Sphere of fire

Sphere of fire is the name given in Ptolemaic astronomy to the sphere intervening between, and separating, the earth and the moon.

Traditional concept

The Middle Ages inherited the Aristotelian concept of the four elements of earth, water, air and fire as making up the sublunary world, arranged in concentric spheres about the earth as centre:[1] as the purest of the four elements, fire - and the sphere of fire - stood highest in the ascending sequence of the scala naturae, and closest to the superlunary world of the aether.[2] Dante and Beatrice in The Divine Comedy ascended through the sphere of fire to reach the Moon,[3] while three centuries later Benvenuto Cellini claimed in his autobiography to have bellowed so loud as to reach the sphere of fire.[4]

The contemporary astronomer Jofrancus Offusius estimated the distance to the sphere of fire from the earth in terms of multiples of the earth's diameter, and believed that comets emanated from the space between the sphere of fire and the moon.[5]

New philosophy

The rise of heliocentrism had by the early seventeenth century destroyed the very foundations for the concept of the sphere of fire.[6] John Donne lamented in 1611 that "The new philosophy calls all in doubt,/The element of fire is quite put out".[7]

See also

References

  1. ↑ J. B. Bury, The Cambridge Medieval History Vol VIII (1936) p. 669
  2. ↑ I. Rivers, Classical and Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry (1994) p. 69 and p. 79
  3. ↑ Dante, Paradiso (Penguin 1975) p. 61
  4. ↑ G. Bull transl., the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (Penguin 1956) p. 345
  5. ↑ B. Stephenson, The Music of the Heavens (2014) p. 60
  6. ↑ Stephen Toulmin, Night Sky at Rhodes (1963) p. 100
  7. ↑ M. Ashley, England in the Seventeenth Century (1960) p. 35
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