Law, Survival, and Filiation: An Anthropological and Metaphysical Interpretation

Abstract

This article proposes an anthropological and metaphysical interpretation of law-centered worldviews—religious, philosophical, and modern—as collective survival structures emerging from historical rupture, trauma, and chronic insecurity. It argues that when Law becomes absolute and self-justifying, it functions as a cosmological principle analogous to those found in pagan systems. In contrast, Christianity does not constitute a cosmology but introduces a relational ontology grounded in filiation and grace. The deepest divide in modernity is thus not between belief and unbelief, but between survival under impersonal Law and mature relational existence rooted in received love.

Law, Survival, and Filiation: An Anthropological and Metaphysical Interpretation

Introduction

Contemporary discourse often opposes modern rationalism to religion, or secular modernity to ancient paganism. Such oppositions obscure a deeper structural continuity. Modern rationalism, ancient Stoicism, contemporary neo-paganism, and various forms of religious legalism all share a common metaphysical matrix: the primacy of an impersonal Law, conceived alternately as cosmic order, rational necessity, ritual norm, or total juridical framework.

By contrast, Christianity—particularly in its Trinitarian and incarnational articulation—does not present itself as a cosmology or a theory of worldly order. It proposes instead a relational ontology grounded in filiation. This article argues that the historical persistence of law-centered metaphysics can be understood as a collective survival strategy, and that the refusal of filiation reflects not moral immaturity, but a structural response to insecurity, trauma, and the loss of trust.

1. Christianity and the Break with Cosmology

Unlike pagan, monist, or pantheistic systems, Christianity does not sacralize the cosmos or the laws governing it. The Christian God is transcendent to creation, personal, and free; He is neither an immanent force within the world nor an emanation of it. The Christian Logos is not an impersonal rational structure but a person who becomes incarnate.

This distinction is decisive. Where cosmological systems seek to describe the order of reality and align human existence with it, Christianity introduces an asymmetrical and vertical relationship grounded in grace. Moral goodness is not primarily conformity to a norm, but a free response to a gift already received. In this sense, Christian monotheism is not one cosmology among others, but a rupture with every attempt to sacralize the order of the world.

2. Law-Centered Metaphysics as a Structure of Survival

The history of ideas shows that metaphysical systems centered on Law tend to emerge or intensify in contexts of rupture, collapse, or prolonged insecurity. Stoicism develops in the wake of the dissolution of the Greek city-state; Rabbinic Judaism takes shape after the destruction of the Temple; juridical Islam elaborates a comprehensive normative order; modern rationalism accompanies the disenchantment of the world and the anxiety of meaning.

In these contexts, Law fulfills a precise anthropological function: it stabilizes, secures, and renders reality predictable. It replaces relationship with norm, trust with control, and love with obligation. This does not constitute moral immaturity, but a form of collective post-traumatic adaptation oriented toward psychological and social survival.

3. Sacralization of Law and the Return to Cosmology

When Law becomes primary, total, and self-justifying, it ceases to function as mediation within a relationship and becomes a structuring principle of reality itself. In such configurations, Law operates analogously to the sacred laws of ancient paganisms: cosmic necessity, rational order, equilibrium of forces, or harmony to be preserved.

This process is not specific to any single tradition. It appears in ancient pagan systems (Moira, Logos, Dharma), in Stoicism, in certain post-biblical forms of Judaism where Halakha becomes a total structure of life, in juridical Islam, in modern rationalism, and in contemporary neo-pagan movements. The convergence does not point to an identitarian origin, but to a universal anthropological structure: the sacralization of nomos in response to insecurity.

It is essential to emphasize that biblical Judaism does not belong to this schema. It affirms a transcendent, personal Creator God. However, like all historical traditions, it does not entirely escape—in some of its later configurations—the temptation to transform Law from covenantal mediation into a normative cosmology.

4. Diffuse Conditioning and Chronic Stress

Contemporary societies generate, without centralized intent, a state of chronic psychological stress: constant exposure to fear, urgency, normativity, and mediated authority. Mass media—television yesterday, screens today—function as low-intensity conditioning mechanisms comparable to diffuse psychological warfare.

