The present volume has its origins in an international conference on ‘Natural law in Eastern Europe’ and is a contribution to the network on Natural Law 1625–1850.1 The Network is devoted to inter-disciplinary research on early modern natural law considered as an intellectual culture anchored in educational institutions but with wide-ranging intellectual, political and social significance.2 Without ignoring the common idea of natural law as a chapter in the doctrinal history of philosophy or legal and political theory, this approach identifies natural law not in terms of universal ideas but instead by means of its institutional, educational, literary, and linguistic manifestations in widely different locales. By the same token, it suspends common ideas of development and progress and adopts an episodic approach to the subject.3 With this programme the network seeks to supplement more traditional lines of scholarship on natural law, of which there is an extensive amount in various specialist disciplines as far as North-Western Europe, especially Germany, is concerned. In contrast, the Eastern European region has been rather underexplored territory, but the wide brief adopted by the Network has made it obvious to address the question of natural law east of the Empire and in its borderlands. Many systematic, historical, and interdisciplinary questions have not hitherto been asked, let alone answered. Which works and tenets of modern natural law reached East-Central Europe, and how? How was it received, what influence did it have? And how did theorists and users of natural law in Eastern Europe enrich the pan-European discourse?
Given that natural law was anything but a unitary theoretical structure, the papers here are devoted to the particular manifestations of natural law in multiple, often overlapping but also contrasting contexts. On the one hand the socio-political characteristics of individual nations in the region are invoked, on the other due consideration is given to over-arching political structures in the region. Within the three state formations – Russia, Poland-Lithuania, and the Habsburg Empire – a social, political, and religious multiplicity co-existed with spatially overlapping and synchronous, though distinct interpretive communities. With regard to the reception of natural law in these different interpretive communities, parallel and rivalling phenomena could be detected and the interconnectedness of these belong to the primary fields of interest in the present volume.
Including East-Central Europe in the geographical spectrum for early modern natural law opened up hitherto underexplored fields of investigation. The present volume presents, for the first time, more or less detailed historical and interpretative accounts of the instruction in natural law in East European cities such as Saint Petersburg, Vilnius, Warsaw, Cracow, Elbląg, Toruń, Gdańsk, Prague, Vienna, Sárospatak, Debrecen, and Cluj. These accounts are embedded in the context of religious and political debates of the region. Details of the already established reception of Hugo Grotius by Polish Socinians, the use of Samuel Pufendorf’s manuals in Lutheran towns of Royal Prussia, or the reception of natural law by Unitarians in Transylvania highlight the potential of seeing natural jurisprudence as an integral part of political and religious counter-cultures in East-Central Europe. The volume pays special attention to the tension between ideas of the state and its legislation, administration, and policies, on the one hand, and identitarian discourses of religious or national groups, on the other; both the perspective from above and that from below made use of certain elements of modern natural law.
The first thematic bloc of the volume deals with Poland-Lithuania. The four contributions make it clear that both in its Roman Catholic and its Lutheran form natural law was instrumental in the development of critical positions towards the existing political system of the Polish-Lithuanian noble republic. In ‘Natural law in Polish and Lithuanian sources: a comparative perspective,’ Steffen Huber reconstructs the humanist-Aristotelian Catholic natural law tradition in Vilnius, Warsaw and Cracow. The paper points out the context of practical philosophy in the Jesuit school network, centred at the University of Vilnius, and it presents a number of hitherto under-explored archive materials. On the basis of these sources, Huber outlines the main characteristics of Polish-Lithuanian (academic) natural law as a set of rather unsystematic elements embracing naturalism, contractarianism, and cultural pluralism.
In ‘The influence of natural law on the discourse of toleration in seventeenth-century Poland-Lithuania,’ Karin Friedrich explores Grotius’s views of Polish religious policies together with his impact on Polish political thought and legislation. Friedrich concludes that Grotius’s idea of sociability suited the civic humanism and the republican model of the Commonwealth more than Lipsius’s respublica Christiana. She also shows how the views of Grotius as a religious thinker reverberated in some system-critical circles of radical Protestants in seventeenth-century Poland.
Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz contributes a comprehensive intellectual profile of the Polish political system in order to understand the context in which natural law arguments for modernisation and Europeanisation of the political culture were embedded. In ‘Why was the political discourse of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility so weakly influenced by natural law?,’ she argues that Polish discourses did not adopt natural law as the basis for theories of the state and authority. Instead, Polish intellectuals in the early modernity turned to these ideas only when they became relevant to human rights and thus struck a chord with the growing need to account not only for political society but for the entire social community.
