Few groups have had their reputation transformed so radically in recent years as the Socinians. Publicly loathed and reviled in the early modern period, these heterodox Christians began to be treated in a rather more sympathetic manner from the early twentieth century. Their contemporaries answered the Socinians' critique of the Trinity with vitriolic denunciation, even with the stake; modern readers are, however, more likely to display sympathy with their objections to such a complicated doctrine. The Socinians' emphasis on reason and good works marked them out as heretics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but today seems to prove the authenticity of their Christianity. The Arminians experienced a similar, if rather less dramatic fate, moving from the outskirts to the mainstream of Protestantism. Initially, the rehabilitation work was undertaken by theologians anxious to provide their own religious tradition with secure roots in European history; Unitarian historians, notably Earl Morse Wilbur, provided the invaluable scholarly foundations for any study of the Socinians.Footnote 1 The works reviewed here, however, are part of a more recent attempt to bring Socinianism and Arminianism out of the confines of confessional history and to integrate them into a broader historical narrative. Together, the authors suggest the importance of Socinianism and Arminianism to the religious and political debates of the seventeenth century – but their books also point to the urgent need for more work on the distinctive nature of these heterodox ideas and their proponents.
Socinianism and Arminianism is a collection of essays whose origin lies in a symposium entitled ‘Socinianism and cultural exchange’ held in July 2003; the papers are, on the whole, concerned with the relationship between the Socinians and their European contemporaries. This relationship was strongest in the Netherlands, although it can also be traced in England and in France, and it is these three countries that provide the geographical focus for the volume. Most of the essays are concerned with the interplay between theologians who come under the Socinian or Arminian label and their more orthodox counterparts – and thereby to show just how extensive the dialogue was. But readers are left to infer this message for themselves, for the essays are varied in approach, in length, and in quality. As a whole, the volume tells no coherent narrative; each article examines a different aspect of the engagement between the Socinians and the wider world. The editors are to be commended for bringing together some of the scholars whose work touches upon the Socinians and Arminians. Yet the volume serves to illustrate the fragmented and often embryonic state of research into these groups and their ideas. Slowly the materials for a new analysis of Socinianism in the seventeenth century are being collected, but the work of synthesis is still waiting to be done.
The volume begins with an introductory section comprising essays by the editors. The first, by Jan Rohls, describes the religious situation in the Netherlands prior to the Synod of Dort in 1618–19, arguing that the synod narrowed the boundaries of the Reformed church, drove out the Arminians, and so ushered in a period of confessional pluralism. It is followed by an article on the ‘new Socinians’ by Martin Mulsow, which takes up the story of the Socinians in the second half of the seventeenth century. Mulsow points to the diversity of beliefs among the so-called Socinians in this period and suggests that the core ideas of the earlier period were remoulded, even transformed, by the Socinians' interactions with a range of European cultures and currents of thought. Mulsow explores the concept of ‘cultural exchange’, arguing that we should see the ‘new Socinians’ as an example par excellence of this phenomenon. Later in the volume Luisa Simonutti pursues a similar theme in her fine article on resistance and toleration. She examines the changing political and ethical dimension to the Socinians' thought, suggesting that here we can see important lines of convergence with the Remonstrants. Both articles point to the dynamism and fluidity within the Socinian community in the late seventeenth century, and they indicate the rich rewards to be reaped from more detailed study.
The longest section deals with England, and particularly with English discussions of the Trinity. Sarah Hutton examines the ambivalent role of Platonic philosophy in defending the Trinity, particularly in the work of Anne Conway and Henry More. Isaac Newton is the subject of Steven Snobelen's essay, which details the parallels between Newton's thought and some of the Socinians, particularly Johannes Crellius. As these essays suggest, the interest in Socinianism displayed by major English figures such as Newton and John Locke has recently begun to attract historians' attention. Yet it has been difficult to evaluate such interest accurately without any adequate account of Socinian thought in the later seventeenth century. These essays represent a step forwards, for the authors are well acquainted with most of the key Socinian texts. And as more research is done on the Socinians and Arminians themselves, the appeal which their ideas had for major philosophers will become clearer.
