History of the Low Countries by J.C.H. Blom & E. Lamberts

Author:J.C.H. Blom & E. Lamberts [Blom, J.C.H. & Lamberts, E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2006-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

Coal mine in Wallonia. Painting by Léonard Defrance. (Musée de l’Art Wallon, Liège.)

From a Clerical to an Anticlerical Policy

The Jesuits represented the best of the Catholic Reformation’s efforts to reconcile faith with the rationality of modern science. In the seventeenth century there was no sign that faith and science were irreconcilable, neither by the great men of science such as Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, nor by an intellectual monastic order like the Jesuits. A group of Jesuits, the Bollandists, used their talents to work out one of the central premises of the Catholic Reformation: purifying faith through reason. They did so by publishing critical editions of medieval hagiographies. Johannes Bollandus’s publication in 1643 of the first volume of Acta sanctorum generated widespread admiration throughout Europe, by both Catholics and Protestants. This gigantic undertaking exceeded the capacity of what a small group could accomplish, and the publication of this work is still undertaken today by a society of Bollandists in Brussels. Many other names could illustrate the flowering of knowledge in the schools of the Jesuits. In the late seventeenth century the Flemish Jesuit missionary Ferdinand Verbiest found more approval at the Chinese court for his astronomical insights than for his theological views.

In the second half of the century intellectual debate was dominated by polemics between the supporters and opponents of the modern philosophy introduced by Descartes. Medieval scholasticism, which offered a Christian interpretation of Aristotelian philosophy, had hitherto been dominant at Catholic universities. The dualistic vision of body and soul developed by Descartes, however, offered an opportunity to reconcile rationalism with faith. Although the theological faculty of Leuven condemned Cartesianism in 1662, the professoriat itself remained divided, and university education came steadily under the influence of the new philosophy.

The powerful position of the church in the Austrian Netherlands was an inheritance of the late sixteenth century and the Catholic Reformation. Monastic orders came to dominate education as well as the care of the sick and the poor. Ecclesiastical courts, too, expanded their oversight over matters of faith and life. The division of public authority between church and state was accepted by the government because its authority rested on religion, and because faith demanded obedience and submission. As the Czech-Catholic general Wallenstein expressed it: faith in society corresponded to discipline in an army. Philip II had drawn his authority from his defense of the Catholic faith and in the Netherlands, as elsewhere, church and state went hand in hand. Europe in the age of the Reformation excluded religious toleration (cuius regio, illius et religio). This principle of intolerance also lay at the basis of the Peace of Westphalia, which put an end to the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, a conflict in which most of the European powers had been involved.

The effects of intolerance were very different in a Catholic country like the Spanish Netherlands than it was in a Protestant country like the United Provinces. In the Republic Calvinism achieved a privileged status in a country which initially consisted of a Catholic majority.

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