Christianity, which even in the second century was hardly more than an extended Order, and whose public influence was out of all proportion to the number of its adherents, grew suddenly vast about the year 250. This is the epochal moment in which the last city-cults of the Classical effaced themselves before, _not Christianity, but the new-born Pagan Church_. The records of the Fratres Arvales in Rome break off in 241, and the last cult-inscriptions at Olympia are of 265. At the same time, the cumulation of the most diverse priestly characters in one man became customary,[451] implying that these usages were felt no longer as specific, but as usages of one single religion. And this religion set out to _convert_, spreading itself far and wide over the lands of the Hellenistic-Roman stock. The Christian religion, on the other hand, was alone in spreading (_c._ 300) over the great Arabian field. And for that very reason it was inevitable that inner contradiction should now be set up in it. Due, not now to the spiritual dispositions of particular men, but to the spirit of the particular landscapes, these contradictions led to the break-up of Christianity into several religions--and for ever. The _controversy concerning the nature of Christ_ was the issue on which this conflict came up for decision. The matter in dispute was just those problems of substance which in the same form and with the same tendency fill the thoughts of all other Magian theologies. Neoplatonic Scholasticism, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and above all Proclus treated it in a Western formulation, by modes of thought closely akin to Philo’s and even to Paul’s. The relation between the Primary One, Nus, Logos, the Father, and the Mediator was considered with reference to the substantial. Was the process thereof one of emanation, of partition, or of pervasion? Was one contained in the other, are they identical, or mutually exclusive? Was the Triad at the same time a Monad? In the East a different constitution of the problem is evidenced already in the premisses of the John Gospel and the Bardesanian Gnosis: the relation of Ahuramazda to the Holy Spirit (Spenta Mainyu) and the nature of Vohu Mano gave plenty of occupation to the Avestan “fathers”; and it was just at the time of the decisive Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon that we find the temporary triumph of Zrvanism (438-457), with its primacy of the divine world-course (Zrvan as historic Time) over the divine substances marking a peak of dogmatic battle. Later, Islam took up the whole subject over again and sought to solve it in relation to the nature (_Wesenheit_) of Mohammed and the Koran. The problem had been there, ever since a Magian mankind had come into being--very much as the specifically Western will-problem, our counterpart to the substance-problem, was posed in the beginnings of Faustian thought. There is no need to look for these problems; they are there as soon as the Culture thinks, they are the fundamental form of