Summary of the Chapters

With a focus on Hugo Grotius and the context from which he came to prom­inence, the opening chapter outlines a paradigmatic case of the interplay between natural law and the sacred polity.

While Grotius may have been the preceptor of Early Modern natural law, Samuel Pufendorf was no doubt its most effective propagator. The first profes­sor of natural law, he professionalized the discipline and transformed it into a main stay of Lutheran polities.

In the opening essay, Arthur Eyffinger precisely brings out these elements in his short history of natural law amidst the religious debates and strife in the young Dutch Republic of the United Seven Provinces. Taking Hugo Grotius as his protagonist and by placing him in the context of his times, Eyffinger neatly introduces the core topics of this volume, discussing the interplay of law and theology, of politics and religion, and of the universal and the particular trac­ing their development throughout the writings of Grotius from 1600 to the end of his life in 1645.

At various points Eyffinger preludes on themes in the other contributions to this volume, for example, the discussion of sovereignty in Alberto Clerici's chapter, the natural history of priesthood (Stefanie Ertz), or the issue of vol­untarism in the three chapters on Pufendorf. Evidently, Grotius's connection to Melanchthon, Scholasticism and to Calvinist authors forms a connection to the chapters on Hemmingsen, Junius and Suarez, whereas the last chapter by Adriana Luna-Fabritius mirrors the opening one in demonstrating the width of Grotius's intellectual contribution in tracing his influence in the (early) Neapolitan Enlightenment.

Chapters 3 to 7 present important and distinct religious perspectives on nat­ural law, from the Lutheran perspective of Hemmingius to the neo-Scholastic metaphysics of law of Francisco Suarez. First, Mads Jensen gives a fresh appraisal of the Lutheran approach in an influential book on natural law by Niels Hemmingsen, showing how this pupil of Melanchthon opens up natu­ral law to man's rational understanding and thereby to mankind in general, even while Scripture supports and inspires this understanding.

a Christian must not necessarily follow the Mosaic laws but has the per­mission to follow those laws that cohere with the natural law, even if these have been instituted by pagan magistrates. I will show subsequently that the Roman law surpasses the laws of all other nations and really repre­sents a kind of philosophy.^[32]

What was only a programmatic statement with Melanchthon became a full- fledged legal theology with his pupil. In the words of Mads Jensen:

Thus, the usefulness of the Decalogue as a summary of natural law depended on it corresponding with what reason could in fact determine on its own accord. In other words, what philosophers could say of the law of nature. This did not take away from the divine origin of natural law, or the more explicitly divine authority of the Decalogue, rather it under­scored its universality. It emphasized how a Christian ruler, and not just the Israelite kings, were obliged to rule with the sword in one hand and the Decalogue in the other.

In chapter 4, Alberto Clerici questions the received opinion that Monarchomach political thought is only about resistance. He shows that Calvinist authors used Ciceronian natural law language as additional justification for their pleas for European sovereigns to intervene abroad in cases where citizens are suffering (religious) persecution by a tyrant. The Ciceronian reference is to the com­mon humankind that we all belong to and that doesn't allow us to suffer ill- treatment of fellow humans. Clerici interestingly develops his case by tracing the development of this argument in early Calvinist writings in connection with the French wars and the Dutch revolt, culminating in the Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1579). In the latter work Clerici finds premonitions of the full-fledged natural law-based theories of intervention in the writings of Alberico Gentili and Hugo Grotius.

According to Clerici, from the scattered remarks of this eschatological piece of propaganda, it is possible to detect a minimal but important shift from a purely religious duty to help the innocents against tyrants, to a moral duty in the name of a Neostoic �humankind', no longer specifically tied to a Christian cosmos. This expansion and radicalization of Huguenot views towards an eth­ics of a �responsibility to protect' men as simple human beings is of course less a complete and mature process of secularization than the tactical juxtaposi­tion and integration of different rhetorical strategies and philosophical tradi­tions in order to achieve a political goal.

