Biblical Philology and Hermeneutical Debate in the Dutch Republic in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jetze Touber
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Conflicting Interests ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Held Back

Spinoza’s time was rife with conflicts. Historians tend to structure these by grouping two opposing forces: progressive Cartesio-Cocceian-liberals versus conservative Aristotelian-Voetian-Orangists. Moderately enlightened progressives, so the story goes, endorsed notions such as human dignity, toleration, freedom of opinion, but shied away from radicalism, held back by the conservative counterforce. Yet the drift was supposed to be inevitably towards the Enlightenment. This chapter tries to capture theological conflicts in the Dutch Republic of the Early Enlightenment in a triangular scheme, that covers a wider range of conflicting interests. Its corners are constituted by ‘dogmatism’ (Dordrecht orthodoxy), ‘scripturalism’ (Cocceianism), and ‘rationalism’ (theology inspired by Cartesianism, Spinozism, or any other brand of new philosophy). Dogmatics and rationalists battled in terms of philosophy, whereas the scripturalists and their respective opponents fought each other rather in the field of biblical scholarship. This multilateral conflict within Dutch Calvinism made the ideal of a unified church untenable.

scholarly journals Making the States’ Translation (1637): Orthodox Calvinist Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Republic

2017 ◽  
Vol 110 (3) ◽  
pp. 440-463
Author(s):  
Dirk van Miert
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Past ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of

In the study of the history of biblical scholarship, there has been a tendency among historians to emphasize biblical philology as a force which, together with the new philosophy and the new science of the seventeenth century, caused the erosion of universal scriptural authority from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. A case in point is Jonathan Israel's impressive account of how biblical criticism in the hands of Spinoza paved the way for the Enlightenment. Others who have argued for a post-Spinozist rise of biblical criticism include Frank Manuel, Adam Sutcliffe, and Travis Frampton. These scholars have built upon longer standing interpretations such as those of Hugh Trevor-Roper and Paul Hazard. However, scholars in the past two decades such as Anthony Grafton, Scott Mandelbrote and Jean-Louis Quantin have altered the picture of an exegetical revolution inaugurated by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Spinoza (1632–1677), and Richard Simon (1638–1712). These heterodox philosophers in fact relied on philological research that had been largely developed in the first half of the seventeenth century. Moreover, such research was carried out by scholars who had no subversive agenda. This is to say that the importance attached to a historical and philological approach to the biblical text had a cross-confessional appeal, not just a radical-political one.

Court, Salon and Republic of Letters

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Randall
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Political World ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The World ◽  
The Republic ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
The Ideal

The humanist educational project to educate the elite of Western Europe produced as one of its dizzy successes the application of conversation to the speech and behavior of nobleman at court. This, the development of the ideal of the courtier, took conversation from the leisurely retreat from the ancient political world to the courtly heart of the Renaissance political world. The salons of seventeenth-century France further transformed the conversational tradition of the court: in principle, the conversation of the salons began quietly to set itself to rival the world of oratory, to address itself to the same worldly subject matter. The Republic of Letters provided an alternate social matrix for sermo, scholarly rather than courtly—and one which migrated away from its Ciceronian roots towards the mode of Baylean critique. Where the courtly and scholarly traditions of sermo acted as complementary modes during the Renaissance, the increasing scope of salonnier conversation and the increasing abandonment of sermo by the Republic of Letters set them at odds with one another in the opening of the Enlightenment. Both now harbored universalizing ambitions, which would set these sibling modes to fierce conflict.

Intellectual Change before the Enlightenment: Scotland, the Netherlands and the Reception of Cartesian Thought, 1650–1700

2015 ◽  
Vol 94 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alasdair Raffe
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
United Provinces

This article argues that intellectual historians' fascination with a narrative of the emerging Scottish enlightenment has led to a neglect of ideas that did not shape enlightenment culture. As a contribution to a less teleological intellectual history of Scotland, the article examines the reception of the philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650). Cartesian thought enjoyed a brief period of popularity from the 1670s to the 1690s but appeared outdated by the mid-eighteenth century. Debates about Cartesianism illustrate the ways in which late seventeenth-century Scottish intellectual life was conditioned by the rivalry between presbyterians and episcopalians, and by fears that new philosophy would undermine christianity. Moreover, the reception of Cartesian thought exemplifies intellectual connections between Scotland and the Netherlands. Not only did Descartes' philosophy win its first supporters in the United Provinces, but the Dutch Republic also provided the arguments employed by the main Scottish critics of Cartesianism. In this period the Netherlands was both a source of philosophical innovation and of conservative reaction to intellectual change.

