God in heaven
To the medieval Christian the transparent envelope of air enclosing the earth was the home not only of birds but also of demons, spirits which might be evil (acolytes of the fallen angel Lucifer), neutral or good. Round the orbit of the moon air gave way to ether in which six other planets – Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn in that order - also circled. Angels, too, moved through the ether. In the region beyond it, also wheeling, lay the stellatum, the dimension of the stars and galaxies whose relative stations were constant, unlike the planets. The furthermost element, the primum mobile, a total void but rotating like the others, was the last frontier of time and space.
Outside space and time, entirely surrounding the whole system, lay the empyrean, infinite and eternal, the domain of God, the origin of all being. He presided here with Jesus and the Holy Spirit, accompanied by Mary, Queen of Heaven, and a celestial hierarchy of Cherubim, Seraphim and Thrones, Virtues, Dominions and Powers, Principalities, Archangels and Angels. Men could not observe them during the day because their eyes were dazzled by the strength of the sunlight, while at night they were dimmed when the sun passed behind the earth, whose shadow was cast like a cone of inky darkness up into the firmament. Throughout the upper reaches of the sky the sun's pervading light shone to the continuous and heavenly music of the spheres, expressing their love of their creator, just as their rotation manifested their unceasing effort to approach him more closely.
Looking up at any time of day or night every monk could therefore visualise a 'revelry of insatiable love' in which they had a vital role to play, for one of the fundamentals of the universe was its unity; every component related to every other in a logical and harmonious pattern. However man's place was pivotal; created when God breathed life into dust, every human soul since had been fetched from heaven at birth and might return there after death. Like stones, plants and animals, men and women were of the earth, but unlike them though in common with the angels and God, they possessed reason. They therefore had a responsibility for their fellow creatures.
The paramount figure in this scheme of creation was of course God. He was not precisely the god of the gospels for the Roman church had adopted a triune Godhead, defined in 'The Apostles Creed' as a trinity comprising God the Father, his son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit - Jesus being conceived by the Holy Spirit of Mary, a virgin. The apostles might have been puzzled by this definition of God, particularly as Jesus, who may have regarded himself as performing an unprecedented mission on earth, perhaps referred to himself as 'the son of man', never as the son of God.