A Brill Calendar: October 19

The Death of Jacobus Arminius

Few professors at Leyden University shaped succeeding generations so deeply and lastingly as Jacobus Arminius.

He died October on 19, 1609: during the sixth year of his tenure in the faculty of theology. From its earliest decades, this institute of higher learning and education became a crucial social force in a country still at loggerheads with foreign powers - on subjects like oppression and abuse in religious affairs.

‘Jacob Hermanszoon’ as he was christened in his native small town of Oudewater, Holland, started his intellectual career in Leyden in 1576, when the University was brand-new; complementing it in Basel and Geneva, Switzerland, where he became thoroughly versed in Calvinist perspectives on the Christian religion. He returned in due time to his homeland to be ordained as a Minister of the Dutch Reformed Church in Amsterdam in 1588.

Fifteen years later, this ‘doctrinal shepherd’ was called to Leyden, where his views and teachings were challenged by a learned colleague, Franciscus Gomarus. The intellectual controversy they engaged in concerned a key topic of the belief they seemed to share: predestination, a complicated theological concept concerning the harshness of the Protestant Creator and the sinfulness of His human creatures.

It is seldom that an academic dispute divided a country so sharply, curiously and bitterly; although, it should be admitted, not for a long time. Gomarus, survived Arminius (the more liberal and amiable of the two contestants) and lived to see his perspective on salvation & doom embraced by the Synod of Dordt (1618 – ’19), an ecclesiastic gathering of Northern European Protestants in the city of Dordrecht.

This Synod agreed on an orthodoxy that outlawed Arminian tenets, placing them beyond the Pale; at least for a decade. Curiously enough, Arminius’ collected works, the ‘Opera Omnia’, appear for the first time in print only in 1629, when the controversy had lost its sharpest edge.