Finally, ecclesiastical politics provides us with examples, and these have analogies even in purely religious developments. The polytheism of antiquity had many of the essential characteristics that I have subsumed here under the concept of “the narrower circle.” For the most part, the cults set themselves off from one another by sharp internal and local boundaries. The circles of believers were centripetal; often they were mutually indifferent to one another, often hostile. The gods themselves were often aristocratically ranked, with complicated relationships of superordination and subordination, and with segregated spheres of potency. At the outset of the Christian era in the domain of classical culture, this condition led to monotheism, to the enthronement of a single and personal God who united in himself all the powers of those discrete and segregated deities.

XREF: Connects to the book's broader 'narrower circle' concept applied across domains beyond religion.

XREF: Connects to Weber's broader thesis on how hierarchical religious structures evolve toward unified systems, relevant to sociological accounts of religious rationalization.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 676