3

NAVIGATING THE INFINITE

My God, you are absolute infinity itself, which I perceive to be the infinite end, but I am unable to grasp how an end without an end is an end.

NICHOLAS OF CUSA, ON THE VISION OF GOD

Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos.

JORGE LUIS BORGES, “THE ALEPH”

Ending the Endless: Thomas Aquinas

From the ashes of the mid-thirteenth century arises a familiar question: Is there one world, or are there many? Might there even be an infinite number of them? The author of the question is Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), and one almost wonders why he bothers to ask. Hadn’t the matter been put to rest by Plato, sealed by Aristotle, diagrammed by Ptolemy, and Christianized by Augustine? Hadn’t all the pluralizing dissenters been “hissed off the stage” or consigned to dust and ashes centuries ago? And yet here we find Thomas in the Summa theologiae, beginning as usual with the position he will refute, saying: “[I]t would seem that there is not only one world, but many.”¹ To whom would it seem that this is the case? What has changed since Augustine declared the matter closed nearly a millennium ago?

What has changed is, in one sense, a return of the “same,” which is to say a rediscovery of Aristotle. As is well known, most of Aristotle’s works had been lost to the Latin-speaking world between the third century B.C.E. and the twelfth century C.E., when scores of his manuscripts were translated, debated, and made the object of lengthy scholastic commentaries.2 Among these newly recovered manuscripts was the De caelo, which was translated from Arabic into Latin in 1170. As we saw in chapter 1, this text insists against the Atomists that the cosmos must be unique, basing its claims on the principles of “natural motion.” If another world existed, Aristotle reasons, then its earth would move unnaturally “up” with respect to our world, even as it moved naturally “down” with respect to its own. “This, however, is impossible,” he says, because it is the property of earth to move down.³ Elements cannot move both naturally and unnaturally at once, so “it follows that there cannot be more worlds than one.”⁴ With the rediscovery of the De caelo, medieval Europe thus possessed a seemingly definitive argument for the singularity of the cosmos, one that reaffirmed the teachings of Platonists and church fathers alike.

This agreement notwithstanding, Aristotle also held cosmological positions that contradicted the received teachings of medieval Europe—perhaps most problematically concerning the eternity of the cosmos.⁵ Here we might recall Augustine’s insistence that the world could not be eternal without compromising the singularity of God: if God alone is God, then nothing else can exist alongside him. Thus began centuries of Latinate efforts to evaluate Aristotelian cosmology in the light of Christian theology, with the universities’ “secular masters” ready to adopt Aristotle wholesale, the Franciscans looking to abandon any position that seemed to contradict scripture, and the Dominican Thomas Aquinas working to reconcile the two.⁶ In this era of intellectual fervor, even the most firmly entrenched doctrines were reopened for debate, including the doctrine of cosmic singularity. So even though the Epicureans themselves would not be given a fair hearing until the seventeenth century, their teachings on the plurality of worlds were tentatively engaged five hundred years earlier as the medieval West came to terms with the very philosopher who had rejected them.⁷

Among Aristotle’s Christian interpreters in particular, the central cosmological concern was to uphold the sovereignty of God with respect to creation. This emphasis on sovereignty, in turn, reopened the question of cosmic plurality in the high Scholastic period. After all, one might ask, if God is omnipotent, then why would “he” limit himself to creating one world? It is in this sense that Thomas Aquinas concedes in Question 47 of the Summa theologiae that it might “seem” that there are many worlds. “For the same reason He created one,” Thomas reasons, “He could create many, since His power is not limited to the creation of one world; but rather is infinite” (1.47.3).⁸ Indeed, the infinity of God’s power might even lead us to posit an infinite number of worlds.

Yet just as an eternal world would threaten God’s singularity, Thomas seems concerned that infinite worlds might rival his infinity. Indeed, a standoff between material and divine infinity can be seen as early as Question 2 of the Summa, in which Thomas proves the existence of God based on the absurdity of an infinite causal regress. “Whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another,” he argues in the first of his five proofs. “If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again. But this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and, consequently, no other mover…. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God” (1.2.3, emphasis added).

In the work of this proof, Thomas aligns “everyone’s” God with Aristotle’s prime mover: the extracosmic stopgap that prevents the causal march to infinity. God puts an end to worldly endlessness. How, then, could there be an endless number of worlds? Where is the place for a first mover if worlds extend backward eternally?

In short, the doctrine of a plurality of worlds threatens Thomas’s whole theological infrastructure: if worlds have existed from eternity, then there is no starting point for God to occupy. In the Summa, Thomas therefore raises the possibility of a cosmic plurality, only to launch a multipronged attack against it. He calls briefly on the Gospel of John (“‘the world was made by Him,’ where the world is named as one”), offers a brief paraphrase of the De caelo’s argument from natural motion, and appeals in passing to its neo-Timaean insistence that “the world is composed of the whole of its matter” (1.47.3, emphasis added).9 In this manner, Thomas lines up the usual sources of authority against cosmic multiplicity: scripture, Plato, and Aristotle all seem to say no. But his chief strategic move in the face of this possibility is to refocus the question, shifting the measure of divine sovereignty away from brute force and toward singularity. An omnipotent God could make other worlds, Thomas imagines, but doing so would compromise his unity.

The argument proceeds as follows: all things come from God, and all things find their end (terminus) in God. This means that “[w]hatever things come from God, have relation of order to each other, and to God himself.”10 This “relation of order” denotes the hierarchy of creation—the Neoplatonic “Great Chain of Being” under which all things from angels to snails are peacefully, permanently, and vertically related to God and one another.¹¹ In an earlier question, Thomas calls on this ordered relation to demonstrate the oneness of God: the unity of creation, he argues, testifies to the unity of its creator (1.11.3). In the question at hand, the demonstration is simply reversed: because God is one, “it must be that all things should belong to one world” (1.47.3). Taking these questions together, we can see that the oneness of the cosmos is both a function and a sign of the oneness of God. The only way to “assert that many worlds exist” would therefore be to deny the “ordaining wisdom” of God altogether—to say that there is no providential order of things (1.47.3). Here Aquinas offers the example of “Democritus, who said that this world, besides an infinite number of other worlds, was made from a casual concourse of atoms” (1.47.3). To affirm an infinity of worlds is therefore to deny the involvement of God, for God is said to be the end of all creation. But insofar as “the infinite is opposed to the notion of end” (1.47.3), infinite worlds would mean the absence of end; there would be no single source, no final home, and no ordered passage from one to the other. Many worlds, in short, would mean no God, and “this reason proves that the world is one” (1.47.3).

Although the tone is far more somber, one can thus detect in this argument echoes of Augustine, who likewise rejected cosmic infinity because of its endlessness. A soul destined to recurring embodiment, he feared, would never find its rest in God.¹² To his credit, Thomas has arguably found firmer ground for his rejection than the Augustinian “heaven forbid”: if all things have their end in one God, he reasons, then all things must belong to one world. Thomas may well have adapted this strategy from Book Lambda of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which asserts that the cosmos must be singular because its source of motion is singular.¹³ As we will recall, however, Aristotle’s proof undermines itself even before it is concluded, producing either forty-seven or fifty-five prime movers in the process of trying to secure one and opening in spite of itself onto just as many worlds. Thomas’s argument similarly can be made to tremble at the very point that it hinges the number of the cosmos on the number of God. For however closely Thomas may align them, his God differs from the prime mover in not being simply one. His God is rather three-in-one, an eternal interrelation of identity and difference. So even if God is the end of all things, God is an “end” that is both one and many: multiple. Might the things of creation not therefore occupy multiple worlds?

This might be a compelling possibility, but it would be unacceptable to Thomas for two reasons. First, he insists on the priority of identity over difference even within the Trinity, arguing in the previous article that “unity” pertains to the Godhead and “multiplicity” only to creation.14 God might contain plurality, and God certainly produces plurality, but God is primarily one.¹⁵ Second, Thomas assumes that if numerous worlds were to exist, they would bear no relation to one another, constituting nothing more than a haphazard plurality à la Democritus. But if we push on the first assumption, then the second moves as well: if the Christian God is eternally triune, then God is not single first and plural afterward, but eternally pluri-singular. What, then, would prevent such a God from creating multiple worlds that are nonetheless interrelated? If the number of creation really mirrors the number of God, then wouldn’t an entangled multiplicity of worlds reflect God’s many-oneness more fully than a single world would?

It is perhaps for this reason that Thomas shifted his strategy the next and last time he addressed the question of multiple worlds. Two years before the end of his life, he wrote a detailed commentary on the De caelo in which he hinges the oneness of the cosmos not on the oneness of God, but on the omnipotence of God. Although it might seem that an omnipotent God would create as many worlds as possible, Thomas counters that “it takes more power to make one perfect [individual] than to make several imperfect.”¹⁶ A “perfect” individual world would be one that includes all beings within it, and (back to the Timaeus again) a world that contains all beings within it would have to be singular. It therefore does more justice to the omnipotence of God to say the world is one than to suggest it might be one of many.

