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].

The Middle Ages cherished Augustine's words: "If I had only seen myself, I would have seen You." But now there is a conviction that man, with his narrow egoism, self-will, and the violence of base passions (which manifested themselves with particular force in the disasters of the wars of the seventeenth century: in the Thirty Years' War, Germany lost two-thirds of its population) is far from the best aid for the study of God's law. In man, the action of these laws is clouded, distorted by the chaos of his affects. The physical world, on the other hand, reveals to the inquisitive mind the natural laws in their pure form. However, in order to comprehend them, man himself must first be cleansed of the filth of his self-will.

In fact, as early as the fourth century, St. John Chrysostom gave an example to man of the movement of the stars, which do not deviate from their path, unlike man...: "The heavens, and the sun, and the moon, and the chorus of stars, and all other creatures, are in great order, but our deeds are in disorder" (1 Discourse on the Devil, 7).

But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a new form of spiritual vigilance and readiness to distrust obvious statements emerged. The discovery of perspective in painting and the discovery of prejudices in philosophy are equally fundamental events of modern times: the world as it appears and the world as it is are not one and the same. And all this requires the discipline of thought, the verification of what seems obvious. And here Copernicus explained that the truth can be found only in spite of the data of human senses (for the senses tell us that the Earth is motionless, and it is the Sun that walks in the sky).

Thus, "It is not the laughter and riot of the flesh of the medieval carnival, not the Renaissance brilliance of beauty and the desire for glory, but a deep inner concentration, in the silence of which one can hear the voice of personal fate and the meaning of life, that becomes the main orientation of life. The emergence of mechanistic philosophy, the formation of the experimental method in science and the flowering of the genre of still life in the XVII century have the same social roots. In still life, on the one hand, there is a rejection of worldly joys, and on the other hand, there is a keen interest in all the details of the world. For just "admiration" there was no need to kill nature. A similar mood for thinking about death was created in the seventeenth century by mechanical devices. If living nature was associated with the affects inherent in damaged human nature, then mechanical devices were associated with complete control of the mind over oneself and the world. The image of the world as a clockwork mechanism and the image of God as a watchmaker were perceived as soul-saving. Paradoxically, the image of an artificial thing, of "dead nature," of a mechanism, was contrasted by Protestantism of the seventeenth century with the phenomena of living nature as an expression of higher spirituality as opposed to the old "soulfulness"[6].

It is precisely because of its opposition to the world of human affects and passions that the world of natural rationality and immutability looks like something morally attractive.

The world into which Europe is emerging from the Middle Ages (more precisely, from the period of the Renaissance crisis of the Middle Ages) is the world of the Reformation. The world of religious tension.

The Reformation, in its search for allies against Rome, appealed to the people. A new wave of intra-European missionary work began. And then it turned out that the average person is essentially unfamiliar with Christianity. It turned out that paganism lives not only in the cardinal's chambers, but also in the peasant's hut. It turned out that the peasants saw the Catholic priest as a magician rather than a preacher and teacher. And since Protestantism rejects the authority of the priest, it was easiest to find a replacement for it in the village witch, and not in the city professor of theology. The intellectual elite of Europe is discovering the world of nocturnal superstitions of the people – the world of witches. And the witch hunt begins. And the Inquisition began to flourish. And science is born.