If numerous aspects of his teaching – the fixity of species, or the unchanging motion of sun, and moon, and stars as they revolved around the earth – could readily be integrated into the fabric of Christian teaching, then others were more problematic. The very notion of a rationally ordered cosmos, so appealing to natural philosophers, continued to unsettle many in the Church. Aristotle’s insistence that there had been no creation, that the universe had always existed and always would, was a particularly glaring contradiction of Christian scripture.
