Note (return) — Chapter I

As Catholicism, from every point of view, is the result of the blending of Christianity with the ideas of antiquity,12 so the Catholic dogmatic, as it was developed after the second or third century on the basis of the Logos doctrine, is Christianity conceived and formulated from the standpoint of the Greek philosophy of religion.13 This Christianity conquered the old world, and became the foundation of a new phase of history in the Middle Ages. The union of the Christian religion with a definite historical phase of human knowledge and culture may be lamented in the interest of the Christian religion, which was thereby secularised, and in the interest of the development of culture which was thereby retarded(?). But lamentations become here ill-founded assumptions, as absolutely everything that we have and value is due to the alliance that Christianity and antiquity concluded in such a way that neither was able to prevail over the other. Our inward and spiritual life, which owes the least part of its content to the empiric knowledge which we have acquired, is based up to the present moment on the discords resulting from that union.