and the legends surrounding him, choosing to emulate his purported teachings:

Pythagoras himself may, like Socrates, have written nothing; certainly no writings attributable to him survive, and by most accounts his teachings were transmitted orally and secretively in enigmatic forms designed to perplex the uninitiated.

As a way of making it possible to draw sensible conclusions from this heterogeneous documentary record, I propose—rather than pursuing the nearly impossible goal of establishing rigorously verifiable “truth” about Pythagoras, his teachings, and his followers—to study the chronological development of perceptions about these topics . . . . (Joost-Gaugier)

Very much like Socrates, Buddha and Jesus, the Samian sage [Pythagoras] was – principally, if not exclusively – a master of orality who left no written texts behind him: neither poems nor treatises in prose. Secondly, even if he had written something, the mystery-inspired secrecy practised in the circle of followers gravitating around him had as a consequence that, apparently, no writings were in public circulation outside the sectlike early Pythagorean communities before Philolaus of Croton (c.470–after 399 BCE). Thirdly, no direct disciple of Pythagoras is known to have recorded the master’s voice or written his biography, as for example Xenophon and Plato did for Socrates and Porphyry for Plotinus. (Ancient Philosophy of)

In spite of the historical uncertainties, however, that have plagued searching scholars, the contribution of Pythagoreanism to Western culture has been significant and therefore justifies the effort, however inadequate, to depict what its teachings may have been. Moreover, the heterogeneousness of Pythagorean doctrines has been well documented ever since Heracleitus, a classic early 5th-century Greek philosopher who, scoffing at Pythagoras’s wide-ranging knowledge, said that it “does not teach one to have intelligence.” (Thesleff)

Philolaus was a student of the celebrated number theory of Pythagoras, who stressed the importance of numerical groupings. He was particularly interested in the properties inherent in the decad, the sum of the first four numbers. Speusippus, the successor of Plato as head of the Greek Academy, is reported to have reproduced the doctrine of the first four numbers from a book by Philolaus. Only fragments of his [Philolaus] works survive, however, and the belief that Philolaus was the first systematizer of Pythagoreanism is widely disputed. (Britannica, “Philolaus”)

Plato didn’t invent the idea that the Earth is round. And, while we cannot rule out that he found it in the book by Anaxagoras, it is more likely he picked it up from his friends among the Pythagoreans of Italy. (Hannam, The Globe: How)

It’s certain from the Phaedo that Plato was familiar with the concept of the Globe by the 370s BC, and that he could have picked this idea up from his Pythagorean contacts in southern Italy. (Hannam, The Globe: How)

After the death of Socrates, Plato may have traveled extensively in Greece, Italy, and Egypt, though on such particulars the evidence is uncertain. The followers of Pythagoras (c. 580–c. 500 BCE) seem to have influenced his philosophical program . . . . (Meinwald)

Plato is said to have learned his speculative and physical doctrines from the Italian Pythagoreans, his ethics from Socrates, and his logic from Zeno, Parmenides and the Eleatics. But all of these teachings descended from Pythagoras. (The Pythagorean Sourcebook)

Plato’s emphasis on ideal mathematics suggests a link with the earlier thought of the Pythagorean school . . . . Pythagoras of Samos worked in the late 6th century BCE; his followers maintained his teachings for centuries after that. The Pythagoreans had a particular interest in examples of mathematical harmony in the universe. For them, pure number served as a pattern or a template for the physical world. . . . Their ideas clearly went beyond mathematics to numerology and number mysticism. However, the notion of pure number as the foundation of physical existence clearly influenced Plato’s concept of abstract idea. (Kiely)

Pythagoras and his followers developed an ideology based on the notion of number as the basis of physical existence. His legend grew, and the later Greeks attributed a variety of specific discoveries to him and his school. Some of these may be genuine, some not. More significantly, Pythagorean ideas on number and reality had a profound influence on later Greek philosophical and mathematical developments, particularly the Platonic notion of abstract truth as the basis of physical nature.

. . .

Plato (427–347 BCE) gives an account of the creation of the physical universe and its relationship with abstract truth in his work Timaeus. . . . spherical objects—the moon or a pearl—are based on the idea of a perfect sphere. Plato explains the stages of creation, stressing the spherical shape of the universe and the circular character of its motions . . . .

Over the course of his discussion, Plato embraces a number of older Greek philosophical traditions. For example, he describes the divisions of the world soul, the spirit of the universe, in terms of harmonic ratios, very much in the spirit of the Pythagoreans. While Plato is usually viewed as a rational thinker, his account of the creation of the world soul is quite obscure and reveals the influence of Pythagorean number-mysticism: (Kiely)

The Pythagoreans sought numerical harmony in the universe and saw nature as an expression of number. Plato stressed the abstract character of truth and viewed mathematics, and especially geometry, as examples of such abstraction. His ideas showed some Pythagorean influence, for he maintained that matter itself was an expression of geometrical idea. (Kiely)

Number and geometry mysticism

The earliest philosophers did not bother with systematic experiments and the majority were religious, as opposed to absolute atheists:

The primacy of ethics over objective knowledge explains some of the puzzling facts about Greek science [philosophy]. For example, Greek natural philosophers rarely bothered with experiments. (Hannam, “Atoms and flat-Earth”)

[Philosophy is] a search for a general understanding of values and reality by chiefly speculative rather than observational means. (“Philosophy”)

Few philosophers rejected ordinary religious practice or wholly abandoned the authority of traditional story. Some of them (Epimenides the Cretan, for example, who said, epigrammatically, that all Cretans were liars, about 600 BC, or Iamblichus of Syrian Chalcis in the early fourth century AD) behaved like witch-doctors. Solon of Athens, who is now chiefly remembered for his radical response to the Athenian economic crisis, brought Epimenides in to exorcise and purify the city by prayers and sacrifice. (Clark)

Philosophy was invented by pagans. Or to be more precise: it was invented by people who lived in pagan societies, many centuries before the foundation of the great monotheist religions of the Western world. (Myers)

When I point out the proposition with which this overture began, that philosophy (in the Western world anyway), was invented by pagans, it is often replied that those ideas were ‘not truly pagan’ because they were associated with people in organized urban civilizations, or because their ideas were too easily assimilated into Christianity. . . . many well-respected Greek and Roman philosophers invoked pagan gods by name right in their books. Indeed, Socrates himself invoked the pagan god Asclepius in his dying breath! (Myers)

Philosophers have gotten something of a bad reputation for widespread—and perhaps closed-minded—atheism. The reality, however, is quite otherwise. . . . For most of their history, philosophy and religion have almost always been intertwined in one way or another, and the vast majority of philosophers have had some kind of religious beliefs, oftentimes central to their philosophy, whether or not they have made the links explicit. . . . Though their methods (sometimes) differ, philosophy and religion have always shared a number of similar goals in terms of seeking answers to life’s “Big Questions,” questions about the ultimate nature of reality, our purpose or place in the world, the meaning of life and how we should live it. (Introduction to Philosophy)

Pythagoras believed that numbers were divine. He worshiped the Monad or One as supreme god, which corresponded to the number one. He also believed that numbers were inherently geometrical. The geometry for the number one or the Monad was a small point or circle, perceived as the first mark required to form lines and then shapes. Conversely, the three-dimensional representation of a small point or circle was a sphere. This mystical system based on numbers and geometry naturally led Pythagoras to choose a sphere for the shape of the world, since it denoted the beginning, divinity, perfection, equality, totality, etc.:

Aetius (first or second century A.D.) is one of the most important sources for the opinions of the earliest Greek philosophers, whose actual works have for the most part perished. He says of Pythagoras that he was the first to call the search for wisdom “philosophy,” and that he “assumed as first principles the numbers and the symmetries existing among them, which he calls harmonies, and the elements compounded of both, that are called geometrical. . . .” However ‘unreliable’ we choose to treat this transmission, even this brief extract does contain some remarkably significant possibilities which call for interpretation.

