Natural Law and Citizens of the World

One of Hugo Grotius’s most important legacies was his application of natural law to what became the field of international relations. Influenced by classical Stoic thought, he regarded all free people as bound to universal moral principles that rational minds could discern through observation and logic. Within his own time, this commitment to natural law in international affairs moved him away from standard hierarchical views that categorized societies based on their adherence to Christian religion and morality. ^{Footnote 9}

The immediate contexts for Grotius’s appeal to natural law arose with the initial challenges that Asian trading posed for the VOC in the early seventeenth century. The Netherlands was at war with Spain and Portugal, which led to numerous naval engagements in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. An incident in the Straits of Singapore in 1603 prompted Grotius to defend the VOC’s seizure of a Portuguese carrack, the Santa Caterina. Admiral Jacob van Heemskerk captured the ship in February and was delighted to learn that the ship carried a bounteous cargo worth three million guilders. Company directors had no intention of returning the booty to their Portuguese enemies. At the request of the directors, Grotius wrote De Jure Praedae (On the Law of Prize and Booty) in 1604–5, though only the twelfth chapter (Mare Liberum, The Free Sea) was published straightaway. The remainder of the treatise was not published until the nineteenth century. ^{Footnote 10} In the work, Grotius vindicated van Heemskerk’s assault on the Santa Caterina and defended retention of the booty, but on a more theoretical level he also asserted the VOC’s rights to privateering and armed trading. A decade later in negotiations with the English and the Spanish over trading rights in the East, Grotius advocated the VOC’s rights to use force against indigenous rulers and European interlopers who violated monopolistic agreements with the company. The natural law principles of inviolability of contracts and divided sovereignty, according to Grotius, authorized the company to punish breaches ruthlessly, a policy that became notorious in the East Indies.

In making the VOC’s case, Grotius exhibited a global outlook that cast all people as citizens of the world. Certainly Grotius developed his legal philosophy in large part out of his and the VOC’s own financial self-interest during a time of intense commercial rivalry and projected them onto trans-European affairs. Yet it was also the case that his perception of world societies was inextricably intertwined with the formulation and application of these theories. Steeped in the humanist pantheon of pagan and Christian writers, Grotius devoted considerable attention to the customs and practices of people around the world. His classical training and voracious consumption of ethnographic literature brought him into contact with a diverse array of societies from the ancient and classical ages down to his present day. This wide exposure was not unusual for a humanist, yet he wrote about them in a remarkable variety of contexts that reveals a deeply rooted engagement with world cultures.

In De Jure Praedae, Grotius’s arguments betray a mind immersed in the cultures of the world and their diffusion from ancient times to his present day. The Portuguese, the first Europeans to sail into the Indian Ocean at the end of the fifteenth century, claimed jurisdiction over this vast stretch of sea and required all ships to have in their possession a Portuguese passport (cartaz). According to the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) mediated by Pope Alexander VI, Portugal enjoyed monopolistic rights for trading, evangelizing, and colonizing in Asia. ^{Footnote 11} Grotius attempted to refute Portuguese claims by contextualizing commerce in Asia within long-established patterns of trade and travel. In so doing, Grotius marshaled a long lineup of classical writers to demonstrate that the Portuguese assertions overlooked very long historical patterns of commerce among Asian peoples.

Citing and quoting widely from the Roman and Greek historians Pliny the Elder, Pomponius, Caelius Antipater, Florius, Strabo, and others, he brought attention to the enduring and extensive trading relations across land and sea. For example, Grotius pointed to writings that the Carthaginians had sailed down the west coast of Africa and around the Cape of Good Hope to Ethiopia on commercial voyages. Referencing Strabo, he observed that Arab mariners possessed knowledge of the routes as well. Grotius noted that in Southeast Asia Arabs and Chinese had engaged in ongoing commercial relations with merchants in the East Indies for several centuries. He utilized Pomponius to call attention to the fact that Chinese merchants as a matter of course traveled to obscure locations to sell their goods and trusted in the good faith of local brokers. In making the case that the Dutch should ally with Asian princes against the nefarious Portuguese, Grotius lined up several instances of political alliance between Roman emperors and Asian representatives. He underscored, from Florius, that envoys from the East Indies had voyaged to the court of Caesar Augustus and offered valuable gifts as tribute. Similarly, Pliny had written that emissaries from Sumatra had visited emperor Claudius. Grotius also reflected on the fighting ability of East Indians and the long-standing alliances that the Dutch could leverage against the Portuguese. These examples not only show that Grotius had a wide-ranging comprehension of Asian commercial and geopolitical affairs, but that he also brought them to bear on commercial disputes with the Portuguese. ^{Footnote 12}

