Abstract

The paper does not intend to go into the distinction between law and religion, not to review the dialectic traditionally established between religion and positive law in the history of philosophy. It focuses on the history of the doctrine of natural law as crystallized in a paradigm that still remains as philosophically powerful as culturally weak. The emergence of the new social problems of a secularized world, the new significance assumed by the problems of religious multiculturalism, are not only opening new problematic horizons to jurists, but also causing a profound alteration in the way the dialectic between religion and positive law has been generally conceived.