MICROCOSM AND MACROCOSM. - The term microcosm, from the Greek μικρός "small" and κόσμος "world," was used for the first time by Democritus (H. Diels, Vorsokratiker, Berlin 1922, 55 B 34) and then especially by the Stoics (Plutarch, De stoicorum repugnantiis, 44), as a definition of man, inasmuch as in him there is the synthesis of the natural elements and the image of the whole.
By inverse analogy, already from the first Ionian philosophers (Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Empedocles) and then by Plato with ample allegory (Tim., 30-38), the world had been conceived as a great animated organism, and thus the opposite term mega-or macro-cosm (μέγας, μακρός "great") also came to be formed, though in a less clear-cut manner. For Aristotle (De An., III, 8, 431 b 21) and then for Scholasticism (Sum. Theol., 1a, q. 84, a. 2, ad 2), the soul is in some way the universe, inasmuch as through sensory and intellectual knowledge it can assimilate all things to itself. Through Boethius (De diffinitione: PL 64, 907) the term entered Christian literature, which considers man (parvus mundus) not only as the image of the sensible universe, but in some way of the whole of creation, including the angels, and of the divinity itself. The Renaissance, with its parallel revaluation of nature and of man, took up the idea in a naturalistic sense, and the concept of man as the mirror and quintessence of the universe often appears in Cusanus (De docta ignor., III, 31), Cardano, Campanella (De sensu ver., I, 10), G. Bruno, etc.
In the modern age, although the concept has not been abandoned, the formulation has lost importance, while the term microcosm is sometimes applied to the atom described by Bohr as a small planetary system.
Bibliography2 works
Filippo Selvaggi