Amsterdam

by Russell Shorto

  The turmoil roiling Europe was due in large part to the convergence of two historic forces. The Reformation had fractured the unity that had existed under Roman Catholicism. People yearned for a new underlying unity. Many if not most of those who practiced the new critical thinking did so not to try to debunk Christianity, or religion itself, but to reconcile faith with the new philosophy. Christianity was a religion rooted in historical events; its founding figure was a man-God who had lived in a definable period, so that its foundational texts recorded events that took place alongside other historical events. The goal of many thinkers was to weed out inconsistency in the Bible, to reconcile its supernatural elements with natural philosophy, to solve problems of translation and untangle confused historical time lines: in short, to make the Bible make sense. The longing for this was palpable. And the debates about how to do it, or whether it was the correct strategy at all, raged, in large part, in Amsterdam’s cafés and in journals and books that came off the city’s presses. Its printers were willing to give voice to all sides.

  One of the most vital questions was whether a state should tolerate churches other than its established one. The debate on this question reached a crisis in 1685, when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, a ruling that had allowed Huguenots—Protestant French—to practice their faith. Protestantism was once again banned in France. As Protestant schools and churches were shut down, fifty thousand French Calvinists—including much of France’s intellectual elite—migrated en masse to Dutch cities. The affair simultaneously reenriched Amsterdam’s intellectual life and made the city the center of a renewed debate on the question of tolerance. The newcomers were alive to the fact that the tolerance the city practiced, which not only allowed them to settle but also gave them the means to disseminate their ideas, was itself a model of what they wanted for their home countries. Jean Le Clerc, who emigrated from Geneva and became one of the founders of the scholarly journal (he published three French-language journals in Amsterdam), was eager to acknowledge his debt. “May this Town ever remain a safe Sanctuary to the Innocent, and by it’s generous Carriage draw down upon it’s self the Praises and Blessings of all those who are Lovers of Virtue,” he wrote at one point. And at another: “I confess had [I] lived any where else, [I] could not possibly have profited [my] Contemporaries so much by the printing of so many Volumes, because so many Books are no where so easily publish’d, and sold, as at Amsterdam.”

  The Huguenot émigrés took root in Amsterdam and helped to spread the city’s liberalism. Maybe the most useful part of the recent recategorization of the Enlightenment is the idea of dividing this complex force into two streams: a moderate and a radical Enlightenment. The moderate thinkers were those who believed it necessary to make the new philosophy match up with Christian theology. They wanted not to tear down the existing foundations of society but to strengthen them. The radicals believed there was no choice but to rebuild from the ground up, on secular, rational lines. Each strain had its impassioned proponents, who did battle with one another for a century, in journals and books and from church pulpits. And the two strains each climaxed in a world-historic event. The French Revolution, which was a total revolution, against both the church and the monarchy, was the outcome of the radical Enlightenment. The patriot army of the American Revolution, which threw off a monarchy and made way for government to be rebuilt on a democratic ideal, did not ransack churches; the Enlightenment channel of Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin followed a more moderate course. To this day descendants of the radical Enlightenment equate religion with superstition and believe that religion is a vestige of Western society’s childhood that it has yet to outgrow, while people who believe that faith and reason are mutually beneficial are under the influence of the moderate Enlightenment.

