CHAPTER XIXARMINIUS
The struggle for tolerance is part of the age-old conflict between “organized society” which places the continued safety of the “group” ahead of all other considerations and those private citizens of unusual intelligence or energy who hold that such improvement as the world has thus far experienced was invariably due to the efforts of the individual and not due to the efforts of the mass (which by its very nature is distrustful of all innovations) and that therefore the rights of the individual are far more important than those of the mass.
If we agree to accept these premises as true, it follows that the amount of tolerance in any given country must be in direct proportion to the degree of individual liberty enjoyed by the majority of its inhabitants.
Now in the olden days it sometimes happened that an exceptionally enlightened ruler spake unto his children and said, “I firmly believe in the principle of live and let live. I expect all my beloved subjects to practice tolerance towards their neighbors or bear the consequences.”
In that case, of course, eager citizens hastened to lay in a supply of the official buttons bearing the proud inscription, “Tolerance first.”
But these sudden conversions, due to a fear of His Majesty’s hangman, were rarely of a lasting nature and only bore fruit if the sovereign accompanied his threat by an intelligentsystem of gradual education along the lines of practical every day politics.
Such a fortunate combination of circumstances occurred in the Dutch Republic during the latter half of the sixteenth century.
In the first place the country consisted of several thousand semi-independent towns and villages and these for the greater part were inhabited by fishermen, sailors and traders, three classes of people who are accustomed to a certain amount of independence of action and who are forced by the nature of their trade to make quick decisions and to judge the casual occurrences of the day’s work upon their own merits.
I would not for a moment claim that, man for man, they were a whit more intelligent or broadminded than their neighbors in other parts of the world. But hard work and tenacity of purpose had made them the grain and fish carriers of all northern and western Europe. They knew that the money of a Catholic was just as good as that of a Protestant and they preferred a Turk who paid cash to a Presbyterian who asked for six months’ credit. An ideal country therefore to start a little experiment in tolerance and furthermore the right man was in the right place and what is infinitely more important the right man was in the right place at the right moment.
William the Silent was a shining example of the old maxim that “those who wish to rule the world must know the world.” He began life as a very fashionable and rich young man, enjoying a most enviable social position as the confidential secretary of the greatest monarch of his time. He wasted scandalous sums of money upon dinners and dances, married several of the better known heiresses of his day and lived gayly without a care for the day of tomorrow. He was nota particularly studious person and racing charts interested him infinitely more than religious tracts.
The social unrest which followed in the wake of the Reformation did not at first impress him as anything more serious than still another quarrel between capital and labor, the sort of thing that could be settled by the use of a little tact and the display of a few brawny police constables.
But once he had grasped the true nature of the issue that had arisen between the sovereign and his subjects, this amiable grand seigneur was suddenly transformed into the exceedingly able leader of what, to all intents and purposes, was the prime lost cause of the age. The palaces and horses, the gold plate and the country estates were sold at short notice (or confiscated at no notice at all) and the sporting young man from Brussels became the most tenacious and successful enemy of the house of Habsburg.
This change of fortune, however, did not affect his private character. William had been a philosopher in the days of plenty. He remained a philosopher when he lived in a couple of furnished rooms and did not know how to pay for Saturday’s clean wash. And just as in the olden days he had worked hard to frustrate the plans of a cardinal who had expressed the intention of building a sufficient number of gallows to accommodate all Protestants, he now made it a point to bridle the energy of those ardent Calvinists who wished to hang all Catholics.
His task was wellnigh hopeless.
Between twenty and thirty thousand people had already been killed, the prisons of the Inquisition were full of new candidates for martyrdom and in far off Spain new armies were being recruited to smash the rebellion before it should spread to other parts of the Empire.
To tell people who were fighting for their lives that theymust love those who had just hanged their sons and brothers and uncles and grandfathers was out of the question. But by his personal example, by his conciliatory attitude towards those who opposed him, William was able to show his followers how a man of character can invariably rise superior to the old Mosaic law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
In this campaign for public decency he enjoyed the support of a very remarkable man. In the church of Gouda you may this very day read a curious monosyllabic epitaph which enumerates the virtues of one Dirck Coornhert, who lies buried there. This Coornhert was an interesting fellow. He was the son of well-to-do people and had spent many years of his youth traveling in foreign lands and getting some first hand information about Germany, Spain and France. As soon as he had returned home from this trip he fell in love with a girl who did not have a cent. His careful Dutch father had forbidden the marriage. When his son married the girl just the same, he did what those ancestral patriarchs were supposed to do under the circumstances; he talked about filial ingratitude and disinherited the boy.
This was inconvenient, in so far as young Coornhert was now obliged to go to work for a living. But he was a young man of parts, learned a trade and set up as a copper-engraver.
