Culture and Law Part 4 – Faustian Law
Unlike Magian Law Faustian Law was almost entirely constructed from the ground up without the aid of a transition between higher cultures and of the acts of inspiration it took it was quintessentially of a Faustian character to do so. The Pre-cultural era sparked an series of tribal codes belonging to the various Germanic tribes in what is comparable to the book of Deuteronomy for the pre-cultural Jews of the Magian culture, and as the Jews built off of the remaining works available in Babylon, so to the Goths working off of the remnants of the Roman Empire.
Of the varieties of law seen in Western Civilisation, there were three at the onset of its existence. The first was derived from the presence of the Normans in old England after 1066, bringing their laws and making those laws applicable to all the folk of England as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon laws which subjected those people to the rule of a few great men. English law has become the standard today by virtue of its survivability over the last thousand years and was brought wherever the British conquered in order to bring civilization to those lands. English law was developed by its own Faustian empiricism, that is, instead of having judges judge cases in isolation, cases were examined and compiled into law books in order to establish precedent to look back upon in future cases; in Rome, cases were examined without reference to any other case, but in England, they were examined with reference to as many as reasonably possible.
Behind the English law in importance, South France and Northern Italy fathered their own codices off of the Roman style: the French Droit ecrit, to oppose the more Germanic inspired droit coutumier, and the legal traditions in Pavia, Lombardy in Italy where the Expositio and Lombarda were devised in the 11th Century around the same time as the establishment of English law. They continued on until they were replaced by Napoleon’s Code Civile but were nevertheless of great importance in their influence throughout the centuries.
Lastly, there is the German tradition, which, transitioning away from tribal laws and into the connected world of the higher culture of Northern Europe, began to frame its law in the forms of Italy, where it’s judges would learn before returning across the alps to the greater half of the Holy Roman Empire to deliver its policy as a form of “Roman Law”. Only it was not Roman law that they received, for that was long since dead and unrecognisable thanks to the Byzantines which is where things get interesting:
Very quickly a German spirit got hold of the legal codes and turned upon it. German glossators maintained that truth was found not in worldly substances but in universal ideas, thus the law should not be followed from the Lombarda but from the manipulation of these universal notions to one’s favour. It was the Faustian spirit at action taking the rules of the world and bending it to what fit its purposes and by the renaissance this became the typical means by which to interact with legal codes.
Around 1140 the Decretum of Gratian also marked a new style of law based upon the science of spirituality which brought the influence of the church into legal codes. The Papacy’s presence in the law began to immediately rub up against the Empire’s creating a tension comparable to time and space; one law, the state law, is focused on the temporal effects going into the future, whilst the church law is focused the timeless and eternal principles, once again marriage is cited to show this tension: in Britain, marriage may be held as a ceremony at a church, but must also be registered and concurred by the state to be legally binding, in each nation this relationship may vary, but the relationship stands due to the tension between church and state for power.
Faustian Law is through and through a Will to power. Cases and disputes are styled as debates where men skilled in knowledge of the history of law, and refined in their capacity to bend the world to their will, compete for the side of the judge and the jury. The winning side may only have proven what was written in statutes or have cited only previously decided precedent, but otherwise, the judge may use the events of the case to create new laws of their own accord, taking the temporal battle of facts and transmuting the result into immutable and eternal truths for others to learn in the thousand-year tradition of the refining of legal technique. It’s no disputing that English law overshadows the two other forms, but each tree of law has played its part in the development of Faustian jurisprudence as it steadily solidified into a system almost indistinguishable from a science in its own right.