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Calvinism and Religious Tolerationin the Dutch Golden Age
Dutch society has enjoyed a reputation, or notoriety, for
permissivenessfrom the sixteenth century to present times. The
Dutch Republic in theGolden Age was the only society that tolerated
religious dissenters ofall persuasions in early modern Europe,
despite being committed to astrictly Calvinist public Church.
Professors R. Po-Chia Hsia and Henkvan Nierop have brought together
a group of leading historians from theUSA, the UK, and the
Netherlands to probe the history and myth ofthisDutch tradition of
religious tolerance. This collection of outstandingessays
reconsiders and revises contemporary views of Dutch tolerance.Taken
as a whole, the volumes innovative scholarship offers
unexpectedinsights into this important topic in religious and
cultural history.
. - is Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of European andAsian History
at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author oreditor of
eight books on early modern Europe, including In and Outof the
Ghetto: JewishGentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early
ModernGermany (Cambridge, ) and The World of Catholic Renewal,
(Cambridge, ).
is Professor of Early Modern History at the Univer-sity of
Amsterdam and Director of the Amsterdam Centre for the Studyof the
Golden Age. He is the author or editor of a number of books
onEuropean and Dutch history, including The Nobility of Holland:
FromKnights to Regents, (Cambridge, ).
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Calvinism and ReligiousToleration in the DutchGolden Age
Edited by
R. Po-Chia HsiaPennsylvania State University
and
Henk van NieropUniversiteit van Amsterdam
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PUBLISHED BY CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS (VIRTUAL PUBLISHING) FOR
AND ON BEHALF OF THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP 40 West
20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road,
Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia http://www.cambridge.org
Cambridge University Press 2002 This edition Cambridge University
Press (Virtual Publishing) 2003 First published in printed format
2002 A catalogue record for the original printed book is available
from the British Library and from the Library of Congress Original
ISBN 0 521 80682 8 hardback ISBN 0 511 02070 8 virtual (netLibrary
Edition)
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Contents
Notes on contributors page vii
Introduction -
Dutch religious tolerance: celebration and revision .
Religious toleration in the United Provinces:from case to
model
The bond of Christian piety: the individual practiceof tolerance
and intolerance in the Dutch Republic
Religious policies in the seventeenth-centuryDutch Republic
Paying off the sheriff: strategies of Catholic tolerationin
Golden Age Holland
Sewing the bailiff in a blanket: Catholicsand the law in
Holland
Anabaptism and tolerance: possibilities and limitations
Jews and religious toleration in the Dutch Republic
v
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vi Contents
Religious toleration and radical philosophyin the later Dutch
Golden Age ()
The politics of intolerance: citizenship and religionin the
Dutch Republic (seventeenth to eighteenth centuries)
Select bibliography Index
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Notes on contributors
is Professor of Early Modern History at the Free Uni-versity in
Amsterdam. He is the author of many books, including Lasociete
neerlandaise et ses gradues, : une recherche serielle sur lestatut
des intellectuels (Amsterdam, ), Wegen van Evert Willemsz.:Een
Hollands weeskind op zoek naar zichzelf (Nijmegen, ),and :
Bevochten eendracht (The Hague, ).
is Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies
inPrinceton.Hismany publications includeDutch Primacy in World
Trade, (Oxford, ),The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and
Fall() (Oxford, ), and Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy andthe
Making of Modernity (Oxford, ). He won the Wolf-son Literary Prize
for History in . He is a Fellow of the BritishAcademy and a member
of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences.
. is Professor of Dutch History at University CollegeLondon. He
is the author of Calvinists and Libertines: Confession andCommunity
in Utrecht, (Oxford, ) for which he wonthe Philip Schaff Prize and
the Roland Bainton Prize in History andTheology.
is Associate Professor of History at Louisiana StateUniversity
and the author of Liberty and Religion: Church and State inLeidens
Reformation, (Leiden, ).
is Professor of EarlyModernHistory at theUniversityof Amsterdam
and Director of the Amsterdam Centre for the Studyof the Golden
Age. His publications include The Nobility of Holland:From Knights
to Regents, (Cambridge, ) and Het verraadvan het Noorderkwartier:
oorlog, terreur en recht in de Nederlandse Opstand(Amsterdam,
).
- is Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of European andAsian History
at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author or
vii
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viii Notes on contributors
editor of eight books on early modern Europe, including In and
Out ofthe Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and
Early ModernGermany (Cambridge, ) and The World of Catholic
Renewal, (Cambridge, ).
is Lecturer in Modern History at the University ofOxford and
Tutor at Somerville College, Oxford. She is the authorof Religious
Choice in the Dutch Republic: The Reformation of ArnoldusBuchelius
() (Manchester, ) for which she won the KeetjeHodshon Prize for
History of the Hollandsche Maatschappij derWetenschappen.
is Professor of Economic and Social History at the Uni-versity
of Utrecht. His publications include Gezeten burgers: de elite
ineen Hollandse stad, Leiden (Dieren, ) and Republikeinseveelheid,
democratisch enkelvoud: sociale verandering in het
Revolutietijd-vak, s-Hertogenbosch (Nijmegen, ).
is Reader in the Research Centre for Religion andSociety at the
University of Amsterdam. His publications includeTheology, Biblical
Scholarship and Rabbinical Studies in the SeventeenthCentury:
Constantijn LEmpereur (), Professor of Hebrew andTheology at Leiden
(Leiden, ) and Religieuze regimes: over gods-dienst en maatschappij
in Nederland, (Amsterdam, ).
is Lecturer of the History of Christianity at the Universityof
Amsterdam and the author of Haarlem na de Reformatie:
stedelijkecultuur en kerkelijk leven, (TheHague, ) andArmenzorg
inFriesland : publieke zorg en particuliere liefdadigheid in zes
Friesesteden: Leeuwarden, Bolsward, Franeker, Sneek, Dokkum en
Harlingen(Hilversum, ).
was Research Fellow at the Fryske Akademy inLeeuwarden. He is
the author of Het geleerde Friesland een mythe?:universiteit en
maatschappij in Friesland en Stad en Lande ca. (Leeuwarden, ) and
Om de ware gemeente en de oude gron-den: geschiedenis van de
dopersen in de Nederlanden (Hilversum,).
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1 Introduction
Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia
Defending himself against criticisms that he was making war on
his fellowco-religionists, Colonel Jean-Baptiste Stouppe, the
Reformed Swiss com-mander of LouisXIVs troops inUtrecht during the
occupation of ,retorted that the Dutch were not at all Reformed. It
is well known . . . thatin addition to the Reformed, Stouppe wrote
in his tractOn the Religion ofthe Hollanders (), there are Roman
Catholics, Lutherans, Brownists,Independents, Arminians,
Anabaptists, Socinians, Arians, Enthusiasts,Quakers, Borelists,
Muscovites, Libertines, and many more . . . I am noteven speaking
of the Jews, Turks, and Persians . . . I must also report onan
enlightened and learned man, who has a great following . . .His
nameis Spinoza. He was born a Jew and had not swore off allegiance
to theJewish religion, nor has he accepted Christianity. He is a
wicked and verybad Jew, and not a better Christian either.
His criticisms aside, the Netherlands were indeed a Calvinist
country,albeit tolerant of numerous religious communities, a fact
celebrated in ourvisions of aDutchGoldenAge butmuch decried by
contemporaries, evenby those who enjoyed toleration. Consider the
case of the Anabaptists,the most persecuted religious community
during the early decades of theReformation. In his preface to the
Martelaers Spiegel Hans de Ries() lamented the languor of his
fellow Mennonites. Contrastingthe fervour of their forebears who
were hunted down for their faith, DeRies chastised the Mennonites
of his day for being cold and carelessin religious matters. He saw
a community preoccupied with temporalaffairs: the oxen must first
be checked and the field inspected before onecan come to the
heavenly celebration. Wickedness is changed into pompand splendor;
goods are multiplied, but the soul is impoverished; clotheshave
become expensive, but interior beauty is gone; love has grown
coldand diminished, and quarrels have increased. Such was the price
for Cited in Willem Frijhoff, Hollands Gouden Eeuw, in De gouden
delta der Lage Landen.
Twintig eeuwen beschaving tussen Seine en Rijn (Antwerp, ), p. .
Martelaers Spiegel der Werelose Christenen . . . , published in
Haarlem, ; cited in BradS. Gregory, Salvation at Stake. Christian
Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge,MA, ), p. .
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Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia
religious toleration, as the last Mennonite martyr died in in
thenorthern Low Countries. In fact, the Mennonites found themselves
ina new state and society, where religious toleration enabled a
gradualprocess of economic and cultural assimilation.
This new state, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, emerged
outof the revolt against Spain in an alliance that guaranteed
freedom ofconscience; in the Union of Utrecht (), the rebel
provinces agreedin article that nobody shall be persecuted or
examined for religiousreasons. Not everyone concurred. From the
beginning of the discus-sion on religious plurality in the
Netherlands, the Calvinist Church vehe-mently opposed any official
status for Catholicism, a position shared byother Protestant
leaders during the long war with Spain, when Catholicsremained a
potential source of rebellion inside the new Dutch
Republic.Anti-Catholic legislations remained in force throughout
the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries, but their enforcement, as
the contributionsby Henk van Nierop and Christine Kooi show in this
volume, wassporadic and uneven. The central paradox of the Dutch
Republic isthis: the existence of a confessionally pluralistic
society with an offi-cial intolerant Calvinist Church that
discriminated against Catholics, butwhose pragmatic religious
toleration elicited admiration and bewilder-ment in ancien regime
Europe and whose longevity surpassed the perhapsmore tolerant
religious regime of the sixteenth-century
PolishLithuanianCommonwealth.The Netherlands in the Golden Age were
a remarkable society. Not
only did the different Christian confessions carve out social
and polit-ical spaces in the Republic, Sephardic and Ashkenazic
Jews also trans-formed Amsterdam into the centre of Jewish life in
northern Europeduring the seventeenth century. Individuals found
porous boundaries.Consider the following examples: a Portuguese
Jewish philosopher turnedagnostic (Benedict Spinoza, ); a Mennonite
poet converted toCatholicism (Joost van den Vondel, ); and a
poetess abandon-ing the Reformed Church for Rome, sending her sons
to be educatedin Leuven (Anna Roemersdochter Visscher, ). That
religiouspluralism flourished in a polity with an official
Calvinist Church madethis story of toleration even more remarkable.
