Batavia's Graveyard (6 page)

By the time Cornelisz set off for Haarlem, then, other voices and other thoughts
had probably begun to make their mark on him. And when he got there, he soon discovered
that his new home was far removed from the provincial narrowness of Bergum and Leeuwarden.
Haarlem was a place where wealthy men pursued religious and philosophical inquiries
largely free from the attentions of the Dutch Reformed Church. If one knew the right
people, introductions could be arranged to certain circles where radical and even openly
heretical ideas were freely discussed. Working on the Grote Houtstraat and dealing with
some of the most influential people in the city, Jeronimus was in an excellent position to
make such acquaintances. And it seems this is precisely what he did.

The fencing club run by a certain Giraldo Thibault in Amsterdam was typical of
the philosophical talking-shops that would have attracted Cornelisz. The club was located
in a fashionable area of the town, and its habitués were mostly young, unmarried, very
wealthy members of the city’s ruling class. They generally came to Thibault daily,
ostensibly in the hope of mastering his fashionable technique. But for many of the members
the club’s real attraction was that they could relax and mix informally with their
peers, far from the ears of parents, wives, or ministers of the church. The salon was a
fine place to meet interesting new friends. Thibault knew everyone worth knowing in the
city, and his club was popular with artists, doctors, and professors as well as with the
sons of wealthy burghers. One member of the fencing master’s circle was Cornelis van
Hogelande, who was professor of philosophy at the University of Leyden and also a leading
alchemist. Thibault’s brother-in-law Guillermo Bartolotti was the second-richest man
in the Republic and had long been a major investor in the VOC. Another frequent visitor to
the club was Johannes van der Beeck, one of the finest of Dutch painters; a sometime
resident of Haarlem, he was better known by the Latin version of his name,
“Torrentius.”

Thibault himself was a good deal more than a mere swordsman. Many of his pupils
revered him as a philosopher as well, and he and his friends are known to have discussed
many of the topics that fascinated the humanists of the day. Talk in the salon ranged from
alchemy and Greek philosophy to magic and mythology. The apparently unremarkable fencing
club thus served as a conduit through which many new and revolutionary ideas found their
way into the very heart of the Dutch Republic.

It is unlikely that Jeronimus himself was a pupil of Thibault’s. He probably
lacked the social standing required to gain entry to such an exclusive group. But he
certainly had connections with some of the master swordsman’s acquaintances, and,
through them, he became familiar with some dangerous philosophies. These he seems to have
absorbed and combined with the radical Anabaptist precepts he had picked up in his youth
to create a strange, intensely personal creed—one that was not only explicitly
heretical, but potentially murderous as well.

The man who linked Cornelisz to Giraldo Thibault’s circle was Torrentius the
painter. Jeronimus knew him in Haarlem, and though it is impossible to say with any
certainty where or when they met, they did live in close proximity to each other, the
apothecary in the Grote Houtstraat and the painter only 200 yards away in a house on the
Zijlstraat. Cornelisz and Torrentius also had several acquaintances in common—Jacob
Schoudt, whom Jeronimus used as his solicitor in his pursuit of Heyltgen Jansdr, had known
the painter well for years, and Lenaert Lenaertsz, a well-respected local merchant, was
very close to both of them. Apothecaries also sold many of the materials that artists
needed for their work—white lead, gold leaf, turpentine—so it is possible that
Torrentius acquired his supplies from Cornelisz. By the late 1620s the two men knew each
other well enough for Jeronimus to be described as a disciple of the painter.

It was, without question, a potentially dangerous relationship for a newcomer to
Haarlem to engage in, for Torrentius was a controversial figure throughout the Dutch
Republic. He had been raised as a Catholic, even working for a while in Spain; and by
1615, back home in the United Provinces, he had acquired a reputation as a lively but
dissolute companion who spent freely on fine clothing and roistering in the many taverns
of the Dutch Republic. A bill that he and a group of friends ran up at the inn The
Double-Crowned Rainbow, in Leyden, came to the staggering total of 485 guilders—more
than 18 months’ wages for a reasonably well-to-do artisan at that time. Part of this
sum, at least, must have been incurred in paying for the services of women; the painter
often claimed that adultery was not a sin and bragged that he had half the whores of
Holland at his personal disposal.