Several articles are devoted to Hugo Grotius, an Arminian who read the works of the Socinians closely, and whose own writings helped to spread the message of Arminius and Socinus. Grotius's theology, once a rather neglected part of his œuvre, is becoming more widely known and studied, not least through the important translations of his Defensio fidei, a refutation of Socinus's De Jesu Christo servatore (1594), and De summo imperium potestate.Footnote 2 One of the most vexed questions regarding his theology is its relationship to Socinian thought. Grotius was plagued by accusations of Socinianism during his life and there clearly was some fire behind this smoke. He certainly read Socinian works and by the 1630s he was involved in friendly correspondence with several Socinians, praising them for their peacefulness and for their commitment to Christian living.Footnote 3 In public he was, of course, always careful to distance himself from their theological doctrines, especially where the Trinity and the satisfaction of Christ were concerned. Yet, as recent work on the Socinians has shown, there was far more to Socinianism than a denial of these doctrines, and historians have begun to speculate whether Socinus might have helped to shape Grotius's thought across a broad range of issues. The works reviewed here shed some light upon this question.
Hans Blom deals with the question of punishment in both Grotius's theological and more obviously political writing. Punishment was the central issue in the Defensio fidei, but Grotius's argument in this work is rather different from his position in both the earlier manuscript De jure praedae (c.1604) and the later De jure belli ac pacis (1625). Blom shows that there is both continuity and development in Grotius's understanding of punishment, development which was not unaffected by his reflections upon Socinus's theology – and upon all the judicial and political implications which followed from the Italian's views. The Socinians could not let Grotius's Defensio fidei go unanswered; as Blom relates, Crellius replied in 1623 and was in turn opposed by the Dutch republican Lambert Velthuysen. But the fascinating debate which followed, touching on the origins of rights of punishment belonging to individuals and the mechanisms by which those rights should be transferred to a magistrate, deserved to be analysed in more detail. Grotius and the Socinians shared what we might call a juridical approach to theology, and their theological reflections informed their understanding of justice and authority here on earth. Again, the essay demonstrates that the thinking of both Grotius and the Socinians was far from static, and yet the reader is left with only a sketch of the changes occurring within the Socinian community.
Grotius's engagement with Socinian writing provides one of the central themes of J. P. Heering's study of Grotius's De veritate religionis christianae. This was Grotius's most widely read work, printed in numerous editions and translated into almost every European language – and some non-European ones. Scholars have paid it relatively little attention until now, but Heering's work reveals just how distinctive, and often heterodox, Grotius's arguments were. Here, Heering wants to challenge the interpretation of De veritate offered by François LaPlanche, who had placed it firmly within the mainstream of Protestant apologetics.Footnote 4 The bulk of Heering's work, based upon a Dutch doctoral thesis of 1992, is a close study of Grotius's themes and sources, but it concludes with a chapter on the reception of the work. By this point the reader will begin to appreciate both the scale of the negative reaction by Grotius's Calvinist contemporaries and the enduring appeal of the work as hardline Calvinism began to fade.
Perhaps the most striking finding of Heering's research is the extent to which Grotius borrowed from a work by Faustus Socinus in putting together De veritate. This was the Italian's De auctoritate sacrae scripturae, a defence of the credibility and reliability of the scriptural texts. As Heering shows, Socinus's approach in this work differed from contemporary Protestants because he eschewed natural theology, on which they had relied, for a defence of Christianity based upon the scriptures alone rather than on men's innate ideas of God or on the testimony of the spirit. Grotius supplemented Socinus's ideas with more standard arguments, including Philip Duplessis-Mornay's discussions of natural theology. Indeed, Grotius drew on a range of authors and sought to absorb the best parts of Socinian, Protestant, and even Roman Catholic apologetics. The price for such eclecticism was the abandonment of all discussion of dogma, a price which Grotius himself was happy to pay. Heering emphasizes the irenic dimension to the work, portraying it as a careful attempt on Grotius's part to synthesize and to condense the evidence for Christianity so as to win non-Christians to the faith. As such, it lacked the confessional bias so common among Protestant writing and it contained a much stronger emphasis on ethics than was usual in this genre.