How does one explain the See Alastair Hamilton, Sjouke Voolstra,
and Piet Visser (eds.), From Martyr to Muppy.
A Historical Introduction to Cultural Assimilation Processes of
a Religious Minority in theNetherlands: the Mennonites (Amsterdam,
).
M.E.H.N. Mout, A Comparative View of Dutch Toleration in the
Sixteenth and EarlySeventeenth Centuries, in C.
Berkvens-Stevelinck, J. Israel, and G.H.M. PosthumusMeyjes (eds.),
The Emergence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic (Leiden/New
York/Cologne, ), p. .
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Introduction
juxtaposition of Calvinist hegemony and religious toleration?
The historyof the Sephardim inAmsterdamprovides an instructive
example. Cominginitially in the s as Portuguese merchants and
Christian converts, theso-called New Christians, Sephardic Jews in
fact, were welcomed by theRegents of Holland but were strongly
opposed by the Reformed clergy.When the conversos reverted to the
open practice of Judaism, reaction fromthe ReformedChurch was
fierce. The predikantAbrahamCoster attackedthe Sephardim as an
unclean people who sought to build a public syn-agogue in which
they can perform their evil and foolish ceremonies andspew forth
their gross blasphemies against Christ and his holy Gospels,as well
as their curses against the Christians and Christian
authorities.
Moreover, almost from the beginning of their settlement in
Amsterdam,Protestant groups sought out the Jews for debates and
conversion. In Hugh Broughton, the English pastor of the separatist
community inMiddelburg, wrote a polemic in Hebrew against Judaism.
There weremany attempts to convert the Jews in the seventeenth
century, especiallybetween and . Provocations and opposition aside,
the Jewishcommunity flourished because of the protection of the
regents, who ig-nored most of the complaints of the Reformed
clergy. What matteredto the regents was social peace; the
pragmatism guiding magisterial pol-icy stipulated that the Jewish
community maintained internal disciplineand kept watch over its own
boundaries. By providing for their own poorand by strictly
prohibiting the circumcision of Christian converts, theAmsterdam
Jewish community maintained a stable relationship with theregents
of the city that became the model for Jewish toleration in the
restof the Republic.Social discipline and religious toleration, it
would seem, went hand in
hand in the Dutch Republic, unlike the case in the Holy Roman
Empire,as Peter vanRooden argues in his contribution on attitudes
towards Jews.
A linchpin in this arrangement was poor relief. By requiring the
differentreligious communities to take care of their own poor, the
regents effec-tively carved up Dutch society into clearly
recognisable pillars (zuilen),to use a term from later Dutch
sociology, with sharply marked boundariesbetween the larger civil
sphere and the separate religious spheres, as JokeSpaans argues in
her essay. This genius in mapping social topography en-sured that
religious and civil identities were anchored in separate
spaces,
Cited in Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation.
Conversos and Community inEarly Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington, IN,
), p. .
R.G. Fuks-Mansfeld,De Sefardim in Amsterdam tot . Aspecten van
een joodse minderheidin een Hollandse stad (Hilversum, ), pp. .
On social discipline and confessional conformity in Central
Europe, see R. Po-ChiaHsia,Social Discipline in the Reformation.
Central Europe (London, ).
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Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia
which allowed for a nuanced articulation of the individual, the
commu-nal, and the civil in different representations. Expressions
of loyalty tothe House of Orange, for example, enabled all
religious communities,including the Jews and Catholics, to
celebrate a common patriotism, inspite of the unequal legal and
civil status enjoyed by the different reli-gious groups. Religious
plurality was thus predicated upon a rigorousand vigilant
patrolling of boundaries, undertaken by individuals, com-munities,
and above all by the civil authorities. Order and
discipline,therefore, laid the foundations for religious pluralism.
The search for or-der propelled inner journeys of religious
crossings, as was the case withArnoldus Buchelius (), who evolved
from Catholic to Libertineand finally to Counter-Remonstrant, as
Judith Pollmann shows in hercontribution. The private and the
public coexisted in the easygoing so-ciability of Buchelius with
those not of the Calvinist Church and in hisdoctrinal intolerance
of other religious communities. The constructionof the vast grey
zone of freedom between the private and the public,where different
religious and immigrant groups must interact in daily life,was the
work of civil authorities, who rigorously censored
confessionalpolemic and defamations that could lead to disturbance
of social peace.
It was the case in with Cornelis Buyck, brewer and deacon of
theCalvinist Church in Woerden, who insulted his
Counter-Remonstrantpastor as a false minister and a liar, and who
was fined the enormoussum of fl. (a workers annual wages); it
applied to Hans Joostenszoonand his wife, Mennonites who converted
to Judaism, and who in turnconverted an elder of the Reformed
Church in Grosthuizen, who were allthree arrested, sentenced to
die, and pardoned to exile in ; and itwas particularly true for
those who confounded all religious boundariesby calling into
question the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, as thefollowers
of Spinoza and Descartes in Holland experienced at first handthe
limits of toleration, as Jonathan Israel reminds us in his
chapter.Toleration, nevertheless, has served the Netherlands well.
Visitors to
the Republic in the seventeenth century associated religious
pluralismwith economic prosperity; and the image of an open society
in an age ofreligious conformity has shaped Dutch self-image down
to our day, asBen Kaplan argues in his essay.
Willem Frijhoff gives an incisive analysis to this process in
his Dimensions de la coex-istence confessionnelle, in C.
Berkvens-Stevelinck, J. Israel, and G.H.M. PosthumusMeyjes (eds.),
The Emergence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic (Leiden/New
York/Cologne, ), pp. .
Frijhoff, Dimensions de la coexistence, p. . Bodian, Hebrews of
the Portuguese Nation, p. .
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Introduction
Our collection of essays focuses on the making of this
toleration in theDutch Golden Age, on the structure, contingency,
agency, mechanism,and limitations of religious pluralism and
toleration. Drawing togethervastly divergent research interests and
perspectives, our volume offersfour conclusions and themes in the
history of religious toleration: theyconcern periodisation, local
diversity, the techniques of toleration, andcomparative
history.
Phases in the making of religious toleration
First, the making of religious toleration in the Dutch Republic
seemsto have evolved over three distinct phases. The first period,
c. to, was characterised by the attainment of Calvinist hegemony
withinthe rebellious provinces. While claiming only about per cent
of thepopulation of the north as full members, the Reformed Church
achievedthe status of official church ( publieke kerk), while the
doctrinal and ec-clesiological conflicts between Remonstrants and
Counter-Remonstrantsended up in the triumph of the more restrictive
wing of Calvinism withthe Synod of Dordrecht. During this first
period, the most restrictiveanti-Catholic legislations were
enacted, although the Twelve Years Trucein the war with Spain gave
Catholics a reprieve in the actual enforcementof the edicts. The
formation of theMennonite community and the arrivalof Sephardic
Jews also made this initial period one of tremendous socialchange
in the Netherlands, as the new society absorbed not only
differentChristian and Jewish communities, but immigrants from
Iberia, France,the southern Low Countries, England, and Germany.A
second period, c. to , coincided with the Golden Age of
the Dutch Republic. A pragmatic and successful model of a
pluriconfes-sional society evolved in the Netherlands, where a
strong civil authority,especially in Holland, kept the peace
between a hegemonic ReformedChurch and the other religious
communities. The separation betweenprivate and public spheres, the
continued repression of Catholics duringthe span of the war and the
beginning of Catholic missions launched fromthe south, the open
toleration of the Jewish community, and the economicand cultural
assimilation of the Mennonites characterised the success
ofreligious toleration. Yet the limits of toleration were also
clearly manifestin the repression against anti-Trinitarians,
deists, agnostics, and atheists.The third period spanned the
eighteenth century until the end of the
old Republic. The making of a system of religious pluralism was
com-plete, resulting in a pillarized society of separate
communities underthe watchful supervision of a strong civil
authority. Improvements in the
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Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia
rights of Catholics represented the most significant development
in a so-ciety where they still constituted nearly one-half of the
population.
Local diversity
The chapters collected in our volume demonstrate the existence
of greatdifferences in religious toleration among towns, regions,
and provincesin the Dutch Republic. Historians have long been aware
of the predomi-nance of Holland and Amsterdam in the economy,
culture, and politicsof the Netherlands. This was not the same for
the history of religioustoleration. The story of the Sephardim in
the early modern Republic,for example, largely unfolded in
Amsterdam; and the Amsterdam re-gents have been hailed in
particular as exemplary of the liberal and tole-rant attitude of
the Dutch Republic. Yet it was the Amsterdam regentswho cracked
down on the followers of Spinoza and Descartes in the lastdecades
of the seventeenth century. Like all civil magistrates, the
regentsin Amsterdam were above all concerned with discipline and
stability. Ifsocial peace was achieved with toleration in the towns
of Holland, a diffe-rent consideration guided the civil authorities
in the eastern provinces ofUtrecht and Overijssel. Maarten Prak
argues that in towns dominated byguilds, such as Arnhem, Deventer,
Nijmegen, Utrecht, and Zwolle, theReformed Church exercised far
greater political pressure and achieveda more repressive hegemony
vis-a`-vis minority religious communities.Catholics, for example,
were excluded from guild membership and citi-zenship until the
eighteenth century. By moving away from Holland, weimmediately
acquire a very different picture of society and religion in
theDutch Republic. We must constantly remember the sovereignty of
theindividual provinces and the importance of local custom in the
newUnited Provinces.
Techniques of toleration
The most visible technique in favour of religious toleration was
writing.During the early modern period, the Netherlands produced
the mostsignificant works in religious toleration and liberty; the
names of Hugode Groot, Coornhert, Wtenbogaert, and others come
readily to mind.Toleration and plurality provided the theme for the
formation of a textualand intellectual community that crossed
religious boundaries. In additionto Remonstrant writers, members of
other religious communities alsodefended liberty of worship; the
importance of this textual tradition for
Johan E. Elias, Geschiedenis van het Amsterdamsche
regentenpatriciaat (The Hague, ).
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Introduction
one religious community is shown by Samme Zijlstra in his
analysis ofMennonite ideals of toleration.Litigation represented
another technique in the struggle for toleration.
Protracted lawsuits against anti-Catholic placards in Texel and
Hoorn,for example, reflected the strong legal culture in the
Netherlands and theavailability of institutional recourse for
minority groups to contest theapplication of repressive
legislation. In fact, Catholics employed manytechniques to counter
religious persecutions, resorting to bribery, ap-pealing to noble
patrons, and counting on the laxity of local magistrates.The key to
this contest was the struggle for equal civil rights by minor-ity
religious groups, which were eventually achieved by the end of
theeighteenth century. A decentralised country with archaic
constitutionsand fragmented political authorities was not likely or
inclined to imposereligious conformity.
