The Background of Modern Science 9 



rectly to them how the universe is ordered. Extraordinarily 

 gifted people, with powerful imaginations and great liter- 

 ary skill, they put together the Book which served the 

 Western world for nearly two thousand years as a princi- 

 pal source of beUefs about both the material and the 

 spiritual worlds. 



At the close of the ancient period these two traditions, 

 the Greek and the Jewish, provided the basis for the de- 

 velopment of the Christian church which dominated all 

 the affairs of Western men from then on. By and large, 

 the church, especially in its early period, took an even 

 more skeptical view of the material world than either the 

 Greeks or the Jews. Impressed by all the admittedly bad 

 things that occur in the world of everyday experience, the 

 greatest thinkers and the most holy men found virtue in 

 renouncing this world and looking for salvation in the 

 next. Knowledge of both worlds was sought through an 

 incomparable development of the methods of revelation 

 and right reason. The power and beauty of the method 

 are probably no better seen than in the work of St. Thomas 

 Aquinas, who succeeded magnificently in bringing Greek 

 thought (especially that of Aristotle) and Jewish revela- 

 tion together in an ordered system which explained almost 

 all aspects of the material and the spiritual worlds. So 

 orderly it was, and so satisfying to most people, that efforts 

 to change it or even to call attention to any events which 

 might not be in accord with it were often punished as 

 heresy. 



The medieval period is thus the most typical and thor- 

 oughgoing example of a time when man consciously en- 

 dured a high degree of physical hardship and anxiety while 

 preserving a stable and at the same time exalted picture 

 of his relationship to God and the universe. No one should 

 beUttle either the motivation or the results of this way of life, 



