ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses how Ludvig Holberg negotiates the European debate on the foundations of morals at different stages of his authorship. A basic continuity in his view on morals and religion, but the perspective changes as questions of moral theology and philosophy are transformed to a methodical subjectivism in the personal essays that he wrote under influence of German protestant eclecticism. The natural law debate is the European framework for Holberg's earliest engagement with morals and religion in his modest work on natural law from 1716, a work that was reprinted in new editions throughout his life. Holberg's critique of stoicism is part of his emerging scepticism towards any abstract system, philosophical, moral or theological, as opposed to individual experience. Holberg's use of the concept of 'systema' in his later writings must be considered in light of his explicit eclecticism. The idea of an innate universal moral sense remains at the core of Holberg's system of moral religion in Epistles.
