During Abraham Kuyper’s eight years at Leiden University, where he earned his baccalaureate in 1858 and a doctorate in 1863, he lived at his parents’ home but roamed far afield in his mind. Unlike his father, he became acutely interested in intellectual matters. He showed a volatile spirit, developed bold ambitions, and rode the radical edge in his chosen field of theology. He traveled the world via history and literature; he won special distinction as a promising young scholar; he fell in love with a girl to whom he could play Pygmalion; and at the end of it all, he wound up just where his father had been at a comparable stage — in a village pastorate with a new wife and an uncertain future. Small wonder that in the middle of the process he suffered a complete breakdown, or that at the end he underwent a religious conversion triggered by the agonies of ambition and pride.
Romance Academic and Domestic
Although fallen some from its glory days in the seventeenth century, the university that Kuyper entered in September 1855 was still the Netherlands’ largest and best. Leiden’s law faculty was especially renowned, attracting half the student body, especially those from upper-class families. These were the students who controlled campus life and put on the university’s famous masquerades, public spectacles on the order of later American intercollegiate athletics.
Leiden was at heart an institution devoted to perpetuating the Dutch governing elite. But its theology students, like Kuyper, were predominantly middle class in background and faced uncertain employment. Almost half of them were pastors’ sons, and the rest often had an uncle or grandfather in the profession. Their numbers at Leiden were down 25 percent from the 1830s, when theology students had received special government subsidies, and would drop 50 percent again by the 1880s. Kuyper’s entry in the late 1850s came amid a temporary boom in their ranks, which forecast competition for good posts in the future. Compared to the Golden Age, fewer students in any field were coming to Leiden from abroad or even from outlying Dutch provinces, so that the students who lived at home as Kuyper did were the provincials among the provincial. Hallway gossip doubtless communicated his tight circumstances as well. With his father supporting a family of seven on an annual salary of 1850 guilders ($740 US), Kuyper depended on a government stipend for tuition and expenses. Spending money was scarce.
Kuyper naturally chafed at these arrangements. He resisted his father’s pressure to interrupt study time for tea and small talk with the family. He heard all the usual warnings about women and drink and cringed on the occasion when, unable to find his house key upon returning from a late night with friends, he had to rouse “the old man in his sleeping cap” to open the door. Such occasions were infrequent, though, since Kuyper devoted himself ceaselessly to work — seven days and six nights a week. After morning lectures he gave afternoon tutorials to earn spending money, then returned home to study until midnight or even 2:00 a.m. In one nine-month period, the barely-twenty-two-year-old wrote a 320-page manuscript entirely in Latin, using sources so rare that he had to requisition them from French and German libraries. His time was as constrained as his budget, for his state subsidy would run out in six years. Then, presumably with doctorate in hand, he could look forward to competing in a glutted market for a parish with an average starting salary of 800 guilders ($320 US).
Kuyper was spiritually discontent as well. As his work schedule implies, he did not attend church regularly, despite his pastor father, nor, after his profession of faith, did he take Communion with any relish. His most famous public reflection on the situation came later, in 1873. It should be read cautiously in light of his polemical purposes at the time, but there is little in his letters, in his reported behavior, or in the model of his professors to cast doubt on the substance of his recollections:
In the years of my youth the church aroused my aversion more than my affection . . . particularly through the way that church life manifested itself in Leiden. . . . [There] a most pitiful situation prevailed, and the deceit, the hypocrisy, the unspiritual routine that sap the lifeblood of our whole ecclesiastical fellowship were most lamentably prevalent. . . . The spirit was absent, and my heart could feel no sympathy either for a church that so blatantly dishonored itself or for a religion that was represented by such a church.
Kuyper remembered, incorrectly, that he had therefore “postponed my profession of faith until the last possible moment” before his ministerial candidate’s examination; in fact, he took that step in 1857, not at the 1859 deadline. But it was true enough that “upon entering the academic world, I stood without defense or weapon against the powers of negation.” He put some of the blame on his father’s theology, but the real problem lay within: “My faith was not deeply rooted in my unconverted, self-centered soul and was bound to wither once exposed to the scorching heat of the spirit of doubt.”
With such an attitude it was not surprising that in his undergraduate work Kuyper was far more taken with history and literature than with theology. For extra credit he participated in Professor C. G. Cobet’s select “disputations” — debates over particular passages in classical texts. Cobet, one of Europe’s outstanding Greek philologists, used these exercises as research assistance; undergraduates sought them out as a bracing excursion into the world of advanced analysis and scholarly debate. The nineteen-year-old Kuyper thus found himself in the dock of an afternoon defending, in Latin, two dozen propositions about Lysias, or nineteen on Livy and four about Demosthenes, or — in his last year — eight on Tacitus, eight on Homer, and eight on Plato’s Symposium. Besides acquainting him deeply with classical literature, the exercises afforded excellent training in close argumentation.