In addition to making a world historical case against the enemies of the VOC, Grotius betrayed a preoccupation with the narrative of world history throughout his life. In his commentaries on the Old and New Testaments, as well as in focused theological treatises, Grotius analyzed the observances and beliefs of peoples that Jews and Christians had encountered. Concerned with the conversion of non-Christians in his own time, Grotius composed De Veritate Religionis Christianae (On the Truth of the Christian Religion, 1627), to equip Europeans overseas in spreading the gospel. In 1642, three years before his death, he authored Dissertatio de origine gentium Americanarum (Dissertation on the Origin of American Peoples). In this speculative work, Grotius compared Asian and American customs to make a case about the derivation of native peoples in the Americas. ^{Footnote 13} Surveying Nordic customs, he concluded that indigenous peoples of North America descended from Norse migrations. Peruvians, on the other hand, originated from Chinese migrant communities that journeyed the expanse of the Pacific Ocean to relocate in the Andes. Grotius believed that both Peruvian and Chinese civilizations worshiped the sun and exhibited an elegant and imperial mien. ^{Footnote 14} Thus Grotius’s intellectual life and labor reveals a thinker thoroughly absorbed by the historical development of world societies. This perspective closely informed his understanding and application of natural rights at a time when commercial expansion and empire building made them urgent.

Concerned to defend the interests of the VOC and imbued with a historical awareness of world societies, Grotius articulated a comprehensive vision of natural rights. In the Prolegomena to De Jure Praedae, he laid out his first principles, rooted in the universal dominion of natural law. He wrote, “For the law of nature—that is to say, the law instilled by God into the heart of created things, from the first moment of their creation, for their own conservation—is law for all times and places, inasmuch as the Divine Will is immutable and eternal.” ^{Footnote 15} Accordingly, all people were citizens of the world and endowed with natural liberty that encompasses the right to possess property, to engage in productive labor, to trade freely, to defend themselves, and to pursue their own well-being insofar as it does not infringe on the rights of others. ^{Footnote 16} This position hardly represented anything innovative, since it corresponded to the natural law tradition explicated by medieval scholastics.

Grotius did, however, give several unique twists to the natural rights tradition. One contribution was his elimination of any distinctions between Europeans and non-Europeans, Christians and non-Christians. ^{Footnote 17} In a period in which European ethnographers, missionaries, and theologians thought reflexively in hierarchical modes of comparison, his universalist worldview marked a significant departure. For Grotius, natural law bound all people as God’s creatures, regardless of nation or religion, to a common set of standards. Moreover, he contended that Christian powers have an obligation to assist and protect non-Christian princes. ^{Footnote 18} Throughout holy writ, examples abounded to show that those of true faith had much in common with people of different religious commitments. In the Old Testament, Abraham, Isaac, David, and Solomon frequently contracted alliances with gentile neighbors for mutual benefit. Self-protection was a basic tenet of natural law, so allying with “infidels” to defend one’s own interest satisfied both the Golden Rule in the New Testament and the universal law of love intrinsic to all people. ^{Footnote 19} Even if a Christian nation acted as a predator against gentiles, other Christian states ought not to side with their co-religionists, but instead to uphold justice. Charity dictated that Christians defend pagans against Christians who transgressed the laws of nature. ^{Footnote 20} This line of reasoning led Grotius to conclude that the “human brotherhood (in accord with nature’s plan)” obliged the VOC to help the innocent King of Johor against the predations of the Portuguese and Spanish. ^{Footnote 21} Such an act of justice might even lead pagans to Christ:

