This study aims to demonstrate both the nature and some consequences of certain dominant intellectual developments and changes in Europe during the Christian period, primarily as they relate to the Greek East and the Latin West.

This book is not a historical study. Essentially, it examines types of mentality or forms of perceptual understanding; and to the extent that it uses what we call history, it does so because at this level it is easier to describe the nature of the shifts from one form of understanding to another.

Furthermore, the forms of understanding under discussion are not of equal value or integrity. On the contrary, some of these forms preserve, with greater or lesser adequacy, eternal truths, in the sense that they correspond to the universal truth of things, while others are merely inventions of individual human minds...