This book was written in parentheses. As I progressed through the second volume of the Metaphysics of Beauty, commenting on the baptismal Fathers, I realized that I was speaking about a Christianity after the fourth century, in which doctrine was influenced mainly by Stoic and Neoplatonic thought. This Christianity may have been hostile to Greek philosophy, but it adopted critically its intellectual tools, such as the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible, and slipped into its own soteriology. I insisted, therefore, on the developments and bypassed the initial event, as if they were identical things. Thus, a void was created, which I now try to fill with "The Secret of Jesus", so that the philokalic studies that will follow can be placed in their own historical horizon and the static representation can be succeeded by interpretive dynamics. [...] (from the author's preface)