As it turned out, however, neither of Thomas’s approaches succeeded in putting cosmic multiplicity to rest. A mere three years after Thomas’s death in 1274, Bishop Etienne Tempier of Paris issued a list of 219 heretical Aristotelian teachings, among which was Condemnation 34: “Quod prima causa non posset plures mundos facere.”17 Anyone who taught that “the first Cause cannot make many worlds” would henceforth be excommunicated for undermining the absolute power of God. And so the Scholastics of the late thirteenth century and the fourteenth century could not rest with Thomas’s Christianized repetitions of Aristotle. More important, they could not rest with Aristotle himself—and would even have to face the possibility that his nesting-doll cosmology was wrong. In the long run, then, these ecclesiastical prohibitions opened a surprising space of intellectual freedom, one that eventually led to the wholesale abandonment of Aristotelian physics in the late seventeenth century.¹⁸ However coercive the Condemnations of 1277 may have been, they eventually prompted a shift in thinking so radical that Pierre Duhem calls them “the birth certificate of modern physics.”¹⁹

But, of course, the first three hundred years of “modern physics” never went so far as to teach that there were multiple worlds. Neither, as it turned out, did the Scholastics after 1277. Rather, reading Condemnation 34 as closely as possible, they found a number of ways to argue that although God could create worlds other than this one, he never would. For the sake of clarity, these strategies can be grouped into two. The authors one might call “voluntarist” held to Aristotelian physics even as they accepted the bishop’s chastisement, arguing that although the laws of nature preclude the existence of more than one world, an omnipotent God could decide to override the laws of nature if he so wanted.²⁰ The “naturalist” authors, by contrast, used the Condemnations as an opportunity to undermine the very principles of Aristotelian physics. By attacking the De caelo’s two proofs of cosmic singularity, they argued that other worlds could exist in full accordance with the laws of nature. For example, they maintained, other worlds might be composed of different elements, with different sorts of motion.²¹ Or even if the materials were the same, another world’s “earth” and “fire” might move down and up with respect to that world alone, preventing any conflict between “natural” and “unnatural” motion.²² Finally, they argued, it is senseless to say that all the matter in existence has been used up on this world because an omnipotent God can always make more. In a strange turn of events, then, the very teaching that Lucretius found inimical to the plurality of worlds came back in the late medieval period to support it: if God created one world ex nihilo, then God could create any number of them ex nihilo. “In order to establish this position,” wrote Richard of Middleton (1249–1302), “one can invoke the sentence of Lord Etienne … he has excommunicated those who teach that God could not have created several worlds.”²³ We would therefore do well to teach that he could have.

For all their daring flirtations, however, none of these authors dared to assert the existence of other worlds. Rather, at some point in each of their arguments, one finds the sort of “standard disclaimer” issued by Nicole Oresme (ca. 1320/25–1382) in Le livre du ciel et du monde (1377): although God in his omnipotence could create and care for numerous worlds (Oresme was particularly taken with the possibility that there might be smaller worlds embedded concentrically within our world, which might itself be embedded within larger ones), “there never has been nor will there be more than one world.”24 Voluntarists and naturalists alike, the late Scholastics exhibited what Steven Dick calls a “uniquely medieval mixture of boldness and conservatism”:²⁵ they went to extraordinary lengths to defend the possibility of other worlds but would not even contemplate the actuality of those worlds. The upshot of this medieval mixture was that although these authors called into question almost all of Aristotle’s cosmological principles, they left his cosmic geography in place. At the close of the fourteenth century, Europe still imagined the world as a set of concentric circles with earth at the center; rings of water, air, and fire surrounding it; and a halo of “fixed stars” moving calmly around the circumference once a day. These stars were held to be the Primum Mobile, or “first moved” of the cosmos. Set in motion by the prime mover itself, the fixed stars then conferred movement on the lesser cosmic bodies within their bounds.

This motive gradation allowed the Aristotelian cosmos to be mapped onto the Neoplatonic “Chain of Being” in which physical position was thought to coincide with spiritual rank. Of this worldview, Ernst Cassirer explains that “the higher an element stands in the cosmic stepladder, the closer it is to the unmoved mover of the world, and the purer and more complete its nature.”²⁶ The realm of the stars, made of an incorruptible “fifth essence” (quinta essentia), was thought to be nearest to God, whereas the corruptible earth was farthest away; here we might recall Dante’s journey from the inferno at the center of the earth, up the purgatorial mountain, to the stars at the gates of paradise (figure 3.1).²⁷ On the earth itself, the beings that participate most fully in divine intellect are ranked above the others—hence, the superiority of angels to humans, humans to animals, men to women, and reason to the passions. And so cosmology recapitulates theology: as Thomas insisted, the order of the universe mediates the singular God down through the hierarchical ranks of the singular cosmos. This means that if any of these terms were to be challenged, the rest would have to change as well. Any real departure from Aristotle’s tidy circles would need to reconsider the singularity of God, the singularity of the cosmos, and its hierarchical arrangement. It is therefore striking that this departure initially came from within the Christian theological tradition itself. The thinker who genuinely abandoned Aristotelian cosmology was not Nicolaus Copernicus, who put the sun at the center of the universe in 1543, but Nicholas of Cusa, who declared a hundred years earlier that the universe had no center at all.

FIGURE 3.1 The Dantean universe. (Adapted from Michelangelo Caetani, La materia della “Divina Commedia” di Dante Alighierie [Monte Cassino, 1855])

End Without End: Nicholas of Cusa

“The Earth Is Not the Center of the World”

Picture yourself on a boat, Cusa tells us, sailing through a vast ocean. Unless you can see the shore recede behind you or the waters rush beneath you, you will think you are at rest no matter how fast you may be moving. Indeed, even if you do gaze down at the waters flowing by, you may at first perceive that they are moving while you are standing still. So it is with our position in the universe. Although the earth moves through a vast expanse of space, we perceive ourselves to be at rest in the middle of the world because we lack an unmoved point of reference. The same holds for every other cosmic body: everything in the universe moves in imperfect circles around its neighbors.²⁸ And yet precisely because nothing is at rest, he says in On Learned Ignorance, “it always appears to every observer, whether on the earth, the sun, or another star, that one is … at an immovable center of things and that all else is being moved” (2.12.162). For Cusa, nothing is at the center of the universe, which means that everything is at the center—from its own perspective. Even those stars that we see at the outer edge of the universe occupy the center of creation from their own vantage point and see us at the outskirts. Thus there is neither center nor circumference, but a shifting series of cosmic configurations depending on the observer’s point of view.

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) has long been touted as a surprising forerunner of modern cosmology,29 and, given this brief meditation alone, it is easy to see why. Not only did Cusa remove the earth from the center of the universe and set it in motion, but he also set it in motion in orbits that are not quite circular. He did the same for all other celestial bodies as well, and, astonishingly, this led him to an early articulation of the theory of special relativity. In 1905, Einstein would write that “electrodynamics [and] mechanics possess no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest”; rather, rest and motion are wholly relative to the standpoint of the observer.³⁰ Cusa had considered this proliferation of vantage points four and a half centuries earlier in De docta ignorantia (1440), concluding, moreover, that all the “stellar regions” beyond our own were most likely “inhabited”—although by what sorts of species, he could not say. The furthest he would go was to imagine that the inhabitants of the sun were likely to be “more solar, bright, illuminated, and intellectual, even more spiritual than those on the moon, who are more lunar, and than those on the earth, who are more weighty.” For the most part, however, Cusa maintained that the inhabitants of distant cosmic bodies “remain completely unknown” (2.12.172). A mobile earth, noncircular orbits, the relativity of motion, extraterrestrial life—each of these postulates can be seen as strikingly protomodern. Nevertheless, the development for which Cusa has become best known is his systematic destruction of Aristotle’s cosmic nesting dolls. As Alexandre Koyré explains, “[I]t was Nicholas of Cusa, the last great philosopher of the dying Middle Ages, who first rejected the medieval cosmos-conception and to whom, as often as not, is ascribed the merit, or the crime, of having asserted the infinity of the universe.”³¹

Of course, this radical idea was not exactly new. As we might recall, Lucretius argued for the infinity of the universe by entreating us to hurl a spear at whatever we might think to be its boundary. If nothing stops the spear, then there is no boundary; if something stops the spear, then there is something beyond boundary. Either way, the boundary is not a boundary, and the universe must be infinite.³² Cusa offers a similar line of reasoning with far less fanfare in De docta ignorantia, saying that “the universe is limitless [interminatum], for nothing actually greater than it, in relation to which it would be limited, can be given” (2.1.97). In other words, because the universe is all that is, there cannot be anything outside it to bind it. When one considers, furthermore, that Cusa was the first Western philosopher since Lucretius to assert the existence of extraterrestrial beings and that he was sixteen years old when the papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini rediscovered Lucretius’s De rerum natura,³³ one might even be tempted to see Cusa’s cosmology as some sort of resurrected Atomism. Yet as Steven Dick has cautioned, Cusa’s physics is more clearly a reaction against Aristotle than it is a retrieval of Epicurus. Furthermore, although Cusa was at least nominally aware of Epicurean cosmology, he never once cites Lucretius and probably never read the De rerum natura.³⁴ Perhaps even more important, however, aligning Cusa too closely with any of the Atomists would cause us to miss the distinctive character of his cosmology. If the Atomist worlds are an interrelated many and the Stoics’ an ever-recurring one, the Cusan universe can be regarded as either one or many or both of them at once—depending on how you look at it.

