---
title: "Book of Nature"
chunk: 2/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Nature"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:30:57.421095+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Christianity and Greek culture ==
The Greeks constructed a view of the natural world in which all references to mythological origins and causes were removed. Greek philosophers inadvertently left the upper world vacant by abandoning ancient ties to free-acting, conspiring gods of nature. The new philosophy of nature made unseen mythological forces irrelevant. While some philosophers drifted toward atheism, others worked within the new philosophy to reconstitute the concept of a divine being. Consequently, the new outlook toward the natural world inspired the belief in one supreme force compatible with the new philosophy—in other words, monotheistic. However, the path from nature to rediscovering a divine being was uncertain. The belief in causality in nature implied an endless, interconnected chain of causation acting upon the natural world. It is presumed, however, that Greek thought denied the existence of a natural world where causality was infinite, which gave rise to the notion of "first cause", upon which the order of other causes must rely.
The first contact between Christianity and Greek culture occurred in Athens in the first century CE. The Christian Scriptures note that within a few years of Christ’s crucifixion, Paul and Silas were debating with Epicureans and Stoics at the Areopagus. Christian theologians viewed the Greeks as a pagan culture whose philosophers were obsessed with the wonders of the material, or the natural world. Observation and explanation of natural phenomena were of little value to the Church. Consequently, early Christian theologians dismissed Greek knowledge as perishable in contrast to actual knowledge derived from sacred Scripture. At the same time, the Church Fathers struggled with questions concerning the natural world and its creation that reflected the concerns of Greek philosophers. 
Despite their rejection of pagan thinking, the Church Fathers benefited from Greek dialectic and ontology by inheriting a technical language that could help express solutions to their concerns. As Peter Harrison observes, "In the application of the principles of pagan philosophy to the raw materials of a faith, the content of which was expressed in those documents which were to become the New Testament, we can discern the beginnings of Christian theology." Eventually, Church Fathers would recognize the value of the natural world because it provided a means of deciphering God’s work and acquiring true knowledge of Him. God was believed to have infused the material world with symbolic meaning, which, if understood by man, reveals higher spiritual truths. 
What the Church Fathers needed, and did not inherit from the early Greek philosophers, was a method of interpreting the symbolic meanings embedded in the material world. According to Harrison, it was Church Father Origen in the third century who perfected a hermeneutical method that was first developed by the Platonists of the Alexandrian school by which the natural world could be persuaded to give up hidden meanings.
In Christianity, early Church Fathers appeared to use the idea of a book of nature, librum naturae, as part of a two-book theology: "Among the Fathers of the Church, explicit references to the Book of Nature can be found, in St. Basil, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Augustine, John Cassian, St. John Chrysostom, Ephrem the Syrian, St. Maximus the Confessor". St Augustine suggested that Nature and the Bible were a two-volume set of books written by God and filled with divine knowledge.

== Rediscovering the natural world ==

By the twelfth century, a renewed study of nature was beginning to emerge along with the recovered works of ancient philosophers, translated from Arabic to original Greek. The writings of Aristotle were seen as being among the most important of the ancient texts and had a remarkable influence among intellectuals. Interest in the material world, in conjunction with the doctrines of Aristotle, elevated sensory experience to new levels of importance. Earlier teachings concerning the relationship between God and man’s knowledge of material things gave way to a world in which knowledge of the material world conveyed the knowledge of God. Whereas scholars and theologians once held a symbolist mentality of the natural world as expressive of spiritual realities, intellectual thinking now regarded nature as a "coherent entity which the senses could systematically investigate. The idea of nature is that of a particular ordering of natural objects, and the study of nature is the systematic investigation of that order". 
The idea of order in nature implied a structure to the physical world whereby relationships between objects could be defined. According to Harrison, the twelfth century marked an important time in the Christian era when the world became invested with its patterns of order—patterns based on networks of likeness or similarities among material things, which led to a pre-modern knowledge of nature. It was believed that "While God has made all things that reside in the Book of Nature, certain objects in nature share similar characteristics with other objects, which delineates the sphere of nature and 'establishes the systematizing principles upon which knowledge of the natural world is based'". Nature could now be read like a book.

== The birth of modern science ==