Nicolaus Hieronymus Gundling was born in a village near Nuremberg in 1672. His father, Wolfgang Gundling, was a Lutheran pastor, first in Kirchensittenbach and later at St Lorenz Church in Nuremberg. He initially taught his son privately before sending him to the Gymnasium Aegidianum in Nuremberg.

In accordance with the wishes of his father, who died in 1689, and of his legal guardians, Gundling studied theology and church history at the universities of Altdorf and Jena. At Altdorf, the professor of theology Johann Fabricius was probably Gundling’s most important teacher. During his second period of study there, Gundling even lived in Fabricius’s house and was permitted to use his library. Towards the end of his studies, he also defended, under Fabricius’s presidency, a disputation on a work of church history by his father, Wolfgang Gundling, concerning the fourth-century Synod of Gangra.

During his studies at Jena, Gundling attended lectures with a similar focus. After a brief period at the University of Leipzig in 1695, he returned to Nuremberg, where he attempted to establish himself as a preacher. As he was unable to secure a position, however, he also worked as a private tutor. In 1698, he came to the University of Halle as Hofmeister to two young noblemen whom he accompanied during their studies.

At Halle, Gundling embarked on a second course of study, which also brought his theological career to an end. Christian Thomasius made such a profound impression on him that, on Thomasius’s advice, he turned from theology to jurisprudence. While supporting himself by giving private lessons to other students, Gundling attended Thomasius’s full programme of lectures in philosophy, jurisprudence, and history. The courses offered by Johann Franz Budde in philosophy and history exerted a similarly strong influence on him. After completing his studies in the whole of ius civile, Gundling defended a disputation for the licentiate degree in 1703 and received his doctorate in law only a few months later.

Gundling’s career as a university lecturer advanced rapidly. Over the following two years, as a docent, he offered lecture courses on philosophy, history, and rhetoric, as well as across the full range of jurisprudence—an unusually extensive teaching programme.

With the support of Daniel Ludolph Freiherr von Danckelmann, one of the curators of the University of Halle, Gundling was appointed extraordinary professor of philosophy in 1705, a position that authorised him to deliver public lectures on history and ‘antiquities’, particularly Roman political and legal history. In the same year, following Wagenseil’s death, Gundling was offered the chair of public and canon law at Altdorf. He was unable to accept the offer, however, because the Prussian king refused to release him from his position in Halle. Instead, he was appointed ordinary professor of philosophy at Halle in 1706 and, in 1707, Konsistorialrat of the Duchy of Magdeburg, owing to his additional qualification in theology. In early 1708, Gundling succeeded to the ordinary chair of eloquence and antiquities, which had been left vacant by Christoph Cellarius the previous year.

In 1712, Gundling was appointed to the newly established ordinary chair of natural law and the law of nations in the Faculty of Law, marking a further step in his academic career. Although he had not yet published any writings of his own on natural law, he had delivered a series of lectures on Grotius between 1706 and 1710. In 1719, he was appointed to the chair of ius commune, which he held until his death.

Gundling was an exceptionally productive university teacher and author. His two principal fields of expertise were jurisprudence—especially ius civile, ius feudale, ius publicum, and natural law—and philosophy in its various branches. These were followed by theology and, in the manner of a polyhistor, by a remarkably broad command of numerous other fields of learning, including secular and ecclesiastical history, languages, and rhetoric. He mastered Greek and Hebrew and also had knowledge of Chaldean, Arabic, French, Italian, and Spanish. The extraordinary breadth of his learning and the extent of his scholarly productivity are reflected, for example, in the Gundlingiana, the journal he published from 1715 onwards.

Natural law appears to have been only one subject among many in Gundling’s teaching. Compared with the breadth of his lecture courses as a whole, it did not occupy a distinctive or especially prominent place in his career as a university lecturer. Even his appointment to the specially established chair of natural law and the law of nations did not result in a substantial expansion of his teaching in natural law. His courses continued to encompass fields not directly related to natural law, including Roman law (the Institutes and Pandects of Justinian), German law, public law, and feudal law.

Gundling’s career at Halle appears to have been characterised by steady and uninterrupted advancement. There can be little doubt that he enjoyed the particular favour of the Prussian court, and this was probably due not only to his professional abilities. It is at least striking that Gundling displayed a marked loyalty to King Frederick I and knew how to present himself advantageously. From 1707 onwards, he delivered annual public panegyrics in honour of the king, on occasions including his birthday and marriage, culminating in a final eulogy on the king’s death in 1713. Gundling thus served, in effect, as a kind of official laudator of the sovereign at the University of Halle.

Undoubtedly, the Ius naturae ac gentium nova methodo elaboratum et a praesumtis opinionibus aliisque ineptiis vacuum (1715) was Gundling’s principal work on natural law. At least three further editions were published in Halle, while another edition appeared in Geneva [PLEASE add this edition to the bibliography]. Hence, the textbook evidently enjoyed a degree of success, although it did not attain the popularity of Heineccius’s work [PLEASE insert the title of Heineccius’s work].

