The Averroesan-Baconian solution to the dilemma inherited from the Stagirite accounts for the world’s place by turning inward to its very center—to what, existing at this center (indeed as this center) is most immobile. Moreover, this inward/downward turn teases apart the two main Aristotelian criteria of place, containment and immobility, since, conceding that the final sphere is not contained in any surrounder, it relies exclusively on the second criterion, exemplified uniquely in the unmoving earth. But the earth is precisely what is contained and thus implaced, via intermediate spheres, by the outer heaven itself. Strange indeed to think that the place of this heaven is dependent on that to which it itself gives place. One place calls for another: celestial and sublunar entities are codependent in their very difference.
Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1224-1274) thought this solution strange enough to remark, “It seems ridiculous to me to maintain that the final sphere is accidentally in a place by the mere fact that its center is in a place.”4 Given the choice, the Angelic Doctor preferred to return to the Themistian model whereby the final sphere is in place thanks to its own constitution: “It is much more suitable to say that the ultimate sphere is in place because of its own intrinsic parts than because of the center which is altogether outside of its substance.”5 But despite adopting this expressly Aristotelian model for the implacement of the outer sphere, Aquinas came to espouse a quite different model for the implacement of everything else. The true immobility that is required if a place is to be more than a sheer container is not to be found in the centrated earth but in a set of relations to the celestial spheres that surround earth itself. Hence the place of something subcelestial is determined by these relations or, more exactly, by the “order and situation” (prdo et situ) they offer.
Although the container is moved insofar as it is a body, nevertheless, considered according to the order it has to the whole body of heaven, it is not moved. For the other body that succeeds it has the same order and site in comparison to all of heaven that the body which previously left had.6
In other words, the place of anything other than the outermost sphere is determined by its position vis-a-vis the celestial spheres (i.e., “heaven” or “the heavens”)—a position that can also be occupied by other bodies. The heavens, taken as a whole to which all other parts of the cosmos relate, furnish the very fixity or stable reference required by any given place in the cosmos. This radically relational view echoes Theophrastus’s paradigm of place as a matter of the way the parts of a quasi-organic body relate to the whole of that body. It anticipates Leibniz, the most systematic Western thinker of place as relational and someone whose theory also depends on the substitutability of objects located “in the same place” considered in relation to fixed external referents. In between, and in the immediate wake of Aquinas, others were to take up a comparably cosmic relational model: for example, Giles of Rome (who said that “what is formal in place is its location with respect to the universe”),7 John of Jandun (for whom it is the heavens that determine the very centrality of the earth),8 and Duns Scotus (who held that formal or rational place, ratio loci, “is a relation with respect to the whole universe”).9
Although they often go hand in hand, an absolutist model of space is not necessarily a model of infinite space. For if this world system is the only cosmos, it will be at once absolute and self-enclosed. But a relational model such as that proposed by Aquinas and the other theorists just cited is not self-contained; it leads beyond itself, beckoning toward spatial infinity. For it calls for a fixed referent located somewhere external to an implaced item: a stable point on the shore when at sea, a permanent object, an everlasting celestial sphere. In proposing that place is a matter of ordo et situ in regard to something immobile, Aquinas is driven to extend the scene of place itself to “the whole body of heaven.” Refusing to rely exclusively on the earth’s centrality and immobility as had Averroes and Bacon, Aquinas finds the more pertinent fixity to reside in the larger arena of the planets and stars—that is to say, an expansive 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