Desiderius Erasmus came of age when the printing press was a freshly minted technology, destined to disrupt his world just like the Internet and social media has transformed our lives for better and worse, for richer and poorer. Erasmus, the great Christian humanist of the Renaissance, was in a commercial sense the first modern writer, a man who set out to make a living through insightful, humorous commentaries on the powers that be.
Those powers, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, were the church, the crown, a rising merchant class, and strident Protestant reformers like Martin Luther, the Augustinian monk who would battle Erasmus for the mind of a modernizing Europe.
Erasmus, the out-of-wedlock son of a Catholic priest, was born in Rotterdam in 1466. He lived during an era of endemic church corruption, when the Catholic hierarchy and the princes it promoted held great temporal and spiritual power over the impoverished masses. It was a time when plagues and wars were tearing the world to pieces, creating miseries not unlike our own.
Then, and now, the life of a celebrity journalist was all about making connections and finding patrons — working for the elite while maintaining the freedom to satirize their foibles and expose their hypocrisies.
Old Erasmus was one of the founding fathers of my newly imagined Sangha of Skeptical Universalists. He could also be called the patron saint of the Religion Newswriters Association, our not-quite-sacred guild of scribblers who write about religion and spirituality for a general audience. And last, and no doubt least, the work of this seminal Dutch philosopher was one the reasons that the lawyer Jean Lettin III, my eleventh great-grandfather, was chased out of the Low Countries by the northern arm of the Spanish Inquisition.
Erasmus overcame his shameful birth through the power of his intellect and his gifts as a writer. He charmed his professors with his pen, landing a series of appointments as the secretary and scribe for princes who would be kings and priests who would be popes. Learned in Latin and Greek, Erasmus was part of the Renaissance rediscovery of wisdom from the ancient and classical world. His work as a translator and theologian of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament helped lay the groundwork for modern Biblical scholarship and a new way of looking at scripture. He promoted an undogmatic Christianity that sought direction in the life of Christ, not necessarily in the teachings of the church.
He was an extremely popular writer, an idol of the European literati at a time when books were an amazing new technology. His most popular work, The Praise of Folly, was written in 1509 when Erasmus was living in England. “Let others judge me as they will; yet less self-love completely deceives me, I have praised folly and not altogether foolishly,” Erasmus wrote.
“Now, in response to the charge of sarcasm, I reply that this freedom has always been permitted to men of wit, that in their satire they make fun of the common behavior of men with impunity, as long as this freedom does not go to an extreme. For this reason, I wonder at the present sensitivity of ears that are unable to hear anything except solemn addresses. Oh, yes, you will find some persons so perversely religious that they will listen to blasphemies against Christ more readily than the slightest joke about a pope or prince, especially if it pertains to money or revenue.”
Erasmus wrote The Praise of Folly to amuse one of his best friends and patrons, Sir Thomas More. The life of that English writer and philosopher shows the opportunities and dangers of living the literary life of the early Renaissance. More, the author of Utopia, which envisioned a political system ruled by reason, served as an advisor to King Henry VIII, at least until that monarch had More beheaded for refusing to accept the king as the head of the newly created Church of England.
Erasmus also had his critics, traditionalists who saw him as a “relativistic skeptic hiding behind a mask of erudition.” He was seen as shrewd and shallow, not unlike some of today’s political pundits, being a man of “cool calculation rather than burning conviction.”
His satirical pen was his sword, which he used to lance pompous royals and pious Reformers alike. Erasmus loathed clerical fanaticism whether it flowed from Catholic Spain or Protestant Switzerland. Writing about the followers of Martin Luther and John Calvin, Erasmus asked, “Is it for this that we have shaken off bishops and popes, that we may come under yoke of such madmen?” Luther and Erasmus had a famous dispute about free will and predestination, which got ugly when the German church reformer issued one of his vicious polemics against the Dutch humanist.
Luther would later issue an even more infamous attack with his notorious On the Jews and Their Lies. Prefiguring the Nazi Holocaust, Luther called on Germans to “set fire to their synagogues or schools…in honor of our Lord and of Christendom.”He also advocated the confiscation of Jewish prayer books, and the execution of rabbis who dared to teach their faith, proving early on that the Protestants could be as ruthlessly intolerant as pontiffs — or the supreme commanders of the Islamic State that recently ruled a large swath of Iraq and Syria.
