Grotius: Natural Law and Natural Religion

Abstract

Grotius is generally considered as the founder of modern natural law, that is to say, a natural law both subjective and rational.1 He was also one of the major theorists of natural religion in the seventeenth century as well as one of the great exegetes of the Bible. These two aspects of Grotius frequently have been studied as if they belonged to two different persons2, or, as Corsano did, by juxtaposing “the humanist, the theologian and the jurist.”3 However, the theorist of the law of war and peace cites the Apostles or the Fathers of the Church, as well as orators and jurists, to support his theses, and in his learned annotations of the Bible, as in his theological treatises, the ideological/political implications of a variety of theological or ecclesiastical positions are not forgotten. Finally, an analysis of the Prolegomena of the De jure belli ac pacis4 shows how close Grotius remains to the scholastic method, and notably to the De legibus of Suarez.