Legal Theology: Law, Modernity and the Sacred

This article argues that there is both sameness and difference as between the secular and the religious, and that law, modern law, is constituently enmeshed within this sameness and difference. That combination of sameness and difference, along with the integral part of law, is traced in a cumulation of three historicities, the first being the creation of the world\u27s imperium, of the modern world-system, in the sixteenth century. Then, with the second historicity we have the time of revolutions, seen here as almost revolutions, of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And finally, with the third historicity we have the time of high modernism and the death of God in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each of these three phases is captured, as it were, in the work of a corresponding thinker who is taken to be a telling instance: Vitoria, Hobbes, Nietzsche. All of that is then briefly brought into what could precariously be called the present and in a way that reveals the exercise to have been all along a history of the present