Life and Death at the End of the Nineteenth Century
Kuyper’s book of America reflections, published early in 1899, concluded with the same warning that had marked the last press interviews on his trip. Unless soon reversed, he predicted, the United States’ new imperial spirit would corrupt its politics and thicken the “new and much darker war clouds [now looming] on the horizon of international life.” The cloud that Kuyper took to be the most threatening would indeed break over South Africa before the year was out, but the Fashoda crisis in the Sudan the year before signaled continuing imperial rivalries in North Africa, while America’s “pacification” of the Philippines brought “the crude, cruel game” near the shores of Asia. Violence was striking closer to home too, as European heads of state fell in a steady stream of assassinations: the president of France in 1894, the premier of Bulgaria in 1895, the empress of Austria in 1898, the king of Italy (and nearly the crown prince of England) in 1900. President William McKinley joined the list in 1901. Meanwhile, the wages of character assassination came due in France when the espionage conviction of Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus was exposed as an anti-Semitic plot, toppling the conservative regime that had prosecuted him. Kuyper was so appalled by its conduct that he commended radical novelist Emile Zola for leading the exposé.
Against this background, the sense of an ending that had been building in Europe in the 1890s came to a peak. Kuyper entered that conversation with some of his ablest writing. He gave his last great diagnostic of European culture in October 1899 with his rectorial address on “Evolution.” He began writing his critique of British imperialism in South Africa two months later. The two pieces both revolve around the themes of conflict and death. But death had gotten personal before that. In 1898 Bismarck and Gladstone, the twin landmarks of European politics since his youth, both passed from the scene. Then, on August 25, 1899, his wife Jo died at fifty-seven years of age.
Dealing with Death
The place where Jo passed away — Meiringen, in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland — was the site of arguably the most sensational death of all in the late nineteenth century. The town was a mecca for tourists — for the Kuypers in 1899 and especially for the English, who visited there in such numbers as to sustain an Anglican church to accommodate them. It was thus an apt setting for the climactic duel in Arthur Conan Doyle’s world-famous stories of Sherlock Holmes. A funicular completed in 1898 still takes the visitor from the village outskirts to the peak of Reichenbach Falls, where Holmes and his archenemy, Professor Moriarty, grappled in mortal combat until the two apparently hurtled to their death on the rocks below. As it turned out, popular demand forced Doyle to bring Holmes back to life, though he was even less willing to indulge notions of resurrection from the dead than he was to (as he thought) waste his creative powers on the Holmes brand instead of producing the elevated literature he believed to be his destiny. Doyle penned his Holmesian tales of rational deduction as parables of science triumphing over the delusions of ghosts, mystery, and the supernatural. His hero had escaped death at the falls by a deft martial-arts maneuver, Doyle later explained. After his first wife died in 1906, then two brothers-in-law, two nephews, his own brother, and finally his son Kingsley perished in or soon after World War I, Doyle turned to the occult in hopes of contacting the departed. Spiritualism had a well-established pedigree among erstwhile rationalists who found the mystery of personal loss harder to fathom than advertised.
Of the far less famous death in his own family, Kuyper said little publicly about its cause, alluding only to a flare-up of Jo’s chronic lung problems. In fact, she had been depressed and ailing since the death of their youngest son, Willy, six years before. Kuyper was quite more willing than Doyle to take on the meaning of death and discuss it for his readers, however. The liturgy from Jo’s funeral is preserved in Kuyper’s papers with copious notes in his own hand. The next issue of De Heraut ran a meditation on death, one in a series that continued until his sixty-fifth birthday, in 1902. It appeared in book form as Asleep in Jesus.
One constant characterized all his reflections. If, as the local Swiss pastor acknowledged in his funeral sermon, it was especially hard to bury a loved one so far from home, it was all the more important to remember the stout Reformed faith that had suffused her life. The text of the occasion was Hosea 14:9: “The ways of the Lord are right, and the just shall walk in them; but transgressors shall fall therein.” That God’s ways are right does not mean that they are easy, the pastor continued, but they are never crooked. Our stumbling along the way was more likely evidence of the presence of or a punishment for sin, but the straightness of God’s ways meant that our sure hope for final peace need never waver. The text at graveside (Psalm 73:23-28) was more personal, highlighting trust amid faltering strength: “Thou wilt guide me with Thy counsel and afterward receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but thee? And there is no one on earth I desire beside thee. My flesh and my heart fail, but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion forever.” The mourners ended by singing Psalm 125:2, befitting both the Swiss scene and bedrock Reformed conviction: “As the mountains are around Jerusalem, so the Lord is round about his people, from this time forth and forevermore.”