The published correspondence of Grotius provides the main source for Heering's account of the origins of De veritate and the reaction which it provoked. His perspective, therefore, is very much that of Grotius himself, at least as Grotius presented himself to his correspondents. Given the extensive and detailed accounts which Grotius provides, this enables Heering to reconstruct the milieu in which the Dutch scholar operated in some detail, but it leads to a very sympathetic account which takes Grotius's self-proclaimed irenicism at face value. He does not explore what this irenicism might have meant in the contested and tense years of the late 1630s – the political and intellectual context is sketched only lightly. The work is a very helpful guide to the contents of De veritate and to Grotius's apologetic endeavour as he himself understood it, but Heering leaves the readers to work out for themselves the wider significance of Grotius's efforts. Nevertheless, it is another step towards a fuller understanding of just what was going on among the Remonstrant and Socinian communities in the seventeenth centuries, and what this might have meant for their intellectual and political life. The detailed study here, like those contained in Socinianism and Arminianism, will be of greatest value as part of a larger historical project.
Arminius's writing is also subjected to detailed analysis in Keith Stanglin's Arminius on the assurance of salvation. Stanglin's subject is the Leiden career of the controversial Dutch theologian, and specifically the debates on predestination that took place while he was professor of theology there, between 1603 and 1609. The views of Arminius's contemporaries and opponents are treated thoroughly, for Stanglin wants to show just how much common ground there was between all the Leiden theology professors. Arminius objected, however, to his colleagues' teaching on assurance, fearing that it could lead to a false sense of security for the believer. He wanted to find a space for resistible grace and to prevent the unconditional predestination trumpeted by his contemporaries from dominating the Dutch Reformed Church; this was at the heart of the conflict he provoked. Stanglin places Arminius firmly within a Protestant context, one which includes Melanchthon as well as Calvin, and he is at pains to show the continuities between Arminius's beliefs and those that had gone before. The Arminius who comes across in the Leiden disputations is willing to tinker with the Reformed synthesis, confident that the building will still stand. His colleagues fear for the stability of the whole if the parts are altered or re-arranged in any way.
The heterodoxy of Stanglin's Arminius is of a very mild and scholarly kind, and it hardly seems to justify the opprobrium heaped upon him by some contemporaries. Stanglin does not deal with some of Arminius's more controversial ideas, such as his Christology; Arminius suggested that Christ received his essence from the Father, which implied Christ's inferiority.Footnote 5 Moreover, any sense of the political context – such as the negotiations for a truce with Spain which dominated the years Stanglin examines – is lacking. By isolating the disputations from their broader setting, Stanglin can give his full attention to the theology. But it becomes more difficult to grasp why these debates mattered so much at this moment in time.
English Calvinists of the generation after Arminius would trace back the roots of crypto-popery and heterodoxy to this Dutch theologian; they would have been unsympathetic to Stanglin's attempt to place Arminius within the Reformed mainstream. Even Laud and the English anti-Calvinists were rather wary of the controversial and potentially disruptive ideas of this Leiden professor. By the late 1640s, however, some of the ideas associated with Arminius were starting to look much more appealing and they would even be taken up by men who considered themselves Reformed. The most notorious proponent of a broadly Arminian theology in England was John Goodwin, one of the most colourful, energetic, and politically active ministers of the English Revolution. Like the Dutch Arminians, he became disillusioned with a Calvinism which left no space for human moral effort or individual enquiry. But Goodwin went much further than Arminius or even Grotius, and his support for toleration, his appeals to reason, and his dogged combat against what he saw as the ‘High Presbyterian Spirit’ have won him many modern admirers. Admiration does not always inspire detailed scholarly analysis, however, and until now he has not been studied in any depth. John Coffey's new biography, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: religion and intellectual change in seventeenth-century England provides an excellent guide to the life and thought of this fascinating minister.