  Both of these branches of the so-called High Enlightenment have roots going back to the Dutch Enlightenment of the seventeenth century. Seeds of both lines of thought sprouted in Amsterdam’s literary scene of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In many cases, figures of moderate bent were seen as dangerously radical. Jean Frederic Bernard was born in Provence; his father was a Huguenot pastor, and after Louis XIV’s proclamation made it illegal for Huguenots to practice their religion in France, the family traveled to Amsterdam, where they registered as members of the Walloon Church (the same church where Joris Rapalje and Catalina Trico were married). Bernard became a bookseller and publisher. His abiding conviction, which surely was based in part on personal experience as well as his reading of Spinoza, was that when religion was a public matter, war and turmoil ensued. Therefore, he argued in the first book he published, which he himself wrote, religion should be a strictly private matter: a tame-sounding pronouncement today but it marked him as dangerous. Bernard’s magnum opus, produced together with an engraver named Bernard Picart, a fellow Huguenot who had also fled to Amsterdam, was a seven-volume overview of the world’s religions, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde. It took the two men fourteen years and encompassed 3,000 pages and 250 illustrations. The engravings were intricate and the text was dispassionate. And it was revolutionary, for it applied one of the tools of critical thought—comparative analysis—to religion. It set varieties of Christian worship alongside “pagan” practices. A Chinese funeral procession, a marriage on Java, a praying Turk, the Catholic ceremony of confirmation, Incas worshiping the sun: all of these appeared together with scenes of what would have seemed to most readers ordinary piety: a funeral in Amsterdam, a service in the Walloon Church. The book was widely criticized for lowering Christianity to the level of pagan worship, but over time (and shorn of some of its radical Spinozist language) it took root. It went through many printings and became one element of the long, slow advance of the idea of religious tolerance.

  One of Bernard’s more radical colleagues—also a Huguenot refugee—was Charles Levier, who in 1719 published what was possibly the most scandalous book of the early eighteenth century: La Vie et l’esprit de Spinoza. It was actually two manuscripts. The first part was the first-ever biography of Spinoza, the publication of which indicated that, more than forty years after Spinoza’s death, he was an icon to radicals and freethinkers. The second part—the “spirit” of Spinoza—would eventually be retitled and go on to have a long life of dismaying the righteous. Its later title was The Treatise of the Three Imposters; the three imposters were the founders of the three great Western religions. The text—which appropriated a whole chunk of Spinoza’s Ethics and mashed it together with writings by other radical thinkers, all done by an anonymous editor for maximum shock value—argued that Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed had deceived their followers and established their religions not as spiritual resources but as power bases. Levier published the book on behalf of a group of Dutch-based radicals; their purpose in putting out this incendiary text was, as one scholar puts it, “to construct and disseminate the first portable philosophical compendium of free-thought, at once anti-Christian and anti-absolutist.” The little volume rankled and raged its way down the eighteenth century and became a kind of intellectual setup for the French Revolution: an aggressive screed that attacked the whole established order. Those behind it signaled their homage to Spinoza on the title page of its 1735 reprint by giving the same false place and fictional house of publication (Hamburg, Chez Henry Hunrath) that Spinoza had invented for his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.

  Through such works, as well as his own, Spinoza influenced both radical and moderate thinkers in the eighteenth century. One of his prime overall contributions to Western history, as Israel puts it, was “his denial of Satan and of devils in general.” That may seem a bit narrow as an overall contribution, but it is in a sense the wedge between the medieval and the modern. Devils, hell, and sin, and for that matter miracles and heaven: these were seen by freethinkers as invented devices for controlling people, for keeping them chained to the will of the established authorities. The new philosophers promoted common sense and reason
in ordinary life. Theologians saw at once what was at stake: if a system such as what Spinoza advocated took hold, society would not be rooted in church and monarchy; instead, people would insist that politics have as their guiding principles things like the promotion of individual life, individual liberty, and the pursuit of individual happiness.