The Emancipation of Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1590-1670

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk van Miert
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Textual Criticism ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
External Development

This book argues that the application of tools, developed in the study of ancient Greek and Latin authors, to the Bible aimed to stabilize the biblical text but had the unintentional effect that the text grew more and more unstable. Spinoza capitalized on this tradition in his notorious Theological-Political Treatise, published in the Dutch Republic in 1670. But the foundations on which his radical biblical scholarship is built were laid by Reformed philologists who started from the hermeneutical assumption that philology was the maidservant of reformed dogma. On this basis, they pushed biblical scholarship to the centre of historical studies during the first half of the seventeenth century. The monograph shows how Jacob Arminius, Franciscus Gomarus, the translators and revisers of the States’ Translation (the Dutch Authorized Version), Daniel Heinsius, Hugo Grotius, Claude Saumaise, Isaac de La Peyrère, and Isaac Vossius all drew on techniques developed by classical scholars of Renaissance humanism, notably Joseph Scaliger, who devoted themselves to the study of manuscripts, (oriental) languages, and ancient history. These scholars’ accomplishments in textual criticism, the analysis of languages, and the reconstruction of political and cultural historical contexts are assessed and compared, and it is demonstrated that their methods were closely linked. Apart from this internal analysis, the book considers the external development of biblical philology. It became the cutting-edge science of the day and grew from an arcane research specialism into a fashionable science for scholars who wanted to share in the fame of being a universal critic.

Theological Education At the Dutch Universities in the Seventeenth Century: Four Professors On Their Ideal of the Curriculum

2005 ◽  
Vol 85 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-132
Author(s):  
F.G.M. Broeyer
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Theological Education ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Academic Teaching ◽  
Critical Attitude ◽  
High Level ◽  
Dutch Universities ◽  
The Ideal

AbstractDuring the seventeenth century the academic teaching of theology in the Dutch Republic was on a high level. The universities had first-rate professors at their disposal for the subjects taught at the time. In this article some treatises on theological education are discussed. The authors are the professors Antonius Walaeus, Gisbertus Voetius, Franciscus Burman, and Samuel Maresius. Walaeus, Voetius, and Burman wrote about the content of the curriculum and the ideal way of studying theology. They differ in outlook. Burman even advocates a critical attitude based upon a Cartesian principle. Precisely because of unorthodox ideas gaining ground Maresius voiced somber reflections on an assumed decline of the Dutch faculties of theology.

The Ideal Hero: A Seventeenth-Century Choice

1965 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-65
Author(s):  
F. K. Dawson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Ideal

Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660-1710

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jetze Touber
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Dutch Golden Age

This book investigates the biblical criticism of Spinoza from the perspective of the Dutch Reformed society in which the philosopher lived and worked. It focusses on philological investigation of the Bible: its words, its language, and the historical context in which it originated. The book charts contested issues of biblical philology in mainstream Dutch Calvinism, to determine whether Spinoza’s work on the Bible had any bearing on the Reformed understanding of the way society should engage with Scripture. Spinoza has received massive attention, both inside and outside academia. His unconventional interpretation of the Old Testament passages has been examined repeatedly over the decades. So has that of fellow ‘radicals’ (rationalists, radicals, deists, libertines, enthusiasts), against the backdrop of a society that is assumed to have been hostile, overwhelmed, static, and uniform. This book inverts this perspective and looks at how the Dutch Republic digested biblical philology and biblical criticism, including that of Spinoza. It takes into account the highly neglected area of the Reformed ministry and theology of the Dutch Golden Age. The result is that Dutch ecclesiastical history, up until now the preserve of the partisan scholarship of confessionalized church historians, is brought into dialogue with Early Modern intellectual currents. This book concludes that Spinoza, rather than simply pushing biblical scholarship in the direction of modernity, acted in an indirect way upon ongoing debates in Dutch society, shifting trends in those debates, but not always in the same direction, and not always equally profoundly, at all times, on all levels.

scholarly journals The Jesuitesses in the Bookshop: Catholic Lay Sisters’ Participation in the Dutch Book Trade, 1650–1750

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 163-184
Author(s):  
Elise Watson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
Dutch Book ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Institutional Critique ◽  
Public Criticism

The institutional Catholic Church in seventeenth-century Amsterdam relied on the work of inspired women who lived under an informal religious rule and called themselves ‘spiritual daughters’. Once the States of Holland banned all public exercise of Catholicism, spiritual daughters leveraged the ambiguity of their religious status to pursue unique roles in their communities as catechists, booksellers and enthusiastic consumers of print. However, their lack of a formal order caused consternation among their Catholic confessors. It also disturbed Reformed authorities in their communities, who branded them ‘Jesuitesses’. Whilst many scholars have documented this tension between inspired daughter and institutional critique, it has yet to be contextualized fully within the literary culture of the Dutch Republic. This article suggests that due to the de-institutionalized status of the spiritual daughters and the discursive print culture that surrounded them, public criticism replaced direct censure by Catholic and Reformed authorities as the primary impediment to their inspired work.

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