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INTRODUCTION

Religion and Politics in the United Provinces

In June 1619 Hugo Grotius was imprisoned at Loevestein Castle, in the south of the United Provinces, sentenced to life imprisonment for treason. For any thirty-six-year-old, this would have been a grim prospect; even more so for one who had been born a member of the governing elite of the United Provinces and had already enjoyed prestige and success. The De Groots (Latinized as Grotius) were a prominent family in the Dutch city of Delft, where Hugo was born on 10 April 1583.

As regents of the city—that is, members of the oligarchy which ruled many Dutch towns, including Delft—the De Groots belonged to the social class at the core of the political, economic, and religious life of the seven northern provinces of the Netherlands that in 1579 had declared their independence from one of the superpowers of the time, the Catholic Spanish monarchy. Protestant, wealthy, and well educated, they had high stakes in the economic and military activities which were at the root of the Dutch golden age of prosperity—the overseas trade carried out by one of the most powerful economic organizations of the early modern period: the private corporation which went under the name of Dutch East India Company.

As a young and virtually unique political entity, the United Provinces in the first decades of Grotius’s life were still settling their form of government. While pondering the expediency of choosing a new monarch, the seven United Provinces assumed the status of a republic and governed themselves through a complex and not altogether clear system in which power was shared between the provincial Statholders (that is, the old royal governors now appointed by the provinces themselves) and the Estates

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(that is, the representative assemblies of the provinces), which in turn sent delegates to an Estates General of the Union at The Hague.

Inevitably, perhaps, a power struggle simmered under the brittle surface of the recently created union between forces favoring a more centralized form of government and the monarchical element of the United Provinces constitution on the one side, and forces favoring the autonomy of the provinces and the republican element on the other. This tension was compounded by economic and religious differences in the provinces, and by the fact that most of them had chosen the same Statholder, namely the Prince of Orange, effectively making of him almost a king in pectore.

These diverse forces had been bound together in their struggle to overthrow their Catholic ruler not least by their common desire to win the freedom necessary to practice their Protestant religion undisturbed. But the protestantism in question was by no means a seamless fabric, and these varying strands of religious allegiance soon became inextricably interwoven with economic and political interests. Indeed, the most important proximate cause of the appeals by Grotius (and other Dutch thinkers) to religious toleration was not primarily the clashes between Christians and non-Christians, or between Catholics and Protestants, or even between Lutherans and Calvinists, but the war which broke out between two different camps in the Reformed community, which were rooted, in turn, in different social and economic sections of the Dutch population.

In religion, the rural and less wealthy provinces tended to embrace a strict Calvinism characterized by a hard-line doctrine of predestination; in politics, they looked to the Prince of Orange as their protector and as the enforcer of the purer Calvinist confession. On the other hand, the urbanized, commercial, and richer provinces (including first and foremost Grotius’s own province of Holland) emphasized their autonomy against central government and tended to side with the followers of the Dutch Reformed theologian, Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609).

Arminius had rejected the rigid doctrine of predestination, arguing (in line with the humanistic tradition of Erasmus) that election did take into account the individual’s response to divine grace. In 1610, shortly after Arminius’s death, his position was systematized by Simon Episcopius and Jan Uytenbogaert into five “articles of remonstrance,” for which the followers of Arminius were called “Remonstrants.”

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The opposition of hard-line Dutch Calvinists against the Remonstrants was fierce and uncompromising. They called for a general synod of international Calvinism to cleanse the Dutch Reformed church of these defections from strict Calvinism and to proclaim their own views as official orthodoxy. The principle of church authority—thrown out through the door by the Protestant Reformation in favor of sola Scriptura—was coming back through the window in order to settle this intra-Calvinist dispute arising from the vexed question of what in fact Scripture taught on issues such as election and predestination.

