This work is in three chapters. The first exegetes Heidegger's image of "the approach of night" to the world of human concern in our epoch. The second chapter brings this image to the world of modem law, and argues that legal formalism obscures the meaning of law for human concern. The third chapter maintains that the world or worldview of the strict separation of church and state is obscured by the formalist tendency to consider this separation as a set of rules apart from the purposes or rationales for which they have been established.
Letters by Leo Strauss provide my entrance into the meaning of "world night" in Heidegger's thought. The world or worldview for the things that are of concern for one's understanding is benighted when its meaning no longer shows itself to or is manifest for one's understanding: one's world becomes "value-neutral," which has happened to the scientific world in the epoch of positivism.
I argue especially against Max Weber's legal theory, which routinizes Aristotle's terminology of substance unto the absence of substance for the citizenry, that any legal system's world would be benighted if its citizenry consider its laws as manifesting no substantive values.
The primary substantive worldview binding the American judiciary to assert this separation proves to be a reverence for religion or worship of God, yet this (theological) worldview is hardly noticed by the judges who are held by it, for they seem to assume that the separation is understandable regardless of its purposes. If freedom for religion becomes asserted judicially apart from any reasons for it, "night" has overcome its originating worldview.