A second contribution of Grotius to the development of a natural rights tradition concerned his concept of divisible sovereignty. This idea introduced the possibility that political institutions or individuals could partition authority, such as in a land ruled primarily by a monarch, but in conjunction with a law-affirming body. In the Dutch case, the Spanish Hapsburg crown had lordship over the Netherlands, but exercised authority in cooperation with the States General. Grotius defended the Dutch Revolt against the Hapsburgs as a just public war by the States to defend its tax prerogatives. In 1569, the Duke of Alba, governor of the Netherlands for the Spanish king, imposed a harsh tax on the country, a move that Grotius claimed usurped the States’ right of taxation. The States, led by William of Orange, therefore were justified by natural law in resisting this encroachment. Within European affairs, this rather unorthodox justification enabled Grotius to champion the Dutch cause without succumbing to social contract theories that placed the right of revolt in the hands of lower magistrates or the people, which he vigorously opposed. In an international setting, divisible sovereignty could empower a private European party to exercise authority previously held by an indigenous regime. ^{Footnote 23} The concept of divisible sovereignty helped give theoretical support to the VOC, as well as other European interests, when they needed to assert themselves either by negotiation or force with indigenous regimes. In this scenario, natural law permitted a European party to appropriate and gain authority over land that the inhabitants were not utilizing in a productive manner. Having established sovereignty, the European occupants could then punish local rulers for violations of natural law.

A third Grotian innovation in natural law theory focused on breach of contract, which constituted one of the chief problems the Dutch encountered with local rulers in the East Indies. As maintained by Grotius, natural law established the sanctity of contracts, regardless of any discrepancy in power or leverage between the contracting parties. He argued that all free and rational people have the natural right to enter into an agreement—even to sell themselves into slavery. Once they agreed to a treaty or contract, it was unbreachable; aggrieved partners had the right to punish transgressors. Combined with the theory of divisible sovereignty, the inviolability of contracts gave almost unfettered support to the Dutch in their commercial and territorial interactions with indigenous rulers overseas. ^{Footnote 24} The most famous episode in the enforcement of this principle occurred on the Banda Islands in 1621. After learning that local merchants sold nutmeg outside of the monopolistic treaties with the VOC, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the governor-general of the company, invaded the islands with the assistance of Japanese mercenaries and massacred almost all the natives, and subsequently imported African slaves to cultivate nutmeg and mace. At other locations, VOC forces eliminated rivals, ousting the Portuguese from Melaka in 1641 and subduing Makassar (in Sulawesi) in 1669. In islands that the Dutch did not actually conquer, VOC governors attempted to coerce local sultans into agreements that gave exclusive rights to the company. ^{Footnote 25} Though Grotius’s work had a direct bearing on the European colonial legacy, Edward Keene has pointed out that the Dutch theorist also had in mind relations between states in Europe. ^{Footnote 26}

The combination of natural rights for all people as citizens of the world and the division of sovereignty resulted in an ironic paradox. On the one hand, it rejected religious distinctions used in defense of colonial conquest and asserted universal equity for all under the standard of natural law. This orientation grew out of Grotius’s global perspective, embedded in his classical training and in the consumption of ethnographic literature. Yet on the other hand, he deployed a theory of natural rights that legitimized the subjugation of indigenous peoples by the VOC and other European imperial forces.

Irenic Vision of Global Christianity

Grotius’s engagement with people and societies around the world also contributed to his vision of an irenic, global Christianity. In 1627, he published De Veritate, one of the first works written by a Protestant as an apologetic guide for Europeans who found themselves in overseas lands surrounded by enemies of Christianity. Since 1615, Dutch Reformed pastors and missionaries, in the pay of the VOC, had proselytized in the East Indies, seeking to win converts among Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims. Thus, Grotius was quite cognizant of Dutch Protestant efforts at spreading the gospel in the East Indies and perhaps also in Formosa, which got under way in the 1620s. He outlined as his basic purpose to defend the superiority of the Christian faith against what he considered the other three world religions: paganism, Judaism, and Mohammedanism. ^{Footnote 27} De Veritate, however, was not intended primarily for consumption by non-Christians, but as he stated, “my purpose was to benefit all my countrymen, especially sea-faring men, that they might not (as many do) lose and misspend their time. . . . I exhorted them to use the art [of navigation], not only for their own proper gain and commodity, but also for the propagation of the true Christian Religion.” He went on to add that the manual should serve to arm Christians to refute the errors of the enemies of the faith. ^{Footnote 28}

Scholars have commented on the irenic tone of De Veritate. Jan Paul Heering, for example, pointed out that Grotius drafted the work to set forth the fundamental ethical tenets of Christianity, eschewing dogmatic nuances that would present difficulties for peoples beyond Europe. ^{Footnote 29} Indeed, Grotius avoided contested theological points among Protestants, notably disputes over predestination, as well as disagreements with Catholics over religious authority and images. Yet he also sidestepped foundational teachings that most every Christian fully embraced, such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the sacraments. In fact, the Calvinists Gisbertus Voetius, Martin Schoeck, and André Rivet accused him of Socinianism, a rationalist and anti-Trinitarian heresy. ^{Footnote 30} Even though Socinianism was a favorite epithet that Calvinists hurled at Protestant enemies, the ecumenical and naturalistic character of the work was not lost on Grotius’s contemporaries in Europe.