Grotius grew up in the midst of this political and religious unrest. He was educated in the humanist tradition which the new University of Leiden had deeply institutionalized and come to exemplify, gained a doctorate in law in 1598 from the University of Orléans, and soon distinguished himself for his exceptional rhetorical gifts and extraordinary erudition. A brilliant political and diplomatic career seemed certain when the young prodigy was enlisted as adviser to Johann van Oldenbarnevelt (1547–1619), the de facto prime minister of the United Provinces. Instead, this close association with the political and religious program of Oldenbarnevelt led Grotius to his prison cell in Loevestein Castle.

Supporting Oldenbarnevelt’s efforts to protect the Remonstrants, Grotius called for toleration of religious views diverging from strict Calvinism and opposed the convocation of the synod demanded by hard-line Calvinists. The call for toleration and religious freedom on the part of a religious group which stands in danger of being outlawed is not in itself surprising. In Grotius, however, this appeal was part of a broader, coherent religious vision which sought to overcome divisions among Christians on the basis of that very principle of sola Scriptura which had been one of the original leitmotifs of the Protestant Reformation. Following in particular the teaching of Franciscus Junius senior (1545–1602), Grotius embraced the doctrine of fundamental and nonfundamental articles of faith. All fundamental articles of faith necessary to salvation were clearly contained in Scripture.¹ All issues not explicitly determined by Scripture, instead of being established as necessary dogmas by church

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authority, should be considered as adiafora: that is, as “indifferent” matters, or matters of opinion and free interpretation.

In this power struggle, Oldenbarnevelt’s party was routed. In July 1617, Prince Maurice of Orange declared himself firmly on the side of the counter-Remonstrants. In August 1618, he arrested Oldenbarnevelt and his associates on charges of high treason. Strict Calvinists likewise succeeded in their efforts to call a general synod of Reformed churches, which met in Dort (Dordrecht) from 13 November 1618 to 9 May 1619 and resulted in a comprehensive condemnation of Remonstrant doctrines. Oldenbarnevelt was beheaded on 13 May 1619; Grotius received a sentence of life imprisonment. After several months under arrest at The Hague, he settled into his prospective lifetime’s incarceration at Loevestein Castle, devoting himself to study and writing.

De Veritate Religionis Christianae

His time as a prisoner was extremely productive: he returned to the study of jurisprudence, meditated on moral philosophy (translating into Latin ethical excerpts from Greek poets and dramatists), and resumed his earlier writing on theology. It was at Loevestein that the first version of his work on the truth of the Christian religion was written in the form of a Dutch poem, Bewijs van den waren godsdienst (“Proof of the True Religion”).² In March 1621, however, with the help of his wife, he escaped from prison. Eventually he reached Paris, where he began life in exile under the protection of friends and, in due course, of the French king.

The Bewijs van den waren godsdienst was published in 1622. In 1627 it was followed by the appearance in Leiden and Paris of a Latin book which, under the title Sensus librorum sex, quos pro veritate religionis Christianae Batavice scripsit Hugo Grotius, reworked and recast in prose the themes covered in the Dutch poem. This little book with the cumbersome title was the first edition of De Veritate Religionis Christianae, a work destined to become a world-famous treatise advocating the truth

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of the Christian religion.³ The second edition, bearing the simplified title De Veritate Religionis Christianae, was published in Leiden in 1629.

Written in a plain and direct language for his countrymen and “especially Seamen, that they might have an Opportunity to employ that Time which in long Voyages lies upon their Hands, and is usually thrown away,”⁴ this short work aimed to confirm to those who came into contact with pagans, Muslims, and Jews that the Christian religion was the true revealed religion. In addition to “fortifying” the beliefs of Grotius’s countrymen, the treatise was also intended for missionary purposes, namely for convincing non-Christians that “the Christian Religion recommends itself above all others” and “it self is most true and certain.”⁵

Grotius’s intention to target a readership of seamen was not as implausible as it might appear at first glance, if one recalls that the first version of Grotius’s apology was not only in the vernacular but also in verse, to add pleasure to the reading and to aid retention in the memory. Seamen were, of course, central to the Dutch Republic’s standing as the greatest commercial country of the age: it dominated the Baltic trade, which furnished western Europe with many of its basic staples, and through the Dutch East India Company, the Dutch had displaced the Portuguese in the more exotic and prestigious (if less profitable) trade with India and the Far East.

