Voetius not only overlapped with Witsius for 40 odd years, but he was an important subject in the Dutch Reformed world in which Witsius lived and breathed. Not only was Witsius heavily influenced by Voetius, but Witsius’ own work was – in a sense – an attempt to reconcile the best of Voetius and Cocceius and their respective methodologies. Any careful study into Witsius must grapple with Gijsbert Voet, and hopefully the following biography presents a clear albeit brief look into this important Dutch father.
Biography of Voetius
Born in the small fortified city of Heusden as the son of Paulus Voet and Maria de Jongeling, Gisbertus (or Gijsbert) Voetius’s early years were dominated by the experience of war. Heusden was on the front line in both a military and a religious sense, as it was situated on the southern bank of the river Meuse that would later form the borderline dividing Catholic and Protestant parts of the country. Voetius’s relatives were directly involved in the conflict with Spain. Grandfather Nicolaas Dirkszoon Voet, heir to a Westphalian noble family, died in prison in ’s Hertogenbosch where he was kept on account of his support of William the Silent. Several members of Gijsbert’s mother’s family would flee the city, leaving all their possessions behind in order to accompany the Prince of Orange to Breda. Voetius’s father meanwhile saw his own property being demolished in the rampage around Heusden. Having joined the State militias for a second time in 1592, he was killed in the siege of Bredevoort in 1597, leaving behind the sickly Maria with four children.
Gijsbert was then only eight and went to live with the local blacksmith, expenses being defrayed by the city government. Noticing his excellence in the study of letters, the Heusden magistrates decided to prolong their sustenance. In 1604 they sent their youngster – of small stature, but intellectually mature – as ‘the city’s student’ to the Leiden State College. Voetius seems to have felt at home there. The daily readings of the Scriptures and the Heidelberg Catechism as well as the College’s propaedeutic courses in philosophy doubtlessly contributed to his later belief in the importance of a well-defined body of student material, such as it appears in his Exercitia et bibliotheca studiosi theologiae of 1644. In philosophy, Voetius showed a special predilection for the works of Bartholomaeus Keckermann (1571–1609), but his philosophical schooling was far from one-sided. Together with fellow students such as Simon Episcopius and Caspar Barlaeus, both of whom, like his professor in logic Petrus Bertius, would later become champions of the Arminian cause, Voetius read a huge amount of ancient literature. He studied Lucretius’s De rerum natura alongside Aristotelian, Stoic and neo-Stoic classics of physics, ethics and psychology, and also read more recent works on medicine, natural history and geography. He further exercised his mathematical skills, attended chemical and anatomical experiments, and is said to have learned to play the zither, the organ and the flute. Continue reading »
