Chapter 43: The Individualist Messiahs: David Joris, Nicolas Frey, Hendrik Niclaes

David Joris

Among the wandering preachers whom the Reformation and the free interpretation of the sacred texts threw upon Europe’s roads, David Joris distinguished himself more through the singularity of his destiny than through the originality of his thought. Pursued by the hatred of the Catholics, Lutherians, Calvinists, Mennonites and Munsterians, this man — upon whose head there was a price wherever he went — would end his life peacefully in Basle, under the outward appearance of a notable, orthodox adept of Reformed doctrines, honorably known as John of Bruges.

Born in Bruges, perhaps in Delft, less probably in Ghent, he was surnamed David due to the role traditionally played by his father, Joris, during the sacred mysteries presented at the Chambre de Rhetorique. After a career as a glass engraver in Delft, he traveled as much as a merchant in the Netherlands, France and England, frequently visiting Antwerp, where he engaged in polemics with Eloi Pruystinck, founder of a group of Free-Spirit.

In 1524, he wedded Dirckgen Willems in Delft. His enthusiasm for the Reformation and his hostility for the Roman clergy brought him public torture and a banishment of three years. He then adhered to the most persecuted sect, the Anabaptists, went to Strasbourg in 1535 and manifested his opposition to the violence of the Munsterites. By virtue of an exception, his meglomania never brought him to renounce the ideals of pacificism and tolerance.

The vision of the prophetess Anneken Jans suddenly revealed to him his eschatalogical mission. He identified with the biblical David whom his father so often played on the boards of the local theater; he preached renunciation, asceticism and the advent of the millennium. The number of his partisans soon worried the temporal powers, which took repressive measures against him. Like all those elected by God, David discerned in the threats that stood out against the horizon the traditional ordeals that announced the birth of a new era. He wrote to the court of Holland, to Philippe of Hesse and to the Emperor, soliciting their support for the Davidite royalty that God had enjoined him to found.

In 1539, when Menno Simonsz denounced her as a false prophet, Anneken Jans was burned at Delft. Condemned to a proscribed life, he clandestinely visited Holland, Frize and Belgium. After the death of John of Battenburg, many terrorists joined his party, in which nonviolence offered a larger place for certain Free-Spirit ideas, in particular, Adamism, that is, the necessity of recovering Edenic innocence.

Although he was hunted everywhere in Europe, David Joris devoted himself to a frenetic activity intended to get himself recognized as a messiah. He went to Oldenburg and Strasbourg, encountering there the moderate wing of the Anabaptists, whom he irritated with his obstinacy in asking for their obedience. In 1542, his most important book, The Book of Marvels (’t Wonderboeck), was published.

David denied the Bible its self-avowed privilege as unique Book. Mystical experience took priority over Scripture because only revelation illuminates the presence of God in each person. Identifying the body of man with the temple of God, David — in the first edition of his book — represented “the last Adam or the new ecclesiastical man” and “the fiance of the Christ, the renewal of all things” in engravings that were judged to be “obscene.” A note made precise the idea that the attractiveness of the young woman of the era of the saints, or Eve, symbolized “the happiness, life and voluptuousness of the spirit.” Once more, the amorous conjunction discovered in spiritual androgyny the pretext for its natural legitimization. The secret life joyously led by David after his retreat from Basle would use religious discourse to remove shame and bad conscience.

Jundt quotes many extracts from the Wonderboeck.

God is absolute, without beginning, a light beyond all light, a depthless abyss, the eternal origin of all that exists, an endless end. He resides in himself, unchanging and impassive, incomprehensible and silent, reposing on the foundation of his own being, like a rock or a mountain of gold. Essence without essence, he does not manifest himself in his absoluteness, he does not think about himself; nor does he express what he is; his grandeur, length, size and depth surpass all human conception; everything is annihilated on his side. And yet he is the supreme activity, he is the eternal essence and lives in all objects. It is not outside of ourselves that we must look for him, but inside us, because he is Spirit; he is the infinite light of eternal justice, widsom, truth and reason; he is the Lord of this very light, substance, life and intelligence that enlighten the intimate thoughts of the hearts of the believers and thanks to which we are able to distinguish the objects of the visible world: holy and pure essence, of perfect beauty and innocence.