Nowhere and Everywhere

The first crucial distinction to draw between Cusa and the Atomists is that the Cusan universe is not exactly infinite. It is not finite because, as Cusa states in De docta ignorantia, “it lacks boundaries within which it is enclosed” (2.11.156), but neither is it infinite because it is not “from itself.” “Nothing is from itself except the simply maximum,” which is to say God, who alone is absolutely infinite (2.2.98). This distinction clearly constitutes another major difference from Lucretius, whose gods are finite beings that have nothing to do with the creation or governance of the world. Lucretian worlds, we will recall, can bring themselves to order through the stormlike collisions or vortical swirl of atoms. The Cusan universe, by contrast, cannot get itself together; the source of its being lies beyond itself in God. Because “the universe embraces all things that are not God” (2.1.97), it cannot, strictly speaking, be called infinite. And yet, again, it has no bounds.

To account for this finite sort of infinity, Cusa borrows some terminology from Thomas Aquinas, who in Disputated Questions on the Power of God (1265–1266) distinguishes between the “negative infinite which simply has no limit” and the “privative infinite … which should have limits naturally but which lacks them.”35 Cusa attributes the former to God and the latter to the universe: God has his reason for being within himself and is thus “negatively” infinite, whereas the universe has its reason for being outside itself and is thus “privatively” infinite.³⁶ In Cusa’s own language in De docta ignorantia, God is the “absolute” infinite, whereas the universe is a “contracted” infinite—a concrete and, for that reason, restricted infinite (2.4.113). But this very difference between God and the universe constitutes their inexorable relation: in its contracted infinity, the universe exists as a created reflection of God. Like God, it has no limits; like God (and like Timaeus’s “perfect living creature”), it contains everything that is as well as the seeds of what might yet be. “It is as if the Creator had spoken, ‘Let it be made,’” writes Cusa, “and because God, who is eternity itself, could not be made, that was made which could be made, which would be as much like God as possible” (2.2.104). Emerging from the very being of God, the universe is the expression (explicatio) of the divine enfolding (complicatio): as Elizabeth Brient puts it, “a concrete likeness of God unfolded in the diversity and multiplicity of space and time.”³⁷

This likeness is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the dizzying geometry of De docta ignorantia. As we have already seen, the Cusan universe has neither center nor circumference; rather, it appears to have its center wherever an observer finds herself and its circumference as far as she can see. Our sense of the universe is thus irreducibly perspectival. And yet, Cusa promises, we can visualize the whole—provided we are willing to shatter our spatial sensibilities. “You must make use of your imagination as much as possible,” he advises, “and enfold the center with the poles” (2.11.161). The result will be something like a sphere whose center coincides with its periphery. Only if you can picture such an unpicturable thing will you begin to “understand something about the motion of the universe” (2.11.161). Moreover, you will begin to understand the likeness between the universe and its creator, for insofar as God is both omnipresent and boundless, God can be thought of as “an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere” (2.11.161, emphasis added).38

The image of an infinite sphere itself is not unique to Cusa: it had appeared in the work of Alain de Lille, St. Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, and Meister Eckhart (from whom Cusa most likely picked it up)³⁹ to describe the ineffable being of God. What is unique is that Cusa is applying what had been a theological metaphor to the creation itself, thereby rendering the universe just as incomprehensible as its creator. “Therefore enfold these different images,” he entreats us, “so that the center is the zenith and vice versa, and then … you come to see that the world and its motion and shape cannot be grasped, for it will … have its center and circumference nowhere” (2.11.161, translation altered slightly, emphasis added). Yet even here, we should note, Cusa is careful not quite to identify the infinite sphere of the world with the infinite sphere of God (Jorge Luis Borges’s Tzinacán will go a bit further four centuries later, conflating “the deity” with “the universe” in a mystical vision).⁴⁰ The difference, for Cusa, is that God is a sphere with its “center everywhere,” whereas the universe is a sphere with its center nowhere.⁴¹ Just as we saw the universe’s difference from God secure its resemblance to God, we therefore now see the resemblance ratchet up the difference: both are infinite spheres, but God is omnicentric, whereas the universe has no center at all.

But then, again, can’t the universe be said to have as many centers as there are positions within it, and is it not in this sense omnicentric? The issue once again boils down to perspective. The universe has no absolute center within itself because there is no body in the universe that is equidistant to each of its “poles.” “Precise equidistance to different points cannot be found outside God,” Cusa explains, which is to say that God alone is equally proximate to all parts of creation. But insofar as God is equally proximate to all parts of creation, the universe does indeed have a center: “God is the center of the earth,” Cusa proclaims, “of all the spheres, and of all things that are in the world” (2.11.157, emphasis added). And so in this very particular sense, the center of the world is not nowhere, but everywhere—because God is everywhere. Even as Cusa asserts this principle, however, he adds a qualification—just in case we have missed the context: “[T]he world machine will have, one might say [quasi], its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere, for its circumference and its center is God, who is everywhere and nowhere” (2.12.162, emphasis added). So just as the universe is finite in one respect and infinite in another, its center is nowhere on its own, but everywhere in God. This quasi-omnicentrism establishes the universe as the strongest possible imago dei, a concrete expression of divine being itself. Yet we should note that this likeness holds only insofar as God occupies the center(s) of the very universe that resembles God. Cusa, in other words, is shattering the simple mirror game between God and the universe by folding God into God’s own image, as its omnicentric center. The universe does not resemble a God who stands outside it; it resembles God only insofar as it embodies God everywhere, equally.

It is with this insight that Cusa truly demolishes the graduated cosmos of his Scholastic predecessors. God is not mediated down through the heavenly ranks to the lowly earth at its center; rather, God is directly present to every part of the boundless universe. As Cassirer explains it, “[T]here is no absolute above and below, and … no body is closer or farther from the divine, original source of being than any other; rather, each is ‘immediate to God.’”42 There is no privileged place in the universe, no distinction between the astral and sublunar spheres. And so the order of things is not a static hierarchy under an extracosmic divinity; instead, it is a dynamic holography in which God is fully and equally present to everything in creation. This radical indwelling is, for Cusa, what it means to make a world in the first place: “[C]reating,” he ventures in De docta ignorantia, “seems to be not other than God’s being all things” (2.2.101).

If all things exist as the image of God, then it is not the case that God is mediated by some things (intelligences, Reason, Man) to other things (matter, the passions, women, and nonhuman animals). Rather, Cusa writes, “God communicates without difference or envy” so that every creature becomes a “perfect” image of God: “[E]very creature is, as it were, a finite infinity or created god, so that it exists in the way in which this could best be” (2.2.104). Precisely because God immediately communicates Godself to every creature, however, every creature also mediates God to every other creature. Because God is in each thing as the being of each thing, everything mediates God to everything. And insofar as “everything” as such is the universe itself, Nicholas suggests that “God is in all things as if [quasi] by mediation of the universe” (2.5.117). “As if” by mediation of the universe, it is not just the case that God is in all things and all things are in God, but also that “all things are in all things” (1.15.118, emphasis added).

And yet … and yet—with Cusa, one must always say “and yet.” All things are in all things, and yet all things are not identical. No created thing is identical to any other because, again, pure equality belongs to God alone. Therefore, although each thing has the same essence (quidditas) as all other things, each thing participates in that essence differently (1.17.48). Thus the things of creation are at once radically co-implicated and radically particular: everything shares the essence of God, yet every thing is irreducibly itself. By a similar logic, while God is equally present to all parts of the universe, God also remains distinct from the universe.43 Creation is the expression of God, the contraction of God, the holographic dwelling place of God, and yet creation is not God. Cusa often expresses this difference as a matter of number: whereas God is unity itself, the universe is unity “contracted in plurality” (1.2.6).

