The Story of Christianity

by David Bentley Hart

One of those historical myths that enjoy popular currency, even though they cannot survive the scrutiny of serious historical study, is that, at the dawn of the Christian era, there was a thriving Hellenistic scientific culture that Christianity – through some supposed hostility to learning and reason – methodically destroyed; and that this Christian antagonism to science persisted into the early modern period – as is evident from Galileo’s trial in Rome – until the power of the Church was at last broken, and secular faculties of science began to appear. This story is impossible to reconcile with the historical evidence, ancient, Medieval, or modern. It misrepresents the characters both of Hellenistic science and of early Christianity, as well as that of Medieval intellectual culture; and it entirely belies the fascinating reality that, in the 16th and 17th centuries, Christian scientists educated in Christian universities and following a Christian tradition of scientific and mathematical speculation overturned a pagan cosmology and physics unchallenged since the days of Aristotle.