Paradise on Agape and Law in Byzantium

Brandon L. Paradise, Rutgers Law School, Newardk, has published Agape and Law in Byzantium. Here is the abstract.

This study focuses on agape love and Eastern Orthodox soteriology as master narratives in the Byzantine legal imagination. It is an approach to the conference theme that inspired this chapter--the "sacred arts of Orthodoxy" in so far as the "art of legal disputation," so central to Byzantine literature, is a much neglected area of study, where rhetoric, ethics, legal theory and theology all coincide in a symphonia which is distinctively "Orthodox." As scholars have recently argued, law in Byzantium is better understood as a rhetorical, literary negotiation of broad, extra-legal religious, cultural and philosophical narratives than as an autonomous, formalist-positivist discipline that mirrors the scientific aspirations of modern western legal systems.560 Rather than attempting to generate formally correct "legal" solutions derived exclusively from rule or formalist discourse, Byzantine law seeks to render 'substantive justice' as measured by extra-legal narratives, including—and perhaps most importantly for this study—the master narratives of the gospel and Orthodox theology.561 Concretely put, this means that law in Byzantium is more an exercise in literary negotiation and applied morality than an exercise in technocratic and autonomous rule reasoning. Thus, unlike modern western legal systems, Byzantine law clearly imagines itself less as legal science and more as artistic practice. The praxis of this artistic endeavor is the shepherding of society on the basis of agape-love and in the direction of Orthodox soteriology, so that law becomes a force for realizing these two extra-legal cultural ideals.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.