Page:The Gradual Acceptance of the Copernican Theory of the Universe.djvu/128

 Section 10: On the position of the universe according to its divisions. Does it not also concern Physics to discuss those things that lie outside the universe?

If there were any natural body beyond the heavens, most assuredly it would concern Physics, that is, the observer and student of nature. But in the book of Origins, the Master workman is said to have separated the waters and placed the firmament in between them. The Hebrew philosophers declare that the crystalline sphere which Ezekiel called the great crystal and upon which he saw God seated, as he wrote, is as far beyond the farthermost heaven as our ocean is far from that heaven, and that this orb is motionless and therefore is called God's throne. For "seat" implies quiet and tranquility which could be proper for none other than the one immobile and immutable God. This is far more probable and likely than Aristotle's absurd idea, unworthy the name of a philosopher, by which he placed the eternal God in a moving heaven as if He were its source of motion and in such fashion that He was constrained of necessity to move it. We have already refuted this idea. It has also been shown that these celestial waters full of fertility and productiveness sometimes are spread abroad more widely and sometimes less so, as though obviously restrained, whence the heavens are said to be closed and roofed, with clouds or that floods burst forth out of the heaven to inundate the earth. Finally we read in the Holy Scriptures that the eternal God is seated upon the flood.

Why then are not eleven spheres counted?

Because the crystalline sphere is said to have been separated from the inferior waters by the firmament, and it therefore cannot be called a heaven. Furthermore motion is proper to all the heavens, but the crystalline one is stationary. That is why Rabi Akiba called it a marble counterpart of the universe. This also is signified in the construction of the altar which was covered with a pavilion in addition to its ten curtains for, as it is stated elsewhere, God covers the heavens with clouds, and the Scriptures often make mention of the waters beyond the heavens. There are those, however, who teach that the Hebrew word Scamajim may be applied only to a dual

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