Erasmus agreed with Luther’s attack on the selling of papal indulgences, which the humanist satirized as “soul trafficking.” But Erasmus found Luther’s polemics brutish and in bad taste, including such treatises as Against the Roman Papacy, an Institute of the Devil, in which Luther called the pope a “farting ass” and the “brothel-keeper over all brothel keepers.” These are just some of the reasons that Erasmus never sided with Luther or Calvin or the other strident church reformers. While he cleverly critiqued the excesses and abuses of priests and pontiffs, the great humanist still considered himself Catholic communicant. He didn’t trust the reformers any more than he trusted the pope. They all showed themselves to be tyrants.
While Erasmus sought a middle ground, his name and his ideas were cited by Flemish leaders who refused to endorse the more outlandish edicts the king sought to impose on accused heretics across the Low Countries. This sparked a severe backlash in the 1530s. Erasmus died amidst these attacks, in Basel, Switzerland in 1536. Church theologians at Catholic University at Leuven, in Flemish Brabant, banned his works, as did the Dominicans in the Low Countries, the land of his birth. Later, local bishops attacked provincial jurists for being overly influenced by his humanist ideas, accusing lawyers at the Grand Council of Mechelen of mocking church ceremonies and defaming clergy.
Here’s where my ancestors enter the picture. The surviving records do not explain why Jean Lettin III, a lawyer associated with the Grand Council did not inherit his father and his grandfather’s coveted post as the greffier — or head clerk —of that judicial body, nor precisely why he fled his Flemish homeland for refuge in England in the 1560s.
But he may have been associated with that group of Grand Counsel lawyers who were accused of being followers of Erasmus and of disparaging the church. Those lawyers had their property confiscated and were exiled to England. Records in the Belgium state archives reveal that Jean Lettin I held the post of greffier of the Grand Conseil from 1494 until August 31, 1521, when he was succeeded by his son, Jean Lettin II. Later records show that on July 20, 1564, right after Jean Lettin II passed the job onto his son-in-law, rather than his son, Jean II was ordained as a Catholic priest. That son-in-law who got the job was married to Jean III’s sister, Franchoise Lettin, the ancestor whose name, as we saw in Chapter Three, appears on a tomb inside the Mechelen cathedral.
Other records reveal that Jean III was involved in efforts to make sure that the city privileges of Mechelen were honored by the Holy Roman Emperor. Perhaps this is why Jean III was passed over for that post and why he might have first lost favor with the powers that be. He was among a group of lawyers who were trying to assert the political independence of Mechelen, whose residents had traditionally had more rights and privileges under the dukes of Burgundy and the Hapsburg kings. Those old covenants, for example, would give one more protection in a heresy trial. That was pretty important. It could be the difference between getting sent into exile or burned at the stake.
Were Jean Lettin III’s troubles in 1566 caused by his allegiance to the ideas of Erasmus, who had died just three decades earlier?
We’re getting back to the “imagining” zone here, but something tells me that Jean Lettin III may have been one of those Grand Council lawyers inspired by the humanism of Erasmus, and that his father wound up siding with the traditionalist forces aligned with the Roman Catholic Church. Jean Lettin II may have sided with Catholics who condemned secular judges who were “prepared to hang some unfortunate wretch for stealing a few pence, yet did nothing about blasphemers.” Another Catholic critic of the courts complained that Protestant heretics who dishonored God and the blessed sacraments were simply allowed to go abroad, while petty thieves were quickly brought to trial.
Anyway, it was into this caldron, in 1564, that Jean Lettin II resigned from the Grand Council and became a Catholic priest. In two years, the Iconoclastic Fury would sweep the provinces and Jean’s son would flee to England.
As mentioned earlier, Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, was born and raised in the Burgundian Netherlands and was an early patron of Erasmus. But that did not stop him from going after the heretics of his time. He issued his first placard against Lutheran heresy in September 1520, even before the Diet of Worms condemned Luther. In 1523, he received papal approval to appoint an inquisitor whose jurisdiction was the investigation and trial of heresy cases. This was when long-established secular and ecclesiastical tribunals like the Grand Council of Mechelen were first ordered to prosecute Anabaptists, Lutherans and spiritualists.
In 1545, the emperor appointed Pieter Titelman, one of the most notorious inquisitors of the Hapsburg Netherlands, to enforce orthodoxy in Flanders. He and his paid informants went after Calvinists, Anabaptists and had a particular dislike for Mennonites. Over the next twenty years, there were over a thousand heresy trials and more than a hundred executions in the Low Countries.
It’s hard to imagine that the Lettins, with their key role in the Grand Council, were not swept up in either side of that campaign.