Kuyper’s favorite teacher was Matthias de Vries, professor of Dutch literature. Indeed, De Vries was the favorite of many. One of them, the future eminent Dutch historian P. J. Blok, located the lure of “our beloved Thijs” in the “enthusiasm” he exuded amid a faculty of cold fish. Greatly learned himself, De Vries kindled in students love for study as such, whatever their field. His specialty in medieval Dutch literature was immediately attractive to the young Kuyper, but Bram followed him across the whole range of Dutch letters and attended the master’s private home seminars even while working on his doctorate. Kuyper would do some research for the definitive new dictionary of the Dutch language that De Vries was compiling, and admired the respect for Dutch culture that the work raised beyond the Netherlands’ borders. De Vries was equally important in introducing the historical method at Leiden, superseding traditional static approaches with a passion to trace a language’s “organic development” from its roots through its many branches and literary fruit. At the same time he took language to be the key to understanding history — “language as it dwells and blooms in the heart of the people, free and unencumbered, loose and living, and thus pure and true.” In short, De Vries exemplified the Romantic linguistics pioneered in the previous century by Johann Gottfried Herder. That Kuyper absorbed these concepts at the bedrock of his thinking is evident from their many allusions, invocations, and operations across his writings.
Another romance bloomed closer at hand. In the summer of 1858, twenty years old and newly graduated from college, Kuyper met Johanna Schaay, a sixteen-year-old Rotterdam girl who happened to be visiting her aunt at Leiden. Whether because his professional future needed some permanent commitment in his personal life, or because he yearned for something beyond his parents’ house, or simply because he was madly in love, Kuyper that summer entered upon an all-consuming courtship of Jo. Neither set of parents was enthused. Jo first struck Kuyper’s parents and sisters as a fashion-plate daughter of a stockbroker father; Jan Frederik advised his son to wait for better prospects. With the young lovers exchanging pledges anyway (on September 14, three months into their relationship), the Schaays insisted that they exchange two and not Kuyper’s preferred four letters a week. They refused entreaties that the betrothal be publicly announced already that Christmas; the next Easter, 1859, seemed soon enough. There followed a classic Victorian engagement of long delay between the declaration and consummation of marital desire.
In this case it entailed five years of Bram’s assertiveness and Jo’s patience. Some friends had joined his father in advising against their match, Kuyper wrote Jo, “but I’ve always thought to myself: I’d rather shape a girl, teach her to think, raise her more and more up to the level where I stand.” Specifically, Jo had to be refitted to become “a Dominie’s wife, a cultured woman, a mother . . . who might have to educate her own children.” The chief obstacle to that end came from her social location, Bram discovered: “Never have I so fully recognized as since our engagement what a gulf exists between the business class and learned folks”; “we” are classically educated and “you” are not. Don’t blame yourself, Bram reassured her; it’s your family’s fault: “by the nature of things, in circles such as yours more work is often done with the body than with the mind.” His solution was to prescribe a daily reading program to get Jo up to speed on French, English, and German literature. Pope, Shakespeare, and Schiller set the standard for style, but he thought she should begin with Paradise Lost for its elevated substance. Jo acquiesced and wrote back that she had acquired the books. “Not books!” Bram scolded. “Use their names. Byron and Racine — so they are called.” He was exasperated that she could not extract more time from her household duties (she was the third surviving daughter in a family by now grown to ten), and dismayed that she preferred Dickens to Shakespeare. He ignored her requests for some Dutch titles; he urged her to spend less on clothes and more on building a library. He chided her for filling her letters with chit-chat when his bore higher concerns. The future they were forming together was “a matter of such weight that it must be well compensated.”
Theological Discontent
Bram pressed Jo on the religious front as well. The first months of their engagement coincided with her preparations for public profession of faith, and the graduate student treated the teenager to a seminar in theological method and modern doubt. To his questions about various doctrines she replied with answers drawn variously from the catechism, natural theology, evangelical sentiment, or biblical quotations. None of it was good enough. “Tell me why you believe as you do,” Kuyper demanded, or your belief is not real religion. Perhaps they should debate the Canons of the Synod of Dort for practice. Your most recent reply is more promising but no better grounded than a Catholic’s belief in the Virgin Mary. Finally having had enough, Jo snapped back: Write down some of your convictions and let me ask you “the ‘why’ question”; we’ll see how you do. They finally agreed to let her minister do the catechizing, but all the while Bram let her in on how far from the traditional answers he himself had traveled.
From their correspondence Kuyper’s theology during his doctoral studies can best be described as Unitarian with pronounced Calvinist and moralist accents. It was Unitarian in that he denied the eternal divinity of Christ: “You don’t believe that anyone can doubt that Jesus did not exist before he appeared on earth,” he answered a protest from Jo. “You’re wrong — I deny it and hundreds with me. . . . He is not God to me, for my religious sense teaches me to know but one God. To me he is a man and nothing but a man.” Yet his denial had Calvinist reasons: “. . . most people put Jesus too much in the foreground and thereby so often forget God. Truly, Jo! That may not be; that is not Religion. Jesus himself would be the first to come out against it. He too did everything for God’s honor. We want to follow his example. So give God alone the glory.” Then ethics took over. God’s glory was besmirched at every drop into sin, but disgusted as Kuyper was with gross carnality, he turned his most searching judgment inward. “The rational and religious feeling in us is God, who reveals Himself overall and thus also in man.” Therefore, if the “moral religious consciousness within us . . . is not as it should be, then sin rules in us — in other words, there is sin in us so long as the godly spirit is not all in all within us.” Predictably, it was at this point that the founder of Christianity “becomes so important to me, for the man Jesus became so great, so perfect, as I too am commanded to become.”