Franciscus Junius - also Calvinist but driven by an altogether different agenda - during the last decade of his life a professor in Leiden wrote a study of the Mosaic law that explicitly discusses the relationship between the law of Scripture and the law of nature. In the presentation of Marcus Totzeck in chapter 5, Junius appears as an important connection between on the one hand Jean Calvin and Theodorus Beza and on the other the Protestant natu­ral thinkers of the seventeenth century. This connection is multi-faceted and ranges from an ontology of law, over universality and historicity of the law, to the several ways in which the ubiquity of the eternal law is translated into the advening laws: the divine and the human law.

The challenge of universality of course is that it might very well be in the eye of the beholder only. In the radical reformation this has led to almost con­trary positions as Jozsef Simon argues in chapter 6. In a detailed comparison of two Transylvanian Antitrinitarians, Simon discusses the appeal to a rational religion in the multi-religious world of Transylvania, where both Muslim and Orthodox dogma had to be addressed. Jacobus Palaeologus, who premised a universal desire for salvation, defended the way to salvation for all three reli­gions, by arguing that circumcision is what saves the Jewish nation, as does Christ for Christians and Muslims. Christianity can be explained without cancelling Jewish ceremonies and Jewish ceremonies can bejustified with­out negating the central role of Christ. The second Antitrinitarian, Christian Francken, equally went beyond the confessional setting of Antitrinitarianism, by confronting moral conceptions of revealed religions with a natural univer­salism of philosophy. Both theologians would fall victim to the Inquisition, Palaeologus by decapitation and Francken by imprisonment.

For both Antitrinitarian authors, natural law functioned as a critical tool against claims for certainty of revealed religions. Palaeologus based his removal of the exclusivity of revealed religions on a universal enfolding of supranatural divine grace.

The Jesuit theologian Francisco Suarez changed the very concept of the law of nature by developing an ontology of law in his commentary on Aristotle's metaphysics (1597) and in the later De Legibus ac Deo legislatore (1612), as Dominique Bauer argues in chapter 7. Building on the Aristotelian notion of reason as the defining characteristic of man, she shows that Suarez not so much emphasized that reason allows man to know the law of nature, but rather that reason implies the human condition to live by laws and the neces­sity of a lawgiver to ensure the obligation to obey the laws. At the same time, Suarez argues that the laws of nature embody a true moral standard, to the extent that human law is purely contingent. In this ontology, God is both the Creator of human nature and its Lawgiver. In this way, the law of nature is re­integrated within Catholic theology and the revolutionary use of natural law concepts is effectively undermined, without however denying free choice and self-government.

Thus, Suarez as the main exponent of Counterreformation theology pro­vided an answer to Monarchomach theory aiming at an opposition of forces of resistance and tyranny. Suarez's metaphysics of law was there to stay, widely received in Protestant theology and philosophy of law. Willem van Asselt, e.g. argues that not only was Suarez the master of seventeenth-century metaphys­ics, but also that Scholasticism as a method pervaded protestant theology.^{[34] [35] [36]} Moreover, as a metaphysician Suarez was one of the inspirators of modern philosophy as a professional discipline that is said to have started with Rene Descartes.3⁵ This turn to philosophy in Suarez, notwithstanding his self-image as a theologian, shows in the self-referential aspect of his theory, a phenome­non that Bauer calls mimesis, as in the free choice of man to submit to the law as the will of a superior, and the foundation of the authority of the state on the free will of its citizens.

