Law and Religion: In Search of God

Abstract

Introduction: This work seeks to trace how the figure of God — in a literal or metaphorical sense — has manifested and evolved in the history of law as the ultimate foundation of the normative order. The article examines how, after the “death of God”, law continues to search for the ultimate foundation of normativity, replacing transcendent authority with secular dogmas (Grundnorm, Constitution, “public reason”).Methods: The study employs comparative legal and historical-dogmatic analysis, interpretation of Nietzsche’s thesis and Münchhausen’s trilemma, as well as reconstruction of the practices of sacralization of legal text.Results and discussion: It is demonstrated that both religious and secular theories of law inevitably reach an epistemological limit and compensate for it by creating new “substitutes for God” — canon, procedure, abstract values, and the symbolic authority of the court. This reveals the hidden dogmatism of liberal concepts and the illusion of procedural neutrality. The first part demonstrates the search for the ultimate foundation of law in the absence of an external guarantor, when one is left to seek an immanent axiom — one that is not imposed, yet without which the very experience of law is impossible. In the second part, the authors turn to the “sacralized” legal text and examine law, which, particularly in its dogmatic constructions, constitutes a complex system where the text acts as a canon, and the community of lawyers functions as priests who preserve and interpret its sacred meaning. The third part illustrates the solutions that legal scholarship resorts to in its search for the lost normativity.Conclusions: Law emerges as an inevitably “faith-based” system, chronically experiencing a deficit of justification and therefore constantly producing new forms of sacralization of its own foundations.