Gábor Gángó’s paper, ‘Ernst König and the teaching of natural law at the academic gymnasia of Royal Prussia,’ shows that the rector of the academic gymnasia in Toruń and Elbląg, Ernst König, not only introduced the teaching of natural law in these institutions, but his efforts exerted a lasting impact on the instruction in natural jurisprudence in all three gymnasia of Royal Prussia, including the Athenaeum in Gdańsk. The works of König’s most important author, Samuel Pufendorf, served varying functions according to the rector’s changing didactic goals. His principal objective was to transform the teaching of political science by means of Pufendorf rather than to introduce modern science and philosophy into the curricula of the Lutheran gymnasia.
In the section on the Austrian Empire, Martin P. Schennach analyses a number of scholarly works of jurisprudence with natural law references in Austria in the late eighteenth century. These were works that paved the way for, or reflected public law in the composite state of the Habsburgs. As his ‘Natural law in Austrian and Hungarian science of public law in the second half of the eighteenth century: a comparison’ shows, Austrian and Hungarian Staatsrechtslehre had similar roots in Reichspublizistik and Territorialstaatsrecht. Nevertheless, natural law and Allgemeines Staatsrecht played different roles in Austrian and Hungarian public law. Whereas natural law was avoided by Austrian writers, evidently afraid of its emancipatory potential, Hungarian scholars had no fear of listing natural law among the sources of Hungarian ‘ius publicum.’
Ivo Cerman focuses on the role natural law played in academic teaching in Bohemia. His ‘The chair of natural law in Prague 1748–1775,’ based on extensive archival research, provides a chronological reconstruction of scholarly treatises, lectures, and dissertations at and around the University of Prague. On the basis of the works and teaching activity of Nikolaus Ignaz Koenigsmann, Josef Anton Schuster, and Johann Franz Lothar Schrodt, Cerman outlines the general characteristics of the Bohemian version of natural law, both private and public, in a Catholic context.
The papers of the third bloc of this volume focus on Hungary and Transylvania. Borbála Lovas’s paper, ‘The dream of freedom, peace and order: Natural and divine law in the works of a Unitarian bishop from sixteenth-century Transylvania,’ outlines György Enyedi’s intellectual portrait and highlights biblical and literary aspects of his sermons. Lovas presents the reception of Enyedi’s Explicationes Locorum Veteris et Novi Testamenti (1598) by and in circles around Hugo Grotius, John Locke, or Sir Isaac Newton and shows how some political thoughts in his sermons anticipated a constellation in which the theses of modern natural law were received by the Unitarian Church in Transylvania in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Péter Balázs and Gábor Gángó suggest that political culture in early modern Hungary and Transylvania was more complex in terms of language and tradition than commonly thought. Research into the reception of classical republicanism and ancient constitutionalism should be complemented by systematic exploration of the impact of natural law. Their paper ‘Protestant schooling and natural law in Transylvania and Hungary’ gives a comprehensive account on the reception of natural law in Unitarian and Reformed Protestant institutions. The survey is based on Balázs’s basic research concerning the Reformed Protestant and the Unitarian College in Cluj and Gángó’s archival research in Sárospatak and Debrecen. These institutions were by far the most significant places for the dissemination of the tenets of modern natural law.
To complement the picture with portraits of prominent intellectuals, this section contains two studies, one that present the life and works of the Chancellor of Transylvania and a pupil of Pufendorf, Miklós Bethlen; and one that introduces the Protestant minister Miklós Apáti, a friend of the Cartesian Pierre Poiret. The author of both contributions, József Simon addresses the question of how natural law proved inspiring in Miklós Bethlen’s Autobiography (1701), especially in its voluminous philosophical Preface as well as in Miklós Apáti’s Vita triumphans civilis (Amsterdam 1688), a moral and philosophical guide for the Protestant community in Hungary. In a close reading ‘Political psychology and natural law in Miklós Bethlen’s Preface to his Autobiography (1708)’ Simon suggests that Bethlen through attendance at Pufendorf’s lectures in Heidelberg in 1661 had been inspired to a socio-psychological theory of ‘civic’ or ‘moral qualities.’ As Simon argues, Bethlen did not accept the theory of natural law as an ultimate explanation of human social community. However, Bethlen‘s themes (public communication, reputation, honour, shame, and ambition as political passions) are situated within the theoretical language created by modern natural law. As to Apáti’s work, Simon establishes the parallels between Vita triumphans civilis and Antoine Le Grand’s Institutio philosophiae in his study ‘Moral indifference and hypothetical moral necessity in Miklós Apáti’s Vita triumphans civilis (1688),’ with special attention to their theory of free will and moral obligation.
