The Truth of the Christian Religion with Jean Le Clerc's Notes and Additions. Hugo Grotius

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      The third book focused on philological and historical considerations aiming to establish the authenticity, reliability, and lack of significant corruption of biblical texts, with special regard to the New Testament.

      In 1640 a new Latin edition of De Veritate appeared, in which Grotius had added a formidable apparatus of learned notes designed to support the main text’s arguments by referring to a vast array of ancient, patristic, medieval, and contemporary sources. Here the author’s exceptional humanistic erudition flooded the entire text of De Veritate. Although the arguments in the body of the work remained unchanged, Grotius’s convenient little book was thereby transformed into a treatise which even the most determined sailor who did not happen to be an accomplished humanist would have found difficult to digest.

      Success and Polemics

      With or without notes, De Veritate received a remarkably warm welcome throughout the international Christian community of almost all parties. As one of the early translators of Grotius’s work, John Clarke, wrote, “this Piece of Grotius” has met in the world with “general Acceptation.”¹⁰ Its success can only be described as overwhelming. Already before Grotius’s death, in 1645, ten Latin, one German, one English, and two French editions had appeared. This was, however, only the tip of an iceberg. By the middle of the nineteenth century there had appeared sixty-four editions in Latin, seven in German, forty-five in English, eight in French, seven in Dutch, four in Scandinavian languages, three in Welsh, one in Hungarian, one in Polish, and one in Italian, plus six in Oriental languages, clearly meant as missionary tools.

      The one dissonant voice in this choir of praise was that of Grotius’s old enemies, the hard-line Calvinists who had condemned the Remonstrants and zealously continued to attack them as, among other things, crypto-Socinians. Among this group in particular, Socinianism was at the time

      [print edition page xvi]

      almost synonymous with heresy. More specifically, the movement (which derived its name from its Italian founder, Faustus Socinus) denied the dogma of the Trinity—and therefore the divinity of Jesus Christ—on two main grounds: first, in its view, the Trinitarian doctrine was against reason; and second, being irrational, the dogma of the Trinity could not be (and indeed was not) contained in Scripture.

      The charge of Socinianism was routinely thrown at the Remonstrants for their minimalist attitude toward dogmas and their emphasis on Scripture as the sole source of the articles of faith that Christians should be required to embrace. It was not long before this accusation fell upon Grotius as well, and De Veritate was branded as leaning toward Islam and Socinianism.¹¹ To the modern, untutored eye, the charge of favoring Islam might appear quite extravagant directed at a work which devotes an entire book to showing in sometimes even disturbingly firm terms the superiority of Christianity to Islam. But in the eyes of the anti-Remonstrant Calvinists who attacked Grotius, this charge was united with that of Socinianism and was grounded in the fact that both Socinians and Muslims denied the distinctive dogma of the Christian revelation, the Trinity, a dogma conspicuous for its absence from De Veritate.

      Grotius tried his best not to be dragged into the ensuing polemic but felt compelled to explain himself to his friends. His line of defense was clear. De Veritate, as befitted a work addressed not only to Christians but also to non-Christians, was not the place to discuss the doctrine of the Trinity. This was a central truth unique to Christian revelation which could not be reached by natural reason. Attempts to prove the Trinity by means of rational arguments or through reference to pre-Christian authors, such as Plato and the neo-Platonists, were misguided, in Grotius’s view, since Scripture and only Scripture was the source of revealed truths.¹²

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      In De Veritate he had taken people as far in the knowledge of God as was possible on the basis of natural reason, then focused on proving the authenticity and reliability of the Scriptures, in which doctrines surpassing the natural light of reason were revealed.¹³ As Grotius pointed out, the (Catholic) doctors of the Sorbonne who had examined De Veritate before its publication, and who certainly were not known for their dogmatic leniency, had failed to detect any shadow of Socinianism. Instead, the Sorbonne doctors had probably found Grotius quite in line with the teaching of Thomas Aquinas, who argued that natural reason provided the praeambula fidei but was incapable of reaching supernatural truths, for which revelation was needed.

      Interestingly, De Veritate sailed through the Spanish and Venetian Inquisitions almost without a scratch, and the prominent Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597–1679) was reported to have kept it constantly to hand, in case an opportunity for evangelizing should present itself. The Lutherans also greeted the work with approval, as testified by Christoph Köler’s German translation of 1631.¹⁴ In short, in this particular instance those who vociferously denounced the absence of dogmas were the representatives, not of the Roman church so often stigmatized for its zeal for rigid doctrinal definitions, but of a branch of Reformed Protestantism which regarded itself as an unyielding defender of Calvinist orthodoxy.

      As for Grotius, the approach to the Christian religion chosen in De Veritate was perfectly in line with his long-standing view that division among Christians could and should be overcome on the basis of the distinction between fundamental and nonfundamental articles of faith coupled with the crucial claim that all fundamental articles are explicitly contained in Scripture. For him as for others, this claim also provided a solid criterion for religious toleration. In De Veritate, instead of embarking on an inappropriate dogmatic treatment of what Christians should

      [print edition page xviii]

      believe, he had limited himself to proving the reliability and authenticity of Scripture—the only voice to which one was required to listen. Once its divine inspiration had been established, one had only to let it speak to discover all fundamental Christian truths.

      It is remarkable that a man who wrote the first version of this work in a state of life imprisonment as a consequence (at least in a significant measure) of religious divisions should spend no ink to condemn in it the views of his opponents. Despite the high personal price he paid for the intestine fights within the Reformed camp, in De Veritate he rose above them to focus on what he regarded as the agreement among Christians “in the principal things.” The opportunity for reestablishing unity among Christians, in other words, was provided by precisely “those Commands” by which the Christian religion recommended itself above other faiths as well. The certainty of Christianity was confirmed by the very fact that “those who[,] being highly enraged against one another, have fought for Matter of Disagreement, never ventured to go so far as to deny, that these were the Precepts of Christ.”¹⁵

      Christianity was thus presented in De Veritate as an eminently reasonable religion, though in a manner quite different from Grotius’s deistic successors: Christianity was reasonable, in Grotius’s view, not because there was not room within it for supernatural truths such as the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and miracles (in fact, miracles did heavy duty within his argumentation), but because it agreed with what natural reason could discover about God, it contained nothing irrational or contradictory, it was based on texts the authenticity and reliability of which could be proved, and (finally and most importantly) it displayed and advocated superior moral standards.

      Le Clerc’s Additions

      Among the posthumous Latin editions of De Veritate, the most important and influential were those of Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736). Born and raised in Geneva and transplanted successively to Grenoble and Saumur in France and for six months also to London, Le Clerc settled in

      [print edition page xix]

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