by Many contemporaries believe that the most important achievement of humanity is today’s technoscientific culture, and that in the past people fumbled in the darkness of irrationality, myth, and spirituality. That said, the fact that the contemporary world is unable to match or even comprehend the level of knowledge and architectural and technological competence required for feats of engineering such as the megalithic terrace at Baalbek in Lebanon, or the chambers carved out of rock at Barabar in India, shows just how immature our own civilisation is.
Our world, furthermore, cannot comprehend how ancient cultures managed to cultivate, simultaneously, advanced mathematics, astronomical knowledge, engineering, artistic refinement, mythical thought, and spirituality. Most of us, indeed, cannot accept that the people of the so-called “precritical” cultures of prehistory and antiquity were capable of thinking in complex ways, harmoniously integrating advanced science, spiritual insight, and a variety of practical skills of an artistic and technical nature. And yet this is precisely how the minds of the ancients worked, and the achievements of the past amply demonstrate it, especially in the case of artistic and architectural programs of gigantic proportions, the conception and execution of which required astronomical observation, mathematical calculation, and engineering of the highest order, all of incredible difficulty, and which were nevertheless dedicated to spiritual purposes.
Against this background, it should not come as a surprise that the contemporary world displays a similar incapacity to understand tendencies in early Christian theology, especially of the mystical type, for which the treatment of problems from diverse perspectives, rather than unilaterally, was essential. As Lucian Blaga observed in his Trilogy of Knowledge, the Christian theologians of the early centuries consistently refused to treat the objects of contemplation or intellectual curiosity in a simplistic manner, reducing them to formal logic, for example to the principles of noncontradiction and excluded middle. What may be called the beginnings of Orthodox thought at the end of antiquity and in late antiquity—not to mention the splendid cultural syntheses of the Byzantine Middle Ages—are samples of sophisticated, nuanced, and complex thought, a thought that transcends both the “educated” reductionism of modern elites and contemporary pseudo-Orthodox fundamentalism. Only such a type of thought could define the contours of its objects as mysteries, leading to paradoxical formulations such as God as unity and trinity; God as invisible yet representable iconographically; Christ as God and man, one person in two natures; a mother who remained a virgin; a universe that is ontologically homogeneous yet composed of various levels of reality, and so on. By contrast, modern culture treats such objects as anomalies typical of the supposed irrationality of religious and theological thought. The fact that the same type of complex thought operates in the sciences of the modern world does not impress us, even though these sciences, many centuries after early Christian theology, have ceased to reduce reality to simplistic models…
What I am proposing here, even though I am dealing with Christian examples from late antiquity, is the possibility that, once we have understood the complex thought of the theologians of early Christianity, we will be able to understand much older, prehistoric and ancient, embodiments of this type of thought. By complex thought I mean the treatment of problems in a transdisciplinary manner, more precisely from the perspective of the principle of the included middle. Thus, what I propose is that transdisciplinarity constitutes an indispensable instrument for the modern world, both for the study of the past and for learning from the past lessons useful for today—for example, how to build a culture capable of integrating science, technology, theology, and spirituality.
Contrary to the majority opinion, according to which circum-European humanity evolved from reason in classical antiquity to irrationality in the Christian era, only to turn once again toward the norms of rationality in the modern secular world, this narrative has no correspondence in reality; it is a myth. I am not referring merely to the fact that the supposed modern rationality has failed lamentably in its project of building the new humanity, lucid and knowledgeable, situated at the center of a world that it sovereignly controls by technical solutions. People have not become better, and the slave they have created, technology, is already undermining life on earth. But I refer above all to the ignorance that characterises the modern perception of early and medieval Christianity, an ignorance that has led to erroneous representations of the situation.
Historians today are discovering with astonishment a Christian world far more complex than was previously believed, a world that—far from parting ways with reason or embracing the irrational together with spirituality—continued to develop the great currents of ancient culture and civilisation in a dynamic and creative manner. This development is evident in the achievements of the Christian world, from the systemic combination of intellectual curiosity, technological innovation, and spiritual formation, to astonishing advances in each of these directions taken separately. I shall offer only two examples.
