What is the Law? Tradition and Modernity in Alfonso de Castro (s. XVI)

The XVIth century signals the spatial and temporal rupturing of the West, expressed ad extra in the suggestive discovery of the New World and, ad intra, in the breaking of former confidence signaled by the Reform. The XVIth century would culminate in breaking the uniformity of Catholicism, the birth of national projects, and the universality of experience of a Humanism that nourished the possibility of Christendom before other religions (Judaism, Islam). But while this experience of unification of identity was confirmed in the Spanish monarchy, the rest of Europe was opening itself to the New World. The discovery brought concrete existential experiences that were very different, and inaugurated a new age in which experience of national identity was now realized individually, without the possibility of a unification of the diverse. Individual interest will little by little impose upon the common good, for the general community, while existent, could not be the ultimate grounding of concrete measures: there is no measurable unity, and if there is no quantifiable criterion, there cannot be a decisive criterion, a science, a law that unifies processes, at least the political ones. Alfonso de Castro answers to a nature of the law that runs away from ontological personalism and common-good essentialism, by presupposing the common good of the manifest human nature. Freed from the naturalism of Aristotelian hermeneutics and grounded on the expression of the human will, true and authentic receptacle of human freedom, he supports a criterion of humanity and citizenship that does not fall into a solipsism of the will that has proven so ill. Some of his thesis anticipated democracy and secured the universality of the Catholic-Christian message in the diversity of founding wills of the socio-political community was not followed by jurist theologians.