Hugo Grotius had a high opinion of Francisco Suarez. To his friend Jean de Cordes (1570-1642) he wrote: â€?But why this contempt for Suarez, the man who if correctly judged in [that kind of] philosophy that is now connected to Scholasticism has such subtlety that barely anyone equals him'.3⁶

Eyffinger takes up his analysis of the Grotian program, discussing the status of natural law and its relationship to God the author of nature, but also sacred history and its role in the explanation of human society, as well as more techni­cal issues as the classification of laws and its problems. As a theorist of natural law, Grotius was addressing issues that differed from those of Suarez, at least in the books that address most directly the connection between law and reli­gion: Ordinum pietas (1613) and De imperio summarum potestatum circa sacra. (written 1616; published 1647). These texts provide a good occasion to detail the supposition that Grotius was a main protagonist of Early Modern seculariza­tion. This might seem to apply especially to his contribution to the theory of law itself. Yet, as Arthur Eyffinger argues in chapter 8, the secularization is only in some respects and half-hearted anyway. In chapter 9, to that end, Stefanie Ertz analyzes in detail the crucial argumentative changes during these crucial years of Grotius's intellectual development in the period between De iure prae­dae (1605) and De iure belli ac pacis (1625), defying against presentism and the teleological presupposition that the past was meant to bring about the present.

She shows how Grotius managed to rule out the paradigmatic role of the Hebrew theocracy as the main reference in the discourse of the ius circa sacra. He associated the religion of the Patriarchs with the natural �imperium' of the paterfamilias, which made his interpretation of patriarchal priesthood become a central point of coincidence between conceptual, biblical-histori­cal and extra-biblical historical evidence. Religious authority, accordingly, had always been included in this father's (natural) right to decide whom to transfer an office that was by its very nature not a right, but a duty - and which, as such, could neither be immediately part of ruling power, nor be derived from the concept of imperium in the way of other (worldly) political functions.

In sum, Grotius's account of patriarchal priesthood in De imperio was to make the ius circa sacra of the civil sovereign an affair, no longer predomi­nantly of interpreting God's positive laws, but rather of natural law and the ius gentium. By doing so, Grotius at once offered an interpretation of sacred history that would lastly - namely, in De iure belli ac pacis - result in making the Hebrew theocracy appear as a rather subordinate and even extraordinary episode in an overall narrative of the historical interaction between natural and universal divine positive law.

Moreover, De imperio was also pioneering in the elaboration of that very dis­tinction between ius naturale (divinum) and ius divinum positivum for which De iure belli ac pacis was to become famous, and which - being a conceptual and not just historical distinction, that is, which did not just apply to different modes of promulgation, but also, and even foremost, to distinct modes of obli­gation - would prove extremely important in the transition from early modern to enlightened natural law as well as for the transition from Humanist bible interpretation to rational bible criticism.

Looking at Grotius's natural law with the benefit of hindsight, Jiri Chotas isolates toleration as the crucial concept in the later seventeenth-century debate on whether Grotius was a secularizer or not, and argues that Grotius built his natural law on both secular and theological foundations. Chotas sees in Grotius's comprehensive approach to a system of international law and the idea of religious tolerance the main reasons why his writings should be stud­ied in our times. It is important to also present this modern perspective since notwithstanding the canonical lineage over Thomas Hobbes to John Locke (1632-1704) and the secularism of modern liberalism, the more cautious inte­gration of religious and philosophical perspectives in Grotius contains a sepa­rate inspiration for the challenges of today.

The following three chapters are devoted to Samuel Pufendorf, the first two concentrating on his view on church-state relations and toleration and the third on the presumed voluntarism of Pufendorf.

Thomas Behme wants to find out whether Pufendorf's recourse to Luther in proving his Lutheran orthodoxy was for tactical reasons only or the expression of an essential affinity of his natural law and Lutheranism. This takes Behme to an incisive analysis of two of Pufendorf's writings, De habitu religionis Christianae and Jusfeciale divinum.

Thus, Pufendorf interprets Luther - as Behme formulates it - with the help of Philipp Melanchthon who had reintroduced Aristotelian philoso­phy into the Lutheran theology, and his advocacy of moral philosophy as an autonomous discipline, without direct relevance to man's salvation. Thus Melanchthon, somehow anticipating Pufendorf's secularization program, interprets Luther's distinction of the two kingdoms in a way that allows for the study of worldly and secular life, independent from religion. In Pufendorf's hands this becomes a strong justification of secular government, including the authority over external church affairs, thereby upsetting the Lutheran sepa­ration of church and state. The territorial church government (landesherrli- ches Kirchenregiment) that emerged in the Lutheran territories resulted from the role of the Protestant princes as political protectors of the Lutheran belief and had no dogmatic basis in Luther's theology. Pufendorf's apology of that contemporary practice which started from an original advocacy of the mutual independence of natural law and moral theology methodologically recalls the role of the state of nature in deriving sovereign power as it existed in his times. Thus, his endeavors on both fields end in an apology of the status quo to prove its reasonableness or rather its conformity to true religion.

