116 cosmos
the Bible, and the other is the Book of Nature. The two, far from being incom-
patible, are both given us for our understanding. To understand God, we do
three basic things: we look within ourselves; we look to God as revealed in the
Bible; we look at the Book of Nature as revealed in the physical world around
us. Augustine thought what we call “science” to be a holy activity.
Because of its openness to misunderstanding, I avoid using the term “lit-
eral” and instead contrast the “overt” sense of a text to its “symbolic” sense.
The simplistic idea that “the ideal rational language is literal and univocal and
has a unique relation to truth” underlies both biblical and scientific “literal-
ism.”^10 For example, the statement that God has a throne in heaven, or the
statement that Christ sits at the “right hand of the Father” are seldom intended
in the overt sense (there is a physical place called heaven where there is a
physical elaborate chair, and so on) but rather in the symbolic sense, where
God’s throne represents his power throughout the cosmos or where the “right
hand” expresses closeness and honor. Educated people have always understood
that when Jesus warns people who have logs in their eyes not to judge others
who have specks in their eyes (Matthew 7.3–5), he is not suggesting that people
were walking around with pieces of cedar jutting out of their sockets. Tradi-
tional thinkers recognized that metaphor expresses a deeper reality than can
be obtained through a reductionist reading. Since they regarded the Bible as
revealed, they regarded everything in it as meaningful. This almost forced the
growth of metaphor, as it was clear that everything in it does not have an overt
meaning. Multiple levels of meaning were established by Origen (about 185–
254) and then by Augustine.^11 They read the Bible on at least four levels, the
overt, the allegorical, the moral, and the eschatological (referring to the end of
the world), all of the latter three being generally metaphorical. Their intention
was to open out meaning through “depth-metaphor.”
By the middle of the twelfth century, Abelard’s (d. 1142) critiques of Bible
and tradition had led to a new method known as “dialectic.”^12 A thesis was
stated; then its antithesis; and then, through the use of reason, its synthesis.
This dialectic, without which much of modern philosophy would have been
impossible, was the core of the “scholastic method.” No longer could a question
be answered by simply citing a traditional view from the Church Fathers or
Aristotle. On the other hand, a number of bishops feared that a principle vital
to the life of the Christian Church was at stake: Apostolic Succession. The truth
of Christianity was based on the authority that the bishops held as successors
to the Apostles. The bishops feared that university professors would often (un-
surprisingly) prefer their own rational expositions to apostolic authority. There
was also an honest theological worry. When academics argued that academic
formulas were true in the sense that they expressed absolute reality, they were
skirting an equation of cosmos and universe. This problem would underlie the
Galileo affair later.
At the end of the Middle Ages appeared a perfect cosmos, incorporating