That numbers were assumed as first principles is not unexpected, but the idea of “symmetries existing among them” is particularly evocative. Their harmonies are likewise said to be among them. Further, the geometricals are elements compounded of the numbers with their inherent symmetrical harmonies. (Iamblichus, The Theology of)

Each of the basic ‘geometricals’ can be generated out of a series of morphic points as three-dimensional reflections of the first monad or the ‘original’ singular spherical body—the sphere being the most perfect and most simple three-dimensional form, simultaneously representing the unique, unity and the unified. (Iamblichus, The Theology of)

So we get One reflecting as a single dot or shadow on a surface for us to ‘imagine’ or remember Oneness from. If we should take the Pythagorean tradition literally, the first and comprehensive evidence of ‘ideal’ or archetypal number is an array of ‘dots’ in triangular form: (Iamblichus, The Theology of)

From this perspective ‘the monad’ or ‘One’ was readily identified with the divine origin of reality. Here, however, it is not so much a question of Pythagorean mathematics translating number theories into geometrical notations; rather, numbers were in their nature geometrical and even corporeal substances. (Sandywell)

The cosmic numerical Pythagorean principles were represented by geometrical figures and were the powers that ordered the world. (Hillar)

Pythagoras held that one of the first principles, the Monad, is God and the Good, which is the origin of the One, and is itself Intelligence . . . . (The Pythagorean Sourcebook)

Pythagoras the Samian, son of Mnesarchus, said that the Monad is God, and that nothing has been brought into being apart from this. (The Pythagorean Sourcebook)

The monad, or the one, is the arche of all things, but not in the absolute sense. The monad itself is woven out of unlimiteds and limiters. It leads to the creation of numbers and thus the presence of numbers and numerical proportions can be found in all things in the cosmos. Without numbers, the cosmos would not exist, numbers would not exist without the monad, and so it can be called the arche. It is the arche, the first beginning of the organized, structured nature: the cosmos. (Drozdek)

The monad (one) is god and the good, intelligence. Its circular representation has a centre, the source around which everything revolves, but which in itself is beyond understanding. (Horsman)

Furthermore, the concept of the One was fundamental to Pythagorean number-mysticism. According to Aristotle, the Pythagoreans regarded number both as the matter of things and as properties and states. But for the Pythagoreans, the One (or the Monad) was not the first in a series of number, nor even a number itself, but the generator of numbers, the “principle” or “origin” of all numbers. (Stamatellos)

The Pythagoreans believed that Number is “the principle, the source and the root of all things.” But to make things more explicit: the Monad, or Unity, is the principle of Number. In other words, the Pythagoreans did not see One as a number at all, but as the principle underlying number, which is to say that numbers—especially the first ten-may be seen as manifestations of diversity in a unified continuum. (The Pythagorean Sourcebook)

Because Pythagorean science possessed a sacred dimension, Number is seen not only as a universal principle, it is a divine principle as well. The two, in fact, are synonymous: because Number is universal it is divine; but one could as easily say that because it is divine, it is universal. . . . It should be very firmly emphasized, however, that for Pythagoras the scientific and religious dimensions of number were never at odds with each other. (The Pythagorean Sourcebook)

The Pythagoreans considered the Monad as the origin of all things, just as a point is the beginning of a line, a line of a surface, and a surface of a solid, which constitutes a body. A point implies a preceding Monad, so that it is really the principle of bodies, and all of them arise from the Monad. (The Pythagorean Sourcebook)

Number is cosmogonic: all things are generated from Numbers, and in particular from the archetypal Monad or ‘the One’. (Sandywell)

Certain numbers held a mystical fascination for the Pythagoreans. The first of these was, naturally, the number of numbers, the One or Monad which generates the natural number series. The One is the very utterance of the Universe itself, the root chord of its universal melody. (Sandywell)

Numbers were projected as geometrical figures in a planar field. The next step in this numbers game was to represent the spatiotemporal world of physical objects in numerical form. We move from two-dimensional to three-dimensional geometrical analogies. The number one thus represented the point, two the line, three the triangle, and four the pyramid. (Sandywell)

The earliest known systematic cult based on the rule of numbers was that of the Pythagoreans. Pythagoras was a Greek who thrived in the 6th century BCE. . . .

The Pythagoreans invested specific numbers with mystical properties. The number 1 symbolized unity and the origin of all things, since all other numbers can be created from 1 by adding enough copies of it. . . . A single point corresponds to 1, a line to 2 (because a line has two extremities), a triangle to 3 . . . . (Stewart)

However, Pythagoras would say that, after the transcendental Monad, the sphere is the first manifested “object” of the cosmos. The sphere is the cosmos. What has been projected outward from that dimensionless point is a sphere, the perfect geometric figure—whether interpreted from an ideal or a mundane point of view. (Dunn)

And if we want some proof of Pythagoras’s mathematical hypothesis, we only have to recall that the first manifestation, from the “seed” of the universe (equated with the “dot”)[,] is the sphere, a perfect geometrical form, which, as Guthrie reminds us, is made of a particularly tenuous form of matter. (Dunn)

There is no question that all of Pythagoras’s doctrines trace their source to the transcendental and eternal Monad. (Dunn)

Clearly, the Pythagoreans did not understand mathematical natural laws in modern terms. Rather, they pursued a form of number mysticism, seeking the hidden numerical patterns and harmonies that lay behind physical or visual phenomena. This led to an interest in numerology, in numbers with mystical or sacred character. The Pythagoreans shared the general Greek reverence for the number 1, the monad, the source of things. (Kiely)

The Pythagoreans thus believed that number was embedded in physical phenomena and in the figures of geometry. They stressed the harmonious, exact relationships between whole numbers (integers) and viewed such relationships in a mystical way. (Kiely)

Ever the master geometer, Pythagoras taught that the movements of the Sun, Moon and planets must be based on the simplest and purest geometrical shape, the circle.

And Pythagoras’s obsession with circles led him to the first major discovery in astronomy. He realized that the Earth is not flat, but is a round ball floating in space.

Today, we take this for granted. But it’s not all obvious – and none of the other great civilizations of the past took this giant intellectual leap. (Couper and Henbest)

Pythagoras argued that the Earth was a sphere. He must have seen and wondered at the sight of a ship falling below the horizon, but his reasoning was that of the philosopher rather than the astronomer—he thought the Earth must be spherical simply because in his opinion the sphere was the perfect shape. (Aughton)

Hardly any philosopher after Pythagoras questioned the idea, even though it was born out of Pythagorean mysticism:

Pythagoras held that the earth and the heavenly bodies were spheres moving in harmony. Plato accepted the idea that the earth was a sphere and supposed that the moon, sun, planets, and fixed stars revolved around it in their own orbits. With some variations, this model became widespread in the Hellenistic period and later. Cicero, in the Dream of Scipio, posited nine spheres. The outermost, the starry heaven, contains the whole and is itself the supreme god. Beneath it are seven other spheres: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, and Moon. The ninth and central sphere, the earth, is immovable and lowest of all. The model of the geocentric universe, with various refinements, was given its classical expression by Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria in the 2nd century CE. The attempt of Aristarchus of Samos in the 3rd century BCE to argue for a heliocentric universe had little impact. (Ancient Religions)

. . . Aristotle, in his De caelo, still has difficulties in fighting some empirical arguments for a flat earth, which he overcomes at last by means of a metaphysical argument: the sphere is the natural shape for a body that, consisting of the heaviest element, is amassed at its natural place, which is below, and in a spherical universe this means: at the center of that universe. (Couprie)

The shape of the world affects the deployment of a map as well as the cultural understanding of the spatial relationship between places. The question was tackled by many Greek thinkers, from Homer onward. Although the flat earth theory noted in the early maps and cosmographies of Anaximander and others was quickly abandoned, symmetry, geographical determinism, and Hellenocentricism persisted, bolstered by philosophical and ethnic prejudices of Greek superiority. The Pythagoreans in Croton (circa 450 BCE) may have been the first to suggest a spherical earth, and the theory gained philosophical currency because the sphere was thought to be the “perfect” shape. Nonetheless, representing the earth on a three‐dimensional sphere was impractical at best, and cartographers continued to employ a facile two‐dimensional medium on papyrus, wood, or bronze. (A Companion to)

Philosophers such as the Stoics taught that human souls were spherical for similar reasons. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic himself and he wrote:

The spherical form of the soul maintains its figure, when it is neither extended towards any object, nor contracted inwards, nor dispersed nor sinks down, but is illuminated by light, by which it sees the truth, the truth of all things and the truth that is in itself. (Aurelius)

Author Russell McNeil helps trace this belief back to Pythagoras:

The notion that the soul is configured in the shape of a perfect sphere reflects the influence of the Greek Pythagorean philosophical school on early Stoicism. Pythagoras conjectured that the cosmos was in the shape of a perfect sphere, and that the Earth - at the center of the cosmos - was also shaped as a perfect sphere. The Stoics maintained that the animating intelligence of the universe, Logos, filled the entire cosmos but not the void beyond. Thus it would follow that this animating principle - referred to also at times as the world-soul - would also form the shape of the physical figure of the universe, that is, a perfect sphere. (McNeil)

Thus, a peculiar homage to circles and spheres was born and it was injected into ideas about the shape of the cosmos, the world, and even human souls.

