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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 January 2010
Western democracy developed within the matrix of Christendom and the Enlightenment, and it can only be deciphered in relation to both. The relationship is, however, complex, multi-layered, and ambiguous. As Harold Berman reminds us: ‘Liberal democracy was the first great secular religion in Western history – the first ideology which became divorced from traditional Christianity.’ Yet a divorce implies partners who were previously married, shared much in common, and who, even in their separation, cannot fully break with their past relationship. So, Berman continues, democracy took over from Christianity ‘both its sense of the sacred and some of its major values’.
CHRISTENDOM: A NEW WORLD ORDER
The Edict of Milan in 313 was a turning-point in European history, ‘the great charter of the New Republic’, as Charles Norris Cochrane called it. In terms derived from the priestly legitimation of Israelite monarchy, it provided much needed vindication of imperial authority, and, while it did not make Christianity the Roman imperial religion immediately, it did give it the status and freedom for which earlier apologists had argued. The provisions of the Edict made possible, for the first time in antiquity, the separation of political and religious power, thus anticipating, though by no means achieving, the separation of powers and the distinction between political and civil society so fundamental to democracy.
Constantine was a transitional figure who initiated the ‘project of a Christian commonwealth’; towards the end of the same century, Emperor Theodosius transformed what Constantine began into an Orthodox empire.
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