In truth, many of the province’s rich young men behaved in much this sort of
way. But Torrentius was notoriously indiscreet, which made his activities unusually risky.
Riotous living and consorting with prostitutes were severely frowned on by the church
authorities and could easily attract the censure of otherwise well-disposed acquaintances.
In Torrentius’s case, plenty of shocked witnesses could testify to the artist’s
loose morals. His marriage, to a well-brought-up young girl named Cornelia van Camp, had
been a disgrace; the couple quarreled violently and when the union finally collapsed,
Torrentius had gone to prison rather than pay for his wife’s upkeep. The nudes and
mythological scenes he painted also made him suspect, but it was the drunken conversations
he indulged in, in the back rooms of taverns up and down the province, that particularly
concerned his family and friends. On one occasion Torrentius and his company were heard to
drink a toast to the devil. On another, in a Haarlem hostelry, they drank first to the
Prince of Orange, next to Christ, and finally to the prince of darkness. A Leyden man
named Hendrick van Swieten, who had been lodging in the same tavern, was reportedly so
shocked he feared such blasphemy might cause the building to sink into the
ground.

Deeply incriminating though it was, such evidence actually paled beside the tales
that were told in Haarlem concerning Torrentius’s apparently preternatural skill as
an artist. The painter, it was popularly supposed, was actually a black magician who
freely admitted that his masterpieces were not produced by human hands. Rather, it was
claimed, he simply placed his paints on the floor next to a blank canvas and watched while
supernatural music played and his paintings magically created themselves. Others whispered
that Torrentius often went for walks alone in the woods south of Haarlem, where he was
understood to converse with the devil. When he was seen purchasing black hens and roosters
in the market, it was said he needed them as sacrifices to Beelzebub. Ghostly voices had
been heard coming from his studio.

These accounts, and others, may well have been greatly exaggerated; Torrentius
himself always claimed that many of his controversial comments had been meant as jokes.
But, even so, there is little doubt that by the standards of the day, he was a heretic.
Torrentius insisted, for example, that there was no such place as hell, arguing that it
was ridiculous to suppose there was, since it was well known there was nothing beneath the
ground but earth. He told friends the scriptures were nothing but a collection of
fables—a useful tool for keeping the population in check. He was overheard describing
the Bible as “the Book of Fools and Jesters.” He even mocked the suffering of
Christ.

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.
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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 worldly possessions, now they could live in luxury—and now too they
could lie and steal and fornicate without qualms of conscience, for since inwardly the
soul was wholly absorbed into God, external acts were of no account . . . . The Free Spirit
movement was, therefore, an affirmation of freedom so reckless and unqualified that it
amounted to a total denial of every kind of restraint and limitation.”

Not every member of the sect exercised his license to cheat and steal. The
founders of the movement taught that perfect happiness was most likely to be found in
quiet contemplation. But in truth the Free Spirit was generally perceived, even among its
adepts, as a movement of anarchy and self-exaltation. As such it was vigorously persecuted
and never had a large number of adherents, even in its German heartland. From time to time
the Catholic Church seems to have hoped that the sect had been stamped out altogether. But
antinomianism was too potent a philosophy to be repressed for long. Although the Brethren
of the Free Spirit vanished around 1400, their ideas found their way into the Low
Countries under the guise of “Spiritual Liberty.” A sect of this name was
crushed in Antwerp around 1544, and the surviving Libertines fled from Flanders. Some of
them turned up in Tournai and Strasbourg. Others vanished altogether. It seems at least
possible that a few went north into what became the Dutch Republic.

Cornelisz, then, was apparently a Libertine—though not a very good one, for
he ignored the more spiritual aspects of the faith in favor of the promise of complete
freedom of action. In this he resembled Torrentius, his friend and teacher, and the two
men might well have gone on enjoying their philosophical debates indefinitely had the
painter not at last attracted the attention of the Dutch authorities around 1625. From
then on, however, Torrentius found himself fighting for his freedom and his life. Labeled
a heretic, hounded by both church and state, he became the first of Giraldo
Thibault’s circle to be persecuted for his beliefs. The thoughts and views of his
acquaintances became of increasing interest to the authorities as well.