While Erasmus and Luther dueled during their lifetimes, they both put a spotlight on the Roman Catholic Church’s cruel, corrupt and widespread use of papal indulgences and excommunication as weapons of economic — not just theological — exploitation. Excommunication — being cut off from the sacraments and the community of fellow believers — was routinely used as a tool for the collection of debts. This was imposed on “senior clerics unable to meet the levies imposed on their offices but also from ordinary Christians falling behind in their tithes.” Church leaders expanded this punishment to prohibit all commercial dealings with offenders. Entire towns were cut off when they joined together to protest this church corruption. “Crowds of excommunicants, forced from their homes, were reduced to begging,” writes Michael Massing. “Those who died while excommunicated had to be interred without the rites of the Church and so were exposed to an eternity of torment.”
Erasmus also pressed against the church’s efforts to impose sexual prohibitions as a means of social control — a practice that endures to this day. He opposed the imposition of celibacy on priests and the church’s unshakable opposition to divorce. The Dutch wordsmith had a gift for telegraphing his argument with a few words. “Monasticism is not piety,” he wrote.
In his brilliant book Fatal Discord — Erasmus, Luther and the Fight for the Western Mind,” Massing reveals how Erasmus “censured the quarreling spirit of the monastic orders, the sloth of mendicant friars, theologians puffed up with learning, clerics enamored of war, crusaders seeking converts at the point of a sword, and church services filled with blaring trumpets and yelping choirs. He embraced humility, brotherhood, charity, wise princes, and pacifist priests. At every point, he sought to stress the human qualities of Christ and the value of inner spirituality over external show.”
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Erasmus laid the groundwork for a philosophy that would evolve into secular humanism, ideals I embrace in my Skeptical Universalism. A bit later in the tumultuous sixteenth century, another philosopher, Giordano Bruno, would help establish a mystical tradition that would become another ingredient in my grow-your-own religion.
Bruno, a Dominican friar, argued that the universe was infinite and had no celestial body at its center. He believed in the transmigration of the soul, also known as reincarnation. His execution by the Roman Inquisition on February 17, 1600, which prefigured the more famous heresy trial of Galileo, made him — despite his clear spiritualist bent — one of the early martyrs of modern science.
What was so dangerous about this defrocked mystic?
Bruno helped lead a revival of the pagan tendencies in the early centuries of what would become known as “Christianity.” This mix of astrology, magic, animism and alchemy — perhaps with a dash of psychoactive herbs thrown in for true inspiration — represented a return to the philosophy and mystery cults of ancient Greece.
“Bruno presented the living earth as revolving around the divine sun with other innumerable worlds in an infinite cosmos,” explains Peter Marshall, a British historian of esoteric thought. “Echoing Copernicus and against all Catholic dogma, Bruno affirmed that ‘the earth did go round.’ Nothing in the living world is immobile; everything moves in an inherent circular motion through a kind of magical animism. There is no death in the universe, only change. Inspired by the Hermetica and the Cabala, Bruno’s cosmology could therefore do without the notion of the transcendent Creator God so dear to Catholicism.”
Bruno was among an eclectic network of wandering scholars, spiritualists, alchemists, astrologers, magicians and proto-scientists who roamed across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, monitored by Catholic inquisitors yet periodically welcomed into the royal courts of monarchs and princes from Naples to Paris to London.
Born in Nola, near Naples, in 1548, Bruno was part of the Renaissance rediscovery of long lost philosophies from the ancient world. He was especially drawn to the religion of Egyptian antiquity and the great Greek myths. He found his truth and the foundation of his magical worldview in the Hermetic philosophy and its metaphysical worship of “God in things.” He drew inspiration from the Hermetic text Asclepius and its revelation that “a human being is a great wonder.” The great-but-flawed Greek gods point to the powers and virtues in our own psyche and soul. “In every man,” he wrote, “there is a world, a universe.”
Ordained as a Dominican friar, Giordano Bruno strayed so far from orthodox Christianity that he would be condemned by Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans and Calvinists. But this sixteenth century mystic was embraced by King Rudolf, the mad Bohemian king. Yet Bruno’s “gnostic panentheism” was still dangerous enough to get him burned at the stake in Rome’s Campo di Fiori in the year 1600.
