Thought

If Law refers to man, it is necessary to know the whole man, placing him in the fullness of his environment. The fragmented man—the man of economists, the man of doctors, the man of sociologists—is not the man, the absolutely real being and essentially one.

Pure monstrosity is an abstract Law, directed at equally abstract men. Law, man, and his life remain blurred in the inflated and colorful laboratory formulations.

He errs who claims that Law begins and ends in the letter of the law. Because attachment to the legal text, without appreciation of its color and flavor, of its adjustment or nonconformity with a higher Law, is a form of terrorism.

Politicians and jurists—and it would be good if there were some serious communication between them—should carry under their arm a vademecum of solutions to vital problems. It would be good if both, in concert, applied their instruments to the needs and purposes of life.

Only through paths of difficulty can this which is now a dream be fulfilled. In a society marred by a thousand evils and, above all, by the maximum lack of morality, there is nothing but heroic battle. A tough and muffled battle, sure and constant, fought by men who profess justice with authentic personality.

Justice, which matters so much to the dignity of the human person, cannot be measured with instruments of mechanical or technical precision. Justice is not a "thing." It bears direct reference to the interiority of the best in each man, which is his own "self."

Man does not live, but co-exists. It is bad, however, when laws do not make good his encounter in the social environment. It is bad when they do not ease such an encounter when the person, with all his burden of human dignity, and society, with all that it has of necessary aggregate, collide head-on.

Man, cornered by the environment, loses faith in higher Law, expecting everything—well-being, security, happiness, and even entertainment—from each day's new law, which is so often smeared with politicking, which is to say, "a politics without ethics."

In no manner of State should anything attack human dignity, that which is proper to each man, that which rejects countless slaveries.

No nation can today be a "restricted zone," because so many things bring all peoples into communication, and the putting into play of "national interests" alone will ultimately harm its own defenders.

Politicking corners Politics, with a capital P, that is, that "art of making a nation, a people," according to Unamuno's expression. Politicking debases whatever it touches. For starters, language, as proven by the devilish juggling to which the word "democracy" has been subjected.

Freedom is a pure name, which is made into a banner to commit the greatest outrages. The poor man is free, but to un-live in misery. The rich man is free, but to amass great wealth, in promotion and detriment of the masses, of a mass that does not coexist, that does not live in society, and whose prevalence in the social environment, when alien to honor, favors the tyrannical corruption of government.

Freedom has its root and reason in the very human person itself. Its sanction or recognition by political society is anything but a pure gratuitous concession.

History speaks to us, at every step, of famines affecting millions. The grave and general lack of economic sustenance moves all manner of discord and revolts. But the lack of the other bread, of cultural bread, that which is food for the soul, is no less a cause of disagreements that lead to outrages and misfortunes.

History is a swarm of facts. Discovering the existing link even between those that appear most different and shocking leads to discovering the one, long, general, and secret cause of the very fabric that is history.

The course of history speaks to us of innumerable trials, tests, or experiments concerning one single argument: that of the drama of the human being in his struggle to find refuge against night and winter.

To narrate an epoch without discovering the sediment that the past left in it contributes to not clarifying the totality of its image.

It is indeed a matter of exalting the civilizing work of Rome. Rome prevents an entire world from being victim to moral and political disintegration. It provides a political-administrative organization and channels into civilizing course the populations of central and southern Europe that still lived in a state of migratory tribes or in perpetual war among themselves.

Far from me the idea that Romanity came to be a constant haven of wonders. But I fight, in any case, against those who, urged today by their political ideologies, only notice certain crude or bitter scenes of the film.

Roman Law is defined by what it has that is most brilliant, profound, and sustained, and this is by the "spiritual form," by the spirited ready light that gives it its being, in response to a pronouncedly Roman manner of culture.

Rome is a people in which the juridical—not the legal—oozes everywhere. Hence, to approach this, the juridical, it is necessary to immerse oneself in the fullness of Roman life. Dealing solely with the scarce texts, few legal texts—and even jurisprudential ones—leads to capturing a flat and poor image of the best legal formation that times have known.

If we speak of Roman Law, it is convenient to keep this idea in mind: that the "new" must rest on the old, on the experienced and known. At least, a new historical moment is not absolutely uniform and unequal with respect to the previous one.

We must seek the existing pairing among all institutions, without excluding the most disparate. It matters to know if, as we believe, some and others respond to the needs and requirements demanded by social life. If we make an isolated examination of institutions, worrying only about finding out what there is in each of particularism or detail, of mere technique, of cold and rigid dogmatism, we will not come to know the soul that beats in the entire system.

He who begins in research must understand that not everything is science brought to completion, definitive, sacred, and untouchable fruit of the "vetustocracy." True that scientific knowledge is work of spaced and laborious toil, which assists with authority men laden with years, but nothing assures their infallibility.

Let the novice pay attention to whatever consecrated men say or write, but without forgetting that much remains to be discovered and that, sometimes, and as Arangio-Ruiz would say, it is necessary to exercise the ars ignorandi.