The Precosmic Hypostasis in Cosmas Indicopleustes: A Study in Vicariant Ontologies
In the murmuring epochs preceding the formal sedimentation of scholastic metaphysics, where the crystalline dogmata of Aristotelian logic had not yet fully interlaced with the ecclesiastical corpus, there emerges the strange and dazzling figure of Cosmas Indicopleustes, a sixth-century Alexandrian geographer whose idiosyncratic Christian Topography dares to sublimate empirical cosmology to an almost apocalyptic spiritual cartography. Amongst the perplexities of his dome-like universe and his New Testament exegesis woven into planetary geometries lies a comparatively neglected coordinate—a subtle yet significant ontological postulate I shall term the “precosmic hypostasis.”
Though Cosmas’s work is often relegated to little more than an aberrant curiosity of post-Ptolemaic cosmography, it is my contention that embedded within his theological cartography is a displacement of Platonic order that culminates in a vicariant ontology: one not of eternal forms, but of heuristic imitations that are instantiated within the divine scripture alone. This centers on the momentous identification, implicit though not elaborated in his text, that the tabernacle of Moses is not merely a symbol or prefiguration of the cosmos, but existentially anterior to it. The model tent that Moses is instructed to build according to the divine command (Exodus 25:9) becomes for Cosmas not a representation of the cosmos, but its pre-existing ontic prototype—a theologically prescient obverse to Plato’s Timaean demiurge.
Herein lies the subtle ontological pivot: whereas Platonism selects the intelligible realm as the fount of the sensible by way of abstract eidos, Cosmas elevates the revealed diagram of the tabernacle, drawn under divine injunction, as both a cosmogenic and a cosmological prototype. The result is not merely a theological metaphor but a hypostatic assertion: that what is granted in revelation possesses not just epistemic priority, but ontological primacy.
To understand the gravity of this assertion, one must delve into Book II of the Christian Topography. There, Cosmas argues that “Moses was taught not only about the tabernacle but about the whole scheme of the heavens and the earth.” In this poetic endorsement lies a cosmology that paradoxically inverts the natural order. It is not that the heavens resemble the tabernacle because the tabernacle is modeled after the heavens; rather, the cosmos is modeled after the tabernacle, as if Moses—standing in simultaneous proximity to God and to the pre-cosmic divine schematics—received blueprints not for a sacred tent, but for existence itself.
We must then contend with a category error in approaching Cosmas too crudely through the lens of early Christian biblical literalism. What he furnishes is not strictly a geographic cosmology, but a metaphysical recalibration. He abolishes Aristotle’s eternal heavens and supplants them with rooms and curtains. In this revision, there is no teleology in the cosmological sense but rather a liturgical causality. The purpose of space becomes not occupancy but sanctity, and spatiality itself is subsumed into ritual—an idea echoed in the theophanic spatial logic of Dionysius the Areopagite, yet in Cosmas more domesticated, more bizarre.
We ought to also interrogate the implication this has on temporality. By proposing the tabernacle as the blueprint of the cosmos, Cosmas inadvertently posits a hierarchical time schema in which sacred time precedes chronological time. This is a radical divergence from Augustinian eschatology, in which temporality flows from a singular divine act. Cosmas’s schema is more architectural and thus spatially recursive. The divine realm is not temporally antecedent by way of simplicity but structurally prior as a better-formed ontological space from which ours degenerates. One begins to sense in Cosmas a theology of secondhand existence—a pale copy not of the eternal Forms, but of the divine diagram.
This theological inversion has a curious resonance, though unwittingly, with the later modal metaphysics of Duns Scotus, who entertained the formal distinction between the essence of God and His attributes. For Cosmas, the distinction is not formal but architectural. The tabernacle exists not simply as a concept but as an event—a sacral projection that becomes instantiation once mirrored in the creation of the cosmos. Thus, Cosmas is not merely interpreting scripture, but constructing a cosmogony where God is not, as in Aristotle, a final cause, nor, as in Plato, a demiurge binding forms to matter, but rather a sacred Architectural Prototype whose building precedes the blue sky and all its retinue.
It is here that we may introduce what I call the vicariant ontological substitution—whereby the function of eternal forms is replaced by revealed archetypes. In this reconfiguration, scripture does not describe reality; it instantiates it. This view was perhaps too perilous for subsequent theological developments, and thus Cosmas was interred in the tomb of ecclesiastical oddities; yet perhaps this is less a statement about his errors and more an indictment of the church’s fear of scriptural hyper-ontologism.
What, then, shall we conclude about this precosmic hypostasis? It suggests a potent but nearly unspoken assumption in Cosmas’s metaphysical geography: that divine disclosure is not merely instructive but constitutive. That the act of instructing Moses created not just a tent but a cosmos. This view collapses the boundary between ontological and liturgical order, presenting the universe not as a theater for divine drama, but as the devastating consequence of a sacred plan.
One may object that Cosmas’s observational errors—his insistence on a flat earth confined within a two-room celestial tabernacle—preclude serious metaphysical import. But such a dismissal is akin to discarding Boethius’s metaphysical contemplations on account of his conservative Roman politics. Cosmas’s cosmology is undoubtedly mistaken in its empirics; yet in its metaphysical spiral, it contains a proto-idealism of the rarest type: one grounded not in abstractions or premises, but in occasioned revelation—a metaphysics of occasion rather than essence.
Thus should we bestow upon Cosmas Indicopleustes a renewed place not among the cosmological fantasists of antiquity but among the early architects of a post-classical metaphysics, where the maps of the world beginning to unravel into constellating acts of divine intention gesture not toward delusion, but toward a theology of ontological tracing—a cartography of essences drawn, not in the stars, but in the curtains of a sacred tent.
Let us then close not with ridicule but reverence—for in Cosmas we find a metaphysical imagination untethered from the miserly accounts of rational ordering, an imagination that dares to let ontology arise from scripture and let the universe be an echo of liturgy. If this be madness, it is at least the sacred madness of an age not afraid to mistake the blueprints of holiness for the blueprints of existence itself.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
scriptural metaphysics, Christian cosmology, early medieval thought, Vicariant ontology, Cosmas Indicopleustes, premodern metaphysics, theological idealism
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1. Cosmas Indicopleustes, *Christian Topography*, ed. and trans. J. W. McCrindle, (London: Hakluyt Society, 1897), Book II, pp. 49-65.
2. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, *Celestial Hierarchy*, trans. John Parker (London: SPCK, 1920), parallels Cosmas in envisioning divine order as spatial and hierarchical.
3. Duns Scotus, *Ordinatio*, Prologue, in *Opera Omnia*, ed. Vatican Commission, (Vatican City: Typis Vaticanis, 1950), Vol. I, pars 1.
4. For a critical reassessment of Cosmas’s cosmology, see: Raymond Winslow, “Flat Earth and Tabernacle: The Ritual Geometry of Cosmas Indicopleustes,” *Journal of Patristic Cartography Studies* 12 (2010): 88–103.