The Netherlands in comparative perspective
Finally, we would like to propose, more as a theme than as a
conclu-sion, the importance of comparing religious plurality and
toleration inthe Dutch Republic with other societies in the early
modern period.While the intellectual traditions have been studied
in the larger Europeancontext, a comparative social and political
history of religious plural-ism and toleration in early modern
Europe has yet to be written. Despitescepticism of the depth of
toleration in the Netherlands, the DutchRepublic compared
favourably to her neighbours. English Catholics,French Protestants,
and suspect Judaisers in Spain and Portugal all en-dured far
harsher treatments than their Dutch counterparts. Even in theHoly
Roman Empire, where religious peace between the Christian
con-fessions was established in and , and where Jewish
communitiesfound protection among princes and magistrates, pathways
through re-ligious boundaries bristled with far more dangerous
obstacles than inthe Netherlands. To investigate the social and
political context for re-ligious pluralism is not to deny the
achievements of the new Republic.By delineating the structures of
toleration and by probing its limits, wecan come to appreciate even
more the achievements of a pragmatic andunsystematic arrangement
that gave lustre to the Dutch Golden Age.
See C. Berkvens-Stevelinck, J. Israel, and G.H.M. Posthumus
Meyjes (eds.), The Emer-gence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic
(Leiden/New York/Cologne, ).
SeeMarijkeGijswijt-Hofstra (ed.),Een schijn van
verdraagzaamheid. Afwijking en tolerantiein Nederland van de
zestiende eeuw tot heden (Hilversum, ).
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2 Dutch religious tolerance: celebrationand revision
Benjamin J. Kaplan
When foreigners visit the Netherlands today, certain items seem
invari-ably to stand on their touristic agenda: the Rijksmuseum,
Anne Frankshouse, a boat ride through the canals. One of the more
remarkable itemsis a walk through Amsterdams red light district,
where, on a typical sum-mer evening, in addition to the clientele,
thousands of foreigners throng men, women, couples, even families.
Such districts are not usually on theitinerary of respectable
tourists, but in Amsterdam a promenade thereserves a purpose:
foreigners are invited to wonder at the tolerance or, ifyou prefer,
permissiveness that prevails in the Netherlands. In the
samedistrict but during the daytime, the Amstelkring Museum extends
essen-tially the same invitation. The museum preserves Our Lord in
the Attic,one of the roughly twenty Catholic schuilkerken, or
clandestine churches,that operated in Amsterdam in the latter half
of the seventeenth century.Nestled within the top floors of a large
but unremarkable house namedTheHart, Our Lord does not betray its
existence to the casual passer-by it has no tower, no stained-glass
windows, no crosses on the outside and, but for the museum banner
that hangs today on the buildings frontfacade, one could easily
pass by it unawares. In its day, though, its exis-tence was an open
secret, like that of the other schuilkerken. Its
discreetarchitecture fooled no one, but did help to reconcile the
formal illegal-ity of Catholic worship with its actual prevalence.
Today, the museumsguidebook (English version) presents the church
as a token of the liber-alism of the mercantile Dutch in an age of
intolerance.
Around the world, Dutch society is famous for its tolerance,
whichextends to drug use, alternate lifestyles, and other matters
about whichmost industrial lands feel a deep ambivalence. But
whence comes thattolerance, that liberalism? The guidebook hints at
two answers. One isthat tolerance promotes commerce and thus is
profitable; the other isthat the Dutch are simply a liberal, that
is, tolerant, people. Toleranceis represented as smart economics,
but also as a national trait a virtue
Amstelkring Museum: Our Lord in the Attic (n.p., ), first
page.
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Dutch religious tolerance: celebration and revision
by most peoples account, a vice by others, but either way as
somethingrooted in the history, customs, and very character of the
Dutch people.The Dutch, in other words, do not just practise
tolerance: by their ownaccount and others, they are tolerant; it is
considered one of their definingcharacteristics.
This is nothing new: Dutch tolerance was already proverbial in
theGolden Age, though the tolerance then under discussion extended
onlyto religions. Indeed, as early as the sixteenth century, in the
crucible oftheir Revolt against Spain, the Dutch with Hollanders in
the vanguard began to define themselves as an especially, even
uniquely tolerant peo-ple. That identity was cemented in the Golden
Age, when Calvinists,Catholics, Mennonites, and a host of other
religious groups lived peace-fully alongside one another. In our
own century, the same notion ofDutchness has expanded beyond the
religious, just as the concept of tole-rance itself, rooted in the
religious dilemmas of early modern Europe, hascome to be applied to
all forms of otherness.Logically, the argument that the Dutch
practise tolerance because they
are tolerant is nothing but a tautology, unless one believes in
nationalcharacter as an autonomous, causal force in history, which
few scholarsdo today. As a cultural construct, though, the argument
continues tofunction as a powerful expression of national identity.
In that capacityit provides a standard of behaviour against which
the Dutch judge theirsociety and government severely sometimes, for
example as concernspolicy towards the ethnic minorities come in
recent decades to live in theNetherlands. It also provides a
framework for the interpretation of Dutchhistory. But here the
problems begin, for the essentialising of Dutch
Hans Bots, Tolerantie of gecultiveerde tweedracht. Het beeld van
de Nederlandse toler-antie bij buitenlanders in de zeventiende en
achttiende eeuw, Bijdragen en Mededelingenbetreffende de
Geschiedenis der Nederlanden (), ; W.W.Mijnhardt, De
geschied-schrijving over de ideeengeschiedenis van de e- en -eeuwse
Republiek, in W.W.Mijnhardt (ed.), Kantelend geschiedbeeld.
Nederlandse historiografie sinds 1945 (Utrecht/Antwerp, ), p. ; B.
van Heerikhuizen, What is Typically Dutch? Sociologists inthe s and
s on theDutchNational Character,Netherlands Journal of Sociology
(), ; R. van Ginkel, Typisch Nederlands . . .Ruth Benedict over het
nation-aal karakter van de Nederlanders, Amsterdams Sociologisch
Tijdschrift (), , ;Ernest Zahn, Regenten, rebellen en reformatoren.
Een visie op Nederland en de Nederlanders(Amsterdam, ), pp. ;
Herman Pleij, Hollands welbehagen (Amsterdam, ),pp. .
On the complex relations between social practice and cultural
identity, and problems ofterminology, seeWillemFrijhoff, Identiteit
en identiteitsbesef. De historicus en de span-ning tussen
verbeelding, benoeming en herkenning, Bijdragen enMededelingen
betreffendede Geschiedenis der Nederlanden (), .
See, for the Netherlands, Rob van Ginkels careful examination of
twentieth-centuryideas and discussions concerning Dutch national
identity and character: Rob vanGinkel, Op zoek naar eigenheid.
Denkbeelden en discussies over cultuur en identiteit inNederland
(The Hague, ).
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Benjamin J. Kaplan
tolerance has for centuries involved mythologising, encouraged
anachro-nism, and served partisan causes. In this way it has long
obscured ourunderstanding of religious life in the Dutch Republic.
Today it does thesame, but in a twofold manner: not just by
propagating but also by pro-voking reactions, some of them
exaggerated, against such mythologising,anachronism, and
partisanship.Themythologising began early. In the sixteenth
century, Netherlanders
justified their Revolt against Spain most frequently as a
conservativeaction in defence of their historic privileges, or
liberties. As JuliaanWoltjer has pointed out, only some of those
privileges had a firm basis inlaw or fact, and what they entailed
was not always crystal clear. Even thefamous jus de non evocando,
perhaps the most frequently cited privilege ofall, was capable of
varying constructions: while most people agreed thatit guaranteed
that a burgher accused of a crime would not be tried bya court
outside his province, opinions differed as to whether it assignedto
local municipal courts sole and final jurisdiction in such cases.
Eitherway, the privilege conjured up a time when cities and
provinces had en-joyed judicial autonomy, and therein lay the true
power of the privilegesgenerally: to evoke an idealised past
against which the present could bejudged. However vague their
positive content, no one mistook the privi-leges negative import as
an indictment of, and justification for resistanceto, the Habsburg
governments unwelcome initiatives and innovations.Foremost among
the latter were the efforts of Philip II to introduce whatthe
Dutch, with great effect if little accuracy, called the Spanish
Inquisi-tion: an institutional structure for suppressing
Protestantism, reformingthe Catholic Church, and imposing
Tridentine orthodoxy on the peo-ple of the Netherlands. Such a
programme entailed gewetensdwang, theforcing of consciences, on a
massive scale.But if gewetensdwang was new and contrary to the
privileges, was its
opposite, freedomof conscience, then part of a hallowed past?
That was atleast the vague implication, mademore plausible by the
fact that believersin the old Catholic faith as well as converts to
Protestantism resisted thegovernments religious policies. Still,
given that the variety of religiousbeliefs spawned by the
Reformation was scarcely older than the placardsoutlawing them, it
took some legerdemain to construe the privileges asguarantors of
freedom of conscience. Nevertheless, a few writers of theperiod did
so explicitly. Two anonymous pamphlets dating from appealed to the
Joyous Entry of Brabant, the oath taken since by
J.J. Woltjer, Dutch Privileges, Real and Imaginary, in J.S.
Bromley and E.H. Kossmann(eds.), Britain and the Netherlands, vol.
: Some Political Mythologies (The Hague, ),pp. ; James D. Tracy,
Holland Under Habsburg Rule . The Formation of aBody Politic
(Berkeley, ), pp. .
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Dutch religious tolerance: celebration and revision
each new duke of Brabant by which he swore to do no violence or
abuseto any person in any manner.
This word in any manner, expressly highlighted [wtstaende] in
the Joyous Entry,excludes any kind of violence or abuse, be it to
property, body, or soul, so that theking is bound by virtue of the
Joyous Entry to leave every person in possession oftheir freedom,
not only of property or body but also of soul, that is, of
conscience.
