Man is manifestly the raison d’être of the whole of nature. Moreover, nature could not be ordered to God except through man. God being the end of the universe, it is necessary that the universe be capable of a return to the Universal Principle…. But only an intellectual creature is capable of such a return.
because it knows the universal formality of the good and of being is thereby ordered immediately to the universal principle of being.
In other words, only a creature capable of making a tour of being can rejoin the source of being.
Could the universe actually loop back on itself? And if you traveled far enough in a straight line, would you eventually return to your starting point, just as if you traveled in any one direction for long enough on the surface of the Earth?
While it’s easy to see how a positively-curved space can be finite and closed, it’s a little less intuitive to realize that a flat space could be finite and closed as well, but that’s also the case. To understand, simply imagine a long, straight cylinder, and then bending that cylinder into a donut-like shape until the two ends connect. This shape -- known as a torus -- is both spatially flat and also finite and closed.
Well, that's a relief. I always suspected the cosmos resembles a donut, hence the ʘin ONE CʘSMOS.
Let’s jump to the bottom line: in theory a straight line would return to itself, but there hasn’t been enough time for it to do so:
The Universe may, on some very grand cosmic scale, truly be finite in nature. But even if it is, we’ll never be able to know. While we can travel through space as far as we like, as fast as we can, for as long as we can imagine without end..., there is a cosmic horizon that limits how far we can travel through the expanding Universe, and for objects more than ~18 billion light-years away at present, they’re already effectively gone (ibid.).
Yes, but there is a real world from which the world of physics is but an abstraction. This latter is what De Koninck refers to as "the hollow universe." And even though it is hollow, no one could actually live inside it:
The objects available to us in experience are much richer than those described in modern mathematical physics…. Mathematical physics deals, literally, with abstractions and there is a tendency to take these abstractions for the whole of reality. The result is what De Koninck meant by the expression “hollow universe” (Armour).
The world is explicable from man; but man is not explicable from the world. Man is a given reality; the world is a hypothesis we invent.
Of all the vicious circles one could imagine, that in which the materialist encloses himself is the most primitive, restrictive, and binding (De Koninck).
Every natural form tends toward man…. in this perspective, subhuman forms are much less states than tendencies.
the cosmos is open to another world which acts on it. And this cause can only be a living being; it is necessarily a pure spirit, a transcosmic being.