At this point, it might be helpful to recall Thomas Aquinas’s concern that a plurality of worlds would compromise the singularity of their creator. If there were more than one world, he argued, then they would be ordered to different ends. If there were an infinite number of worlds, then they would have no end at all. Because Thomas’s God is the one end of all things, all things must occupy this one world. As we have just seen, however, Cusa departs radically from this theocosmology, figuring God not as an extracosmic point, but as the omnipresent center, and the world not as a hierarchical chain, but as a holographic web. Insofar as God can be called an end for Cusa, the notion of “end” is therefore not at all opposed to infinity. “My God,” he exclaims in De visione dei (On the Vision of God, 1453), “you are absolute infinity itself, which I perceive to be the infinite end, but I am unable to grasp how an end without an end is an end.”⁴⁴ Considering, then, that the “end” of “all things in all things” is an “end without end,” how would Cusa answer the perennial question of whether there is one world or many?

A Perspectival Multiverse

At first blush, the answer seems fairly straightforward. If the earth is just another star, then there are a vast number of “earths,” each of them inhabited and occupying the center of its own world. In this sense, Cusa’s one universe can be said to be composed of a plurality of worlds—perhaps even an infinity of them, considering the universe is spatiotemporally boundless.45 Cusa’s cosmology would thus look like a Christianized Atomism: a staggering plurality of worlds, plus God, minus the unqualified “infinity.”

And yet even if we put both Cusa’s God and his contracted infinity to one side, the Cusan mundi differ significantly from the Atomist kosmoi when one considers the nature of their relation to one another. The interaction between worlds in Democritus, we might remember, was limited to their colliding with and destroying one another. Their atoms would then recombine to form new worlds, which would live until they crashed into other neighbors nearby. For Epicurus, this type of interaction disappears because cosmic destruction comes about through gradual decay rather than through collision. As we might remember, however, this very propensity to decay renders each world the product of other worlds and the material for others still, and in this sense Epicurean worlds bear the physical imprint of others. That having been said, Epicurean worlds never interact with one another while they are alive; rather, they drift by themselves through an infinite void, living for a time and then dying.

Cusa’s “worlds,” by contrast, not only interact with one another but compose one another—simultaneously. The crucial image of this real-time intercomposition can be found in one of Cusa’s meditations on the sun. To support his claim that the earth is a star like any other, he speculates that the earth must look like a sun from far away. Likewise, the sun must not look bright to its own inhabitants, who probably see their dwelling place much as we see our own earth. After all, each heavenly body occupies the center of its own world, and here Cusa figures each “world” in surprisingly Aristotelian (but typically qualified) fashion. Just as our earth is surrounded by layers of water, air, and fire, he argues in De docta ignorantia, “the sun’s body, on examination, is discovered to have, as it were [quasi], a more central earth, a fiery brightness, as it were, along its circumference, and in between, as it were, a watery cloud and brighter air” (2.12.164, emphasis added). The reason the sun looks so bright to us is that we are outside its “region of fire” and so cannot see its inner elemental regions. By that same principle, “if someone were outside [our] region of fire, this earth of ours would … appear to that individual as a bright star.” Cusa goes on to speculate that “if the moon does not appear so bright to us, it is perhaps because we are within its watery region, so to speak” (2.12.165, emphasis added). The Cusan universe is therefore not a disconnected proliferation of worlds, but an overlapping, interconstituted set of them. There is no void between worlds—nor is there any clear separation between them. There is no “ours” floating along independently of “theirs.” In fact, to push Cusa a bit, one might even say that each cosmic body inhabits many different worlds at the same time: our earth, for example, occupies the “center” of its own world, the midranges of others, and the peripheries of others still. As it were.

Then, again, it is precisely this inextricability among “worlds” that leads Cusa at one point to deny any cosmic plurality, calling creation “a single universal world [unus mundus universalis]” (2.12.172). As he explains it, every thing of creation participates in the being of God through the mediation of every other thing. Cusa might therefore say along with William James that “our ‘multiverse’ still makes a ‘universe’” because the order of these “strung-along” and interdetermined worlds is one in its multicentricity.46 The way Cusa ultimately puts it is that “the creation as creation [creatura ut creatura] … cannot be called ‘one,’ since it descends from unity, nor ‘many,’ since it takes its being from the One, nor both ‘one and many’ conjointly” (2.2.100). Rather, like everything else in the Cusan landscape, the creation can be said to be one thing from one perspective and another from another: creation as creation is many, whereas creation in God is one. From the perspective of any world, there are many worlds; from the perspective of the one God, the world is one.

That having been said, the oneness of God is different than we might think, by virtue of the one God’s also being three. As Cusa understands the doctrine of the Trinity, God is at once Unity, Equality, and Connection (Unitas, Aequalitas, Nexus), eternally generating unity from unity (as equal to itself) and holding this unity in unified relation to unity (as the connection between them) (1.7.20–21, 1.9.24). As such, God cannot be said to be one as opposed to many, identity as opposed to difference, or unity as opposed to multiplicity. God is, rather, the radical co-implication of all of these, a “oneness” that “precedes all opposition” (1.24.77). The unity of God is therefore not different from plurality, but a “unity to which neither otherness nor plurality nor multiplicity is opposed” (1.24.76).

To say that creation is “one … since it takes its being from the One” (2.2.100) is therefore not to say that creation is not also many, because the One itself is not “not many.” This is the reason Cusa dedicates a full chapter to elaborating the Trinitarian operations of the universe itself: as the created expression of God, the universe generates all things through a triune dance of potentiality, actuality, and the connection between them (2.7.127–31). As the image of God, the universe is therefore both one and many, even though as creation it can be only either one or many (2.2.100). The answer to the question of the number of creation is therefore that there is one world and there are many worlds and that there is either one world that is not opposed to manyness or many worlds held together in oneness. Any way you look at it, the universe is neither simply one nor simply many, but a complex co-implication that shifts according to your vision. What Cusan cosmology comes down to, what it opens up, is something like a “perspectival multiverse.”

Postscript

Infamously, the Roman Catholic Church would not share Cusa’s vision of the perspectival multiverse. A mere century and a half later, the whole idea would be obliterated along with the former Dominican Giordano Bruno, who, as the story goes, was burned at the stake for professing the same cosmic ideas as Nicholas of Cusa.47 We will turn to this story and its complications in a moment, but it is important to note that the Cusan controversy ignited immediately after the publication of De docta ignorantia, when the Heidelberg professor Johannes Wenck issued a lengthy accusation of heresy against its author.⁴⁸ Calling his refutation De ignota litteratura (On Ignorant Erudition, 1442–1443), Wenck rails against each of Cusa’s positions—from his method of learned ignorance (“[H]ow … are we to understand incomprehensible things incomprehensibly?”) to his departure from Thomas’s Aristotelian God (“[T]his deduction destroys the Prime Mover!”).⁴⁹ But each of these epistemological and theological errors stems, for Wenck, from Cusa’s having destroyed the hierarchical Scholastic cosmos. By setting the earth in motion and relating all things immediately to God, Cusa allegedly “deifies everything, annihilates everything, and presents the annihilation as deification.”⁵⁰ Wenck’s stated concern is that Cusa is a pantheist, that he has destroyed the difference between the creator and creation. As we have seen, however, Cusa takes pains to maintain this distinction. The real problem seems to be that by flattening out the order of mediation, Cusa’s cosmology threatens to do the same to ecclesiastical authority. After all, if all things participate directly in God, then what use are the professional ranks of bishops, priests, and deacons? This is part of the reason Cusa’s ideas would become so inflammatory in 1600 as the Roman Catholic Church sought to regain control over the Protestant disaster, and it certainly lies behind Wenck’s distaste for them. Whether in the seventeenth century or the fifteenth century, it is no surprise that an authoritarian doctor of the church might recoil from Cusan cosmology.

What is far more surprising is Cusa’s own departure from his perspectival multiverse. In the works that follow the De docta, Cusa barely mentions cosmology at all, instead offering varied meditations on the soul’s ascent to God.⁵¹ Although these works refrain from addressing the constitution of the universe directly, they have striking, perhaps disappointing, cosmological implications. One year before his death, for example, Cusa published a treatise called De venatione sapientia (The Hunt for Wisdom, 1463), which likens the soul to a hunter and God to its prey.⁵² Many of the familiar elements are here—from the quest to know an unknowable God to the language of contraction to the elaboration of the Trinity. There are some developments as well: Cusa has begun to call God “Non Aliud” (Not Other) to mark God’s transcendence of identity and difference and “Possest” (Possibility to Be) to mark God’s transcendence of actuality and possibility.⁵³ Perhaps most dramatically, De venatione introduces a brand-new category, which Cusa calls posse fieri (the possibility to become). Because God is being rather than becoming (a distinction that Cusa either did not make or just did not mention in De docta), Cusa explains that God must make the possibility to become before making anything that becomes. Posse fieri is therefore “the first and greatest of all creatures”: the stuff out of which God then creates everything else.⁵⁴

The difference, then, is that whereas De docta figures the universe as the created expression (explicatio) of God, De venatione inserts an ontological category between them. And, coincidentally, the universe that God creates out of posse fieri is no longer the destratified proliferation of perspectives that explicated the infinite sphere. Rather, it is a bizarrely re-Scholasticized cosmos. The posse fieri itself takes the form of the heavenly bodies, which Cusa now calls “intellectual natures” and which are made of an incorruptible substance at the circumference of the cosmos.55 Our earth, made of finite, sublunar materials, has been carefully placed at its center.⁵⁶ And in a book that Cusa wrote in the same year, a character called “the Cardinal” tells the duke of Bavaria—with no complication or qualification, no “as it were” or “so to speak”—that because the world is almost perfectly round, “there will … only be one world.”⁵⁷ So the late-Cusan cosmos becomes a single sphere with stars at the periphery and the earth at the center. After all that.