That this interpretation might seem rather far-fetched did not
escape theauthor of either pamphlet, but in its support both cited
a treaty betweenBrabant and Flanders concluded in (and published,
as a timely re-minder, in ), in which the vague phrase in any
manner is glossed tomean in soul, body, or property. Contrary to
what some people think,says one of the pamphlets, it is a wonder to
see how careful our ances-tors always were to preserve and to
retain the enjoyment of this right,freedom of conscience, which
until the arrival of the Inquisition we al-ways enjoyed. Even more
remarkably, both pamphlets go on to equatefreedom of conscience
explicitly with freedom of worship. Not eventhe Inquisition could
stop people from believing what they wished; thefreedom which it
took from us, therefore (so the argument went), musthave been the
right to profess our beliefs publicly and to worship God
inaccordance with them.Thus by anachronism religious tolerance took
on the aura of an an-
cient custom. Once gained, that aura did not readily fade.
Eighteen yearslater, Cornelis Pieterszoon Hooft, burgomaster of
Amsterdam, thoughtit entirely plausible to tell his fellow regents
that it was in accordancewith the ancient manner of governing this
land and this city that theybear with each others mistakes in
matters of faith and not disturb anyperson on account of religion.
In , Pieter de la Court representedwhat he perceived as a decline
in religious tolerance as a departure fromthe original maxims of
his province.
Some of its apologists, however, represented the Revolt as a
fightnot just for specific freedoms, plural, but for freedom,
singular and
Anon., Een goede Waerschouwinghe voor den Borgheren, ende
besonder dien vanden leden vanAntwerpen/ Datsy hen niet en souden
laten verlockenmet het soet aengheuen vande bedriechlyckeArtijkelen
van peyse/ onlancx ghecomen van Cuelen (n.p., ), fo. r.
Anon. (eenen goede[n] liefhebber des vreedts), Een Goede
vermaninge aen de goedeborghers van Bruessele/ dat sy souden
blijuen in goede eendracht/ ende niet treden in partij-schap teghen
malcanderen om eenighe saecken (Ghent, ), fo. . Cf. Anon.,
Letterenvan Verbande tuss. Brabant ende Vlaenderen, ghedaen ende
besloten int Jaer 1339 (Delft,); P.A.M. Geurts, De Nederlandse
opstand in de pamfletten (Utrecht, ),pp. , .
Gerard Brandt, Historie der Reformatie, en andre kerkelyke
geschiedenissen, in en ontrent deNederlanden, vols. (Amsterdam, ),
vol. , p. .
Pieter de la Court, The True Interest and Political Maxims of
the Republic of Holland(New York, ), p. .
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Benjamin J. Kaplan
abstract. Jacob vanWesembeeke, Pensionary of Antwerp, played a
crucialrole in developing this argument. In he described the people
of theNetherlands as having always been not just lovers, in the
manner com-mon to other peoples, but special and extremely ardent
advocates, ob-servers, and defenders of their ancient liberty and
freedom. William ofOrange, for whom Wesembeeke worked for a time as
propagandist, tookup the theme, characterising Netherlanders as
exceptional lovers andadvocates of their liberty and enemies of all
violence and oppression.
Both men attributed a religious dimension to the liberty so
cherished,Wesembeeke speaking reverently, for example, of the
anchienne liberteau spirituel of the Netherlands. Thus the Dutch
devotion to religiousfreedom was given a basis in national
character as well as custom.That character took on a sharper
profile over the course of the Revolt,
especially after the return of the southern provinces to the
Spanish fold.Northerners Hollanders in particular increasingly
appropriated tothemselves the special love of freedom once more
widely conceded.
One way they did so was through the myth of the Batavians, which
hadbeen circulating since the s but gained enormous cultural
promi-nence from the s. Histories, dramas, and paintings celebrated
thisancient Germanic tribe, known chiefly from the writings of
Tacitus, asancestors of the contemporary Hollanders and founders of
their polity.Virtuous, industrious, pious, and clean, paragons of a
simple decency,the Batavians appear in works like Hugo Grotius
Liber de AntiquitateReipublicae Batavicae () above all as fiercely
independent. The taleof their struggle for autonomy from Rome was
taken to prefigure theHollanders own struggle with Spain and
predict its happy outcome.
In another work, the Parallelon Rerum-Publicarum Liber Tertius
(writtenaround ), Grotius compared the formerly Batavian, now
Hollandicpeople to the ancient Athenians and Romans. The former
emerge as su-perior in almost every respect to the paragons of
civilisation venerated
Ch. Rahlenbeck (ed.), Memoires de Jacques de Wesembeke
(Brussels, ), p. . Cf.Martin van Gelderen (ed.), The Dutch Revolt
(Cambridge, ), p. xiii.
Quoted in Martin van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the
Dutch Revolt (Cambridge, ), p. ; cf. Catherine Secretan, Les
privile`ges, berceau de la liberte(Paris, ), p. .
Secretan, Les privile`ges, p. . See E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier and
W.R.E. Velema (eds.), Vrijheid. Een geschiedenis van devijftiende
tot de twintigste eeuw (Amsterdam, ).
Hugo de Groot, De Oudheid van de Bataafse nu Hollandse
Republiek, ed. G.C. Molewijk(Weesp, ); I. Schoffer, The Batavian
Myth during the Sixteenth and SeventeenthCenturies, in J.S. Bromley
and E.H. Kossmann (eds.),Britain and the Netherlands, vol. :Some
Political Mythologies (The Hague, ), pp. ; Simon Schama, The
Embar-rassment of Riches. An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the
Golden Age (New York, ),pp. ; Marijke Spies, Verbeeldingen van
vrijheid: David en Mozes, Burgerhart enBato, Brutus en Cato, De
Zeventiende Eeuw (), .
-
Dutch religious tolerance: celebration and revision
by Renaissance Europe. This experiment in comparative ethnology
rep-resents the Revolt as a fight by the Hollanders for the freedom
of theirsouls as well as of their bodies, and exults in
theHollanders combinationof piety and tolerance:
This [Reformed] religion . . .we maintain with a rare constancy
and we spread itas we extend our territory. . . .We prescribe it
without forcing it on anyone [zonderhem af te perssen], and those
who take no pleasure in it with us we consider worthymore of pity
than of punishment. We have no commands to give to the humanheart;
we torture no souls. Let each one believe what he can; in this
regard toolet be inviolate [ongeschonden].
The reverse side of such self-congratulation was the anxious
xenophobiadirected at Calvinist refugees from the southern
provinces. This emotionpervaded towns like Leiden and Utrecht,
where such refugees comprisedone-third or more of the membership of
the Reformed Church, but wascommon enough elsewhere. Southern
Calvinists were accused of anintolerance that mirrored that of the
Spanish and was equally pernicious.Their opponents said that the
Calvinists form of church governmentmerely replaced the old Spanish
Inquisition with a new Genevan one,and that their violent efforts
to suppress Catholicism, having fatallyundermined the Revolt in the
south, now threatened to do the same in thenorth. The story of
Gents Calvinist theocracy was referred to frequently,in tones of
dark foreboding. A famous speech delivered in byBurgomaster Hooft
encapsulates much of this thinking. Occasionedby the
excommunication and imprisonment of Goosen Vogelsang, amaker of
velvet, it was a tirade against the influence of foreigners,
bywhich Hooft meant Calvinist refugees from the south, within the
DutchReformed Churches. The management of affairs, Hooft argued,
shouldbe in the hands of persons of a prudent, steady, and
peaceable dispo-sition, which qualities, I believe, prevail more
among the natives thanamong those who have come here to live from
other lands. These foreignministers and elders, trying to impose on
the natives an alien orthodoxy
Hugo Grotius, Parallelon Rerum-Publicarum Liber Tertius: de
moribus ingenioque populo-rum Atheniensium, Romanorum, Batavorum,
ed. J. Meerman, vols. (Haarlem, ), vol. , p. . See also Christian
Gellinek, Hugo Grotius (Boston, ), pp. ; E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier,
Grotius, Hooft and the Writing of History in the DutchRepublic, in
A.C. Duke and C.A. Tamse (eds.), Britain and the Netherlands, vol.
:Clios Mirror. Historiography in Britain and the Netherlands
(Zutphen, ), pp. ;H. Kampinga, De opvattingen over onze oudere
vaderlandsche geschiedenis bij de Hollandschehistorici der XVIe en
XVIIe eeuw (The Hague, ), pp. , , , , .
Benjamin J. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines. Confession and
Community in Utrecht, (Oxford, ), pp. ; Christine Jane Kooi, The
Reformed Community ofLeiden, , PhD thesis, YaleUniversity (),
especially pp. ; Joke Spaans,Haarlem na de Reformatie. Stedelijke
cultuur en kerkelijk leven, (The Hague,), p. .
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Benjamin J. Kaplan
and, more importantly, an alien demand for orthodoxy, show that
theydo not know the nature of the land and its people; Hollanders,
declaredHooft, are accustomed, like the Bereans, to examine
Scripture forthemselves. Hooft ignored the fact that few of the
Reformed Churchesin the north were ever completely dominated by
southerners, and thenonly briefly. He remained silent about the
extremism of some of his ownlandsmen.In the seventeenth century,
Remonstrants developed further this strat-
egy of branding intolerance a foreign vice and imputing an
innate tol-erance to the Dutch. In his Kerckelijcke Historie,
Johannes Wtenbogaerthailed the Revolt against Spain as a fight for
the pure Gospel and forfreedom of conscience. To these two causes,
he suggested, the Dutch hadbeen devoted since the beginning of the
Reformation and so remained especially Hollanders who, whatever
their persuasion (excepting theRoman and Genevan heretic-hunters
and -burners, and those who sup-port them), do not like the burning
of books under any circumstances.
Of course, no one needed reminding who the most outspoken
cham-pions of religious tolerance were in contemporary Holland. In
effect,Wtenbogaert was claiming the Dutch character to be
inherentlyRemonstrant in its religious sensibility. His narrative
of the Reformationbolstered such claims by highlighting the
continuity between his ownpartys beliefs and those of the first
Dutch reformers.
Other Remonstrant authors adopted the same strategic use of
histor-ical narrative, but located the origins of Dutch
Protestantism not in thes, as didWtenbogaert, but earlier, with
Erasmus of Rotterdam. It wasGrotius who, in his Ordinum Hollandiae
ac Westfrisiae Pietas (), firstmade the case for the broad
popularity of Erasmian piety in the Habs-burg Netherlands; he who
first represented the Remonstrants as the heirsof this
Netherlandish tradition, tracing a continuous chain of
influencesfrom the great Christian humanist, via the so-called
Libertines of thelate sixteenth century, to his own party. As has
been shown, the facts
Brandt, Historie der Reformatie, vol. , pp. , . Joannes
Wtenbogaert, Kerckelijcke Historie, Vervattende verscheyden
Gedenckwaerdigesaeken, In de Christenheyt voorgevallen, van Het
Jaer vier hondert af, tot in het Jaer sestienhondert ende
negentien. Voornamentlijck in dese Geunieerde Provincien
(Rotterdam, ),p. .
