Did Pope Zachary infamously condemn St. Virgil for believing that people might live on the opposite side of the Earth? Blaise Pascal mentions this in his discourse on Sts. Augustine and Aquinas regarding matters of fact and science (click here for it, from the Faith & Science Resource Center here at VaticanObservatory.org); he refers to “the letters of excommunication of Pope Zachary against St. Virgil for maintaining the existence of our Antipodes”. Antipodes are people living on the opposite side of the globe from us. Pascal was criticizing those who reject scientific ideas on religious grounds.
I think this story is a misinterpretation of what Pope Zachary (who reigned 741-752) said.
What did Pope Zachary say? According to John Carey in his paper “Ireland and the Antipodes: The Heterodoxy of Virgil of Salzburg” (Speculum, Vol. 64, No. 1, 1989), Zachary said:
De perversa autem et iniqua doctrina, quae contra Deum et animam suam locutus est, si clarificatum fuerit ita eum confiteri, quod alius mundus et alii homines sub terra sint seu sol et luna, hunc habito concilio ab aecclesia pelle sacerdotii honore privatum.
(An older source for Zachary’s words, the 1644 Conciliorvm omnivm generalivm et provincialivm Collectio Regia, Volume 17 (Paris) says the words are “qui contra Deum”, but that does not change things too much.) In an article on the “Warfare of Science III” in the August 1891 issue of The Catholic World, Augustine F. Hewit, S.J. translates Zachary’s Latin as:
Concerning his [St. Virgil’s] perverse and bad doctrine, by which he has spoken against God and his own soul, if it is made clear that he has professed that there is another world under the earth, with other men having another sun and moon, let him be expelled from the church by a council and deprived of the honor of the priesthood.
Why would Hewit be writing about this, in a series of articles called the “Warfare of Science”? Probably because Andrew Dickson White had told the Virgil story in his 1876 book, The Warfare of Science, as an illustration of the Catholic Church rejecting a scientific idea. The subject of Virgil had also featured in John Elliot Drinkwater Bethune’s 1832 book Life of Galileo (of course… Galileo!):
Those who saw nothing in the punishment of Galileo but passion and blinded superstition, took occasion to revert to the history of a similar blunder of the Court of Rome in the middle of the eighth century. A Bavarian bishop name Virgil… had asserted the existence of Antipodes, which excited in the ignorant bigots of his time no less alarm than did the motion of the earth in the seventeenth century.
Hewit explains the problem Zachary would have had with Virgil’s idea:
There is no question here of the rotundity of the earth or the antipodes in our sense of the word. The censure falls upon the opinion that there is another race of men in the opposite hemisphere. The inhabitants of this opposite hemisphere are called antipodes in the ancient authors, and not the hemisphere itself. Why was the assertion that such a race existed denounced as contrary to the doctrine of the Scriptures? Because it was supposed to be contrary to the doctrine of the unity of the human race, which pertains to the Christian faith, inasmuch as it is an essential dogma that all men fell in Adam and are redeemed in Christ. Now, the ancient Greeks, who had discovered the sphericity of the earth, supposed that the habitable regions opposite to their own were separated from them by an impassable burning zone, or by one of ice, or of water. This notion was transmitted to the Christian generations. So long as it prevailed there was no room for regarding the antipodes as descendants from Adam, who had colonized the opposite hemisphere from Asia. Hence, to assert their existence was equivalent to a denial of the unity of the human race. But, as soon as it was discovered that all parts of the globe are accessible and can have been peopled by descendants of Adam, the apparent contradiction between the assertion of the existence of antipodes and the doctrines of the faith disappeared. Virgil may have convinced Pope Zachary that he was right, a very probable conjecture which accounts fully for the fact that the impeachment of his orthodoxy was quashed, and that he was promoted to the episcopate and canonized.
(On a side note, this matter of the unity of man comes up in the new book by Br. Guy Consolmagno and me that is coming out next month, When Science Goes Wrong: The Desire and Search for Truth—click here for more on that book.)
The shape of the Earth, says Hewit, was not an issue:
The fathers of the church, whose language about antipodes is explained by what has gone before, did not generally reject the sphericity of the earth, much less condemn it as contrary to the Scriptures. Lactantius and Cosmas Indicopleustes do not represent the patristic doctrine, and even they do not censure the doctrine of the sphericity of the earth on the score of dogma. Origen, Ambrose, Augustine, Hilary, Gregory Nyssen, Gregory Nazianzen, James of Edessa, Isidore of Seville, and Ven. Bede either treat the question as one which is open to free discussion, or speak, respectively, with more or less of a leaning to the cosmographic system of Ptolemy.
However, my feeling here is that antipodes are not at all what Pope Zachary had in mind. Carey provides this quote from Manilius’s first-century poem Astronomy, line 384-386, as an example of an ancient writer talking about antipodes:
Another part of the world lies under the waters, inaccessible to us;
there, there are unknown races of men, and unvisited realms,
drawing a shared light from a single sun.
(Cary erroneously cites this as coming from Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things—although Lucretius does mention the same ideas.)
This is different from what Zachary is saying in regard to Virgil. Zachary is talking about the idea of another sun and moon and earth and people. Zachary is talking about an entire subterranean universe. He thinks Virgil is proposing that within the Earth is an entire universe.
Recall that the astronomy of the time was geocentric. Earth was at the center, surrounded by the moon, sun, planets, and the sphere of stars. It was plausibly a spherical universe. Well, you could imagine a universe like that inside our spherical Earth.
Suppose you drill down 200 miles and encounter… the stars of another universe! At the center of that universe is another tiny Earth, orbited by another sun and moon (and planets). This could go on indefinitely. There could be another universe inside that Earth, and another within that, and downward and smaller ad infinitum. Likewise, the starry sphere surrounding our Earth could be inside another Earth, and that Earth inside another, upward and larger ad infinitum. Needless to say, this idea would be practically impossible to test scientifically. I think Pope Zachary thought Virgil was talking about a multiverse!
If this seems nutty for an eighth-century pope, consider that Albert of Saxony, bishop of Halberstadt from 1366-1390, talked about this exact sort of thing:
Worlds can be imagined simultaneously which are [concentric]…. Indeed, they would be concentric if beyond the last heaven of our world we should imagine an earthy orb, and beyond that an aqueous orb, and beyond that an airy orb, and beyond that a fiery orb, and beyond that celestial orbs like the celestial orbs of our world; or, if inside our earth, it could be imagined that the aggregate of celestial orbs was contiguous with the concavity of the orb of our earth and within this aggregate of super-celestial orbs, four elements could be imagined, just as in our world. And so, by ascending and descending, an infinite number of concentric worlds can be imagined.
If a bishop can think this up in the fourteenth century, why not a pope in the eighth (or, if the idea was St. Virgil’s, another bishop, since Virgil went on to become bishop of Salzburg)? I don’t think Pope Zachary condemned St. Virgil for believing that people might live on opposite side of the Earth; I think he was condemning the idea of universes inside of Earth!