A work aimed both at fortifying the Christian faith of those who were increasingly confronted with alternative and often competing systems of beliefs, and at gaining converts to Christianity through peaceful means of persuasion, was highly topical not only for genuine religious reasons but also for the political, social, and economic stability of the United Provinces. That Grotius was encouraged to prepare a Latin version indicates that an international readership more educated than the average sailor also appreciated his agile compendium of arguments in support of the Christian religion.

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Originality and philosophical sophistication were not in fact Grotius’s main concern. It has rightly been observed that the arguments presented by Grotius can be traced quite closely to existing literature⁶ and tend to fall short of the argumentative rigor found in other classical theological and philosophical works. Grotius’s genius lay not in new or more philosophically sophisticated proofs (which would have been unintelligible to most readers, let alone the average sailor) but in selecting, organizing, and presenting in clear and compelling language arguments which could be easily followed and understood.

Like the original Dutch poem, De Veritate was divided into six books. The first three contained positive arguments for the truth of the Christian religion; the remaining three offered comparisons with paganism, Judaism, and Islam designed to display their inferiority. The key argumentative strategy was “to show the Reasonableness of believing and embracing the Christian Religion”⁷ based on three considerations: its agreement with the conclusions of natural reason concerning the existence of God and his attributes; the authenticity and reliability of Scripture; and the morally excellent teaching contained especially in the New Testament. Accordingly, the first book offered some of the traditional proofs of the existence of God; a discussion of his attributes; and a response to some classical objections to the existence of an omnipotent, completely good, and provident God in the face of so much evil in the world.

The second book turned from natural theology to the Christian revelation, defending the truth of the historical facts on which Christianity rested, that is, the life and scandalous death of Jesus of Nazareth. Such an ignominious death and the ensuing persecutions would normally have meant the end of a sect. Amazingly, Grotius argued, Christianity instead spread and was embraced by “very many” men “of good Judgment, and of no small Learning,” who acknowledged that reports of Jesus’s miracles were “true, and founded upon sufficient Testimony” and that “some of the Works of Christ were such as seem to declare God himself to be the Author of them.”⁸ After this class of arguments “drawn from Matters

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of Fact,” Grotius turned to “those which are drawn from the Nature of the Doctrine,”⁹ that is, to the moral superiority of its commandments.

The third book focused on philological and historical considerations aiming to establish the authenticity, reliability, and lack of significant corruption of biblical texts, with special regard to the New Testament.

In 1640 a new Latin edition of De Veritate appeared, in which Grotius had added a formidable apparatus of learned notes designed to support the main text’s arguments by referring to a vast array of ancient, patristic, medieval, and contemporary sources. Here the author’s exceptional humanistic erudition flooded the entire text of De Veritate. Although the arguments in the body of the work remained unchanged, Grotius’s convenient little book was thereby transformed into a treatise which even the most determined sailor who did not happen to be an accomplished humanist would have found difficult to digest.

Success and Polemics

With or without notes, De Veritate received a remarkably warm welcome throughout the international Christian community of almost all parties. As one of the early translators of Grotius’s work, John Clarke, wrote, “this Piece of Grotius” has met in the world with “general Acceptation.”¹⁰ Its success can only be described as overwhelming. Already before Grotius’s death, in 1645, ten Latin, one German, one English, and two French editions had appeared. This was, however, only the tip of an iceberg. By the middle of the nineteenth century there had appeared sixty-four editions in Latin, seven in German, forty-five in English, eight in French, seven in Dutch, four in Scandinavian languages, three in Welsh, one in Hungarian, one in Polish, and one in Italian, plus six in Oriental languages, clearly meant as missionary tools.