For his part, Grotius explained that he omitted any discussion of dogma in order to simplify basic Christian teachings. Even though he acknowledged that “a great diversity of opinion” existed among Christians, he maintained that “there are some common principles, whereof it is agreed by all.” ^{Footnote 31} These beliefs included the existence of a transcendent creator, the immortality of the soul, the authority of scripture, the divine power of Jesus Christ, and the moral tenets of Christianity. ^{Footnote 32} In doing so, Grotius presented a universal image of Christendom that he believed would win many “heathens, Jews, and Turks” to Christ. ^{Footnote 33} Not only did he repeatedly express the strong hope for the conversion of pagans, Jews, and Muslims, but his conception of the possibilities for a universal, ecumenical faith stemmed from his confidence in the moral and rational agency of peoples around the world. ^{Footnote 34} One of his proofs for the existence of God was the “light of reason . . . manifested in all nations” except those overcome by “savage cruelty.” ^{Footnote 35}

Throughout the corpus of his writings, Grotius took a historicist and anthropological approach to gentile societies, identifying common functions of pagan religious habits across great distances of time and space and contextualizing them within their own contemporary setting. He regarded pagan observances as a range of eclectic external religious expressions practiced by peoples around the world since the fall of Adam and Eve. Yet he also recognized a commonality in all of the myths and rituals. For example, in his commentary on the Old Testament, he noted the lineage of pagan gods and rituals from the ancient Phoenicians and Egyptians to the Greeks and Romans of classical antiquity to the observances of contemporary gentile societies. ^{Footnote 36} In De Veritate, he identified connections between pagan customs in Arabia with those in Guinea and between those in ancient Egypt with derivative practices in America and Africa. The most sophisticated representation of paganism appeared in classical Greece and Rome, the high point from which it had fragmented and devolved into an array of idle superstitions and licentious activities. ^{Footnote 37}

Grotius’s treatment of paganism past and present provided a degree of relativity to his posture toward non-Christian religions and his appeal for Christian unity. For all Protestant theologians including Grotius, the defining feature of pagan observance was idolatry, which they understood to be the use of religious imagery and ceremonies that distorted the image of the true and infinite nature of God. ^{Footnote 38} Grotius’s historicist interpretation of the Old Testament and the Decalogue, however, led him to depart radically from most theologians and pastors within the Reformed faith. For Protestants, especially Calvinists, idolatry formed the ultimate religious perversion, synonymous with original sin, because idol worship elevated the material creature over the invisible, transcendent God. John Calvin himself wrote that pagans “measure him [God] by the yardstick of their own stupidity.” Consequently, “even though they are compelled to recognize some god, they strip him of his glory by taking away his power . . . so they, by fashioning a dead and empty idol, are truly said to deny God.” ^{Footnote 39}

Without a doubt, Grotius considered idolatry and paganism to be superstitious practices, but not a violation of divine law. In his treatment of the second commandment (prohibiting the worship of graven images), he argued that the ban was simply a historical and temporary injunction to the Hebrews. Relying heavily on the Jewish medieval philosopher Maimonides, Grotius contended that the decree was intended to keep the Israelites from imitating their pagan neighbors, which potentially could lead them down a wayward path to polytheism. Commenting on the Decalogue, Grotius classified the prohibition of graven images not as the condemnation of an essentially evil practice, but rather as a constructive admonition against customs that could lead people away from a true understanding of God. He observed that the commandment came historically just after the Hebrews had fled Egypt and thus the proscription served to prepare them for settlement in a new land. Grotius drew out a contemporary application of his radically historicist reading of the second commandment: the prohibition against religious imagery did not extend to Christians. Thus Protestants erred theologically when they associated Catholics with pagan idolaters. ^{Footnote 40}

