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MANY WORLDS IN THE UNIVERSE.
Those who think that the almost innumerable multitude of heavenly bodies was created for the benefit of the earthly globe and its inhabitants as their ultimate purpose are mistaken. Natural reason forbids the enslavement of far nobler and more majestic natures to baser and worse ones. Is it not more probable that each globe constitutes a distinct World, and that so many worlds, like fiefs of the divine and eternal empire, are spread and suspended throughout the vast space of Ether, bound to one another by that medium as a common bond, and that the immensity of the whole Universe consists of these manifold natures? Although they are very distant from one another in nature and place, they agree through mutual love so as to produce a perfect harmony in the Universe. Heaven is the common field of all of them, though much purer around the more perfect bodies. An exceedingly fine, breath-like and in some measure spiritual body therefore lies between them and fills the intervening spaces. It readily receives the varied dispositions of so many natures and the hidden powers continually flowing from them, and communicates what it receives with the greatest speed to others, however distant. For Heaven is Nature’s vehicle, through whose mediation all the cities of the Universe conduct commerce with one another and share in each other’s faculties. Thus they are bound together by the strongest bond of love and kinship, as though by a kind of magnetic power.
THE EARTH’S GLOBE AMONG THE STARS.
What prevents the earthly globe from being numbered among the stars no less than the Moon? Each body is opaque by its own nature; each borrows light from the Sun; each is solid and reflects the solar rays; each emits spirits and powers; and each hangs suspended in its own heaven or air. There is doubt about movement, but why is the Earth’s movement necessary? Why should it not also stand among so many fixed bodies? Perhaps the Moon too has its own inhabitants. It is beyond belief that such immense masses of globes should remain idle and barren, inhabited by no creatures, and that their movements, actions and labours should serve only the benefit of this lowest and basest globe. For God himself, unable to endure solitude, passed beyond himself through Creation, poured himself wholly into creatures and prescribed to them the law of multiplication. Is it not more consonant with divine goodness and glory to profess a single structure of the whole Universe, like an empire adorned with the varied natures of many Worlds as with provinces or cities? And to profess that those worlds are so many dwellings for innumerable inhabitants of different kinds, all created for the supreme glory of their eternal Maker?
Who would not revere the Sun as an immortal lamp suspended in the middle of the supreme Prince’s hall, illuminating all its corners and recesses? Or as the deputy of divine Majesty, pouring light, spirit and life into every creature of the Universe? For it was fitting that God, most remote from matter, should handle and govern his material works through an instrument, a most excellent material intermediary filled with life-giving spirit, and set a perceptible Monarch over perceptible creatures and peoples.
This doctrine of many globes or Worlds does not conflict with Holy Scripture, which presents to us only the genesis of this World of ours. It recounts almost everything about that genesis in mystical rather than plain language, merely touching upon the other natures of the Universe, so that the weak minds of human beings, long fallen through the fault of curiosity and the desire for knowledge, might be permitted to wonder more than to know. This clouding of truth and this darkness of the human mind were part of the punishment for sin. Because of it, humanity fell from the pleasure of Paradise, the delights of the sciences and the knowledge of Nature and heavenly things. Having raised itself towards a wrongful desire for forbidden knowledge, it was to be humbled through the just deprivation even of permitted knowledge. Thus, with multiplicity and confusion introduced into the sciences, it was punished by the loss of true knowledge, which had been a single knowledge of all things. This is that Cherub appointed to guard Paradise, threatening with a fiery sword, blinding the guilty minds of human beings by the brilliance of his light and keeping them from Nature’s secrets and the truth of the Universe.
Although Divinity is the most perfect unity, it nevertheless seems in a certain way to consist and be complete in two things: intellect and will. Through intellect it knows all things from eternity; through will it performs all things, both in the most perfect manner. Knowledge and wisdom belong to Intellect; goodness, justice, mercy and the other virtues that among us concern conduct belong to will. So indeed does God’s omnipotence itself, which is nothing other than omnipotent will. Intelligible natures, namely the angelic nature and the human soul, which are little images of Divinity, are also endowed with those two faculties according to their own weight and measure. In them intellect is the instrument of knowledge, Will of operation; beyond these they can do nothing.
THE END.