This paragraph is indebted to the insights of Charles H. Parker,
To the Attentive, Non-partisan Reader. The Appeal to History and
National Identity in the Religious Disputesof the
Seventeenth-Century Netherlands, Sixteenth Century Journal (), .Cf.
also D. Nauta, De Reformatie in Nederland in de historiografie, in
P.A.M. Geurtsand A.E.M. Janssen (eds.), Geschiedschrijving in
Nederland, vol. : Geschiedbeoefening(The Hague, ), p. .
HugoGrotius,OrdinumHollandiae acWestfrisiae Pietas, ed. Edwin
Rabbie (Leiden, ),p. .
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Dutch religious tolerance: celebration and revision
of the matter were much more complicated. Erasmus influence in
theNetherlands was as diffuse as it was pervasive, and the
inclination to viewethical behaviour as the essence of Christianity
did not necessarily owe itsinspiration to him. Dirck Coornhert,
Hubert Duifhuis, Caspar Coolhaes,and other religious leaders known
as Libertines were inspired by spiritu-alist and Protestant
teachings at least as much as by humanist ones. AndJacob Arminius
certainly did not derive from Erasmus his position
onpredestination. By constructing retrospectively such a line of
influence,however, Grotius gave his own religious party a venerable
genealogy. As anative Hollander, uniquely eminent scholar, and
champion of a purifiedChristianity, Erasmus was the perfect
father-figure for a religious move-ment intent on portraying itself
as autochthonous, popular, and distinctlyDutch. Gerard Brandts
Historie der Reformatie stands as a masterfulelaboration of the
same historical schema. It represents Erasmus notjust as a bona
fide Reformer, but as the wisest and most importantin all Europe:
This man led freedom into the Christian church / . . . /A
Rotterdammer teaches the world Reformation. For Brandt, as
forGrotius, the historic popularity of Erasmus in the Netherlands
impliedthat the Remonstrant faith had the sympathy of the Dutch
people and thereligious tolerance by which it survived their
support. By Brandts day, italso conveyed a message about the
legitimacy of the political patrons oftolerance, the pro-States,
anti-Orangist party. Remonstrant viewpointsdominated Dutch
historiography to the end of the Republic and even
G.H.M. Posthumus Meyjes, De doorwerking van de Moderne Devotie
met name bijde Remonstranten, in P. Bange et al. (eds.), De
doorwerking van de Moderne Devotie.Windesheim (Hilversum, ), pp. ;
M.E.H.N. Mout, Limits andDebates. A Comparative View of Dutch
Toleration in the Sixteenth and EarlySeventeenth Centuries, in C.
Berkvens-Stevelinck, J. Israel, and G.H.M. PosthumusMeyjes (eds.),
The Emergence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic (Leiden/New
York/Cologne, ), pp. ; Benjamin J. Kaplan, Hubert Duifhuis and the
Nature ofDutch Libertinism, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis (), ;
Kaplan, Calvinists andLibertines, chapter ; Bruce Mansfield,
Phoenix of His Age. Interpretations of Erasmus c. (Toronto, ),
chapter ; J.C.H. Blom and C.J. Misset, Een
onvervalschteNederlandsche geest. Enkele historiografische
kanttekeningen bij het concept van eennationaal-gereformeerde
richting, in E.K. Grootes and J. den Haan (eds.), Geschiede-nis
godsdienst letterkunde. Opstellen aangeboden aan dr. S.B.J.
Zilverberg (Roden, ),pp. ; Carl Bangs, Arminius. A Study in the
Dutch Reformation (Grand Rapids, MI,), pp. et seq.
Deez heeft de vrijheit in de Christen kerk geleidt / . . . / Een
Rotterdammer leerdtde werelt Reformeren: Brandt, Historie der
Reformatie, vol. , caption to the portraitof Erasmus, between pp.
and . Cf. Peter Burke, The Politics of ReformationHistory: Burnet
and Brandt, in A.C. Duke and C.A. Tamse (eds.), Britain and
theNetherlands, vol. :Clios Mirror. Historiography in Britain and
the Netherlands (Zutphen,), pp. ; S.B.J. Zilverberg, Gerard Brandt
als kerkhistoricus,Nederlands Archiefvoor Kerkgeschiedenis (), .
The historical schema of Remonstrant historianPhilip van Limborch
was essentially the same; cf. Pieter Jacobus Barnouw, Philippus
vanLimborch (The Hague, ), pp. , .
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Benjamin J. Kaplan
beyond, thanks partly to the influence of the Collegiant Jan
WagenaarsVaderlandsche Historie ().
Proclaiming themselves the heirs of the original Dutch
Reformationand the bearers of a genuinely Dutch Protestantism,
Remonstrants foundit natural to pray not just for their own welfare
but for that of the entireDutch fatherland. According to Peter van
Rooden, the Remonstrantswere the first group of dissenters to
celebrate the national days of fast-ing, prayer, and thanksgiving
(bededagen) decreed by the States-General,adopting the custom as
early as . Remonstrant ministers like SimonEpiscopius proclaimed
that God had bestowed his blessing on the DutchRepublic and allowed
it to prosper as a reward for the religious toler-ance practised by
its government. By the end of the seventeenth century,Mennonite and
Lutheran congregations commonly celebrated the sameoccasions with
similar prayers. In the eighteenth century, the
differentdenominations even competed to display the greatest
patriotism. All ofthem attributed the special divine status of the
land in part to its tolerance,which allowed their churches to
function.
That hundreds of foreigners who visited the Republic remarked on
itsreligious tolerance is well known; indeed, by the late
seventeenth centurythe Netherlands clearly stood for tolerance in
the minds of foreigners,just as it does today. From the s, if not
earlier, the itinerary of foreigntourists conventionally included a
sampling of churches and synagogues;guidebooks, a genre that
developed later in the century, pointed them tothe same. Like
modern tourists, visitors took aesthetic pleasure in the artand
architecture; by attending services they satisfied what we would
callan anthropological interest in foreign customs and rituals
(those of theJews and Quakers exercised a special fascination,
accounts suggest); and,like todays tourist in the red light
district, some of them also deriveda thrill from exposure to things
forbidden at home. Savoured or con-demned, religious pluralism
featured as a standard topos in their travel ac-counts, which, in
this regard as in others, tended to conflate the Republicas a whole
with Holland. Indeed, based sometimes on only a quick visit
See G.J. Schutte, A Subject of Admiration and Encomium. The
History of the DutchRepublic as Interpreted by Non-Dutch Authors in
the Second Half of the EighteenthCentury, in A.C. Duke and C.A.
Tamse (eds.), Britain and the Netherlands, vol. :CliosMirror.
Historiography in Britain and theNetherlands (Zutphen, ), p. ;
L.H.M.Wessels, Jan Wagenaar (). Bijdrage tot een herwaardering, in
P.A.M. Geurtsand A.E.M. Janssen (eds.), Geschiedschrijving in
Nederland, vol. : Geschiedschrijvers(The Hague, ), pp. .
Peter van Rooden, Dissenters en bededagen. Civil religion ten
tijde van de Republiek,Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de
Geschiedenis der Nederlanden (), . Although Van Rooden suggests
that many Catholics probably celebrated the samebiddagen, it is
unclear whether they expressed (or felt) the same gratitude as did
Protestantdissenters for the nations tolerance.
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Dutch religious tolerance: celebration and revision
to Amsterdam, German accounts made sweeping generalisations
aboutDutch tolerance. In part, this was visitors seeing what they
were preparedto see and reporting back what they themselves had
read in earlier reports.C.D. van Strien has noted that English
authors of travel accounts oftenborrowed heavily from the travel
guides and earlier accounts they hadread. Such literature became a
vehicle for the circulation of stereotypes.So did the periodical
literature of the Enlightenment, which likewise re-presented the
Dutch as an especially tolerant, freedom-loving people.
It was not just foreigners, though, who defined the Dutch as
tolerant;rather, as we have seen, the definition originated among
groups withinthe Netherlands for whom it had special, partisan
meanings. If it becamepart of a more widely shared self-definition,
it was not because all theDutch were happy about this
characteristic of their society, only that theyacknowledged it and
saw it as distinctive. Nor should this sense of collec-tive
identity be equated with modern nationalism. Scholars have
amplydocumented the ambiguities of the term nation in the early
modernperiod and the continued strength of local and provincial
loyalties. As inother spheres, so in the cultural Holland had a
disproportionate influ-ence within the Republic and was able to
project aspects of its own self-definition on the larger whole.
Certain cities, like Haarlem and Gouda,consciously cultivated
reputations for tolerance; others, like Dordrechtand Groningen, did
not. Only towards the end of the eighteenth cen-tury did the notion
emerge that each political nation should comprisea single,
organically united, culturally and linguistically unique Volk.
Aproduct of Herder and German Romanticism, the equation of
nationand Volk gave new power and meaning to the notion of Dutch
religioustolerance.
Julia Bientjes, Holland und der Hollander im Urteil deutscher
Reisender (Groningen, ), especially pp. ; Bots, Tolerantie of
gecultiveerde tweedracht,; Christian Gellinek (ed.), Europas Erster
Baedeker. Filip von Zesens Amsterdam (New York, ); Marijke Meijer
Drees, Andere landen, andere mensen. De beeldvorm-ing van Holland
versus Spanje en Engeland omstreeks (The Hague, ), especiallypp. ,
; R. Murris, La Hollande et les Hollandais au XVIIe et au
XVIIIesie`cles vus par les Francais (Paris, ); C.D. van Strien,
British Travellers in Hollandduring the Stuart Period. Edward
Browne and John Locke as Tourists in the United Provinces(Leiden,
), especially pp. , , , , , ; and Madeleine vanStrien-Chardonneau,
Le voyage de Hollande: recits de voyageurs francais dans les
Provinces-Unies, (Oxford, ), pp. . See also Herman Meyer, Das Bild
desHollanders in der deutschen Literatur, in Herman Meyer, Zarte
Empirie. Studien zurLiteraturgeschichte (Stuttgart, ), pp. ; and
the new anthology, Kees van Strien,Touring the Low Countries.
