Is Space, the Universal Container of All Things, Created or Uncreated?

Abstract

Since Vacuity and Imaginary Space or Space itself is Nothingness, for the latter is the negation of one condition and the affirmation of another (as was shown in the preceding Chapter), it follows that Vacuity or Imaginary Space or Space itself is one of the two things that exist, either the created or the uncreated. There is no third. The fact that Vacuity or Imaginary Space or Space itself are created from Nothingness is stated by Jacques du Bois, a Leyden churchman who wrote on page 39 of his Dialogus Theologicus Astronomicus (in a passage in which he contradicts Galileo, Philip Lansberg, and others who hold that the sun is in the center of the world and that the earth revolves around it); “He who denies the existence of Vacuity above the distant heavens contradicts the infinity of the Divine Essence; for if the skies of the heavens do not encompass God, as Solomon holds in Kings I, Chapter 8, 27, then there is some Place beyond them wherein this Divine Essence abides which cannot be contained by any boundaries. We usually call this Place, Vacuity, because it contains no body. Accordingly before the creation of the world, God was present everywhere and extended infinitely in that boundless abyss which could not be filled by any finite body like the uppermost Heaven, no matter how great it might be.