What was it that prompted Cusa to retreat so severely from his perspectival multiverse? Was it fear of other Wencks? Something about the posse fieri? Intellectual exhaustion in the face of a multitude that was nevertheless one? One will likely never know. And yet, as Cusa consoles us, “one will be the more learned, the more one knows that one is ignorant” (1.1.4).

Infinity Unbound: Giordano Bruno

Copernican Convulsions

The Wenck affair aside, Cusa’s era will turn out to have been one of comparative intellectual freedom—one in which it was possible to assert the mobility of the earth, for example, without being sentenced to a lifetime of house arrest, as was Galileo Galilei, or to death, as was Giordano Bruno (1548–1600). The case of Bruno is particularly striking, for, as we shall see, his cosmology was far more radical than Galileo’s and in large measure directly imported from Cusa. And although Cusa’s De docta ignorantia generated some controversy, it was never officially interrogated or condemned; to the contrary, Cusa was made a cardinal eight years after its publication. Retrospectively, one can therefore locate his multiversal musings in a strange space of quiet before the convulsions of the sixteenth century, when a series of anthropological, scientific, and ecclesiastical upheavals prompted a protracted inquisitorial frenzy on the part of a besieged Christendom. It was in large part this frenzy that made impossible for Bruno in 1600 what had been possible for Cusa in 1440. In the context of the Copernican Revolution and of the Counter-Reformation, Bruno’s neo-Cusan multiverse posed such a direct and coherent threat that it led to his being burned at the stake in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori on an Ash Wednesday at the turn of the seventeenth century.

All this notwithstanding, historical differences alone cannot account for Cusa’s and Bruno’s wildly divergent fates. For one thing, the two men seem to have had vastly different personalities. That which is carefully qualified in Cusa is loudly proclaimed in Bruno, the philosopher from Nola who is said to have “preached” his boundless cosmology “with the fervor of an evangelist”58 and who made use of anatomical jokes, elitist jabs, narcissistic flourishes, and a “rich repertory of Neapolitan curses” in order to do so.⁵⁹ Far more important, the teachings of the Cusan and the Nolan were not in fact the same. Bruno did import most of his cosmological principles from the man he called “the divine Cusanus,”⁶⁰ but he went on to make some subtle alterations that would have profound theological consequences—most significantly concerning the divinity of Christ, the doctrine of the Trinity, and the eternity of creation. Strictly speaking, it is these theological “errors” rather than the cosmological teachings themselves that eventually led to Bruno’s execution. But as we shall see, Bruno’s heretical theology was not unconnected to his multiversal cosmology; in fact, each was the product of the other.

Like Cusa, Bruno held that “the earth is not in the centre of the universe,” insisting that it revolves around the sun.⁶¹ Of course, Bruno’s most immediate predecessor with respect to this principle was not Cusa, but Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), who had set forth a heliocentric model of the universe in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), published just before his death. In the throes of the ensuing controversy—at this point, more academic than ecclesiastical—Bruno offered The Ash Wednesday Supper (1584) in part as a defense of Copernicus, “a man of deep, developed, diligent and mature genius,” against his contemporary detractors: a mainly Oxonian throng of “Peripatetics who get angry and heated for Aristotle.”⁶² Aristotle, Bruno charged, had kept philosophy imprisoned for centuries within a bounded cosmos, a notion that would have baffled earlier teachers such as Democritus and Pythagoras. Bruno therefore interpreted the Copernican “revolution” as something more like a restoration—a return to the more authentic teachings of the pre-Socratics. In Bruno’s characteristically baroque turn of phrase, Copernicus was “ordained by the gods to be the dawn which must precede the rising of the sun of the ancient and true philosophy, for so many centuries entombed in the dark caverns of blind, spiteful, arrogant and envious ignorance.”⁶³ But we should note that Bruno’s praise of Copernicus here is carefully circumscribed: Copernicus was the precursor to a revival of the ancients—the dawn before the sun rather than the sun itself. And the reason Copernicus remained confined to the dawn was twofold: his retention of a finite cosmos and his failure to philosophize.

For all the controversy that Copernicus’s heliocentric model generated, Bruno charged that it did not depart all that radically from the geocentric model because it still retained a motionless center and periphery. Of course, the body at the center had changed—Copernicus put the sun where the earth had been—but the so-called fixed stars remained firmly in place, making the heliocentric model as much a series of nested circles as the geocentric model. Bruno offers his most memorable elaboration of this symmetry in a diagram in The Ash Wednesday Supper, which holds the Copernican system within the same stellar boundary as the Ptolemaic one (figure 3.2). In a sense, however, Copernicus’s boundary is not quite the same as Ptolemy’s, for in the geocentric model the fixed stars make one full rotation around the earth every twenty-four hours, whereas in the heliocentric model they stand still while the earth turns. The Copernican cosmos might therefore seem even more bounded than the Ptolemaic cosmos, with the stars truly “fixed” in the heavens. Ironically, however, this fixing of the fixed stars had the opposite effect, opening the heliocentric model out to infinity by undermining Aristotle’s only demonstration of cosmic finitude.

This demonstration, we will recall, begins from the premise that “the body which moves in a circle must necessarily be finite.”⁶⁴ Cosmologically, this means that if the stars at the edge of the universe move in a circle around the earth, the whole universe must be finite. Of course, this reasoning works as long as the earth is thought to occupy the center of the universe. But if the sun occupies the center of the universe, then the stars must stand motionless as the earth rotates on its axis. Because the stars of the heliocentric model do not move in a circle, they cannot assure us of the finitude of the cosmic “circumference.” And if the circumference cannot be said to be finite, then it cannot really be said to be a circumference at all. The Copernican universe might, in other words, be infinite.

The first Copernican to ascribe infinity to the heliocentric universe was the English mathematician and astronomer Thomas Digges (ca. 1546–1595), whose translation of the De revolutionibus in an encyclopedia appendix (1576) features a diagram in which the stars, rather than being confined to a thin ring around the cosmos, are extended out indefinitely (figure 3.3). As we can see, there is still only one world at the center of Digges’s infinite universe—only one solar system, surrounded by an endless, starry sky.⁶⁵ This conclusion, however “Copernican” it might have been, nevertheless had proved a bit too much for Copernicus himself to handle. The astronomer was certainly aware that an immobile circumference opened the door to an infinite universe, “for the strongest argument by which they try to establish that the universe is finite is its motion.” Nevertheless, he preferred not to think too much about it, proposing to “leave the question whether the universe is finite or infinite for the natural philosophers to argue.”⁶⁶ As far as Bruno was concerned, this was the real reason that Copernicus stopped short of overturning “vulgar” Aristotelian cosmology once and for all—because he was too much of a mathematician and not enough of a natural philosopher.⁶⁷

FIGURE 3.2 The symmetry between the Ptolemaic and Copernican models of the universe. (From Giordano Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper/La cena de le Ceneri [1584], trans. Stanley L. Jaki [Paris: Mouton, 1975], 140, fig. 7. Reproduced by permission of Walter de Gruyter GmbH)

FIGURE 3.3 The caption to Thomas Digges’s illustration of the Copernican universe reads: “This orb of stars fixed infinitely up extendeth itself in altitude spherically and therefore immovable, the palace of felicity garnished with perpetual shining glorious light innumerable far excelling our sun both in quantity and in quality, the very court of celestial angels devoid of grief and replenished with perfect endless joy, the [home] for the elect” (quoted in John D. Barrow, The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless, and Endless [New York: Vintage, 2005], 118). (From Thomas Digges, “A Perfit Description of the Caelestial Orbes,” in Leonard Digges, A Prognostication Everlasting [London, 1576], fol. 43. Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

