In order to understand what was happening in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we must turn to much more ancient times.

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 super-mundane, that is, supra-cosmic. 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. Do not admire the world, do not get carried away by it. First understand that the world and God are not one and the same and that your first love must 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... Thus, "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."4

Here is the text from the first page of the Bible: "And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven [to illuminate 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 heaven works"5.

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. In Christianity, the image of the Creator is not the world, but man, the Only-begotten of God is the Son, and not the Universe. This remoteness of the world and man from God made it possible to create a space of cosmologoumena, that is, such judgments about man and the world that did not immediately take on a religious character and thus did not arouse suspicion of blasphemy. There is simply no detailed cosmological system in Scripture. But this also meant in fact that a huge gap was formed for the researcher for free research on issues that in principle were not resolved by past centuries. As a result, the Middle Ages, which had one faith, gave rise to many philosophical systems.

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 – from the ancient heritage.

In view of the lack of a clear and detailed cosmology, astronomy, and physics in the Bible, the medieval world used Aristotelian physics.6 The Church called to follow the Bible, advised to study ancient authors and warned against excessive enthusiasm for them: "We do not prevent anyone from getting acquainted with secular education, if he desires it, unless he has accepted the monastic life. But we do not advise anyone to devote themselves to it to the end, and we absolutely forbid anyone to expect from it any accuracy in the knowledge of God."7

The fact is that the heritage of ancient philosophers 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.

Extremely important for the emergence of science were the anathemas proclaimed in Byzantium to Plato in the 11th century, and to Aristotle in Europe in the 13th century.

The Council of the humanist philosopher John Italos in 1076 proclaimed: "Anathema to those who promise to be pious and shamelessly introduce the impious Hellenic teachings into the Orthodox and Catholic Church about human souls, about heaven, earth and other creatures" (Second Anathema). The seventh anathema: "To those who go through the Hellenic teachings and learn them not for the sake of teaching, but also to those who follow their vain opinions and believe in them as true and teach them anathema."

Is it necessary to make it clear that this rejects not the judgment about the existence of souls, heaven and earth in general, but concrete, pagan-philosophical, pre-Christian views on them? For example, the sixth anathema of the Emperor Justinian from his epistle to Patriarch Menas (543) reads: "If anyone says that the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars, and the supercelestial waters are animate and rational forces, let him be anathema."8