During the 17th Century, the concept of law started to develop in a rationalistic, and non-religious as well as less value-dependent direction than before,86 thereby allowing legal theory to endow natural law with a level of intrinsic perfection and completeness that it had earlier lacked.87 From this point on legal theory considered natural law to be a truly supernatural category.88 During this period, legal theory reformulated its fundamentals, and subjected the mediaeval notion of a connection between natural law and positive law to analysis and criticized it for its want of philosophical stringency. On the one hand, legal theory rejected the idea of natural law as being identical to all expressions of actual law, and on the other, it replaced the idea of natural and positive identity with the idea that natural law was a system of law lacking direct connection to, and relevance for, the practical undertakings of the legislators and courts.89 While older legal theory denied the possibility of collisions occurring between natural law and positive law since it understood the entire system of law, natural and positive alike, to be intrinsically rational and just, the legal theory of the new era accepted that the metaphysical world view contained discrepancies between essence and expression, cause and effect, and finally, between natural law and positive law, which in turn allowed the conclusion that natural law was just and positive law unjust.90 At first, the ontological separation of natural law from positive law saved jurisprudence from critique, insofar as the separation made the conclusions of jurisprudence ideally true, ideals to p a r t v i i , c h a p t e r 1 586 1. 3. 2 17th - 18th century: the carte s ian revolut ion - unive r sal sci ence - juri sprudence “more geometrico” 86 Wieacker, History, pp. 210-211; Schröder, Recht alsWissenschaft, pp. 7-8 and 97-104. 87 Schröder, Recht alsWissenschaft, pp. 102-104. 88 See ibid., p. 104. 89 Cf. ibid., p. 203. 90 Ibid., p. 110. See § 31.
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