Perhaps the most fatal argument lay in the express contradiction, by the Old Testament account of the Creation, of the Hellenic idea of an eternally recurrent universe.[215] Neoplatonist and Peripatetic alike had denied that there ever had been a first day or a first Great Year.[216] Yet the words of Scripture are very definite and very explicit: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” Neither Christian nor Jew could question the meaning of these words nor think otherwise than that all things were created at a certain fixed and calculable point in time or else, following Augustine, that the universe and time were created simultaneously. In spite of these fatal objections, neither the Great Year theory nor astrology perished completely in the Middle Ages. Lingering on underground, they gave an heretical and pagan tinge to the thought of many a philosopher and theologian during our twelfth and thirteenth centuries and thereafter.[217] THE CREATION Even the Scriptural history of the Creation did not wholly satisfy the inquiring curiosity of theologians or philosophers. One of the primary problems dealt with by scholars was the problem of the first chapters of Genesis. This inquiry led into the domain of metaphysics and theology: through it men hoped to arrive at an understanding of the nature of God and of his relation to the universe, to time, and to man. It also led to innumerable speculations about the actual manner in which the will of God operated in fashioning the world and to discussions of this question from very diverse points of view—literal, allegorical, transcendental. Indeed, there were even a few writers, notably the Venerable Bede, who went so far as to try to reconcile a physical conception of the processes of creation with the account given in the Bible[218] and who thus prepared the way for more rationalistic studies of the Works of the Six Days in the centuries which were to follow. _SHAPE AND SIZE OF THE EARTH_ EARLY CHRISTIAN BELIEF IN A FLAT EARTH Prevalent among most peoples in an early stage of their intellectual development is the natural and obvious theory that the earth is a flat disk covered by a dome-shaped heaven. This view was held by the Assyrians, Chaldeans, Egyptians,[219] and, as we saw in the first chapter, by the early Greeks; it was long believed by the Jews[220] and is found in the Koran;[221] it was undoubtedly reflected in the words of Scripture, although what is said there on the subject is by no means definite and occurs in connections wholly incidental to other subjects. We read in Isaiah (xl, 22):[222] “It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.”