THE CORPUS IURIS A HOLY BOOK
As the parallels between the Christian bible and the lawbook of EmperorJustinian are noticeable, so is the similarity between the civilians of the Corpus iuris and the contemporary scholastic theologians.
Both were working on venerable and authoritaÂtive texts that needed elucidation and explanation in the light of their own times and needs. The comparison also applies to the sixteenth-century reaction against these medieval endeavÂours. Just as the Protestants rejected the medieval â€?betrayal’ of the original purity of Holy Writ, so the legal humanists — who used the same slogan adfontes - rejected and derided the ignoÂrance of previous Schools of Roman law and attempted to unÂderstand the laws of Justinian in their original context and their true meaning, as discovered with the help of the new historÂical and philological methods. In so doing they revealed the historical nature of the Corpus iuris as the product of a particuÂlar, past civilization and not a timeless revelation, â€?fallen from heaven’. However, Protestants and legal humanists soon discovÂered that rejecting tradition, and restoring the exclusive authorÂity of ancient texts, caused new problems. The pure, restored texts still needed to be studied and explained, which led to a5 6 The holy books of the law
multiplicity of Protestant denominations and interpretations of Holy Writ. Similarly modern lawyers and historians have unÂderstood the Corpus iuris in divergent ways, and many theories and schools of textual criticism have arisen (there is no need here to enter into the details of the well-known history of glossators, commentators, humanists, usus modernus and Pandectism).
It is obvious that �holy books’ exist in the legal as well as the religious sphere. They are, however, exceptional, as most legal systems in human experience belong to a quite different type, based on ancient custom, precedent and the accumulated wisdom of generations of iurisperiti.
Classical Roman law is a celebrated example, and so are the common law, England’s â€?Old Constitution’ and medieval customary law - especially feudalism - which affected the lives of countless Europeans for an entire millennium.[66] The ius commune, however, was difÂferent: it was a deviation from the almost universal pattern, as it was based on an authoritative book, taught and assimiÂlated by the â€?happy few’ who had mastered its ancient message (in chapter 5 we will say something about the cultural climate in which this came about). The consequences for this neo-Roman law were predictable: it was strong on conceptual definitions, scholastic subtleties, refined distinctions and a theoretical and logical framework, all of which was - certainly in its initial phase - as remote from the daily life of ordinary people as it was satisfactory to scholars enamoured of a good intellectual Spielerei. This sort of bookish law was also, by definition, conÂtrolled by an elite of Latin-speakers, who alone understood the relevant esoteric literature.