### Biblical Cosmography
The ancient Hebrews held ideas about the structure of the world consonant with those then widespread in the East. They depicted the earth as a flat, round disc, with Palestine and Jerusalem at its center, interrupted here and there by seas and surrounded by a great ocean, which God has set limits to that should not be transgressed (Job 26:10).
This disc rests upon the primordial waters of the great abyss or *tĕhôm* (Gen 1:2; cf. Akkadian *tâmtu*), and is consolidated by columns (Ps 18:16). From the great abyss, waters rise to feed springs and rivers. In the depths of the earth lies *šĕ’ôl* (Job 10:21-22; cf. Akkadian *arallû*), destined for the abode of departed souls, which appear as shadows, *rĕpā’îm* (Ps 88:11). Above, the solid heavenly vault (“firmament”) serves to divide the upper waters from the lower (Gen 1:6-8) and to retain these in their reservoirs (Job 38:22). When God wishes to send rain, He opens the floodgates (Gen 7:11; 8:2) and allows the waters to flow. The starry heaven would be the highest (according to G. Schiaparelli) and as thin as a curtain or skin (Vulgate, cf. Ps 104:2); according to others, the stars, along with the sun and moon, would instead be affixed to the solid firmament (cf. Gen 1:14, 15, 17), with the consequent difficulty of explaining the motion of the stars, which was recognized and admitted by the Hebrews. In short, the Hebrews pictured the cosmos according to the analogy of a house, whose ground floor corresponds to the earth’s surface, the underground level to *šĕ’ôl*, the roof to the heavenly vault, and the terrace to what lies above the heavens (v. EXAMERON).
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### Cosmology
From Greek *xóqûoç* (world) and *xóyoc* (discourse), it is the part of natural philosophy that studies corporeal being in general and the universe as a whole. As a title of a philosophical treatise, the term first appears with C. Wolff (*Cosmologia generalis*, Frankfurt 1731) and was later adopted, particularly by Neoscholastics, either simply as a replacement for the traditional term “physics” or, more often, to designate the general part of “physics.”
**S. TORTA.** — In the history of Western thought, the philosophy of nature arises within a broader process in which the world is conceived as a *cosmos*, i.e., as an autonomous reality moved and governed by immanent forces according to definable laws. Among the earliest Ionian philosophers, this new conception appears linked to a unitary view of the entire cosmos, which, in contrast to the multiplicity and inconstancy of things, demanded a distinction between variable forms and the single, imperishable foundation of reality. The determination of this foundation became the first problem of cosmology. With the Pythagoreans’ discovery of the normative role of numbers in natural phenomena, a new and important motif entered speculation, contributing to the orientation of thought toward a pluralistic and atomistic cosmology. The Eleatic school represents in part a reaction against this Pythagorean direction: the basis of its doctrine is a dialectic that, for the first time, develops the problems of becoming, being, and its determinations from an ontological standpoint. The paradoxical conclusions reached by Eleatic monism led to the two attempts by Empedocles and Anaxagoras to take up cosmological questions on a pluralistic basis. Eleatic and Pythagorean motifs also combine in Democritus’ atomic system.
In Plato’s thought, cosmology does not emerge as an autonomous science. All that is knowable in empirical things derives from the Ideas and mathematical values. Scientific propositions about things are therefore possible only at the level of a mathematized physics. This mathematics, however, acquires in Plato’s philosophy a wholly original meaning: numbers and figures are the norms of a preparatory order, intermediate between the Ideas and sensible things. Above the mathematical order stands the order of essences, an immediate expression of the dialectical relations among the Ideas themselves. The modifications that Platonic doctrines undergo in Aristotle are chiefly governed by the idea of the ontological primacy of concrete being. Corresponding to this primacy in the realm of essences is that of the *εἰδός ἄτομον*, which stands to generic essences in the relation of act to potency. Thus falls Plato’s descending dialectic and with it the aprioristic conception of science. Among the four types of causes, the two final causes hold first place. The teleological order that directs all beings toward the supreme good is limited only by prime matter. In his treatment of the intrinsic principles of bodies, Aristotle develops his hylomorphic doctrine (v. ILMORFISMO).
Christianity, with its doctrine of a transcendent God and of creation, introduced a view of the universe to which Greek and Hellenistic philosophy, despite notable convergences, had not attained. In the development of this new conception, the writers of the patristic age made extensive use of contemporary doctrines, especially those of the Stoic and Platonic schools. An occasion to address the more neglected cosmological questions arose in their commentaries on Genesis; commentaries on the Hexameron became, from Theophilus of Antioch and Origen onward, a typical literary form in which the Fathers’ thoughts on the universe found expression.