The young theologian doubted other doctrines that Jo was memorizing as well. On immortality, “I feel that I need” such a belief, he wrote her, “but I cannot make it clear and comprehensible. And does needing it make it true?” On the atonement: “To me forgiveness through the blood of Christ is completely unintelligible.” As to revelation, “how do you know that Jesus indeed said such and such? And is what Jesus said still unconditionally true? Wasn’t Jesus also a man?” Church trappings fared worst of all. “Religion does not consist in forms — going to church, celebrating the Lord’s Supper, baptism, confession, and what have you,” he fumed. “Were we perfect, I’d have nothing to do with any of them — indeed, would renounce them.” All material expressions of the divine were suspect. Seeing God’s majesty in the starry sky, as Jo wrote she was wont to do, “is not yet Religion. That is nothing more than a taste for religion, religious feeling, and the momentary upwelling of that feeling.” The beautiful and lovely might be foremost in the human imagination of God, “but that’s a side issue, a form, a change of clothes — not the essence. The chief matter is and remains: holy, holy, holy is the Lord. That is, for whatever is sinful and impure, for whatever does not fully concur with the highest ideal of virtue, there is no place with God. The moral element, the holiness of God we must feel above all else.” He urged her to leave behind everything material and “feel God in your inmost parts, feel his breath run through your limbs, and then fervently thank him as you know that you are human, that God has passed down something of his spirit also in you.”
Kuyper’s discontent rode the cutting edge of Dutch theology, which by now had moved beyond conventional forms of piety but also the two forms of Romantic religion that had proposed to replace them. The conventional pieties included, first, the rote repetition of Reformed standards that Kuyper suspected in Jo’s catechism classes, and secondly the “rational supernaturalism” that had once held sway among the learned and still survived in people like his father. Arising in the late eighteenth century, rational supernaturalism attempted to reassert traditional Christian doctrines against Enlightenment criticism by appeal to the latter’s standards of reason rather than first of all to its own faith or revelation. The result, the visiting Scottish theologian James Mackay later observed, was a system that affirmed miracles while trying to explain them by nature; that accepted biblical authority without specifying its grounds or particular claims; that acknowledged biblical revelation, though remaining vague as to what exactly Scripture was revealing; that followed Jesus without deciding the question of his two natures. Theological minimalists felt the system worked well enough, but to orthodox Reformed circles like the Seceders, this was the old humanist program restyled for rationalist taste. To others, of more Romantic inclination, the approach was arid and outmoded.
The Réveil, where Kuyper would one day find his first audience, belonged in the Romantic camp in appealing to a young generation dissatisfied with the skeptical spirit of their parents. Their yearnings ran in traditional channels, enwrapped in love of Jesus and the bonds of evangelical fellowship. Those priorities put limits on theological pursuits as such, lest intellectual demands cool heart religion or doctrinal particulars disrupt group unity. The more constructive theology that Kuyper encountered as a student thus came from the more liberal Groningen school. It was Romantic in reaching out to such German luminaries as Friedrich Schleiermacher and Johann Herder. Philosophically it borrowed from German Idealism, even more from Plato. Substantively, it was Christocentric, vesting ultimate authority for doctrine and life in the “Spirit of Christ as revealed in the New Testament.” Yet the Groningers were susceptible to charges that they taught more an Arian than a Trinitarian Christ. In their view, Jesus, preexistent but not divine, brought down to earth the perfection attained by virtue of his unity with the Father and thus served as the ultimate inspiration for all who would follow him. On this account the spiritual life became less a struggle with compulsive depravity than a progressive movement toward fellowship with God; to attain that was to realize true humanity. And the Groningers saw that destiny to be promised for more than individuals. Just as the risen Lord was further revealed in the historical development of the society he founded — the church — so the progress of world history would yield perfection for whole nations, the entire race. The Groningers’ crusade for national betterment, especially in public schooling, was as good as its word.
The New Realism
The only problem — so thought the rising theologians of the 1850s — was that the Romantic premises no less than the biblical claims of these schools were outmoded. A new realism was ascendant at Leiden along with the hard-nosed liberalism of Thorbecke, who was expected back on the faculty once his political diversion was over. If the natural sciences still lagged in enrollment at mid-century, the positivism and empiricism represented by the country’s foremost philosopher, Cornelis W. Opzoomer of Utrecht, made a compelling case to refute — or to emulate. In Kuyper’s case the answer came from Joannes Henricus Scholten, the pioneer of Modernist theology in the Netherlands and Kuyper’s graduate-school mentor. The most important Dutch theologian of his generation, Scholten sounded a tough-minded naturalism that discarded dreamy Romantic wishes. “Nature” no longer spoke in beatific harmonies but in a long struggle in which spirit sought to triumph over flesh, the moral over the willful. All religion at bottom was a function of this process, Scholten taught, a school of sublime morality for the less tutored that would give way as the progress of reason advanced. As for Christianity in particular, Scholten and his Leiden colleagues adopted the astringent biblical hermeneutics of the German Higher Criticism, demoting Scripture and especially the Groningers’ beloved New Testament as a reliable historical record. What remained of rational supernaturalism was exposed as a bundle of inconsistencies, while the Groningen theology seemed quite sentimental. The Modernist agenda was to forthrightly naturalize Christian theology as an allegory — the best available allegory — of human development toward full responsible freedom, which was God’s ultimate purpose in history.
