Vera Philosophia: The Philosophical Significance of Renaissance Jurisprudence

Vera Philosophia: The Philosophical Significance of Renaissance Jurisprudence* DONALD R. KELLEY "CIVIL SCIENCE IS THE TRUE PHILOSOPHY," declared the fifteenth-century jurist Claude de Seyssel, "and it is to be preferred to all other fields because of its purpose.''1 From the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, throughout the career of modern legal thought, this conviction was maintained and, in some circles, expanded. Furthermo~, many aspects of formal philosophy--including the nature of man and the universe, the problem of knowledge, the processes of cause and effect, and the search for a proper scientific method--were taken up, sometimes productively, by jurists. Yet in histories of philosophy and of thought in general, which often find occasion to discuss such fields as natural science, literature, art, and of course pofitical thought, it is hardly possible to find even recognition of the si~ificance of jurisprudence, to say nothing of discussion of its contributions. This circumstance is another illustration of the specializaton and fragmentation of knowledge that has occurred since the Renaissance, and another source of misunderstanding about the history of thought between that age and the Enlightenment. The identification of law and philosophy was one of the few doctrines that gained almost universal assent in a profession that has never been known for agreement. It was defended by jurists of all sorts---by ancients and modems, by glossators and postglossators , by ultramontanes and citramontanes, by civilians and feudists, by scholastics and humanists. It was based upon impeccable, indeed inviolable authority, appearing as it did in the very first title of the Digest, taken from the work of that most classical of jurists, Ulpian. It was glossed and reglossed hundreds of times, elaborated in terms of Platonic, Aristotelian and Ciceronian thought, and confirmed by the hardly less celebrated formula that defined law as "the knowledge of things divine and human," that is, as sapientia, wisdom itself.2 Finally, in more recent times, it was given new life by incorporation in more than one system of thought from Baldus to Giambattista Vico, although again few figure in histories of philosophy3 * Versions of this paper have been given at Columbia, Brown, Harvard and the University of Toledo. z In Vl. FForum partes (s. 1. n. d.), f. 1 on Digest I, 1, 1: "Civilis scientia vera est philosophia et aiiis omnibus propter eius finem praeferenda." The "FF," as Renaissance jurists liked to explain, was the closest Latin printers could come to the pi of the Greek "Pandecta." Digest I, 1, 10, 2. The better known aspects of this idea have been traced by Eugene Rice, The Renaissance Idea of Wisdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), but for contemporaries fewer texts could have been more familiar than Accursius' Gloss on Digest I, 1, 1: "civilis sapientia vera philosophia dicitur, id est amor sapientiae." 3 Especially Vico, De Universi ]uris uno principio et fine uno, ed. F. Ventura (BAH, 1936), Proloquium. discussion in my "Vieo's Road," in Giambattista Vico's Science of Humanity, ed. G. Tagliacozzo and D. Verene (Baltimore, 1976). [267] 268 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY In certain ways the ties between philosophy and jurisprudence were strengthened by Renaissance humanism, especially because of the pedagogical conviction that law was associated with the studia humanitatis and specifically with moral philosophy. This point was argued countless times, from Coluccio Salutati's Nobility ol Law and Medicine to Vico's Study Methods of Our Time,4 in a whole genre of methodological treatises (de modo studiench"et docendi ]uris), themselves derived from Justinian's prefatory constitutions instructing his law professors, and in the obiter dicta of the so-called "legal humanists," headed in the sixteenth century by Andrea Alciato. Characteristically, most humanists believed that this association had been lost. "Law is the art of the good and the just, etc.," quoted Guillaume Budt, the only scholar acknowledged as Alciato's peer. "To philosophize on this point is the job of the jurist, and from this we conclude that the study of law has degenerated from its original state. Today there are no longer jurisconsults, or philosophers, but only lawyers" (jurisperitO. 5 It was Budt's hope to restore law to its condition as a form of wisdom, "that cycle of...