Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), and Henry More (1614–87), took a broader view and argued that an infinite universe would redound to God’s glory. Milton has much in common with these three thinkers, but there is a difference between his universe and theirs. They imagined that the stellar universe itself was infinite. Milton is unusual in that he places a finite universe in an infinite abyss and shuts infinity out by enclosing his universe with a protective shell. Critics have been hard-pressed to find precedents for this shell. The traditional Ptolemaic universe was
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