The vision was bracing in its honesty, freshness, and courage, and in Scholten’s heyday students flocked to his lecture hall to hear it. They came not just from theology, like Kuyper, but from across the university to witness, as Scholten’s successor remembered it, “one great, fully fledged world and life view [being] built up before their eyes.” This was “an all-inclusive monism . . . wherein all questions had an answer, wherein no divisions remained for human thought, but wherein everything flowed out from God ‘as the power of all powers, the life of all life.’” The vision retained “a fascinating charm” upon the audience, wherever they came to rest intellectually or vocationally.
Kuyper was a case in point. However much he eventually came to disagree with Scholten in substance, he retained much of the master’s style and spirit. Abraham Kuenen, Scholten’s foremost contemporary, remembered him as “a picture of strength,” “a character of granite.” K. H. Roessingh, Scholten’s successor, described him as “a prophet in the podium.” All these images Kuyper assiduously cultivated. Scholten never espoused a position, Kuenen observed, without first retreating into private meditation, testing the notion at the bar of his own spiritual life, there also entertaining every reason against it, until at last he could come before his students and speak with all doubts resolved. The procedure describes Kuyper’s lifelong practice to a T. As would Kuyper, Scholten became interested in classic Reformed theology at his first village parish, where its tough lineaments looked attractive compared to other options. Both men then set out to “develop” Reformed theology from its outdated language until it came into rapport with the needs of the day. Comprehend, think, and know were both the teacher’s and the student’s favorite imperatives, and system and consistency were the hallmarks of their finished products. Kuyper would remember Scholten when he championed theology as a science with its own rights, from Scholten bear the conviction that Calvinism was the purest form of Christianity, and with Scholten take the supralapsarian track within Reformed theology. As in some understandings of classic Calvinism, Scholten’s predestination verged on determinism, with the sovereign will of God moving ineluctably toward the consummation of the world-order. Kuyper would de-naturalize (or re-supernaturalize) that conception, but when one day he roiled the waters of the national church by insisting on the doctrine of divine election, he could claim accurately enough to be transmitting a lesson learned at Scholten’s feet.
Scholten’s project bore a twofold direction. In one respect it obeyed the Modernist injunction that theology be a “free science,” set loose to study “the religious life of humanity in its historical and psychological variety.” Yet in Scholten’s eyes the Reformed tradition stood supreme amid that variety. Although it is possible to infer that, if theology simply reflects human values, then the best theology reflects the best people, Scholten saved his praise for Reformed “principles” operating within Reformed churches, especially for those figures who followed those principles consistently over the flux of time. Kuyper learned nothing so fundamentally as this point: as to method, Reformed theology had grown by extrapolation from certain fixed “principles”; as to substance, first among these principles was the absolute sovereignty of God. One other lesson reverberated as well. Just as the sovereignty of God was (in the parlance of the trade) the “material” principle of the Reformed tradition, so Scripture constituted its “formal” rule. But with Scripture’s textual credibility being undermined as he wrote (even by what he wrote), Scholten returned to the old Reformed emphasis upon the testimony of the Holy Spirit — namely, that the Bible remains inert until the Spirit quickens the believer’s heart to accept its truth. For Scholten this inner witness in effect became the ultimate authority in the church as well as in the individual soul. Christ as the sinless one alone revealed God as author of the moral order, but only the pure in heart could see him as such. In Scholten’s Modernist translation, the testimony of the Holy Spirit was “the witness of reason in its moral purity.”
German Philosophy
This was the language of Immanuel Kant, indicating that from Scholten Kuyper was acquiring philosophical along with theological habits. The philosophy proved to be just as lasting as the theology, and of much greater consequence for Kuyper’s long-term influence as a thinker. His key proposal would come in the area of epistemology, the theory of how humans acquire knowledge or certify truth. Here, in contrast to other contemporary Protestants of orthodox hue, Kuyper would combine Reformed Christian and German Idealist sources. Scholten again showed how. Though he advertised Modernism as a response to the rising tide of science, in fact an Idealist set of presuppositions controlled all of Scholten’s thinking, including his empiricist claims. The course of human history to him remained more Hegelian than Darwinian, not an evolutionary struggle in which a materialist nature selected among random variations, but a saga of Mind asserting ever more control over matter, of Will becoming ever more infused with Right so as to infuse Mind with a yearning for the Good. Reason within — especially what Kant had called “practical reason,” anchored in the moral will — still shaped the world without, and could have, must have, increasing effect over time, as all the heirs of Hegel knew.
