Introduction

Niels Hemmingsen was arguably the most significant Danish thinker of the sixteenth-century Reformation, and as such continues to attract attention. He was one of Philipp Melanchthoris most accomplished students, return­ing to Denmark to become professor of Greek, Dialectics, Hebrew and finally Theology.

This work is famous as the first attempt to set out a theory of natural law on the basis of reason and, as Hemmingsen wrote, �without prophetic and apostolic voices’.^{[123] [124] As such it has received a certain amount of attention in the scholarship on the history of natural law since as early as the seventeenth century. The earliest histories of natural law were concerned with identify­ing Hemmingsen’s choice of the �principle’ of natural law and his method in treating the law of nature, and subsequent discussions have sought to eval­uate Hemmingsen as a precursor to Hugo Grotius. More recent scholarship, however, has discussed Hemmingsen as a follower of Philipp Melanchthon,}

but with significant disagreement as to the nature and significance of Melanchthon’s and Hemmingsen’s theories of natural law and their uses of the Decalogue.

This chapter seeks to clarify the nature of Hemmingsen’s contribution in De lege naturae to the Philippist philosophical and political programme. Where much scholarship has emphasised the role and primacy of the Decalogue in Melanchthon’s and Hemmingsen’s natural law theories, this chapter argues that this is misleading.^[125] It contends that Melanchthon’s moral philosophical works contained a clear conception of natural law and moral philosophy as devel­oped, by philosophers, on the basis of reason and that Hemmingsen carried forward and developed this programme. This in turn sheds light on our concep­tion of the �Lutheran’ �politica christiana’.

Following a brief overview of the scholarship on Hemmingsen’s De lege naturae (section 2), the chapter then turns to a brief biography of Hemmingsen and an account of Melanchthon’s moral philosophical programme at the time he would have encountered it in Wittenberg (section 3). On this basis, sec­tion 4 turns to an analysis of De lege naturae with particular attention to the method and approach of Hemmingsen’s philosophical discussion of the law of nature. This allows for a discussion in section 5 of how this theory of natural law provided a philosophical defence of certain confessionally specific argu­ments concerning political order and authority, in particular the three estates doctrine and the ruler’s duty to uphold Lutheran doctrine. The chapter con­cludes with a summary characterisation of Hemmingsen’s development of Philippist natural law theory, and what this means for our understanding of the �Lutheran’ �politica christiana’.

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