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De Zeventiende Eeuw. Jaargang 22 (2006)

De Zeventiende Eeuw. Jaargang 22

(2006)– [tijdschrift] Zeventiende Eeuw, De–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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Religionis ergo: The Religious Images of Early Modern Leiden
Christine Kooi

By the height of the seventeenth century the religious culture of Leiden presented to the contemporary imagination a wide variety of images. One was that of the heroic bulwark that, by God's grace, held out against the murderous tyranny of Catholic Spain. The siege of 1574 was a founding episode in what Simon Schama has called the ‘patriotic scripture’ of the Dutch Republic. Protestant chroniclers such as Jean Fruytiers described it in biblical terms of an Old Testament siege of Jerusalem, an epic contest between faith and idolatry.1 Leiden was defended and saved, the most zealous Calvinists insisted, ‘for the sake of religion’ (haec religionis ergo).2 Another image was that of Leiden the bastion of libertinism, where tolerant magistrates such as Jan van Hout prevailed over Calvinist precisians and attempted to keep the public church firmly under municipal control.3 This was the Leiden that embraced freethinkers such as Dirck Volkertsz Coornhert and Caspar Coolhaes. The association of Leiden with religious liberty was enhanced by its welcoming of refugees of all confessional stripes: Flemish Calvinists, English Separatists, and French Huguenots. Finally, there was the image of Leiden as the center of academic religion, home of the most important university in Protestant Europe, a learned center where the Reformation carried on the scholarly traditions of the Renaissance.4 This learning was a source of both scholarship and controversy. It was in this academic milieu that the most divisive dispute within early modern Calvinism - the conflict between Arminians and Gomarists - first arose. All three of these religious images were to some degree double-edged; depending on the beholder, they could be seen as positive or negative. Its heroism might seem like narrow-minded intolerance; its liberty like irreligious license; and its scholarship like quarrelsome obscurantism.

The dualistic character of early modern Leiden's religious culture was the result of two major episodes: the consistorial disputes of the late 1500s and the Arminian controversy of the early 1600s. Both of these were conflicts, one ecclesiological (the church's relationship to the polity), the other theological (the nature of salvation), that resulted in serious schisms within the city's Reformed congregation.5 At stake in both these controversies were differing visions of the nature of Leiden's reformation, where

its very identity as a Protestant city was at stake; small wonder, then, that the religious image of Leiden would also be subject to differing perceptions. Conflict seemed to lay at the very heart of the city's early modern spiritual culture.

The central event of the religious history of Leiden in the early modern period was of course the Reformation. If the expansion of woolen textile manufactures in the 1500s and 1600s established Leiden's definitive economic identity as an industrial city, then the incursion of dissident Christianity in Holland in the sixteenth century gave it its eventual Protestant character. Already in the first half of the century the city's large proletariat gained a reputation as a breeding ground for sectarian radicals such as John of Leiden, one of the leaders of the notorious Anabaptist kingdom of Münster. ‘Jantje van Leiden’ and others of his ragged and zealous ilk epitomized in the contemporary mind the evils of heresy and the mortal threat it posed.6 After the Habsburg regime suppressed Anabaptism into underground pacifism by the middle of the sixteenth century, a new generation of far more successful religious rebels arose in the form of Reformed Protestantism. The formal establishment of the Reformed Church in 1572 in Leiden, as elsewhere in Holland, was attended by violence, both iconoclastic and anticlerical.7 Attacks on churches and assaults on clergy heralded the city's official overgang from loyalism to rebellion and therefore from Catholic to Protestant. Conflict was thus inherent in the identity of Protestant Leiden from its inception; revolt and reformation went hand in hand.

