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.

The first conclusion is that Europe needs Christian missionaries no less than distant and pagan China. And to lead a mission, you need missionaries. Priests must turn to the people and become teachers more than correctors. And then it turned out that some requirements were made of a priest who only repeated prayers written centuries before him in the Latin "missal" ("service book"), and quite different requirements should now be made of a preacher and a missionary.11 First of all, the church hierarchs took a closer look at their clergy. And as a result, the Inquisition had a job. Between 1560 and 1620 in Spain, a large proportion of the Inquisition tribunals had two-thirds of all cases investigated by the priests themselves (the proportion of such investigations in the country as a whole was 40 percent).12

Further, attention was paid to the goodness of the faith of the parishioners. And then it turned out that the peasants saw the Catholic priest as a magician rather than a preacher and teacher. And since Protestantism rejected the authority of the priest, it was easier for the peasant to find a substitute for him in a long-known village sorceress than in a city professor of theology. But if he did not see a mystical threat in the priest, then relations with the sorceress were more complicated: hope and fear were indistinguishably intertwined here. A witch hunt inevitably turns into a witch hunt.

Is it a coincidence that the Reformation and the witch-hunt coincide?13 I don't think so. In all religions of the world, there is a memory of some deep and "ancient evil" (in The Lord of the Rings, it was woken up by dwarves who dug too deep into caves). And yet the man of the Middle Ages felt relatively safe from this evil: church shrines and shrines gave him a sense of mystical security.

However, newborn Protestantism resolutely rejected this habitual defensive line. For Luther and Calvin, for Zwingli and Hobbes, the recognition of a place or image as holy means only the recognition of it as withdrawn from everyday use: the meaning of the word "holy" "does not imply the real presence of God and God's grace in a place or image, but only a new attitude of man towards them due to the fact that he considers this or that thing to remind him of God. For Luther, therefore, the water in the baptismal font is indistinguishable from that which splashes in the cow's swill (baptismal "water is water, no better than that which a cow drinks"14). In general, "in the picture of the world of Luther and Calvin there are no special "sacred" points either in space or in time, because everything is sacred. In this picture of the world, there are no ontologically nobler spheres or less noble, contemptible lower levels of being... From the Calvinist point of view, for example, the Creator imprinted no less truth in the secretions of the organism than in the Scriptures."15 For a philosopher, this identity could mean that everything is sacred. For a simpler person, this meant that nothing was sacred, that Epiphany water had no more protective properties than ordinary water. But old Freud was right when he asserted that the greatest motivation is not libido, but the need for security. The previous "security systems" were broken. New ones did not appear immediately.

And – the Great Fear came. 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.

Well, when talking about the birth of science, there is no way to get away from this vile word – "inquisition". And since we are talking about the Inquisition (and secular people always talk about it, it is only necessary to mention the Church), then let us dwell on this sad page of church history longer.

People of the Middle Ages are constantly accused of superstition. But they did not read these "superstitions" in the Bible or in patristic works.