The Source of Grotius's 'Etiamsi Daremus ... Deus Non Esse'.

The immediate source of Grotius's etiamsi -claim (natural law would be valid even if there were no God or human affairs were no concern for him) has never been convincingly identified. This paper argues that Grotius's formulation of the claim derives from a very similar sentence of Bartolomé de Medina (1527–1580), a Spanish scholastic and eminent member of the School of Salamanca, whose work Grotius quotes in De iure belli ac pacis. Medina ascribes the sentence to Seneca, but there is apparently no such proposition in Seneca's extant works. Nevertheless, related propositions were attributed to Seneca in the medieval period, not least in sermons and pastoral writings, even in vernacular languages. This shows that, even outside academic debates, counterfactual reasoning involving God's non-existence or indifference to human affairs was not considered illicit or dangerous in the Middle Ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]