Abstract

The article refers to the beginning of the religious-political distinction of the semantics of ,secular' and ,sacred'. Already in the 5th century Pope Gelasius I. developed this distinction in the framework of Christology. Occidental Christianity later turned to then developed motives, explanatory schemes and legitimation patterns to find an approach for disentangling religion and politics, state and religion. The thesis of the article states that it is typical for modernity to base all explanations of moral and legal orders on the autonomy of a profane reason. With this the traditional Christian master narrative of ,two swords' or ,two powers' is leading to a dead end both for justifying the constitutional guaranteed separation of state and religion and for structuring their correlation