Descartes: A Biography

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In Search of a Career (–) 

enemy by both France and the United Provinces. Accordingly, despite the

appearance of paradox, Catholic France supported the emerging auton-

omy of the Calvinist United Provinces.

In, therefore, when Descartes embarked on his first foreign jour-

ney, he had to travel through the Spanish Netherlands to reach his initial

destination in Holland. He could have travelled by boat from a north-

ern French port and sailed along the North Sea until he reached a safe

port in Holland, such as Rotterdam. This was the route he recommended

to Ferrier over a decade later.However, he subsequently claimed that

his first sea voyage was in;thus we must assume that Descartes

completed his journey overland, by carriage or canal. His destination

was still only a loose confederation of provinces, over which Maurits of

Nassau had becomeStadtholder(provincial governor) and, since the death

of his half-brother in, Prince of Orange. The religious identity of the

emerging state had been defined initially by its rejection of an imposed

Catholicism rather than by a popular adoption of Calvinism. However,

that situation changed significantly during the first two decades of the

seventeenth century, when Calvinist preachers and theologians identified

the ‘one true church’ with the same degree of intolerance and commit-

ment that their Catholic counterparts had exhibited since the Council of

Trent. The result was a public policy of closing the churches and meeting

houses of Catholics, Anabaptists, and all those classified as heretics, and a

significant turn toward fundamentalism and religious intolerance.

The most public expression of this division and of its impact on the

United Provinces was the long-running dispute between rival followers

of Jacobus Arminius (–) and Franciscus Gomarus (–).

Arminius had been appointed a professor of theology at Leiden in,

and he had begun almost immediately to express doubts about a strict

understanding of the doctrine of predestination. The proponents of that

dogma believed that God decides in advance that certain individuals will

be saved or damned to eternal perdition. Accordingly, the church they join

and the religious life they lead results from God’s predestination, rather

than from a free choice by the people involved. This theological dispute

mirrored a similar and equally acrimonious division among Catholic the-

ologians about the efficacy of God’s grace, and about the compatibility of

genuine free will with an ‘irresistible’ divine influence.When Arminius

questioned this doctrine, the implications of his challenge were not limited

to speculative theology. To the extent that he defended human free will