Alas! once a Dutchman, always a dominie. When evening came, he hastily dropped the burin, picked up the goose-quill and wrote articles upon the events of the day. His style was not exactly what one would nowadays call “amusing.” But his books contained a great deal of that amiable common sense which had distinguished the work of Erasmus and they made him many friends and brought him into contact withWilliam the Silent who thought so highly of his abilities that he employed him as one of his confidential advisers.
Now William was engaged in a strange sort of debate. King Philip, aided and abetted by the Pope, was trying to rid the world of the enemy of the human race (to wit, his own enemy, William) by a standing offer of twenty-five thousand golden ducats and a patent of nobility and forgiveness of all sins to whomsoever would go to Holland and murder the arch-heretic. William, who had already lived through five attempts upon his life, felt it his duty to refute the arguments of good King Philip in a series of pamphlets and Coornhert assisted him.
That the house of Habsburg, for whom these arguments were intended, should thereby be converted to tolerance was of course an idle hope. But as all the world was watching the duel between William and Philip, those little pamphlets were translated and read everywhere and they caused a healthy discussion of many subjects that people had never before dared to mention above a whisper.
Unfortunately the debates did not last very long. On the ninth of July of the year 1584 a young French Catholic gained that reward of twenty-five thousand ducats and six years later Coornhert died before he had been able to finish the translation of the works of Erasmus into the Dutch vernacular.
As for the next twenty years, they were so full of the noise of battle that even the fulminations of the different theologians went unheard. And when finally the enemy had been driven from the territory of the new republic, there was no William to take hold of internal affairs and three score sects and denominations, who had been forced into temporary but unnatural friendship by the presence of a large number of Spanish mercenaries, flew at each other’s throats.
Of course, they had to have a pretext for their quarrel but who ever heard of a theologian without a grievance?
In the University of Leiden there were two professors who disagreed. That was nothing either new or unusual. But these two professors disagreed upon the question of the freedom of the will and that was a very serious matter. At once the delighted populace took a hand in the discussion and within less than a month the entire country was divided into two hostile camps.
On the one side, the friends of Arminius.
On the other, the followers of Gomarus.
The latter, although born of Dutch parents, had lived all his life in Germany and was a brilliant product of the Teuton system of pedagogy. He possessed immense learning combined with a total absence of ordinary horse-sense. His mind was versed in the mysteries of Hebrew prosody but his heart beat according to the rules of the Aramaic syntax.
His opponent, Arminius, was a very different sort of man. He was born in Oudewater, a little city not far away from that cloister Steyn where Erasmus had spent the unhappy years of his early manhood. As a child he had won the friendship of a neighbor, a famous mathematician and professor of astronomy in the University of Marburg. This man, Rudolf Snellius, had taken Arminius back with him to Germany that he might be properly educated. But when the boy went home for his first vacation he found that his native town had been sacked by the Spaniards and that all his relatives had been murdered.
That seemed to end his career but fortunately some rich people with kind hearts heard of the sad plight of the young orphan and they put up a purse and sent him to Leiden to study theology. He worked hard and after half a dozenyears he had learned all there was to be learned and looked for fresh intellectual grazing grounds.
In those days, brilliant students could always find a patron willing to invest a few dollars in their future. Soon Arminius, provided with a letter of credit issued by certain guilds of Amsterdam, was merrily trotting southward in search of future educational opportunities.
As behooved a respectable candidate of theology, he went first of all to Geneva. Calvin was dead, but his man Friday, the learned Theodore Beza, had succeeded him as shepherd of the seraphic flock. The fine nose of this old heresy hunter at once detected a slight odor of Ramism in the doctrines of the young Dutchman and the visit of Arminius was cut short.
The word Ramism means nothing to modern readers. But three hundred years ago it was considered a most dangerous religious novelty, as those who are familiar with the assembled works of Milton will know. It had been invented or originated (or what you please) by a Frenchman, a certain Pierre de la Ramée. As a student, de la Ramée had been so utterly exasperated by the antiquated methods of his professors that he had chosen as subject for his doctor’s dissertation the somewhat startling text, “Everything ever taught by Aristotle is absolutely wrong.”
Needless to say this subject did not gain him the good will of his teachers. When a few years afterwards he elaborated his idea in a number of learned volumes, his death was a foregone conclusion. He fell as one of the first victims of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew.
But his books, those pesky books which refuse to be assassinated together with their authors, had survived and Ramée’s curious system of logic had gained great popularity throughout northern and western Europe. Truly pious peoplehowever believed that Ramism was the password to Hades and Arminius was advised to go to Basel where “libertines” (a sixteenth century colloquialism meaning “liberals”) had been considered good form ever since that unfortunate city had fallen under the spell of the quizzical Erasmus.
Arminius, thus forewarned, traveled northward and then decided upon something quite unusual. He boldly invaded the enemy’s territory, studied for a few semesters in the University of Padua and paid a visit to Rome. This made him a dangerous person in the eyes of his fellow countrymen when he returned to his native country in the year 1587. But as he seemed to develop neither horns nor a tail, he was gradually taken back into their good favor and was allowed to accept a call as minister to Amsterdam.
