Enter Secularisation Heinsius

heinsius: enter secularisation 93 Chapter three HeiNSiuS: ENter SeculariSatioN 1. Vita Brevis Daniel Heinsius (1580-1655) is known today in some seldom-over- lapping circles of intellectual historians for his biblical criticism, or for his literary influence. His emblem books, love poetry and moralising epigrams had a substantial impact on the genre. His drama theory and vernacular poetry profoundly influenced German poetry through Martin Opitz, English literature through Ben Jonson, Milton and Dryden, and practically every seventeenth-century French playwright and literary theorist.1 Although Diderot ranks him with Lipsius, Scioppius and Gataker as one ‘des restaurateurs de la Philosophie sto- icienne parmi les modernes,’ today there is no discussion of the political relevance of Heinsius’s thought.2 This may be because he wrote no single great statement on law or politics. But placing him in the context of other Leiden thinkers allows us to reread his texts with a sharper eye, and reinstate him as a prominent seculariser and political theorist. Religious warfare defined Heinsius’s early life. Born in Ghent in 1580, his parents fled with the child to Zeeland from the invading Spanish armies, then to England for a short while, and back to Flushing in Zeeland. Flushing then was nominally held by the English Crown as one of three ‘cautionary towns’, securities for Elizabeth’s loan to the young republic. In 1596 Heinsius enrolled at the University of Fra- neker, moved to Leiden two years later, and quickly became one of Scaliger’s most highly prized students and friends.3 1 Sellin, Heinsius Kern, Influence. 2 Encyclopédie, s.v. ‘Stoicisme,’ 15.525-33, at 532-3. Christopher Brooke points out that this illustrious roll-call was an approving inversion of what was originally a hitlist, developed by Buddeus and Brucker as part of an anti-Spinozist drive to equate Stoics with atheists, against syncretists who ‘tried to equate Stoic fate with divine Providence.’ Brooke, “How the Stoics,” 401-2. 3 It was an honour for Heinsius that Scaliger chose his panegyric to preface the Thesaurus temporum According to Heinsius, Scaliger died in his arms. See his letter to Casaubon, Leiden, 28 March, 1609. Heinsius, Scaligeri Epistolae, Ep. 453. Kern, Influence, 50-1 cites Scaliger’s last letter to Heinsius, and a part of Heinsius’s funeral 94 chapter three Volumes of original poetry in Latin are among his earliest publica- tions: the Iambi in 1602, Elegiae in 1603, and the Poemata of 1605. His Emblemata amatoria, in Dutch and Latin, first appeared in 1604. Although the genre of ‘visual epigrams’ was well established by then (most notably by Alciato’s Emblematum liber, published first in 1531), Heinsius’s verve and originality turned his book into a runaway best- seller, inspiring scores of imitators over the next two centuries. His collected Latin orations were first printed in 1609, and expanded ver- sions were republished throughout his life and long after his death. His Auriacus, sive Libertas Saucia (William of Orange, or Liberty Wounded), a patriotic play about the assassination of William the Silent, was performed and first published in 1602. His close Leiden friend and associate, the historian Petrus Scriverius, edited the first collection of Heinsius’s Dutch poetry in 1615 as the Nederduytsche poemata. Many enlarged editions followed. In addition to original compositions, the young Heinsius was also a prolific editor of texts. In 1603 he published Hesiod and the bucolic poets. In 1610 alone he brought out editions of Nonnus, Horace, Seneca and Aristotle’s Poetics, all of key importance to the Leiden project, as we will see later. His rise at Leiden was accordingly mete- oric. In 1603 he was appointed professor of poetics, in 1605 professor of Greek, in 1612 he took the chair of politics, and in 1613 that of history. In 1607 he became the fourth librarian of the University, a coveted position that put him at the centre of institutional affairs. Albeit the political significance of his writings is now forgotten, one can detect Leiden secularising techniques at work in almost every- thing he wrote before 1617, and more often than not in writings after Dordt. What makes Heinsius especially fascinating in the context of Leiden secularisation is the variety of subjects, fields and genres to which he managed to adapt the Scaligerian method, namely the appli- cation of historical critice as the touch-stone of all statements, religious or otherwise. A famous instance is Heinsius’s discovery, expounded in several books discussed below, that certain linguistic turns in the New Testament came not from divine inspiration, but from the Hellenistic dialect of predominantly Alexandrian Jews. Similarly to Scaliger’s debunking of Christian stories through histori- oration for Scaliger. De Jonge, “Daniel Heinsius.” For more details on Heinsius’s life see Becker-Cantarino, Heinsius, and her introduction to the N ederduytsche poemata. Sellin, Heinsius..

Load more