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CONTENDING IDEAS in WESTERN EUROPE (6 of 6)

While a few philosophers in Europe were busy justifying their Christianity, some others were working with their minds in ways that would change the world.

From the 6th century, textbooks supported the sphericity of the Earth. There was Boethius who wrote of the Earth as an insignificant point in the center of a spherical cosmos. There was Bishop Isidore of Seville (560 – 636) who had a widely read encyclopedia, The Etymologies, and he believed that the world was globular. The English scholar Bede wrote of the earth as "set like a sphere in the middle of the whole universe."

By the 11th century, Europeans had learned of Islamic astronomy, which revitalized Europe intellectually. Thomas Aquinas acquired access to Aristotle's ideas, and Aquinas concluded that the earth was a sphere. "On the Sphere of the World" was the title of the most influential astronomy textbook of the 13th century and required reading by students in all Western European universities.

Flat disk didn't make sense, neither did a flat world of any other shape. Nature beyond little things and bigger than local terrains had no edges. That was not general knowledge, but a view of the earth as flat raised the questions of where was the water of the oceans to fall and why didn't the oceans drain. And there were the sailors who saw mountains disappear below the horizon when they sailed away from shore. The earth being round was the best explanation of this.

By the time of Columbus, belief that the world was round was common sense. Other mentalities that made the voyage to the so-called New World possible were new ideas about sailing ships. Europeans borrowed changes that were made by the Chinese, who created the rudder, which replaced as a means of steering a long oar projecting from the stern. And as had the Chinese, in the 1400s a second mast was added, and then a third. By the end of the 1400s there would be ships with four masts carrying as many as eight sails. And there was the magnetic compass and an astrolabe for measuring the angle of celestial bodies from the horizon.

These technological changes put the world on a course of new global travel and international contacts. It was a major start toward a shrinking world unforeseen by those trying to describe human nature and the meaning of life.