DIREITO E RELIGIÃO

REFLEXÕES ACERCA DO CONTEÚDO CULTURAL DAS NORMAS JURÍDICAS

Abstract

The secularity of the law is undoubtedly one of the most important cultural achievements of Western civilization. The dissociation between law and religion was the key step for developing an unprecedented legal culture, a tradition to which we are the heirs and successors. The separation between the temporal and the divine has allowed the emergence of a way to organize social life that is no longer founded on the sacred or the supernatural, but rather on the human capacity to establish the rules of conduct and decide on disputes according to their own criteria. Nevertheless, religion has never ceased to be an important source of content in the Western legal tradition. While the authority of legal norms is now grounded in human will itself, the values provided by the predominant religious beliefs have not stopped making up the substance of the law.
It is about the relationship between law and religion upon which we propose to reflect in this work, examining the tension that has developed between the sacred and the profane, based on the Greek invention of rational discourse. For this purpose, we show the Roman law’s viewpoint on the old religion and the setbacks caused by medieval Christianity to the legal experience, as well as their important axiological contributions to modern law. Finally, the foremost cultural and ethical feature of the law and its role in reconciling the different regulatory aspects of culture through its formal instruments is addressed.