Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [22]
So far as Torrentius’s critics were concerned, these views proved the painter was no Christian. Many believed he lived his life according to the precepts of Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher who wrote that true happiness is to be found in the pursuit of pleasure, and certainly his activities in Holland’s taverns suggest an acquaintance with the Epicurean worldview. But for all this, Torrentius was not an atheist. He was, if anything, a Gnostic—a believer in the ancient heresy that God and Satan are equal in strength, and that the world is the creation of the devil. Like all Gnostics, the painter held that each man had a divine spark within him, which was suppressed by sin but could nevertheless be reanimated while he was still on Earth; indeed, he hinted to one correspondent that he himself had successfully completed this quasi-alchemical operation.
This was without question an intensely heretical philosophy. During the Middle Ages, thousands of people had gone to the stake for such beliefs, and even in the Dutch Republic of the 1620s, such views could be enough to earn a man a death sentence. Yet Torrentius apparently believed himself to be too well connected to run afoul of the church or the civic authorities. He openly discussed Gnostic philosophy with his friends.
Jeronimus Cornelisz came to share several of Torrentius’s thoughts and may well have picked up a number of his views in discussion with the freethinking painter. Like Torrentius, the apothecary did not believe in the existence of hell. Like him, he saw merit in the Epicurean way of life. But Jeronimus went further than his friend in some respects, holding to philosophies that even Torrentius could not agree with. Where he came across such ideas remains a mystery; it may be that they, too, had been discussed at philosophical salons such as Thibault’s fencing club, though the apothecary could also have heard them in his youth in Friesland. All that is certain is that they made even the Gnostic heresy seem harmless in comparison.
Cornelisz’s central belief, it seems, was that his every action was directly inspired by God. “All I do,” he explained to a handful of trusted acquaintances, “God gave the same into my heart.” It followed that he himself lived his life in what amounted to a state of grace. This was an intensely liberating philosophy, and one that would have shocked any God-fearing Calvinist to the core. Taken literally, it implied that the apothecary was incapable of sin. If each idea, each action, was directly inspired by God, then no thought, no deed—not even murder—could truly be described as evil.
Twisted and simplistic though it might have seemed to any orthodox Christian, Jeronimus’s strange philosophy had a long tradition. Its proper name is anti-nomianism, the idea that moral law is not binding on an individual who exists in a state of perfection. No other creed—not the Jewish faith, nor even the Muslim—held quite so much terror for the clergy of the Dutch Reformed Church, for no other philosophy was quite so dangerous to the established order.
The antinomian philosophy had existed in Europe since at least the early thirteenth century, when a group called the Amaurians began preaching it in Paris, mixed with the teachings of Epicurus. Similar beliefs cropped up again in Germany a century later, where a sect known as the Brethren of the Free Spirit emerged, eventually spreading throughout central Europe. On this occasion they persisted well into the sixteenth century.*7
The Brethren divided humanity into two groups—the “crude in spirit” and the “subtle.” Those who failed to cultivate and ultimately release the divine potential that lay within them would always remain crude, but those who absorbed themselves in it could become living gods. As one historian of the movement explains:
“Every impulse was experienced as a divine command; now they could surround themselves with