Article 34 of the Condemnations states: “That the first cause [i.e., God] could not make several worlds.”13 But if God is truly omnipotent, reasoned Tempier, then there is no reason why He cannot make other worlds than this world. As Nicholas Oresme (ca. 1325-1382) put it straightforwardly in the fourteenth century: “God can and could in his omnipotence make another world besides this one or several like or unlike it.”14 Of most interest to us is not the question of world plurality as such; rather, it is the implication of such plurality: if there are several worlds that coexist with each other, then they must share a space larger than the place taken up by any one of them. If, moreover, there are an infinite number of such worlds—as the Atomists first speculated, and as ensues from God’s omnipotence (for why should He stop at the creation of one or even a few worlds?)—then the space shared must be infinite in extent. Such intercosmic space is empty, a void, except where occupied by given worlds, as Oresme concludes: “Outside the heavens, then, is an empty incorporeal space quite different from any other plenum or corporeal space.”15 The indefinite plurality of worlds calls for such a space; thanks to its coherent imaginability, its real—its plausible—possibility (though not its actuality) is assured.
A second path to spatial infinity arises from article 49: “That God could not move the heavens [i.e., the world] with rectilinear motion; and the reason is that a vacuum would remain.”16 At stake here is the question, what would happen if the world were moved, even ever so slightly, in a lateral direction along an imaginary line? In moving from position A to position B, would it not vacate position A, leaving it strictly empty? Would it not move into position B, which must have been empty for it to be occupied by this movement? Extending the stakes further—as theologians are wont to do, given their desire to do justice to God’s unlimited powers—are we not driven to ask, is not such emptiness endless in principle, if it is true that God could move the world anywhere! Oresme is again apt.
But perhaps someone will say that to move with respect to place is to change one’s position in relation to some other body which may, or may not, be in motion itself. Yet I say that this is not valid primarily because there is an imagined infinite and immobile space outside the world . . . and it is possible without contradiction that the whole world could be moved in that space with rectilinear motion. To say the contrary is an article condemned at Paris. Now assuming such a motion, there would be no other body to which the world could be related with respect to place.17
This is a particularly revealing statement. Not only does it posit “space” (spatium)—immobile, infinite, and extracosmic—as what is required for worldtranslation, but it does so in express contrast with “place” (locus). As the last sentence suggests, place is at stake in a delimited relational model wherein one body is situated vis-a-vis another body. But this model does not obtain in the case of article 49: at issue here is the movement of the world in and by itself without reference to anything else, including any fixed marker. It is a question of an isolated motu recto, a motion taken with reference to the moving thing alone. Such a sheer motion is a motion in an absolute space—a space in which locations are not relative to each other but intrinsic to the preestablished parts of that space itself. Which is to say: a literally absolute space. Oresme’s espousal of such a model of space, occurring exactly a century after the Condemnations, looks forward to Newton—including his defender, Samuel Clarke, who argued against Leibniz that a relativist model of space could not explain world-translation: “If space were nothing but the order of things coexisting [as Leibniz holds], it would follow that if 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