Above the firmament or these superior waters was the third heaven, or the empyream, to which St. Paul was caught up. The firmament was a sort of demi-vault which came close down to the earth.
It is clear that, according to this opinion, there could be no antipodes. Accordingly, St. Augustine treats the idea of antipodes as an absurdity; and Lactantius, whom we have already quoted, expressly says "can there possibly be any persons so simple as to believe that there are men whose heads are lower than their feet?" etc.
St. Chrysostom exclaims, in his fourteenth homily, "Where are they who pretend that the heavens are movable, and that their form is circular?"
Lactantius, once more, says, in the third book of his "Institutions," "I could prove to you by many arguments that it is impossible heaven should surround the earth."
The author of the "Spectacle of Nature" may repeat to M. le Chevalier as often as he pleases, that Lactantius and St. Chrysostom are great philosophers. He will be told in reply that they were great saints; and that to be a great saint, it is not at all necessary to be a great astronomer. It will be believed that they are in heaven, although it will be admitted to be impossible to say precisely in what part of it.
Infernum, subterranean; the regions below, or the infernal regions. Nations which buried the dead placed them in the inferior or infernal regions. Their soul, then, was with them in those regions. Such were the first physics and the first metaphysics of the Egyptians and Greeks.
The Indians, who were far more ancient, who had invented the ingenious doctrine of the metempsychosis, never believed that souls existed in the infernal regions.
The Japanese, Coreans, Chinese, and the inhabitants of the vast territory of eastern and western Tartary never knew a word of the philosophy of the infernal regions.
The Greeks, in the course of time, constituted an immense kingdom of these infernal regions, which they liberally conferred on Pluto and his wife Proserpine. They assigned them three privy counsellors, three housekeepers called Furies, and three Fates to spin, wind, and cut the thread of human life. And, as in ancient times, every hero had his dog to guard his gate, so was Pluto attended and guarded by an immense dog with three heads; for everything, it seems, was to be done by threes. Of the three privy counsellors, Minos, Æacus, and Rhadamanthus, one judged Greece, another Asia Minor--for the Greeks were then unacquainted with the Greater Asia--and the third was for Europe.