Tradiții populare, tradiții hermetice: contrareforma și raționalizarea lumii

The modern heading towards a purely rational understanding of the universe is by no means related to expanding the range and accuracy of empirical techniques and instruments of measure. In a way, modern science came alive when it was least needed, as emphasized by Culianu. What seems to have greatly favored it was the outcome of a bitter fight run by the Church, both Catholic and Protestant, against any use of human imagination. Defeating both popular and hermetical culture inherited from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the ecclesiastical power set the road for the use of more ideologically neutral quantitative measures, and prepared the ground for the sovereignty of modern experimental sciences.