The Fate of Place - Edward Casey

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is a matter of what can be imagined, of what could be; finite space is a matter of what is the case. Thus for Oresme’s near-contemporary John Buridan (ca. 1295-1356), “although God could indeed create corporeal spaces and substances beyond the world, and to any degree he pleased, it did not follow that he had actually done so.”22 Buridan’s statement makes it clear that, in the end, post-1277 thinkers wanted to have it both ways: what is possible and what is so are both valorized, albeit on drastically different grounds. Edward Grant concludes that “because of the Condemnations, it became a characteristic feature of fourteenth-century scholastic discussion for authors to declare that although something was naturally impossible, it was supernaturally possible.”23

      The move to infinite space, whether it takes the “relativist” or the “absolutist” route, was thus a move to a posited or supposed space—not to an actual space, as occurred later on in the Renaissance and in the seventeenth century. But the move remains immensely significant, since it accustomed medieval minds to think in terms of a space without end, whatever they held to be in fact the case concerning the given material universe. Even if the Condemnations of 1277 do not represent the literal birth of modern science, they certainly prepared the way for a science significantly committed to the actual infinity of physical space. And they did so by the promotion of pure possibilities projected by a cosmologically informed theological imagination.

      The valorization of secundum imaginationem also prepared the way for an important new development in the advancing conceptualization of infinite space. Precisely because such space had been freely projected by the intense discussions that followed the publication of the Condemnations, it could be recharacterized in terms of divinity rather than sheer physicality. Oresme, for instance, says expressly that “this space of which we are talking is infinite and indivisible, and is the immensity of God and God Himself.”24 The converse also holds: God’s immensity is “necessarily all in every extension or space or place which exists or can be imagined.” 25 This is so even though God Himself is “without any quantity”26 and thus dimensionless and unextended. Unlike Philo of Alexandria (for whom God is Place) and such seventeenth-century thinkers as More, Raphson, and Newton—all of whom consider God to be identical with infinite physical space—Oresme makes God immanent to infinite space without being identical with such space in every respect, especially not in its dimensional, extended character.

      It is a remarkable fact that no medieval thinker, not even those who basked in the euphoria unleashed by the Bishop of Paris, claimed that God creates an infinite void space separate from Himself. The reason is that such a space, existing apart from God, would be a rival and limit to God’s own infinite spatiality.27 It is more plausible to maintain that if there is an infinite empty space, it is at one with God, pervaded by Him (and He by it), and finally not distinguishable from His own immensity. A crucial step in this direction had already been taken by Hermes Trismegistus, that apocryphal Egyptian vatic figure who was a numinous presence for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance alike. Trismegistus was held to proclaim in the widely read Asclepius that the extramundane space outside the cosmos is not filled with anything material or even quasi-material (e.g., pneuma) but is packed with “things apprehensible by thought alone, that is, with things of like nature with its own [i.e., thought’s] divine being.”28 Thinking is divine, and it is this internal divinity that allows “thought alone” to be akin to the noetic content of an imagined infinite space. But the divinity of human thought—an Aristotelian theme—was bypassed in the High Middle Ages in favor of God’s much superior divinity. Hence it is God’s divine presence, not human “active intellect,” that was believed to fill any possible extramundane, unmoving infinite space.

      This last, momentous step was first made by Thomas Bradwardine (ca. 1290-1349) in his De causa Dei contra Pelagium. In this text, Bradwardine sets forth five crucial corollaries.

      1 First, that essentially and in presence, God is necessarily everywhere in the world and all its parts;

      2 And also beyond the real world in a place, or in an imaginary infinite void.

      3 And so truly can He be called immense and unlimited.

      4 And so a reply seems to emerge to the old questions of the gentiles and heretics—”Where is your God?” And, “Where was God before the [creation of the] world?”

      5 And it also seems obvious that a void can exist without body, but in no manner can it exist without God.29

      Bradwardine presents us with a pure panentheism of the void. God’s “presence . . . necessarily everywhere” converts the void from what had been a purely negative and imaginary entity for other thinkers into something at once positive and real: positive insofar as it is not simply a form of nonbeing (e.g., void as sheer nothing), real insofar as it is filled with God’s being (which is not only real but most real). Where Oresme had attributed reality to the void solely on the basis that it is an object of reason or understanding (as opposed to sensation or perception), Bradwardine is unhesitating in his conviction that the reality of any extramundane void stems exclusively from God’s ulterior reality.30 It does not stem from any quasi-physical attributes such as extendedness or dimensionality. Indeed, the void in question may even lack extension or dimension—unacceptable as this thought would be to Philoponus or Descartes. In this regard, it is nonphysical and “imaginary.” But in the regard that matters most—that is, God’s immanence in this space—it is altogether real.

      By the same token, however, we can ask: Is such a void “empty of everything except God”?31 Perhaps this vast void is not dimensional or extended precisely because nothing else is there but God, who was considered dimensionless and unextended by Bradwardine, Oresme, and other fourteenth-century theologians. But if so, perhaps this new void is literally a deus ex machina, invoked only in order to ensure that God has a proper place in which to exist. The void would then be a “place” that, precisely in accommodating God as “immense and unlimited,” must be an infinite “space.” Its existence would be merely tautological in status, a conceptual redundancy, part of God’s definition. This much seems implied by Bradwardine’s fifth corollary: if the void can “in no manner exist without God,” by the same token it need not have (perhaps it cannot have) any other occupants in it. This is hardly a suitable model for the known universe, filled as it is with innumerable and diverse things.

      As if anticipating this skeptical line of questioning, Bradwardine singles out three respects in which the void is more than a scene for God’s residence. First, the void has parts, which are not necessarily identical with God’s parts and which can thus belong to things other than God. I take this to be the purport of the first corollary: “God is necessarily everywhere in the world and all its parts.” Second, the void has places, which once again are not necessarily those of God Himself; as Bradwardine adds, “God persists essentially by Himself in every place, eternally and immovably everywhere.”32 Indeed, as if to drive the point home, he remarks that “it is more perfect to be everywhere in some place, and simultaneously in many places, than in a unique place only.”33 Thus God does not restrict his occupation of the universe to His own place (assuming that this place is somehow delimited)—any more than to one part of space. Third, and most convincing, is Bradwardine’s explication of his second corollary. To say that God is “beyond the real world in a place, or in an imaginary infinite void,” is coded language for a return engagement with the continuing issue of whether God can move the world motu recto. The place beyond the world is the place to which God moves this world; since God can move the world to an infinite number of such extramundane places, he moves it in an “imaginary infinite void” that is the whole of space in which such motions are possible. Indefinite displacing entails unending spacing. As Bradwardine is wont to put it, if God moves the world from place A to place B, then either He was already in B or not. If he was not, then his omnipresence is compromised. If he was, then he is necessarily everywhere—in A and B, but also in C, D, E, and so on, ad infinitum. “If he was there [in B], then, by the same reasoning, He was there before and can now be imagined as everywhere outside the world.”34

      Bradwardine’s views, though forgotten in detail until the belated publication of his De causa Dei contra Pelagium in 1618, nevertheless spelled out an entire way

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