That Kuyper swam in these waters at Leiden is particularly evident from the way he treated Modernist theology in a major public address he delivered a decade later, after he had converted to orthodoxy. Again, extrapolation backwards from that text requires caution, but the leading question in the speech is unmistakably the epistemological question of “appearance” vs. “reality.” How he and the others packing Scholten’s lectures had grasped at the parade of German philosophers which there passed in review, Kuyper recalled: “People turned their gaze on the hieroglyphics of Kant’s oracular language, bathed in Jacobi’s streams of feeling, raved a while about Fichte’s Idealism of the Ego and Non-Ego, hoped for a moment to find firmer ground in Schelling’s gnosticism, and at last gaped at the dizzying mental gymnastics whereby Hegel won admiration as an athlete.” None of it had worked, the now orthodox Kuyper of 1871 concluded, but that did not lead him to dismiss it all as a bad dream or to celebrate the succeeding Realist turn instead. Rather, the latter represented a deeper sinking still, “back to the lowest level of spiritual existence . . . fashioning an idol out of gross empiricism.” The new “realism threatens us with a real danger,” Kuyper continued. “The distance from its base to the fatal abyss of materialism is easily measured, and we are well on our way to it.”
We will return to how Kuyper resolved the appearance-reality issue later, but we need to pause first to register how deep and permanent was the impact of German Idealism on his thinking. For both theological and political reasons, Kuyper would always denounce Hegel’s nomination of the State as the true incarnation of the divine; yet Kuyper literally could not think outside the Hegelian method by which Mind(s) developing down through time constituted the essence of history. In 1892, thirty years out of university and defending Christian orthodoxy from its latest and most fearsome scorner, he scolded that “not a single element surfaces in Nietzsche that does not stem, by legitimate descent, from the premises of Schelling and Hegel.” On the other hand, the theological summa he was writing at the same moment took its method from Fichte, and his final word on epistemology warned that “whoever neglects to maintain the autonomy of the spiritual over against the material in his point of departure will eventually come to the idolization of matter via the adoration of man.” On this score he gave tribute where it was due: “Whatever bloody lashings Kant brought us, he was nevertheless the one who released orthodoxy” from the “cookie-cutter” superficialities of rational supernaturalism. Kant had endowed the far better project of framing “a Christian worldview” in which reason put together the world on Christian premises. This was Kuyper’s own signal endeavor, and he confessed that it “owe[d] to the powerful command with which the Athlete of Koningsberg dared to direct his operations from the subject” — that is, from the convictions of the thinker instead of the world thought about.
Vocationally, too, the Germans cast their spell. As he sent off his finished dissertation, Kuyper penned an Idealist rhapsody to Jo about the study where he had just expended so much effort — and where he would like to spend the rest of his life. Gazing at the flowers in his window, the pictures of his friends all around, and “above all the busts of great men . . . and the products of learning and good taste on my table and bookcase,” he rhapsodized: “Oh then I feel so infinitely much richer, more blessed and happy” than in contemplating a career of practical routine. “Here I have faith and hope for the future, for here I see what man can be; here I create my world around me, for [now quoting in German] here my heart is my world!”
The orthodox Kuyper who spoke in critique of Modernism in 1871 would fault it at just this point. Modernism was but a human projection, he concluded, a beautiful fantasy spun out of the imagination, doomed to shatter against the hard rocks of fact. All the more surprising, then, to see how much of the method he retained — that is, to see what constituted “reality” for Kuyper and to which “facts” he appealed. His speech presented no “positive” case from evidence, even the evidence of Scripture or dogmatic theology. It invoked not the prestige of science but the dangers of scientism. The real issues of life were being fought out on a supernatural level invisible to the human eye, Kuyper averred, and to comprehend that scene he conducted his listeners through the channels of inward experience, calling upon poets to mark the way. He turned to “Hamlet” for the test of adjudicating between appearance and reality, and he illustrated the perils of imagination by comparing the word and real-life deeds of poets famous — Dante, Goethe, Schiller — and now obscure — Gottfried Bürger and Friedrich von Matthison.
German Literature
This particular list of poets is telling for Kuyper’s philosophical questions and life issues alike. It is a canon of the German Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”), an explosion of literary creativity in the 1770s that founded the modern era of German literature and reverberated across the Continent. The movement’s godfather was J. G. Hamann, the Lutheran “magus of the North” and foremost opponent of the Enlightenment. Hamann’s student Johann Herder was its leading theoretician, Shakespeare its icon, Goethe its greatest poet, Schiller its channel to later Romantics, Bürger its bestseller and the coiner of its name. Tired of the dry rationalism and neo-classical aesthetics on offer from the Enlightenment, the poets of Sturm und Drang yearned for the intense experience of an authentic self. Life as prescribed by court, church, and school was so dreadful as to demand resistance, and so became a heroic theater of conflict and passion. Appropriately, Goethe’s Faust was Sturm und Drang’s greatest creation, and Prometheus its favorite hero from antiquity. At the end of these struggles beckoned perfect unity: unity within the integrated self, unity of the self with nature, unity of all separate domains — occupation and imagination, personal and public, the routine and the transcendent — into a single whole consistent with one’s tested, triumphant soul.
