Other fathers thought the stars abiding-places of the angels, and that stars were moved by angels. The Gnostics thought the stars spiritual beings governed by angels, and appointed not to cause earthly events but to indicate them. As to the heavens in general, the prevailing view in the Church was based upon the scriptural declarations that a solid vault--a "firmament"--was extended above the earth, and that the heavenly bodies were simply lights hung within it. This was for a time held very tenaciously. St. Philastrius, in his famous treatise on heresies, pronounced it a heresy to deny that the stars are brought out by God from his treasure-house and hung in the sky every evening; any other view he declared "false to the Catholic faith." This view also survived in the sacred theory established so firmly by Cosmas in the sixth century. Having established his plan of the universe upon various texts in the Old and New Testaments, and having made it a vast oblong box, covered by the solid "firmament," he brought in additional texts from Scripture to account for the planetary movements, and developed at length the theory that the sun and planets are moved and the "windows of heaven" opened and shut by angels appointed for that purpose. How intensely real this way of looking at the universe was, we find in the writings of St. Isidore, the greatest leader of orthodox thought in the seventh century. He affirms that since the fall of man, and on account of it, the sun and moon shine with a feebler light; but he proves from a text in Isaiah that when the world shall be fully redeemed these "great lights" will shine again in all their early splendour. But, despite these authorities and their theological finalities, the evolution of scientific thought continued, its main germ being the geocentric doctrine--the doctrine that the earth is the centre, and that the sun and planets revolve about it.(40) (40) For passage cited from Clement of Alexandria, see English translation, Edinburgh, 1869, vol. ii, p. 368; also the Miscellanies, Book V, cap. vi. For typical statements by St. Augustine, see De Genesi, ii, cap. ix, in Migne, Patr. Lat., tome xxiv, pp. 270-271. For Origen's view, see the De Principiis, lib. i, cap. vii; see also Leopardi's Errori Populari, cap. xi; also Wilson's Selections from the Prophetic Scriptures in Ante-Nicene Library, p. 132. For Philo Judaeus, see On the Creation of the World, chaps. xviii and xix, and On Monarchy, chap. i. For St. Isidore, see the De Ordine Creaturarum, cap v, in Migne, Patr. Lat., lxxxiii, pp. 923-925; also 1000, 1001. For Philastrius, see the De Hoeresibus, chap. cxxxiii, in Migne, tome xii, p. 1264. For Cosmas's view, see his Topographia Christiana, in Montfaucon, Col. Nov. Patrum, ii, p. 150, and elsewhere as cited in my chapter on Geography.