There he made himself not only useful but he gained quite a reputation as a hero during one of the many outbreaks of the plague. Soon he was held in such genuine esteem that he was entrusted with the task of reorganizing the public school system of that big city and when in the year 1603 he was called to Leiden as a full-fledged professor of theology, he left the capital amidst the sincere regrets of the entire population.
If he had known beforehand what was awaiting him in Leiden, I am sure he would never have gone. He arrived just when the battle between the Infralapsarians and the Supralapsarians was at its height.
Arminius was both by nature and education an Infralapsarian. He tried to be fair to his colleague, the Supralapsarian Gomarus. But alas, the differences between the Supralapsarians and the Infralapsarians were such as allowed of no compromise. And Arminius was forced to declare himself an out and out Infralapsarian.
Of course, you will ask me what Supra- and Infralapsarians were. I don’t know, and I seem unable to learn such things. But as far as I can make out, it was the age-old quarrel between those who believed (as did Arminius) that man is to a certain extent possessed of a free will and able to shape his own destinies and those who like Sophocles and Calvin and Gomarus taught that everything in our lives has been pre-ordained ages before we were born and that our fate therefore depends upon a throw of the divine dice at the hour of creation.
In the year 1600 by far the greater number of the people of northern Europe were Supralapsarians. They loved to listen to sermons which doomed the majority of their neighbors to eternal perdition and those few ministers who dared to preach a gospel of good will and charity were at once suspected of criminal weakness, fit rivals of those tender hearted doctors who fail to prescribe malodorous medicines and kill their patients by their kindness.
As soon as the gossiping old women of Leiden had discovered that Arminius was an Infralapsarian, his usefulness had come to an end. The poor man died under the torrent of abuse that was let loose upon him by his former friends and supporters. And then, as seemed unavoidable during the seventeenth century, Infralapsarianism and Supralapsarianism made their entrance into the field of politics and the Supralapsarians won at the polls and the Infralapsarians were declared enemies of the public order and traitors to their country.
Before this absurd quarrel had come to an end, Oldenbarnevelt, the man who next to William the Silent had been responsible for the foundation of the Republic, lay dead with his head between his feet; Grotius, whose moderation had made him the first great advocate of an equitable systemof international law, was eating the bread of charity at the court of the Queen of Sweden; and the work of William the Silent seemed entirely undone.
But Calvinism did not gain the triumph it had hoped.
The Dutch Republic was a republic only in name. It was really a sort of merchants’ and bankers’ club, ruled by a few hundred influential families. These gentlemen were not at all interested in equality and fraternity, but they did believe in law and order. They recognized and supported the established church. On Sundays with a great display of unction they proceeded to the large white-washed sepulchers which in former days had been Catholic Cathedrals and which now were Protestant lecture halls. But on Monday, when the clergy paid its respects to the Honorable Burgomaster and Town Councilor, with a long list of grievances against this and that and the other person, their lordships were “in conference” and unable to receive the reverend gentlemen. If the reverend gentlemen insisted, and induced (as frequently happened) a few thousand of their loyal parishioners to “demonstrate” in front of the town hall, then their lordships would graciously deign to accept a neatly written copy of the reverend gentlemen’s complaints and suggestions. But as soon as the door had been closed upon the last of the darkly garbed petitioners, their lordships would use the document to light their pipes.
For they had adopted the useful and practical maxim of “once is enough and too many” and they were so horrified by what had happened during the terrible years of the great Supralapsarian civil war that they uncompromisingly suppressed all further forms of religious frenzy.
Posterity has not always been kind to those aristocrats of the ledger. Undoubtedly they regarded the country as their private property and did not always differentiate with sufficientnicety between the interests of their fatherland and those of their own firm. They lacked that broad vision which goes with empire and almost invariably they were penny-wise and pound-foolish. But they did something which deserves our hearty commendation. They turned their country into an international clearing-house where all sorts of people with all sorts of ideas were given the widest degree of liberty to say, think, write and print whatever pleased them.
I do not want to paint too rosy a picture. Here and there, under a threat of ministerial disapprobation, the Town Councilors were sometimes obliged to suppress a secret society of Catholics or to confiscate the pamphlets printed by a particularly noisy heretic. But generally speaking, as long as one did not climb on a soap-box in the middle of the market place to denounce the doctrine of predestination or carry a big rosary into a public dining-hall or deny the existence of God in the South Side Methodist Church of Haarlem, one enjoyed a degree of personal immunity which for almost two centuries made the Dutch Republic a veritable haven of rest for all those who in other parts of the world were persecuted for the sake of their opinions.
Soon the rumor of this Paradise Regained spread abroad. And during the next two hundred years, the print shops and the coffee-houses of Holland were filled with a motley crew of enthusiasts, the advance guard of a strange new army of spiritual liberation.