Last week one of our musical friends sent us an email letting us know that on the following Sunday he would be playing his violin as part of a trio during the morning service at the Reformed Church in Blawenburg. We took the hint and showed up for nine o’clock. It was the first time I had been to a religious service of that denomination. The music, all Vivaldi, was well done, and nicely complemented a simple, dignified worship service and an excellent sermon. Blawenburg is an unincorporated wide place in the road (two roads, actually) in Montgomery Township, Somerset County, NJ, on the outskirts of Princeton. The Reformed Church, which used generally to be called the Dutch Reformed, descends from the mainstream of Low Countries Protestantism of the Reformation period. It shares a good deal in common with English and Scottish Presbyterianism and their American descendants. We recall that some of the English “Pilgrims” who came to New England in the early seventeenth century had first sought refuge in the Netherlands. Today there is not all that much that is ethnically Dutch in the Reformed Church. But just as you will still find traces of seventeenth-century French Catholicism in Québec, you might find traces of seventeenth-century Dutch Protestantism in Holland, Michigan.
The Dutch colonial presence, which had been powerful in old New York, long remained visible in Brooklyn, Long Island, and in parts of central New Jersey. It survives today chiefly in place and family names, and in aging ecclesiastical buildings. I am an aficionado of libraries. There is a magnificent gem of a nineteenth-century theological collection preserved at the Dutch Reformed seminary in New Brunswick. I suspect that the library acquisitions budget has been far from opulent for at least two generations, so that the collection itself has a kind of museum aura. New Brunswick is an old town in which there is also a very large old Reformed parish church. Indeed in the Princeton area there are many handsome old Dutch church buildings of similar design, most of them disproportionately large in reference not merely to today’s church-going population but to what might be called absolute population. The last “official” population figure I have for Blawenburg is 190; the church I visited, built in 1832, could easily seat 300. Sunday’s congregation, not counting the musicians, was about a dozen. Fit audience if few, and certainly friendly. I was reminded of a huge and absolutely empty seventeenth-century Dutch church built in stone that I saw in Colombo, in Sri Lanka.
Nowhere does architectural form more necessarily follow function than in ecclesiastical buildings. Most of the church interiors one sees in old Dutch paintings are actually rather jarring to the informed eye: medieval buildings that were theologically “cleaned up” in the waves of rabid iconoclastic vandalism that were a distinctive expression of the Protestant Revolt in the Low Countries. A Gothic church emptied of its mysterious flickering lights, colored windows, dark side chapels and abundance of icons of various sorts can seem lifeless and antiseptic. The public worship of the old Catholicism was built around a sacred performative mystery, and often enough mystification—what Browning memorably called “the blessed mutter of the Mass.” The Protestant reformers demanded a radical return to the Bible, to its reading and to its explication by their preachers. When they began to raise new church buildings, the difference in emphasis became obvious in the architecture: simple undecorated boxes, though often with lateral balconies, with the focus on central lecterns from which the Bible was read and pulpits from which it was preached. There had been to some slight extent a medieval anticipation of this in the churches built by medieval Dominicans—members of the Order of Preachers—whose buildings have with exaggeration been called “preaching barns”.
I am hardly an expert on the religious history of the Low Countries, but I did read a couple of books years ago that have stuck with me. The first was The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1856), by John Lathrop Motley. Motley was an accomplished statesman and amateur historian whose works, though now pretty much discarded, found a large popular audience in the nineteenth century. The major theme of the work is the triumph of Protestant liberty over Catholic religious oppression in the Spanish Netherlands of the sixteenth century. Despite certain biases, it is full of fascinating episodes vividly recounted. The other book is an extraordinary and now sadly neglected novel first conceived in that same year of 1856, though published only a decade later: The Legend of Ulenspiegel by Charles de Coster.* This brilliant work may be the Moby Dick of Belgian literature, though perhaps a little shorter. The original text celebrates, in a pseudo-Renaissance French, the exploits of the famous folk hero and trickster Till Eulenspiegel. The name is translated “Owlglass” in early English versions. The iconographic attributes of an owl and a glass (i.e., mirror) characterize visual representations of this Wiley Coyote of popular Low German literature. De Coster honors the bilingualism of his region while transforming a legendary picaresque figure into a hero of religious liberty in an actual historical situation: quite a remarkable feat, really.
and in a Renaissance comic book
All this came flooding into my mind along with the Vivaldi “Sarabande.” Perhaps it was the noble simplicity of that piece that brought to my mind two other unavoidable (for me) cultural connections with the simplicity of Netherlandish Christianity. These were the Beghards and the Beguines, on the one hand, and Erasmus of Rotterdam on the other. It is possible that you have never heard of the former. The Beghards (men) and the Beguines (women) were lay followers of the religious life in late medieval Europe—monks and nuns, so to speak, but living in the lay world. They were to be found in many parts of Europe, but particularly in the Low Countries. Their lives, like those of so many of the simple folk in The Legend of Ulenspiegel, were often considered scandalous by the official ecclesiastical authorities, but the official ecclesiastical authorities were experts in finding scandal. As for Erasmus of Rotterdam, he is a household name. He was one of the most learned men in Europe as the age of the Revival of Learning began, and his erudite works continue to challenge scholars to this very day. He was the editor of the first modern scholarly edition of the Greek New Testament, a book that has probably been the most seriously studied text in the world for half a millennium. But of all his own original works his favorite, and mine, is as simple in its aspect as an old whitewashed church building on a country road. It is called the Enchiridion, or Handbook; and it lays out the vision of a simple Christian life very different from the stultifying logic-chopping of the dogmatic theologians of his day. I think of it as especially Dutch.
*Charles de Coster, The Legend of Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzac, and Their Adventures Heroical, Joyous and Glorious in the Land of Flanders and Elsewhere, trans. by F. M. Atkinson (London: Heinemann: 1922). The scholarly edition is La légende et les aventures héroiques, joyeuses et glorieuses d’Ulenspiegel et de Lamme Goedzk au pays de Flandres et ailleurs, ed. Joseph Hanse (Bruxelles: Renaissance du Livre, 1959).