The eternal and hidden God is obliged to manifest his unintelligible essence through his Word [parole] of justice, in the power of his eternal wisdom and trust; he realizes in his Word the virtuality that he has to know himself. In his Word, he lets escape outside of himself, and creates in visible form, his Sons and Daughters in conformity with his own manner of being, and destined to possess in all truth his Spirit and essence, as the eternal lights of the new heavens. God knows himself in the Word [Verbe], which is the image of his divine splendor, his Spirit and his substance, insofar as it is inclined towards the world of the creatures; he expresses in himself all that exists, his holy creatures equal to him, who are his Sons and Daughters. God thus begins to exist (in concrete form) in his creatures; his creation has its eternal origin in himself and pursues itself indefinitely by means of the Son, that is to say, the divine intelligence and the distinctions that this intelligence establishes in the absolute essence. Everything that emanates from God is and remains God; God remains in everything, all in all, him alone and no other. In this emanation towards us, God has received in Christ the many denominations, by means of which we try, stammering, to express his essence. This emanation does not exhaust the divine essence: similar to a fountain that flows without interruption, the Spirit of God overflows all parts and lets escape beyond him the plenitude of his being, strength, life and intelligence.

When a person is elevated to the perfection of the life of the Spirit, there is no longer for him any difference between good and evil, life and death, the fall and the rising. The members of the body fulfill quite different functions and yet are equally necessary to him: it is likewise unnecessary to say that one thing is not as good as another, because all things are equally good in the eyes of God and it isn’t possible to make them otherwise or better. To scorn anything would be to scorn God in his entirety [son oeuvre]. It is only for us that different degrees of beauty, faith, spirituality and holiness exist: for God and in God there is neither augmentation nor diminution; he remains unchanging in his essence as he has always been. If someone — following the example of the Pharisians — wants to render his external life irreproachable so as to appear just and good in the eyes of mankind, it is only necessary to aggravate the state of corruption in which he finds himself; because he scorns the work and life of God, he damns his soul through his own justice and his own wisdom. No: to be blamed and condemned on earth is to be justified and sanctified in heaven. What one in the here-below calls lowdown and corrupt is beautiful and praiseworthy to [aupres] the Lord; because what pleases men displeases God; what they call good, he calls evil; what they consider to be pure and holy, he considers impure and execrable. In the same way that light follows darkness, and day is born from night, faith manifests itself through incredulity, hope through despair, love through hate and envy, goodness of the heart through guile, simplicity through duplicity, innocence through indecency, frankness through dissimulation, the spirit through the flesh, truth through the lie, and celestial essence through terrestrial essence; and so it is necessary to place oneself above the judgment of men, if they blame you or if they praise you, to act in complete freedom, and to realize with a total independence good through evil, what is imperishable through what is perishable, and to let what is luminous and pure manifest itself in its purity through what is impure.

Mankind must completely abandon itself to God’s direction and do what he commands, women as well as men. God only acts from eternity in eternity; everything that exists is his work. It follows that all that is, must be, and that which does not exist, must not. God in his goodness has made everything good. Thus we live without being concerned about anything, because we are free from all evil; we reside and we live in the good. We abstain from finding anything bad, because all God’s works are good. If someone does us wrong, we do not get carried away: do we get irritated with the stone against which we stub our toe? In the same way that a flute does not play itself, but is played by the breath of a person, mankind does not act by itself, but is played, speaks and manifests itself through him. Mankind is the property of God; the unique goal of its existence is to glorify its Creator; thus it must not seek its own glory in anything, but must attribute all glory to God and Christ, according to the terms of the Scriptures. Each must be content with the destiny that has been assigned to him; mankind must obey (without murmuring appeals to his Creator), must be ready to follow God anywhere he pleases and to let God make of it what he wants. Does not the potter have the right to give the clay the form that is fitting? With his iron scepter, the Eternal will break all resistance from his creatures, as easily as the potter in anger smashes the vases that he has fashioned. The man to whom these truths appear too elevated must not repell them for the simple reason that he does not understand them; he must receive them in complete submission and keep quiet on what exceeds his understanding, unless he would risk blaspheming God in his ignorance, according to the Scriptures.

