The Word of God and the Book of Nature in the Focus of Human Knowledge: Preliminary Remarks on Late Antiquity

The project is dedicated to the development of a new concept of the history of science, that would account for the role of theological knowledge in the development of scientific knowledge. The development of natural sciences in the High Middle Ages and in following eras contrasted the metaphorical image of the "Book of Nature" and the Bible as a book of Revelation. Howe­ver, this pair of concepts emerged in late Antiquity; but at that time it was not contradicting, but complementing each other. The 3rd–4th centuries AD deserve special attention, as the notions of “theology” and “physics” in a form close to the modern understanding first occurred. Until this time, the “theological” discourse was mainly limited to the metaphysical model of one or ano­ther philosophical school, and the “physical” one – to the corresponding model of cosmology, whereas now the search begins for the basis for the synthesis of the entire diversity of mythological and natural scientific experience collected over the period of the thousand-year develo­p­ment of Hellenic culture. One of the bases of synthesis is rethinking of the role of matter and material objects in their relationship with the intelligible world, which, in turn, brings out the notion of “symbol”. The article demonstrates how the symbolic method allows to integrate the cumulative natural scientific knowledge into the worldview model of theurgic Neoplatonism and into the Christian philosophy of the Alexandrian school.