In his cosmology, the “Temple of Wisdom” of ancient Egypt was the real foundation of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the inspiration for both the mysteries of the cross and the mysticism of the Cabala. He compared the religious authorities of his day to “dim-eyed moles” who remain in the darkness. Bruno, who starkly thought in terms of darkness and light, worshipped the sun. “Those who were born to see the sun, being full of thanksgiving when they come to the end of the loathsome night, dispose themselves to receive in the very center of their eyes’ crystal globe the long-expected rays of the glorious sun, and, with unaccustomed gladness in their hearts, they lift up hands and voices to adore the east.”
Bruno was among a group of sixteenth century mystics and madmen who misdated by several centuries several key Hermetic texts upon which they based their philosophy. These writings, named after the Greek god Hermes, included the Asclepius and the Corpus Hermeticum. They mistakenly thought these texts predated and predicted the rise and fall of Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, they were created between A.D. 100 and 300. They were cast in a pseudo-Egyptian framework, but scholars now see them as containing very few genuine Egyptian elements.
“They were certainly not written in remotest antiquity by an all-wise Egyptian priest, as the Renaissance believed, but by various authors, all probably Greek, and they contain popular Greek philosophy of the period, a mix of Platonism and Stoicism, combined with some Jewish and probably some Persian influences,” writes Frances A. Yates, the author of Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition.”
By the time of Bruno’s life, the guardians of orthodoxy in the Roman Catholic Church had spent centuries trying to purge medieval magic and occultism from its ranks, including the witchcraft of women who employed various herbs and potions to heal and enlighten. But this began to change to Bruno’s time. “Renaissance magic, which was a reformed and learned magic and always declaimed any connection with the old ignorant, evil, or black magic, was often an adjunct of an esteemed Renaissance philosopher,” Yates writes.
This new worldview was based upon “the fundamental tenet that man through his intellect is divine, and that gnosis consists in becoming, or rebecoming a god in order to see God.”
Bruno, who entered the Dominican order in 1563 and was first branded as a heretic in 1576, travelled throughout Protestant England and continental Europe preaching the “new philosophy.”
“Unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God,” Bruno preached. “Make yourself grow to a greatness beyond measure…free yourself from the body; raise yourself above all time, become Eternity, then you will understand God,” he wrote. It is within our power to strip “veils and coverings from the face of nature,” to illuminate those who “could not see their own image in the innumerable mirrors of reality which surround them on every side.”
Statements like these lead some recent scholars to wonder whether Bruno’s mix of revelation and grandiosity was fueled by the ingestion of a Holy Eucharist that contained sacred plant medicines with psychedelic properties.
Brian Muraresku argues just this in his 2021 bestselling book The Immortality Key — The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. Muraresku subscribes to the “pagan continuity theory.” That’s the idea, which is supported by some evidence, that a secret tradition dating back to ancient Greece and the Eleusinian Mysteries has been kept alive by an underground network of witches and wise men through use of mind-expanding plants and drugs. What passes for Holy Communion in the Catholic church today is just a pale imitation of these secret age-old rites. Today’s wafer and wine, Muraresku writes, is nothing more than a “placebo Eucharist.”
Muraresku argues, with limited but intriguing evidence, that Bruno was enlightened by “drugs that the Vatican perceived as a heretical imitation of its own Eucharist, which it specifically convicted both Bruno and the witches of blaspheming.” At least some of the countless men and women condemned by the Inquisition were employing “drugs that were considered so unquestionably superior to the traditional Christian Eucharist, however, that the wizard (Bruno) and his sisters were willing to trade their lives for the ‘highest and final illumination’ that could only be delivered by a homemade Eucharist.”
Twelve years before his execution, Bruno spent six months in and around the Prague castle of Rudolf II, the mad and mystical Bohemian king and the strangest royal to ever claim the throne as Holy Roman Emperor. It was here that Bruno developed some of his pioneering ideas in the study of mnemonics, or the Art of Memory, as he titled of one of his books. Bruno claimed to have rediscovered an ancient Egyptian practice by which the memory, through imagination, could be used to discover the secrets the universe. Writing and modern languages, he argued, had caused “a great rift both in the memory and the divine and magical sciences,” causing us to forget that the mind of God is present in the mind of humans.
“Time is the father of truth,” Bruno wrote. “Its mother is our mind.”
In the end, King Rudolf did not save Bruno from the inquisitor’s flames, but this infamously eclectic monarch did help establish a tradition of East-meets-West mysticism.
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In these middle decades of the 16th century, much of the world’s divine and secular power flowed from Madrid and the royal court of Philip II, the stridently Roman Catholic monarch who forced my family and thousands more to flee from their Flemish homeland. But on the other side of Europe, at Prague Castle, the kings of Bohemia would cultivate a very different spiritual legacy.
