Can you elaborate on this?
It was discovered that man can live without a state; this became the basis of Western liberalism. It was discovered that the state, if it exists, must serve men and that it is incorrect to believe that the purpose of men is to serve the state. It was discovered that economic life, religious life, law, and private property can all exist and function effectively without a state. From this emerged laissez-faire, separation of Church and State, rule of law, and the sanctity of private property. In Rome, in Byzantium, and in Russia, law was regarded as an enactment of a supreme power. In the West, when no supreme power existed, it was discovered that law still existed as the body of rules which govern social life. Thus law was found by observation in the West, not enacted by autocracy as in the East. This meant that authority was established by law and under the law in the West, while authority was established by power and above the law in the East. The West felt that the rules of economic life were found and not enacted; that individuals had rights independent of, and even opposed to, public authority; that groups could exist, as the Church existed, by right and not by privilege, and without the need to have any charter of incorporation entitling them to exist as a group or act as a group; that groups or individuals could own property as a right and not as a privilege and that such property could not be taken by force but must be taken by established process of law. It was emphasized in the West that the way a thing was done was more important than what was done, while in the East what was done was far more significant than the way in which it was done.There was also another basic distinction between Western Civilization and Russian Civilization. This was derived from the history of Christianity. This new faith came into Classical Civilization from Semitic society. In its origin it was a this-worldly religion, believing that the world and the flesh were basically good, or at least filled with good potentialities, because both were made by God; the body was made in the image of God; God became Man in this world with a human body, to save men as individuals, and to establish "Peace on earth." The early Christians intensified the "this-worldly" tradition, insisting that salvation was possible only because God lived and died in a human body in this world, that the individual could be saved only through God's help (grace) and by living correctly in this body on this earth (good works), that there would be, some day, a millennium on this earth and that, at that Last Judgment, there would be a resurrection of the body and life everlasting. In this way the world of space and time, which God had made at the beginning with the statement, "It was good" (Book of Genesis), would, at the end, be restored to its original condition.
This optimistic, "this-worldly" religion was taken into Classical Civilization at a time when the philosophic outlook of that society was quite incompatible with the religious outlook of Christianity. The Classical philosophic outlook, which we might call Neoplatonic, was derived from the teachings of Persian Zoroastrianism, Pythagorean rationalism, and Platonism. It was dualistic, dividing the universe into two opposed worlds, the world of matter and flesh and the world of spirit and ideas. The former world was changeable, unknowable, illusionary, and evil; the latter world was eternal, knowable, real, and good. Truth, to these people, could be found by the use of reason and logic alone, not by use of the body or the senses, since these were prone to error, and must be spurned. The body, as Plato said, was the "tomb of the soul."
Thus the Classical world into which Christianity came about A.D. 60 believed that the world and the body were unreal, unknowable, corrupt, and hopeless and that no truth or success could be found by the use of the body, the senses, or matter. A small minority, derived from Democritus and the early Ionian scientists through Aristotle, Epicurus, and Lucretius, rejected the Platonic dualism, preferring materialism as an explanation of reality. These materialists were equally incompatible with the new Christian religion. Moreover, even the ordinary citizen of Rome had an outlook whose implications were not compatible with the Christian religion. To give one simple example: while the Christians spoke of a millennium in the future, the average Roman continued to think of a "Golden Age" in the past, just as Homer had.
Let me apologize for throwing at you so much text so densely packed with meaning and information. Virtually every sentence and frame of reference in these few paragraphs presupposes considerable background knowledge, not all of which I posses. Quigley was scholar and a philosopher of almost frightening erudition, tossing off revelatory insights as casual asides. But I think that the gist of it is clear enough for the purposes of this conversation, and ti may go someway towards answering your question.