Roman law and canon law
During the Middle Ages, the Church was the leading public institution with the greatest intellectual talent. The law of the Church, however, was not comparable to Justinian’s Compilation.
For this reason, civil lawyers considered canon law methods and techniques to be intellectually inferior in rank. Around 1140, however, the monk Gratian, a canon lawyer from Bologna, published the Concordia discordantium canonum [Harmonizing the divergent norms], known as Gratian’s Decree (Decretum Gratiani), an authoritative collection of canon law material that tried to harmonize apparent textual contradictions. Gratian’s sources were the Bible, Justinian’s Code, the writings of the Church Fathers, papal decretals, and acts and decrees of the councils and synods. The Decretum marked the starting point of the development of canon law as a legal science, because of the systematic and critical way in which materials were arranged and analyzed. Medieval canon law was a well-balanced combination of ecclesiastical sources and medieval interpretation of Roman law.Gratian’s followers, the school of decretists, started to produce and collect the existing glosses while the civil glossators were doing their jobs. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there was strong competition between civil commentators and canon lawyers. Although the law of the Church differed from civil law, and the work of civilists and canonists remained distinct in content and application, canon law and civil law were so intertwined than one could not understand either without the other. The civil law was concerned with justice in order to guarantee happiness and prosperity on earth; the canon law focused on justice to ensure the salvation of the souls (salus animarum).
Canon law and civil law constantly interacted by the principle of complementarity: on the one hand, in the absence of canon law norms, ecclesiastical courts used to apply civil law; on the other hand, secular courts regularly
took into consideration general principles of canon law to resolve concrete civil legal issues.
This explains why many lawyers were instructed in both civil and canon law (utrumque ius).Papal legislation was vigorous after the publication of the Gratian’s Decree, and, as a result, canon lawyers had to respond to it in different ways than Roman law experts did. In 1234 Pope Gregory IX promulgated a large collection of new papal decretals (called Liber Extra, edited by Saint Raymond of Penyafort). Pope Boniface VIII, in 1298, propagated a further collection (Liber Sextus). In 1582, after the Council of Trent (1545-63), Pope Gregory XIII disseminated a critical and official compilation of all canon law materials from the Decretum Gratiani to the later decretals of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It was called Corpus Iuris Canonici (the body of canon law). The name was an evident allusion to Justinian’s Corpus Iuris. Legist was the name churchmen gave in referring to an expert in Roman Justinian law.
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