Tradition and Modernity 27In other words, axial categories were not erased but were reinterpreted,
radicalised and turned upside down by the new movements of the age, by insti-
gating new visions of a kingdom of God on earth governed by the vanguard
of the faithful, the ‘people of God’. The religious reformers of the sixteenth
century, led by Luther and Calvin, opted for a drastically new foundation of
the order of the fading church institution. Yet the most striking example of a
radical transformation based on the vision of an immanent shift of axial values
previously oriented to transcendence was the revolution of Oliver Cromwell
(1599–1658) in England. This was not by chance the fi rst revolution that has
been considered as modern, and one that occurred in the cradle itself of eco-
nomic and political modernity. The call for a kingdom of God now breaks the
axial tension between immanence and transcendence and becomes a tool for
their ultimate fusion, via programmes that bring immanence to the horizons of
salvation. This outcome of the new breakthrough is a new type of civilisational
power that becomes condensed in the machinery of the modern state (Voegelin
1998: 217–68).
Both the revolution of Cromwell as an instrument for instituting the unlim-
ited sovereignty of the commoners via the state and Weber’s idea of a Protestant
ethic as an engine of unlimited capitalist development show that signifi cant reli-
gious minorities now played radically innovative roles in core domains of society.
A positive relationship emerged not only between religious disciplines and the
transformations of the commercial and, later, industrial society, but also with
the imperatives of regulation of action and concentration of power in the hands
of the modern state. The process is well exemplifi ed by the brutal simplifi cation
of the formulas of management of the formerly triadic relationship underlying
the social bond via the emergence of a ‘contract law’ in England during the
seventeenth century: the dealings of ego with alter were facilitated by a reduction
of their tension according to notions of economic interest and business profi t,
thanks to the support of a benevolent Leviathan, the monster-like modern state
depicted by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), upholding the observance of the now
sacred law of contract (Hobbes [1651] 1996).
An important collateral effect of the process was a growing pressure to rede-
fi ne the proper realm of religion. A drastic redefi nition was achieved through
the consecration of the political principle of cuius regio eius religio, a pillar of the
emerging European international law with the Peace of Westphalia of 1648.
This principle drastically reduced the instability of religiously motivated con-
fl ict by sanctioning the religion of the ruler in each and every state as the only
legitimate one. This compressed religious realm came to be governed also from
within, through rendering religion a matter of personal belief and sovereignty
of the self within the ‘inner forum’. The emerging states not only gained a legal
legitimacy in governing the religious fi eld, but also operated as the collectors of
the surplus of meaning left uninvested by religious traditions and ungoverned