In his Heraut meditation Kuyper got more personal. “There you stood with a broken heart by the deathbed. There lay your deceased, lifeless, inanimate, for all the world as if she had been swallowed up by death. Swallowed up — a hard word. Devoured, as if by a beast of prey. All at once, gone: the look of the eye, the sweet words . . . everything, clean gone.” The experience was no less difficult for believers than for anyone else, Kuyper emphasized for his readers. Yet “God’s Word, without in any way discounting the harshness of that reality, turns it around for you. Totally.” It opens “your soul’s eye” to see that, in Jesus’ resurrection, the devouring process has been reversed. For the faithful, Kuyper quoted Paul, the moment of death means that “what is mortal is swallowed up by life.”
What happens to the departed next Kuyper explored in the rest of the fifty-two meditations that make up Asleep in Jesus. Three prevalent notions he debunked right away. First were Spiritualist yearnings à la Conan Doyle to communicate with deceased family members. Blood family ends at the grave, Kuyper insisted; thereafter the saints become exclusively part of the family of Jesus. Secondly, he rejected the notion of heaven as an aerie of disembodied souls. On the contrary, Kuyper insisted that the body was essential to genuine humanity. The soul’s continuing and conscious existence between death and the Last Judgment, when everyone would become endowed with a resurrected body, was anomalous, second-best. Thirdly, the afterlife was no scene of sedentary singing. Indeed, souls in the intermediate state were as busy as ever, “restless[ly] working [but] without ever becoming weary.” Death simply transferred the believer to a new stage of service. A seemingly premature death signaled that God needed just the sort of service which the decedent alone could provide. If Kuyper’s therefore was an exceedingly Protestant heaven, all action and little beatific vision, it also exhibited all the diversity he loved on earth. Jesus’ saying that his Father’s house had “many mansions” meant that each dwelling there would have “a peculiar something of its own by which to distinguish itself from the other.” Heaven too will be a pluriform society, “the blessed [gathering] together according to their nature, their talents, their gifts.”
Still, at the risk of some contradiction, Kuyper ultimately defined the afterlife by its restfulness. In part this meant that believers had arrived in the “fatherland,” no longer strangers or pilgrims subject to scorn and resistance. It also meant having achieved pure being and no longer becoming, resolving one’s personal dialectic. Above all, it meant gaining full coherence of personality, a steadiness of soul. What Kuyper most looked forward to was getting beyond the power of temptation — not just the forgiveness of sins but release from the anxiety that one might sin. On earth life is strife and conflict, Kuyper repeated, and necessarily so, for without struggle there would be no advance. But the process brought a weariness, moral more than physical, and at this point in his life Kuyper was eager to stand, as he put it, as a pillar in God’s temple instead of having to wing around in God’s service. The tension between the active and restful images of eternity he resolved with a third, aptly organic motif. Rest and growth came together as one bloomed as a leaf on Christ the vine, nurtured by his roots, manifesting divine beauty, free at last from the sin that on earth twines around everything good.
For all his affirmation of the physical, Kuyper’s meditations evinced some body-soul tension. The soul remained the core of the self, the persistent personality. It needed body most of all to express itself. With that, the eternal (and not just intermediate) heaven became a house of witness, reminding the saints below that they had a like calling on earth. Kuyper thus concluded his meditations on a note of relentless struggle, now against everything in modern life that corroded belief in the soul, the resurrection, and eternal destiny. The major address he had to give at the Free University in October would be an epic word in that witness, meant to cut through, as its opening line declared, “the hypnosis of the dogma of Evolution” under which “our nineteenth century is dying away.” Kuyper labored at the text from September into October as he lingered on in Switzerland near Jo’s grave. In such circumstances, “when that mysterious wave of the demoniac of universal misery breaks against your wearied breast, and when in the broken wave your own personal sin rolls in upon you, then no comfort avails, then no help saves,” Kuyper reflected. “Then there is but one way out. . . . God Himself as the Fountain of life . . . must take your soul up into Himself.”
Evolution as Science
Kuyper delivered “Evolution” on October 20, the nineteenth anniversary of the opening of the university and the last time he would address it in this role. Indeed, it might have been the last time a leading politician in a Western nation could credibly carry off such an effort. Gladstone might have managed it at an earlier day; Woodrow Wilson, soon to become president of Princeton, and Theodore Roosevelt, who, like Kuyper, would become head of government in 1901, might have done it at the time. But precious few subsequent statesmen could match the command that Kuyper showed of the mediating scientific literature on offer (his text cites exactly the authors that historians of science refer to today), not to mention his philosophical sweep and grasp. Nor could most of the conservative Protestants who would challenge Darwinism in the twentieth century. Unlike them, but much more like traditional Calvinists in his own generation, Kuyper did not insist on literalistic readings of the relevant biblical passages, nor quail at the prospect of a very old earth and resort to fantasies about Flood geology. More controversially, then and now, he did not balk at the transmutation of species or at the “spontaneous unfolding of the species in organic life from the cytode or nuclear cell.” He was a consistent Calvinist: “We will not force our style upon the Chief Architect of the universe. If He is to be the Architect not in name only but in reality, He will also be supreme in the choice of style.” If that style turned out to be evolution over eons of time, the believer would find nothing in Scripture or theology that posed insuperable objections.
