The Perimeters

1.1 The Dutch Revolt: Ideology

The Dutch Revolt opened as another chapter in the intellectual crisis that, for half a century by then, had been unravelling former concepts, structures and ideals in Europe.

Within twenty years its figurehead, the Prince of Orange, cornered by Parma's tercios and Bellarmini's Jesuits in their wake forcibly withdrew to Holland, the last bastion able and willing to make a stand. The move came at a substantial cost. As Hugo Grotius claimed with hindsight, it was tanta­mount to treason in turning Libertas into the handmaiden of Religio. It left the Politiquen at the mercy of the Kerckelycken and sacrificed Toleration to exclu­sivity. It substituted the ideal of the Una Sancta with that of the communio sanctorum and split the herd by shifting sheep from goat, selecti from reprobi. To prove the point, positions soon hardened. King Philip's repressive decrees made merchant marranos and the Portuguese House in Antwerp seek refuge in Middelburg and Amsterdam and transfer wealth. Religious and intellectual dissenters, Huguenots prominent among them, fled to Leiden and The Hague, to foster debate - and dissent.

By 1608, military deadlock and financial dire straits at both ends imposed negotiations between Brussels and The Hague. The three-pronged agenda covered the full palette of politics, economy and religion - epitomised in the catchwords Sovereignty, Indian Trade and Toleration.

The Truce of 1609 never solved the riddle. The Seven Provinces, out of the original Seventeen, that were left at odds never shared much common ground, whether regarding religious denomination, political tradition and outlook, or economic priorities. They wisely resolved upon the flimsiest of pacts of defence, harnessed in a loose confederation. Even so, the compromise proved hazardous: within the bosom of the Reformed Church the quibbling never stopped. Fundamental debate, first over religious technicalities, then, as these erupted into social turmoil, concerning the competence of secular authorities to interfere in the matter issued in vicious infighting, to wreck the aristocratic republic that Oldenbarnevelt, the foremost man of state and raison d’etat, and Hugo Grotius, his ideological aide-de-camp had in mind.

1.2 Leiden University: Calvinists and Humanists

The Remonstrant Troubles first flared up in Leiden, and not by accident. Leiden University was founded as the ideological counterpart to Louvain in the South. It was the bastion of Calvinist orthodoxy, but likewise, and in line with Erasmus's Trilingue in Louvain, the citadel of secular learning in the scep­tical tradition of Humanism. The bipartition of outlook and methods reflected the two ends Leiden served: to drill the clergy and train the political cadre and legal elite. In no domain this bifurcation manifested itself more pregnantly than in the approach to the core and kernel of Calvinist doctrine, biblical hermeneutics.

The double outlook accounts for the unique stamp and durable renown of Leiden Academia of the period. It produced Arminius and Gomarus in the Genevese tradition of Calvin and Beza, alongside Hugo Grotius's and Daniel Heinsius's learned Annotationes^[39] on the testaments in that formidable tradition that harked back to Lorenzo Valla and ran from Erasmus and Melanchthon to Scaliger, Casaubonus and Selden. Both types of research were pioneering and trendsetting, but they reflected different worlds. The dichotomy proved a predica­ment: it entailed the mesalliance of stern Calvinist orthodoxy and critical, discern­ing humanist learning.

Calvinist dons focused on scripture exclusively, mostly in an ahistoric and uncritical approach that never questioned the authenticity or self-sufficiency of divinely inspired texts.^[40] Humanist scholars, by contrast, in a critical approach that was only stiffened by the growing scepticism religious strife incurred acutely delved for the authenticity, historicity and emendation of scripture. Integrating Oriental and Hebrew studies in their quest, they projected the impressive ration­ale and formidable tools of classical philology and critical historical research^[41] on a corpus of texts ranging from Aramaic and Kabbalah to Arabic and Koran, and including the legacies of Patres and Scholastics.^[42] To them, the Decalogue held no different status from Egyptian papyri, Syrian scrolls or medieval vellums.^[43]

To typify the kind of research, one such quest was aimed at establishing world chronology and pinpoint biblical tradition within its wider context.^[44] Justus Scaliger's major aspiration in his De emendatione temporum (1583) and Thesaurus temporum (1606) that prompted Anthony Grafton's magisterial research was to reconstruct Eusebius's Chronicles of world history. Hugo Grotius, Scaliger's gifted pupil, claimed that in his (sadly lost) treatise Philarchaeus (c.

This research was never purely academic or art for art's sake: it carried emi­nent social overtones and political aspirations, reflecting the keen ambition, through �objective' philology, to identify the �unbiased' Truth, unwind the hair­splitting subtleties of clashing denominations, and put a halt to infighting. Predictably, these rebels were blasphemed by dogmatic hardliners whether Catholic, Lutheran or Calvinist.^{[47] [48] [49] [50] [51] [52] Grotius counted as �Judaizans' in some cir­cles,11 lPapizans' in other gremia.}

1.3 Biblical Hermeneutics and Hebrew Studies

Symptomatic of the twofold ambition, yet sadly adding to the separation of minds, was the bifurcation of the study of Hebrew^² split up between the departments of Divinity and Liberal Artsd³ With Divinity dons the role of Hebrew was often fairly limited: rabbinic sources and Talmud were ruled out as categorically as Patres and Church Councils. Often enough, Hebrew was disre­garded altogether and, to oblige students, scripture read in the Septuagint ver- sion.1⁴ The seminal professor of Hebrew, Johannes Drusius, faced a blatant lack of interest?⁵ Scaliger complained with Casaubonus that Leiden theologians only had a rudimentary understanding of (Biblical) Hebrew;^[53] he never took Franciscus Junius's Hebrew Grammar (1590) seriously.

Grotius, for all his veneration of his erstwhile teacher and landlord in Leiden,1^[54] held the Bible translation Junius and Tremellius (a converted Jew) had published to be far inferior to Pagninus's text.