Antiquity

Abstract

Abstract The legalization of Christianity in the late Roman Empire was a key moment in the development of Western constitutionalism. Harold Berman famously emphasized the role of the Gregorian Papal Revolution in the development of Western law. But that medieval revolution that lies at the foundation of constitutionalism depended on the much earlier Constantinian revolution, which secured the independence of the church. Merely as a sociological phenomenon, the church was unique in the ancient world, and the church claimed to be much more than a purely sociological phenomenon. She claimed to be the bearer of the meaning of human history, a holy and separate people that was a sign of a perfected kingdom of the future. In recognizing the church, Constantine inaugurated, without entirely realizing it, a “migration of the holy,” a shift of the locus of sanctity from the prince to the church. Legalization of the church dealt a blow to the belief in “sacral kingship” common in ancient politics right up to the imperium of Diocletian. After Constantine, Christian emperors recognized the church’s leaders as spokesmen of God, to whom they were accountable. The fifth-century Gelasian theory of “two powers” was an early form of the “separation of powers” as the church provided a “check and balance,” a real counterweight to imperial authority.