Knowing the Spirit(s) in the Dutch Radical Reformation: From Physical Perception to Rational Doubt, 1536–1690

Abstract

Waite argues that the religious tolerance and skepticism toward the devil of the Dutch Republic were actively promoted by the region’s spiritualists who depreciated confessional externals. Beginning with the visionary sixteenth-century Anabaptist prophet David Joris who believed he could perceive the Spirit within him, Waite explores how Joris’s spiritualism—which depreciated the letter of scripture, fused the Holy Spirit with his own mind, and denied the independent existence of demons or angels—was developed by seventeenth-century spiritualists, such as the liberal Mennonites or Doopsgezinden. When in 1691 the Reformed preacher and Cartesian, Balthasar Bekker, published his The Bewitched World denying demons a place in the world, many of his opponents accused him of following Joris. While he denied the charge, thanks to his colleagues who had propagated Joris’s unusual demonology in order to condemn it, it had become commonplace. Spiritualism thus helped shape early Enlightenment discourse on the devil.