Hugo Grotius’s Hermeneutics of Natural and Divine Law

Abstract

Interchanges between political, juridical and theological thought in the early modern period have been studied extensively during the past decades. Less light has been cast on the corresponding interrelations between politico-juridical thought and biblical hermeneutics. However, this issue deserves some attention, too, as the following case study on Hugo Grotius wants to show by pointing to the mutual adjustment of juridical, theological and biblical arguments in the progress of the core semantics of Grotius’s natural law theory from De iure praedae to De iure belli ac pacis.