Justice & Law Quote by Pedro Calderon de la Barca

A lawyerly question dressed as poetry, this line turns nature into a courtroom exhibit and dares the audience to object. Calderon de la Barca, writing inside Spain's Catholic, honor-obsessed Golden Age, knows exactly how to make an argument feel inevitable: he stacks "law" and "reason" beside "God" and then makes the human claim look petty against the effortless generosity of creation. If God "has given" running water, fish, beasts, and birds, who is a magistrate - or a jealous patriarch, or an anxious king - to ration them?

The intent is less pastoral admiration than rhetorical entrapment. The speaker doesn't ask for permission; he asks what kind of moral logic would be brazen enough to deny what is "so sweet, so natural". That doubling is the trick. "Sweet" flatters desire; "natural" legitimizes it. Calderon is staging a familiar baroque conflict: social codes and property lines versus appetites that present themselves as both innocent and ordained.

Subtextually, the quote is a weapon against scarcity narratives. Laws don't merely regulate; they invent guilt. By listing a stream, a fish, a beast, a bird, the line widens from one person's need to an entire ecology of abundance, implying that restriction is artificial, even corrupt. It is also a subtle attack on human exceptionalism: if animals take freely from God's pantry, why must humans dramatize survival as a sin?

In Calderon's theater, arguments like this often sit inside larger debates about freedom, honor, and authority - the sense that society's rules are elaborate costumes over something older and harder to police.