Cosmological Provocations

If Bruno confined Copernicus to the “dawn” of the ancient-new cosmology, he associated his own teachings with the rising of its sun. It was “the Nolan,” declared the Nolan, who finally had the courage to do away with the sphere of the fixed stars and assert the cosmic infinity that Copernicanism implied. It was the Nolan who had “freed the human mind” by breaking the bars of its Aristotelian prison. “Now behold,” says one of Bruno’s characters of his own creator, “the man who has surmounted the air, penetrated the sky, wandered among stars, passed beyond the borders of the world, effaced the imaginary walls of the first, eighth, ninth, tenth spheres, and the many more you could add according to the tattlings of empty mathematicians and the blind vision of vulgar philosophers.”68

If this hymn of praise sounds familiar, it is because Bruno had found a “living teacher” in Lucretius, whose work had been back in circulation for more than a century. We might recall that the De rerum natura lauded Epicurus as a god for having passed “beyond the fiery ramparts” of the cosmos and out to an infinite number of worlds.⁶⁹ In Bruno’s work, the god becomes Bruno himself—the only man of his age to travel beyond the false confines of Aristotelian circles and proclaim that “the universe is of infinite size and the worlds therein without number.”⁷⁰ Again, this conclusion was a direct consequence of the Copernican turn, but no one had yet had the courage to give it any thought. Such thought had been discouraged, above all, by the preface to the first edition of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus, which announced that the book was of strictly mathematical importance and that it made no truth claims about the actual constitution of the universe.⁷¹ Bruno was the first person to insist that this preface could not have been written by Copernicus himself but was “added by I know not what conceited ass.”⁷² Even though he could not name the ass who had written it (Johannes Kepler would eventually discover him to be the Lutheran theologian Andreas Osiander), Bruno’s rejection of the preface cleared away the chief obstacle to philosophical reflection on the Copernican hypothesis. As Hilary Gatti has summarized the matter, “Bruno attempted to pilot a recalcitrant sixteenth-century public, convinced of the falsity of the Copernican hypothesis except within a strictly mathematical formulation of it, toward a realist acceptance of the heliocentric principle, together with much else that Copernicus himself would not have been prepared to accept.”⁷³

All told, the “much else” that Copernicus would have resisted amounts to a kind of Epicurean-inflected, pseudo-Cusan cosmology. Bruno posits an infinite universe filled with innumerable worlds that move in a “void.” As a corrective to Aristotle, who denied the existence of an absolute vacuum, Bruno explains that the void is not nothing; it is simply the space in which worlds come to be.74 Like Plato’s khôra, Bruno’s void is the “bosom in which the whole has its being.” Of the infinite worlds within this infinite bosom, many “contain animals and inhabitants no less than our own earth [does],”⁷⁵ rendering our planet just one of countless others like it. It follows that neither the earth nor the sun nor any other cosmic body occupies the center of the universe; rather, as Cusa suggested, the “center” is wherever one happens to be in the universe. Thus, according to Bruno in Cause, Principle, and Unity (1584), “we may affirm that the universe is entirely center; or that the center of the universe is everywhere, and the circumference nowhere insofar as it is different from the center.”⁷⁶

Insofar as this infinite sphere has no fixed center or periphery, there is no distinction between the sublunar and astral spheres; “consequently, that beautiful order and ladder of nature is but a charming dream, an old wives’ tale.”⁷⁷ As many commentators have explained, the Brunian universe is therefore “homogeneous” rather than hierarchical; no place within it is either geographically or ontologically privileged.⁷⁸ That said, this “homogeneity” does not amount to indifference; elements of the cosmos are differentiated from one another, as they are in Cusa, by virtue of each thing’s particular capacity to contain the whole. And insofar as this is the case, insofar as “this universe … is found entire in each of its parts,” one can go so far as to say that “all things are in all things” and that “all things are in each thing.”⁷⁹ It is as if every point in the cosmos were Borges’s “aleph”: “the place where, without admixture or confusion, all the places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist.”⁸⁰ For Bruno, all things are both radically particular and radically co-implicated by means of the grand cosmic holography in which everything participates.

It may therefore strike us as strange that Bruno thought he had made such an unprecedented departure from the cosmological stupidity of his age. After all, each of his principles seems to have been lifted directly out of Cusa. Indeed, Bruno admits in On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (1584) that “the Cusan seems to have approached” the teachings he himself now proclaims. But the Cusan fell short, Bruno maintains, because he failed to distinguish between types of cosmic bodies.⁸¹

For Cusa, we will recall, the earth is a star like any other; to the inhabitants of the sun, the earth looks just as bright as the sun does to us. Conversely, every cosmic body is an “earth” at the center of its own world, surrounded by progressive rings of water, air, and fire. Bruno changes this model considerably by making what might seem to be a subtle distinction between “hot” and “cold” bodies, which is to say between stars and planets. Although all cosmic bodies move, these two classes of bodies move “differently,” with the watery, cold ones orbiting the fiery, hot ones. This means that Bruno’s worlds, unlike Cusa’s, are not centered around any given cosmic body; rather, they are centered (in good Copernican fashion) around a sun. For Bruno, to say there are an infinite number of worlds is therefore to say there are “innumerable suns, and an infinite number of earths [that] revolve around those suns, just as the seven we can observe revolve around this sun which is close to us.”82 Worlds, in other words, are solar systems.

Unlike Cusa’s worlds, then, Bruno’s do not overlap: they look far more like Epicurean kosmoi than Cusan mundi. As Miguel Granada has explained, each Brunian world is “separated from the adjacent ones by a vast extension of space filled with pure air or ether,” terms that Bruno used interchangeably with “void.”⁸³ This separation allows Bruno to avoid the Aristotelian claim that the “earth” of a hypothetical other world would be drawn to “our” center as well as to its own; for Bruno, the distance between worlds is so great that cosmic bodies can only “move toward communication with convenient things,” having no bearing on things far away.⁸⁴ Each system thus exists in a self-sustaining equilibrium, with its sun and planets moving “according to an intrinsic principle” that Bruno calls the “soul” of each cosmic body.⁸⁵ By attributing an animating principle to each planet and star, Bruno eliminates any need for a prime mover—not to mention for a “first moved” sphere of fixed stars that would confer movement on the rest of the cosmos. This is not to say that Brunian cosmology has no need for a divine principle, but that Bruno’s God acts through immanent processes of motion, “giving the power to generate their own motion to an infinity of worlds.”⁸⁶

But, again, the bodies within Bruno’s infinity of worlds move only in relation to the bodies closest to them. As they so move, Granada explains, they exchange particles of matter with one another, “the stars emitting light and heat and the planets emitting humid exhalations” so that the life of each system is constantly renewed.87 And with this renewal, Bruno swerves away from Epicurus and back toward Plato. Securing the self-containment of each system allows Bruno to ensure their eternity, skirting the Democritean collision, the Epicurean demise, and the Stoic cataclysm all in the same gesture. Worlds will never come close enough to collide with one another; every earth constantly receives new life through its exchange with the sun; and the sun is so tempered by water that it will never consume the cosmos in flames. As they do in the Timaeus, then, the elements sustain a constant, harmonious relation that ensures the eternity of the creation they compose. The only significant difference is that Bruno’s elemental dance takes place within an infinity of kosmoi, each of which is just as everlasting as the universal whole.

In On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, Bruno goes on to deploy this process of elemental exchange to rid himself of Cusa’s one Aristotelian remnant: the elemental striation of kosmoi. Worlds are not layer cakes of earth, water, air, and fire, Bruno argues; they are “heterogeneous bodies” composed of a strikingly Timaean sort of mixing. Because Bruno’s worlds inhale and exhale particles of matter, they are like animals, “great globes in which earth is no heavier than the other elements,” but is intermingled with them. The same goes for all innerworldly things; although one element—fire, for example—may predominate in any given body, it exists in tensional dependence with all the others: “fire” is not fire without the “earth” it consumes and the air that contains it. So there can be no “outer” sphere of pure fire. We might say that with this destratification of worlds, Bruno radicalizes Cusa’s antihierarchical gesture even further, showing even “the famous order of the elements … to be in vain.”⁸⁸

But Bruno’s most dramatic cosmological departure from Cusa lies in his demolition of the boundary between absolute and contracted infinity. For Bruno, the universe is not “finitely” or “privatively” infinite, nor is it infinite from one perspective and finite from another. The Brunian universe is just infinite—genuinely infinite—both in power and in extension. To be fair, in On the Infinite Universe Bruno does make one fairly perfunctory qualification to this designation, conceding that the universe, unlike God, is not “all-comprehensive infinity” because it, unlike God, is “comprehensively in the whole but not comprehensively in those parts which we can distinguish within the whole.” From this statement alone, we might think that Bruno is adopting Cusa’s distinction between “absolute” and “contracted” infinity. But immediately after making this qualification, Bruno goes on to undermine it, pointing out that the “parts” of the universe cannot actually be called parts at all “since they pertain to an infinite whole.”⁸⁹ If the universe is infinite, he insists, then each of its “parts” would have to be infinite. As Bruno explains in Cause, Principle, and Unity, this means that an infinite universe can only be “found entire in each of its parts”—just like God.⁹⁰ This, then, is the cosmological departure from Cusa that will open the theological floodgates: Bruno collapses the distinction between the boundless universe and its infinite God.