In the 1560s, Rudolf was a young archduke and monarch-in-waiting living in the Spanish court under King Philip’s watchful eye. He was one of Philip’s nephews — a fellow member of the House of Hapsburg and a man destined to reign as the Bohemian King of Prague and emperor of all Christendom, including those pesky Protestants.
Rudolf II was born in Vienna in the summer of 1552, the eldest son and successor to Maximillian II, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia, Hungary and Croatia. Rudolf’s mother was Maria of Spain, one of the legitimate daughters of Charles V.
Her newborn child was so tiny and ill that he was not expected to live. So at birth, Rudolf was not taken to his mother’s breast, but plunged instead into the warm carcasses of a series of freshly killed lambs, which were lined up to be slaughtered on a nearby butcher’s block, one after the other in a frantic, bloody spectacle designed to simulate the warm and fleshy conditions of the maternal womb. It was not until the second day of his life that the sickly infant was finally raised to the breast of a wet nurse.
So perhaps it’s not surprising that Rudolf was a strange child and an even stranger man. As a young boy, he was prone to both flights of fancy and moods of severe melancholy. What Rudolf needed, his parents decided, was to be raised under the strict militaristic rule of the Spanish crown and given a religious education by the most strident Catholic dogmatist of his day.
Philip fit the bill. This plan for the child’s upbringing may have been pushed by mom, not dad. Rudolf’s mother was the dogmatic Catholic of the family. His father, like Charles V, was a relative free-thinker for his time, known for his humanistic sympathies. As mentioned earlier, Charles had been a royal patron to Erasmus.
Charles V, Rudolf’s grandfather, had abdicated and given Philip parts of his global empire, which stretched from Prague to Mexico and from Naples to Brussels. Charles’ parting advice to Philip was “trust no one, listen to everyone, decide alone.”
Rudolf was eleven years old when he and his younger brother were sent off to Spain with their guardians and tutors. He lived under Philip’s tutelage in Spain from 1563 to 1571, the same years that some of the Lettin family were escaping King Philip’s domain.
During his time time in Spain, Rudolf saw his uncle put down the Iconoclastic Fury and Calvinist insurrection in Flanders. In the northern provinces of the Burgundian Netherlands, the extended conflict that would become the Eighty Years War and eventually establish the Dutch Republic. Much closer to home, Rudolf watched as Philip suppressed hundreds of thousands of Moriscos, the forcibly converted Muslims who rebelled in Granada in 1568.
Philip increasingly relied on the sadistic traditions of the Spanish Inquisition to fight religious heresy and solidify political control over his lands. He took Rudolf and his brother to Toledo to witness the pomp and ceremony of an auto-da-fe, the Catholic Mass, public execution and “act of faith” that was used for centuries to punish unrepentant Jews, Muslims, Protestants, pagans and others deemed by inquisitors to be subverters of the one true faith.
In the summer of 1571, at this auto-da-fe in Toledo, two men were burnt in person and three in effigy for the crime of Lutheranism. One of the unrepentant Lutheran preachers insulted the priests as they exhorted him, declaring himself a better Catholic than the Spanish Papists. He dared to call himself a true martyr of the real church of Christ. To shut him up, the Lutheran was gagged as he was fastened to the stake. He was pierced by lancers to mock him for claiming the glory of martyrdom. Then, as Rudolf watched with horror, his executioners lit the kindling.
Large crowds of faithful Catholics came out to witness heresy trials and public executions, including this lavish auto-da-fa (“act of faith”) in the Plaza Mayor in Madrid. Thousands of Jews, Muslims,Protestants, pagans and other accused heretics were convicted by the Spanish Inquisition and hung or burned at the stake in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Rudolf, despite his eight-year apprenticeship with Philip, was repelled by these acts of torture. When he questioned the wisdom of these liturgical executions, his uncle replied by saying he would carry the wood to the pyre himself if that’s what was needed to cleanse the church of the evil curse of Protestant heresy.
