ABSTRACT
It is evident that Plato’s abstract model of the universe, represented together with its elements by the regular polyhedra, shaped the way the universe was perceived in the Christian Platonist Middle Ages. To the Greek world in the eighth century and the Latin world in the thirteenth, the universe was visualized as a frame. John of Damascus wrote,
Before the framing of the world … there was no measurable age …
This may have been in the mind of John’s translator, Robert Grosseteste, the bishop of Lincoln, when he contrasted,
… a point in relation to a line, or a single pebble in relation to the sand of the sea … or one speck of dust to the whole frame of the universe.
