From Modesty to Mediocrity: Regulating Public Dispute, 1670-1840: The Case of Dutch Divines

Charity and peace for all mankind are usually ranged among the characteristic aspects of the message put forward in the sacred texts on which the Christian religion is based. Yet the official interpreters of these texts (theologians and ecclesiastical office holders) in Western countries of the early modern period are often associated with exactly the opposite: with hostility, antagonism, belligerence—in short, with what was at the time called odium theologicum or theological hatred. This term of opprobrium was usually bestowed on theologians by the objects of their attack and by other immediate adversaries, by critics of ecclesiastical influence (often jurists and philosophers; sometimes physicians), and by the representatives of suppressed religious minorities. One would of course do well not to accept such accusations at face value. Nevertheless, it is a notion that crops up regularly in early modern intellectual and religious history that theologians, especially those who belonged to the state church and held orthodox doctrinal views, too often displayed an antisocial tendency toward disputatiousness.

The expression odium theologicum (like its twin, rabies theologorum, or the insanity of theologians) seems a contradiction in terms, and drawing attention to such contradictions was a major theme of early modern anticlericalism. ¹ What, however, did the theologians have to say for themselves? How did they resolve the contradiction between the call for universal peace that the Scriptures enjoined upon them to explain and what they themselves actually did in the social, ecclesiastical, and intellectual arena? As a contribution to a symposium on dispute, this essay is concerned, first, with the way these theologians rationalized their quarrels, but also, second, with how the recoil from early modern disputatiousness contributed to an evolving culture of self-conscious mediocrity—a culture in which mediocre and middling eventually became high compliments. The larger question raised here is whether moderation, the avoidance of extremes and contentious claims, has an intrinsic relation to what today we mean by mediocrity.

This contribution is limited in scope to the northern Netherlands, to Protestantism, and to the period between 1670 and 1840. During those years, the northern Netherlands constituted a more or less unified territory: the Dutch Republic until 1795, the Batavian Republic with an interlude of French rule between 1795 and 1813, and the Kingdom of the Netherlands for the remainder of the period. Dutch theological history during this time was dominated by Protestantism, particularly in its Reformed or Calvinist variety. Something could certainly be said about Roman Catholicism (which comprised a very large minority in the Netherlands), if only to demonstrate that none of the developments discussed here is inherently Protestant. However, Roman Catholics will be left out of consideration since they rarely participated in public debate until the first decades of the nineteenth century.

The period in question is one of important changes in the way public dispute was intellectually legitimized. Still relatively fresh in the memories of divines who lived around 1670 was the conflict over Arminianism of the first two decades of the century. These disputes over freedom of the will and divine predestination had brought the United Provinces to the brink of civil war, and those disputes had been resolved by military power and the public enforcement of dogmatic decisions made by the Synod of Dort (1618-19). Theologians were well aware of the social and political dangers of disputes over dogma. Nevertheless, by 1670 a new and equally complicated dispute over doctrinal issues had divided the theological ranks. This time, the dispute concerned the question of how best to interpret the Bible. Should the Old and New Testaments be seen as an essential, unchanging unity (the position of the so-called Voetians, who followed the ideas of Gisbert Voet [1588-1676]), or should the books of Scripture be regarded as the gradual unfolding of a deeper divine plan (the point of view of the "Cocceians," who took their point of departure in...