[105] In Neoplatonism^a a more positive relation was again reached: the gods are manifestations of the One and have a kind of independent spiritual reality. As manifestations of the ultimate One, they are real, but they are not ultimate. They are gods, UNDER the One -- which is the ground of everything. But under this, they have their functions, in the whole of the universe. They are reduced gods, gods with a limited power, and all under the ultimate One. They then were conquered by the Christian God^b, who replaced them all and was, in Christian theology^c, identified with the ultimate One of Neoplatonism. Now what you see here are two things: criticism and compromise. And these are the two ways in which the WHOLE development moved ALL the time. And we will see what we do about that later on. But first let us go ahead. In Christianity^d the decisive figures are Augustine^e and Thomas Aquinas^f. Augustine, as a Platonist, very much liked mathematics and mathematical physics. But he did NOT like natural science, going into the reality of bodily things. He declared that natural science is the job of the demons. Why? There was a very profound idea behind this, the idea that knowing and knower, he who knows and that which is known, are in a kind of eros^g-relationship, in a kind of community. It is demonic to be in community with the bodily world, because the bodily world fights against the spirit. This produced the predominant attitude, for centuries -- for at least one-half thousand years of Western history -- toward [the] natural sciences. They were under distrust -- not mathematics^h but the real empirical knowledge of the bodily world. The change came when Aristotleⁱ entered the scene against Thomas Aquinas and his predecessors and followers... Through HIM, the empirical method became the new method of reaching not only natural knowledge but of reaching also the ultimate knowledge. The empirical method leads from