last, momentous step was first made by Thomas Bradwardine (ca. 1290-1349) in his De causa Dei contra Pelagium. In this text, Bradwardine sets forth five crucial corollaries.
1 First, that essentially and in presence, God is necessarily everywhere in the world and all its parts;
2 And also beyond the real world in a place, or in an imaginary infinite void.
3 And so truly can He be called immense and unlimited.
4 And so a reply seems to emerge to the old questions of the gentiles and heretics—”Where is your God?” And, “Where was God before the [creation of the] world?”
5 And it also seems obvious that a void can exist without body, but in no manner can it exist without God.29
Bradwardine presents us with a pure panentheism of the void. God’s “presence . . . necessarily everywhere” converts the void from what had been a purely negative and imaginary entity for other thinkers into something at once positive and real: positive insofar as it is not simply a form of nonbeing (e.g., void as sheer nothing), real insofar as it is filled with God’s being (which is not only real but most real). Where Oresme had attributed reality to the void solely on the basis that it is an object of reason or understanding (as opposed to sensation or perception), Bradwardine is unhesitating in his conviction that the reality of any extramundane void stems exclusively from God’s ulterior reality.30 It does not stem from any quasi-physical attributes such as extendedness or dimensionality. Indeed, the void in question may even lack extension or dimension—unacceptable as this thought would be to Philoponus or Descartes. In this regard, it is nonphysical and “imaginary.” But in the regard that matters most—that is, God’s immanence in this space—it is altogether real.
By the same token, however, we can ask: Is such a void “empty of everything except God”?31 Perhaps this vast void is not dimensional or extended precisely because nothing else is there but God, who was considered dimensionless and unextended by Bradwardine, Oresme, and other fourteenth-century theologians. But if so, perhaps this new void is literally a deus ex machina, invoked only in order to ensure that God has a proper place in which to exist. The void would then be a “place” that, precisely in accommodating God as “immense and unlimited,” must be an infinite “space.” Its existence would be merely tautological in status, a conceptual redundancy, part of God’s definition. This much seems implied by Bradwardine’s fifth corollary: if the void can “in no manner exist without God,” by the same token it need not have (perhaps it cannot have) any other occupants in it. This is hardly a suitable model for the known universe, filled as it is with innumerable and diverse things.
As if anticipating this skeptical line of questioning, Bradwardine singles out three respects in which the void is more than a scene for God’s residence. First, the void has parts, which are not necessarily identical with God’s parts and which can thus belong to things other than God. I take this to be the purport of the first corollary: “God is necessarily everywhere in the world and all its parts.” Second, the void has places, which once again are not necessarily those of God Himself; as Bradwardine adds, “God persists essentially by Himself in every place, eternally and immovably everywhere.”32 Indeed, as if to drive the point home, he remarks that “it is more perfect to be everywhere in some place, and simultaneously in many places, than in a unique place only.”33 Thus God does not restrict his occupation of the universe to His own place (assuming that this place is somehow delimited)—any more than to one part of space. Third, and most convincing, is Bradwardine’s explication of his second corollary. To say that God is “beyond the real world in a place, or in an imaginary infinite void,” is coded language for a return engagement with the continuing issue of whether God can move the world motu recto. The place beyond the world is the place to which God moves this world; since God can move the world to an infinite number of such extramundane places, he moves it in an “imaginary infinite void” that is the whole of space in which such motions are possible. Indefinite displacing entails unending spacing. As Bradwardine is wont to put it, if God moves the world from place A to place B, then either He was already in B or not. If he was not, then his omnipresence is compromised. If he was, then he is necessarily everywhere—in A and B, but also in C, D, E, and so on, ad infinitum. “If he was there [in B], then, by the same reasoning, He was there before and can now be imagined as everywhere outside the world.”34
Bradwardine’s views, though forgotten in detail until the belated publication of his De causa Dei contra Pelagium in 1618, nevertheless spelled out an entire way of thinking about the void and infinite space—a way that was deeply persuasive in its general outlines. It was pursued not only by John of Ripa and Nicole Oresme in the fourteenth century but by subsequent generations of philosophers and theologians. As Grant observes, “It was some version of Bradwardine’s conception of the relationship between God and infinite space that was adopted and explicated by numerous scholastics during the next few centuries.”35 Bradwardine’s adventuresome view was also explored by the great Jewish thinker Crescas (1340-1410), though with a distinctly Stoic emphasis on the infinite deific void as surrounding the plenary finite world.36 More momentous, this same view “helped shape nonscholastic spatial interpretations in the seventeenth century.”37
The point is not that everyone shared the Bradwardinian vision. Some, like Albert of Saxony (d. 1390) and John of Jandun (d. 1328), decidedly did not, denying any significant sense of a vacuum separatum. Others, like Richard of Middleton (a contemporary of Bradwardine), vacillated by divorcing God’s immensity from infinite void space. Still others were preoccupied with the ancient question as to whether there was voidlike space within the world (even Bradwardine conceded that “by means of His absolute power, God could make a void anywhere that he wishes, inside or outside of the world”).38 Certain thinkers, like Nicholas of Autrecourt (active in the first half of the fourteenth century), even attempted to revive an Atomist notion of internal, interstitial vacua. But it remains the case that the freedom of speculation first tasted on the issuance of the 219 condemnations by the Bishop of Paris in 1277 was not only satisfying theologically (since it acted to restore faith in God’s uninhibited powers, hemmed in as they were by Aristotelian cosmology) but also intoxicating philosophically (since it allowed numerous thought experiments concerning infinite space as a situs imaginarius).39 Most important, it led to a fresh vision of what infinite space might be like were it to be identical with God—and God with it. It was a vision, befitting the Middle Ages, that was nothing short of “the divinization of space.”40
We can say, in fact, that the Middle Ages contributed two new senses of infinite space to the gathering field of forces that were gradually granting primacy to space over place. Beyond the distinctive spatial infinites already posited in the ancient world by Atomism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Neoplatonism, we must now take into account a sense of infinite space as (a) imaginal-hypothetico-speculative, a space projected in a series of bold Gedankenexperimente that were not idle excursions but disciplined and serious efforts to grasp what space would be like if it had no imaginable limits; (b) divine, that is, an attribute of God or, more strongly still, identical with God’s very being as immense beyond measure. These two emerging senses of the spatially infinite are deeply coimplicated: the divinization of space makes what is otherwise merely imaginal and negative into something real and positive, while imagined projections of such space furnish a limitless scope to the divine that is lacking on Aristotle’s model of God as a Unmoved Mover who has no choice but to deal with a self-contained cosmos.
Along with this extended foray into a divinized-imaginified space came a related effort to overcome the confinement of place—at least as this latter was conceived on the model of Physics, book 4. Place itself (locus) was conceived in three distinctive senses in the medieval period. The first of these senses remains at least partly Aristotelian, while the other two senses depart ever more radically from the paradigm of place as an immobile container:
