In his late essays of the 1970s Patočka inquires into the essence of European civilization – its birth in Ancient Greece, its formation in Medieval Christianity, its success in producing modern natural science, and its fall in the world wars of the twentieth century. He asks what legacy old Europe has bequeathed to mankind in the post-European, globalized world. One of the main components of this legacy is the Christian religion. The paper attempts to explicitly reconstruct Patočka's indeed very heretical formulation of this religion as introducing a wholly new era in world history.