During much of their time in Spain, Rudolf and his brother lived in a grand palace, monastery and shrine his uncle was building outside Madrid. Today, tourists who visit the sprawling El Escorial complex may stumble across a palace tomb that purportedly contains a Catholic communion wafer that miraculously bled when it was tramped upon by a soldier fighting with the Calvinist forces in the Netherlands. El Escorial was to serve as Philip’s final resting place, and the bas-relief that adorns his tomb depicts none other than Rudolf handing this miraculous wafer to his glorious uncle. This reflects, not reality, but Philip’s dream for Rudolf, the future Holy Roman Emperor. In his farewell address to his two nephews, delivered by Philip upon their parting in 1571, the king of Spain had this to say about the return of Rudolf and his brother to Bohemia:
“Since you return to countries dangerous to your soul, I wish to put you on your guard as if you were my own children. May no one deter you from your faith which is the only true one! Only read books given by your confessor or by men known for their piety. Receive the sacraments very often. In this world, it is as necessary for your salvation as it is for your glory and honor.”
Rudolf did not listen to his uncle’s dogmatic advice. Not even close. His court inside Prague Castle would soon become a notorious safe haven for artists, alchemists, inventors, magicians, mathematicians, spirit mediums and Jewish Cabalists. And also for charlatans, puffers and mystical con-artists. “He delights in hearing secrets about things both natural and artificial,” one Venetian envoy said of Rudolf. “Whoever is able to deal in such matters will always find the ear of the Emperor ready.”
Rudolf II, the Bohemian king in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, was arguably the most theologically eclectic character to ever occupy the throne of the Holy Roman Emperor.
As emperor, Rudolf was more interested in collecting art than conquering territory. He added new wings to Prague Castle to house his collection. He was also fascinated by objects, especially anything that purported to have some mystical power, to open doors into other worlds.
What most interested the emperor was alchemy, not the mere turning lead into gold, but the magical transformation of the material to the spiritual. His famous Cabinet of Curiosities included an Ainkuern, the horn of a unicorn stolen from the infidels in Byzantium during the crusade of 1204. Just in case it was the Holy Grail, Rudolf regularly took communion from this jewel-encrusted cup. He had a vast and eclectic collection of telescopes, astrolabes, sextants and clocks, including one that was covered with magical symbols and was purportedly able to call up the spirits of the dead whenever it chimed.
The Philosopher’s Stone was perhaps the primary symbol of mystical alchemy, which was among other things the search for the elixir of life, a substance that could enable one to achieve enlightenment and perhaps even immortality. It also involved the transmutation of substances, such as turning base metal into gold, or in the Christian tradition, turning the wine and wafer into the actual body and blood of Christ.
Renaissance alchemists with mystical leanings were inspired by ancient Greek writings about prima materia, or first matter, and anima mundi, or world soul, seen as an intrinsic connection between all living things on the planet. In the twentieth century, spiritual seekers in the West employed the practices of tantric Buddhism and Hinduism, along with psychedelic plants and chemicals, in an effort to explore these same realms.
In a book dedicated to Emperor Rudolf, Bruno expressed his dream that the warring Christian sects of their time could be replaced by a religion of love and a cult of nature. “The procedure which the Church uses today is not that which the Apostles used; for they converted people with preaching and the example of a good life, but now whoever does not wish to be a Catholic must endure punishment and pain, for force is used and not love; the world cannot go on like this, for there is nothing but ignorance and no religion which is good.”
This dream for a “religion of love and cult of nature” would not come true in Bruno’s lifetime. He risked arrest by returning to Venice, where he was swept up by the machinery of the Venetian and Roman Inquisitions. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome’s Campo di Fiori. Today, at that spot in the Eternal City, near Piazza Navona, there’s a statute of Bruno, erected in 1889 by Masonic sympathizers working for the unification of Rome and the reduction of papal power. Each year, on the anniversary of his execution, a group of Freemasons, freethinkers, atheists, pantheists and various “New Age” enthusiasts gather at the statute to remember this grand magician, mystic and misfit, described by his biographer as “the enfant terrible of religious Hermetists.”
Much of my time as a journalist working the God beat was spent investigating a dizzying array of religious sects, spiritual cults and other messianic movements that flowered in the last half of the twentieth century. Two of the most notorious were led by “free love” gurus — one from the mysterious East — Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh — and the other from the wilds of the West Coast Pentecostal Christian movement — David “Moses” Berg, the founder of the Children of God, also known as The Family International.
Perhaps that’s why I find myself drawn to the story of the Dutch mystic Hendrik Niclaes and his Family of Love. Despite its small following, Niclaes and his followers became one of the most notorious heretical movements of sixteenth century. They are mostly forgotten now, but Niclaes and his band of messianic mystics and misfits were very much on the minds of the religious leaders — Catholic and Protestant — who chased my ancestors from the killing fields of Flanders, to the shores of England and onto the New World between the years 1567 and 1638.