Philosophy and worship

Pythagoras studied the mysticism of various places to formulate his philosophy. Chief among them were Egypt and Babylon:

However, he [Pythagoras] also studied mathematics, astronomy, religion, and mysticism with Egyptian priests, with the Arabs, with the Chaldaeans of Babylon, and with the Persian prophet Zoroaster. (D’Angelo)

Pythagoras learned ancient arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, and he probably also studied religious theories having to do with the celestial bodies, which were identified with gods or spirits. (D’Angelo)

In Egypt he [Pythagoras] lived with the priests, and learned the language and wisdom of the Egyptians . . . . In Arabia he confer­red with the king. In Babylon he associated with the other Chaldeans, especially attaching himself to Zaratus [=Zoroaster], by whom he was purified from the pollutions of his past life, and taught the things from which a virtuous man ought to be free. Likewise he heard lectures about Nature, and the principles of wholes. It was from his stay among these foreigners that Pythagoras acquired the greater part of his wisdom. (The Pythagorean Sourcebook)

Here [in Babylon] he [Pythagoras] was overjoyed to be associated with the Magi, who instructed him in their venerable knowledge, and in the most perfect worship of the Gods. (The Pythagorean Sourcebook)

Although Pythagoras worshiped the Monad, he still paid homage to other subordinate gods. Characteristic of his sacred belief in spheres, it is said that Pythagoras fashioned graven images to the gods in the shape of spheres to convey their divinity:

. . . Pythagoras and his followers did not abandon the polytheism of the Homeric/Olympic [Greek] tradition. Some thought Pythagoras was an incarnation of Apollo, and that god’s association with moderation, intelligence, and order was in accord with Pythagorean ideals. (Ferguson)

And, in short, it is said that Pythagoras was emulous of the Orphic mode of writing and [piety of] disposition; and that he honored the Gods in a way similar to that of Orpheus, placing them in images and in brass, not conjoined to our forms, but to divine receptacles;[36] because they comprehend and provide for all things; and have a nature and morphe [form] similar to the universe. . . .

[36]i. e. To spheres; Iamblichus indicating by this, that Pythagoras as well as Orpheus considered a spherical figure as the most appropriate image of divinity. For the universe is spherical; and, as Iamblichus afterwards observes, the Gods have a nature and morphe similar to the universe; morphe, as we learn from Simplicius, pertaining to the color, figure, and magnitude of superficies. (Iamblichus, Iamblichus’ Life of)

In short, Pythagoras imitated the Orphic mode of writing, and [pious] disposition, and the way they honored the Gods, representing them in images and in brass not resembling our [human] form, but the divine receptacle [of the Sphere], because they comprehend and provide for all things, being of nature and form similar to the universe.

But his divine philosophy and worship was compound, having learned much from the Orphic followers, but much also from the Egyptian priests, the Chaldeans and Magi, the mysteries of Eleusis, Imbrus, Samothracia, and Delos, and even the Celtic and Iberian. (The Pythagorean Sourcebook)

Confirmed by Copernicus

Approximately two thousand years after Pythagoras, Nicolaus Copernicus (credited for the heliocentric system, synonymous with solar system and heliocentrism) confirms the reasons why the world was determined to be a sphere long before him, reiterating what Pythagoras had previously established:

In the beginning we should remark that the world is globe-shaped; whether because this figure is the most perfect of all, as it is an integral whole and needs no joints; or because this figure is the one having the greatest volume and thus is especially suitable for that which is going to comprehend and conserve all things; or even because the separate parts of the world i.e., the sun, moon, and stars are viewed under such a form; or because everything in the world tends to be delimited by this form . . . . And so no one would hesitate to say that this form belongs to the heavenly bodies. (Copernicus)

The Jews

The Jews at the time of Christ, and even centuries later, did not subscribe to the belief in a spherical world. Flavius Josephus (a notable Jewish historian of the first century) writes:

After this, on the second day, he [God] placed the heaven over the whole world, and separated it from the other parts, and he determined it should stand by itself. He also placed a crystalline [solid firmament] round [over] it, and put it together in a manner agreeable to the earth, and fitted it for giving moisture and rain, and for affording the advantage of dews. On the third day he appointed the dry land to appear, with the sea itself round about it; and on the very same day he made the plants and the seeds to spring out of the earth. On the fourth day he adorned the heaven with the sun, the moon, and the other stars, and appointed them their motions and courses, that the vicissitudes of the seasons might be clearly signified. And on the fifth day he produced the living creatures, both those that swim, and those that fly; the former in the sea, the latter in the air: he also sorted them as to society and mixture, for procreation, and that their kinds might increase and multiply. On the sixth day he created the four-footed beasts, and made them male and female: on the same day he also formed man. Accordingly Moses says, That in just six days the world, and all that is therein, was made. And that the seventh day was a rest, and a release from the labor of such operations; whence it is that we Celebrate a rest from our labors on that day, and call it the Sabbath, which word denotes rest in the Hebrew tongue. (Josephus)

Josephus states that God “placed the heaven over the whole world,” desiring that “it should stand by itself,” and “placed a crystalline [solid firmament] round [over] it,” indicating by this, an enclosed flat world.

The rabbinic writers of the Talmud (influential Jewish texts compiled up to the sixth century) also describe a flat world:

The Babylonian Talmud was compiled up to the 6th century. Some scholars suggest that the organization of the Talmud began early and that successive generations of amoraim added layer upon layer to previously arranged material. Others suggest that at the beginning a stratum called Gemara, consisting only of Halakhic decisions or short comments, was set forth. Still others theorize that no overall arrangement of Talmudic material was made until the end of the 4th century. (Silberman and Dimitrovsky)

. . . the Earth was considered by the sages of the Talmud to be flat. As recorded in the Jerusalem Talmud, people lived on this flat Earth completely surrounded by water:

. . .

. . . Covering this flat Earth was an opaque cap referred to as the rakia, which is most commonly translated as the sky or firmament. (Brown)

Christ participated in the work of creation (Hebrews 1; Genesis 1:26; Proverbs 8:22-30; 1 Corinthians 1:22-25; Colossians 1:12-20) and certainly knew the form of the world, yet he never issued a correction to the plain words of Genesis 1 and what was generally believed by Jews at the time. After his resurrection he also appears to a group on the road to Emmaus and expounds the Scriptures beginning at Moses or Genesis. The famous words “In the beginning God created” (Genesis 1:1) lead up to the revelation that the world is flat and closed off, and this is where Christ began his conversation:

Luke 24:13-16, 25-27
King James Version
13 And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs.

14 And they talked together of all these things which had happened.

15 And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them.

16 But their eyes were holden that they should not know him.

. . .

25 Then he said unto them, O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken:

26 Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?

27 And beginning at Moses [Genesis] and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.

The Greeks

Although the Greeks traditionally viewed the world as flat, that slowly changed when Greek philosophers, following the example of Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, began teaching otherwise:

In common with Homer, early Greek astronomers assumed that the sky was a dome over the Earth. (Hannam, The Globe: How)

In the centuries after Homer and Hesiod, later thinkers like Plato retained the convention of a moral order that undergirded nature and society, but relegated the myths to background colour. . . . It was during this period that the theory of the Globe was discovered and began to displace the traditional flat earth from the Greek world picture. (Hannam, The Globe: How)

Paul encountered Greek philosophers in the first century while visiting Athens, Greece. They were the Epicureans and the Stoics (previously mentioned):

Acts 17:16-18
King James Version
16 Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred in him, when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry.

17 Therefore disputed he in the synagogue with the Jews, and with the devout persons, and in the market daily with them that met with him.

18 Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoicks, encountered him. And some said, What will this babbler say? other some, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods: because he preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection.

The Epicureans and Stoics were two rival schools of philosophy very influential in Rome. Of the two, the Stoics were arguably the more popular:

The Hellenistic [Greek] philosophies became known in Rome from the third century BC onwards as the result of various movements. Ideas from the Greek colonies in south Italy started to spread northwards, conquests in the mainland brought back Greeks to be schoolmasters and private tutors, and adolescents from the wealthier Roman families travelled to the centres of learning in the Greek world, touring the schools at Athens, Alexandria, Pergamum and Rhodes. The two philosophies that had most impact on Rome were Epicureanism and Stoicism . . . . (Wright, Cosmology in Antiquity)

In the post-Aristotelian Hellenistic [Greek] era the rival schools of Epicurus and the Stoic Zeno of Citium were founded, and over the next centuries both Epicureanism and a modified form of Stoicism became influential in the intellectual life of the increasingly powerful city of Rome. (Wright, Cosmology in Antiquity)

The Stoics, like their predecessors Plato and Aristotle, believed in a spherical world:

Stoic cosmology adopted from Plato and Aristotle the pattern of a central spherical earth with the stars and planets rotating around it. (Wright, Introducing Greek Philosophy)

The Epicureans, on the other hand, were more skeptical. To them, the claim of a spherical world could not be empirically proven (confirmed by observable reality) and aspects of it were problematic, such as there being no real sense of up or down in a spherical world. The Epicureans were the rare exception, however. After the fourth century B.C. (roughly a century or two after Pythagoras) the belief in a spherical world became standard among most philosophers:

Epicurus strongly advocated the use of empirical observation. Regarding meteorological phenomena, Epicurus emphasizes that the causes proposed and accounts offered must not contradict experience. For Epicurus, agreement with the phenomena is imperative; even though meteorological phenomena may be explained by a number of causes, none of these may contradict sensory perception. (Warren)

Epicurus and his followers regarded cosmological and astronomical theories as unprovable in practice . . . .

