[Palingenius] argued that there must be creatures in the other regions of the heavens immeasurably superior to man, since it is inconceivable that “the infinite power of God”’ can have exhausted itself with the production of so insignificant and wretched a being.
But the actual tendency of the geocentric system was, for the medieval mind, precisely the opposite. For the centre of the world was not a position of honor; it was rather the place farthest removed from the Empyrean, the bottom of the creation, to which its dregs and baser elements sank.
And the one change of this kind implied by the abandonment of the geocentric system was, as is evident from what has already been said, the reverse of that often attributed to the new astronomy; to remove man from the centre of things was to raise him from his low estate.
