Was the Earth created with or without mountains? A strange question, perhaps, but one that nonetheless occupied the residents of the Jesuit college of Coimbre, France, for the better part of the year 1592, when the gold-rich mountains of the newfound Americas and of Asia were much on the European mind.
Using twists and turns of logic and complex arguments of faith, the seminarians argued pro and con, invoking such contradictory sources as their near-contemporary St. John of the Cross, who urged seekers after the truth to retreat to “solitary places, which tend to lift up the soul to God, like mountains, which furnish no resources for worldly recreations,” and the Old Testament prophets, who conversely regarded mountains as frightful places capable of settlement only by Yahweh and assorted demons. But in the end, having determined that the mountains brought living humans as close as they could ever come to the heavens, the Jesuits of Coimbre ruled that mountains were evidence of the earth’s perfection as the creation of an infallible God. So the matter rested. Only a century later would it be revived, briefly, when the Protestant theologian Thomas Burnet countered that the earth was inherently “confused by Nature” and that the mountains were “Ruines and Rubbish on a dirty little planet.”
Ruins and rubbish, the flatlander’s world view, the notions of someone who has little use for alternate realities. We have since his time made room in our mental and spiritual worlds for mountains, and Burnet has few modern supporters, I suspect, with the notable exception of the confirmed city dweller and sophisticate Roland Barthes, a sometimes Catholic, sometimes Marxist, always interesting literary critic who sniffed at the “Helvetico-Protestant morality” of mountain lovers while arguing that qualities like verticality, “so contrary to the bliss of travel,” are the heaven of the Michelin Blue Guide but the hell of ordinary mortals. Poor misguided soul, Barthes was run down while trying to cross a busy Paris street, miles away from the nearest mountain of any account, safe from the imagined terrors of the Alps.
The Swiss Alps at the Sihlsee. Photograph by Gregory McNamee.
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