On the shape of the earth, the doxographies are not helpful. . . . What we can say is that Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and everyone else with serious scientific interests (excluding, that is, the Epicureans) come to see the earth as spherical, from the fourth century BC on. (Brill’s Companion to)

The Romans

The Romans were fans of Greek philosophy and we find sphere symbols on their coins. They adopted the idea of a spherical world from the Greeks and used it to illustrate their desired conquest of the whole world:

Few Romans did more to educate his countrymen about Greek philosophy than Marcus Tullius Cicero. . . .

While Cicero was out of favour in Rome, he retired to his villa and wrote dialogues to expound the doctrines of the Platonists and Stoics, as well as castigate the Epicureans, of whom he did not approve. His substantial oeuvre, much of which survives, remains an important, if second-hand, source of information about Greek thought.

Cicero accepted the Globe simply because that was what educated Greeks believed. (Hannam, The Globe: How)

Even though the Greeks created the first astronomical sphere theories and images, they rarely showed them on their coins. It was the Romans who showed spheres on millions of their minted coins. (Sidrys)

Universal empire was quite specifically articulated in Rome under Augustus at the time of Christ. In his Res gestae, posted posthumously near his mausoleum, the emperor’s achievements in framing the territorial shape and limits of Roman rule were recounted. Divine will “had assigned to Rome the destiny of conquering, of dominating, but also of pacifying and organizing the whole world.” . . . .

As an imperial symbol, the globe appears on Roman coins from about 75 B.C.E. Unmarked, the sphere may represent equally the celestial or terrestrial globe, permitting a symbolic link between the divine order symbolized by the former and the territorial order imperially imposed upon the latter. Thus Augustus’s imperial declaration was placed within an architectural complex at the heart of his imperial city that may also have incorporated a world map and certainly included calendrical monuments establishing a coincidence between the emperor’s nativity and the order of cosmic time. Thus the terrestrially located emperor is imaginatively transformed into the celestial Apollo, omnipotent because omniscient across global space.

If the emperor and empire are cosmographically located and legitimated by reference to the predictability and order of the heavens, the terrestrial orb denotes direct territorial authority. (Cosgrove)

Minting coins was a prerogative of the emperor, as it gave him a medium on which to communicate with his subjects. Today, the countless surviving examples are invaluable evidence of the kinds of symbolism that were supposed to be meaningful to ordinary people.

The obverse side of most coins was stamped with a bust of the emperor in profile, while the reverse allowed for more creative iconography. Spheres and orbs were common motifs. (Hannam, The Globe: How)

Tiberius Caesar Augustus was the Roman emperor in power at the time of Christ (Luke 3:1). He had a particular interest in spheres and included them in his coins:

In the following Julio-Claudian era (30 BC - AD 69), the percentage of sphere reverses doubled to 7.5%, and the actual quantity of sphere reverse types rose from 21 to 163. Emperors of this era who were most interested in issuing the sphere symbol on their coinage reverses were Galba (92 types), as well as Tiberius (26% of all of his coinage) . . . . (Sidrys)

Tiberius issued the highest percentage of sphere reverse types (26%) during the Julio-Claudian era, although it is from a relatively low total coinage (21/80). (Sidrys)

Tiberius’ tremendous interest in astrology stimulated him to issue in AD 34-37 on the reverses of several bronze coins the largest celestial sphere ever shown on a Roman coin, with slanting Zodiac belt, and an attached rudder with a small Earth globe enigmatically connected at the bottom (Figures 39B, C). Tiberius may have been creatively teaching the public that the small global Earth, the centre of the universe, is controlling the huge celestial sphere. (Sidrys)

It is possible that the coin of the emperor held by Christ in Mark 12 included such imagery on it.

By the first century B.C., a spherical world was generally accepted by the intellectual class of Rome, but it remained an enigma to the common folk on the street generations later:

Cicero, in the ‘Dream of Scipio’, gave the view of the earth generally accepted by educated Romans in the first century BC. In this the earth is spherical, in the centre of the cosmos, but quite small compared to the celestial bodies. (Wright, Cosmology in Antiquity)

However, Pliny the Elder wrote his Natural History (Book II, 161) in the mid 1st century AD and commented about the Earth and its sphericity (as similarly wrote Seneca and Ptolemy) that there ‘is a great conflict between the learned and the man in the street at this juncture… An ordinary person inquires why men on the opposite side do not fall off…’. (Sidrys)

Pliny the Elder describes the earth as a sphere (writing c. AD 65-75), but also states that ‘there is a great conflict between the learned and the man-in-the-street at this junction’. Pliny explains that scholars assert that men inhabit the entire globe, but ‘an ordinary person, however, inquires why men on the opposite side do not fall off’. (Sidrys)

In the section of Natural History on astronomy [of his book], Pliny noted that there was a consensus that the Earth was a sphere. Unfortunately, after that, things get more confused. He castigated the common folk for imagining that people on the other side of the world ought to fall off and that the oceans should be flat. They can’t understand, he said, how water can form a sphere around the Earth by sinking as close to the centre of the universe as it can. . . .

. . . At one point, out of the blue, he [Pliny] suggested the Earth could be shaped like a pine cone. We are left with a tantalizing hint that the debate about the shape of the Earth among educated Romans had more nuance than just ‘round’ versus ‘flat’. (Hannam, The Globe: How)

Pliny the Elder disagreed that antipodeans [people on the bottom or sides] were implausible. He noted that the intelligentsia [intellectuals] said the Earth was inhabited all round, even though vulgar [common] people wanted to know why dwellers ‘down under’ didn’t fall into space. (Hannam, The Globe: How)

. . . the debate about the antipodes [people on the bottom or sides] was still raging long after Western Christians defaulted to acceptance of the Globe. There was also plenty of room for disagreement about the arrangement of the continents and the width of the Ocean. By the end of the Middle Ages, some of these questions would assume momentous importance. (Hannam, The Globe: How)

The average citizen of the first century posed a reasonable question: Why do the people on the bottom or sides not fall off? It would take another 1,700 years for that question to receive an answer with the invention of a force called “gravity” by Isaac Newton.

Proponents of a spherical world often mock the notion of a flat world, suggesting that people would fall off its edges, but they fail to carefully review some of the details. In the book of Genesis the world is contained inside a firmament or firm barrier (a dome), there is no falling off edges (Genesis 1:6-10). The word “earth” in Scripture does not denote a spinning sphere suspended in the cosmos, but dry land that emerges inside or under this firmament (Genesis 1:8-10; Harper). Outside of the firmament we are told there are great waters (Genesis 1:6-7) and further up is the throne of God (Isaiah 40:21-22, Isaiah 66:1, Acts 7:48-49, Ezekiel 1:26-28, Psalm 104:1-3, Job 26:10-11, 2 Samuel 22:8). Hence, the world is submerged in water. Ironically, the argument of falling off the world was instead addressed at the belief in a spherical world as documented in the first century.

For those doubting this is the correct interpretation of Genesis 1, even the Vatican’s lead Jesuit astronomer, Guy Consolmagno, admits the verses are plainly describing a flat world. However, he urges readers to take the description metaphorically, when there is no indication in the context to do so:

And I’m thinking, you know, have you actually read Genesis? Where it says the world is flat and it’s covered with a dome and there’s water above and below the dome, you know? . . . what are the oldest books we have? . . . They’re poems, they’re books of poetry and the world was interpreted in terms of metaphor and simile. . . . most religious people are not . . . fundamentalists [people who read the Bible in the normal contextual sense]. Most evangelicals are not. (“Was the Bible”)

Consider also the natural behavior of gas, and oxygen which is a gas. Gases always expand in all directions to occupy the available space they are in. Hence, they always exist inside the walls of some container:

Because the particles in a gas are free of attractive forces and can move easily in every direction, a gas will expand to fill its container. If the container is flexible, it will expand; this is observed when a balloon is inflated with gas. If the container is rigid and more gas is added, the volume of the gas will remain the same, but there will be less space between its particles than there was before. If some of the gas is released from the container, the remaining gas particles will again spread to fill the container. (“gas - Students”)

Gases nevertheless do have a structure of sorts on a molecular scale. They consist of a vast number of molecules moving chaotically in all directions and colliding with one another and with the walls of their container. Beyond this, there is no structure—the molecules are distributed essentially randomly in space, traveling in arbitrary directions at speeds that are distributed randomly about an average determined by the gas temperature. The pressure exerted by a gas is the result of the innumerable impacts of the molecules on the container walls and appears steady to human senses because so many collisions occur each second on all sections of the walls. (“gas - Scholars”)

Inexplicably, the oxygen that we breathe is not affected by these natural laws while it sits beside the vacuum of “outer space.” Naturally, it would have expanded in all directions to fill the cosmos. To solve this predicament, the concept of the force of gravity is used. The force of gravity, however, has never been proven:

We don’t really know [what the force of gravity is]. We can define what it is as a field of influence, because we know how it operates in the universe. And some scientists think that it is made up of particles called gravitons which travel at the speed of light. However, if we are to be honest, we do not know what gravity “is” in any fundamental way . . . . (“StarChild Question of”)

Gravitons have not been directly observed . . . . (Britannica, “graviton”)

What the force of gravity describes, that is observable, is simply called “buoyancy.” Some objects go up or down depending on the medium they are in (such as water, air, etc.) and their density. A balloon, for example, goes up because it is lighter than air. A force called “gravity” does not attract it back down.

