ABSTRACT
God is usually in the background sustaining the whole order of creation. But he was sometimes compared with the sun. The author of Cursor Mundi explained the doctrine of the Trinity through this correspondence. Just as in the chain of being the position of man was the most interesting of all, so among the correspondences that between man and the cosmos was the most famous and the most exciting. Although the Elizabethan correspondences are the same as, the Medieval, they served not quite the same parts of the mind. The Middle Ages used them more coolly and intellectually, rather as if they were a mathematical formula. To the correspondence between macrocosm, body politic, and microcosm, the Elizabethans gave a double function. Modern astronomers, hating the asteroids for being so many and so obstructive, have named them the vermin of the sky.