In the section on Russia, Ivo Cerman revisits an enigmatic figure in the history of natural law, Frédéric-Henri Strube de Piermont, a participant in various endeavours to give the legal system in Russia a natural law foundation. In ‘Strube de Piermont: The passionate natural law in Russia’ Cerman situates Strube’s story against the backdrop of the broader history of the reception of natural law in Russia. The turn towards the passionate side of human nature as a foundation for natural law was a European phenomenon, often based upon a dubious interpretation of Christian Thomasius, who also taught Strube. In his time this German émigré was an influential author whose Recherche nouvelle de l’origine et des fondemens du droit de la nature (1740) as well as Ebauche des loix naturelles (1744) fitted into this broader development in European natural law theory.
The studies assembled here will undoubtedly give rise to several general conclusions, but we would make the following observations. In the Eastern part of the European continent the institutions were generally characterised by a sharper profile than their professors, and the confessional differences provide more fundamental dividing lines than the state or national borders. Communication and knowledge transfer seem to have taken place only within national and confessional borders. Apart from indirect polemics, there was no inter-confessional communication, while scholarly exchange across national borders existed only with Western university centres. Accordingly, the dissemination of locally created knowledge of natural law in East-Central Europe was confined to regional contexts. In connection with communication, it is also important to note that in the absence of printing machines, manuscript books and hand-written lecture texts had to be relied upon, and they were widely used.
It is notable that the reception of modern, post-Grotian natural law in East-Central Europe saw a confessionalisation of these ideas, a subject that invites closer comparison with similar developments in the West. It is clear that neither a moral consensus disconnected from theology, nor an inter-confessional common denominator was formulated on a natural law basis. The propagation of Protestant natural law was congruent with the propagation of religious Reformation. While important branches of natural law in Germany at least in principle aimed at a theoretical foundation for peaceful co-existence of the confessions as provided for in the major peace treaties, in the East natural law was uniformly a theoretical instrument in support of the antagonistic positions in religious politics. A few exceptions apart, Protestant students brought home natural law as a concise, ready-for-use curriculum rather than an open intellectual enterprise. Schoolbooks, compendia, natural law catechisms form the majority of natural law books in the school libraries.
The development of Catholic natural law seems fundamentally different from the parallel phenomena in Germany. In Germany the instruction of natural law at the Catholic universities while clearly critical of the Protestant ideas, especially those of Pufendorf and Thomasius, nevertheless absorbed a number of compatible elements from the Protestant tradition. But in East-Central Europe Catholic natural law kept its distance. Before the partition of Poland, Catholic natural law there took a sharply polemical stance towards Pufendorf. Particular to Polish-Lithuanian political discourse was a humanist-Aristotelian natural law inspired by the teaching of Francisco Suárez at the University of Ingolstadt which was received at the University of Vilnius. As for the Habsburg lands, after 1777 the Imperial Court imposed the Catholic natural law of Carl Anton Martini as a unified theory of the Empire (Gesamtstaatsidee). Thanks to its monopolized curricula in Catholic educational institutions, this theory of the Austrian state was propagated from the chairs of natural law to the Empire as a whole. Catholic natural law was placed in the service of political absolutism.
There was a fundamental difference between Protestant and Catholic natural law in the dissemination of the tenets of natural law which in the former case was a from-below process in the Protestant confessions, while a from-above one in the case of the Catholic Church. The objective of the former was to promote the equal status of citizens in private law and to secure religious tolerance within the framework of absolute state power. The ambition of Catholic natural law teaching was to offer a justice-based, synallagmatic legal theory of the relation between the absolute state and the citizen instead of the idea of political authority based upon power or on the right of conquest. Especially after the Turkish wars, Protestant emphasis was on security against state violence and intolerance, while Catholic natural law was a means for the government itself to establish religious and social peace.
