by the immediate surrounder of an object; it is termed “material” or “mobile” (this latter inasmuch as what surrounds the object may give way to another environing medium);
•place of the cosmos: this is the position of the world-whole itself; and the burning issue, as we have seen, is whether this place can be exchanged for another place—whether in particular the world can be moved from position A to position B; this is what is at stake in article 49 of the Condemnations, which concerns whether God can move the existing world from its apparently “immobile” position;
•place between worlds: here the issue is how one existing cosmos is related spatially to another also-existing cosmos—and to still others as well, ultimately to the entire universe; the debate is over article 34, that is, whether there can be plural worlds.
If the first conception keeps place securely in the wraps in which Aristotle and the Peripatetic school had left it—literally a wraparound position that the medievals euphemistically called “lodging”—the second and third conceptions begin to break away from this tight tethering. In both of these latter cases, we witness place becoming space under our very eyes. In the second case, this happens in the form of a concern with the absolute locus of the world: if this locus can be displaced, then there must already exist an encompassing scene of diverse possible loci, each such place preestablished in an absolute space that embraces them all and each an unchanging part of that all-embracing space. In the third case, the transformation occurs on a relativist paradigm in which the crucial connection is not with a single Space but with other worlds in other places: what matters most is what lies between these worlds, that is, their interplace.
Whether by the second or by the third route, the adventurous avenue toward infinite space opened up decisively after the thirteenth century in the West. The closely confining circuit of place-as-perimeter dissolved and the vista of a New World of Space began to captivate the ablest minds of the succeeding period. It seems hardly accidental that the great Age of Discovery in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—an age that set out expressly to explore a terra incognita of interconnected places within the larger space of the earth itself as well as the still larger space of the heavens—immediately followed upon the bold speculations of philosophers and theologians in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. From an entirely imagined and divine status that was fully gained by A.D. 1400, such spaces became actual in the form of an earth and a sky that lay ready for discovery and possession not only by thought and faith but also by arms and men. And with the advent of an endlessly challenging space of exploration, we have reached the threshold of the Renaissance.
III
All things are in all things.
—Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance
Henceforth I spread confident wings to space; I fear no barrier of crystal or of glass; I cleave the heavens and soar to the infinite.
—Giordano Bruno, Dedicatory Poem to On the Infinite Universe and Worlds
“Renaissance” does not mean something entirely new but, instead, renewed, new again. The New World of Renaissance thinking about place and space, more often than not, carries forward an Old World of previous conceptions. Just as the Middle Ages—and before that, the Hellenistic period—looked back at Aristotle most insistently, so the Renaissance will return to Plato for comparable inspiration. It will also go back to other sources, for example, the Neo-platonists (especially Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Philoponus) and the unknown authors of the Hermetica. As Frances Yates, who has made the strongest case for the Hermetic origins of Renaissance thought, puts it,
The great forward movements of the Renaissance all derive their vigour, their emotional impulse, from looking backwards. . . . [For the Renaissance] history was not an evolution from primitive animal origins through ever growing complexity and progress; the past was always better than the present, and progress was revival, rebirth, renaissance of antiquity.41
A primary case in point is the very idea of spatial infinity, sometimes assumed to have been a product of late Renaissance thinking. We have seen, however, that this idea, at once alarming and attractive, first arose in ancient Atomism, and was pursued vigorously by Epicurus and the Stoics, explicitly formulated by Lucretius and Sextus Empiricus, investigated with subtle fervor by many generations of philosophers in the wake of Aristotle (from Theophrastus and Strato to Philoponus and Simplicius), examined in Arabic commentaries on Aristotle, and forcefully revived after 1277 in medieval thought. It is a paradox of the history of ideas that a book as insightful and scrupulous as Alexandre Koyre’s From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe contributes by its title, if not always by its explicit claims, to the mistaken view that spatial infinity was a belated invention of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the West.42
Also quite fateful in its consequences was the famous claim that the universe has its center “everywhere” (ubique) and its circumference “nowhere” (nullibi). Although often attributed to Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), in fact the claim derives from a pseudo-Hermetic text of the twelfth century, “The Book of the XXIV Philosophers.”43 This statement of early medieval origin was destined to become a mot celebre: not only Cusa but Giordano Bruno and Blaise Pascal (in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, respectively) cite it without attribution, each as if he had composed it himself.
Bruno’s version is unusually instructive: “Surely we can affirm that the universe is all center, or that the center of the universe is everywhere, and that the circumference is not in any part, although it is different from the center; or that the circumference is throughout all, but the center is not to be found inasmuch as it is different from that.”44 Considered as a challenge to Aristotle—to his closed and centered world—this complex proposition has two parts: (i) In saying that the center is everywhere, it proposes that there is no single privileged center such as the earth—or any other heavenly body, not even the sun (Copernicus’s efforts, known to Bruno, notwithstanding). The Arisotelian cosmographic model of a hierarchical universe with an immobile earth situated at the still center gives way to the idea that any part of the universe can be considered a fully valid center: the universe is “all center.” This in turn implies that every place is a center—a center of perspectival viewing from which all other places can (at least in principle) be seen. As Cusa was the first to insist, the perception of the universe is relative to the place of the observer.45 In other words, place is anywhere you choose to take up a point of view, and the universe yields an indefinite number of such places, (ii) In holding that the circumference is “throughout all”—that is, not in any single region, not even at the delimiting edge of the universe—Bruno maintains that it is in effect nowhere, “not in any [single] part.” The circumference is all over the place, which is tantamount to saying that it is located in pure space and not in a particular place or set of places. Nor is such space a mere composite of places that are parts of the whole. It is a radically open field that is coextensive with the universe in its totality. In terms of Archytas’s conundrum, we would have to say that no one could ever get to the edge of the world in the first place: nothing is at the edge since nothing can serve as the edge, as a simple circumference. There is no outer limit, no end to space. As Bruno himself comments, “Outside and beyond the infinite being, there exists nothing that is, because [such being] has no outside and no beyond.”46
What is remarkable, then, about the claim in question—whether in its initial or its Cusan version—is that it manages to combine recognition of the importance of place with an equal acknowledgment of the value of infinite space. In this respect, it reflects its historical origin at the beginning of the Middle Ages: at the very moment when Aristotle was being rediscovered, yet also when burgeoning interest in the possible infinity of space was colluding with theological speculation as to God’s uncontainable immensity. That the Renaissance took up the pseudo-Hermetic saying so enthusiastically indicates that the tension between
