Introduction
This chapter highlights some aspects of natural law in Jacobus Palaeologus (ca. 1520-1585) and Christian Francken (1552-after 1610). Neither of the two can be called a theoretician of natural law or of law of nations in the classical sense of the terms.[364] They considered the problem of natural law according to their specific argumentative goals still before Grotius and his followers introduced their classical conceptions in the seventeenth century.
Although there were significant uses of the idea of lex naturalis in the writings of radical protestant authors in the sixteenth century, these were not presented within the frameÂwork of a contractual theory - as their counterparts in the second half of the seventeenth century would be without exception.However, Eastern-European radical Protestant texts and authors are still of some relevance to our topic. The feature common to both Grotius's followers and the radical Protestant - in my case Antitrinitarian - authors is their shared tendency towards universalism; hence the title of my contribution â€?Challenges of Universalism'. While aiming at a universal reformation of Western Christianity, the Antitrinitarian culture of religious thinking created space for other, much more radical thought experiments as well. No doubt, Jacobus Palaeologus and Christian Francken went beyond the confessional setting of Antitrinitarianism, as the first developed a conception of sacred universalism for the monotheistic religions of his time, and the second confronted moral conceptions of revealed religions with a natural universalism of philosophy. Their biographies have common features: neither Palaeologus, nor Francken held any official position in the institutional hierarchy of the church, they played the role of independent ideological supporters of the Antitrinitarian movement. However, their - especially Palaeologus's - influence on the later history of the institutionalised denomination in Transylvania is enormous.[365] Both biographies end up with a dark last chapter of imprisonment by the Inquisition: Palaeologus was beheaded in 1585, Francken spent the last 13 years of his life in the jail of the Holy Office in Rome until his death around 1611.
2