Tolerating ¿Hidden? Churches

By Eduardo di Paolo

While cruising through the city during the last Open Monumenten Dag, I marvelled at how many houses in the centre, utterly regular in appearance, were, in reality, churches. Their main identitary trait is, in fact, their hiddenness; they are now remnants of the bygone era of tumultuous 17th-century Dutch religious politics. Their opaque covertness represents the historical turn of the tide in the region, which saw Catholicism being usurped as the main religion and solidified its minority role in the public sphere in favour of a now-omnipresent Reformism (within which Calvinist currents remain paramount). Contrary to a virtual totality of European cases in which—after the wave of wars and repressions which followed the Reformation of the Christian Church, the faithful of the dominated creed were prosecuted and annulled—the newly established Dutch Republic distinguished itself through practices and policies recognised as tolerant. This trait, which emerged in opposition to the oppressiveness of the previous monarchic catholic rulers, firmly attached itself to the myth of the nation and has become rooted in the image of ‘Dutchness’. In front of these church houses, though, whose main characteristic is furtivity, I see a tension between the absolute ‘good-ness’ of tolerance and the clandestinity it enforces. However, I do not see this as a contradiction, but rather as a testament to the layered complexity of the concept of ‘tolerance’, whose effective material virtues have been reified and, thus, obfuscated by centuries of overtly political instrumentalisation, nationalistic pride and finally rendered an incoherent blob of unique moral righteousness, unfailingly taken at face value.

      This imaginary of Dutch tolerance has roots which predate the realization of the first Republic of the Seven United Netherlands (originated in 1579): anachronistic accounts of a reconstructed past of unbowed liberty and virtuous tolerance started surfacing profusely during the Spanish rule of the lands, starting from the 16th century. Ancient roots of it, corroborating these traits as inherently Dutch, were found among the Batavians, a Germanic tribe which revolted against the foreign dominion of the Roman Empire in 69 A.D. It was, then, only logical that the Reformed Christian faith would reach such heights of popularity specifically in Holland, where freedom of conscience had been part of its soul for millennia, if you looked hard enough. This indomitable storied past, in unison with the new attuned spiritual lymph of Calvinism, promoted an unsubdued Netherlands, capable, and made for, overthrowing the empire looming over them. The political rule of Philip II of Habsburg, whose main intent was to scale up gewetensdwang—the forcing of consciences—was especially illegitimate in the land of “exceptional lovers and advocates of their liberty and enemies of all violence and oppression”, as Willem van Oranje—Pater Patriae, Vader des Vaderlands—gloriously stated. The Dutch Revolt, fueled by these ideas and drawn out for decades, resulted in the overthrowing of Spanish Catholic Rule in the Netherlands and the creation of the Dutch Republic. As a result, starting from the 1580s, the Reformed Church became the privileged Church and the only public one; Catholic worship was banished from the public plaza and its Church was dispossessed of its buildings in favour of either the new public one or the newborn government. Catholics, though, were still able to profess their faith privately, under the veil of their own domestic roof. Thus, the eventuality of a degeneration of what Karl Popper has later described as ‘the Paradox of Tolerance’, according to which a society tolerant of intolerance would eventually be bested by intolerant forces, was slayed and Dutch liberalism prevailed.

      While the non-Calvinist cult was limited to a supposed invisibility to the national community and its rituals atomised, only allowing for familial worship, there was room (albeit very shadowy) under the scope of the law to make space for an enlarged religious congregation. Able to maneuver under the ostensibly tolerant Hollanders, groups of Catholics started to meet in increasingly larger numbers: their secret meetings were itinerant and quiet, replacing the loud church bells of the Oude Kerk with shushed prayer. As time went on, though, secrecy started to become more of an outwardly scenic fiction than an underground society. Chants started getting louder, and the rooms of prayer that hosted the community turned larger, more adornate and sedentary. This tacit permissiveness has materialised in schuilkerken - ‘hidden church’ in Dutch -  like Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder, "Our Dear Lord in the Attic"; masses were celebrated starting from 1661 in the house of a German merchant in the current Red Light District. At the beginning of the 18th century, after approval of the local government was obtained, with the deal sweetened by large payments and constant deposit of taxes, walls were torn down, artists brought in and the chapel of the regular-looking house made into a proper church on the inside. The rich baroque of the interior was ‘let’ exist thanks to that same doctrine of tolerance.

But this principle remains defined as ‘acts of allowing or accepting things that one disapproves of or dislikes’ , whose guidelines are always defined by someone recognised as entitled to decide what is in proper taste and what, in turn, cannot be tolerated. What crosses the line is very often debated publicly, and because of its contentiousness, we have many records of it; for example, in 1691, the Amsterdam City Council mandated:

4) To avoid giving any offense, they promise that the entrance to the new permitted assembly place shall be behind, on the Burgwal, where it is less offensive

(5) They promise not to tolerate any sleds being parked in front of the assembly place

(6) it is to see to it that at the end of services no one stands around in front of the assembly place waiting for another person

(7) The undersigned shall take great care that his services begin and end at such times that no offense will be given by [Catholics and Reformed Protestants] meeting each other when coming from and going to church

(8) The undersigned shall see to it that Catholics not pass through the street in a troop, nor with rosary, church book, or other offensive objects apparent, when going to or coming from the permitted assembly place.

The political character of ‘tolerance’ entails a constant dispute over where the boundary of acceptableness is drawn. Often, the point through which the line is painted can be pushed, with enough economic incentive. It is not a case that these churches were allowed to expand only when merchants or wealthy patrons could afford to pay a tax to the city, making them welcome enough to practice their confession. The entwined financial quality of the phenomenon with the rise of a proto-capitalist liberal economy is confirmed in the guidebook of the abovementioned "Our Dear Lord in the Attic", which presents what is now a museum as:

“a token of the liberalism of the mercantile Dutch in an age of intolerance.”

      Exactly because of the fact that tolerance has been seen as a particularly innate Dutch quality, the opposite has often been held as true: that intolerance, the negation of Dutchness itself, must be a foreign vice. As mentioned above, religious authoritarianism was the defining characteristic of the Spanish regime, being repudiated for that exact reason. Subsequently, though, an anxiety-ridden xenophobia was directed towards Southern Calvinists, those who left the lands still held by the Habsburgs towards Holland. They were seen as representatives of an ideal of a similar theocratic despotism, just as intolerant as the Catholic Spanish. Thus, as the burgemeester Hooft remarked, “The management of affairs should be in the hands of persons of a prudent, steady, and peaceable disposition, which qualities, I believe, prevail more among the natives than among those who have come here to live from other lands.” Political power is better kept between ‘us’.

      It will not be a shock to you that tolerance as a political tool has been reused incessantly ever since, especially thanks to the geopolitical primacy of the nation-state and the romanticisation of its values and rhetoric. While tolerance has been time and time again an ally of genuine openness and acceptance, its essence is not of pure goodness. As with any political instrument, it must be perennially questioned and examined. Most recently, intolerance of intolerants has been used to shield away from the moral national community whoever can be objectified as ‘Muslim’, for the sake of the protection of the saint values that have made the nation. Even as schuilkerken are now semi-obscure representations of a distant past, they continue to incarnate the dilemmas of tolerance and hiddenness.