Paulo Barrozo 204 § There have been only two paradigms of law in the entire history of high-complexity societies: The Great Manifold andThe Great Alliance paradigms. The Great Manifold did not fully consolidate until the thirteenth century, in the wake of the philosophical, demographic, economic, institutional, cultural, political, geopolitical, cognitive, technological, self-referential, and communicative transformations that marked the High Middle Ages in Western Europe. 9 This paradigm of law brought into a compelling jurisprudential manifold the following: revealed divine will, the will of princes and popes, the will or urban elites in city-states, instrumental, cognitive and normative rationalities, the reception of Aristotelian philosophy, and the historical legacies of ius particulare , Roman law and canon law. The intellectual hero ofThe Great Manifoldwas Thomas Aquinas, whose classical natural law theory enshrined the triadic will-history-reason nature of law in such a mode as to allow it to coexist with intense religiosity of the type our general culture no longer has access to. The cornerstone of the paradigm is a concept of law as a kaleidoscope of normativity, 10 resulting in a system presented as the complete ordering of all things. This ordering of all things is achieved by interlocking four 9 I am grateful to Julia Barrozo for research on factors that coalesced as the tipping point of complexity in the thirteenth century. 10 Following a pre-Socratic tradition of distinguishing physis and nomos, Aristotle had already problematized the bipartite nature of political justice: one part natural, the other conventional. In Book V ofNicomachean Ethics , one reads that “Of political justice part is natural, part legal.” (ARISTOTLE, 1995). One would have to wait until the Renaissance for the divine to release humanking to subjection solely to its own normative scheme. See, e. g., Pico della Mirandola: ““We have given you, Oh Adam; no visage proper to yourself, nor any endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgment and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature. I have placed you at the very center of the world […]. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, either mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.” (DELLA MIRANDOLA, 1956, p. 7-8). Aquinas’ kaleidoscopic normativity stands between Aristotle’s and Della Mirandola’s.
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