domain that increasingly demands the term “spatial” rather than “placial.” Where this latter term implies something strictly contained, the heavens, taken as a spatial whole, are uncontained. Regular and steady enough in their appearance and motions to provide a stable region of reference for everything here below, as unbounded they lead outward beyond themselves into what can be regarded only as unending space.
In this way we rejoin the second question raised above: In (or into) what would the cosmos move if it were to move at all? Where would the system of fixed reference be if it were itself to be displaced? If it is anywhere, it is in space. Moreover, in infinite space: if the world can be moved even once, it can be moved an indefinite number of times and will thus require an endless amount of space in which to move.
It follows that God’s creative force, if it is to be truly omnipotent, must not be limited to constituting finite regions of the known universe, such as the earth or the planets or even the stars. This force must be equal to the task of creating infinite space—and not just of shaping an already existing space, as befits the Demiurge in the Timaeus. World-constitution is not enough when space-creation is called for.
II
The infinite is an imperative necessity.
—Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds
This brings us to the fateful year 1277, just three years after Aquinas’s death. It is only fitting that shortly after the death of the very thinker who had so ingeniously pointed to the need for infinite space—if Thomas did not explicitly endorse such space, his relational model certainly entails it10—Etienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris, at Pope John XXI’s request and after consulting with theologians of the Sorbonne, issued a series of 219 condemnations of doctrines that denied or limited the power of God, including the power to move the world into a different place than it currently occupies. These momentous condemnations were driven by a desire to make the intellectual world safe for Christian doctrine, its teaching and its theology. But in fact they marked a decisive turning point in medieval thought concerning place and especially space. Until then, the primary efforts had been to shore up Aristotle with the aid of sympathetic commentators such as Themistius and Averroes—in short, to patch up the system of the world first outlined in Physics, book 4, a text preserved in Arabic during the Dark Ages and then translated into Latin in the twelfth century A.D. by Gerard of Cremona. The massive translation of many texts authored by Aristotle and Averroes at this same time sparked a renewed passion for discussing questions of place and space that was to continue for four more centuries and that rivaled the Hellenistic and Neoplatonic preoccupation with many of the same questions.11
The availability of these translations also led to the incorporation of Aristotle into the official curriculum of the University of Paris by the middle of the thirteenth century. So successful was this revival of Aristotle that local theologians in Paris became disturbed: Did not the Aristotelian cosmology hamper God’s powers unduly? Is the extent of God’s creative force limited to this admittedly finite world? Are not other worlds possible? Could not God jostle our world sideways in space, moving it into a new place and leaving an empty place behind? These and affiliated questions fueled the Condemnations, which attempted to reinstate the omnipotence of God in the physical world—a world whose final description was not to be left to the hands of a pagan philosopher, like Aristotle, no matter how important he had been for Thomas Aquinas (who was at least indirectly indicted by the Condemnations: their retraction in 1325 was motivated mainly by an effort to effect his redemption).
For our purposes, the primary importance of the documents of 1277 lies in their reopening the vista of the possible infinity of space. For the Condemnations give virtual carte blanche to explorations of spatial infinity—so long as this infinity remains linked to God’s omnipotence. But the explorations themselves soon exceeded their theological origins; directly or indirectly, they inspired the bold thought experiments of thinkers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, engendering the conceptual ventures that laid down the foundations of modern physics, above all its commitment to the infinity of the physical universe. Pierre Duhem has termed 1277 “the birthdate of modern science.”12 Whatever may be the truth of this claim, there can be little doubt that one of the most fateful things condemned by the Condemnations was the primacy of place, thereby making room for the apotheosis of space that occurred in the seventeenth century. Yet place was not condemned outright—any more than it had been by Philoponus or Simplicius. As in the case of the Neoplatonists, space was allowed to triumph gradually over place by a steadily increasing affirmation of its supremacy.
Article 34 of the Condemnations states: “That the first cause [i.e., God] could not make several worlds.”13 But if God is truly omnipotent, reasoned Tempier, then there is no reason why He cannot make other worlds than this world. As Nicholas Oresme (ca. 1325-1382) put it straightforwardly in the fourteenth century: “God can and could in his omnipotence make another world besides this one or several like or unlike it.”14 Of most interest to us is not the question of world plurality as such; rather, it is the implication of such plurality: if there are several worlds that coexist with each other, then they must share a space larger than the place taken up by any one of them. If, moreover, there are an infinite number of such worlds—as the Atomists first speculated, and as ensues from God’s omnipotence (for why should He stop at the creation of one or even a few worlds?)—then the space shared must be infinite in extent. Such intercosmic space is empty, a void, except where occupied by given worlds, as Oresme concludes: “Outside the heavens, then, is an empty incorporeal space quite different from any other plenum or corporeal space.”15 The indefinite plurality of worlds calls for such a space; thanks to its coherent imaginability, its real—its plausible—possibility (though not its actuality) is assured.
A second path to spatial infinity arises from article 49: “That God could not move the heavens [i.e., the world] with rectilinear motion; and the reason is that a vacuum would remain.”16 At stake here is the question, what would happen if the world were moved, even ever so slightly, in a lateral direction along an imaginary line? In moving from position A to position B, would it not vacate position A, leaving it strictly empty? Would it not move into position B, which must have been empty for it to be occupied by this movement? Extending the stakes further—as theologians are wont to do, given their desire to do justice to God’s unlimited powers—are we not driven to ask, is not such emptiness endless in principle, if it is true that God could move the world anywhere! Oresme is again apt.
But perhaps someone will say that to move with respect to place is to change one’s position in relation to some other body which may, or may not, be in motion itself. Yet I say that this is not valid primarily because there is an imagined infinite and immobile space outside the world . . . and it is possible without contradiction that the whole world could be moved in that space with rectilinear motion. To say the contrary is an article condemned at Paris. Now assuming such a motion, there would be no other body to which the world could be related with respect to place.17
This is a particularly revealing statement. Not only does it posit “space” (spatium)—immobile, infinite, and extracosmic—as what is required for worldtranslation, but it does so in express contrast with “place” (locus). As the last sentence suggests, place is at stake in a delimited relational model wherein one body is situated vis-a-vis another body. But this model does not obtain in the case of article 49: at issue here is the movement of the world in and by itself without reference to anything else, including any fixed marker. It is a question of an isolated motu recto, a motion taken with reference to the moving thing alone. Such a sheer motion is a motion in an absolute space—a space in which locations are not relative to each other but intrinsic to the preestablished parts of that space itself. Which is to say: a literally absolute space. Oresme’s espousal of such a model of space, occurring exactly a century after the Condemnations, looks forward to Newton—including his defender, Samuel Clarke, who argued against Leibniz that a relativist
