The Way to the Secularisation of the Natural Law

The concept of natural law in Thomas Aquinas's writings is based on the concept of the eternal law, which is a creative idea in God's mind. The natural law is a participation of the rational being in this eternal law. Some thinkers of the second Scholasticism understood the natural law more and more independently on this theological ground. According to Grotius it is independent even of God. This paper presents Aquinas's view and investigates the writings of some Dominican and Jesuit authors with respect to the question on the development of the Grotian secularisation of the natural law. It concentrates especially on the tension between the intellectualism and the voluntarism and on the weakening of the importance of the dependency of the natural law on the eternal law.