KNOWLEDGE OF SCIENCE AND NATURAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE early Roman Empire was largely an inheritance from the ancient Greeks. Christian beliefs and ideas about the world that emerged during the first few centuries after Christ interacted with the dominant pagan view and helped shape a new outlook and a new worldview. If the wisdom of the world had previously been embedded in pagan learning, the triumph of Christianity in the late fourth century changed all that. The new wisdom emanated from Sacred Scripture, the Bible, and in the fundamental belief that an omniscient and omnipotent God had created our world from nothing, a conception that would have been utterly incomprehensible and unintelligible to traditional Greek philosophers. An important part of our story concerns the interrelationship between pagan and Christian learning. The eventual explicit and self-conscious use of reason as a force in medieval intellectual life emerged from this interrelationship, with results that were profound for the late Middle Ages and for the future of Western society.

CHRISTIANITY AND LATE ANTIQUITY

To understand what happened in the twelfth century, it is necessary to begin with the early Middle Ages, with its roots in the late Roman Empire. During that period in Western Europe, intellectual life was shaped by concerns about the Christian religion and its theology, and by a modest amount of secular learning that was largely an inheritance from pagan Greek sources, such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and the Stoics.