and speaks through his mouth. But it follows from this that their respective relations to written law — the prætor's to his edict, the cadi's to the jurists' texts — must be entirely different. It is a quintessence of concentrated experience that the prætor makes his own, but the texts are a sort of oracle that the cadi esoterically questions. It does not matter in the least to the cadi what a passage originally meant or why it was framed. He consults the words — even the letters — and he does so not at all for their everyday meanings, but for the magic relations in which they must stand towards the case before him. We know this relation of the "spirit" to the "letter" from the Gnosis, from the early-Christian, Jewish, and Persian apocalyptic and mystical literature, from the Neopythagorean philosophy, from the Kabbalah; and there is not the slightest doubt that the Latin codices were used in exactly the same way in the minor judicial practice of the Aramæan world. The conviction that the letters contain secret meanings, penetrated with the Spirit of God, finds imaginative expression in the fact (mentioned above) that all religions of the Arabian world formed scripts of their own, in which the holy books had to be written and which maintained themselves with astounding tenacity as badges of the respective "nations" even after changes of language.[1]
But even in law the basis of determining the truth by a majority of texts is the fact of the consensus of the spiritual elect, the ijma.[2] This theory Islamic science worked out to its logical conclusions. We seek to find the truth, each for himself, by personal pondering, but the Arabian savant feels for and ascertains the general conviction of his associates, which cannot err because the mind of God and the mind of the community are the same. If consensus is found, truth is established. "Ijma" is the key of all Early Christian, Jewish, and Persian Councils, but it is the key, too, of the famous Law of Citations of Valentinian III (426), which the law-men have universally ridiculed without in the least understanding its spiritual foundations. The law limits the number of great jurists whose texts were allowed to be cited to five, and thus set up a canon — in the same sense as the Old and New Testaments, both of which also were summations of texts which might be cited as canonical. If opinions differed, the law of Valentinian laid it down that a majority should prevail, or if the texts were equally divided, the authority of Papinian.[3] The interpolation method, used on a large scale by Tribonian for the Digest of Justinian,
- ↑ For example, Hebrew was supplanted by Aramaic for all ordinary purposes as early as the Maccabees — and to such an extent that in the synagogues the Scriptures had to be translated for the people — but has held its ground as a religious vehicle, and above all as a script, even to this day. (The present use of a spoken Hebrew represents a revival in more recent times, after the wider dispersion of the early Middle Ages had broken the connexion with the Aramaic lands.) In the Persian field the older Zend survived alongside the newer Pehlevi. In Egypt somewhat similar influences were contemporaneously determining the evolution of popular Demotic and official Greek into the Coptic language with Greek characters. — Tr.
- ↑ M. Horten, D. rel. Gedankenwelt d. Volkes im heut. Islam, p. xvi. Cf. Chapter VII below.
- ↑ Mayr, IV, 45, et seq. [Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. XXIII, p. 570. — Tr.]
