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Lux in Tenebris Lucet Illuminating Rational-Spiritualism and the Metaphor of Inner Light in a Quaker - Collegiant Dispute (1657-1662)

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Lux in Tenebris Lucet Illuminating Rational-Spiritualism and the Metaphor of Inner Light in a Quaker - Collegiant Dispute (1657-1662) Lux in Tenebris Lucet Illuminating rational-spiritualism and the metaphor of inner light in a Quaker - Collegiant dispute (1657-1662) Martin van Wattingen 0153346 University of Amsterdam Master Thesis, Research MA Theology & Religious Studies (June, 2017) Thesis Supervisor: dr. H. J. Borsje Second Reader: Prof. dr. L. van Bunge Table of Contents Introduction ………………………………………………………………… 3 Reseach Questions and Methodology ……….……………………… 9 Enlightenment Historiography ……….………………………………. 12 From Kant to postmodernism …………………………..…………. 12 Jonathan Israel and the Radical Enlightenment …….………….. 17 Historical Background ……..………………………………………….. 22 The Dutch Collegiants ……………………………………………… 25 Early Quakers in Holland ….………………………………………. 30 The Pamplet War ……..…………………………………………………. 34 William Ames, Het Ligt dat in de duisternisse schijnt …..………. 37 Pieter Balling, Het licht op den kandelaar ……………………….. 61 Conclusion ……..…………………………………………………………. 70 Bibliography …….………………………………………………………… 73 1 Preface and Acknowledgments The thesis before you was my final proof of competence for obtaining the Master of Arts (MA) degree from the University of Amsterdam. It was written to fulfill the graduation requirements and, at the same time, it is the end result of my time as a Research-master student and concludes my education. According to historian Jan Wagenaar, the first Collegiants in Amsterdam held their meetings in a house on the corner of the Rokin and the Kalfsvelsteeg, merely a ‘stone’s throw’ away from the university library (Special Collections) where I have spend so much time completing my research. Coming from a long line of ‘Amsterdammers,’ the city’s history has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. Gradually, I started to develop a special interest in the intellectual ‘climate’ in the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic. It would not take long before Spinoza and the Collegiants ‘crossed my path.’ When you say Spinoza or Collegiants, the name Wiep van Bunge will follow suit. Our introduction was, understandably, a humbling and inspirational experience. It has been an honor that professor van Bunge has co-read my thesis. My supervisor, dr. Jacqueline Borsje, who was responsible for that introduction, has to be credited for the completion of my thesis in general. At a crucial moment she gave me the much-needed motivational speech and ‘push’ in the right direction. I am gratefull for both their time and dedication. I also wish to express my sincere gratitude to my family, friends and girlfriend for their love, trust, support and encouragement when I needed it the most. And last, but definitely not least, my parents and my sister deserve particular appreciation. The completion of this project would not have been accomplished without your confidence and endless patience. 2 Introduction In 1662, an extremely controversial pamphlet circled among the intellectual elite in Amsterdam, the largest and most densely populated city in the Dutch Republic. Its ambiguous title, Het licht op den kandelaar. Dienende, tot opmerkinge van de voornaamste dingen; in het boekje genaamt De verborgentheden van het rijke Ghodts, &c. tegens Galenus Abrahamsz., en zijn Toestemmers &c. verhandelt en beschreven door William Ames (The Light on the Candlestick. Serving to Remark on the Foremost Things in the Book Called The Mysteries of God’s Kingdom, against Galenus Abrahamsz. and his Supporters by William Ames), engendered substantial controversy concerning the author and its purpose. Although Het licht was published anonymously and “printed for the author” (Gedrukt voor den Autheur), it is now fairly certain that the author was Pieter Balling, a close friend of Spinoza who frequently visited the meetings of a specific group of protestant dissenters in the Dutch Republic, who were called Collegiants. Over time, however, the tract had been attributed to others as well. Especially William Ames, whose name is displayed prominently on the title page, has often been regarded as the author. Yet Ames was not the author. Instead, he wrote The Mysteries of God’s Kingdom in which he responded to Galenus Abrahamsz. de Haan, a minister of the Mennonite congregation in Amsterdam and leader of the local branch of Collegiants in the capital. But the ambiguity can only partly be attributed to the puzzling title. The theme of Balling’s pamphlet was the divine light that guides humankind, a topic Ames had written many times about. In fact, Ames’ oeuvre consisted primarily of publications with similar titles. As one of the first Quaker missionaries in Holland, he had often felt the need to defend the doctrine of the inner