Leone Caetani ( 1869 – 1935), Duke of Sermoneta also known as Prince Caetani was an Italian scholar, politician and historian of the Middle East.
Caetani is considered a pioneer and founding father in the application of the historical method on the sources of the early Islamic traditions which he subjected to minute historical and psychological analysis.
Caetani sees in the spread of Islam, among the Christians of the Eastern Churches, revulsion of feeling from the dogmatic subtleties introduced into Christian theology by the Hellenistic spirit.
“For the East, with its love of clear and simple concepts, Hellenic culture was, from the religious point of view, a misfortune, because it changed the sublime and simple teachings of Christ into a creed bristling with incomprehensible dogmas, Pull of doubts and uncertainties;
these ended with producing a feeling of deep dismay and shook the very foundations of religious belief;
so that when at last there appeared, coming out suddenly from the desert, the news of the new revelation, this bastard oriental Christianity, torn asunder by internal discords, wavering in its fundamental dogmas, dismayed by such incertitudes,
could no longer resist the temptations of a new faith, which swept away at one single stroke all miserable doubts, and offered, along with simple, clear and undisputed doctrines, great material advantages also.
The East then abandoned Christ and threw itself into the arms of the Prophet of Arabia.”1
1. Caetani, vol. 2. pp. 1045-6