José-Luis Villacañas, professor of the Complutense University of Madrid, has published a book dedicated to the problems of the imperial political theology. The author is wellknown in the field of political philosophy and over the last decade, he has made a name as a specialist on Carl Schmitt and as an editor of his works. He has also written books about Hans Blumenberg and the imperial idea in the Spain of Charles V Habsburg. Therefore, when one meets a new book by Villacañas called The Imperial Political Theology and the Community of Christian Salvation, one expects another text about Early Modern political culture. However, this expectation would not be met. Based methodologically upon the conceptions of Max Weber, Friedrich Nietzsche and Carl Schmitt, Villacañas writes about the Roman Republic and, further, the Roman Empire in the context of the birth of Christendom and Christian theology. If one of the first heroes of this book is the Roman dictator Sulla, its last hero is the famous theologist of the 5th century AD, Aurelius Augustine.Villacañas structures his book in seven big chapters, each of them divided into sections. The first chapter covers questions of the genealogy and the logic of the Roman ratio imperii. The first section gives a brief excursus on the origin of the principal concepts of the Roman world, such as a patrimonium, paterfamilias, princeps. The author further analyses the main algorithms of the evolution of the Roman Republic in the 1st century BCE. He shows that the formation of the Principate was, in fact, an inevitable result of the processes initiated by the Sullan dictatorship and his lack of legitimacy (p. 45-47). The Empire, being born, became the second column of the Roman world, where the first was its traditional patrimonialism.The political constitution of the Principate was too weak and needed additional support to make the emperor's rule stronger and more prosperous. This support was found, according to Villacañas, in the political religion and, particularly, in the deification of the princeps. The princeps was considered as the father of the fatherland, pater patriae,