Medieval cosmology developed in a rich and multifaceted manner. The superiority of Aristotelian physics ensured its significant influence among scholastics of Augustinian (School of St. Bonaventure) and Neoplatonic (Ripolinus and Hugh of Strasbourg, Witelo) orientation from the mid-12th century onward. Medieval cosmology reached its peak with the reconstruction of Aristotelian physics in the works of St. Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas. The integration of Aristotelian doctrine into the great philosophical-theological syntheses required certain corrections and additions that were also significant for the deeper direction of cosmological speculation. Thus, divine exemplarism became a common doctrine among medievals, chance was subordinated to divine providence, and the metaphysics of cosmic causality was deepened and refined.
Modern cosmological systems were immediately prepared by a current, especially lively in Italy and Germany, in which the transition occurred from the internal experience of late medieval mysticism to an enthusiastic experience of the universe, more or less close to pantheism. The principal inspiration of this current was N. Cusanus, its most influential representatives G. Bruno and Paracelsus. Another factor of the greatest importance was the natural sciences. The first fruit of the new scientific movement was modern mechanics (G. Galilei, C. Huygens, I. Newton), which gained ever-wider influence and led to the collapse of the physics of sensible qualities. The tendencies at work in the new physics found a first expression, inspired by mathematical rationalism, in Descartes’ mechanistic cosmology.
**Biblical Cosmography** — A miniature depicting a side view of the cosmos contained in the *Topographia Christiana* of Cosmas Indicopleustes: Cod. Vat. gr., 699, f. 43 r (9th century) — Vatican Library. Graphic reconstruction of the same miniature.
In Kantian criticism, a fundamental distinction is drawn between the sciences critically assured of the objects of experience and metaphysics. Theoretical knowledge of nature is essentially identified with Newtonian physics. By reason of the limited scope of this knowledge, Kant was able to avoid the dogmatic-physicalistic consequences thereof.
For the history of natural philosophy from the end of Romanticism onward, the orientation of all natural sciences toward the scientific ideal of physics was of decisive importance. The debate over the true meaning and scope of the scientific image of the world, constructed under the methodological guidance of physics, characterizes the subsequent period, which is otherwise rather heterogeneous. The dogmatic acceptance of scientific concepts led to a group of doctrines (materialism, energetism, evolutionism) lacking the necessary philosophical depth. The philosophers of the positivistic school (A. Comte, E. Mach) subjected scientific methods to a critique ordinarily grounded in the presuppositions of a radical empiricism. Other philosophers (E. V. Hartmann, H. Driesch), however, defended the right and necessity of a natural philosophy whose task they saw in extending and deepening the image of the world as outlined by the empirical sciences, so as to satisfy the demands of a comprehensive causal and final understanding.
For the continuators of the Scholastic tradition, faced with the profound differences between Aristotelian physics and the results of the natural sciences, the task arose of highlighting the properly philosophical content of the traditional doctrine and demonstrating the possibility and necessity of a cosmological speculation prior to and beyond experimental inquiry. The Neoscholastics were able to demonstrate conclusively that the essential theses of their philosophy are grounded in general philosophical principles and in the most universal and fundamental data of experience.
The problem of deeper divergences in the history of natural philosophy arises from the diversity of metaphysical presuppositions. The resolution of questions such as idealism or realism, the relations between cosmic being and absolute being, nominalism or pluralism, does not belong to natural philosophy but to metaphysics. Yet even after these problems are excluded from natural philosophy, there remains a group of questions which, though ordinarily discussed in treatises on natural philosophy, are in strict terms metaphysical. The questions concerning the temporal existence of corporeal things—namely, their coming into being and passing away as substances and their accidental mutability, the compatibility of the autonomy of individual beings with their dependence on others, and of substantial unity with the multiplicity of integral parts—are among the most important of this group. The Aristotelian tradition seeks the solution of these questions on the basis of the metaphysical theory of potency and act and of hylomorphism, which is the application of that theory to the constitution of bodies. The problems of transient causality receive their clarification chiefly from the doctrine of the identity between the act of action and the “passio.”
A second group of problems centers on the question of the physical essence of bodies. This involves the determination of the essential and fundamental properties of bodies in general and the order and manner in which other corporeal determinations arise from them. In these questions, natural philosophy is in closer contact with experimental inquiry, as is demonstrated by some of the responses, which are intimately connected with physical theories (mechanism, recent dynamism based on electromagnetic field physics). The Scholastics consider quantity as the primary property of bodies, immediately connected with their materiality. The difficulties concerning continuous extension, which have formed one of the most important motives for the elaboration of various dynamistic theories, are resolved by the doctrine of the actual unity of the continuum (v.), which is at once a potential multiplicity. Against mechanism, however, the Scholastics reject the denial of qualitative properties and of intrinsic mutability in bodies, insisting especially on the existence of operative potencies required by the causal explanation of any natural change. Even in the question of the nature of spatial relations, Scholastic doctrine departs from mechanical-dynamistic conceptions by affirming space as an “ens rationis” that has its foundation in the real extension of bodies and in the dimensional relations deriving therefrom. Connected with that of space is the question of time, resolved on the basis of the Aristotelian principle that gives the concept of time a real foundation in successive motion.
To the questions relating to the generic properties of bodies is linked the question