God should remove the whole material world entire, with any swiftness whatever, yet it would still always continue in the same place.”18 The world would stay in the same place, since its relations with its own constituents would remain the same. If the world is to move into another place than the one it presently occupies, it must be with a motion that moves across the steady structure of an absolute space.
This last discussion makes it even more apparent that “absolute space” and “infinite space,” though closely allied in thinkers such as Oresme and Newton, are not to be confused. “Absolute” implies something self-sufficient, “freed from” any dependency on its own parts, much less any relation to other things elsewhere; whatever is absolute stands apart—thus the ab-, ‘away’, ‘off—from any immersion (i.e., any “solution”) in these extraneous factors, being genuinely independent of them. “Infinite” entails unending extent; here sheer quantity is at stake: what John Locke calls “expansion.” Unlikely as it may seem to the modern mind—indebted as it is to Newton, who brought absolute and infinite space together in one consistent theory—it is perfectly possible to posit an absolute, finite space. This is precisely the space of Plato’s chōra, of Aristotle’s heavens with the earth at the center, of almost every other ancient model of a closed world, and of Philoponean “spatial extension.”19 It is also perfectly possible to think of an absolute and finite world set in an open sea of infinite space: such is the standard Stoic model.
Further evidence for the inherent dissociability of absolute and infinite space is found in the fact that medieval thought arrived at the infinity of space in two distinctly different ways. In the first, a relational model, pushed to an extreme in the manner I have discussed, yields spatial infinity: such is the way of Aquinas (and of Bacon, Scotus, and others). In the second, an absolutist model ends equally in infinity: such is the way of Oresme (and of Robert Holkot, Richard of Middleton, and others).20 It is striking that articles 34 and 49 of the Condemnations point respectively to these two primary avenues to the infinity of space. On the one hand, the plurality of worlds at issue in article 34 encourages a relational model of infinite space inasmuch as these various worlds serve as reference points—that is, cosmic places—for each other’s positions in a vast intercosmic void. On the other hand, the movement of a single world (and in particular our world), which is at stake in article 49, induces the spectacle of an endless space in which locations are not determined by reference to the positions of other entities.
Two problems of cosmological/theological scope; two solutions of physical/philosophical import. The result is two paths to infinite space: one keeps a role for place; the other dispenses with place altogether.
I do not mean to imply that there ever existed a perfect equilibrium between the two approaches to space in its infinity. The first approach, significantly inaugurated by Aquinas before the Condemnations, was not to be fully pursued again until Locke took it up in 1690 in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The second approach, which stemmed more directly from the Condemnations themselves, was more favored and influential during the next few centuries, culminating in the publication of Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy just three years before Locke’s Essay. Despite the predominance of the second direction, both tendencies share one important thing in common: they both were conceived as ways in which infinite space can be imagined.
For philosophers and theologians alike in the wake of 1277, what had been liberated was not so much a revised picture of the physical world as the freedom to project purely possible cosmological scenarios: what the world and the universe would be like if God were to choose to alter things as they are radically. Concerning things as they are, Aristotelian cosmology and physics were still regarded as the most reliable modes of explanation; but suddenly there was occasion, indeed active solicitation, to imagine things differently. Even if God is unlikely to reverse course—He has, after all, quite an investment in a world He has already created—it is conceptually salutary to think how He might have proceeded otherwise. When one begins to think this “otherwise,” one is approaching things secundum imaginationem, “according to imagination”—not according to how things in fact are, have been, or will presumably be. Pondering the imagined situation in which God might destroy everything within “the arch of the heavens or within the sphere of the moon”—thereby leaving “a great expanse and empty space”—Oresme remarks that “such a situation can surely be imagined and is definitely possible although it could not arise from pure natural causes, as Aristotle shows in his arguments in the fourth book of the Physics.”21 By extension, infinite space is a matter of what can be imagined, of what could be; finite space is a matter of what is the case. Thus for Oresme’s near-contemporary John Buridan (ca. 1295-1356), “although God could indeed create corporeal spaces and substances beyond the world, and to any degree he pleased, it did not follow that he had actually done so.”22 Buridan’s statement makes it clear that, in the end, post-1277 thinkers wanted to have it both ways: what is possible and what is so are both valorized, albeit on drastically different grounds. Edward Grant concludes that “because of the Condemnations, it became a characteristic feature of fourteenth-century scholastic discussion for authors to declare that although something was naturally impossible, it was supernaturally possible.”23
The move to infinite space, whether it takes the “relativist” or the “absolutist” route, was thus a move to a posited or supposed space—not to an actual space, as occurred later on in the Renaissance and in the seventeenth century. But the move remains immensely significant, since it accustomed medieval minds to think in terms of a space without end, whatever they held to be in fact the case concerning the given material universe. Even if the Condemnations of 1277 do not represent the literal birth of modern science, they certainly prepared the way for a science significantly committed to the actual infinity of physical space. And they did so by the promotion of pure possibilities projected by a cosmologically informed theological imagination.
The valorization of secundum imaginationem also prepared the way for an important new development in the advancing conceptualization of infinite space. Precisely because such space had been freely projected by the intense discussions that followed the publication of the Condemnations, it could be recharacterized in terms of divinity rather than sheer physicality. Oresme, for instance, says expressly that “this space of which we are talking is infinite and indivisible, and is the immensity of God and God Himself.”24 The converse also holds: God’s immensity is “necessarily all in every extension or space or place which exists or can be imagined.” 25 This is so even though God Himself is “without any quantity”26 and thus dimensionless and unextended. Unlike Philo of Alexandria (for whom God is Place) and such seventeenth-century thinkers as More, Raphson, and Newton—all of whom consider God to be identical with infinite physical space—Oresme makes God immanent to infinite space without being identical with such space in every respect, especially not in its dimensional, extended character.
It is a remarkable fact that no medieval thinker, not even those who basked in the euphoria unleashed by the Bishop of Paris, claimed that God creates an infinite void space separate from Himself. The reason is that such a space, existing apart from God, would be a rival and limit to God’s own infinite spatiality.27 It is more plausible to maintain that if there is an infinite empty space, it is at one with God, pervaded by Him (and He by it), and finally not distinguishable from His own immensity. A crucial step in this direction had already been taken by Hermes Trismegistus, that apocryphal Egyptian vatic figure who was a numinous presence for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance alike. Trismegistus was held to proclaim in the widely read Asclepius that the extramundane space outside the cosmos is not filled with anything material or even quasi-material (e.g., pneuma) but is packed with “things apprehensible by thought alone, that is, with things of like nature with its own [i.e., thought’s] divine being.”28 Thinking is divine, and it is this internal divinity that allows “thought alone” to be akin to the noetic content of an imagined infinite space. But the divinity of human thought—an Aristotelian theme—was bypassed in the High Middle Ages in favor of God’s much superior divinity. Hence it is God’s divine presence, not human “active