The regenerated need no longer desire, seek and marry according to the flesh any [particular] woman, as if they were [mere] men, subjected to their sinful natures, but can desire, seek and marry — according to the inward Spirit — the celestial substance, whose beauty is eternal and whose glory is imperishable; they must conceive in their intelligence the splendor and purity of the divine essence, the unalterable satisfaction that God experiences in himself and must let the rest follow their regular course, according to the good will of God. A man must not devote himself to a woman, nor a woman to a man: the elect must devote themselves exclusively to the Lord. Not that men and women must cease to engender [children], which would be contrary to the plan and will of God: here it is a question of the marriage of the angels, the celestial wedding, long since prepared for the children of God, according to the words [parole] of Jeremiah, Chap. XXXI: a woman will surround a man and unite with him; she will become a man with him, flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone. This isn’t a unique woman of whom the prophet speaks, but seven women united into one, the Fiance of Christ resides in seven communities. Seven women, yes, seven communities — understand me well! — must voluntarily humble themselves before one man who is Christ and they will be called his wives. Many communities give to Christ the names of Lord, Husband and King; but they are not his wives or his body: as long as they have not become his wives, he will not be their husband or their life. Christ lives for God and the community lives for Christ, that is to say, the woman lives for the man, but the man does not live for the woman. Indeed, the man is not created for the woman, but the woman is created for the man. The woman is deprived of liberty, vigor and will; she is placed under the power of the man, not under the protection and power of God. Such were Adam and Eve, of whom we carry the image in our nature: here were two souls, originally united in a single body. This unity has been broken: the man carries in himself the substance of the heavens, the woman the substance of the earth. This is why it is necessary for the woman to become man, according to the Scriptures, so that the substance foreign to the divine being can disappear. Then man will be an angel before the face of God, and man and woman together will again become equal to the Creator. Whomever will not be found in this state of celestial marriage will be cursed.[475]

Jundt concludes: “David Joris thus founded the legitimacy of polygamy or, rather, elective affinity, on the metaphysical principle of the recomposition of the integrity of human nature through the union of the sexes in a single being.”[476]

Unfortunate turns of events weren’t without the comfort of the idea that (according to the Lord) it suited David Joris to live an existence as bitter as that of a messiah, sect leader, apostle or outlaw. His mother was decapitated at Delft. In Deventer, his friend and publisher Juriaen Ketel died on the scaffold; his confessions led to the death of Eloi Pruystinck of Antwerp and the execution of his “libertine” friends. In his hatred, Menno Simonsz pursued Joris, denouncing his hypocrisy and the debaucheries perpetrated under the cover of perfection.

In Frize, a polemic with Johannes had [...][477] Lasco, where his authority as prophet was disparaged, motivated him to withdraw to Basle. There, under the name John of Bruges, he presented himself as a Lutherian who was persecuted by the papists. He installed himself in Basle in 1544 with his family, including his son-in-law, Simon Blesdijck, who was a Mennonite turncoat.

A respectable citizen thanks to the money that his disciples sent him, David Joris continued to send many letters of millenarianist hopes to his partisans, who lived as far away as Denmark. He justified his retreat by referring to the flight of the Christ to Egypt. No doubt Joris found good reasons by which to comfort his disciples’ voluntary poverty, while he himself lived in opulence thanks to his sect’s funds.

Furthermore, he used his credit as a notable from Basle to openly wage combat in favor of tolerance. He defended Michel Servetus and united in friendship with Schwenckfeld and Castellion. Towards the end of his life, he quarreled with his son-in-law Blesdijck, who became an enemy due to conditional loyalty. David Joris died on 25 August 1556 and was interred with great pomp at the Saint-Leonard Church in Basle.

Approximately two and a half years later, following the familial dissensions to which Blesdijck was not a stranger, Joris’ identity was brutally revealed, which provoked a slightly banal scandal in the city. Anxious, his family and friends protested their innocence. They affirmed that they knew nothing of the doctrines professed by David and that Blesdijck would condemn (the least orthodox aspects, that is) in a lampoon. He publicly adjured.

On 13 May 1559, the body and books of David were thrown on the pyre. Up to the Seventeenth Century, the Davidjorists continued to exist in Holstein, keeping up an atmosphere of polemic and calumny. David would find a defender in Gottfried Arnold, who attempted to rehabilitate him in his Unpartelische Kirchen — und Ketzer — Historie.[478]

Nicolas Frey

The case of Nicolas Frey offers a piquant parallel to the attitude of Henry VIII of England; and while the sword of justice overwhelmed one and served the other, the same divine will conferred the seal of its absolutism upon their very personal choices in the treatment of conjugal and private affairs.