Accounts of British Travellers, (Amsterdam, );Schutte, A Subject of
Admiration and Encomium , pp. .
F.M. Barnard, Herders Social and Political Thought (Oxford, );
Lewis W. Spitz,Natural Law and the Theory of History in Herder,
Journal of the History of Ideas (), .
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Benjamin J. Kaplan
According to the Romantics and their heirs, every Volk had a
uniquespirit, or character. Generally the qualities attributed in
the nineteenthcentury to the Dutch volksgeest, or volkskarakter,
were the same ones at-tributed more than two centuries earlier:
love of freedom first and fore-most, followed by virtue, tolerance,
a deep biblical piety, industry, clean-liness, chastity (among
women), and certain qualities of moderation andsteady temper
captured by the term phlegmatic and by Dutch wordsdifficult to
translate like nuchter and bedaard (against these, the most
com-monly mentioned vices were greed, drunkenness, stupidity, and
crude-ness). Explanations for these qualities to the extent that
considered oneswere offered shifted a bit more. Early modern
scholars had followed theancient Greeks in pointing to climate and
soil as their chief causes. Warmor cold, wet or dry, the
environment determined a peoples body type andcharacter. While the
Dutch, then, shared many traits with other northernpeoples,
Hollands cold and wetness, it was said, gave its dwellers
specialqualities of soul and of mind. In the nineteenth century,
the great lib-eral historian Robert Fruin raised two others forces
to a level equal withenvironment: race and social conditions. By
the first he meant partic-ularly to distinguish the Germanic from
the Roman (that is, romance-language-speaking) volksaard; the
latter referred to a peoples economicactivities. Commerce, dominant
in the Netherlands, demands freedomof movement; it cannot suffer to
be regulated or ruled and has theeffect of stimulating love of
freedom in all domains, the religious as wellas the political.
Fruin added cynically that such love did not necessarilytranslate
into liberality, a willingness to grant others the freedom
youdemand for yourself, citing as an example the way the Dutch
ruled theircolonies. But his was a dissenting opinion, and even he
did not pur-sue the thought consequently. If he had, he might well
have cited theReformation as another example. Instead, he
subscribed completely tothe Whiggish view of it as a glorious phase
in the centuries-long strugglebetween two great forces, centralised
tyranny and the spirit of civil andreligious liberty, as John
Lothrop Motley put it. Both men, along withBakhuizen van den Brink
and other liberal historians of the nineteenthcentury, projected
onto the past the liberal Protestantism of their ownage. To them,
freedom religious, civic, economic was an essential,
Grotius, Parallelon, vol. , pp. ; Meijer Drees, Andere landen,
andere mensen, espe-cially pp. , ; Kampinga,De opvattingen over
onze oudere vaderlandsche geschiede-nis, pp. . Among the
Renaissance scholars who preceded Grotius in developing
thisclimatological theory was the French political theorist Jean
Bodin, unmentioned byMeijer Drees. See the modern translation: Jean
Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehen-sion of History (New York, ),
pp. .
John Lothrop Motley, The Rise of the Dutch Republic (London, ),
p. .
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Dutch religious tolerance: celebration and revision
indivisible principle, and necessarily entailed religious
tolerance. Historywas the story of its progress.
Liberal church historians, especially members of the
Groningenschool of Protestant scholarship, applied the same
thinking more speci-fically to the course of the Dutch Reformation.
On the one hand, as anorthern Germanic people the Dutch were said
to incline naturally toProtestantism, the religion of freedom. On
the other, their unique traitswere said to give Dutch Protestantism
distinctive qualities. Bernard terHaar wrote of the Reformation in
the Netherlands that it proceeded en-tirely from the spirit of the
people [volksgeest], and took, from its earliestbeginning, an
independent course that was entirely in accord with thepeoples
character [volkskarakter]. That character was tolerant, confi-dent
in human freewill, and inclined to view sermon-on-the-mount
ethicsas the essence of Christianity. Also writing around
mid-century, PetrusHofstede de Groot portrayed Calvinism as a
belief system imposed byforeigners on the Dutch people which
disrupted and disturbed the natu-ral, genuinely Netherlandish
development of the Christian spirit here.
In the evolution of that spirit, the Groningen school assigned
to Erasmusa very special place. As Barend Glasius put it,
Erasmuss distinctive manner of thinking and acting, with respect
to the refor-mation of the church, had its basis chiefly in his
temperament and character asa Netherlander; and . . . reciprocally
the great influence which he exercised onthe supporters of
Reformation and the course of Reformation in our fatherland
Robert Fruin, Het karakter van het Nederlandsche volk, in Robert
Fruin, Verspreidegeschriften, ed. P.J. Blok, P.L. Muller, and S.
Muller, vols. (The Hague, ), vol. ,pp. (on liberality, p. ); Robert
Fruin, Het antirevolutionnaire staatsrecht vanGroen van Prinsterer
ontvouwd en beoordeeld, in Robert Fruin, Verspreide geschriften,ed.
P.J. Blok, P.L. Muller, and S. Muller, vols. (The Hague, ), vol. ,
pp. ; Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, pp. , , , and passim;
J.W. Smit, Fruinen de partijen tijdens de Republiek (Groningen, ),
especially pp. , ; JohnPaul Elliott, Protestantization in the
Northern Netherlands, a Case Study: The Classisof Dordrecht , PhD
thesis, Columbia University (), pp. ; HerbertButterfield, The Whig
Interpretation of History (London, ). While in many ways theliberal
historiography of the nineteenth century was a continuation and
development ofthe Remonstrant/Staatsgezinde historiographic school
of the Republic (represented byhistorians like Brandt, Van
Limborch, and Wagenaar), Smit shows that Fruin
departedsignificantly from this tradition in his appreciation for
centralised governmental authority.
B. Glasius and H.M.C. van Oosterzee, Galerij van Nederlandsche
geloofshelden voor deevangelie-waarheid (Tiel, ), especially pp. ;
Petrus Hofstede de Groot, DeGroninger godgeleerden in hunne
eigenaardigheid: toespraak aan zijne vroegere en tegen-woordige
leerlingen, na vervulde vijfentwintigjarige hoogleeraarsbediening
(Groningen, ),especially pp. .
Bernard ter Haar, De geschiedenis der Kerkhervorming, in
tafereelen: een leesboek ter beves-tiging der protestanten in hun
christelijk geloof (Amsterdam, ), p. .
Quoted in Nauta, De Reformatie in Nederland in de
historiografie, p. , whose treat-ment of the nineteenth-century
church historians I largely follow.
-
Benjamin J. Kaplan
seems to have resulted from the Netherlanders natural conformity
with theircountryman.
Even before Erasmus, though, came Geert Groote, Wessel Gansfort,
andthe Brothers of the Common Life; for Glasius and the others,
these menand the movement with which they were associated, the
Modern Devo-tion, expressed the first distinctly Dutch conception
of Christendom andwere the true originators of the Dutch
Reformation.
In the early twentieth century, the Leiden church historians
FredrikPijper and Johannes Lindeboom brought a greater scholarly
rigour to thestudy of the Dutch Reformation, but interpretatively
they stood directlyin the tradition of the Groningen school. To
denote the distinctly Dutchreligious movement he saw unfolding in
the sixteenth century, Pijpercoined the label national-Netherlandic
reform movement (nationaal-Nederlandse reformatorische richting),
which Lindeboom later shortenedto Netherlandic-reformist
(Nederlandse-reformatorische) or alternately tonational-Reformed
(nationaal-Gereformeerd ). Both men saw the move-ment as
essentially Erasmian in character and continuing in a straightline
of influence down to the Remonstrants. They did not
celebrateexuberantly, but they did maintain the same pantheon of
Dutch re-formers as their predecessors, which included such figures
as CornelisHoen, Anastasius Veluanus, Hubert Duifhuis, and Dirk
Coornhert.
Lindeboom described the Niederlandisch Frommigkeitstypus that
thesemen embodied as oriented towards the Bible (especially in its
originallanguages), optimistic about human nature, and somewhat
indifferent toceremonies; it strives, he said, for apostolic
simplicity and for pure be-haviour more than pure doctrine. Hendrik
Enno van Gelder continuedthe same historiographic tradition into
the s. While dropping the na-tionalist terminology, he was
unabashed in his anachronism: he explicitlypresented the same cast
of characters as the most modern of their time,
Barend Glasius, Verhandeling over Erasmus als Nederlandsch
Kerkhervormer (The Hague,), p. .
Petrus Hofstede de Groot, Johan Wessel Ganzevoort, op het
negende halve eeuwfeest zijnergeboorte herdacht (Groningen, ); Ter
Haar, De geschiedenis der Kerkhervorming, intafereelen; B. ter
Haar, W. Moll, and E.B. Swalue (eds.), Geschiedenis der
christelijke kerkin Nederland, in tafereelen, vols. (Amsterdam,
).
Fredrik Pijper, Geestelijke stroomingen in Nederland voor de
opkomst van het remon-strantisme, in G.J. Heering (ed.), De
remonstranten, gedenkboek bij het -jarig bestaander Remonstrantsche
Broederschap (Leiden, ), pp. ; Fredrik Pijper, Erasmus ende
Nederlandsche Reformatie (Leiden, ); Johannes Lindeboom, De
confessioneele on-twikkeling der Reformatie in de Nederlanden (The
Hague, ); Johannes Lindeboom,Erasmus Bedeutung fur die Entwicklung
des geistigen Lebens in den Niederlanden,Archiv fur
Reformationsgeschichte (), ; Nauta, De Reformatie in Nederland inde
historiografie; Blom and Misset, Een onvervalschte Nederlandsche
geest .
Lindeboom, Erasmus Bedeutung, .
-
Dutch religious tolerance: celebration and revision
unconscious precursors of liberal Protestantism and of modern
emanci-pation fromChurch supervision, conscious defenders of
tolerance, some-times even of religious freedom. InThe Two
Reformations of the SixteenthCentury (), Enno van Gelder elevated
Erasmian humanism to its ul-timate status as not just a bona fide
Reformation, but as the majorone of the sixteenth century,
exceeding the Protestant Reformation in itsradicalism and long-term
impact.
