III. Verwicklungen und Entflechtungen

Abstract

Entanglements and disentanglements. Differentiating and dedifferentiating law and religion, statute and legal reason in early modern natural law debates. The article reconstructs the connections between modern (17th and 18th century) natural law and the 15th and 16th century catholic natural law discourse. It is shown that the modern natural law was based on the work of catholic theologians who treated questions of conscience as legal issues. The natural law was then cut out of theology by Grotius and by later natural lawyers, who reformulated within the law what they perceived as the universal elements of catholic natural law. In those debates the natural lawyers established the - since then evident - differences between positive law and natural law on the one hand and between legal and religous natural law on the other. Yet, those debates did not concern a ‘secularization’ of natural law. Much more specifically, the natural lawyers disentangled the universal logic of law and those religious elements that could, in the confessional age, no longer be regarded as universal.