Religion and natural law in Interregnum England: Thomas Barlow on human obligation

Thesis

This thesis recovers the distinctive contribution of the English Reformed divine Thomas Barlow (1608/9-1691) to the development of natural law theory, mainly through an extensive study of his manuscripts at The Queen’s College, Oxford. Facing the breakdown of conventional norms and order during the English Civil War and the Interregnum, Barlow embarked on an investigation of human obligation by nature and God. In pursuing this inquiry, he drew on a wide range of leading contemporary jurists and theologians on the Continent, including the Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius, the Jesuit theologian Francisco Suárez, and the Dutch Arminian (Remonstrant) leader Simon Episcopius. Despite the stark theological differences between Barlow and these scholars, their expositions of natural law, divine positive law, and obligation formed the core of Barlow’s thinking.

As this thesis demonstrates, Barlow stands out as the central figure in England who inherited the Grotian legal framework consisting of natural law and divine positive law and refined this using the resources of Catholic and Remonstrant legal scholarship. In the 1650s, Barlow’s sophisticated ideas of natural law and divine positive law had direct implications not only for national questions of church government, toleration, and political authority, but also for more local and individual issues of marital ethics, diet, and attendance at communion. For Barlow, at the heart of all these questions was the problem of human obligation. Moreover, Barlow’s approach to the question of excommunication from this perspective of human obligation suggests an alternative way to understand the debate on church and state that involved figures like Thomas Hobbes and Thomas Erastus. Although Barlow developed his thought in Interregnum Oxford under Oliver Cromwell’s government, his theory of human obligation would reach far and wide, shaping the late seventeenth-century discussion of law and obligation, of which John Locke was part.

Authors: Lee, HD

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-6rqkvpzxb
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Queen's College; natural law; Thomas Barlow; Francisco Suárez; Thomas Hobbes; Hugo Grotius; Simon Episcopius; Interregnum; Thomas Erastus
• Subjects: institutional history; religious history; intellectual history