The Elizabethan World Picture

Almost every well-read person is familiar with the work of the great authors even if only by reputation rather than through personal knowledge. But there must be hundreds of lesser lights who deserve to be better known. E.M.W. Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture is one of them. It opened my eyes to a thoughtscape I didn't know existed. And yet I had a lifelong familiarity with bits and pieces of it. These bits and pieces are like the ruins of old castles and monasteries, or sections of masonry incorporated into newer walls of our culture. This thoughtscape is basically neo-platonic, and at one time it was what everyone believed. It had the same place in the way people thought about things as science does today. It was only in late medieval times that it began to be seriously challenged by Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and others. Their new science swept over the previous thoughtscape like a tsunami.
Tillyard's book is a snapshot of the state of the public thoughtscape in Elizabethan England, the age of Shakespeare, John Donne, Edmund Spenser, John Dowland and so many others in which one of those inexplicable eruptions of human creativity convulsed Europe at that time and London thronged with explorers, poets, scientists, and sermonisers. The new science still coexisted side by side with the older neoplatonic science. The purpose of Tillyard's little book is to show that a knowledge of that elder science is indispensable for an understanding of those great Elizabethan figures.
Neoplatonism is the shorthand term I use but Tillyard doesn't. He contents himself with describing the salient features of the system as understood in that time and place and leaves it up to the reader to pursue the topic further should he wish.
He emphasizes that this was the way everybody thought and quotes extensively from various writers to prove how commonplace was this way of thinking. This was the science that had been grafted onto Christian dogma. Christianity is based on the gospels and epistles which tell of God become man to suffer on the cross for the redemption of mankind. But scripture says very little about the universal order beyond the fact that it was created by God. That was where the neoplatonic/ptolemaic system came in. It seemed to describe the universe in an entirely logical way. And the math worked. It was that system that the calculations of Copernicus et al shook to its foundations.
I have been more interested in its role in the history of thought than its literary aspect, but I am also attracted to it. There is something beautiful and in harmony with the human heart about that older system, and there something in our modern system I find cold and inhuman. In the neoplatonic/ptolemaic system the soul of man was integrated into metaphysics, astronomy, and all of creation. For Christians Man is the reason God created the universe. And I think this is an innate belief all human beings have, though often dismissed mainly through the influence of modern science which sees man as a mere accident, on an insignificant planet, not much different than an amoeba or a rosebush. A philosophy known as 'Deep Ecology' goes further and suggests that Man is a cancer on the earth. This philosophy permeates political movements as diverse as PETA, Planned Parenthood, the Green Party and it teaches us to hate ourselves.
By contrast, the neoplatonic/ptolemaic system saw Man as an essential link in the mystery of Creation, which itself was holy and sacred.
Our link is part of a cosmic Great Chain of Being that includes not only all visible things but a multiplicity of other invisible universes inhabited by supernatural beings known as Angels, both blessed and damned. The system was hierarchical starting at the bottom with 'inferior creatures' and proceeding upwards to the very throne of God.
Tillyard quotes, among others, Sir John Fortesque, a jurist writing on the law of nature:
So that from the highest angel down to the lowest of his kind there is absolutely not found an angel that has not a superior or an inferior; nor from man down to the merest worm is there any creature which is not in some respect superior to one creature or inferior to another. So that there is nothing which the bond of order does not embrace.
The details of this chain are elaborated well in the book, for instance that the highest form of one class connected to the lowest form of the next class. The dolphin is the highest of the fishes, the king of its kind. This logic also justified the hierarchy of society with a king at the top followed by nobility and winding up with common labourers. Also there was a hierarchy of races which helped to justify black slavery, neither was there any room for democratic ideals.
Another element of the system was the theory of Corresponding Planes. Not only was there a hierarchy of substances, living beings, angels, there was a hierarchy of Planes of existence. Tillyard explains: The different planes were the divine and angelic, the universe or macrocosm, the commonwealth or body politic, man or the microcosm, and the lower creation...the mind is like an ocean because it is microcosmic, it contains all the bounty of the seas in little.
In other words every aspect of the material world has a corresponding aspect in the celestial sphere.
I can't explain why I felt it was appropriate to insert this little digression at this point, except that it illustrates how one world picture can be so thoroughly overthrown in just a few short centuries. Its example should be a cautionary tale for the arrogant Daniel Dennetts and Richard Dawkins of the world. It also fits in with my theme of how thought, an immaterial, intangible activity, is a precursor to the appearance of that material reality they worship. Even more importantly I think that cultural heritage amounted to a projection of the human soul onto the universe so that the universe became a mirror image for mankind in which everything outside him corresponded to what was essential within. Our own era's science, for all its many successes, is still in its youth. And perhaps as the adolescent matures and mellows out it will find there was much wisdom in its parent.