This profile closely matches that of the mature Kuyper. Certainly it resonated with his youthful disquiet over the penny-pinching compromises of his father, the snobbery of the chosen in Law, the prospect of a life spent observing ecclesiastical rote. The movement spoke to his spirit too. His 1871 address on “Modernism” begins by invoking conflicts of “volcanic” force and cosmic sweep: “Look around: from all directions the battle of the spirits rushes in upon you. Underneath and around you everything is seething and in ferment.” Twenty years later, in his speech of 1892, he was still joining with the protesters of the 1770s in reproaching theirs as “an age of cold Deism, of a spirit-deadening Rationalism, of omnipresent artifice and conventionality. Its society resembled the waiting room of a morgue, uninspired and devoid of idealism.” Kuyper disavowed the pantheism that, with some justice, he saw the Sturm und Drang generating in opposition to the Enlightenment, but he added: “I would not be classified with those who have nothing good to say about pantheism in any form.” Sturm und Drang and its Romantic child had done well to infuse the nineteenth century with “enthusiasm and resilience.” Therefore, he concluded, “if I had to choose between an icy Deism . . . and a melting pantheism . . . I could not possibly hesitate. In India I would have been a Buddhist and probably praised the Vedanta. In China I would have preferred the system of Lao-tse over that of Confucius. And in Japan I would have turned from the official Shintoism in order to share the suffering of the oppressed Buddhist priests.”
Finally, Sturm und Drang fit Kuyper’s prevailing philosophical question. Proto-Romantics though they were, its writers were too taken with the concrete detail of the world to share their descendants’ penchant for mysticism, ghosts, and fantasy. They were Realists in their confidence that nature was meaningful and that imagination marked the high road into rather than away from things “as they actually are.” They sired the vibrant realist fiction of Kuyper’s mature years as much as the Romantic poetry of his youth. But their program left them with exactly the problem that Kuyper explored in “Modernism”: how to determine where subjectivity ended and reality began; more broadly, how to harness vaulting spiritual yearnings to concrete earthly forms, how to reconcile the demand for personal autonomy with the goal of universal harmony. Kuyper even pinpointed the spot where the contradictions in fact often came to tragedy, in the poets’ consuming idealization of simple country girls. Schiller’s Laura, Matthison’s Adelaide, Bürger’s Lenore — all were either illusions from the start or finally immolated in the poet’s love. To the list Kuyper could have added Faust’s Gretchen in the second category. Perhaps Jo fit in the first.
Glory and Trial
Heady as these thoughts may have seemed, Kuyper could get down to earth in the most expeditious way. Such was the case in April 1859 — i.e., in the spring of his first year in graduate school, in the middle of his twenty-second year, and in the immediate wake of his public betrothal — when the theology faculty at Groningen announced a national student research competition. The gold medal would be worthwhile in itself, but Matthias de Vries, who passed along the announcement to Kuyper, had launched his own academic career in just such a contest and knew what an opportunity it offered. The essay, which was to compare John Calvin’s and Johannes à Lasco’s (Jan Laski) views of the church, involved the church-history track that Kuyper had pursued from his gymnasium oration on Ulfilas to a major research paper on the medieval Pope Nicholas I, finished just the previous January.
The agenda behind the contest was more complicated. The Groningers aimed to use à Lasco against Scholten’s critique of their theology. For Scholten the Reformed tradition centered on dogma in general and on the doctrine of election in particular, and was international in character, all of which warranted Calvin as a father of the Dutch Reformed Church. The Groningers’ interest in a distinctively Dutch church found à Lasco much more promising. His theology, like theirs, centered on the person of Christ and the doctrine of the church. Moreover, though of Polish origin himself, à Lasco had led Dutch-language churches in exile during the Spanish persecution, and his 1554 catechism and the 1571 Synod at Emden, where he pastored, were the earliest in Dutch Reformed history. They thus had precedence over their counterparts among the French-oriented southerners who, the Groningers complained, had introduced the alien Calvin into the Netherlands. In a way, then, the contest invited Kuyper to reject his Leiden master.
Career-wise, it gave him a chance at an unexpected future, beyond the toils of his father, toward the influence and intellectual fulfillment of an academic career. The ambitions that Kuyper invested in this project are manifest in his correspondence of the time and from the pride of place he would give the “à Lasco” episode in his 1873 memoir. The two sources do not tell the same story, however. In his memoir, a scouring of all the library catalogues in the country, in all of Europe, found them bereft of à Lasco titles, tempting him to despair of the project. At this point Professor de Vries recommended a visit to his father, a book collector (indeed, one of the country’s foremost) in Haarlem. But De Vries Senior, Kuyper recalled, did not know whether he had anything relevant on the topic. Kuyper was to come back in a week. When he did, he saw “a collection of Lasciana more complete than was — and is — to be found in any library in all of Europe.” The moral was clear: “. . . you must personally experience such a surprise in your own life-struggle to know what it is to encounter a miracle of God on life’s journey.” In fact, the record shows that his search did not last six months but three weeks; proceeded via Utrecht, where nearly half of à Lasco’s corpus was available; and involved a return the next day (not the next week) to the senior De Vries who knew that, but not exactly where, the pertinent titles were in his collection. De Vries did own one crucial volume that Utrecht lacked; in that regard, he did offer up, as Kuyper recalled, the “treasure” that constituted “the ‘to be or not to be’ of the contest.”