Nicolas Frey was originally from Windsheim in Bavaria, where he was a trader of furs. When the Reformation came to this town, he became one of the most zealous partisans of the new ideas; but a short time later he allied himself with the Anabaptists in the countryside, received a second baptism, which would be the occasion for trouble in his native town; he was imprisoned and then released when he promised to change his conduct. But as the authorities demanded that he publicly retract his errors, he preferred to flee rather than submit to this humiliation. Thus after 15 years of marriage, he left his wife Catherine, with whom he had eight children, and headed towards Nuremburg. Deceiving the hospitality that he was offered in this town by one of its most pious and respected citizens, he won over to his doctrines the sister of his host, a woman named Elizabeth, and engaged with her in what he called a spiritual and celestial marriage. Catherine, the abandoned wife, arrived a little later in Nuremburg and encouraged her husband to return with her to their native town. In response, Frey mistreated her and chased her away. Later on, he wrote about this subject to his spiritual sister or, as he called her, his conjugal sister, Elizabeth: ‘I have seen in the Trinity that I must break the head of my first wife so that the prophecies of the Old and New Testaments can be accomplished. Is it not said that the seed [semence] of the woman will break the head of the serpent? My first wife is the serpent or demon spoken of by the Scriptures; as far as you are concerned, you are the wife whose seed must break her head. So as to become a disciple of Christ, I must hate women, children, home and homeland. If I have crushed the serpent of disbelief, it is because I was forced to do so, because it isn’t me who did it, but God who lives inside me and in whom I live.’ Obliged to leave Nuremburg, Frey went to Strasbourg in 1532; Elizabeth joined him soon thereafter. Their imprudent schemes and badly dissimulated relations with the other sectarians of the locality soon attracted the attention of the authorities. They were imprisoned. Warned of the presence of her husband in Strasbourg, Catherine went there and beseeched him to return with her to Windsheim. Frey was inflexible. Seeing his obstinacy, the magistrate condemned him on 19 May 1534 to be drowned as a bigamist, which took place three days later at the Pont du Corbeau.

According to Capiton, he had to confess the following errors: ‘The Church and the sacraments are the inventions of the Devil. — All the prophecies of the Scriptures refer to me, to my first wife and second wife. My first wife is the Queen of the Kingdom of Disbelief; she is prefigured in the person of Saul. My second wife is prefigured in David, I myself in Jonathan. In the same way that David and Jonathan formed a perpetual alliance to hunt Saul, I am allied spiritually with Elizabeth so as to hunt Catherine. — The most perfect work that a believer can accomplish is to abandon his first wife and wed a second. — The faith that justifies the Christian and the love of one’s neighbor consist in the constant affection of Elizabeth; this is a work that God produced in her, so that the loyal and pious Christian is improved and comes closer to his own origin. — Elizabeth is the mother of all believers; it is through her that the true Christian faith began on earth. — In the same way that Mary engendered the Christ, Elizabeth will restore the image of the Christ to humanity and for this reason she is as worthy of singing the Magnificat as the Virgin. — I am the leader of the Church; the Christ accomplished in me all his previous promises; no divine promise will be accomplished after me. — I am Christ following the eternal Word [Verbe], the angular rock that the builders rejected. — I am sent by God to show mankind the image of Christ in my person, just as Moses had previously showed it in his person. All the mysteries of the divinity must now be unveiled, because the Last Days have come. — All creatures who have fallen into perdition since the birth of Christ must be restored to their original perfection in me; I am the instrument by which God wishes to manifest his glory. — It is to the sublime school of God that Elizabeth brought these revelations; it is the Holy-Spirit who gave birth to them in her heart. — The ordinary preachers of the Gospel have only flattered idols; they know, it is true, how to quarter grossly the rocks [pierres] and to clear away the terrain for the future edifice, but they know nothing of construction. In their preaching they dishonor God and seduce their brothers because of their lack of faith, because they say that we are all sinners and they refrain from fulfilling the holy and perfect law, which is to abandon wife and children and follow the Lord.’[479]

Hendrik Niclaes And The Familists

Founded in 1540 by Hendrik Niclaes, the Family of Love — often wrongly defined as an Anabaptist sect — intended to reestablish the original human community in its innocence. Its organization included a bishop, whose authority was supported by twelve sages and four classes of priests. All gave their personal belongings to the sect. It included a quite large number of faithful, principally in the Netherlands and England, where their existence was still attested to in the Seventeenth Century.

