It likened all phenomena, natural and spiritual, to human acts.  It saw in the Almighty, the Eternal, only a gigantic man.

The patristic philosophy.  As to the earth, it affirmed that it is a flat surface, over which the sky is spread like a dome, or, as St. Augustine tells us, is stretched like a skin.  In this the sun and moon and stars move, so that they may give light by day and by night to man.  The earth was made of matter created by God out of nothing, and, with all the tribes of animals and plants inhabiting it, was finished in six days.  Above the sky or firmament is heaven; in the dark and fiery space beneath the earth is hell.  The earth is the central and most important body of the universe, all other things being intended for and subservient to it.

As to man, he was made out of the dust of the earth.  At first he was alone, but subsequently woman was formed from one of his ribs.  He is the greatest and choicest of the works of God.  He was placed in a paradise near the banks of the Euphrates, and was very wise and very pure; but, having tasted of the forbidden fruit, and thereby broken the commandment given to him, he was condemned to labor and to death.

The descendants of the first man, undeterred by his punishment, pursued such a career of wickedness that it became necessary to destroy them.  A deluge, therefore, flooded the face of the earth, and rose over the tops of the mountains.  Having accomplished its purpose, the water was dried up by a wind.

From this catastrophe Noah and his three sons, with their wives, were saved in an ark.  Of these sons, Shem remained in Asia and repeopled it.  Ham peopled Africa; Japhet, Europe.  As the Fathers were not acquainted with the existence of America, they did not provide an ancestor for its people.

Let us listen to what some of these authorities say in support of their assertions.  Thus Lactantius, referring to the heretical doctrine of the globular form of the earth, remarks:  “Is it possible that men can be so absurd as to believe that the crops and the trees on the other side of the earth hang downward, and that men have their feet higher than their heads?  If you ask them how they defend these monstrosities, how things do not fall away from the earth on that side, they reply that the nature of things is such that heavy bodies tend toward the centre, like the spokes of a wheel, while light bodies, as clouds, smoke, fire, tend from the centre to the heavens on all sides.  Now, I am really at a loss what to say of those who, when they have once gone wrong, steadily persevere in their folly, and defend one absurd opinion by another.”  On the question of the antipodes, St. Augustine asserts that “it is impossible there should be inhabitants on the opposite side of the earth, since no such race is recorded by Scripture among the descendants of Adam.”  Perhaps, however, the most unanswerable argument against the sphericity of the earth was this, that “in the day of judgment, men on the other side of a globe could not see the Lord descending through the air.”