ANCIENT AND MEDIAEVAL BELIEFS Q 



St. Augustine of Hippo is a high authority for the Western 

 Church Hke St. Basil for the Eastern. He also accepted the 

 spontaneous generation of living things as an unchanging 

 truth and strove in his teachings simply to bring the pheno- 

 menon into line with the world philosophy of the Christian 

 Church. Similarly, he wrote " God as a rule creates wine 

 from water and earth through the mediation of grapes and 

 their juice; however sometimes, as in Cana of Galilee, he can 

 create it directly from water. Thus also, in respect of living 

 things, he may cause them to be born from seeds or to 

 emerge from inanimate matter where invisible spiritual seeds 

 {occulta semina) repose." 



Thus Augustine saw in the spontaneous generation of 

 living things a manifestation of divine will — the animation 

 of inert matter by the ' life-creating spirit '. In this he 

 affirmed a doctrine concerning spontaneous generation which 

 was in complete agreement with the dogmas of the Christian 

 Church. ^^ 



Throughout the Middle Ages a belief in spontaneous 

 generation held undivided sway over people's minds. 

 Mediaeval philosophical thought could exist only as theo- 

 logical thought, embodied in one or another doctrine of the 

 Church. Any kind of philosophical question could only 

 obtain a hearing if it was linked with one or another 

 theological problem. Philosophy became the ' handmaid of 

 theology ', ancilla theologiae}^ The problems of science were 

 relegated to a lower plane. People did not use observation 

 and experiment as a guide to an understanding of nature but 

 used instead the teachings of the Bible and of theological 

 treatises. Only a very scanty knowledge of the problems 

 of mathematics, astronomy and medicine penetrated into 

 Europe from the Arab and Hebrew teachers. 



It was in this way that the works of Aristotle first reached 

 the European peoples, though often in the form of garbled 

 translations. At first his teachings appeared dangerous, but 

 later, when the Church appreciated the full usefulness of 

 these teachings for many of its purposes, it raised Aristotle 

 to the status of ' the forerunner of Christ in the realm of 

 nature ' (praecursor Christi in rebus naturalibus). Accord- 

 ingly, in the apposite words of V. Lenin, " the scholasts 



