In the Republic, liberty was a religious tenet reserved exclusively for Romans. Juridically protected, it was considered necessary to preserve Roman morality. After the collapse of the Republic, the concept of liberty remained as a rhetorical support for the emperor, but its substantive meaning had changed. .
One development in this period, however, enhanced both the value and future success of liberty, for: Out of the political wasteland of the collapse of the Roman Republic there came birth as well as death. There was death for a narrowly defined ideal of republican Liberty based upon a concept of collective political authority. Yet in hard and bitter agony there was also the birth of a new and more noble conception of Liberty. It was this more exalted, more inclusive vision of Liberty which would be invoked so many centuries later by a bold group of men willing to justify revolution by an appeal to the self-evident truth that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with the inalienable right to Liberty. .
The idea of liberty received its greatest impetus and universal appeal from Christianity, which breathed life into it by revealing its connection with the providence of God. The implications for this revelation were refined in the course of the Middle Ages and are here examined by Professor Ralph McInerny. McInerny observes that in modernity, liberty is considered as "immunity from obstacles and impediments,"" so that one may fulfill the choices made by his own will, while in the Middle Ages scholars believed liberty's proper meaning referred to one's capacity for something. Medievals maintained that since man chooses deliberate actions he is different from other living things and must be held responsible for those actions. Man alone knowingly directs himself to the good. The good man seeks to act in accordance with a good which is not self-determined, but exists independently of his choosing.