/ ɛkstrəˈmʌndeɪn – outside, beyond the physical world or universe /
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A case study illustrating Jung’s respect for the inner world of the individual. State best described as ”situated in or relating to a region beyond the material world”, or existing outside of the physical world or universe. A state beyond mundane, beyond ordinary… It’s first known use was as early as around year 1665 and much later Carl Gustav Jung cultivated the ability to have visions from deep imagination, which some would label these explorations as mystical experiences while others would say they are more akin to the sort creative thinking artists do. Jung considered himself first and foremost an empiricist.
He stated that, ”the reality of the psyche’ is my working hypothesis, and my principal activity consists in collecting factual material to describe and explain it”. In order to collect this material, Jung paid attention to things that seemed to be expressions of the psyche. This information included dreams, daydreams, fantasy, and things in the outer world that seemed to reflect internal situations.
He later developed a technique called active imagination in order to further explore the inner world:
The world of the inner is as infinite as the world of the outer. Just as you become a part of the manifold essence of the world through your bodies, so you become a part of the manifold essence of the inner world through your soul. This inner world is truly infinite, in no way poorer than the outer one.
Man lives in two worlds.
(Carl Jung, ”The Red Book” – page 264)
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By Thomas Bradwardine & Thomas Buckingham
Much earlier Thomas Bradwardine’s most famous work was a treatise on grace and free will entitled ”De causa Dei” from 1344, in which he so stressed the divine concurrence with all human volition that his followers concluded from it a universal determinism. In the corollaries to Book I, Chapter 5 of ”De causa Dei”, Bradwardine assumes the existence of an actual, infinite, God-filled extramundane void. Bradwardine was a precocious student, educated at Balliol College (University of Oxford) where he was a fellow by 1321; he took the degree of ”doctor of divinity”, and acquired the reputation of a profound scholar, a skillful mathematician and an able theologian. He was also a gifted logician with theories on the insolubles and in particular the liar paradox. was an English cleric, scholar, mathematician, physicist, courtier and, very briefly, Archbishop of Canterbury.
As a celebrated scholastic philosopher and doctor of theology often called ”doctor profundus”.
But on the other hand, Thomas Buckingham, Bradwardine’s former student, develops in the unedited Question 23 of his ”Quaestiones theologicae” a rejection of the void’s existence precisely in opposition to the theory of his master. His argumentation is not only remarkable in its own but there it also allows us to reassess essential concepts from Bradwardine’s original idea presented in ”De causa Dei”, such as divine power, causality and ubiquity. This paper first presents the Aristotelian notion of the void in rendering it in the context of the philosophy of nature at fourteenth-century Oxford; it is then dedicated to the analysis of the chapter in question from ”De causa Dei” along with Buckingham’s answer.
It is accompanied by a critical edition of Question 23 from Buckingham’s ”Quaestiones theologicae”:
Sit necesse ponere Deum esse extra mundum in situ seu vacuo imaginario infinito
It is necessary to maintain that God is outside world in a vacuum or in an imaginary infinite
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