In fact, before Newton, the word “gravity” simply meant the quality of being “heavy, weighty” (“Gravity, N., Etymology”). Newton did not invent the word, but he did invent the force and he changed the meaning of the word to represent a force, instead of a quality.

The Roman Catholic Church

When Rome fell, the Roman Catholic Church preserved the cultural heritage of Rome, including the belief in a spherical world:

Medieval Rome’s aspiration to global centrality was reflected in the city’s landscape of fragments and memories scattered among fields, pastures, vines, and wasteland within the compass of the Antonine Wall and loosely coordinated by the cross described by its four basilicas. St. John Lateran, “mother and head church of the world,” had been Constantine’s imperial gift to the papacy on his departure for Byzantium. . . . The severed hand and great bronze globe from the fifty-meter imperial colossus that had stood before the Colosseum were placed among other marvels, including the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, outside the Lateran, thereby refiguring the papal palace as a temporal center of spiritual imperium. From the eighth century the “marvels” of Rome were described in guides for pilgrim visitors to a Christianized pagan metropolis . . . . (Cosgrove)

The Roman popes consciously adopted imperial ritual and rhetoric after the fall of the Western Empire in 476, and their sacramental consecration of feudal monarchy from the time of Pépin and the Frankish kings sustained in the fragmented west of Europe an illusion of sacred imperial continuity. Thus the emperor Henry II’s blue robe decorated with the constellations represented “the universe over which its wearer reigns at the center of a cosmos revolving around a divine axis”; in the king’s hand the orb represented the terrestrial earth, and his eight-sided crown prefigured the celestial city at the end of time. The twelfth-century popes Gregory VII and Innocent III completed the transformation of the papacy into an absolutist and universalist monarchy located at the juncture of celestial and terrestrial space. (Cosgrove)

Despite scholastic dispute, the image of a spherical earth at the stable center of concentric spheres, encompassed, penetrated, and animated by the Trinity, enjoyed unchallenged acceptance in the Latin West. “All who learned to read and write absorbed at least the skeletal frame of scholastic cosmology”; its principles were pictured in mosaics, stone carvings, and stained glass in churches, abbeys, and cathedrals, the medieval world’s centers of popular culture. (Cosgrove)

The physical body of the risen Christ is central to this theological geography. Embodying the globe or world map is a recurrent feature of medieval Christian iconography. In the Liber divinorum (1492), for example, the Father literally encompasses elemental and celestial spheres, his head reaching beyond even the enclosing frame of the universe, while the Son’s body corresponds to the dimensions of the earthly sphere itself. Trinitarian doctrine proclaims God as simultaneously celestial Father, physical Son, and divine Spirit or breath of life. (Cosgrove)

In peculiar fashion, the “Christian” Trinity also made appearances alongside a spherical world; a future study will demonstrate Pythagoras’ relationship to the Trinity.

After the fifth century, the belief in a spherical world found a permanent home in the Church. Augustine of Hippo, an influential father of the Church, instructed believers to heed the teachings of pagan philosophers concerning the physical world:

What were the early Christians to make of this? Their bedrock was the Bible; but the Holy Book doesn’t contain an almanac of the planets. Into this confusion came Augustine of Hippo. After a dissolute early life, this great scholar of the fifth century AD became an exemplary saint. St Augustine concluded that God had used some eminent pagans to tell Christians about the physical world: ‘it must be said that our authors knew the truth about the nature of the skies.’

After Augustine, the teachings of Ptolemy [Greek cosmology] became fossilized in the Christian tradition for a thousand years. In hindsight, it seems incredible that no-one in Europe questioned them . . . . (Couper and Henbest)

It is not true that educated thinkers before the discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), assumed that the Earth was flat. The ancient Greeks knew that it was spherical, and the influential early Church Father, St Augustine (354–430), cautioned Christians against taking the Bible literally when it implied the world was flat, because they would only embarrass themselves in the eyes of pagans. (The Oxford Illustrated)

In the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman periods, the spherical shape of the Earth appears never to have been in doubt, and the concept is described in the works of Eratosthenes (275–194 B.C.), Pliny (23/24–79), Ptolemy (second century), Macrobius (fl. 399–422), and Martianus Capella (fl. 410–39), among others. Even in widely disseminated objects, such as coins of the Roman period, the image of the Earth as a globe appears as a symbol of imperial power. The notion that the early church fathers rejected the Greco-Roman idea of the spherical Earth is almost totally false. (Lindberg and Shank)

Nor were these authors secular “freethinkers,” working outside or against religious authority: almost every single medieval author who describes a spherical Earth was a member of the Catholic Church, from monks, nuns, and friars to priests, bishops, and popes. This is both because education and Latin literacy were primarily the concern of the clergy until the end of the Middle Ages and because the Church had no objection to the idea of a spherical Earth. (Black)

Contrary to popular myths, the Church has been overwhelmingly in favor of a spherical world since the subject of philosophy was broached by the early church fathers. British philosopher Bertrand Russell says plainly:

. . . the Aristotelian belief [Greek cosmology] to the contrary, though accepted by medieval Christians, is a product of the pagan worship of sun and moon and planets. (Russell)

The Jesuit order (a branch of the Church) also made it its mission to bring these ideas to faraway places. In fact, they are credited with bringing the spherical world belief to the Chinese:

Catholic missionary imperialism, cosmographic science, and metaphysical speculation framed the particular goals of the Jesuit order. Founded in 1540 by Ignatius Loyola as an order of Counter Reformation teachers to evangelize at the geographical borders of Christendom, Jesuits located themselves just as earnestly at the frontiers of learning. Their colleges and seminaries housed magnificent libraries, especially in Rome, the center of Jesuit learning and calculation, with which a global network of correspondents communicated. Jesuits such as Christopher Scheiner and Giovanni Battista Riccioli, who illustrated six possible world systems, were major contributors to astronomical science. (Cosgrove)

It’s such a radical idea [a spherical world] that it has been ‘discovered’ only once, in Athens after 400 BCE. The concept of the Earth being round didn’t appear in any other civilisation. India and the Islamic world learnt it from the Greeks, while China had to wait until the Jesuits arrived in the 16th century and turned the Chinese view of the Universe upside down. (Hannam, “Atoms and flat-Earth”)

The spherical shape of the earth was discovered just once, in Athens in the fourth century BC. It took almost 2,500 years to be fully adopted all over the world. (Hannam, “Why are people”)

In 1644, the Jesuit scholar Adam Schall von Bell published a work of Western astrology in Chinese, the Tianwen Shiyong. Jesuit missionaries at the time were trying to ingratiate themselves with the Chinese state through their mastery of Western astronomy. Jesuits had submitted an astronomical globe to the Chongzhen Emperor in 1637, arousing interest in Western knowledge among court officials. (Astrology Through History)

The gifts that [the Jesuit Matteo] Ricci prepared for his calls on the most important figures were above all celestial and terrestrial globes of iron and copper that he constructed himself and copies of his map, objects that served to transmit Western culture and science and that helped him to initiate an invaluable form of communication. In showing the terrestrial globes to the Chinese, Ricci knew that he was revealing to them for the first time the fact that the earth was round, something accepted in the West but still unknown in China. In accordance with the most ancient cosmology (the Gai Tian, or theory of the “celestial hemisphere”), most Chinese were in fact still convinced that the earth was flat and square and was surrounded by the semispherical dome of the sky, in which the sun, the moon, and the planets were set. (Fontana)

Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia remained one of the last places to preserve traditional cosmology, until that changed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:

Throughout pre-modern Southeast Asia, the earth was presumed to be flat. In most regions this belief did not begin to fade until well into the nineteenth century, and in rural areas it could still be found even into the early twentieth century. (Suarez)

To adopt a spherical world, religious texts citing a flat world had to be reinterpreted as allegory:

Acceptance of the earth’s sphericity had to overcome religious objections, since Buddhist scriptures contained readily-perceived contradictions to a spherical world that needed to be interpreted anew before the flat earth model could be respectfully discarded. . . . Both Christianity and Buddhism rationalized discrepancies between canon and science in similar ways: the scriptures were meant to be taken literally only when it came to matters of spiritual truth; details of natural science are revealed figuratively and allegorically. Perhaps Buddha knew that the people to whom he preached were not yet capable of understanding such fantastic notions as a spherical earth, so it was better that he left such spiritually irrelevant matters aside. (Suarez)

This technique was employed by various notable figures of the Judeo-Christian world in centuries prior, including Philo Judaeus, Augustine, and Galileo Galilei. Philo was instrumental in marrying Greek philosophy to Judaism, and in turn Christianity; Augustine’s prominence has previously been discussed; Galileo, although hailed as a hero by some, was not very fond of the Bible and a future study will highlight those examples:

He [Philo] had benefited from a philosophical education that included readings in the Stoics and Aristotle but saved his passion for Plato. Much of his surviving work attempts to synthesize Plato’s philosophy with the Bible by imputing figurative meanings to the sacred text. For example, Genesis tells how God set angels to guard the Garden of Eden after he had expelled Adam and Eve. Philo allegorized the angels with reference to Greek astronomy. He suggested one of them was an allusion to the outer sphere of the cosmos turning from east to west, and the other to the inner planetary spheres that rotate from west to east. It’s clear Philo subscribed to the Aristotelian world picture: the seven planets orbit the Earth within a spherical universe. He accepted that Earth is a ball . . . . But he did not analyse or seek to refute the passages in the Bible that imply the Earth is flat. He was content to leave the issue undiscussed.

