Some of the main points on which the early Christians based their faith, and which had hardened into dogmas through the course of centuries--such, for instance, as the Ascension and the Second Advent--ceased to have their old significance.

In a world where there was neither up nor down, the translation of a corporeal Deity to some place above the clouds, whence he would descend to judge men at the last day, had only a grotesque or a symbolic meaning; whereas to the first disciples, imbued with theories of a fixed celestial sphere, it presented a solemn and apparently well-founded expectation.
The fundamental doctrine of the Incarnation, in like manner, lost intelligibility and value, when God had to be thought no longer as the Creator of a finite cosmos, but as a Being commensurate with infinity.
It was clear to a mind so acute as Bruno's that the dogmas of the Church were correlated to a view of the world which had been superseded; and he drew the logical inference that they were at bottom but poetical and popular adumbrations of the Deity in terms concordant with erroneous physical notions.

Aristotle and Ptolemy, the masters of philosophy and cosmography based upon a theory of the universe as finite and circumscribed within fixed limits, lent admirable aid to the theological constructions of the Middle Ages.

The Church, adopting their science, gave metaphysical and logical consistency to those earlier poetical and popular conceptions of the religious sense.

The _naif_ hopes and romantic mythologies of the first Christians stiffened into syllogisms and ossified in the huge fabric of the _Summa_.