Let us then conceive two spheres, one made of a single light, the other of many bodies, the two equal to each other in volume. But seat one concentrically with the other, and on implanting (embibazein) the other in it, you will see the whole cosmos residing in its place, moving in the immobile light.76
Instead of thinking of the cosmos as an isolated island in an empty universe, Proclus contends that the physical world is coextensive with the luminous supracelestial sphere. As a form of light, this sphere is bodily and elemental; but as a place, it is immaterial. To be immaterial in this manner, however, is to be quite dynamic: the sphere of light is “called place (topos) as being a certain shape (tupos) of the whole cosmic body, causing unextended things to be extended. . . . [Such a] place is animated through the primal soul and has a divine life, being stationary, self-moving intrinsically, [even if it is not] externally active.”77 The sphere of supracelestial light is a Place of places, for it is the vehicle of the World Soul as well as the very place of the cosmos—at once its center and periphery, situating everything in between. Nowhere is there not such light; wherever there is something, it is there in the light—there somewhere, there in a particular place within the absolute Place of the universe. I capitalize this Proclean Place to suggest that it is an adumbration of infinite space. As “supracelestial,” the ultimate sphere of light has a peculiar standing: as bodily, it has sufficient density to count as a place (thus is able to mold, measure, etc.), and yet, as immaterial, it is not the positive infinity of the physical universe that will be the obsession of seventeenth-century speculation. If not yet strictly infinite, however, the supracelestial sphere can be considered absolute: it “forms a kind of absolute place against which the cosmos can rotate and other things move.”78
What Proclus teaches us is that in Neoplatonic thinking there is no contradiction between the bodily and the noetic character of place. A place like the supracelestial sphere is composed of light—it is corporeal—and yet it ranks high in the ascending noetic scale of being. This vision is in many ways the exact converse of the Atomist view of place. Where place for the Atomists is mechanical and physical, that is, bodily and material (and nothing else), place for the Neoplatonists is dynamic and intellective—and one thanks to the other. Moreover, indivisibility now pertains to place, not to atoms: as Proclus puts it bluntly, “Place is an indivisible body.”79 The immateriality of place also allows Neoplatonists to escape the confines of the Aristotelian container model, whose resolute physicalism dictates that the encompassing surface of place has to be material if this surface is to secure sensible bodies in place. Once it is agreed that place need not be physical, place can effect more than delimitation and location: it can preserve and order, support and sustain, raise up and gather. The singular inertia of a material surface is replaced by the plural dynamics of an immaterial presence. The dynamics can be forceful—even holding up bodies from a quasi-gravitational downward pull—as well as subtle. The subtlety is evident both in the nonnumerical measuring power of place and in such ideas as the situatedness of all things in “the luminous vehicle of the World Soul.”
A Neoplatonic approach to place vindicates the common conviction that place always implies some sort of quantity (i.e., some amount of “room”) while also always involving a set of distinctive qualities (as is indicated in such expressions as a “pleasant place,” a “dangerous place”). Just as it is advantageous not to have to tie the quantum of place to arithmetical determination (or else we find ourselves in the midst of land surveys, property lines, and the like), so it is helpful not to limit the qualitative aspects of place to literally sensible properties. Thus Proclus’s idea of a preternatural “light above the Empyrean”80 enables us to draw on the panoply of properties of a natural phenomenon such as light while not enclosing ourselves in the straitjacket of a reductive physics. The immateriality of the noetic notion of place also rejoins Epicurus’s idea of “intangible substance”—without, however, exacting a commitment to a macro- or microvoid. As corporeal, the universe is plenary and not vacuous; but as immaterial, it enjoys the flexibility required for the empowerment and determination of things in place. This conception also artfully avoids the awkward dichotomy inherent in the Stoic view that the world is plenary whereas what lies beyond the world is vacuous. Moreover, when place is recognized as immobile as well as indivisible and immaterial, place can assume an absolute status: as when Syrianus, Proclus’s master, proclaims that “an extension goes through the whole world and receives into itself the whole of corporeal nature.”81
IV
Place, too, not less than time, pervades everything; for everything that happens is in a place.
—Simplicius, In Aristotelis categorias commentarium
Philoponus—born in A.D. 490, five years after Proclus was buried with Syrianus in a conjoint tomb—sought to refine the idea of extension (diastēma), whose full significance had become overshadowed by the more speculative ideas of his immediate Neoplatonic predecessors. For Philoponus, extension and not body, not even immaterial body, is the very essence of place: place is “a certain extension in three dimensions, different from the bodies that come to be in it, bodiless in its own definition—dimensions alone, empty of body.”82 The tie between extension (diastēma) and dimensions (diastaseis) is close, not just linguistically but conceptually: dimensions are what open out extension, delineating its outreach, giving bodies room through which to move. This is why Philoponus can define extension as “room (chōra) for body, and [for] dimensions alone, empty and apart from all substance and matter.”83 Extension is what provides room for things, and the fact that chōra signifies either “room” or “space” allows Philoponus to make a crucial move, namely, to distinguish “spatial extension” from “bodily extension.” Bodily extension is equivalent to the particular place occupied by a given physical body. It is the room taken up by the matter of that body.84 Spatial extension, in contrast, is the extension that need not, in principle, be occupied by any given body or group of bodies: rather than being the room of a body, it gives room for a body. Thus it is a matter of “dimensions alone” and as such is “empty and apart from all substance and matter.” This is so even though such extension is always actually occupied by bodies. Both sorts of extension are alike in being three-dimensional, but bodily extension is filled both in principle and in fact, whereas spatial extension is empty in principle but full in fact.85
Furthermore, bodily extension fits into spatial extension but not vice versa.86 There is always more spatial extension than bodily extension, and spatial extension can be said to consist precisely in this “more,” in fact so much more that Philoponus is tempted to regard spatial extension as tantamount to void. Where void can be defined as “spatial extension extended in three dimensions,” spatial extension is “bodiless and matterless—space without body.”87 Both void and spatial extension are incorporeal and immaterial. In making this quasi-equation, Philoponus is concerned to wipe the slate clean of any such suspicious hybrid entities as immaterial bodies. He replaces Proclus ‘s idea of such bodies—or, for that matter, the quasi-material plenum of Stoic pneuma—with something genuinely “empty by its own definition,”88 that is to say, with the conceptual equivalent of the void. To carry out this radical cleansing operation, Philoponus will even say that “in itself place is void” and that “void and place are in reality the same in substance.”89 Nevertheless, in the end, there is no actual void—void does not exist—and, rather than being the counterpart of place, void is Philoponus’s “name for