Philo’s acceptance of Greek natural philosophy, Globe and all, was not the norm among Jewish people of his time. (Hannam, The Globe: How)

At a risk of generalizing, the exegetes of Alexandria read their Bibles allegorically, looking for layers of meaning behind the plain sense of the text. Recall how the Jewish Alexandrian Philo pioneered this technique back in the first century AD. (Hannam, The Globe: How)

Philo was a Greek-speaking Jew, a member of a noble family who played a prominent part in civic affairs; he had received a comprehensive education and was widely read in Greek philosophy; he lived approximately from 25 BC to AD 45. . . . The larger part of his extensive writings consists of allegorical commentaries on Genesis and Exodus, with some other treatises on particular topics like creation and providence, and biographies of some biblical heroes. He sought to demonstrate that the Jewish scriptures in themselves were able to present not only divine truth but a liberal education; and by the use of allegory he claims that the precise wording of the biblical text, and even the names which it introduces, yield moral and spiritual guidance which coheres [harmonizes] with the philosophy of the contemporary Greek schools. (Stead)

There is no denying that a completely literal reading of the Bible strongly supports the stability of the earth and the movement of the sun. For example, Ecclesiastes 1:5 reads: ‘The sun also arises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it arose’, while Psalm 103:5 (104:5 to Protestants) reads ‘He [God] laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be moved forever.’ Back in the fourth century, St Augustine of Hippo had wrestled with the matter of what to do when the Bible and science said different things in his commentary on the book of Genesis. Genesis clearly conflicted with the best available Greek science of the time. . . . In his commentary he wrote:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens and the other elements of this world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and relative positions . . . Now it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of the Holy Scriptures, talking nonsense on these topics, and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

Augustine’s solution was to set out the circumstances when the Bible should be read in a figurative rather than literal sense.

Carefully developing these earlier ideas, Galileo showed that the Bible should not be read as a scientific document . . . . (Hannam, God’s Philosophers: How)

The Protestant Reformers

The Protestant Reformers inherited the cosmology of the Roman Catholic Church (the church they had split from). This cosmology (known at the time as Aristotelian cosmology, named after the Greek philosopher Aristotle) included a stationary spherical world at the center of all things with the celestial bodies moving around it:

The Aristotelian universe of celestial spheres originated in Athens [Greece], and centuries later was adopted by the Judaic–Christian–Islamic world. Outfitted with theistic additions of Babylonian and Zoroastrian origin, it evolved into the Medieval universe that survived until the sixteenth century. (Harrison)

The Reformers naturally rejected the notion of a solar system or heliocentrism, which displaced the world from the center. Neither of these two systems mentioned fully harmonized with Scripture, however, and both were the product of philosophers, going back to our old friend Pythagoras:

When Copernicus’s work [heliocentrism] first appeared it provoked religious objections, especially on Biblical grounds . . . from Luther and Melanchthon personally. One may suspect that unconscious prejudice had some part in this, and that the Aristotelian view of the universe [Greek cosmology] had become entangled with Christianity more closely than necessity dictated . . . . In any case, if the Old Testament was not Copernican, it was very far from being Ptolemaic [or Aristotelian] either. (Butterfield)

By consulting Luther’s and Calvin’s commentaries on Genesis 1 (searching for keywords like “sphere,” “spherical,” “globe,” “globular,” “orb,” “ball,” “round,” “flat,” “firmament,” “dome,” etc.), we can confirm their beliefs regarding the shape of the world. Luther wrote:

This thick and rude mass of mist or nebulosity, created out of nothing on the first day, God grasps by his Word and commands it to extend itself into the form and with the motion of a sphere. (Luther)

But a question here arises, what those waters are and how those bodies of water which are “above” the firmament are distinguished from those which are “under” the firmament. The division and distinction here made by philosophers is well known. They make the elements to be four; and they distinguish and place them according to their qualities. They assign the lowest place to the earth; a second place to the water; a third to the air; and the last and highest place to the fire. Other philosophers add to these four elements ether as a fifth essence. After this division and number of the elements, there are numerated seven spheres or orbs of the planets, and an eighth sphere of the fixed stars. And on these subjects it is agreed among all philosophers that there are four spheres of generating and corruptible principles; and also eight others of non-generating and incorruptible principles. (Luther)

The philosophers in general teach such things, to which the more modern theologians agree and add to these eight spheres two more,—the crystalline, glacial or aqueous heaven, and then the empyreal or fiery heaven. The Greeks however have discussed these themes much more elegantly and prudently than our scholars. For Ambrose and Augustine have had very childish thoughts. Therefore I praise Jerome because he simply passed over them in silence.

There are some who hold that the crystalline heaven is watery, because they think it is the waters of which Moses here speaks, and there the firmament or eighth sphere is added so that they be not consumed by their rapid and constant motion. But these are puerile thoughts, and I will rather confess that I do not understand Moses in this passage than that I should approve such illiterate thoughts. (Luther)

Philosophers have their disputes also concerning the center of the world and the circumfluent water. Indeed it is wonderful that they go so far as to determine the earth to be the center of the whole creation. And it is from this argument, that they conclude that the earth cannot fall; because it is supported from within by the other spheres surrounding it on every side. Hence according to these philosophers the heaven and all other spheres rest upon this center, by which support they themselves also derive their durability. It is well becoming us to know these arguments. But these philosophers know not that the whole of this stability rests on the power of the Word of God. (Luther)

Evidently, Luther did not comprehend how certain Greek ideas were supposed to reconcile with the Bible. He trusted in the popular philosophers, as everyone was conditioned to do. Calvin assumed a similar position:

We indeed are not ignorant, that the circuit of the heavens is finite, and that the earth, like a little globe, is placed in the center. (Calvin)

It is well again to repeat what I have said before, that it is not here philosophically discussed, how great the sun is in the heaven, and how great, or how little, is the moon; but how much light comes to us from them. For Moses here addresses himself to our senses, that the knowledge of the gifts of God which we enjoy may not glide away [be overlooked]. Therefore, in order to apprehend [understand] the meaning of Moses, it is to no purpose to soar above the heavens; let us only open our eyes to behold this light which God enkindles for us in the earth. By this method (as I have before observed) the dishonesty of those men [philosophers] is sufficiently rebuked, who censure Moses for not speaking with greater exactness. . . .

I have said, that Moses does not here subtilely descant [elaborate], as [like] a philosopher, on the secrets of nature, as may be seen in these words. (Calvin)

It is indeed true, that the air is never agitated by chance; and that God is to be acknowledged as the Author of even the least shower of rain; and it is impossible to excuse the profane subtlety of Aristotle, who, when he disputes so acutely concerning second causes, in his Book on Meteors, buries God himself in profound silence. (Calvin)

Like Luther, Calvin realized that the philosophers removed God from the equation and he was bothered by that. Notice Calvin’s words in the following statement:

Moses describes the special use of this expanse [the firmament], to divide the waters from the waters from which word arises a great difficulty. For it appears opposed to common sense, and quite incredible, that there should be waters above the heaven. Hence some resort to allegory, and philosophize concerning angels; but quite beside the purpose. (Calvin)

Calvin admits the Bible plainly describes a firmament or dome, holding back waters above, and that it proves difficult to grapple with because of what philosophers have already established. He states that some resort to turning the plain terms into allegory, a tactic popularized by Philo and continued by Augustine. In like manner, Luther felt the same about the firmament and the waters beyond it. Luther confessed:

Moses however speaks in the plainest possible terms, both of waters “above” and of waters “under” the firmament. Wherefore I here hold my own mind and judgment in captivity and bow to the Word, although I cannot comprehend it. (Luther)

But we Christians ought to meditate and think on these things and their causes differently from philosophers. Although there are some things which are beyond our comprehension, as for instance these waters that are “above” the firmament, all such things are rather to be believed with a confession of our ignorance than profanely denied, or arrogantly interpreted according to our shallow comprehension. It behooves us ever to adhere to the phraseology of the holy Scriptures, and to stand by the very words of the Holy Spirit, whom it pleased in this sacred narrative by his servant Moses, so to arrange the different parts of the great work of creation, as to place in the midst “the firmament;” . . . .