  The decades from the late 1600s to the early 1700s saw a remarkable change take place in the European debate. Where disagreement and even war had raged between different Christian factions, now the split was between faith and secularism. The whole of society shifted to the left, as it were. By the mid-1700s there were entire libraries of literature promoting science and secularism. And Spinoza’s Tractatus remained a central text. In France the book was scary enough that police in Paris raided bookshops in search of copies. In Germany, Johann Christian Edelmann, one of the leading thinkers of the 1740s, said the Tractatus was the cause of his whole reconsideration of the Bible: “I went over and over again what I read, … used my own reason, asked the advice of other authors who had written either in favour of or against the reputation of the Bible. The more I searched the more I found what an ill ground it was.” Like many others, he followed Spinoza in doing a historical-critical analysis of biblical texts and tried to tease the spirituality at their root from later political overlays. One of his arguments was that the Greek “Logos”—the term that the Gospel of John uses to characterize God’s essence—was originally translated as “ratio,” reason, but that this was changed to “word” in the third century to suit the Church’s political agenda, since any individual could follow his or her reason, but following the word of God suggested obeying the word of the Church. By the early nineteenth century, the excommunicated Jew of Amsterdam had become so much a part of the foundation of German thought that Gotthold Lessing, one of the major figures of the German Enlightenment, responding to a reference to Spinoza’s and various other philosophies in a debate, could remark drily, “There is no other philosophy than the philosophy of Spinoza.”

  The importance of Spinoza to both the radical and moderate Enlightenment strains is reflected in the continued division in how people think of him. For many even today he is the father of modern atheism, yet the German philosopher-poet Novalis called him “God-intoxicated” and Bertrand Russell noted that “his whole philosophy is dominated by the idea of God.” The editor of a recent collection of essays on his philosophy observes that Spinoza has been considered the hero of “Conservatism, Liberalism, Materialism, Idealism, Secularism, Federalism,” and other isms. That range, and its geographic root, is what strikes me. For many of the ideas that went into this philosophy that had such influence across the whole spectrum of modern liberal thought and that are so much a part of who we are sprouted amid the canals, winding streets, and gable-topped houses of the city in which the philosopher came of age.

  In September of 1683 an Englishman sailed across the North Sea and took up residence in Amsterdam. Before he left England, he had made out a will and burned many of his papers, for spies were watching and he feared for his safety. He was fifty-one years old, a man whose interests extended from philosophy to medicine to science to government, but as yet he had published nothing and was unknown outside English elite circles. During and after his five years in Amsterdam and travels to other Dutch cities, where he would be influenced and encouraged by the international cast of thinkers he met there, he would write and publish what would become three hallmark texts of the Enlightenment, on democratic government, tolerance, and epistemology, books that would earn him the unofficial title of father of classical liberalism and that would shape modern political thought, especially in England and the United States. His name was John Locke.

  In England, Charles II was ailing and his death would mean that the monarchy would pass to his brother James, who had converted to Catholicism. The idea of a Catholic’s becoming King of England was so anathema that a vast movement had come into being to try to avert it. Extremists in the movement had gone so far as to devise a plot to kill both Charles and James. Although Locke seems not to have been involved, he was associated with people who were, and he was known to be an ardent republican. Thus, once the plot unraveled, he decided to flee.

  Like thousands before and after him, then, Locke came to Amsterdam for refuge. The winter in which he arrived was one of the coldest in memory; the canals froze over, people took to their ice skates. Quite a few exotic animals, which the city as an emporium of the world regularly housed, didn’t survive. It happened that a lion froze to death, whereupon men of science advertised a public dissection of the rare beast. Locke attended this event, and there a man named Philip van Limborch introduced himself. Van Limborch was a minister and a member of a group of scientists and theologians from a variety of backgrounds—French Huguenots, English separatists, and Dutch Remonstrants—who were committed to finding common ground between faith and the new philosophy and who were devoted above all to articulating a policy of religious tolerance. They exactly suited Locke’s intellectual tastes, and Locke became a fixture at their weekly salons—so much that, in his fastidious way, he drew up rules, in Latin, by which the meetings should be run.

  A main topic of these discussions was the Arminian-Gomarian split in the Dutch Reformed Church. This, Locke learned, was a defining feature of Dutch society over the course of the golden age. The founding protagonists of this debate had both been leading theologians. Jacobus Arminius and his followers preached a philosophy of tolerance of other faiths. They reasoned that the sufferings that the Dutch people had endured under the Spanish Inquisition showed that it was wrong for a government to push its religiously fueled will onto a people—that, in effect, no one should claim to know the mind of God. Arminius’s contemporary Franciscus Goma-rus had led the orthodox wing in insisting that the knowledge that theirs was the one true faith compelled them to reject other faiths and that to do otherwise was to invite Satan into society. The Arminians, or Remonstrants (who were so called after their petition, or remonstrance, to the States of Holland and West Friesland concerning reforms to the faith), became identified with the left wing of Dutch politics over most of the course of the century, and the Gomarians with the right wing.

