Gorlæus’ Two Treatises
Chapter 3 Gorlæus’ Life
3.12. gorlaeus’ contribution to philosophy
As we have just seen, Taurellus furnishes us with the last important piece to the puzzle constituted by Gorlaeus’ precocious philosophical system. However, no original thinker is the sum of his predecessors; nor can Gorlaeus’ system be de-duced from the sum of the views contained in the teaching of De Veno, Scaliger, Vorstius and Taurellus. In fact, only an extraordinarily tidy, coherent and sharp mind could have brought the ideas of such different authors into a new synthesis.
This is why Gorlaeus, despite his youth, deserves to obtain a more honorable place in the history of philosophy and science than he has hitherto been granted.
Our knowledge of the circumstances under which the Excercitationes and the Idea physicae came about certainly do not lessen the respect for the intellectual achievement these two writings represent. At the same time, it obviously influenc-es our interpretation of it. Gorlaeus, as we now know, was not a mature philoso-pher contemplating physical, chemical and medical evidence, but a self-confident student who responded with his writings to a religious controversy with a number of powerful philosophical notions.
If we resume our findings, we may postulate that Gorlaeus’ exposure to specifi-cally Protestant ways of philosophizing began at the University of Franeker. While any Dutch undergraduate in those days was likely to have to come across a range of non-Aristotelian notions, particularly in the fields of metaphysics and logic, Gorlaeus was lucky enough to learn his trade from the versatile and heterodox Henricus de Veno, who in the field of natural philosophy (or physica) combined a scriptural approach with German metaphysics and Italian naturalism. Above, we have traced Gorlaeus’ conviction that all natural bodies are exclusively mixtures of water and earth and that they are mixed through the force of celestial heat back to De Veno and thence to Cardano and the north-Italian commentary literature on Meteorology IV. But we have also seen that Gorlaeus goes beyond his teacher by combining this model with the corpuscular explanations he had found in Scaliger’s anti-Cardanian Exercitationes exotericae.
Gorlaeus’ fascination with Scaliger’s work cannot only be inferred from nu-merous doctrinal parallels, but expresses itself more directly: Scaliger is the only modern author quoted and mentioned by name in all of Gorlaeus’ more than 400 pages. However, we have also seen that this admiration is not blind. Gorlaeus’
rejection of Aristotelian hylemorphism and its substitution by a fully developed atomist doctrine mark a clear break with Scaliger, who, after all, had depicted himself as the protector of Aristotle’s eternally valid physics and had concealed his corpuscularian notions under the Peripatetic terminology of minima naturalia. To explain the sources of Gorlaeus’ atomist ontology, we have had to look elsewhere.
If the arguments presented in this chapter are correct, then his ontology and the
atomism that results from it is not the fruit of Italian medico-philosophical phys-ics, but of German theologico-metaphysical thought.
We have furthermore seen how Gorlaeus, as a beginning student of theology at Leiden University, found himself at the epicenter of the Arminian controversy and the upheaval caused by the appointment of the theologian Conrad Vorstius as Arminius’ successor. Everything we have heard about Gorlaeus – his teacher De Veno, his friend Engelbert Egidius, his roommate Rudolph van Echten, and above all, the doctrinal overlaps with Taurellus and Vorstius – document that he sided with the embattled professor. His propagation, in the Exercitationes of a ‘first philosophy’, ontologically defined, as a method for finding the essential properties of all existing things, including God, can in the context of 1611 be interpreted as nothing else but a defense of the guiding idea behind Vorstius’ controversial Trac-tatus de Deo, which had been published in its final form in 1610.
We have heard that one of the charges brought against Vorstius was that he had followed the ‘atheist physician’ Nicolaus Taurellus in applying physical categories to God. The Utrecht theologian Voetius was later to accuse Gorlaeus of having committed the same crime. This charge, we have found, is correct. We have shown that Taurellus’ ontology provides a number of crucial elements for our reconstruc-tion of Gorlaeus’ atomism, for it represents the blueprint of the latter’s equareconstruc-tion of ‘being’ with ‘existence’, ‘oneness’ and ‘quantity’ – an identification from which atomism follows as a corollary. Put somewhat crudely, Gorlaeus accepted Taurel-lus’ atomist ontology and applied it to his Italianate natural philosophy, thereby producing a philosophical and physical system that was remarkably original.
That system, as we shall see in our concluding chapter, was for some decades read, discussed, accepted or refuted at home and abroad, leaving its most visible and intriguing traces notably in the circle of Descartes’ Dutch friends.
Gorlaeus died in the spring of 1612. We do not know where and why he died, nor whether he had been ill for some time before passing away; perhaps he had con-tracted malaria, as presumably did his father, who also died in 1612.1 All we have is his tomb and his two posthumous publications, the Exercitationes philosophicae (published in 1620) and the Idea physicae (published in 1651). From the unfinished state of the concluding part of the Exercitationes, we may conclude that Gorlaeus was still working on his longer treatise when he died. One in fact senses that his decision to deviate from his standard type of exposition and to jot down a para-phrase of a number of positions defended in a recent theological disputation at Leiden concerning the origin of the soul and the transmission of evil must have been due to his wish to conclude his manuscript before it was too late.2
As we have seen above, the Idea, printed in 1651, contained ideas that were too similar to those expounded in the Exercitationes and appeared too late to elicit much of a reaction.3 With the Exercitationes, the story is different: it enjoyed, no-tably between 1620 and 1650, quite a reputation at home and abroad.
Who decided to publish the Exercitationes in 1620, eight years after Gorlaeus’
death, is not clear. After all, by then, Gorlaeus’ parents had also passed away, and Gorlaeus’ aunt and his cousin Carel van Gelder, a lawyer, were taking care of the estate. It might have been Van Gelder, the executioner of the will of David van Goorle, Sr., who had the book published. One could also imagine an involvement of Abraham van Goorle, Jr., David Gorlaeus’ paternal cousin. Jaeger has suggested that Petrus Bertius, the former regent of the Theological College at Leiden as well as a friend of both Arminius and Gorlaeus’ uncle Abraham, may have organized this publication – but we have already seen that there is no evidence to corrobo-rate that claim.4 What is conspicuous, however, is that whoever it was who edited the work had no interest in revealing himself or his motivations. Contrary to the Idea physicae of 1651, the Exercitationes do not carry any preface or introduction.
Whether this absence of any explanation points to an awareness of the doctrinal incompatibility of its contents with the contra-Remonstrant orthodoxy that had been imposed on the entire country in 1619 at the Synod of Dort cannot be deter-mined, although it is likely.