. . . We say also that all these things were thus created and maintained by the Word, and they can also by virtue of the power in the same Word be changed yet today; as all nature will finally be altogether transformed. Thus also it is contrary to the rule given that waters should be above the heaven or firmament, and yet the text affirms it.

To return therefore unto the principal matter before us; when any inquiry is instituted as to the nature of these waters, it cannot be denied that Moses here affirms that waters are “above” the heaven; but of what kind or nature these waters are, I freely confess for myself that I know not . . . . (Luther)

Newton and the force of gravity

It took nearly 1,700 years from the first century for the concept of gravity to be developed. This was needed to solve the problem of people falling off of a spherical world, among other things:

And how was it possible for Earth itself to revolve on its axis once in 24 hours without hurling all objects, including humans, off its surface? No known physics could answer these questions, and the provision of such answers was to be the central concern of the Scientific Revolution [with Newton].

The reception of Copernican astronomy amounted to victory by infiltration. By the time large-scale opposition to the theory had developed in the church and elsewhere, most of the best professional astronomers had found some aspect or other of the new system indispensable. (Spencer et al.)

This [the solution] was done by Newton who found the law of gravitation, which binds the heavenly bodies together, defines their motions and constitutes the “essential something” which escaped the ancient philosophers . . . . (Rufus)

And where did Newton find this law of gravitation? What is not obvious is that Newton was very much into the occult and the magical:

Newton’s studies of the occult and alchemy are what led him to the concept of gravity. (Britannica, “Isaac Newton”)

One of the first to realize the importance of Newton’s esoteric side was John Maynard Keynes, the leading twentieth-century economist and great collector of Newton’s alchemical writings, who in a paper read to the Royal Society in 1946 commented that ‘Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians …’ (Picknett and Prince)

Newton spent at least twenty years of his life investigating mystical pagan texts, many belonging to a mythic philosopher named Hermes Trismegistus; he will be discussed in detail in a separate study as even Copernicus mentions him in his writings:

Newton frequently cited Hermes Trismegistus in his alchemical and esoteric private writings and wrote a detailed commentary on the Emerald Tablet (which was considerably longer than the original). An American historian who specialized in Newton’s alchemy, Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, comments on the extent of Newton’s passion for Hermes explaining that ‘Newton’s study of Hermes Trismegistus extended over a period of at least twenty years, possibly longer.’ (Picknett and Prince)

The Emerald Tablet is a text belonging to Trismegistus that has startling similarities to Newton’s own concept of gravity. Newton translated the Tablet to English himself, which can be read below:

Separate thou the earth from the fire, the subtile from
the gross sweetly with great indoustry. It ascends from the
earth to the heaven & again it descends to the earth
& receives the force of things superior & inferior.

By this means you shall have the glory of the whole
world & thereby all obscurity shall fly from you.

Its force is above all force. For it vanquishes every
subtile thing & penetrates every solid thing.

So was the world created.

. . .

Hence I am called Hermes Trismegist, having the
three parts of the philosophy of the whole world

That which I have said of the operation of the Sun
is accomplished & ended. (“Keynes MS. 28”)

Trismegistus states in the Tablet that the secret “of the philosophy of the world” and “the operation of the sun” is found in “three parts”; Newton happened to invent three laws of motion. The Tablet also speaks of a force in relation to the sun and other things, stating it is “the force of things superior & inferior” and it “penetrates every solid thing”; Newton also happened to invent the law of gravitation. The law states:

. . . any particle of matter in the universe attracts any other with a force varying directly as the product of the masses and inversely as the square of the distance between them. (Britannica, “Newton’s law of”)

Does this not sound an awful lot like “the force of things superior & inferior”? Some sources are more observant than others in recognizing these influences:

Significantly, he [Newton] had read Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, and was thereby introduced to another intellectual world, the magical Hermetic tradition [of Hermes Trismegistus], which sought to explain natural phenomena in terms of alchemical and magical concepts. The two traditions of natural philosophy, the mechanical and the Hermetic, antithetical though they appear, continued to influence his thought and in their tension supplied the fundamental theme of his scientific career. (Westfall)

During his time of isolation, Newton was greatly influenced by the Hermetic tradition [of Hermes Trismegistus] with which he had been familiar since his undergraduate days. Newton, always somewhat interested in alchemy, now immersed himself in it, copying by hand treatise after treatise and collating them to interpret their arcane imagery. Under the influence of the Hermetic tradition, his conception of nature underwent a decisive change. (Westfall)

The story of an apple falling on Newton’s head and principally bringing him this discovery was very likely his own fabrication, perhaps to diminish the role that other things played in his life and work:

The story of the falling apple stimulating his thinking of about gravity was Newton’s own [invention]. (Picknett and Prince)

It is now recognized that it was not an apple falling on Newton’s head – or even less dramatically simply plumping to the ground in front of him – which gave him his eureka moment, but delving into the pages of the Hermetica [the writings of Hermes Trismegistus]. . . .

. . . the big resistance to his explanation of gravity was that many considered it to be too ‘occult’. His notion of gravity as a force that acts across space, at a distance, and does so in the way it does purely as a consequence of the nature of the universe, was drawn straight from the magical laws of sympathy and attraction as expounded in the Hermetica. (Newton put it more succinctly, declaring ‘Gravity is God’.) (Picknett and Prince)

On Newton’s death, 169 books on alchemy were found in his personal library – making up one-third of his collection. In fact, it transpires from all his writings that his main esoteric preoccupation was the quest for the philosopher’s stone . . . . (Picknett and Prince)

Often undervalued or ignored is the direct interplay of metaphysical and religious commitments on Newton’s scientific investigations. Deep-seated beliefs that gradually became more apparent guided both his personal and professional life. . . .

. . . [his studies] led to significant findings from 1664–1666 relevant for his developing concept of natural unity. In 1665, plague caused Cambridge to close for two years, during which time Newton worked as his own sole tutor. A falling apple, perhaps apocryphal, may have given Newton some insights into gravity during this period, but matters were hardly so effortless. (Henson)

As above, so below

The phrase “as above, so below” is derived from lines of the same Emerald Tablet and is often used by those involved in occultism:

That which is below is like that which is above & that which
is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one
only thing (“Keynes MS. 28”)

This phrase implies that what is up, is also down, a concept that becomes evident in a spherical world. The name of Pythagoras once again crops up here:

Alexander, in his Successions of Philosophers, reports the following doctrines as contained in the Pythagorean memoirs. The Monad is the beginning of everything. From this proceeds the Indefinite Dyad, which is subordinate to the Monad, as to its cause. From the Monad and the Indefinite Dyad proceed numbers. From numbers proceed points. From these, lines, of which plane figures consist. From these plane figures are derived solid bodies. From solid bodies are derived sensible bodies, of which there are four elements, fire, water, earth, and air. The world, which is endued with life and intellect, and which is of a spherical figure, in its center containing the earth, which is also spherical, and inhabited all over, results from a combination of these elements, and from them derives its motion. There are also antipodes [people on the bottom or sides], and what to us is below, is to them above. (The Pythagorean Sourcebook)

The secular world understands the Renaissance as the commingling of art and science, the ‘two cultures’ of C.P. Snow, but that view omits the third element so well represented in Pythagoras and the Neoplatonist tradition: spirituality. Pythagoras it seems was also the first to articulate that uniquely Renaissance idea: that of man as microcosm, also expressed in the image of ‘as above, so below’. (King)

Secret societies

Pythagorean ideals were also adopted by the secret societies of the eighteenth century. They looked again to the circle and sphere as shapes endowed with special significance. Former Librarian of Congress James H. Billington and science writer Kitty Ferguson explain:

Pythagoras, the semi-legendary Greek philosopher, provided a model for the intellectual-turned-revolutionary. He became a kind of patron saint for romantic revolutionaries, who needed new symbols of secular sanctity.

According to tradition, the great geometrician of antiquity [Pythagoras] was driven from Samos, Greece, in the sixth century B.C. to Crotona in Southern Italy, where he allegedly founded a religious-philosophical brotherhood to transform society. Radical intellectual reformers throughout antiquity periodically revived and embellished this tradition. Neo-Pythagoreans flourished in Alexandria in the second century B.C.; and a later group of Pythagoreans produced Apollonius of Tyana in the first century A.D., a wonder-working sage who was in his time a major rival to Christ. Though organized movements faded away, Pythagorean ideas recurred in medieval Christianity, which for a time represented Pythagoras as a hidden Jewish link between Moses and Plato.

