This book was written in parentheses. As I progressed through the second volume of the Metaphysics of Beauty, commenting on the mystical Fathers, I realized that I was speaking of a Christianity after the fourth century, whose doctrine bore the stamp of Stoic and mainly Neoplatonic thought.

This Christianity may have viewed Greek philosophy with hostility, but it critical adopted some of its intellectual tools, such as the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible, and subtly slipped into its soteriology. I insisted on the developments and bypassed the inaugural event, as if they were identical things. Thus, a gap was created, which I now attempt to fill with "The Secret of Jesus," so that the philokalic studies that will follow may be placed within their own historical horizon, and the static representation may be succeeded by interpretive dynamics.

[...] (from the author's preface)