The error of Theodore

I was out for a week (in spirit if not in spacetime). [I may or may not retro-fill content for that past week.UPDATE 6/24 - done] In the meantime I've had the "flat earth" knocking around my noggin. Like: a few weeks ago I leafed through Death Ratio'd, a comic on "cancel culture" (which culture, Munro famously supported, against the Brave browser's founder). A sub-point is how the Internet facilitates shared-delusion. Flat-earth is one, lately floated by no less a light than Vox Day. Vox Day is in eminent company, it turns out; much as Christian apologists like Tim O'Neill dislike it.

I have in mind the Antiochene School. Apologists like to imply that Cosmas was a lone crank. He was not. He was preceded by Lactantius in the West and by John Chrysostom in Constantinople. John in turn could count on Theodore of Mopsuestia and on Diodore of Tarsus.

Which is not to say that the flat-earth became normative, at least among the orthodox. Theodore's tract/homily on Creation dropped out of the copyists' scriptoria. John the Philopon of Alexandria in the late AD 500s would attack the flat earth as the easily-debunked silliness it was and is. Here out West, Lactantius found few takers in Latin or Irish. This despite our bias toward Antioch against Alexandria, down to our choice of Gospels basically Chrysostom's.

Back to the 400s Nestorius, whom the Oriental Church would hoist as confessor and mascot for some critical centuries, is not recorded as promoting this doctrine; his views may or may not have extended to Creation. As far as I know Cyril of Alexandria never mooted it against Nestorius. Nestorius was in Christology keen for some formula as would not provoke a schism. I suspect both took an Augustinian tack, hoping to avoid the issue entirely. As for the Cyril/Hypatia controversy, overblown as it be: likewise I hear nothing about the curvature of the Earth.

The Oriental branch more followed Theodore himself. This leads me to the Alexander Neshana. This text is Syriac, not Palaestinian. That Alexander could traverse this world under Heaven in the sign of the Cross would, to me, assume a flat world. In the context of Heraclius' appeal to the Christian "fifth-column" across the Euphrates, this is suggestive for Oriental acceptance of Theodore here also, even into the seventh century.