The reply given by Aquinas—who respected the king, did not disdain, I believe, the odd glass of good wine at his table, and had proved that he could resist the temptations of women by chasing with a burning brand the naked courtesan whom his brothers had introduced into his bedroom to persuade him to become a Benedictine and not dishonor the family by donning the mendicant habit of the Dominicans—was, as usual, subtle and complex: wine, rulers, women, and truth are not comparable because “non sunt unius generis’ (they are not of one genus).
But if one considers them “per comparationem ad aliquem effectum (by comparing them in their effects), they all can move the human heart to some course of action. Wine acts on our corporeal aspect, “quod facitper temulentiam loqui” (since it makes us speak through drink), while our animal-sensitive nature can be swayed by “delectatio venerea’ (erotic pleasure), or in other words by a woman (Thomas could not conceive of sexual impulses on the other side that could legitimately move a woman, but we cannot expect Thomas to be Heloise). As for the practical intellect, it is obvious that the king’s wishes, or the rule of law, has power over it. But the only force that moves the speculative intellect is truth. And since ” vires corporales subiciuntur viribus animalibus, vires animales intellectualibus, et intellectuales practicae speculativis … ideo simpliciter Veritas dignior est et excellentior et fortior’ (bodily power is subject to animal powers, and our animal powers are inferior to intellectual strength, and practical intellectual strength is second to speculative intellectual power … then it is clear that truth is worthier, more excellent, and stronger).
Such then is the power of truth. But experience teaches us that truth often takes a long time to prevail, and the acceptance of truth costs blood and tears. Might it not happen that something dubious shows similar force, whereby it would be legitimate to talk of the power of the falsehood?
To show that the falsehood (not necessarily in the form of a lie, but certainly in the form of an error) has been the engine behind many historical events, I would have to appeal to a criterion of truth. But if I chose this in too dogmatic a manner, my discourse would run the risk of ending the very moment it began.
If one maintained that all myths, all revelations in every religion, were nothing but lies, then, since belief in gods, of whatever kind, has shaped human history, we could only conclude that we have been living for millennia under the rule of falsehood.
However, we would then be guilty not only of banal euhemerism: the fact is that this same skeptical argument would appear singularly related to its opposite argument about the importance of faith. If you believe in any revealed religion, you have to admit that if Christ is the Son of God, then he is not the Messiah that Jerusalem is still waiting for, and if Mohammed is Allah’s prophet, then it is an error to make sacrifices to the Plumed Serpent. If you are a follower of the most enlightened and indulgent theism, ready to believe at the same time in the Communion of Saints and the Great Wheel of the Tao, then you will reject as the fruit of error the massacre of infidels and heretics. If you are a worshipper of Satan, you will think the Sermon on the Mount puerile. If you are a radical atheist, no faith will be anything but a mistake. Consequently, since in the course of history many have acted in the belief of something that someone else did not believe in, we are obliged to admit that for each of us, in different measure, History has been largely a Theater of Illusions.
Let us stick, then, to a less contentious notion of truth and falsehood, even though it is philosophically contestable—but we all know that if we listened to philosophers everything would be contested, and we would never get anywhere. Let us stick to the criterion of scientific or historical truth that has been accepted by Western culture; in other words, to the criterion whereby we all accept that Julius Caesar was killed on the Ides of March, that on 20 September 1870 the troops of the young kingdom of Savoy entered Rome by the breach of Porta Pia, that sulphuric acid is H2SO4, or that the dolphin is a mammal.
Naturally each of these notions is liable to revision on the basis of new discoveries: but for the time being they are recorded in the Encyclopedia, and until proved otherwise we believe it to be a factual truth that the chemical composition of water is H2O (and some philosophers believe that this truth must hold true in all possible worlds).
At this point we can say that in the course of history it has been the case that credit has been given to beliefs and assertions that today’s Encyclopedia says are factually false; and such credit as to conquer the wise, cause the birth and collapse of empires, inspire poets (who are not always witnesses to truth), push human beings to heroic sacrifices, intolerance, massacres, or the search for truth. If that is so, how can we not assert that the power of falsehood exists?
The almost canonical example is that of Ptolemy’s hypothesis. Today we know that for centuries humanity accepted a false representation of the universe. It tried all possible tricks to make good the falsity of the image, it invented epicycles and deferents, in the end it tried with Tycho Brahe to have all the planets move around the sun provided that it continued to move around the earth. It was on the basis of this image that not just Dante Alighieri acted, which is not significant, but also the Phoenician navigators, Saint Brendan, Erik the Red, and Christopher Columbus (and one of the above was the first to reach America). Moreover, but on the basis of a false hypothesis, man managed to divide up the globe into parallels and meridian degrees, as we still do, only changing the first meridian from the Canaries to Greenwich.
The example of Ptolemy, which by association triggers the memory of Galileo’s unfortunate story, seems deliberately created to lead one to think that my history of falsehood and its power, in its secular boldness, only concerns cases where a dogmatic thought has refused to accept the light of truth. But let us consider a story of the opposite hue, the story of another false opinion, patiently constructed by modern secular thinking to defame religious thought.
Try an experiment, and ask an ordinary person what Christopher Columbus was aiming to prove when he wanted to reach the East by sailing to the West, and what the learned men of Salamanca obstinately denied in order to stop his voyage. The reply, in most cases, will be that Columbus thought the earth was round, while the wise men of Salamanca held that it was flat and that after a short while the three caravels would plunge into the cosmic abyss.
Nineteenth-century lay thought, irritated by the fact that the church had not accepted the heliocentric hypothesis, attributed the idea that the earth was flat to the whole of Christian thought (patristic and scholastic). Nineteenth-century positivism and anticlericalism went to town with this cliché, which, as Jeffrey Burton Russell has shown, was reinforced during the battle fought by the supporters of Darwin’s ideas against all forms of fundamentalism. * It was a question of proving that just as the churches had been wrong about the roundness of the earth, so they could be mistaken about the origin of species.
They then exploited the fact that a fourth-century Christian author like Lactantius (in his Institutiones Divinaé), who had no choice but to regard as correct many biblical passages in which the universe was described as being modeled on the Tabernacle, and therefore as a quadrangle, was opposed to pagan theories of the roundness of the earth, also because he could not accept the idea that the antipodes existed where men would have to walk with their heads upside down …
Finally it was discovered that a sixth-century Byzantine geographer, Cosmas Indicopleustes, in his Topographia Christiana, had maintained that the cosmos was rectangular, with an arch that curved over the flat floor of the earth (once more the archetype was the Tabernacle). In an authoritative book, History of the Planetary Systems from Thales to Kepler by J. L. E. Dreyer, it was admitted that Cosmas was not an official representative of the church, but a lot of space was given to his theory.† Although E. J. Dijksterhuis concedes in The Mechanization of the World Picture that Lactantius and Cosmas must not be considered representative of the scientific culture of the church fathers, he asserts that Cosmas’s theory became the prevailing opinion for many centuries to come.‡
The fact is that Lactantius was left to stew in his own juice by early and medieval Christian culture, and Cosmas’s text, written in Greek, and therefore in a language that the medieval Christian had forgotten, was made known to the Western world only in 1706, in Montfaucon’s Collectio Nova Patrum et Scriptorum Graecorum. No medieval author knew Cosmas, and he was regarded as an authority of the “dark ages” only after his work had been published in English in 1897!
Ptolemy knew, of course, that the earth was round; otherwise he
