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

The echoes of those disputes and anathemas are heard by the churchman to this day. In the Akathist to the Mother of God, She is greeted Who "tore the Athenian weaves." In Great Lent we hear: "Peter is floundering, and Plato is silent; Paul teaches, Pythagoras is ashamed. The same Apostolic Theological Council, the Hellenic dead proclamation, buries and raises the world to the service of Christ."9

For the West, the starting point of medieval science was the Great 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.

These anathemas, which crushed the ancient autoites, became events that liberated the human mind and search. The Church's call not to attach importance to the opinions of ancient metaphysicians meant that reason was freed from the captivity of former natural philosophical authorities. At the same time, however, reason, which investigates the nature of things, in principle could not be satisfied only with complete submission to the word of the Bible, simply because the answers of the Bible could not replace the instructions of the abolished natural philosophers. This means that the answers to all questions could not be found only in the past: neither in the sacred (Biblical) nor in the ancient (pagan). We had to think for ourselves. I emphasize: this conclusion was generated precisely by the dialectically complex attitude of the Church to the church-cultural heritage.

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 Reformation is not a continuation of the Renaissance, but a sharp reaction to it.10 The puritanism of the Reformation is the price to pay for the cultural permissiveness of the previous era.

The transition from the Renaissance to the Modern Age is the transition from carnival to Lent. 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 is not born in the stable era of the Middle Ages, when there are no questions about faith, when it is obvious and unified for the whole of Europe. Science is not born in the time of the vomiting Rabelaisianism of the Renaissance. Science was not born in the era of Enlightenment atheism of the 18th century. Science managed to be born in the most religious-explosive era – in the era of the Reformation and religious wars. Science was born when religious wars broke out in Europe... "Secularized" peoples indifferent to religion do not wage religious wars.

Science arises in the age of the greatest religious tension in Europe – in the age of the Reformation and Counter-Reform. This is the society of severe Calvinism, strict Anglicanism, the time of the emergence of the Jesuit movement, the time of state Protestantism in Germany and Scandinavia.