What was so dangerous about the spiritualist message of the Family of Love, and what does it have to do with the philosophy of Skeptical Universalism?
Little is known of Hendrik Niclaes’ actual childhood, but he was born around 1501 in German territory not far from the Dutch border. He was the son of a prosperous merchant, a devout Catholic. According to a hagiography written decades later by his followers, young Hendrik began questioning Catholic doctrine in his childhood, including church teachings on original sin.
Hendrik grew up to become a fairly prosperous and a widely travelled merchant himself. He started to gain notoriety in Holland when he was thirty years old, at a time when Amsterdam was known as being one of the most tolerant cities in Europe.
According to the lore of his cult, the Family of Love was inspired by Hendrik’s childhood vision that a beautiful mountain rose around him, filling him with a glorious sense of oneness with the earth. This prophetic vision would later be expressed by the Familist idea that “all things come by nature.” Followers of Niclaes sought to connect with an “Inner Light” that would put them in mystical communion with Christ.
Dutch mystic Hendrik Niclaes (1501-1580),
founder of the Family of Love
Niclaes’ following may have its roots in the amorphous Brethren of the Free Spirit, which flourished a few centuries earlier in the Low Countries, Bohemia and elsewhere in Europe. This heretical, anticlerical movement saw the perfected human soul as being indistinguishable from God. Some of these free spirits formed communes and practiced free love, making them the hippies of the Middle Ages.
Hendrik’s Family of Love drew enough attention to themselves that Niclaes was arrested in 1532 on suspicion of heresy. While relatively tolerant, Amsterdam and the northern provinces of the Burgundian Netherlands were still under the control of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. Niclaes was suspected of being aligned with or sympathetic to radical Anabaptists, who in 1534 would briefly seize control of the German city of Munster. Some of these rebels had such a radical communal ideology that all property — including the wives of male members — were shared for the common good. Perhaps this is the root of the later allegation that the Familists engaged in adultery and wife swapping.
Hendrik Niclaes was freed by the magistrates of Amsterdam after vowing his loyalty to the church and promising to have no association with “suspects of heresy.” It’s almost impossible to know exactly what the Familists believed, and what sort of marital arrangements they had, because members of the sect were notorious “nicodemites,” meaning that the routinely misrepresented their religious faith to conceal their true beliefs.
But we do know that the basic teaching of the Family of Love was the belief that man had once been one with God, but lost his way by centering attention on himself. Jesus Christ attempted to lift the veil, to restore this mysterious sense of unity, but the church soon distorted his message. It would take a new prophet with the initials H.N. or Homo Nouvus, the New Man, to restore this connection, a new messiah who would bring together Christians, Muslims and Jews. By following the Gospel According to Hendrik Niclaes, devotees could connect with “the inner man” and see “with the clearness of his Godly Light.”
Niclaes lived for many years in Emdem, a German coastal town just north of the Dutch border, but through his marriage had contacts with leading burghers in the Low Countries. His most important connection was with Christopher Plantin, the influential French Renaissance humanist and book printer who lived in Antwerp and published Niclaes’ writings, including the Glass of Righteousness, between 1555 and 1562.
Niclaes’ ideas spread through the churches in the Burgundian Netherlands and among some in the “stranger churches” established in England by refugees — like the Lettins — fleeing the persecutions of the Duke of Alva. It’s unclear whether or not Niclaes himself visited England, but his teachings were secretly embraced by followers there — and condemned by both the Protestant and Catholic guardians of orthodoxy.
In a letter written in 1567, the same year Jean Lettin III fled to England, Plantin cited the teaching of Niclaes as one of the reasons he was “still advancing in the knowledge of the great and inexpressible secrets of the love of the living God.”
Like Niclaes, Plantin tried to work the middle ground between the warring factions of Catholics and Protestants, doing whatever it took to keep his printing press running. The philosophy of both men was perhaps best expressed by the skeptic Hieronymus Senamus. “I enter the temples of Christians and Israelites and Jews wherever possible and also those of the Lutherans and Zwinglians lest I be offensive to anyone, as if I were an atheist, or seem to disturb the peaceful state of the republic…But I, lest I ever offend, prefer to approve all the religions of all rather than to exclude the one which is perhaps the true religion.”
In his heart, Niclaes was too convinced of his own messianism to be truly classified as a Skeptical Universalist. But gathering on the fringes of his movement were the Antwerp humanists and a circle of Orientalists and Cabalists. They spread the seeds of the interreligious mysticism and the perennial philosophy — the “spiritual but not religious” philosophy embraced by so many seekers today.