Transforming Leiden into a Reformed Protestant city was consequently a difficult and protracted process. It took almost fifty years from Leiden's formal acceptance of the Reformation in 1572 before the city's ecclesiastical and political elites finally negotiated a comfortable settlement between its Reformed Church and the wider municipal society and polity. At the heart of this long dispute lay two differing conceptions of Leiden's public church: most of the city's Reformed preachers and elders envisioned an autonomous, selective household of faith which preached the Word of God and exercised godly discipline while receiving government support and sanction; the town's burgomasters, on the other hand, imagined a truly municipal church that embraced the entire civic community without distinction and which subordinated itself to magisterial authority.8 Competing images of the Reformed community of Leiden thus hampered the peaceable upbuilding of the church from the outset.

That each side was passionately dedicated to its own image of what the city's church should look like was apparent from the vehemence with which the dispute was conducted. At stake was how much freedom the public church should enjoy in governing itself, that is, what was its relationship to the larger community? Did the church transcend the city, or was the city greater than the church? The preacher Pieter Cornelisz, one of the precisian Calvinists who supported church autonomy, exhorted his congre-

gation from the pulpit in 1579 to be ‘steadfast and immovable’ in resisting magisterial encroachments on the public church, a bold act of defiance which got him suspended from his post.9 The Leiden city fathers, in turn, felt strongly enough to hire one of Holland's most learned and eloquent humanists, Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert, to argue their case for them: in a pamphlet Coornhert maintained that since the magistrates represented the entire civic community they had the obligation to superintend the Reformed church with the city walls.10 An image of the church as a godly institution counterposed an image of the church as a civic institution.

The conflict between radical Calvinists and latitudinarian regents about the nature of the city's religious identity continued into the next generation with the Arminian controversy of the early 1600s. In this later case the specific issue was soteriological rather than ecclesiological: the nature of God's predestination and election. Yet in this case again differing images of the church were in disaccord. What began as a scholarly dispute between the two theology professors Arminius and Gomarus in the University about grace and salvation quickly turned into a divisive, bitter conflict about the nature of the public church, not just in Leiden but in the entire Dutch Republic: the Gomarists or Counter-Remonstrants insisted that the church was a closed circle of the godly subject to no earthly authority, while the Arminians or Remonstrants argued for an open congregation comprising a range of opinions and subordinate to government control.11 The controversy became tangled in the political contest between the States of Holland, represented by the land's advocate Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, and the Stadholder Maurice of Nassau, a contest in which Maurice and the Counter-Remonstrants were ultimately triumphant.12 In Leiden the Counter-Remonstrant party assumed control of both the consistory and magistracy; for the first time in fifty years these two bodies were in complete accord, and the era of Leiden's ecclesiastical conflicts came to a close.13 This did not mean, however, that the Calvinist vision of the city's Reformed church triumphed as well. Reformed Leiden continued to seek magisterial support and sanction, and the regents continued to superintend the municipal church. This outcome was a compromise, resulting in a public church neither wholly autonomous nor wholly subordinate.

By the height of the seventeenth century Leiden did indeed project an image of a Reformed Protestant city, like the other major towns of Holland, but its Reformed community possessed a distinctly civic identity. Even the Counter-Remonstrant Calvinist city chronicler Jan Jansz Orlers passed over in silence the contentious history of his congregation in his description of the city's churches in his 1641 Beschrijvinge der stadt Leyden, preferring to celebrate in his panegyric Leiden's ecclesiastical splendor



illustratie
Afb. 1 Marekerk, Leiden, 2005.


rather than its spiritual disputatiousness.14 Leiden's eventual identity as Protestant city was perhaps best embodied by the construction of the Marekerk in mid-century for the new neighborhood on the city's north side. Arent van 's-Gravesande's octagonal design placed classicism in the service of Christianity, a marriage of urban aesthetics with Reformed piety. This centralized design ensured that the Word of God was preached from the pulpit into a domed and colonnaded space defined by order, harmony and proportion.15 Surely no monument better projected the image of Leiden's religious identity in this period, at least the image favored by its ruling elites.