Protestant and Catholic natural law had a common denominator in the form of their wider intellectual impact. They both contributed to the processes of what is commonly understood as enlightenment the region, i.e., to an emphasis on the importance of rational and coherent argument in morals, politics and theology and to the application of moral philosophical principles to social theory and legal codification. They facilitated the introduction of a new political and juridical discourse that was supranational and used a terminology compatible with that of the West. Through the education of the political class and the ecclesiastical intelligentsia, these achievements became part of the wider political culture, even if natural law did not have the impact on legal reform and the conduct of politics that it had in several areas in the West. This confessionally embedded natural-law Enlightenment, focusing on private law and social theory, was arguably more significant, at least in its consequences, than the commonly explored and celebrated elements of East European Enlightenment that were inspired by such figures of the Francophone Enlightenment as Voltaire, Helvétius, and Rousseau: the derision of religion and the clergy as well as the critique of refined civilization and luxury.
Natural law was transmitted to East-Central Europe as a large, broadening set of doctrines from Pufendorf to Thomasius, Wolff, and Heineccius, developed with Grotius as a common but contested point of reference. The ideas came in the form of these thinkers’ own treatises but first of all in textbooks and compendia written by their commentators. These natural law doctrines harboured deep theoretical differences, and they were adapted for use in a wide variety of locales. Nevertheless, they did reflect the relatively stable Westphalian political and social system that most of them were aimed at shoring up in their different places and times during the long period from the 1660s to the 1789 French Revolution (though they continued to have significant influence also in the post-Revolutionary period). This relative stability becomes manifest in comparison with the fundamental changes that the East-Central European region underwent in this period: an increasingly intolerant Poland-Lithuania from the Swedish wars, through the Great Northern War, to its successive partitions; the Czech lands, Hungary, Transylvania and the composite state formation they belonged to, the Habsburg Empire as a whole, from the Turkish and religious wars on its South-Eastern confines, through a series of wars threatening its very existence, to the consolidation of its ruler dynasty, its borders, and its administration. From this follows that the function of natural law as a social theory changed a lot with relation to the changing political circumstances.
To this purpose the natural law ideas that the professors of natural law in East-Central Europe had adopted from the West were well suited. Like their colleagues in the West, they adopted the theory with the help of cases and examples taken from their national legal and political traditions and applied it to the reality of their respective communities. Modern natural law had a flexibility that enabled them to select, compile and organise the tenets they needed. This was also the case in the West, but the greater complexity and deeper conflicts in the East meant that natural law here lost its coherent character and became an applied social theory and a practical guide to morality sooner and more obviously than in the West.
The adoption of modern natural law was enabled, most of all, by intellectual and confessional links to the West. Its vehicle was the confessional affiliations that we discussed above, not the intellectual exchange of the respublica litteraria. It was the changes in the economic, political, and social circumstances that necessitated the adaptation of a suitable vocabulary of human sciences and political discourse. For many professors, the humanist-Aristotelian vocabulary no longer seemed adaptable to social reality, and this led to a precarious balance between the system-critical and the system-supportive sides of natural law (most of all in its Pufendorfian variant) when it was used in the East-Central European political systems. It was this tension that generally resulted in the previously mentioned emphasis on private law and the neglect of elements such as public law, political contract theory, and especially the anthropology of basic rights (first of all, the right to preservation of life). Instead, the focus of the academic courses was on private contracts and legal relations within communities: marriage, family, social relations, and not least freedom of conscience and religious politics. These cautiously critical attitudes were especially noticeable towards the religious policies by the Habsburg Court in Hungary or the Catholic political elite in Poland.
The conflict between the old humanist-Aristotelian curriculum and the new natural law in East-Central Europe led to temporary compromises in some places but in most to the eventual victory of the old curriculum. This was the case in Toruń and Elbląg as well as in Sárospatak. And if natural law had difficulties retaining a lasting role in the educational system, it is not surprising that its impact on political discourse was rather limited. The humanist curriculum was deeply anchored in the politics of Poland and Hungary. The republican political ethos and civic virtue ethics in a Ciceronian vein survived the challenge of natural law with long repercussions for politics in theory and practice in East-Central Europe.
Acknowledgement
The editor wishes to express his sincere gratitude to Knud Haakonssen for initiating investigations on East European natural law traditions at the Research Centre for Early Modern natural law, Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies of the University of Erfurt. The editor also thanks Professor Haakonssen for wide-ranging professional, linguistic, and logistic support as a series editor during the editing process of this volume.