The posthumously published Ausführlicher Discours über das Natur- und Völcker-Recht (1734) was not an entirely separate work, but rather a set of lecture notes based on the aforementioned Ius naturae ac gentium. This edition is particularly interesting because it provides a relatively authentic impression of the lively German style Gundling employed in his lectures.

Another set of lecture notes, edited by Gundling’s former student Christoph Friderich Ayrmann, appeared under the title Erläuterung über Samuelis Pufendorfii zwey Bücher De officio hominis & civis secundum legem naturalem (1744). On the basis of a remark by Ayrmann and a comparison with the lecture programmes, the revised transcript probably derives from a course delivered in 1723. This suggests that Gundling returned to Pufendorf even after the publication of his own textbook.

As might be expected, the structure and table of contents closely follow Pufendorf’s De officio. This correspondence, however, is essentially limited to the formal organisation of the material. Rather than simply explaining Pufendorf, Gundling uses this framework to discuss positions drawn from the broader tradition of modern natural law and to develop his own views.

The same applies to Gundling’s comments on Johann Georg Kulpis’s Collegium Grotianum super iure belli ac pacis. These, too, survive in the form of posthumously published lecture notes, based on lectures delivered from 1714 onwards, and were printed as the third part of Gundling’s Philosophische Discourse, Anderer und Dritter als letzter Theil oder Academische Vorlesungen über seine Viam ad veritatem moralem und Kulpisii Collegium Grotianum (1740).

Gundling’s biographer Christian Friedrich Hempel gives the impression that his contribution to natural-law theory was rather limited, portraying him essentially as a Hobbesian. This assessment, however, is too reductive. Gundling certainly engaged closely with the works of the major pioneers of modern natural law, above all Grotius and Pufendorf, but he also raised fundamental objections to both.

He regarded Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis as lacking any coherent systematic structure and criticised its reliance on historical examples drawn from excessively remote antiquity. In Pufendorf’s De officio, by contrast, he objected to what he considered a defective system as well as to the mediocre quality of its Latin. For the teaching of Grotius, Gundling therefore recommended Johann Scheffer’s extract, Grotius enucleatus, and, for Pufendorf, Jean Barbeyrac’s French edition, which he considered more readable and better annotated.

At the substantive level, Gundling criticised both Grotius and Pufendorf for conflating civil law, natural law, and the law of nations, and for failing to distinguish adequately between the attainment of external and internal peace. In his view, both also lacked a sufficiently clear understanding of the boundary between law and ethics and therefore wrongly incorporated ethical virtues into their accounts of natural law.

Gundling, by contrast, sought to establish a clear separation between natural law and ethics by reducing natural law to a norm that applies exclusively to the area of positive law. Through this sharp distinction between law and morality, he further developed Thomasius’s attempt to confine natural law, in the narrower sense, to the sphere of the justum. Gundling’s new approach towards a consistent juridification of natural law is particularly evident in the structure of his textbook, which departs from the conventional organisation of contemporary works on the subject. All duties which, by definition, belong to the realm of inner peace are excluded. Duties towards God and towards oneself therefore have, in principle, no place within natural law. Nor does Gundling attempt to provide a rational proof of the existence of God, discuss the virtues, or debate doctrines such as de interpretatione.

A further innovation in the structure of Gundling’s exposition lies in the way legal norms are treated: they are systematically explained in turn with reference both to the status naturalis and to the status civilis (for example, prohibitions against contempt and insult, rules concerning oaths in contracts, and rules for family and servants). The binding force of these norms already applies in the state of nature. Natural law must nevertheless be given more concrete form through civil legislation and enforced as coercive law by means of corresponding threats of punishment.

For Gundling, the supreme principle of natural law consists in seeking external peace wherever it can be attained; external peace is, in turn, a prerequisite for the attainment of inner peace. It is at this crucial point that Gundling explicitly aligns himself with Hobbes, namely in his strict emphasis on external peace as the objective of law and political order. Unlike Hobbes, however, Gundling maintains that the duty to preserve peace already applies in the state of nature, even prior to the social contract, although it cannot yet be enforced there. Against this background, Gundling describes himself as ‘a Hobbesian in what is true, but not in what is false’ (Hobbesianus in veris, non vero in falsis).

Finally, Gundling develops within his natural-law theory a conception of religious freedom as an individual and inviolable right. He agrees with Thomasius that religion should generally be regarded as a private matter, given the restriction of the state’s purpose to the preservation of external peace. Unlike Thomasius, however, Gundling also demands that the prince guarantee the free exercise of religion, including forms of worship, as a genuine right: ‘Ich habe ein jus meine Religion zu mainteniren; Hier ist summa libertas.’ The ‘theologian’ Gundling, for whom external worship was an essential dimension of faith, evidently regarded such practices as posing less of a threat to external peace than Thomasius did.

In doing so, however, Gundling removes the barrier that Thomasius had erected against religiously motivated violent conflict and thereby creates a fundamental tension within his own theory. By recognising the free exercise of religion as an inviolable right, he deprives the prince of precisely those ecclesiastical and legal means that might otherwise be used to secure the state’s natural-law purpose of preserving external peace, especially in the face of confessional conflict.