The one dissonant voice in this choir of praise was that of Grotius’s old enemies, the hard-line Calvinists who had condemned the Remonstrants and zealously continued to attack them as, among other things, crypto-Socinians. Among this group in particular, Socinianism was at the time

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almost synonymous with heresy. More specifically, the movement (which derived its name from its Italian founder, Faustus Socinus) denied the dogma of the Trinity—and therefore the divinity of Jesus Christ—on two main grounds: first, in its view, the Trinitarian doctrine was against reason; and second, being irrational, the dogma of the Trinity could not be (and indeed was not) contained in Scripture.

The charge of Socinianism was routinely thrown at the Remonstrants for their minimalist attitude toward dogmas and their emphasis on Scripture as the sole source of the articles of faith that Christians should be required to embrace. It was not long before this accusation fell upon Grotius as well, and De Veritate was branded as leaning toward Islam and Socinianism.¹¹ To the modern, untutored eye, the charge of favoring Islam might appear quite extravagant directed at a work which devotes an entire book to showing in sometimes even disturbingly firm terms the superiority of Christianity to Islam. But in the eyes of the anti-Remonstrant Calvinists who attacked Grotius, this charge was united with that of Socinianism and was grounded in the fact that both Socinians and Muslims denied the distinctive dogma of the Christian revelation, the Trinity, a dogma conspicuous for its absence from De Veritate.

Grotius tried his best not to be dragged into the ensuing polemic but felt compelled to explain himself to his friends. His line of defense was clear. De Veritate, as befitted a work addressed not only to Christians but also to non-Christians, was not the place to discuss the doctrine of the Trinity. This was a central truth unique to Christian revelation which could not be reached by natural reason. Attempts to prove the Trinity by means of rational arguments or through reference to pre-Christian authors, such as Plato and the neo-Platonists, were misguided, in Grotius’s view, since Scripture and only Scripture was the source of revealed truths.¹²

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In De Veritate he had taken people as far in the knowledge of God as was possible on the basis of natural reason, then focused on proving the authenticity and reliability of the Scriptures, in which doctrines surpassing the natural light of reason were revealed.¹³ As Grotius pointed out, the (Catholic) doctors of the Sorbonne who had examined De Veritate before its publication, and who certainly were not known for their dogmatic leniency, had failed to detect any shadow of Socinianism. Instead, the Sorbonne doctors had probably found Grotius quite in line with the teaching of Thomas Aquinas, who argued that natural reason provided the praeambula fidei but was incapable of reaching supernatural truths, for which revelation was needed.

Interestingly, De Veritate sailed through the Spanish and Venetian Inquisitions almost without a scratch, and the prominent Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597–1679) was reported to have kept it constantly to hand, in case an opportunity for evangelizing should present itself. The Lutherans also greeted the work with approval, as testified by Christoph Köler’s German translation of 1631.¹⁴ In short, in this particular instance those who vociferously denounced the absence of dogmas were the representatives, not of the Roman church so often stigmatized for its zeal for rigid doctrinal definitions, but of a branch of Reformed Protestantism which regarded itself as an unyielding defender of Calvinist orthodoxy.

As for Grotius, the approach to the Christian religion chosen in De Veritate was perfectly in line with his long-standing view that division among Christians could and should be overcome on the basis of the distinction between fundamental and nonfundamental articles of faith coupled with the crucial claim that all fundamental articles are explicitly contained in Scripture. For him as for others, this claim also provided a solid criterion for religious toleration. In De Veritate, instead of embarking on an inappropriate dogmatic treatment of what Christians should

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believe, he had limited himself to proving the reliability and authenticity of Scripture—the only voice to which one was required to listen. Once its divine inspiration had been established, one had only to let it speak to discover all fundamental Christian truths.

