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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Religion and the State Today [The First Section] I will not dwell upon the history of the separation between “secular (political)” and “religious”, between the Church and the state, this being well-known. In Dante’s De Monarchia (1311) we find the beginning of the idea of this separation: “the church and the empire have different «fondamenti»” and are the terms of a relation, the first “nell’ambito della paternità”, the second “in quello del dominio”.

It is, however, rightfully said that the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years’ War, after a series of conflicts of a confessional nature, and it opened the historical cycle of the separation between the Pope’s auctoritas and the king’s potestas. “The Church is losing its role as major supporter of the political power, the latter feeling released from the responsibilities directly related to the religious ambit”[^6] .

I will not insist either on the paradoxical interaction between the state and the Church, which determined royal power to try to legitimise itself through the Church’s control over what is holy, and the two, the Church and the state, to organise themselves through “mutual mirroring (gegenseitigen Bespiegelung)”[^7] . One may say that “seit dem Ende des 18.

Jahrhunderts hat die Säkularisierung die Grenzen von Kirchen - und Staatsrecht überschritten und ist zu einer allgemeinen Kategorie geworden, die unauflöslich mit der neuen einheitlichen Vorstellung einer geschichtlichen Zeit verflochten ist.

Aus dieser Verflechtung (bei der die Säkularisierung mit anderen Symbol-Koordinaten der modernen Befindlichkeit zusammenhängt: mit Emanzipation und Fortschritt, Befreiung und Revolution) ergeben sich radikale Neudefinitionen und Sinnverschiebungen des Begriffspaares geistlich/weltlich”[^8] . Today, however, possessing a wider historical knowledge, we must question the history of secularisation.

In order to acknowledge the complexity of the issue we are faced with today, I would like to discuss the matter of emancipation. Few have approached it as convincingly as Moses Mendelssohn. In Jerusalem (1783), the renowned Rabbi of Berlin considered the “state” and “religion” to be “piliers de la vie sociale”, which must reach a “balance”.