We have a good idea what Cosmas was attacking—that is, what drove him to say such ridiculous things. The leading philosopher in Alexandria was a man we call John Philoponos. Philoponos is a nickname—“lover of toil,” literally—given to people marked for their zeal for Christianity. In both Beirut and Alexandria, the two great university cities of the eastern Mediterranean, the philoponoi were, in the words of one scholar, “rather officious and pious intellectuals, bent on sniffing out the remains of pa- ganism”2. In John Philoponos’s case, intellect and zeal took him to the heights of academe, where his reputation was assailed from several directions. All philosophy of this time was at least nominally Platonic, though the follower of Socrates might have had difficulty recognizing his ideas in their “modern” or what we later termed “neo-Platonic” form, and Philoponos was quite modern. He was also, as many Alexandria philosophers before him had been, going back to Clement of Alexandria over 300 years earlier, Christian.
When Cosmas expresses outrage over this combination of new reli¬gion and old philosophy, he is the crank and Philoponos the establishment figure. Philoponos, a man of substance whose work we have come to appreciate more and more with each generation of scholarship,3 taught that the world was a sphere, an idea descending from the best traditions of Alexandrine science. This earned him criticism from Cosmas the flat- earther, and also the more thoughtful rebuke of Simplicius of Athens, a traditionalist philosopher not much taken with Christianity. Simplicius attacked Philoponos for refusing to accept that the world was eternal—for insisting that it had a created beginning and would also have an end Just a Christian. No matter that for the wrong reasons Philoponos was closer to correct about the world than either of his main critics: being right is rarely enough to win the day for philosophers.
Philoponos and Cosmas
We now must leave Philoponos and Cosmas at their loggerheads, for we have no other texts that allow us to overhear them wrangling, though at some remove they must have continued to do so. Philoponos moved increasingly from philosophy to pure theology after writing his books on the (non-)eternity of the world in the 530 s. At just about the time Cosmas crafted his Christian Topography at the end of the 540s, Philoponos wrote an extensive commentary “on the creation of the world.” He lived and worked another twenty years, producing a book on the trinity in about 567, before he disappears from view. Cosmas vanishes as well, but we can allow his afterimage to linger in the pages that follow, a man of broad horizons if narrow mind. We will meet others like him.
