“Etsi Deus non daretur” (“as if God does not exist”): Hugo Grotius and Scholastic Theology

Abstract

In modern Western theology, there is a widespread idea that the formula etsi Deus non daretur (“as if God did not exist”) appears for the fi rst time in works of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and marks the advent of a new secular worldview, according to which the world and man are autonomous and independent from the transcendental God. Nevertheless, historical facts show that this formula was in use as early as the 14th century and repeatedly occurred in works of Catholic scholastics (such as Gabriel Biel, Domingo de Soto, Francisco Suarez, etc.). The author’s opinion is that this formula is nothing more than a mental experiment which was employed in the dispute about the nature of the natural moral law between Christian objectivists and voluntarists. The objectivists who used this experiment defended the idea that the principles of morality (in the form of the natural law) are rooted in human nature itself so fi rmly that their existence and validity do not depend on the presence or absence of any divine commandments and prohibitions. It is in this sense that the aforementioned formula should be understood; even if per impossibile there was no God, the principles of morality would exist in man and would be expressed in the dictates of common sense (recta ratio). This, however, does not in any way imply a denial of the existence of God or even a doubt about it: the mental experiment remains just a mental experiment; as for the rest, the objectivists (including Grotius) emphasised that the nature of man together with the natural moral law embedded in it are what they are only because such was the will of God the Creator.

Keywords

• Hugo Grotius
• Gregory of Rimini
• Francisco Suarez
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• scholasticism
• natural law
• Christian theology
• secularism
• theism