We know that the culture of the Middle Ages was Christian. Which means that it was based on the Bible. But the Bible is based on the message that the only significant connection (religion) is the connection between the soul and God. The God of the Bible is supermundane, that is, supercosmic. He is not part of the cosmos and not the personification of its elements. He is not the Sun, but the Creator of the Sun. He is not the Moon, but the Creator of the Moon.

The biblical prophets warn against idolatry, that is, against worshipping what is created, that which is not God. A pagan in every natural process presupposes the soul and action of a certain god. In order to wean people from animism ("everything is full of gods"), the Bible decides to sacrifice aesthetics to religion. First understand that the world and God are not the same and that your first love should be for the Creator. Not a single landscape sketch, not a single portrait is on the pages of the Bible. Her world was created by engineers rather than artists: there are instructions on how to build Noah's Ark. But there is no description of it. There are instructions on how to build the Temple of Solomon, but there are no impressionist notes on how it "looked". There is a description of how the world was built in six days, but there is no description of the charms of this world...

There are no astral myths in the Bible, which are so organic in the world of pagan religions. There are no stories about where the Sun goes at night, whose face is on the Moon, about who spilled milk on the Milky Way and about who gave birth to the bear cub in the Big Dipper... So, "when Christianity is equated with the wildest myths, I do not laugh, and I do not swear, and I do not lose my temper, I politely remark that identity cannot be considered complete."

Here is the text from the first page of the Bible: "And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven [to illumine the earth, and] to separate the day from the night, and for signs, and times, and days, and years; and let them be lamps in the firmament of heaven, to shine on the earth. And so it was. And God created two great lights: a greater light to rule the day, and a lesser light to rule the night, and the stars; And God hath set them in the firmament of heaven, to shine upon the earth, and to rule day and night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning: the fourth day" (Gen. 1:14-19).

What is it about? — Well, what a question: of course, this is a biblical myth about the creation of the Sun, the Moon and the stars. And that's not "of course". This is not a myth, but a polemic against a myth. In Egypt and Babylon, Phoenicia and Canaan, the Sun and the Moon are the greatest gods. And from the point of view of the biblical author, their religious status is so insignificant that they do not even need to be called by their names. Thus, "two luminaries". Two cheat sheets for people so that they know when to go to what work and when to celebrate the One God who created these light bulbs. The fact that the words "Sun" and "Moon" are not used in this text means that this is a profane text. What myths spoke about in poetic language, the Bible refuses to talk about at all, defiantly switching to engineering terminology: "And the architect also built in two lighting systems - one main ("at the beginning of the day"), and the other emergency (at the beginning of the night)." All! After that, there is no longer the slightest desire to worship light bulbs. Luminaries are for people, and not man is for luminaries.

And nothing more can be learned about the stars from the Bible. This will allow Galileo to remind the inquisitors that the Bible does not even list the "seven luminaries" by name, and therefore "the Bible teaches us how to ascend to heaven, and not how the heavens are arranged"[2].

Thus, precisely because the God of the Bible is supracosmic, the Bible does not contain dogmas about nature and its laws. This makes the biblical tradition extremely plastic in solving scientific problems. For nothing agrees so easily with foreign and new views as silence. The Bible is silent about nature.

But although a religious person can live without interest in cosmology, an ordinary person, and even more so an entire culture, cannot do without it for long. Medieval culture also included a set of cosmological ideas. But where could she get them, if the Bible does not contain them? The Middle Ages took them from their second source, the ancient heritage.

But this heritage is not just "ancient". It is also "pagan". And so began a centuries-old session of exorcism — the expulsion of pagan vestiges from cosmological ideas. One of the most significant moments was the condemnation of the Averroists (Aristotelians) on March 7, 1277 by the Bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier. Among the 219 anathematized theses, paragraph 92 is especially noteworthy for the fate of astronomy. they move like a living creature precisely by the soul and its aspiration: for as an animal moves, because it strives for something, so does the sky." Stars do not have a soul, which means that their movement must be described in the language of mechanics, not psychology.

And yet the Middle Ages in the West ended with the Christian Church itself beginning to creep into something amorphous and omnivorous. The Renaissance is the Renaissance of paganism. Popes who are fond of horoscopes; theologians, in whose works Aristotle is more often heard than the Apostle Paul... But the sixteenth century is the century of reaction. A healthy Christian reaction to the temporary capitulation of Christian will and thought to the bait of pagan carnal and philosophical permissiveness. The transition from the Revival to the New Age is the transition from carnival to Lent. This is the age of the Reformation (and the Counter-Reformation). This is the century of the greatest religious tension in the history of Western Europe. This is an age by no means indifferent to questions of faith. Science was born when religious wars broke out in Europe... "Secularized" peoples indifferent to religion do not wage religious wars.

The Lutherans' call "Scripture alone" was a protest not so much against church traditions as against servility to the authorities of pagan philosophers. This is a sword directed not against John Chrysostom, but against Aristotle and Hermes Trismegistus. It was not Christian dogmas that were destroyed by the Reformation and the emerging science, but by the dogmas of pagan philosophy. The reference to Aristotle became insufficient.

Asceticism and Science

Thus, the pathos of the Christian Reformation is a call to discipline of the mind, will, and feelings. Is this call alien to science? The English chemist Boyle saw the religious application of science in the use of the mind of the investigator to combat sensual passions: "Whoever can make the slightest incidents in his own life, and even the flowers of his garden, lecture him on ethics and theology, it seems to me unlikely to feel the need to run to the tavern." The argumentation is clear: on the one hand, any sprout testifies to the Mind that created it, on the other hand, the researcher learns to see its internal harmonious lawfulness behind the motley diversity of the world. He who has learned to see the laws in nature will also honor those laws that are inscribed in the human heart and, following them, follow the path of commandments and avoidance of sin.

The common denominator of science and faith in the 16th and 17th centuries was the ideology of asceticism. The rationalism of this period is not the triumphalism of the humanists. Doubt stands at the origins of European science. At this time, Descartes was not the only one who doubted himself, the world and God. Lynn White notes that from 1300 to 1650, Europeans were obsessed with subjects relating to death. The symbolism of despair develops. Necrophilia was so widespread that any protest against cruelty was considered immoral. "Any of the elements is pure. And our souls are with dirt in half," wrote the poet of this century[4].