Theological Consequences

For Cusa, we will recall, the relationship between God and creation is secured only by their distinction; it is precisely because the universe is not God that it can be called God’s created image. Whereas book II of De docta ignorantia explains this relationship in predominantly cosmological terms (the universe is the contracted expression of an uncontracted divinity; the universe is divine unity unfolded in the multiplicity of space and time), book III, which I have not yet addressed, shifts to a strictly theological account. In this last third of his treatise, Cusa sets forth an extended systematic Christology, proclaiming that the true bridge between the infinity of God and the finitude of creation is the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ. Insofar as Christ is both infinite and finite, he enables creation to participate in that from which it is ontologically different, bringing into relation entities between which there would otherwise be “no proportion” (3.4.203–7).91

It is precisely this lack of proportion that Bruno abolishes when he attributes full infinity to creation: for Bruno, there is no irreducible difference between the universe and God. This does not mean that Bruno’s universe is God—at least not exactly; it means that the universe issues forth from God and that it does so immediately, without the help of Christ, the posse fieri, or anything else. The Brunian universe is the direct, outward expression of an infinite God, and this is the reason it must itself be infinite. The universe is infinite because the creator holds nothing back, conferring on the universe everything God has, which is everything God is. The universe, in short, is not the contracted image of God, but the unmediated outpouring of God; it is what Hans Blumenberg has called “the essential undisguisedness of divinity itself.”92 There is therefore no need for a mediator—no need for a Christological bridge between God and the universe—because nothing has ever separated them to begin with. So Bruno’s accusers were not exactly wrong when they charged him with denying the divinity of Christ;⁹³ Bruno must have thought it strange to make such a fuss over the manifestation of God in one man when God was already manifest in the whole universe. What seems to have been lost on the inquisitors, however, is that Bruno does not abolish Christology here so much as he cosmicizes it: insofar as the creation flows forth eternally from God, the universe is itself God’s “Son,” eternally begotten of the Father.⁹⁴ There is, in other words, no distinction between God’s “inner” expression in the persons of the Trinity and God’s “outer” expression in creation: creation is the “God from God” and “light from light” that orthodoxy calls the Word of God. Consequently, there is no gap between the eternity of God and the temporality of creation, nor is there a gap between the moment of creation and the event of incarnation. Rather, the universe is the outpouring of God from the beginning, and creation itself is the incarnation. The whole universe is God-in-the-universe.

And so to the old Scholastic question of whether an omnipotent God could create more than one world, Bruno answers that God cannot not do so. “If in the first efficient Cause there be infinite power,” he reasons, “there must result a universe of infinite size and worlds infinite in number.”⁹⁵ This statement is among the teachings that would run him into so much trouble with the Inquisition—not because the church denied that God could create a plurality of worlds (recall Bishop Tempier’s Condemnations), but because it balked at Bruno’s insistence that God had to do so. As the mathematician-theologian Marin Mersenne (1588–1648) would charge a quarter-century after the Nolan’s execution, Bruno’s doctrine of an eternal and ineluctable creation compromises the creator’s free will, “reducing God to the rank of a natural and necessary agent.”⁹⁶ The only way to avoid this indignity, Mersenne insisted, would be to return to that late-medieval solution and teach, as Granada puts it, that “God can do infinite things which he nevertheless does not will to do,”⁹⁷ that God restrains himself from creating the infinite universe of infinite worlds that he very well could have created. To suggest otherwise—to say, for example, that God is bound to create everything God can create—would be to suggest that God cannot quite control Godself: that the universe pours out of its creator eternally, even womanishly, and there is nothing God can do about it.

Although Bruno would not live long enough to refute this argument in person, his thoughts on the matter are just the opposite. As far as Bruno can see, the insult to God’s omnipotence comes not from an infinite universe, but from a finite one: it is a derogation of God’s creative power, he insists, to teach that God creates anything less than God might create. This teaching is also a derogation of divine goodness, for why would a benevolent God refrain from creating as many good things as possible? In fact, as Bruno’s mouthpiece Philotheo points out in On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, to say that God creates anything less than an infinite universe is effectively to say that God creates nothing at all, “for every finite thing is nothing in relation to the infinite.” The infinite God is therefore “glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand, I say in an infinity of worlds.”98 Finally, contra Mersenne, Bruno considers the insult to divine masculinity to come from a restricted creation rather than from an infinite one. “Why do you desire that [divinity] should remain grudgingly sterile,” Philotheo asks, “rather than extend itself as a father, fecund, ornate, and beautiful?”⁹⁹

As is evident from this string of adjectives alone, however, Bruno’s account of divine fatherhood is remarkably queer, unsettling boundaries of sexual and ontological difference alike. The language of “ornate fecundity” aside, we might note that the passage we have just read hinges divine fatherhood on God’s being “extended” into the infinite universe. To call the universe finite, Bruno says, is tantamount to calling God “sterile.” This view squares with what we already know of Bruno’s theology: God creates eternally, and so there is no “God” without the creation that expresses God exhaustively. This means there are no strictly intratrinitarian relations—no “Father” or “Son” gazing at each other before or beyond the universe. Rather, the “only-begotten Son” is creation itself. This means that God can be said to be “Father” only in relation to the infinite universe and worlds that God creates. The fatherhood of God, in other words, depends on creation’s materiality and multiplicity—terms that have traditionally been coded as feminine.

Bruno tackles this coding most directly in Cause, Principle, and Unity by putting it in the mouth of his least intelligent and most Aristotelian interlocutor, Poliinnio. During a conversation about the nature of “primary matter,” Poliinnio explains that Aristotle “compares it to the female sex—that sex, I mean, which is intractable, frail, capricious, cowardly, feeble, vile, ignoble, base, despicable, slovenly, unworthy, deceitful, harmful, abusive”—the list, in true Brunian fashion, goes on.100 The connection between matter and women lies, for Poliinnio, in the notion of “appetite”: just as women’s desire brings about the ruin of men, matter’s “desire” renders corrupt and perishable the form that would otherwise be perfect and eternal. And so two pages later, Poliinnio concludes that “one must condemn the appetite of both women and matter, which is the cause of all evil, all affliction, defect, ruin and corruption” (246). Although the character Gervasio spends a good amount of time ridiculing this position (“this person has given me a pain in the head with his comparison between matter and woman”), it is the twin characters Philotheo and Theophilo, “reliable reporter[s] of the Nolan philosophy,” who set out to break the whole network of associations on which the position relies (85–86, 101).

They accomplish this by means of a two-part strategy that might be called proto-deconstructive. The first part gets under way in the first dialogue, when Philotheo reverses the ancient “table of opposites” that the Metaphysics attributes to Pythagoras. According to Aristotle, the Pythagoreans divide all cosmic principles as follows:

limited	unlimited
even	odd
one	many
right	left
male	female
still	moving
straight	bent
light	darkness
good	bad
square	oblong101

As the feminist philosopher Grace Jantzen has glossed this infamous table, “[T]he left-hand column was orderly, good, and masculine, while the right-hand column was chaotic, bad, and feminine. In the thought of Plato … the items in the left-hand column were further associated with mind and spirit, and the right-hand column with body and matter. Women, who were seen in terms of their reproductive function, were thus conceptually linked with matter and with the chaotic and evil, while men were linked with reason, spirit, and form.”¹⁰²

Bruno’s Philotheo begins to unravel this whole two-column scheme, with all its attendant associations, by aligning the characteristics that are usually coded “female” with maleness and vice versa. To make matters more confusing, he introduces this set of upside-down associations by ascribing them to the Aristotelian Poliinnio. Looking to reason Poliinnio out of his “slanderous rage” toward women, Philotheo tells him, “You hold, on the one hand, the body, masculine, to be your friend, and the soul, feminine, your enemy. On the one hand, you have chaos, masculine, and on the other, organization, feminine” (32). Of course, apart from the “friend” and “enemy” designations, this is precisely the opposite of what Poliinnio holds, for if, as he believes, “prime matter” is female, then the body and chaos must be female as well—in accordance with the usual alignment of attributes. Nevertheless, Philotheo continues unhindered, perhaps hoping to confuse his rather sluggish opponent. Running down all the usual attributes, but backward, he lists on the “masculine” side “error, on the other [feminine side], truth; here, imperfection, there, perfection; here, hell, there, happiness; on this side, Poliinnio the pedant, on the other side, Poliinnia the Muse. In short, all the vices, imperfections, and crimes are masculine, and all the virtues, merits, and goodnesses are feminine [Finalmente tutti vitij, mancementi, et delitti son maschi: et tutti le virtudi, eccellenze, et bontadi son femine]” (32).