Whatever the role “the finger of God” played in setting his work in motion, Kuyper relied on his outstanding preparation in Latin and the staggering labors of his own right hand to bring it to completion. By September he had written 130 pages; by the end of October, his twenty-second birthday, he was complaining of headaches (happily, not caused by the cholera epidemic then afflicting Leiden). The next month his international queries brought in more à Lasco rarities along with ten dissertations on Calvin from Strasbourg. In January 1860 he could send the completed manuscript of 320 pages to a copyist. In March he had a nightmare of having received the gold medal, only to have it crumble to dust in his hands. In April he submitted the manuscript “that contains all my hopes and wishes for the future, and that perhaps will determine my lot forever.” He need not have worried. Kuyper’s was the only entry, but even so, the Groningen faculty awarded him the prize with “exceptionally flattering praise.” Kuyper took the occasion of the award ceremony in October 1860 to make a side trip to the à Lasco archives at Emden, with a view to writing a full dissertation. His plans would become grander yet: to compile a definitive collection of primary sources and write a history of the Dutch churches in exile. The reward, surely, would be a professorship.
But old pressures awaited him back home. His stipend would run out the next summer, so he had to send out applications for other scholarships. He was scheduled to take his doctoral qualifying exams the next March and was determined not only to meet that deadline but to add another summa cum laude to his record. Redoubling his labors after an exhausting year had predictable consequences. By Christmas 1860 his headaches were back, and his frustrations with Jo were acute. He could put up with her going through “the forms” of profession of faith but not when she lagged in proper self-formation. “A girl that can frankly admit that she doesn’t care for Shakespeare, that she wants to drop her French, and yet reads nine volumes of [Eugene] Sue — and that while engaged to someone whose position requires precisely that the development of the mind must provide for his career and bread for his wife and children . . . !” What must be said about your taste? Your neglect of duty? Your preference of poor taste over duty? “Turn back from this smooth way, my dear, dearest Johanna! I pray, I abjure you! Shake yourself awake and become what you must be.” If he seemed wrathful, he assured her, “it is the wrath of love.” In any case, someday “you will thank me for my efforts to make you happy.” Jo could well recall that, earlier, she had echoed his father’s warnings: “Oh, Bram, I think it would have been infinitely better for you had you chosen a girl that had been reared like you and your sisters. Classically, as you call it. Then perhaps everything you wished for you would be fulfilled.” Under so much strain, Kuyper appeared to be close to a complete breakdown. In February 1861 a medical doctor thought Kuyper looked so bad that he took him to his house north of Amsterdam for a two-week rest. He returned home to the good news that his fellowship had been extended, went back to work — and immediately relapsed. Now he sat for hours in his room, listless and dreaming. He could not write more than a letter or read more than two pages at a time. His recovery would take five months, during which the Schaays turned out to have the right qualities after all. They took him into their home in Rotterdam, then on a seven-week cruise through the Rhineland where they had relatives — and where Kuyper could visit à Lasco scholars in Frankfurt, Heidelberg, and Strasbourg.
Kuyper’s return to work in autumn 1861 held good, but it resurrected more starkly than ever the question of his occupational future. He had lost some of the extension on his fellowship to illness, and his exhaustion from research cast his fitness for a scholarly career into doubt. He passed his exams summa cum laude as intended, but he had to revise his dissertation plans radically to fit his foreshortened schedule. With the permission of Groningen he worked on revising his prize essay to satisfy the degree requirements. Thus, he was awarded the doctorate in divinity in September 1862 for a dissertation that encompassed but a large third of the original work. It still found for à Lasco, rather than for Scholten’s Calvin, in judging who had the better conception of the church. Cobet offered him an assistantship in Greek, but its stipend was not enough to support a spouse.
Accordingly, Kuyper shifted his gaze toward the parish ministry, with much apprehension. The prospects of a long tenure in a mean village had revolted him from the start, at the same time that it drove some of his imperatives towards Jo’s self-cultivation. Upon entering active candidacy, however, he found even such a post unlikely, since only orthodox candidates seemed in demand. For six months, from October 1862 through March 1863, he peddled his wares around the provinces. The “sure death” spelled by one village in Friesland was redeemed only by the research trip he took on the side to the archives in Emden. The authorities there let him take back troves of original records to review in Leiden. Old papers paid no bills, however, and again in February, gloom and anxiety threatened to overtake him.
