world-feeling, unless we realize the full extent of the field that this "Arabian" law covered.
The new landscape embraces Syria and northern Mesopotamia, southern Arabia and Byzantium. In all these regions a new law was coming into being, an oral or written customary law of the same "early" type as that met with in the Sachsenpiegel. Wonderfully, the law of individual cities which is so self-evident on Classical ground is here silently transmuted into a law of creed-communities. It is Magian, magic, through and through. Always one Pneuma, one like spirit, one identical knowledge and comprehension of whole and sole truth, welds the believers of the same religion into a unit of will and action, into one juristic person. A juristic person is thus a collective entity which has intentions, resolutions, and responsibilities as an entity. In Christianity we see the idea already actual and effective in the primitive community at Jerusalem,[1] and presently it soars to the conception of a triune Godhead of three Persons.[2]
Before Constantine, even, the Late Classical law of imperial decrees (constitutiones, placita) though the Roman form of city law was strictly kept, was genuinely a law for the believers of the "Syncretic Church,"[3] that mass of cults perfused by one single religiousness. In Rome itself, it is true, law was conceived of by a large part of the population as city-state law, but this feeling became weaker and weaker with every step towards the East. The fusion of the faithful into a single jural community was effected in express form by the Emperor-cult, which was religious law through and through. In relation to this law Jews and Christians[4] were infidels who ensconced themselves with their own laws in another field of law. When in 212 the Aramæan Caracalla, by the Constitutio Antoniana, gave Roman citizenship to all inhabitants except dediticii peregrins,[5] the form of his act was purely Classical, and no doubt there were plenty of people who understood it in the Classical spirit — i.e., as literally an incorporation of the citizens of every other city in the city of Rome. But the Emperor himself conceived it quite otherwise. It made everyone subject to the "Ruler of the Faithful," the head of the cult-religion venerated as Divus. With
- ↑ Acts XV. Herein lies the germ of the idea of a Church law.
- ↑ For Islam as a "juristic person" see M. Horten, Die religiose Gedankenwelt des Volkes im beutigem Islam (1917), p. xxiv.
- ↑ See Ch. VII below. We can venture to make the label so positive because the adherents of all the Late Classical cults were bound together in devout consensus, just as the primitive Christian communities were.
- ↑ The Persian Church came into the Classical field only in the Classical form of Mithraism, which was assimilable in the ensemble of Syncretism.
- ↑ It is difficult to describe this class in a few words. Roughly, they (and the "Junian Latins," so called, who were excepted with them) represented a stratum of Roman society, largely composed of "undesirables," which was only just not servile. In the older legislation they were necessarily lumped with the outer world as peregrins, but when Caracalla made this outer world "Roman," there were obvious reasons against bringing these people into the fold as well. In somewhat the same way the word "outsider" is used in colloquial English with the dual meaning of a foreigner or non-member, and a socially undesirable person. — Tr.
