nce upon a time, in the West, sacred history, human history, and natural history were one. The Hebrew Bible, refracted through the prism of the Christian New Testament, told a story in which time, nature and humanity came into being together. From that beginning, history, with its low spots (Eve, the serpent, the apple) and its high marks (the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ) was the unfolding of God’s plan for the redemption of a fallen humanity. For Christians, time had a plot, and its beginning and end were both part of written history: even as its bright unfolding was traced in the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis, its ending in cataclysm, judgment, and eternal life was laid out in the Book of Revelation.
Humans were there from day six of creation, made by God in his image. Both free will and the moral and ethical understandings that allowed us to live in community with each other were grounded in divine creation: they were gifts of God. Nature was understood to be fitted to human use and to operate on something of a human scale. As this story was told in medieval Europe (roughly, the centuries between the fall of Rome and Columbus’s voyage to the lands that became the Americas) the earth was nested at the heart of the cosmos. Ringed around it were the moon, the planets, the sun, and the stars, all encompassed by the heaven where God reigned in majesty. We looked up from the center not at infinite space but at a mansion made of nested spheres spinning in perfect harmony.
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