This time the cure came from a book that Jo sent him — not high classic literature, but the bestselling British novel of 1853, The Heir of Redclyffe by Charlotte Yonge. The book had been especially popular among earnest young men — Crimean War officers, Oxford undergraduates, young aesthetes like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Henry James. Yonge herself had intended it as an object lesson for the Anglican Tractarian movement, one of whose leaders, John Keble, was her parish priest and had vetted the work in production. In his 1873 memoir Kuyper would pick up “the church question” that the Tractarians had in view, but for the moment the story line involved more riveting existential issues. First and foremost, the male co-lead of Yonge’s drama, Philip de Morville, is pride and ambition incarnate. An honors classics student at Oxford, Philip seemed destined for a career of rare distinction, only to lose his chance — as Kuyper had with Cobet and his à Lasco plans — for want of money. In revenge he takes to building his own reputation by dominating others. Kuyper recognized the part. “I was fascinated by Philip’s character,” he recalled. “Philip was my hero, Philip I admired.” But the melodrama turns when Philip falls sick in Italy. He is saved by his cousin Guy, whom he has been manipulating and censuring by now for 400 pages, only to see Guy contract and then die from the same fever. Philip is plunged into the throes of Victorian remorse, and Kuyper went down with him. When Philip “recognize[d] his own limitations and Guy’s moral superiority,” Kuyper was stricken at two key points of self-image. “Oh, at that moment it seemed as if in the crushed Philip my own heart was devastated, as if each of his words of self-condemnation cut through my soul as a judgment on my own ambitions and character.”
At this point in his 1873 memoir Kuyper would make much of the Anglican burial liturgy in Redclyffe but also disclosed a ritual dimension of his own breakthrough ten years before. “I read how Philip knelt, and before I knew it” this proud sovereign of mind, this disdainer of “forms,” was “kneeling in front of my chair with folded hands. Oh, what my soul experienced at that moment I fully understood only later. Yet, from that moment on I despised what I used to admire and sought what I had dared to despise.”
Put simply, Kuyper had experienced a religious conversion. He was not yet a Calvinist, nor for the moment a theologian; it was enough to be a Christian with an engaged heart. He started going to church again and looked forward to taking the Lord’s Supper. Small wonder that he came to rank Redclyffe “next to the Bible in its meaning for my life.”
The pride and unbelief of his recent past Kuyper would publicly confess. In a letter to Jo he added “lascivious thoughts” to the list, understandably enough for a man in his mid-twenties coming up to the five-year mark of a celibate engagement. Other letters, and other threads in Redclyffe, point to further offenses that had amplified his crisis. The learned Philip pulled tightly on the reins of his (secret) fiancée in the book, urging her on to a program of self-cultivation, while assigning the fledging collegian Guy a reading list to correct his woeful taste. From the very start of their engagement, Kuyper realized, he had sinned against the humble Jo as well as against the Lord, and he now painfully confessed that in the form of a prayer: “When I think that you could have been taken away, and how hopeless my soul would have cried then to get you back, then I feel . . . how much you possess me. God, spare her long yet, let me keep her as an Angel on my life’s way. Let me be a child with her and have for You a child’s heart.”
Besides having been converted, Kuyper was in love again. He copied Jo a Robert Burns epigram from one of Yonge’s chapters: “She is a winsome wee thing,/. . . a bonnie wee thing,/This sweet wee wife of mine.” He identified Guy as a model of the childlike faith he had lost. But the Guy in the text reflected far more of Kuyper than that. Accommodating and self-sacrificial as he is, Guy appears in the novel as the very picture of a Byronic hero, all deep feeling, honor, daring, and ardent poetry against a backdrop of wild scenery. Yet through arduous practice he disciplines Romantic passion with proper form and noblesse oblige into perfect love. Where Goethe missed, Yonge succeeded; Guy brought the Sturm und Drang to quiet harbor. Tellingly, when Kuyper once again thanked Jo for sending him Redclyffe, it was for “giving me Guy. Oh! That was so dear of you! One of the best deeds of your life.”
Yet Kuyper’s vocational question remained. Earlier in February, just before he started reading Redclyffe, a “little jewel” of a parish had come to his attention at the town of Beesd in south Gelderland. It was half Catholic, lacked a railroad link, but offered a salary of 2400 guilders — three times the norm, more than his father’s, more than enough to hire an assistant so that he could proceed with his à Lasco project. He wrote Jo: “Never have I been in such fateful tension over a place as with this one. I’d move heaven and earth for it.” It is not fair to conclude, as has one critic, that Kuyper’s conversion was simply his way of “moving heaven” to secure the post. But money and scholarly ambition were certainly on his mind as he read the early chapters of Redclyffe. “O wealth, wealth!” he quoted from the lips of Philip’s fiancée, “What cruel differences it makes! . . . for want of hateful money,” Philip’s dreams were “spurned.” Kuyper later seconded Philip’s renunciation of this self-pity, and took Jo’s admonition not to hire an assistant. A week after his conversion he told her, “I am calm and resigned, also over Beesd.”
But heaven, or earth, did move for him. Kuyper was invited to give a candidate’s sermon on Good Friday 1863; he received the call Easter Monday. It was exactly four years since his official betrothal to Jo; their banns could now be posted. The only spot on the horizon was the declining health of Jo’s father. Bram’s father presided at their wedding on 1 July 1863; her father died five days later. The couple moved into the parsonage at Beesd, and Kuyper was officially installed in the pulpit on August 9, his father again presiding. Kuyper featured sweetness and light for the day. Church unity was his theme; 1 Corinthians 13 the preparatory reading; Psalm 133:1 the song before the sermon: “How good and pleasant is the sight/When brethren make it their delight/To dwell in blest accord.” He preached on 1 John 1:7: “If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship, one with another.” Time would tell.