Once Philotheo has inverted these associations, Theophilo goes on to subvert them, crossing so many categories that the old table collapses altogether. For example, Philotheo has rather cheekily asserted that materiality is masculine (and therefore corruptible, changeable, etc.), whereas immateriality is feminine (and therefore incorruptible, unchangeable, etc.) (32). As we may notice, this particular assertion may rupture the traditional associations of materiality with femininity and of femininity with corruption, but it preserves the traditional association of materiality with corruption. This last link will be broken in the fourth dialogue, when Theophilo explores the relationship between matter and form. Making an uncharacteristic and formidable departure from Plato, Theophilo argues that form (much like God) does not exist in some extracosmic realm before it gives shape to matter. On the contrary, form without matter cannot exist at all, “for when form is separated from matter it ceases to exist, as is not the case with matter” (86). For example, when a clay pot falls off a shelf, the form of the pot ceases to exist, but the material of the clay remains. Or when a log is thrown on a fire, the form of the log is lost, but the matter is transformed into particles of smoke, air, and ash. Form, in other words, comes and goes. But matter is eternal.

It is therefore not the case that matter “desires” form in purportedly feminine fashion, waiting for it to bring her to life. Rather, “since matter clearly preserves form, form must desire matter in order to perpetuate itself, and not the other way around” (86, emphasis added). Thinking in line with Philotheo’s initial reversals, we might be prompted at this juncture to think that Theophilo is associating matter with masculinity and form with the femininity that desires it—all the while leaving in place the incorruptibility of the masculine and the corruptibility of the feminine. Yet Theophilo makes one more move than this, saying that insofar as matter is the constant substratum beneath all forms, matter must in a sense “contain” all forms, producing them from within itself and then reassimilating them as things are transformed into other things. Matter, as he explains it, “unfolds [esplica] what it possesses enfolded [implicato]” (84).

This enfolding-unfolding, we will note, is a direct citation of Cusa’s implicatio and explicatio, the glaring difference being that Bruno is attributing to matter what his predecessor attributed to God. Matter, for Bruno, has the infinite capacity to implicate and explicate all that is. And strikingly, it is only in the process of divinizing this eternal material principle that he finally gives it a gender: “[T]his matter which unfolds what it possesses enfolded must, therefore, be called a divine and excellent parent, generator and mother [genetrice et madre] of natural things” (84). This is the point at which the “table” finally collapses: matter is not feminine (Philotheo), and matter is feminine (Theophilo), depending on what “feminine” means. But either way we look at it, matter is eternal, so if we want to “relegate” materiality to femininity, then we end up elevating femininity to eternity in the process. And if we want to save eternity for masculinity, then we must saddle masculinity with materiality—and the distinctions recollapse.

In terms of cosmogony, the bottom line for Bruno is that matter eternally generates an infinity of forms from within itself, thereby producing and sustaining the infinite worlds of the infinite universe. Needless to say, then, Bruno does not follow Cusa in reaffirming the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. Insofar as creation is the direct and necessary expression of God, there is no “God” in excess of the material universe—no self-contained divinity that suddenly decides to make something—nor is there ever “nothing” for “him” to create “out of.” Rather, what we have is an infinite God who eternally generates an infinite creation—a God who cannot, in fact, do otherwise. And although this account may feminize and materialize God, although it may compromise the absolute power of God’s will, Bruno mentions in passing that his teachings are no different from those of “Moses himself.” When “Moses” wrote “‘Let the earth bring forth its animals, let the waters bring forth living creatures[,]’ it is as if he had said: ‘Let matter bring them forth.’” And when he wrote “that the efficient intellect (which he calls spirit) ‘brooded on the waters,’” he meant that the intellect “gave the waters a procreative power and produced from them the natural species” (83). “God,” then, is both matter and intellect, both father and mother—the total coincidence of opposites from and as which the universe eternally unfolds.

A Multimodal Multiverse

As the unmediated outpouring of God, the universe must also be said to be the coincidence of opposites, and it is in this sense that Bruno’s infinite worlds can be said not only to be many, but also to be one. Although this theme is a familiar one, Bruno’s many-oneness is subtly different from Cusa’s. For Cusa, we will recall, the universe “in itself” is either one or many, whereas the universe “in God” is both. Because Bruno makes no such distinction, his multiverse is always both one and many, always at the same time, just like God. Yet how does this many-oneness play itself out cosmologically? From what we have already seen, the “manyness” of the universe is clear: there are an infinite number of suns surrounded by an infinite number of earths, each of which has its own principle of motion within it. But how can these infinite worlds also be said to be “one”? If each body has its “own” soul, and if worlds are separated from one another by a vast expanse of interstellar space, and if each of them lives forever, then do they not constitute a more unrelated plurality than the Atomist kosmoi? Just a random scattering of cosmic individuals?

No, replies the Nolan; “the universe is one [l’universo é uno]” (87). Bruno accounts for this cosmic unity in two different ways. First, he posits a “world soul” that permeates the whole of matter to such an extent that neither exists without the other, a corporeal spirit much like the ancient Stoic pneuma. So although all cosmic bodies have their “own,” individual souls, they are also just varying expressions of the one “immense spirit, [which] under different relations and according to different degrees, fills and contains the whole” (6). Moreover, whereas each individual soul moves its own body, the world soul as a whole is at rest. After all, the entirety of an infinite universe cannot rotate (because circular motion implies finitude), and it cannot move rectilinearly (because it has nowhere outside itself to go). So the world soul is the “infinite, immobile” spirit substance of all things, the stuff that lies around, between, and within the infinite worlds of the infinite universe and makes the whole thing one (11).

Bruno’s second argument for the unity of the universe stems from its infinity. If it is true, as he insists in Cause, Principle, and Unity, that “in the infinite there are no parts,” then every bit of the universe contains the entirety of it. In other words, the multitude of things in an infinite universe must, in essence, be one, to such an extent that “all that we see of diversity and difference is nothing but diverse aspects of one and the same substance” (11). At this point, considering the omnipresence of the world soul and the indivisibility of the infinite, Bruno’s cosmology looks nothing like a hyper-Atomist multitude. It suddenly looks far more like a hyper-Stoic monism, with all the diversity of the universe subsumed under a more primordial, more ultimate oneness. “In the multitude I find no joy,” Bruno writes in On the Infinite Universe; “it is Unity that enchants me.”103

Thanks in large part to a scholarly overvaluation and misunderstanding of this utterance,¹⁰⁴ Bruno has traditionally been interpreted as a thoroughgoing monist: a neomystic (or protoromantic) who assimilates all diversity into an undifferentiated one.¹⁰⁵ But it is crucial to recall that, for Bruno, nothing exists without everything. So just as there is no form without matter, no matter without spirit, and no God without creation, there is no “one” without the many. This is not to say that the many is the outward expression of the one or even that it is the created reflection of the one; for Bruno, the many composes the one as such. This, in turn, is not to say that the many is therefore prior to the one or that it makes the one many. Rather, the many makes the one multiple. To use Bruno’s language in Cause, Principle, and Unity, “[I]n the infinite and immobile one, which is substance and being, if there is multiplicity … [it] does not, thereby, cause being to be more than one, but to be multi-modal, multiform, and multi-figured” (90, emphasis added). This, then, is the peculiar ontology of Brunian cosmology: the universe is neither monistic nor dualistic nor pluralistic, nor is it one from one perspective and many from another. Rather, the universe is irreducibly “multimodal”—one by virtue of its infinite multiplicity, with the whole reflected holographically in each of its partless parts.

Postscript

When the inquisitors read Bruno the verdict that called for his execution, he is said to have replied, “You may be more afraid to bring that sentence against me than I am to accept it.”106 This response has become part of a vast stock of Brunian lore and tends to be interpreted as a confirmation of any number of his heretical teachings. Bruno is said to have been unafraid of death because he believed in the transmigration of souls or because he “denied that sins deserve punishment” or because he denied the divinity of Christ and so did not fear he would stand before him in judgment.¹⁰⁷ But one might also interpret this final outburst in cosmological terms as a confession of faith in his multimodal universe. If “the universe is in all things and all things are in the universe,” then this must also mean that “we [are] in it and it in us.” “We” are, in this sense, as eternal as the universe itself. And so the endless sea of matter, constantly unfolding the forms she enfolds, will find something else to do with us—even with a body that has been thrown like wood on a fire: “See, then, how our spirit should not be afflicted, how there is nothing that should frighten us: for [this] unity is stable in its oneness and so remains forever.”¹⁰⁸