Cosmology

The Greek cosmos (κóσµoς, Latin mundus), meaning both order and ornament, was first used by the Pythagoreans as a term for the universe, conceived as harmoniously shaped and bounded, in opposition to shapeless and boundless chaos (1). The traditional Greek cosmology, emphasising the order, finiteness and constancy of the cosmos, dominated Western thought for almost 2,000 years, until in the hundred years from about 1550 to 1650 it was overthrown by the new cosmology in what is known as the Copernican revolution. The traditional cosmology provided a coherent account of the constitution of all existing things and the relationship between them, from the great cosmos or macrocosm, the universe, to the small cosmos or microcosm, man. Although certain modifications had to be made to the tradition to accommodate it to Christian belief, it remained extraordinarily consistent, deriving as it did from a few crucial texts. The most important of these were Plato’s Timaeus (an account of the creation of the world and the relationship between macro-and microcosm), and Aristotle’s On the Heavens, Physics, Metaphysics, On Generation and Corruption and On the Soul (works which modified the Platonic account significantly, and which provided what were to become the accepted definitions of concepts such as motion, function, growth and decay, stability and change). Other classical writers contributed to aspects of the tradition: Ptolemy to astronomy, Hippocrates and Galen to medicine, Strabo to geography, Pliny to natural history. This traditional cosmology was transmitted to the early Middle Ages through the works of encyclopedists and commentators, such as Chalcidius’ commentary on the Timaeus, Macrobius’ Commentary on the Dream of Scipio (the vision at the end of the Republic of Cicero, modelled on the myth of Er at the end of the Republic of Plato), and Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. Although Aristotle’s writings on logic were translated by Boethius, his scientific writings were not generally accessible until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the bulk of the Aristotelian corpus was translated into Latin, some of it from Arabic versions of the Greek. From the thirteenth century Aristotle, christianised by Aquinas, was the recognised authority on philosophy (which included what we should now call science). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the English universities still based the teaching of science largely on Aristotle, while popular encyclopedias such as Batman upon Bartholomew and de la Primaudaye’s The French Academy helped to disseminate the tradition more widely.