Christianity (n.) is an event. Its primordial experience is not concerned with its historical bases but in an immediate experience of God which 'convinces' because it is 'over-powering'.
Christianity (n.) was not a speculative philosophy but an elementary need of masses vegetating in darkness — humanity does not thrive in licentiousness; its meaning was the moral subjugation of the animal instincts.
Christianity (n.) tamed the animal instincts of antiquity so thoroughly that their energy was set free to build civilization.
Christianity (n.) was embraced as a way out of ancient brutality — throw it away and the brutality returns; when a whole nation finds the moral mask too silly to wear, the beast breaks loose.
Christianity (n.) offered late antiquity not a solution but a breaking free: one valuable function detached from all the others that clamoured to govern.
Christianity (n.) protects those who hold its basic attitudes; whoever seriously criticizes them forfeits the protection and delivers himself up to the animal psyche.
Christianity (n.) suppressed individual symbol-formation — so as its intensity fades, sects proliferate: Christian Science, theosophy, anthroposophy are the old function returning.
Christianity (n.) came to many Germanic peoples only at the sword's point of the legions — which is partly why its dogma had to be so rigid.
Christianity (n.) split the barbarian into an upper and a lower half, domesticating the bright one; the dark half still waits, and the more the faith loses authority, the louder the blond beast prowls in its underground prison.
Christianity (n.) is not finished; our conception of it is antiquated — the symbol is alive and carries the seeds of further development.
Christianity (n.) did not burst on history as an absolute novelty; it is the classic example of something historically prepared.
Christianity (n.) needed to seem to have no ancestors: only late did Christians notice the parallels with Dionysus, and they blamed them on the devil.
Christianity (n.) was a mental union in the overcoming of the body; the ancient delight in body and nature lived on in its long list of sins, and alchemy sensed that the union with the body had not yet been realized.