Christian Topography Of Cosmas

Author : E. O. Winstedt
Publisher : CreateSpace
ISBN 13 : 9781496119674
Total Pages : 398 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (196 download)

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Download or read book The Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes written by E. O. Winstedt and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-03-01 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A review from Nature, Vol. 84: THE “Christian Topography” of Kosmas Indikopleustes is a very peculiar work. As a monument-of literary style it is precious, for it shows us what terrible rubbish, what wandering and discursive twaddle, people were already writing in the sixth century, when the mental degeneration of the Middle Ages (more properly called the "Dark Ages") had hardly yet set in. As a geographical landmark it is also precious, for the author, twaddlemonger as he was, went to various parts of the East beyond the ken of the ordinary man of the time, and his descriptions of the Somali coast, of Coromandel, and of Ceylon, which he apparently visited himself, in the sixth century, are in the highest degree interesting and valuable. Finally, as a work of unintentional humour, it is beyond price. Of course, the humour of it would not be apparent to all, and it is perhaps irreverent (to the sixth century, which is now somewhat venerable) to direct the reader's attention to this feature of this peculiar work. Yet, since the editor himself indulges in a hearty laugh over the poor old “Christian Topographer," perhaps the reviewer may be allowed to do so too. 'At any rate, he sins- in the most authoritative company, and if the editor treats his subject (as Mr. Winstedt does) something after the style of Mark Twain and the Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, the reviewer must not be censured if he frivolously suspects the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press of having produced a humorous book.For, really, Mr. Winstedt's introduction to Kosmas is pitched in rather too humorous a tone. Such a quotation as "they didn't know everything down in Judee" (p. 15) is a fault of taste, and one can imagine the bewilderment of a French or German scholar at such an unintelligible sentence as “when he can momentarily get free from the obsession of his King Charles' head—the ' great cosmographer Moses '”! (p. 9). Mr. Winstedt presumably intended this book to be of use to international science, but if so, why has he so ill-advisedly interlarded his otherwise most learned and interesting introduction with comic relief only comprehensible to Englishmen or Americans who know their Dickens and Mark Twain? Kosmas is funny enough of himself without any editorial attempt to make him funnier by means of jarring modern jests, and Mr. Winstedt may be permitted to enjoy, as he does without spoiling things, the good man 's explanation of why the Creation took six days when the Deity could ex hypothesi have done it at a single coup if He had liked; the reason is that the angels were such weak-minded creatures that if He had created everything all at once they would not have understood it at all, so He took six days about it for their sake, in order that they might fully comprehend how it was done in all seriousness and devoutness. But it shows how weak-minded people were themselves already becoming as early as the sixth century. To a civilised man of three centuries before, the idea would have seemed as comic as it does to us. The stupidity of the Dark Ages is already in full blast in the mind of Kosmas the Indian-farer. “What scholar (as the editor quotes from Marion Crawford's ' With the Immortals ') has not laughed at the idea of Kosmas, the Alexandrian, that the sun retired behind a mountain to spend the night? And that the earth, the ocean, and the fabulous mountain were all included and enclosed in a luminous oblong box of the exact shape of the tabernacle of Moses?" ....