Such environments encourage normative retreat: a desire for clear rules, suspicion toward relational freedom, and preference for impersonal structures. In a world perceived as dangerous, filiation—which requires vulnerability and trust—becomes psychologically costly, if not unbearable.

5. The Refusal of Filiation and Genealogical Displacement

Filiation, in its strong anthropological sense, implies a living, asymmetrical, and demanding relationship. It requires accepting dependence, being engendered, and being called. Law-centered metaphysics suspend or replace this relationship.

Contemporary neo-paganism illustrates this displacement clearly. The rejection of a living, transcendent Father is accompanied by an intense appeal to ancestors, bloodlines, and mythic origins. Yet this genealogy does not constitute true filiation; it is a symbolic substitution. Ancestors are silent, fixed, and non-demanding. They legitimate identity without engaging the subject in relationship.

Preferring dead ancestors to a living Father thus neutralizes paternity at the symbolic level. Transmission is invoked, but engendering is refused. This constitutes an anti-filiation: origin without relationship, inheritance without love.

6. Sedevacantism as an Intra-Christian Legalistic Fixation

A similar dynamic can be observed within Christianity itself, particularly in certain forms of sedevacantism. This position is characterized by a refusal to recognize a living ecclesial authority, in favor of exclusive adherence to doctrinal and liturgical forms fixed in the past. Although it presents itself as a defense of Catholic orthodoxy, this posture reflects a logic comparable to law-centered metaphysics: authority is secured through fossilization, while living mediation is perceived as too risky.

Sedevacantism therefore does not represent a return to paganism, but an intra-Christian

7. The Fundamental Divide: Law or Filiation

The decisive divide, therefore, is not between belief and unbelief, nor between modernity and tradition, but between two fundamental anthropologies:

• an anthropology of survival under Law, grounded in conformity, security, and adaptation;
• an anthropology of filiation in grace, grounded in relationship, freedom, and inner transformation.

The former produces responsible yet orphaned subjects; the latter calls for a risky but generative relational maturity.

Conclusion

The contemporary persistence of law-centered metaphysics—whether expressed through rationalism, neo-Stoicism, neo-paganism, or certain forms of religious legalism—should not be interpreted as moral progress or a return to ancient wisdom. It reflects a humanity living under sustained psychological constraint, shaped by insecurity and loss of trust.

Unable to risk filiation, this humanity seeks refuge in impersonal structures of protection. Christianity, in this sense, offers neither an alternative cosmology nor a more demanding Law. It offers an exit from survival logic itself: the passage from conformity to relationship, from norm to filiation, from Law to grace.

Methodological Note

This article adopts an anthropological and metaphysical approach rather than a confessional, polemical, or identitarian one. The religious, philosophical, and cultural traditions discussed are not treated as homogeneous or essentialized entities, but as historical and structural configurations capable of manifesting, to varying degrees, shared anthropological logics.

In particular, references to Judaism, Islam, Christianity, ancient or contemporary paganisms, as well as intra-Christian movements such as sedevacantism, do not concern persons or believing communities as such. They are used exclusively to analyze certain metaphysical structures in which Law tends to become absolutized—namely, the sacralization of norms, the juridification of the relationship to the divine, and the fossilization of authority.

When Judaism is discussed, a clear distinction is made between its biblical core—which affirms a transcendent, personal, and creative God—and certain post-biblical configurations in which Law may, under specific historical conditions, acquire a totalizing function. This distinction is essential in order to avoid any confusion between structural analysis and identitarian attribution.

Similarly, the reference to sedevacantism does not constitute a doctrinal judgment or an ecclesiological position, but the analysis of an intra-Christian legalistic fixation, interpreted as an anthropological symptom comparable to other forms of withdrawal from living mediation in favor of stabilized norms.

Finally, the framework proposed in this article rests on a central hypothesis: the tendency to absolutize Law—whether religious, cosmological, rational, or traditional—constitutes a universal human strategy of survival in the face of insecurity and collective trauma, whereas filiation, understood as a living and asymmetrical relationship, presupposes a degree of trust that certain historical configurations render difficult to sustain. This hypothesis is not intended to rank traditions, but to illuminate the anthropological dynamics that traverse them.