Born in 1502, Hendrik Niclaes claimed that he had his first visions when he was nine years old, while attending a latin school. At the age of 12, he worked in his family’s business and took it over upon the death of his father. Arrested in 1529 for Lutheranism, he went to Amsterdam where he stayed for nine years before being suspected of Anabaptism. In 1541, he lived in Emden where he engaged in a flourishing trade in wool. He frequently traveled to Antwerp, where his friend, the printer Christopher Plantin, had been inspired by several of his texts.

At the age of 59, new prophetic visions and the publicity that he gave them brought torture [by the authorities] down upon him. He fled to Kempen, in the Overijssel, then to London, which was a temporary exile because Niclaes opportunely saved Plantin from ruin by transporting to Cologne the typographical materiels threatened with seizure by those who accused the printer of heresy. Dissent within the group darkened his last years. He died in 1580. Nippold attributed to him 50 pamphlets that were distributed clandestinely.

Niclaes’ doctrine preached love, tolerance and mutual respect, and rejected the God of justice in favor of a God of goodness. From millenarianism he retained the pretense that he acted as the mediator of divine revelation and the herald of the new era, in which antagonism among mankind would disappear.

His principal disciple was his servant, Hendrik Jansen, called Barrefelt, no doubt due to Barneveld, the place of his birth. Around the time of his break with Niclaes in 1573, he took the name Hiel, which in Hebrew means “one life in God.” Having gained the friendship of Christopher Plantin, Hiel began to prophetize on his own, perhaps in England, where the Family of Love had existed for more than a century. Many of these adepts joined the Ranters. His religious doctrine was related to that of Hans Denck.

‘The Father made himself human among us according to the inward man and edified us according to the inward man in a Spirit with him. The soul of man is not a creature, but a part of the uncreated God.’ And so he called himself ‘a man whom God raised from among the dead, whom he filled and anointed with the Holy-Spirit; an enlightened man of the Spirit of the celestial truth and the veritable light of the perfect essence; a man deified along with God in the spirit of his love and transformed into the being of God.’ According to him, the Christ is only ‘the image of the being of the right of God’; he must no longer be envisioned as a historical personage, but as a ‘condition’ shared by all those who live in union with God. From this metaphysical principle, he deduced that sin no longer exists in the heart of the regenerated: his disciples and he ‘only said in their prayers the first three parts of the Dominican oration, because, for them, they did not sin insofar as they were born from God’; he still derived both uselessness and unimportance from religious ceremonies: ‘The Lovers live and die without either baptism or the sacraments,’ or rather they considered the baptism of infants to be a valueless act that some were free to neglect while others were free to practice. They thus distinguished themselves from the Anabaptists, to whom it was no doubt fitting to link them historically. Hendrik Nicolas [sic] founded his doctrine on the theory of the three ages: ‘Moses only preached hope, Christ only taught faith, he himself announced the love that united all. The first penetrated into the square in front of the temple, the second into the sanctuary, he himself into the Holy of Holies.’[480]

The Puritan John Knewstub said of Hendrik Niclaes: “He got religion upside-down. He constructed heaven on earth; he made a man of his God and God a man (...). This heaven was games and laughing, [and] hell was grief, affliction and sorrow.”[481]

Jan Torrentius

Born in Amsterdam in 1589, Jan Torrentius — charged with Anabaptism, Davidjorism and Familism — cut the figure of an accursed painter in liberal Holland, well, at least in Holland liberated from Catholicism. Painter of still-lifes and so-called erotic paintings, he attempted to illustrate the hedonism celebrated by Dutch painting in the Seventeenth Century with, perhaps, less reservation than Jan Steen.

A member of an Adamite group that practiced the pleasures of love and the table,[482] he was arrested and subjected to torture. He denied all participation in the sect, but the “scandalous” character of his works earned him 20 years in prison.

Freed on the insistence of the ambassador from Austria, he took refuge in England. His return to Amsterdam brought new persecutions from the Protestants until his death in 1640. The government would order his paintings collected and burned by an executioner.[483]