Conclusion

With Suarez, the foundation of law has become ahistorical. Law can no longer be legitimately grasped in metaphorical comparisons and analogies, semantic genealogy or vested in the dignity of antiquity.

The case of natural law, with its self-legislating free, rational being that reflects the inherent goodness and justice of actions, in a radical way exempli­fies the implications of Suarez's ahistorically deductive and mimetic approach. It fits in with very similar examples that come forward in other parts of the De Legibus, such as in book vιι on custom. It shows how Suarez inscribes himself in a juridico-philosophical setting in which the shared sinderesis of all rational beings and the unchangeability of natural law that corresponds with it, oppose the contingent dimensions of the extra-legal reality, and yet also, timidly but radically, evoke and substantiate them: in the historical example that no longer displays current law, or in the content of positive law that would only be arbi­trary or conventional, in the actual judgement, finally, of the rational being that is distinguished from the ever present light of reason that is also natural law.