An undercurrent of fascination with Pythagorean thought in the High Renaissance and Enlightenment came to the surface during the French Revolution. [Adam] Weishaupt’s [founder of the Illuminati] final blueprint for politicized Illuminism, written during the first year of the French Revolution, was entitled Pythagoras; and, as extremists sought some simple yet solid principles on which to rebuild society, they increasingly turned for guidance to Pythagorean beliefs in prime numbers and geometric forms. Early, romantic revolutionaries sought occult shortcuts to the inner truths of nature, and repeatedly attached importance to the central prime numbers of Pythagorean mysticism . . . .

However bizarre it may appear to later revolutionaries and historians alike, this Pythagorean passion seriously influenced the organizational activities of the first revolutionaries. . . .

. . . Occultists became politicians, and made special use of the two most important Pythagorean geometric symbols—the circle and the triangle—in dramatizing their challenge to established power. These two forms became symbols of divinity in medieval Christianity. They increasingly dominated the hieroglyphics of the higher Masonic orders—and the imagination of prerevolutionary utopian architects who often sought to build only with “geometric figures from the triangle to the circle.” Since many early leaders of the revolution saw themselves as mason-architects, they felt some affinity with this ongoing campaign to combat the aristocratic rococo style with the “rule of geometry.” Reassured by Newton’s law of gravity about the circular harmony of the universe, they felt that man’s mastery of mathematical laws made him “possessor of the secret of the solar universe” destined to organize human society rationally. At the same time, the proto-romantic philosophy of German occultism inspired many to see man not as a cog but as a dynamic “living point destined to become a circle” with a “field of vision comparable to a circle whose circumference grows without end.”

But before borders could expand, monuments had to be built in the center. The architectural plans for Paris during the early months of the revolution reveal a special fascination with the three-dimensional forms of the triangle and circle: the pyramid and the sphere. Two of the most important monuments proposed in 1791—to the glory of the French nation on the Bastille and to the memory of Mirabeau—were independently designed as giant pyramids. The pyramid form became even more popular after Napoleon’s return from Egypt, though it was soon superseded in public places by the more elongated obelisk. Even before the revolution, utopian architects had felt drawn to “the sublime magnificence of the sphere.” The pure form reappeared in the sketch for a Newton Memorial (a sphere with nothing inside except a small grave lit from a single beam of sunlight), a necropolis for the revolution (an empty globe in the middle of a cemetery), and a proposed Temple of Equality (a huge sphere on columns containing a smaller sphere inside). (Billington)

The later Pythagoreans had been the first school of classical antiquity systematically to contend that the earth and universe were spherical in shape and finite in form. . . . Eighteenth-century Pythagoreans were specially excited by the Illuminist idea of progressive human purification from the lower cycles of animal nature to the heavenly spheres of pure intelligence. The Illuminists’ hierarchy of circles—moving inward from “church” to “synod” to the Areopagite center—suggested the concentric circles in the universe itself. The flame at the center of the final, inner circle was assumed to be an image of the inner fire of the universe around which the earth and all planets revolved.

Occultists may not have always believed in such images literally, but they did usually feel that some secret inner circle held out the promise of both personal redemption and cosmic understanding. (Billington)

The obsession with Pythagoras did have something to do with the way revolutionary activities were organised, though this involved triangles and circles rather than prime numbers. The link revolutionary intellectuals made between Pythagoreans and the circle and sphere was not far-fetched. The Pythagoreans (as reflected, for instance, in the fragments of Philolaus) had been among the earliest to think in terms of a system in which the Earth and the universe were both spherical. Furthermore, Newton’s laws of gravity, which Newton himself had linked with Pythagoras, revealed a ‘circular harmony’. Another Pythagorean doctrine, the transmigration of souls, also suggested a circular movement, forever returning to begin again. Illuminist ‘Pythagoreans’ were fond of the idea that a purification process took place within the framework of this ‘circular’ transmigration of souls, beginning with the lowest forms of life, spiralling upward through the level of humanity to the divine spheres of pure rationality. The ‘rules of geometry’, as they called the laws behind such schemes, were appropriate for those who thought of themselves as the ‘mason-architects’ of a new society. The architect Pierre Patte argued that there was a superior morality about circular shapes because they were essentially more egalitarian and communal.

Accordingly, one way of organising Illuminist groups was in a hierarchy of concentric circles. A flame ‘at the centre’ represented the central fire around which Earth, Sun, and planets moved in the Pythagorean ten-body system. As one advanced in Illuminism, one progressed from the outer circles inward, freeing oneself from physical limitations to join, or rejoin, life in the inner circle or most heavenly sphere. (Ferguson)

In these diagrams a peculiar fire held the most special place at the center of a series of nested circles, symbolizing the ranks one would scale in the organization. Those who reached the innermost circle would reach this fire, the source of cosmic or ultimate understanding. These ideas were not new, but rehashes of old Pythagorean cosmology; the significance of this central fire and its relation to heliocentrism will be discussed in a separate study.

The main point

Copernicus openly states that the first step required to develop his cosmology (heliocentrism) was to convert the world to a sphere. This made it possible and more believable to set it in motion, given the uniform symmetry of a sphere, etc.:

Now that it has been shown that the Earth too has the form of a globe, I think we must see whether or not a movement follows upon its form and what the place of the Earth is in the universe. (Copernicus)

Here, again, Copernicus was echoing what the Pythagoreans had started approximately two thousand years before him:

The speculations of the Pythagoreans, though they had drifted into a wrong channel, had at least accustomed the minds of philosophers to the idea of the spherical earth, and after the time of Philolaus we hear nothing more of the crude notions of earlier ages. The influence of the Pythagoreans was widely felt, and it can be distinctly traced in the views on the system of the world held by the great Attic philosopher [Plato] . . . . (Dreyer)

Pythagoras is said to have been the first to insist the earth was not a flat disk but rather a sphere rotating on its own axis. Above all, he and/or his followers were responsible for deposing the earth from its magisterial rest at the center of the universe. In doing so, they declared the earth a planetes, or “wanderer,” which, along with the other nine heavenly bodies, orbited a central fire known as the “hearth of the universe.” The historical significance of these revolutionary views cannot be overstated, for they led directly to the advanced theories of Aristarchus of Samos and the fully developed heliocentrism of Copernicus . . . . (Soupios)

Philosopher and astronomer W. Carl Rufus also writes:

What then was the secret of his [Copernicus] success? In a quotation above [from his book,] one expression is a revelation. He refers to “the main point, which is the shape of the world, and the fixed symmetry of its parts.” . . . .

In the system proposed by Copernicus the world is spherical. The earth is also spherical as held by the Greeks after Pythagoras. (Rufus)

Conclusion

The belief in a spherical world emerged from number and geometry mysticism, introduced by Pythagoras and carried forward by his successors. The term “philosophers” appears once in Scripture (“G5386 - philosophos - Strong’s”) in the context of an encounter with paganism. Colossians 2:8 also warns of vain philosophies and seeking after mystical wisdom. There was opportunity for Christ and the disciples to endorse the teachings of Greek philosophers, which were well-known by the first century, yet none of them did. Paul plainly told the philosophers of Athens, “I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious” (Acts 17:22).

Some scholars who regard Pythagoras as a mathematician and rational cosmologist, such as Guthrie, admit that the earliest evidence does not support this view . . . . (Huffman)

Mathematics, in the sense of demonstrative deductive argument, begins with him [Pythagoras], and in him is intimately connected with a peculiar form of mysticism. (Russell)

Colossians 2:8
King James Version
Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.

Colossians 2:8
Modern English Version
Beware lest anyone captivate you through philosophy and vain deceit, in the tradition of men and the elementary principles of the world, and not after Christ.

Acts 17:21-22
King James Version
21 (For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.)

22 Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars' hill, and said, Ye men of Athens [philosophers], I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious.

Matthew 5:17-18
King James Version
17 Think not that I [Christ] am come to destroy the law, or the prophets [the Old Testament]: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.

18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law [the Old Testament], till all be fulfilled.

2 Peter 3:1-13
King James Version
1 This second epistle, beloved, I now write unto you; in both which I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance:

2 That ye may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets, and of the commandment of us the apostles of the Lord and Saviour:

3 Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts,

4 And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.

5 For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water [at the creation]:

6 Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water [at the flood], perished:

7 But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.

8 But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

9 The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

10 But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.

11 Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness,

12 Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat?

13 Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.

Isaiah 51:6
King James Version
Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look upon the earth beneath: for the heavens shall vanish away like smoke, and the earth shall wax old like a garment, and they that dwell therein shall die in like manner: but my salvation shall be for ever, and my righteousness shall not be abolished.

Matthew 24:35-39
King James Version
35 Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.

36 But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.

37 But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.

38 For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark,

39 And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.

Revelation 21:1-5
King James Version
1 And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.

2 And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

3 And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.

4 And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

5 And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.

Romans 1:17-22
King James Version
17 For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;

19 Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.

20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:

21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

Likewise, the story is told of how Pythagoras was indeed the first man to call himself a philosopher. Others before had called themselves wise (sophos), but Pythagoras was the first to call himself a philosopher, literally a lover of wisdom. (The Pythagorean Sourcebook)

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