It is remarkable that a man who wrote the first version of this work in a state of life imprisonment as a consequence (at least in a significant measure) of religious divisions should spend no ink to condemn in it the views of his opponents. Despite the high personal price he paid for the intestine fights within the Reformed camp, in De Veritate he rose above them to focus on what he regarded as the agreement among Christians “in the principal things.” The opportunity for reestablishing unity among Christians, in other words, was provided by precisely “those Commands” by which the Christian religion recommended itself above other faiths as well. The certainty of Christianity was confirmed by the very fact that “those who[,] being highly enraged against one another, have fought for Matter of Disagreement, never ventured to go so far as to deny, that these were the Precepts of Christ.”¹⁵

Christianity was thus presented in De Veritate as an eminently reasonable religion, though in a manner quite different from Grotius’s deistic successors: Christianity was reasonable, in Grotius’s view, not because there was not room within it for supernatural truths such as the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and miracles (in fact, miracles did heavy duty within his argumentation), but because it agreed with what natural reason could discover about God, it contained nothing irrational or contradictory, it was based on texts the authenticity and reliability of which could be proved, and (finally and most importantly) it displayed and advocated superior moral standards.

Le Clerc’s Additions

Among the posthumous Latin editions of De Veritate, the most important and influential were those of Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736). Born and raised in Geneva and transplanted successively to Grenoble and Saumur in France and for six months also to London, Le Clerc settled in

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Amsterdam where (from 1684) he taught philosophy, literature, and Hebrew in the Remonstrant seminary. At the death of his close friend, the leading Dutch Remonstrant theologian Philip v. Limborch (1633–1712), Le Clerc was also appointed to the chair of church history. Befriended by John Locke (whom he met during the English thinker’s exile in the United Provinces between 1683 and 1688), he established himself as a key figure of the European republic of letters through his work as a biblical scholar, theologian, and especially as editor of one of the learned journals central to contemporary intellectual life, the Bibliothèque Universelle et Historique (26 volumes, 1686–1694, 1718), continued as Bibliothèque Choisie (28 volumes, 1703–1713, 1718), and then Bibliothèque Ancienne et Moderne (29 volumes, 1714–1727, 1730).

Le Clerc’s first edition of Grotius’s De Veritate Religionis Christianae, published in 1709, supplemented the original work in three respects: it corrected numerous mistakes, especially in quotations from ancient sources; it provided a series of notes in addition to those of Grotius; and it subjoined an additional book to the six of Grotius’s original work. The new book was devoted to the question of which Christian church should be chosen, and in it Le Clerc advanced two main conclusions which were in line with Grotius’s views but were not as explicit in De Veritate as Le Clerc thought necessary. First, nothing else ought to be imposed on Christians aside from what they can gather from the New Testament; and second, the purest Christian doctrine is professed by those who propose as necessary to be believed only those things on which Christians agree.

Le Clerc’s edition, including his “seventh book,” was translated into English in 1711 by John Clarke senior (1682–1757). Brother of Samuel Clarke (1675–1729) and an accomplished mathematician, John Clarke was a clergyman who served as chaplain to the king and (from 1728) as dean of Salisbury.

In 1718 Le Clerc published a second, revised edition, on the basis of which Clarke published his second English edition in 1719, followed by a third in 1729.

The third and definitive Latin edition by Le Clerc appeared in The Hague in 1724. It included an “eighth book” in which Le Clerc argued against those who “imagine it to be quite indifferent, what Party of Christians we really join ourselves with, or indeed only profess to join ourselves

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with.”¹⁶ While “we ought not hastily to condemn” those who have different religious beliefs, the hypocrisy of those who join a certain religious denomination against their “own Conscience” is never permissible.¹⁷ The 1724 edition served as a basis for Clarke’s fourth English edition, which appeared in London in 1743 and included Le Clerc’s “eighth book.”

Especially in the English-speaking world, the two books added by Le Clerc became classic documents in their own right, alongside the original work by Grotius. Testimony to this are the seventeen reprints of Clarke’s definitive English edition of 1743. In its preface, Clarke endorsed the view, shared by Grotius and Le Clerc, that the way to end fighting among Christians was to return to sola Scriptura, in which all the articles of faith necessary for salvation are clearly contained: “the only Remedy that can heal these Divisions amongst Christians … is, in one Word, making the Scripture the only Rule of Faith. Whatever is necessary for a Christian to believe, in order to everlasting Salvation, is there declared.”¹⁸