The Ancient Universe in Religion

We might not realize it, but the Christian culture of today carries with it a footprint of the spiritual universe of the Ancient Mediterranean world. Although modern scientific models overlay most of our ideas about what the universe looks like, the pagan, Christian, and Jewish religions of Ancient Rome had undergone a sort of revolution by the third century, and the echos of that shaped the views of millions afterward.

The image on the left shows the spiritual cosmos that emerged in the Ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian minds. A hard dome prevented the oceans of the heavens above — our blue skies — from crashing down onto our flat earth. Gods dwelled in specific temples and the religions focused on each person knowing their place in the “cosmic hierarchy” and keeping to it. Religious studies scholar Johnathan Z Smith called this the “locative universe”.

In contrast with this view is what we see on the left side of the picture — the sphere of earth in the center, with ever larger celestial spheres surrounding, holding the various planets and eventually the fixed stars. The most changeable material lay at the center, turgid and problematic. The further out, the more permanent the universe became, with the deities outside the spheres altogether. This was Smith’s “utopian” universe, and it got popularized after the breakup of Alexander’s Empire in the Hellenistic period.

Later Ancients — whether Jewish, pagan, or eventually Christian — borrowed this model, which got interwoven with the scientific picture of the universe in varying degrees. The fact that the spiritual and physical cosmos were to interlinked goes a long way to explaining why Galileo’s ideas were so very difficult for people to stomach in the 16th and 17th centuries.