ABSTRACT
The ascription to the State of a creative cultural role presented the ancients with little difficulty. The political and the religious were one: the State was divine, its function was ethical as well as political and economic and, in so far as it was limited, it was auto-limited by its own ethos. The dualism of Church and State in the Christian ages left the State with a role which, directly at least, was little beyond the political and military. According to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the organized Church in every land is really a state within the State. The idea of a two-fold jurisdiction, a temporal and a spiritual, was unknown to the pre-Christian world. On every ground, doctrinal and emotional, Rousseau was bound to be antipathetic to ‘Roman Christianity’. The private and interior religion, which Rousseau calls Christianity or ‘the religion of the man’, remains to be considered.