Concomitant to these elites' view was the image of Leiden as a haven of spiritual liberty. The city's storied role in the Revolt against Spain was well known in early modern Dutch culture and was impressed by the magistrates again and again. If the most radical Calvinists in Leiden's congregation saw the siege and relief of 1573-1574 as a contest between true religion and corrupt superstition, another school of thought, that included most of the civic magistracy, interpreted the event as a struggle for liberty more generally. Haec libertatis ergo, for the sake of liberty, was their preferred motto. Part of the tyranny of Philip II, to be sure, included the suppression of religion, but political and economic freedoms were at stake as well. Thus throughout the early modern period the city government invoked and commemorated the siege to encourage civic pride and unity; every 3 October the city celebrated what it came to see as the most important event in its history with a municipal festival. Thus the image of the siege which eventually predominated was the civic one rather than the religious one:16 To be sure, this identity that the magistrates fostered was Reformed, but not the sectarian Calvinism that had so antagonized them since the 1570s. Instead they opted for a Reformed Protestant ideal that embraced rather than divided. The Remonstrants, who found themselves the target of much Calvinist animosity and perse-

cution, tried to associate with this attitude; after their ejection from the Reformed Church they appealed, in vain as it turned out, to the Leiden magistracy's historic commitment to religious liberty.17

This historic reputation in turn got the civic elite accused of ‘libertinism’ or ‘free thinking’ by the most committed Calvinists. They suspected the magistrates of insufficient devotion to the cause of reformation. In its bitterest moments the Calvinist party within Leiden suggested that the town government harbored secret papists who longed for a return to the dark days of Spain's regime.18 For these precisians ‘liberty’ meant unshackling true religion from idolatry and superstition, liberating Christian souls to preach the Gospel and to reform God's church. Their understanding of liberty therefore took on a particularly religious cast, and they feared that the Leiden magistracy's conception of liberty would all too easily shade into license.

This difference in understanding would extend also to Leiden's most prestigious institution, the university founded in 1575. From the start consistory and magistracy grappled over control over the Republic's first and most distinguished academy.19 The university's purpose was twofold: to train the future ruling elites and to prepare an educated clergy for the public church. To the Leiden magistracy the university was the city's ‘pearl’, and the burgomasters jealously guarded their curatorial oversight of the schoo1.20 This in turn frustrated orthodox Calvinist divines such as the Swiss theologian Lambertus Danaeus, appointed to teach there in 1581, who anticipated the university becoming the cradle of strict Reformed theology and scholarship.21 In fact during the first half-century or so of its existence Leiden's theology faculty remained a considerably heterodox group, so heterodox that it gave birth to the Dutch Reformed Church's gravest crisis, the Arminian controversy. Not until the national Synod of Dordrecht purged the faculty in 1619 did the university of Leiden become a home of solidly orthodox Calvinism; thus fifty years after the city's formal acceptance of the Protestant Reformation had to pass before Leiden became associated in the contemporary imagination with sound Calvinist doctrine. Like the city's Reformed church, the university of Leiden thus also found itself the victim of conflicting religious visions - did the academy serve the polity or did it serve the church?22

The Reformed Church was of course not the only confessional community in early modern Leiden. Like the rest of Holland's cities, Leiden was home to all manner of religious allegiance. Only the Reformed Church was allowed to celebrate its rites publically and to receive official support and sanction.23 But although the public church was

open to all who wished to hear the Gospel preached, the Reformed insisted on high standards for membership: profession of faith and submission to ecclesiastical discipline in belief and behavior. By 1620 these exacting criteria meant that only about one third of the civic population was church member.24

