Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 4 -- The Cross
As Etymologies strove to reconcile the world with Genesis, fossils were the remains from Noah's
flood.
Isidore’s opinion regarding springs and rivers was that of the Pliny the Elder (Chapter 3) who in
turn was repeating the Greeks.
Moreover that the sea does not increase, though it receives all streams and all springs, is
accounted for in this way; partly that its very greatness does not feel the waters flowing in;
secondly, because the bitter water consumes the fresh that is added, or that the clouds draw up
much water to themselves, or that the winds carry it off, and the sun partly dries it up; lastly,
because the water leaks through certain secret holes in the earth, and turns and runs back to
the sources of rivers and to the springs.
It's a wordy Ecclesiastes 1:7.
The abyss is the deep water which cannot be penetrated; whether caverns of unknown waters
from which springs and rivers flow; or the waters that pass secretly beneath, whence it is called
abyss. For all waters or torrents return by secret channels to the abyss which is their source.
Streamflow is thus a combination of rainfall and underground "secret holes."
Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius' (395-423 AD) had argued that
if rain doesn't fall toward the earth's center -- contrary to lore
regarding Columbus, scholars back to the Greeks recognized the
earth to be spherical -- precipitation missing the edges must
ascend toward the heavens. A scribe's illustration is to the right.
But such thought experiments were becoming lost to Platonic
disinterest as unexamined pathways of nature came to be put
forth as de-facto proof of physically-untestable divine law.
John the Scot (800-880) proposed in De Divisione Naturae (866) a sacred
steadiness in the course of all creation. Ecclesiastes 1:7 served his
argument against ungodly material progress,
Divine goodness... flows downward like a stream, first into the primordial
causes, bringing them into being. Next, continuing downward through
these primordial causes, ineffable in their workings, but still in harmony
with them, they flow from higher to lower, finally reaching the lowest
ranks of the All. The return flow is through the most secret pores of
nature by a most concealed path to the source.
Analogy to flow "through the most secret pores of nature by a most concealed path" may illustrate
John's opinion about divine goodness, but it is one more illustration of theology intermingled with
subterranean waters.
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