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THE TRUTH OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION
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NATURAL LAW AND ENLIGHTENMENT CLASSICS
Knud Haakonssen
General Editor
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This book is published by Liberty Fund, Inc., a foundation established to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.
The cuneiform inscription that serves as our logo and as a design element in Liberty Fund books is the earliest-known written appearance of the word “freedom” (amagi), or “liberty.” It is taken from a clay document written about 2300 B.C. in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash.
Introduction, editorial apparatus, and index © 2012 by Liberty Fund, Inc.
Cover art: Portrait of Hugo de Groot by Michiel van Mierevelt, 1608; oil on panel; collection of Historical Museum Rotterdam, on loan from the Van der Mandele Stichting. Reproduced by permission.
This eBook edition published in 2013.
eBook ISBNs:
Kindle 978-1-61487-629-8
E-PUB 978-1-61487-255-9
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CONTENTS
The Truth of the Christian Religion, with Jean Le Clerc’s Notes and Additions
Authors and Works Cited by Grotius and Le Clerc
Index
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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