light, which was so central to their message. By the time Het licht op den kandelaar was issued, Quaker fascination with the inner light had become the main source of some heated arguments and a protracted “pamphlet war” between the two groups. Light has been a common metaphor for truth, knowledge, the life force, (spiritual) insight, individual development, etc. since ancient times. Not only did light bear a religious connotation in its biblical expression of Christ as the divine light and the ‘gift’ of wisdom bestowed from above, as stressed, for instance, by Augustine in his theory of divine illumination. But it was also, as 3 knowledge of the real, associated with the ancient philosophy of Plato. In the Republic Plato had Socrates draw an analogy between the sun, which illuminates the visible realm, and the Idea of the Good illuminating the intelligible realm. Even Aristotle, who objected that knowledge ultimately derives from the senses and sense perception is connected with the soul, claimed that the soul needs an inner light to perceive. A century and a half of humanist scholarship, Arthur Herman observes, had shown Enlightenment historians and philosophers how much Christianity’s evolution owed to a fusion of Jewish and Neo-Platonic ideas. But over the course of the eighteenth century, the understanding Enlightenment thinkers had of the cultural and historical separation between them and the ‘ancients’ made Plato, not Aristotle, “the big loser in all this.”1 Most influential was John Locke, who, in Aristotelian fashion, dismantled Plato’s worldview and political philosophy by stressing the importance of perception and experience. Clearly mirroring Aristotle’s tabula rasa, Locke rejected the principle of innate ideas and emphasized that our mind is blank slate waiting to be written on. This contradiction, Herman argues, between Plato’s worldview and the view of reality Enlightenment thinkers inherited from Aristotle and Locke, was the main reason the Enlightenment “disliked Plato so much.”2 In her elaborate examination of how the Enlightenment’s construal of its ‘dark’ past served as a foil against which its own defining narratives were formulated, Alicia Montoya suggests that, as a rhetorical construct, the ‘medieval’ determined, to some extent, the eighteenth-century perception of modernity.3 According to Montoya, the Enlightenment’s foundational rhetoric renegotiated the meaning of the ancient metaphor of light to create a polemic with the dark and ignorant Middle Ages. Italian humanism in the Renaissance had reversed biblical dualism and the Augustinian metaphor of Christian light versus pagan darkness. Francesco Petrarch in particular had presented the Middle Ages as a dark period that emerged after the golden Age of Antiquity.4 Late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers deviated 1 A. Herman, The Cave and the Light: Plato versus Aristotle, and the struggle for the soul of Western Civilization (New York, 2013), pp. 362-366. 2 Ibid. p. 365. 3 A. Montoya, Medievalist Enlightenment: From Charles Perrault to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Cambridge, 2013). 4 Ibid. pp. 43-46. Cf. J. Tunturi, “Darkness as a Metaphor in the Historiography of the Enlightenment,” in: Approaching Religion, 1 (2011), pp. 20-25. See also T. 4 from Christianity’s authoritative discourse and denounced the doctrine of divine light descending on the believer. Instead, following Descartes’ lumen naturale, they started to propagate the idea of the natural light of reason as a source of human knowledge and truth. “In its most common eighteenth- century use,” Montoya states, “the metaphor of light was assigned primarily a theological meaning, foregrounding perceived oppositions between light as reason and light as revelation.”5 According to Andrew Fix, an expert in Collegiant studies, light retained its central role in European religious and philosophical thought until it began to acquire a new, more secular usage in the late seventeenth century.6 In his Prophecy and Reason, Fix propounds the thesis that the changing view of the individual conscience among a specific group of Protestant dissenters in the Dutch Republic, who were called Collegiants, provides a perfect example of the secularizing and rationalizing trends occurring all over early modern Europe. In his view, “a trend toward secularism and rationalism developed out of religious despair and accelerated as the wars of religion drew to a close in 1648.”7 The decades following the Treaty of Westphalia witnessed the significant process of intellectual evolution that transformed the (older) spiritual notion of inner light into the natural light of human reason. In fact, Fix states, “nothing more clearly illustrates the role of Collegiant thought in the monumental seventeenth-century intellectual transition from faith to reason than the changing conception of the inner light found in Collegiant writings.”8 His argument is that the movement
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