Die Geburt der westlichen Moderne aus dem Geist der Religion

The question of which chain of circumstances led to the development of Western modernity was once the central question in the social-historical work of Max Weber. In contrast to Weber, the article does not go back to the Protestant ethic to identify an important starting point for the emergence of Western modernity, but to the Gregorian reform in the High Middle Ages. The Roman Catholic Church's claims to supremacy over all areas of society have triggered defensive reactions in politics, law, economics, philosophy and morality that continue to have an impact today, beyond the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Western modernity emerged in demarcation and confrontation with the imperial power of the Roman Church, by partially adopting its organizational forms and ideas, but above all by rejecting its universal claim to validity and building non-religious, secular structures and semantics.