Grotius’s optimistic outlook about pagan and Muslim peoples and his belief in the appeal of an ethical nondogmatic Christianity stands in contrast to the view of Calvinist church leaders in the Netherlands and missionaries in the field. Grotius, who died in 1645, lived through the earliest period of Calvinist missions in the East Indies and Formosa. During this period, pastors in Asia and in Europe struggled mightily to determine the requirements for baptism and communion for native peoples. Ministers disagreed over how much doctrine a potential convert should understand and act on before undergoing baptism and before receiving communion. Covenant theology, embraced by Calvinists, complicated matters further since it required Christian parentage as a precondition for baptizing children. Though missionaries differed among themselves over these issues, the solution all agreed upon was that Asian converts should be educated in the doctrinal particulars of the faith to be counted as a full-fledged Christian. Before baptism, potential converts had to demonstrate knowledge of the Apostles Creed, ten commandments, and Lord’s Prayer. In many cases, after baptism natives had to complete long periods of schooling in Reformed Christianity before they could take communion. ^{Footnote 41} In essence, Dutch Calvinists sought to implement a European confessional and dogmatic version of Protestantism in overseas missions. Grotius, conversely, advanced an irenic, global vision of Christianity based in part on his commitment to the rational and moral agency of people around the world.

Grotius’s historical understanding of paganism resonated with and provided intellectual justification for his robust commitment to Christian irenicism in Europe. He also held out hope for converting a European audience to a comprehensive, concordant Christianity, as he made the case for ecumenism and unity in De Veritate. In the preface, he stated that he intended the work “to benefit all my countrymen . . . for the propagation of the true Christian religion.” ^{Footnote 42} De Veritate comprised six sections or books, in which an extensive section of the second book discussed the moral excellence of Christianity. ^{Footnote 43} This section put emphasis on Christianity’s “superiority in the great holiness of laws and precepts, as well in matters pertaining to the worship of God, as likewise in things concerning one’s neighbor.” ^{Footnote 44} The primary object of Christianity, according to Grotius, entails obedience to God and care for one’s neighbor. With regard to the latter, he stressed that Christian forbearance “prohibits one from taking vengeance for injuries in word or deed” and from harboring malice. From there, Grotius went on to laud Christian precepts of sexual fidelity, liberality, honesty, modesty, temperance, meekness, and simplicity. ^{Footnote 45}

It is also clear that Grotius also had his countrymen in mind when he elaborated on the duties Christians owed to their neighbors. A political casualty of the Arminian “Remonstrant” controversy in the Netherlands, Grotius eschewed theological precision and doctrinal division. The dispute in the Dutch Reformed Church erupted in 1605 when Jacob Arminius, theologian at the University of Leiden, came under scrutiny for his criticism of unconditional predestination and other attendant doctrines. Many Arminians, including Grotius, stressed adherence to core teachings of Christianity, rather than profession to the scholasticism of Calvinist theologians. As the theological disagreements became politicized, bitter acrimony divided churches, political parties, even neighborhoods and families until the 1618–19 Synod of Dort rejected Arminianism completely. Grotius paid a price for his Arminian sympathies, undergoing arrest and imprisonment at Loevestein castle from August 1618 to March 1621, when he escaped by hiding in a book trunk. ^{Footnote 46}

He wrote De Veritate while in exile in Paris, where he fled after his escape from Loevestein. Throughout the 1620s and 1630s, he pressed friends and allies in Holland and appealed to the States General in an effort to have his conviction for treason overturned. The States General refused and in 1632 passed a resolution banning him from his homeland for life. The religious divisions in the Netherlands and his political ostracism that resulted from them caused Grotius a great deal of personal distress. ^{Footnote 47} During these quarrels and throughout the rest of his life, he placed emphasis on the unity of all Christians, the ethical injunctions of faith, and the social menace of doctrinal division. In a treatise on political authority, he advised to “abstain from [theological] definitions as much as possible, that is except with respect to doctrines necessary or very profitable for salvation.” ^{Footnote 48} Grotius’s construction of a concordant, universal Christianity, therefore, grew out of his response to both domestic and global spheres of reference.

Civil Control over Religious Practice

Examples from world societies also taught, according to Grotius, that in an ideal society civil authority ought to govern religious institutions and clergy. In De Imperio Summarum Potestatum Circa Sacra (On the Authority of the Highest Powers in Sacred Matters, 1618), he reiterated the universal maxim that “the true happiness of a community is to love God and be loved by God.” ^{Footnote 49} If most theorists down through history could agree with this sentiment, Grotius parted company with most Reformed Protestant and Catholic theologians in assigning the management of ecclesiastical institutions to the state. It might seem somewhat ironic that he took this position, since Maurice of Nassau (the Prince of Orange) and the States General of the Netherlands upheld the Calvinist Counter-Remonstrant position at the Synod of Dort and banned Arminianism. Yet Grotius actually drafted De Imperio on behalf of the Advocate of Holland Johannes van Oldenbarnevelt in his quest to suppress the Counter-Remonstrant party. Prince Maurice, commander of the Dutch army, conducted a coup in the summer of 1618 that unseated van Oldenbarnevelt and charged him, as well as Grotius, with treason. Grotius drafted De Imperio before his arrest and considered Maurice and the States to have acted in the interest of the theocratic Counter-Remonstrants. ^{Footnote 50}