In the next chapter, Heikki Haara argues that Pufendorf does not base his theory of toleration on the individual's rational capacity to choose one's reli­gious beliefs, nor does he straightforwardly support the epistemological claim that it is impossible to coerce belief. Pufendorf defends the freedom of under­standing and will as a precondition of moral accountability. However, he is simultaneously unconvinced about people's rational capacity to recognize the precepts of natural religion through reason. Therefore, the sovereign ought to employ coercion and the threat of punishment to ensure that people uphold, at least externally, the proper natural theological beliefs that are essential to sociability and political stability. In turn, Pufendorf reserves freedom from coercion only for the doctrines of revealed religion that fall outside the scope of natural reason. Thus, his argument for freedom from coercion is not based on a person's rational autonomy to choose one's religious beliefs but on rea­son's limits with regard to revealed religion.

Lastly, Denis Ramelet critically follows the arguments that have been pre­sented for and against the coherence of Pufendorf's voluntarism as it operates in the famous separation of the entia physica from the entia moralia. If the moral being of man is the result of an imposition, - as Pufendorf claims - then the content of morality depends on the will of the lawgiver, whether that is God or man. This coherence has been under discussion as Pufendorf argues that conditional necessity imposes on God a requirement of coherence that limits his freedom, which contradicts the initial Pufendorfian intention to exalt divine omnipotence. Ramelet's detailed analysis shows that on the the­ological level, there is no intermediate coherent position defendable between classical naturalism (from Aristotle to Grotius, including Cicero and Thomas Aquinas) and Ockham's or Descartes's absolute voluntarism. If one wants to exalt divine and/or human freedom, nature must be regarded as devoid of any intrinsic normativity. Conversely, if nature is regarded as devoid of any intrin­sic normativity, one necessarily has to accept the reign of divine and/or human arbitrariness. Yet, it seems that Pufendorf's claim that morality is an answer to the requirements of a peaceful social order allowed him to move beyond the voluntarism-naturalism opposition, a move that might be explained by the impact of the new science.

The opposition between voluntarism and naturalism in Pufendorf disap­pears behind the inscrutability of God's imposition of man's nature. That is, man cannot unequivocally retrieve the essence of man's nature and therefore there is no rational argument about God's intellect to be construed. Being thrown into the world, man diligently has to construct systems of obligation proper to his condition. In the words of Pufendorf himself:

For such an animal to live and enjoy the good things that in this world attend his condition, it is necessary that he be sociable (sociabile), that is, be willing tojoin himself with others like him, and conduct himself towards them in such a way that, far from having any cause to do him harm, they may feel that there is reason to preserve and increase his good fortune.^[37]

The final chapter, by Adriana Luna-Fabritius, analyses how in late seventeenth­century Naples the political writings of Grotius acquired urgency and actuality, bringing an interest in Grotius natural law writings in its wake. Although many of the Neapolitan writers involved were ordained priests, they interpreted Grotius's natural law in a manner that prepared the way for the replacement of Providence and sacred history by the history of human societies. Not uncon­tested of course, and partly driven by a sub-plot of nascent new scientific inter­est, the Neapolitan illuministi prepared the way for the innovative works of, for example, G.B. Vico and F. Galiani. The development of ideas in strong inter­action with the political events of the seventeenth century is not just another illustration of the main thesis of this volume, but also reflects the â€?plus que ga change, plus que ςa reste la meme chose' of natural law in its interaction with religion and politics.