‘spirit’. Redeveloping the original Pauline imagination, the spiritual and the

temporal domains were neatly separated, only to be reconnected in surprisingly

new ways by the vanguard of the faithful, the ‘people of God’ (Voegelin, 1994).

Evidently the paradigm of the ‘Roman road’ is an insufficient explanation of the

rise of a modern, Western, secular will to power if it does not take into account

the radically antinomian challenges allowed and even nourished within its framework.

A recent historical novel fictionally conveys the idea that even the most

radical manifestations of such a challenge within early modernity (like the tragic

events of the Peasants’ war of Thomas Müntzer of 1525 and even more the anabaptist

and proto-communist ‘Kingdom of Zion’ of Münster in 1534–35) cannot

be fully understood outside of the framework of an increasingly sophisticated

Roman Catholic governance of the antinomian tensions that were magnified by

the Protestant challenge and its inherent fragmentation (Blissett, [1999] 2004).

The trajectory of European modernity shows that the upgrading of the power

of the commoner in the determination of the common good is at the beginning

a bottom-up process, often springing from the margins of the socio-political

body. Yet in a second moment the movement is hijacked by the capacity of the

modern state to impose a disciplining frame on the autonomous subjects. The

rise of political modernity, far from being a pure rationalization process, presupposed

a metamorphosis of the myths that had supported the development of

Latin Christendom during the Middle Ages. In contrast to the mostly linear

narrative of Brague’s ‘Roman road’, the consolidation of the power of the modern

state took the form of an inverted church, via a process through which the pastoral

role of disciplining subjects and directing their souls was put to the service of an

increasingly secular order. In this sense, it is true that the significance of the

‘Roman road’ precedes the impetus of the ‘Protestant ethic’, yet the eccentric

process of cultural reconstruction occurring within the former was by no means

based on a removal of primordial factors of identity but rather premised on their

symbolic sublimation. This is evident in the sophisticated doctrines that had

tried, since the High Middle Ages and based on concepts drawn from Roman

law, to construct the second body of the king, the body-politic, as the abstract

incarnation of sovereignty (Kantorowicz, 1957). We might amend Brague’s

argument and hypothesize that only within such radical transformations (whose

immediate roots go back to the latest phase of the hemisphere-wide ecumenical

renaissance) did Western Europe become a civilization in its own right and

Western Europe did not replace a traditional civilization but twisted its axially

eccentric search for a cohesive and dynamic formula of organization able to

magnify the power potential of radical challenges and sedate their destructiveness.

The keys to this crystallization were the emerging mechanisms of integral

institutionalization of the commoners (later, citizens) into the corporate body of

into mildly formalized dynamics of social organization the radical and

heterodox challenges. ‘Routinization’ happens in both cases, but with widely

diverging results in terms of the organized forms of social power.