Patristic anthropology and the future of science

The article offers a brief review of the book “Ambrose of Milan and Aurelius Augustine about soul” by E.P. Aristova, and an interpretation of the significance of this work for the problems of science development and the prospects of European culture. The doctrines on the soul reconstructed by E.P. Aristova set the framework for possible heuristics of thinking about a person in general and about subjectivity in various areas of the socio-cultural process, including the field of scientific, technical and socio-economic policy. The author shows that if the understanding of man as the image of God and, accordingly, as the creator was decisive for the philosophical and scientific thought of early modern period, then the teachings of Ambrose of Milan and Aurelius Augustine reveal the image of a sinner, who is guilty of the world fall and therefore called upon with the help of God to restore the destroyed original order. The article suggests replacing the idea of sin with the idea of responsibility for making decisions with large-scale consequences, while at the same time pointing to the need for existential foundation of the principle of responsibility ‒ the idea of the existential meaning of the actions of an individual, changing the world in a positive or negative direction (good ‒ evil, corruption ‒ chaos, beauty ‒ ugliness). The author claims that the idea of the restoration of the original order corresponds with epistemological realism ‒ as opposed to the idea of voluntaristic (and in this way similar to the divine) creativity, which correlates with epistemological constructivism.