Of course, in every age there have been groups who constructed
Dutchreligious identity differently. During the Reformation, the
Calvinist min-ister Reynier Donteclock made the Hollanders out to
be natural-bornspiritualists; it was their nature and condition, he
postulated, not tomake a work of religion hence their support in
great numbers forhis foe, Coornhert. Usually, though, the different
religious partiesclaimed theDutch character to incline naturally
towards their own beliefs.The Counter-Remonstrant theologian
Jacobus Trigland implied as muchin his Kerckelycke Geschiedenissen
(), the alternate account of theReformation he offered as rebuttal
to Wtenbogaerts Kerckelijcke Historie.Catholic authors used history
similarly, not to claim that the Dutch weretolerant but to
emphasise how ancient and deeply rooted the Catholicfaith was in
their land. Such was the overarching purpose, for exam-ple, of Hugo
van Heussens Batavia Sacra, sive Res Gestae ApostolicorumVirorum,
Qui Fidem Bataviae Primi Intulerunt (). In the nineteenthcentury,
both Calvinist and Catholic historians projected on to the
pasttheir own, confessional visions of the modern Dutch nation. In
the twen-tieth century, some historians have employed a similar
essentialism toexplain the historic popularity of Anabaptism and
Mennonism in theNetherlands. Pijper viewed the sixteenth-century
Anabaptists as consti-tuting the left wing of his
national-Netherlandic Reform movement.More recently, William
Nijenhuis has declared that Anabaptism was atypically Dutch
phenomenon and that two of the [Mennonites] mostimportant
characteristics were in conformity with the Dutch
character:individualism and a morality which tended towards
legalism.
H.A. Enno van Gelder, Revolutionnaire Reformatie. De vestiging
van de Gereformeerde Kerkin de Nederlandse gewesten, gedurende de
eerste jaren van de Opstand tegen Filips II, (Amsterdam, ), pp. .
Cf. H.A. Enno van Gelder, Vrijheid en onvrijheid in deRepubliek.
Geschiedenis der vrijheid van drukpers en godsdienst van tot
(Haarlem,), especially p. ; andH.A. Enno vanGelder, Humanisten en
libertijnen, Erasmusen C.P. Hooft, Nederlands Archief voor
Kerkgeschiedenis (), , .
H.A. Enno van Gelder, The Two Reformations in the Sixteenth
Century. A Study of theReligious Aspects and Consequences of
Renaissance and Humanism (The Hague, ).
Quoted in H. Bonger, Leven en werk van Dirk Volckertsz.
Coornhert (Amsterdam, ),p. .
Pijper, Geestelijke stroomingen, pp. ; W. Nijenhuis, The Dutch
Reformation, inJ.A. Hebly (ed.), Lowland Highlights. Church and
Oecumene in the Netherlands (Kampen,
-
Benjamin J. Kaplan
It is the liberal vision ofDutch identity, though, that has
prevailed in thetwentieth century, and still circulates widely.
Some theologians continueto find meaningful the notion of a Dutch
theologische volksziel, which theyconceive of as anti-dogmatic,
humanistic, and ecumenical. More thana few specialists in religious
history continue to explain the tolerance ofthe Dutch Republic as a
product of the unique power of the Erasmianspirit in its
progenitors homeland, and/or in terms of a Low Countriestradition.
As for the most popular and widely read historians Huizinga,
Romein, Schama they all project onto their broad screensvariants of
the same vision. Even Schama sees the very soul of Dutchnational
identity as Erasmian, and while he does not credit it directly
forthe Republics tolerance, he does represent it as a unifying
force that gavepeople of all religions, from the Catholic painter
Jan Steen to the PietisticCalvinist Jacob Cats, a common ethos.
Where Schama departs from hispredecessors is that, eschewing
essentialism and teleology, he regardsDutchness not as a quality
determined by race, climate, topography, oreconomics, but as a
cultural construct, something the Dutch fashionedfor themselves in
the early years of the Republic. And indeed, that is pre-cisely
what they were doing when they defined themselves, among
otherthings, as tolerant.
Recent decades, however, have seen a reaction set in against the
cele-bration of Dutch religious tolerance; indeed, some scholars
have sug-gested theDutchRepublic was not so tolerant after all.
Jonathan Israel hasused some of the strongest language. The
outlawing of Catholicism andelevation of Reformed Protestantism as
the official faith of the Republicin the period entailed the
decisive rejection of toleration bythe Dutch regent class. What
prevailed thereafter and through the
), p. , critiqued in Otto de Jong, How Protestant are
Mennonites?, in AlastairHamilton, Sjouke Voolstra, and Piet Visser
(eds.), From Martyr to Muppy. A HistoricalIntroduction to Cultural
Assimilation Processes of a Religious Minority in the Netherlands:
TheMennonites (Amsterdam, ), p. . See the remark similar to
Nijenhuiss in Jan enAnnie Romein, De Lage Landen bij de zee
(Utrecht, ), p. .
E.g. A. van Beek, Het Nederlandse van de Nederlandse theologie,
in S.C. Dik andG.W. Muller (eds.), Het hemd is nader dan de rok.
Zes voordrachten over het eigene van deNederlandse cultuur (Assen,
), pp. .
For Erasmian spirit see e.g. Samme Zijlstra, Tgeloove is vrij.
De tolerantiediscussiein de Noordelijke Nederlanden tussen en , in
Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra (ed.),Een schijn van verdraagzaamheid.
Afwijking en tolerantie in Nederland van de zestiende eeuwtot heden
(Hilversum, ), p. ; JamesTracy, Erasmus, Coornhert and the
Acceptanceof Religious Disunity in the Body Politic. A Low
Countries Tradition?, in C. Berkvens-Stevelinck, J. Israel, and
G.H.M. Posthumus Meyjes (eds.), The Emergence of Tolerancein the
Dutch Republic (Leiden/New York/Cologne, ), pp. .
Johan Huizinga, Dutch Civilization in the Seventeenth Century
(London, ), pp. ; Romein, De Lage Landen bij de zee, pp. et seq.;
Schama, The Embarrassment ofRiches, especially pp. , . On the
modern continuation of this process of culturalconstruction, see
Van Ginkel, Op zoek naar eigenheid.
-
Dutch religious tolerance: celebration and revision
entire seventeenth century was an ambivalent semi-tolerance . .
. seethingwith tension. The case of Amsterdams Remonstrants
exemplifies whatIsrael sees more broadly as the experience of the
dissenting churches: thetolerance granted them was really, in his
view, a form of concealed intol-erance, for by confining them to a
single schuilkerk it condemned themto the status of a small and
marginalised group. Outside the General-ity Lands, Catholics, whose
number Israel believes has been exaggerated,formed inmost places an
equally small and tamedminority. In her contri-bution to this
volume, Joke Spaans suggests similarly that containment,not
tolerance, was the policy of Dutch regents towards the
non-Reformedchurches. In any event, the true test of tolerance,
according to Israel, wasnot such rival churches at all but radicals
who broke with traditionalChristianity altogether: Socinians,
deists, and especially Spinozists, whoenjoyed scant freedom of
expression and on occasion suffered direct per-secution. Only in
the eighteenth century did a genuine tolerance, inspiredby the
Enlightenment, come to prevail.Other scholars have denigrated what
tolerance did exist by impugning
its motives. Sometimes they allow a word or two or a subtly
disparag-ing tone to carry the whole weight of their judgement, as
when MarijkeGijswijt-Hofstra uses the phrase
knip-op-de-beurstolerantie. As she andothers point out, by
facilitating commerce and immigration tolerance wasimmensely
profitable. Regents saw its utility also in maintaining peaceand
civil order. Of course, the Dutch themselves advertised the
eco-nomic benefits of tolerance as early as the sixteenth century,
though theirmore sophisticated discourses tended to bundle
tolerance into a broaderpackage of advantageous freedoms. And peace
and order, it shouldbe recognised,were codewords that referred to a
specific status quowhosemaintenance was neither inevitable nor
universally desired. To point outthe interests which religious
tolerance served is only good history, but toreduce the reasons for
its practice to those interests smacks of a reduc-tionism against
which all the methodological insights of the last twentyyears
counsel. Andrew Pettegree goes to an extreme in arguing that
toler-ance was used as ruthlessly and cynically as persecution and
intoleranceto further particular political ends. To the magistrates
who promoted it,it had no value or meaning in itself; it served
merely as a weapon orparty tool in their struggle for power with
the ministers of the Reformed
Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness, and
Fall (Oxford,), pp. , , , .
MarijkeGijswijt-Hofstra, Een schijn van verdraagzaamheid,
inMarijkeGijswijt-Hofstra(ed.), Een schijn van verdraagzaamheid.
Afwijking en tolerantie in Nederland van de zestiendeeeuw tot heden
(Hilversum, ), p. .
For an early example see Van Gelderen, The Dutch Revolt, p.
xiii. De la Court, The TrueInterest and Political Maxims of the
Republic of Holland, is the classic exposition.
-
Benjamin J. Kaplan
Church. It seems highly questionable, though, whether the forces
ofintolerance were themselves always ruthless and cynical, never
mind thesupporters of tolerance, of whom a majority never served in
government.Moreover, if calls for tolerance were merely a stratagem
requiring no con-viction, one would expect them to come equally
from all who would havebenefited. Instead, the loudest, most
insistent ones came from groupswho represented tolerance as one of
their core principles: Libertines inthe earliest years of the
Republic; Collegiants, Waterlander Mennonites,and, above all,
Remonstrants later. Pettegrees revisionism would take usfrom
extreme to extreme from an acceptance of such representationsas the
whole story to a cynical dismissal of them altogether.An essay by
Gijswijt-Hofstra offers clues to why such revisionism has
taken root among historians. It forms the introduction to a
volume en-titled Een schijn van verdraagzaamheid (an appearance, or
false sem-blance, of tolerance). Gijswijt-Hofstra does not deny the
prevalence ofreligious tolerance in the Republic. She concurs,
however, with the para-doxical judgement of Ernst Kossmann that
tolerance itself is inherentlyintolerant, since in the very act of
tolerating, a dominant group defines itsown behaviour or beliefs as
normal and those of the tolerated as deviant.