Although the public church could count on the sympathy of so-called liefhebbers to fill its pews to hear the sermons on Sundays, a large number of Leideners opted to affiliate with other confessions, in particular Catholic, Mennonite and Lutheran. Much to Reformed dismay, the civic magistracy permitted these confessional sub-groups to gather and worship privately without undue interference. The sufferance of Catholicism, which placards issued by the States of Holland officially prohibited, was especially galling to Calvinist divines. But the magistrates' commitment to liberty included freedom of conscience, which they believed prevented them from proscribing private expressions of belief. Consequently these private churches flourished as civic authorities turned a largely blind eye to their activities, so long as they did not upset public order.25 Indeed, Catholic clergy working in Leiden reported to their superiors in the Holland Mission that the city afforded them a relatively high degree of freedom. So, if one of the religious images of early modern Leiden was Protestantism, then another image was that of pluralism. Perhaps next to the sober Calvinist grandeur of the Marekerk could be placed the recessed, concealed and subdued schuilkerken architecture of the city's Lutheran or Lokhorst churches as symbols of Leiden's early modern religious culture.

Reformed Protestantism and religious tolerance placed indelible stamps on the spiritual life of the city. Travelers noted the variety of available houses of worship inside the city walls.26 The Reformed consistory was particularly vexed by the proliferation of Catholic ‘idolatry’ within the city during the seventeenth century; the flourishing of Roman Catholic priests and conventicles conflicted with its image of Leiden as a spiritually cleansed community. At the very least the public religious sphere should belong to the Reformed Church, and the consistory protested loudly and sharply whenever it learned of manifestations of Catholicism in public spaces. In 1621, for example, the consistory successfully lobbied the Gerecht to halt worship services led by the priests Marcus van den Tempel and Rombout van Medenblik inside the Elisabethsgasthuis, a municipal institution. The burgomasters summoned Van Medenblik and warned the priest not to enter ‘any public houses [eenige publycke huysen]’ in the city ever again.27 The trespassing of Catholic priests into the public arena, a breach of the Republic's placards, was a continued preoccupation of the consistory, whose shorthand term for all such transgressions was ‘impudence [stoutigheyt]’.28 It was the sheer brazenness of Catholic activ-

ity as much as its idolatrous nature that so aggravated the Leiden brethren. Such a term also implied that there was a tacit cultural and social consensus about where the various congregations could gather and worship among the crowded neighborhoods of the city. The public sphere (and where exactly this lay was never made explicit) belonged to the Reformed Church, while other confessions operated in a private, domiciled world - that indiscernible realm the magistracy called ‘conscience’. To the magistrates who governed the city the boundaries between public worship and private belief were clear enough; during an episode in 1595 when an uproar in the Lutheran congregation disturbed municipal peace, the Gerecht formulated its position thus:

[a person] may live his faith freely, enjoying the freedom of the fatherland in the stillness of his house without anyone's aggravation, but at the same time it is not permitted that three or four people set up a religion as they see fit, with offerings and use of public preaching, the celebration of sacraments, the collection and distributions of alms and further such practices.29

In other words, the magisterial vision of religious liberty extended to belief but not to practice, thought but not action. Leideners were free to believe what they wished but not to the disadvantage of municipal harmony. Toleration would always be trumped by a more paramount ideal: civic order.

In its myriad religious identities Leiden was of course no different from any other town in early modern Holland. No city in the Dutch Republic, despite its contemporary reputation for both godliness and worldliness, would present an image that was either wholly Calvinist or wholly tolerant. The religious images of early modern Leiden were as numerous as the different churches found within it. Nor were any of those images static; the city embraced an identity of Reformed Protestantism in 1572, yet its travails during the Revolt against Spain also led to its championing of liberty of belief against the coercion of conscience. Its religious identity evolved gradually in the direction of Calvinist orthodoxy during the course of the seventeenth century, especially after the upheavals of 1618-1619, but beneath this Reformed facade hid a host of confessional communities. The city's religious image in the early modern era, paradoxically, was therefore both Protestant and pluralist. The Marekerk, Pieterskerk and Hooglandse Kerk may have been safely in Reformed hands, but within their shadows a variety of religious cultures jostled each other for a place within the city's private spaces.


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