De caelo, Commentaries on Aristotle’s

Abstract

Aristotle’s De caelo was his major contribution to cosmology, embracing the celestial and terrestrial regions into which he divided the cosmos. By translations, it passed from Greek to Arabic, and was finally translated from Arabic, and then from Greek into Latin in the twelfth century. Numerous commentaries and treatises known as Questions were written on the De caelo from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. One of the most problematic questions deriving from De caelo was whether the world is eternal, as Aristotle argued, or whether it was created as Christians insisted. This difficult question, and others, produced a theological reaction in the form of a Church condemnation of 219 articles in 1277. The central issue that emerged was about God’s absolute power. Scholastic natural philosophers assumed that God could do anything short of a logical contradiction. By His supernatural powers, it was therefore assumed that God could do anything that Aristotle had regarded as naturally impossible. This gave rise to numerous hypothetical discussions about what things would be like if God created other worlds and what form that might take, or if He moved our world with a rectilinear motion, or if He made matter disappear and created a vacuum, and so on. In commentaries and Questions on De caelo in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – following the momentous contributions by Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Galileo that had completely subverted Aristotle’s physical cosmos – scholastics sought, as best they could, to adjust to the new cosmology.