First, early Christianity sketched the doctrines mentioned above in paradoxical formulae behind which reside fundamental insights into reality and time-honoured methods of the ancients, such as the Platonic procedure of collection and division, typical of complex thought; what we currently call transdisciplinarity. By contrast, contemporary educated thought, fundamentally simplistic, remains incapable of operating in this way, demolishing the mysteries of Christian theology and replacing them with unilateral models. Thus, for reductionist thought, divinity can be represented either in a monotheistic or in a polytheistic sense; tertium non datur. Likewise, Christ can only be either divine or human; tertium non datur. And so on. But the mysteries of Christian theology can be discerned only within the context of the complex thought of the included middle, which, closer to our own time, describes the nature of light as both wave and particle.
Another example, second, is that of the ancient and medieval Christian schools. I refer above all to the schools of Alexandria and Edessa, founded in the second century; of Antioch and Nisibis, founded in the fourth century; and of Gaza, a monastic school that flourished in the fifth and sixth centuries. The school of Nisibis, for example, developed throughout the Middle Ages, contributing crucially to the creative transmission of classical Greek culture to the Persian and Arab worlds, and from these to the Western world as well. What is relevant here is that the scholars of Nisibis enjoyed a complex training, both scientific and theological, by virtue of which they produced works of great importance for the genesis of Arab science, which in turn catalysed the genesis of modern European science. The study of the scientific contributions of the Nisibene scholars—including in astronomy and mathematics—is only just beginning. For their part, the Byzantine schools benefited from the services of the scholars of Nisibis, with whom they collaborated intensively, thus becoming another major bridge between West and East. It is worth noting that Byzantine scholars, thanks to their versatile training in the universities of the empire, contributed both scientifically and theologically. Thank God, the study of Byzantine sciences and of their contribution to the building of the European Renaissance begins to flourish in our days. Finally, it is no coincidence that the Christian schools of the medieval Western world, founded in the wake of the plundering of the East in the era of the Crusades, followed similar curricula, contributing to the building of a European civilisation open to science and technology as well as to spirituality and theology. That the ecclesiastical authorities at the dawn of modernity were not capable of the same generous openness is not an inherent problem of Christianity, least of all of early Christianity; it is a problem of blind authority, which replaces the search for truth with the exercise of discretionary power of an imperial—totalitarian—kind, but in an epistemological sense.
In short, all these Christian schools cultivated theology and exegesis alongside the study of the natural sciences, logic, mathematics, and philosophy, demonstrating an astonishing capacity for multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. Ultimately, this capacity signifies dispositions as transdisciplinary as those evident in the doctrines of early Christian theology. No wonder that the education conducted in the context of these schools displayed that astonishing ability to unify such diverse domains as metaphysics and biology, chemistry and spirituality, theology and cosmology—syntheses which, in essence, correspond to the great projects of antiquity; veritable “cathedrals of ideas,” to paraphrase Hans Urs von Balthasar. This integrative capacity corresponds to the requirements of the included middle and, therefore, to complex, transdisciplinary thought, whose origins are lost in the mists of prehistory, in the mentality of the builders of astronomically oriented megalithic centres dedicated to spiritual purposes.
Of course, the interpretation of these tendencies and methods as transdisciplinary manifestations avant la lettre requires that the term “transdisciplinarity” be understood as denoting a type of intuition and thinking whose patterns can be recognised, more or less veiled, throughout the length and breadth of history. We cannot expect to find, everywhere and in every place, discourses on method and statements such as the axioms of transdisciplinarity, as formulated by Basarab Nicolescu. Yet these axioms are found embodied, most often implicitly but also in explicit forms, in the cultural and civilisational achievements of prehistory, of classical antiquity, and of early and medieval Christianity, from East to West and from South to North. Thus, the use of transdisciplinarity for deciphering the past is not merely another avenue for research; it is a necessity. Applying the transdisciplinary method retrospectively will undoubtedly lead to a more accurate grasping humanity’s past, with profound implications for understanding the imperatives of the present world.
Acknowledgment Paper presented for the conference Beyond the disciplines: Transdisciplinarity at 40—A universalist message and its essential role in education, formation, and research. Hyperion University, Bucharest, 29-30 October 2026. Given remotely, in Romanian.
30 October 2026 © AIOCS
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