From his ecumenical outlook, Grotius regarded the strife in Holland and the bloodshed throughout Europe as a consequence of powerful religious institutions that overwhelmed the capacities of secular authorities. Division over dogma among Christians generated the destructive passions that engulfed societies; thus only a civil polity, freed from sectarian partisanship, could “preserve the sacred ministry” so that the “kingdom of Christ be propagated, and God served according to his holy word.” ^{Footnote 51} Correspondingly, the role of religion was to “make people quiet, obedient, patriotic, and adherents of justice and equity.” ^{Footnote 52} Because Grotius advocated civil control over the church and countenanced almost no rationale for resistance, scholars place him within the tradition of absolutist theorists, such as Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes. Deborah Baumgold aptly summarizes Grotius’s political outlook as an “absolutism of fear” that recognized “religious conflict, and elite conflict more generally, was the worst evil and a strong state as its necessary antidote.” ^{Footnote 53}

Yet the justification for a strong state to subdue fractious ecclesiastical institutions also echoed Grotius’s global historical perspective. He pointed to well-ordered “heathen” societies in the past and in his own time in which the ruler oversaw religious observance, so that “the name of God be duly honored.” ^{Footnote 54} Such examples provided models to Christian commonwealths, showing that societies worked best when the civil ruler acted as God’s agent. Despite the fact that they had fallen away from the true worship of God, many gentile rulers throughout history realized that their lands received divine favor when they regulated them firmly. The purpose of law generally, as it related to sacred observances, was to restrain priests and pastors from subverting the ultimate social aims of religion. The Decalogue, given to the world through the Hebrews, represented the clearest statement on legal restraints for clerics, to keep them from manufacturing superfluous ceremonies and disruptive dogma. ^{Footnote 55} According to Grotius, the proliferation of ceremonies among the ancient Hebrews occurred after they separated the Levitical priesthood from the authority of judges and kings. Noting that these ceremonies often led to idolatry, Grotius concluded that greater legal control over the priesthood by Israel’s rulers would have protected the people from superstition and false worship. ^{Footnote 56}

Grotius’s intellectual commitment to natural law compelled him to construct a relationship between temporal and religious spheres in light of international experiences and examples. At the conclusion of volume two in De Jure Belli ac Pacis (On the Law of War and Peace, 1625), he asserted that “in all the transactions of the great community at large . . . the law of nature and of nations, founded upon the fear of God, and obedience to his will, is the standard of right to which kings and sovereign states appeal.” ^{Footnote 57} His study of civilizations around the world persuaded him that belief in a supreme being manifested itself in all societies throughout history. All of the laws, customs, beliefs, and observances across time and space pointed to the “irrefutable truth” of a divine order. He surmised that “the belief in a supreme being, and in the control of his providence over human affairs, is one of these universal tenets to be found in all religions, whether true or false.” ^{Footnote 58} The universal principles of a transcendent creator who ordered the world according to moral precepts found its clearest expression in the Decalogue and in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.

Most world societies, however, over time had turned away from, lost sight of, or obfuscated these most basic truths. The reason societies wandered from the divine order was that they failed to impose legal restraints on religious officers and institutions. Grotius believed that an autonomous ecclesiastical entity in any society tends to generate dogmatic minutiae or ceremonies that obscure true religion. It was the task of the civil ruler to keep those tendencies in check. The collective testimony of world societies in which idolatry and superstition abounded demonstrated the failures in curtailing ecclesiastical officers and institutions. “All well governed states,” he observed, enact “wholesome laws to restrain those” who undermine true religion. ^{Footnote 59} It seems clear from his complaints in a number of his works that the culprits were priests and pastors who engaged in endless obfuscations with dogma and external rites. ^{Footnote 60} He noted that the Hebrews gave the ten commandments the force of positive law to uphold authentic religion and keep the priesthood from introducing needless regulations. Thus, Grotius’s engagement with a world beyond Europe had significant implications for his theoretical understanding of church and state within Western Christendom.