In other words, tolerance comes up far short of the mark when
measuredagainst modern standards of equality and
non-discrimination. In the sec-ond place,Gijswijt-Hofstra expresses
great unease with the notion of whatshe calls de Nederlandse
tolerantie, that is, Dutch tolerance in the sin-gular, even when
limiting her consideration to the Republic. She arguesthat
religious tolerance was a product largely of extensive regional
andlocal autonomy within the Republic, and that so much variation
existedin its quality and quantity that to speak of the Republic as
tolerant isin itself misleading. This argument subtly conveys an
animus against thenationalism that the notion of Dutch tolerance
has come to embody.Finally, she criticises as excessive the sheer
amount of attention given toreligious tolerance in the Republic. In
her view, this fixation perpetuates amyth of the Dutch people as
tolerant that obscures the actual intolerancedisplayed in the
modern era, towards ethnic minorities in particular.These views
resonate strongly with values prevalent in modern culture,
especially within the academy. Multiculturalism has raised
standards ofnon-discrimination by exposing cultural biases that had
gone unnoticed;
Andrew Pettegree, The Politics of Toleration in the Free
Netherlands, , inO.P. Grell and B. Scribner (eds.), Tolerance and
Intolerance in the European Reformation(Cambridge, ), longer
quotation from p. .
Gijswijt-Hofstra, Een schijn van verdraagzaamheid, pp. . Note
that Israel andKossmann use the term tolerance differently, the
former to mean full equality andfreedom of public worship.
-
Dutch religious tolerance: celebration and revision
nationalism has yielded place to anti-nationalism, veneration of
the pastto the deconstruction of historical myths. Beginning in the
sixteenth cen-tury, a long succession of groups used the history of
religious tolerationas a vehicle through which to define and
legitimise their own identity.Distorting it through anachronism and
teleology, they shaped that his-tory into something quite
a-historical, the idea that the Dutch were bynature tolerant. That
idea partakes indeed of the mythical. Formerly itinvited
celebration; today it invites debunking. But, in debunking it,
weshould remain conscious of the distortions our own ideological
commit-ments might introduce.Misleading as it was to see in
seventeenth-century tolerance the roots
of modern liberalism, it would be equally misleading to judge it
by mod-ern standards. Ambiguous terminology makes it dangerously
easy to doso: today the phrase religious tolerance implies
religious freedom, whichwe define as a basic human right; it
entails freedom of worship, religiousspeech, and assembly, and the
legal equality of different religious groups.By contrast, until the
Enlightenment to tolerate something meant merelyto souffrir, or
grudgingly concede its existence. Tolerance, by its na-ture,
attributed a basic illegitimacy to what was being tolerated, just
asKossmann says. Thus, to cite but one example, the Discours sur la
permis-sion de liberte, written in , contrasted tolerance to
official sanction;urging that Protestants and Catholics should
remain in the liberty whichthey possess either by permission or by
connivance and tolerance, itequated tolerance precisely with that
connivence by which non-Calvinistssubsequently were able to worship
in the Republic. Adding to the confu-sion, scholars define
tolerance variously as an ideology, attitude, patternof social
behaviour, governmental policy, or legal structure. How
muchtolerance they find in theRepublic seems to depend largely on
their choiceof definition.Measuring degrees of tolerance, however,
may not be the best way
to advance historical understanding. Instead of heaping praise
or cast-ing aspersions, I would urge that we adopt, for the time
being, a more
Kossmann has pointed out the same concerning all representations
of the Dutch as aparticularly freedom-loving people. E.H. Kossmann,
Freedom in Seventeenth-CenturyDutchThought and Practice, in
Jonathan I. Israel (ed.),TheAnglo-DutchMoment. Essayson the
Glorious Revolution and its World Impact (Cambridge, ), p. .
. . .demeurent en la liberte de laquelle ou par permission ou
par connivence & toleranceils sont en possession. Quoted in
Catherine Secretan, La tolerance entre politiqueet rhetorique, in
C. Berkvens-Stevelinck, J. Israel, and G.H.M. Posthumus
Meyjes(eds.),The Emergence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic
(Leiden/NewYork/Cologne, ),pp. . Cf. Philip Benedict, Un roi, une
loi, deux foix: Parameters for the Historyof Catholic-Reformed
Co-existence in France, , in Ole Peter Grell and BobScribner
(eds.), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation
(Cambridge, ),pp. .
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Benjamin J. Kaplan
descriptive approach, and that, instead of continuing to weigh
religiousfervour against self-interest, we explore the many social
and cultural di-mensions of confessional co-existence that have
never received carefulstudy. In , Simon Groenveld argued
provocatively that Dutch soci-ety was first verzuild (columnised)
not in the late nineteenth century,as usually maintained, but in
the seventeenth. By this he meant thatDutch society, in the period
, was divided into comprehensive,largely self-contained religious
blocks, each one endogamous, with itsown norms and values,
charitable systems, educational institutions, andbusiness networks.
Groenvelds conclusions were based on scant infor-mation and
premature, to say the least. They raise, however, a host
offascinating questions. How common were religiously mixed
marriages?DidCatholics, Calvinists, andMennonites go to the same
schools? Attendeach others weddings and funerals? Read the same
books? Play the samemusic? Did they employ, do business with, give
charity to one another?How did confessional co-existence work in
practice? And how distinctivereally how unique in time and place
were the accommodations and ar-rangements by which the different
religious groups in theDutch Republicmanaged to live together? How
Dutch, in other words, was Dutch re-ligious tolerance? Ironically,
that question remains as unanswered as theothers.
Simon Groenveld,Huisgenoten des geloofs. Was de samenleving in
de Republiek der VerenigdeNederlanden verzuild? (Hilversum, ).
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3 Religious toleration in the UnitedProvinces: from case to
model
Willem Frijhoff
The Republic of the Seven United Provinces offers the rather
special caseof a state which called itself mono-confessional and
Protestant while atthe same time organising the civic community
along the lines of religioustoleration; this was sometimes from
conviction and at other times frompolitical expediency. The tension
between these two aspects of collec-tive life and its
representation confessional co-existence in a state thatclaimed to
be Calvinist explains the contrasting images of the UnitedProvinces
that we find in both contemporary and more recent literature.The
variety of solutions adopted in the different provinces, reputed to
beautonomous where religion was concerned, adds still more to the
opacityof the general picture.
Perceptions of religious diversity
Over the centuries, the Dutch Republic has forged for itself the
solidreputation of being a model of religious toleration, in the
European his-torical consciousness. However, on closer observation,
we realise thatthis reputation is based on hindsight, at a time
when there was a publiclyrecognised Church ( publieke kerk), with
its rights and privileges, flankedby confessional groups possessing
their own structure but condemned ei-ther to a secondary role or
even to near-secret worship. At the beginning,the Dutch model was
rather an a-typical solution to religious problemsthat were arising
throughout Europe in similar terms. What is more, thismodel
survived the internal evolution of the United Provinces; early
inthe second half of the seventeenth century the provinces
resolutely moved
Several of the paragraphs in this chapter have been published in
W. Frijhoff, La tolerancesans edit: la situation dans les
Provinces-Unies, in J. Delumeau (ed.), Lacceptation delautre de
lEdit de Nantes a` nos jours (Paris, ), pp. . Translated from the
Frenchby Mary Robitaille. Translation funded by the Royal
Netherlands Academy of Arts andSciences.
H. Bots, Tolerantie of gecultiveerde tweedracht? Het beeld van
de Nederlandse tole-rantie bij buitenlanders in de zeventiende en
achttiende eeuw, Bijdragen en Mededelingenbetreffende de
Geschiedenis der Nederlanden (), .
-
Willem Frijhoff
towards a confessionalisation which had proved its worth in
neighbour-ing countries. The organic link between religious
toleration and com-mercial prosperity was established as early as
in Les Delices de laHollande printed fifteen times between and ,
not to mentiontranslations by Jean-Nicolas de Parival from
Lorraine, a master of lan-guages, settled in Leiden. It became a
cliche, often repeated by latertravellers, from Basnage to
Montesquieu, from the Marquis dArgensonto Voltaire and Diderot,
even while Dutch prosperity was undergoing se-rious and lasting
setbacks. Praise for the Dutch model was then chieflyused to
criticise intolerance at home and to offer an alternative
whichseemed to have proved its worth in Holland.
Opinions can obviously diverge as to which term is the most apt
toqualify the religious pluralism that existed in Holland in the
seventeenthcentury, but the diversity itself was a unanimously
established fact, avidlycommented on by contemporaries. However,
diversity or pluralism doesnot necessarily mean toleration, which
at the very least is the tacit admis-sion of this diversity as
permissible. In fact, several degrees of tolerationcan be defined,
which cannot easily be distinguished in the modern idiom:toleration
in the active sense of the legal freedom to be different
hardlyinvolved more than freedom of conscience; toleration in the
passive senseof the term was more widespread: in other words,
connivance with whatwas not allowed (conniventie or toelating), the
non-application of legallyprescribed practice, and the will to turn
a blind eye (literally oogluikingin Dutch). It is in this passive
sense that toleration usually involved thefreedom of public
worship.
But the toleration of dissident cults could go further, provided
that theerring brethren always placed themselves in the same
spiritual fraternitywith orthodoxy. As long as the socio-Christian
order was not threatened,even militant Calvinists could put up with
certain differences of opin-ion. Gisbert Voetius (), for example,
professor of theology atUtrecht, a defender of Protestant orthodoxy
with theocratic leanings,had several dissertations written on this
subject. He made a distinctionbetween civil toleration (which
included permissio and libertas exercitii )
M. van Strien-Chardonneau, Le voyage de Hollande: recits de
voyageurs francais dans lesProvinces-Unies, (Oxford, ), pp. ; R.
Murris, La Hollande et lesHollandais au XVIIe et au XVIIIe sie`cles
vus par les Francais (Paris, ), pp. ;C.D. van Strien, British
Travellers in Holland during the Stuart Period. Edward Browne
andJohn Locke as Tourists in the United Provinces (Leiden/New
York/Cologne, ); K. vanStrien, Touring the Low Countries. Accounts
of British Travellers, (Amsterdam,); J. Bientjes, Holland und der
Hollander im Urteil deutscher Reisender ()(Groningen, ). On Parival
(c. ), see the article in the Nieuw NederlandschBiografisch
Woordenboek (Leiden, ; reprint Leiden, ), vol. , cols. .
G. Voetius, Selectae disputationes theologicae, vols. (Utrecht,
), particularly vol. (), pp. , and vol. (), p. .
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Religious toleration in the United Provinces
and ecclesiastical toleration, defined essentially as moderatio
and mutuatolerantia, verdraeghsaemheydt in the idiom of the period.
In this form,toleration was considered legitimate as long as peace,
concord, and unityamong the different Christian confessions
remained guaranteed on thebasis of mutual understanding.
People have often talked about the late appearance of the term
tolera-tion as a concept of political philosophy in the writings of
Locke (whoin rigorously divided civil society, to which one is
obliged to belongand thus forced to accept i