  The men Locke found himself in cozy company with were the leading lights of the Remonstrant movement. Under their sway he read books by Dutch writers, including Hugo Grotius, the legal scholar who is considered the founder of the concept of international law, and Spinoza. What Locke most appreciated from them, however, were their own moderate views on reforming society. Religious tolerance—what exactly it meant, what form it should take, what the stakes were in this war of ideas that their society was immersed in—was their primary interest. Van Limborch was himself a Remonstrant minister. He wrote a history of the Arminian-Gomarian controversy and also the first full history of the Inquisition, which he meant as a warning of the dangers of religious intolerance.

  Van Limborch’s right hand was Jean Le Clerc, the Swiss émigré who had founded three French-language scholarly journals in Amsterdam. Le Clerc was likewise a Remonstrant cleric, and a particularly impassioned believer in using the media to press the circle’s ideas out into the world. It was he who began to urge Locke to publish. Thus it was that some of the great English philosopher’s first published works appeared in Amsterdam, in French, for Le Clerc’s Bibliothèque Universelle.

  There was a natural connection between religious tolerance and republicanism, and the Dutch thinkers were aware of Locke’s political views. Locke had already written much of the manuscript of what would later be published as Two Treatises of Government. This he had written in England and kept secret (to avoid detection he seems to have referred to the work in discussions as De Morbo Gallico, “The French Disease,” since he and his republican friends used the common term for syphilis as a cover for the “disease” of autocratic government). In the midst of what many felt was a buildup of autocratic power around the king, Locke constructed a two-part political document. The firs
t was a refutation of the then common argument that the king’s absolute power was justified by mankind’s descent from Adam and transferred from generation to generation via a father’s absolute power over his children. Locke dismantled this tortured logic and put forth the proposition that humans are born not into a state of subjection but rather a “state of nature” that is also a “state of liberty.” In the second treatise, he moved from the proposition that “all men are by nature equal” to the argument that a community is held together by “the consent of every individual” and that government is legitimized by “the consent of the people.”

  These issues became even more topical early in 1685 when Charles II died and his brother James became king of England. James moved quickly to amass power, increasing the size of the army and adjourning Parliament, and also installed Catholics in important positions and otherwise acted to favor Catholicism over Protestantism. In France, at virtually the same time, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes. Van Limborch urged Locke to write and publish something on what was now the burning question of religious tolerance. Before he started work on the topic, Locke was able to get some perspective from those in his circle. He read the manuscript of Van Limborch’s own book on Christianity and tolerance, which summarized and added to the tradition of theological thinking on religious tolerance that had developed from the time of the Spanish Inquisition in the Dutch provinces through the golden age. Regarding the orthodox who insisted on intolerance vis-à-vis other Christian denominations, Van Limborch wrote (in the English translation that appeared in 1702):

  ’Tis necessary that they pronounce all, who err even in the least matters, to be guilty of eternal Damnation. They confess, if we mind the Rule of God’s Word, that all Error is damnable; since whoever preaches any other Gospel than what is preach’d, tho it were an Angel from Heaven, is Anathema, or Accursed, and every Error is in their account a new Gospel: And thus they are under a necessity of damning all who dissent from them; which is not only repugnant to the very Genius of Christianity, but likewise barbarous and inhuman. ’Tis damning Men by whole-sale, and throwing the very Fathers of the Primitive Church, those Glorious Lights of the Christian Religion, into Hell, since they (as well as other Men) were not without their Failings and Errors in some lesser Matters. And what barbarous Usage is this?