Goodwin was elected vicar of Coleman Street in London in 1633, and it was not long before his distinctive theology began to attract comment. To some of his hearers it seemed that Goodwin placed rather too much emphasis on works and rather too little on the need for repentance before grace would be given. As Coffey shows, Goodwin needs to be set within a broader English discussion about the relationship between repentance and faith, law and grace, which continued throughout the 1620s and 1630s. It is becoming clear that after the Synod of Dort there were a number of English attempts to soften the rigours of Calvinism, especially by portraying the offer of grace as universal. The English proponents of such a view had no desire to align themselves with the hated Dutch Arminians, of course, and the English (and sometimes Irish) debate continued independently of developments in Dutch theology. Yet it was difficult to provide a coherent alternative to double-predestination that did not look like Arminianism or Remonstrantism, and Goodwin soon began to read, study, and absorb Dutch works – not only those of Arminius but also of Grotius and the Remonstrants. By the end of the 1640s, Goodwin's writing bore the hallmarks of his Dutch mentors.
With the advent of civil war in the 1640s, Goodwin poured his energies into supporting the Parliamentarians against the Royalists, and then the Independents against the Presbyterians. Coffey provides a clear account of Goodwin's role in the pamphlet wars, including every one of Goodwin's works in his comprehensive account. He suggests that Goodwin sought liberation from the tyranny of royal and episcopal rule – liberation which he saw in both spiritual and classical terms. Behind this analysis lies Coffey's clear belief that the accounts of Parliamentarian ideology provided by Quentin Skinner and John Morrill are not necessarily contradictory; that the liberty which Charles's opponents sought could be expressed in both ‘neo-Roman’ and religious language.Footnote 6 Coffey goes on to outline Goodwin's support for the trial and execution of Charles, showing how Goodwin deployed the language of natural law and apocalyptic expectation to defend the Army's actions. It is a sensible and convincing account of the interconnection between religious and political languages in Goodwin's case, but one suspects that ‘neo-Roman’ liberty was a good deal more compatible with Goodwin's Arminianism than with the Calvinism of so many Parliamentarians.
From the mid-1640s, Goodwin became one of the most zealous advocates of toleration. This led him not only into conflict with the Presbyterians but also with some of the leading Independents, who sought a Calvinist theological framework for any church settlement. Coffey takes us through these debates, showing that Goodwin's belief in the uncertain and provisional nature of all religious knowledge made him unwilling to see any strict theological settlement imposed upon the nation. But the tide was turning against Goodwin and he fell out of favour with the Commonwealth and with successive regimes. From the late 1650s he was increasingly marginalized, and his political career would end, in effect, with the Restoration.
Goodwin was one of the most prolific writers of the English Revolution, and most of his works were occasion pieces, designed to influence debate in a particular way. Coffey situates Goodwin's writings within their polemical milieu well, but his analyses are often suggestive rather than sustained. This is a pity, because the twists and turns of Goodwin's thought reveal a man grappling with some of the central intellectual problems of the period – problems bequeathed by a political and religious crisis that was European in scope. Goodwin looked to a universal natural law to provide the rules for social and civil life but he struggled to combine this with his theological beliefs. Defending toleration, he insisted that nature revealed very little of God and that the magistrate, whose authority came from the natural law, should uphold and protect only the barest minimum of religious doctrine. Against the Calvinists, however, he stressed that special grace was not necessary to know God, that even the sun and stars proclaimed the existence of the Creator. Coffey has space only to suggest these tensions, but they would repay further study and examination.
Arminius, Socinus, and their intellectual heirs fought to re-instate free will and individual responsibility within Protestantism, and to defend their theology through reason. This was an intellectual agenda with consequences across the board, for politics and ecclesiology as well as for theology narrowly understood. Certainly Goodwin's retreat from Calvinism carried with it political as well as religious consequences, and his experience was surely not unique. Together, these works demonstrate the sophistication of Arminian and Socinian thought, which was not confined to the theological sphere but covered issues of justice, resistance, and human authority; Arminianism and Socinianism need to be re-integrated into our broader understanding of European political as well as religious thought. At the same time, there is a recognition in some of these works that Arminians and Socinians were not ivory-tower theologians, but men often involved at the heart of national and international politics. It is only by situating Arminianism and Socinianism within both the political and the intellectual landscape of the early modern period that we will understand the significance of their heterodoxies – and the reactions which they provoked. The works under review mark a welcome beginning to this process.