Niclaes’ own personality and surety as to his own prophetic uniqueness led to the inevitable schisms and eventual decline of the Family of Love. Plantin and others left the fold to embrace the ideas of Henrik Jansen van Barrefelt, a weaver and Christian mystic who wrote under the name “Hiel.” One commentator said this to describe the essence of Barrefelt:
“Men have this hidden treasure in themselves and by a perverse error men seek outside themselves that which is within them.”
Others who split off from Niclaes tried to rise above the wars of religion and sectarian strife that was tearing Europe apart. “I have never denied nor abandoned Christ,” writes Justus Lipsius, “even if I do not profess Lutheranism and live with the Calvinists. For all religions and no religion are one and the same thing to me.” Lipsius also lamented, “Religion, oh religion! How many do you lead astray with vain deceit?”
One can see why the Quakers, some of whom were influenced by writers affiliated with the Family of Love, would become the new focus of religious persecution, being accused of “perfectionism.”
In his book The Family of Love, religion scholar Alastair Hamilton also sees the sect’s influence on the Rosicrucian movement. Sixteenth century philosophers like Niclaes and Barrefelt may have been mostly forgotten, but they helped create an “atmosphere of toleration which permitted the philosophers of the Enlightenment to express their ideas as boldly as they did.”
(We will see my family’s link back to Hendrik Niclaes in later chapters — through my nineteenth century paternal ancestors’ interest in Rosicrucian/Masonic movements, and in the way my maternal clan and I dabbled in the metaphysical Unity movement in the 1930s and 1980s.)
Niclaes, who died around 1580, was repeatedly condemned posthumously and during the last two decades of his life by Catholics and Protestants who conflated Familists with libertines. In England, the Family of Love was linked to a group known as the Surrey Sectarians. All goods were held in common among members of this sect. “Marriage, too, was to take place within the community, while adultery, also amongst members of the sect, was sanctioned enthusiastically.”
Niclaes tried to defend his followers in England. The future of Familism looked bleak on October 3, 1580 when Queen Elizabeth issued a proclamation ordering that these “dangerous Heretikes and Sectaries be severely punished,” instructing her agents to root them out of the churches and burn all of Niclaes’ writings. This helped drive the church underground, making its activities all the more invisible to historians.
Like with everything having to do with the Familists, things were not always as they seemed. The royal crackdown on the Family of Love stopped almost as soon as it started. Several scholars have noted that there were Familists in the queen’s entourage, and there are hints that Elizabeth herself was a fan of Niclaes’ writing or even a secret member. In fact, the monarch herself penned a poem, “On Monsieur’s Departure,” which according to one scholar was clearly based on a book by Niclaes, Terra Pacis, translated from Dutch to English in 1575.
The “Monsieur” in the queen’s poem was Monsieur Francis, the Duke of Anjou, who courted and sought to marry Elizabeth when the queen was in her mid-forties. Francis, the Catholic son of King Henry II of France and Catherine de Medici, was in his mid-twenties, and was one of the few suitors to have been clearly enamored by the Virgin Queen.
Elizabeth had both personal and political reasons to be drawn to Familism. Her poem, writes scholar David Wootten, is the story of a virgin queen “preoccupied with true love, with images of hearts and of the handfast that represents betrothal in marriage. It is the story of an astute politician, who was at odds with her Privy Council and with Puritan preachers and turned to the only people in her rein who thought there was nothing problematic about a Protestant marrying a Catholic.”
Elizabeth’s poem is “a spiritual autobiography” showing obvious familiarity with the philosophy of Hendrik Niclaes. “It is the story of a soul that is blind, but learns to see; that is divided against itself, but ceases to be a stranger to itself…This is the autobiography of the inward man — this gendered language is the language of the poem — on his journey not just to salvation, but to perfection. It is the story of an inward man that becomes God, just as God becomes the inward man.”
Wootten notes that one of the rare original copies of Terra Pacis comes with an inscription that sums up the teachings of the Family of Love: Amor transformat amantem in amatum. “Love transforms the lover into the beloved; or the believer becomes God; and God, through his love for us, becomes man…Thus each believer became Christ himself.”
So, with the inspiration of the writer Erasmus, the mystic Bruno, prophet Niclaes and prince Rudolf behind us, let us follow the Lettins to Elizabethan England, their first stop on a journey to a new world.