The Elizabethan View Of The World

- great social and cultural changes, influenced by Shakespeare, the Christian church und the renaissance - God created the universe, and put everything in right positions. Man should save this at all costs - The people believed in a geo-centric universe, in which the earth is surrounded by spheres - There where eight spheres of varying size, on which Planets like Mars, Jupiter, the sun and the moon were fixed - After that, there were another two circles, the firmament, with the fixed stars, and the master sphere, which was the border to the cosmos, (Empyreum) where God was thought to live with the angels - These spheres consists of a fifth element, or other people thought it was our four elements in a clearer, better form.

- This place of order and freedom, the people had to leave because of Adam s fall, and God sent illness, destruction, death and disorder to the earth, and leaves the men, to live with and like the bible - The stars, influence peoples feelings and what happens, so the life was influenced by external facts - The nearer to the center, the more worse got the mixture of the four elements, up to the hell, which was deep in the earth, a place for damned souls, and in cosmos, it was perfect mixed - God was known as almighty - The nature was the instrument of God here on earth, without, the total chaos would break out - There was a Book of nature, in which laws and rules were written down, after whom the men should life.

- The hierarchy: - bottom: lifeless things (iron higher than stone) - 2. Step: plants and trees - 3. Step: animals (ox higher than cats) - 4. Step: people (varying, king is higher than a farmer) - 5. Step: the nature - 6. Step: the angels - Top: God, watching all from above - This ladder of hierarchy was controlled by the nature, and establishes order and harmony - Man had there civil law, based on the nature s law, based on the laws, God himself gave ? only God gives laws, he controls everything and he gives everything the right way!

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