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.

The Reformation is a schism that again made faith and choice of faith a problem. They began to think about faith, they began to defend their faith. And this time of apologetics coincided with the time of the birth of science. Accidentally? Despite?

And one more thing: in a society where any cultural and social movement can develop normally only with the sanction of the Church, the birth of science would be impossible if its creators and their contemporaries perceived science as an anti-church gesture. If in this society, which is by no means indifferent to religious questions, the emergence of science had been perceived as an anti-religious or at least non-religious event, science would not have arisen in that Europe.

Did the new science destroy something old? –Undoubtedly. But – what? The Christian faith or Aristotle's "eternal philosophy"?

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.

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 common denominator of science and faith in the 16th and 17th centuries was the ideology of asceticism. 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.