There can be few books which have attracted more derision, mixed with wonder, than the Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes. It advances the idea that the world is flat, and that the heavens form the shape of a box with a curved lid. The author cites passages of scripture which he distorts wildly in order to support his thesis, and attempts to argue down the idea of a spherical earth by stigmatizing it as 'pagan.' The approach to scripture is discreditable, and the conclusion made simply wrong.The book is often cited as evidence that Christianity introduced the idea of the flat-earth into the world, and brought in the age of ignorance. This is hardly fair, since Cosmas does not represent a mainstream of any kind, personally or spiritually. The latter pages of his work are devoted to rebutting the criticism of his fellow-monks, that what he was saying was wrong.
It almost makes current political discourse look sensible. I almost made it through Book 1.
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