dogmatic and organizational, stable and exposed to continual challenges. This

expansiveness shaped the growth of Europe well into the Late Middle Ages and

early modernity thanks to a refinement of the notion of the church as a corporate

entity able to incorporate, in various ways, new peoples and territories, both

East and West (in the ‘New World’). Latin Europe, never the direct heir of any

specific cultural tradition and located in the once marginal Far West of the Afro-Eurasian macro-civilizational area, deepened a specifically Roman methodological vocation consisting in transmitting, processing and bringing overlapping and even contrasting identities to a new though conflicted: this is, in essence, Brague’s view of the ‘Roman road’ of Western Europe.

This approach puts us at a safe distance from the type of culturalist essentialism

consisting in identifying given traditions with discrete symbolic materials,

while it also encourages us to focus on the procedures and methods of systematization, desystematization, revision and innovation internal to the traditions here at stake. According to Brague, the main vectors of this process in Western Europe have been Roman law and Roman Catholicism, two traditions that have generated original institutional configurations facilitating the affirmation of a distinctively European identity – both within the porous boundaries of the Far Western peninsula of the Eurasian continent which appropriated the mythical name of ‘Europe’, and vis-à-vis the non-European world external to it, primarily the vast landmass of Eurasia situated to its East, or ‘Orient’. The two discursive traditions facilitating the formation of an original European civilization, Roman Law and Roman Catholicism, provided European elites with a method for selectively drawing on a variety of civilizational sources and magnifying their organizational resources. In the process, ideas of individual agency were yoked to the sovereignty of corporate bodies: first, the church, then the state. Both the legal and the religious tradition converged in producing a European identity even when related to each other via a principled and hardly bridgeable tension between ‘spiritual’ and ‘temporal’ notions of power: the terrain of their convergence was a uniform pattern of formation of a collective will to power, which ongoing legitimization conflicts fomented rather than eroded. The underlying, strongly dualistic institutional configuration based on the relation between church and state was inherited and subjected to ever more trenchant normative reconstructions within the modern political order usually associated with the Peace of Westphalia (1648).

Brague explicitly relates the uniqueness of this type of culture–power syndrome

to its counterpart within Islamic civilization, whose cultural machine appears to

be, in comparison to Europe, more ‘normal’, and hardly fuelled by an eccentric

positioning vis-à-vis its sources. In contrast to the European syndrome of

culture–power facilitated by axial eccentricity, the Islamic civilization deepened the idea of a divine delegation of power to the ‘commoner’ mediated by egalitarian patterns, a process that was also favoured by an extreme symbolic dilution of the attributes of terrestrial power (Salvatore, 2007: 99–241). This motif was already central to the preaching and teaching of key axial characters like Isaiah and Socrates but remained underappreciated in further developments till the emergence of Islam, which Robert Bellah considered paradigmatic of a collective