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:
•place in the cosmos: this is specified 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
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