In fact, Kuyper found evolutionary doctrine to be commensurate with Christianity on key issues. It taught the unity of the whole creation under law. It taught the descent of the human race from one pair of ancestors, contrary to racist theories that postulated multiple originals. It made original sin plausible by restoring the representative character of Adam and rendered Pelagian innocence and self-determination incredible. It “declare[d] for monotheism over polytheism” and directed the universe to some other end than the entire happiness of humanity. “To this I might add,” Kuyper continued, “that the Scriptural charter of Creation eliminates rather than commends the dramatic entry of new beings”; Genesis says that “the earth brought forth” plants and animals, not that “they were set down . . . like pieces on a chessboard.”
In addition, Kuyper accorded Darwinian science considerable merit in its own right. At first he sounded Baconian in “exulting” in the “wealth of facts” Darwin’s devotees had uncovered, but he quickly moved to the newer philosophy of science in commending the “impetus” the model gave “to even deeper, more methodical research,” which disclosed “an entire sequence of phenomena that until then had not received attention or been accounted for.” Its support from embryology, paleontology, psychology, and geography could only be counted as considerable, he concluded.
Still, Darwinism strictly taken was probably at its lowest ebb in scientific reputation in the 1890s, and Kuyper was glad to rehearse the principal complaints against it. He passed by Lord Kelvin’s argument that the Second Law of Thermodynamics did not permit enough cosmic time for Darwin’s form of evolution to have occurred. He mocked the difficulty experimenters had encountered in trying to breed fertile hybrids across species. More seriously, he noted that the geological column contained enough anomalies of “higher” preceding “lower” forms of life to raise doubts about any simple progressive development over time. The fossil record also showed great gaps between stages of evolution, he noted, bespeaking giant leaps forward more than Darwin’s gradual process of change. Furthermore, a gradualist model raised questions about the utility in-process of a feature that some species someday might find useful. The ugly sprouts of wings-in-becoming would hardly engender the sex appeal that generations of rising males in an eventual bird species would need for the preferred procreation that Darwin’s theory required. These and other problems raised the major issue of the time: heredity, or the transmission of inherited — and, to Lamarckian-inclined evolutionists, acquired — characteristics. Under the weight of these objections, historian of science Peter J. Bowler concludes, “the selection theory [i.e., Darwinism proper] had slipped in popularity to such an extent that by 1900 its opponents were convinced that it would never recover.”
Many of these scientific problems would be resolved when the new theory of genetics (being developed at just this time by Kuyper’s countryman Hugo de Vries) was synthesized with natural selection theory in the 1920s and 1930s and with the postulation of punctuated equilibrium fifty years after that. But these turns would not have satisfied Kuyper any more than did most of the alternatives to strict Darwinism being advanced in his own time, for they all partook of the philosophical postulates that to him constituted the fundamental problem. To some extent Kuyper here joined a whole generation of conservative Protestant critics (and others beside) going back to Princeton theologian Charles Hodge a generation before. “Darwinism is atheism,” Hodge concluded, not because it taught radical change over long time, nor even because it postulated natural selection as the mechanism of that change, but because it denied purposeful design in the process. Various evangelical Calvinists in the Anglo-American orbit accommodated Darwinism on this point by locating a God-implanted teleological drive within the evolutionary process itself, a move with which Kuyper was happy enough. But on the Continent, and in England, he saw non- or anti-teleological theories in command, or immanent-design theories that were just as hostile to Christianity and philosophically incoherent besides.
The anti-design voices, such as the German genetics theorist August Weismann, whom Bowler characterizes as “the most dogmatic neo-Darwinist” of the era, Kuyper either bypassed or used to fault the real targets of his speech, the great science popularizers Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel, who ascribed immanent design to material forces. As Kuyper asserted and subsequent historians of science have confirmed, both talked a Darwinian game of random variations accidentally fitting or missing environmental changes, but both were neo-Lamarckian in seeing an inherent progress running through — indeed, governing — all these changes. This progress just happened, yet was nonetheless inevitable, their books taught. The human being was but a particular chemical compound, Haeckel insisted, yet was destined for greatness. God could not be the source of being or of the laws that governed its development, Spencer said mildly, because that all dwelled in the domain of the Unknowable. Haeckel was more forthright: no personal god could possibly exist anywhere but in the benighted superstitions of primitive peoples and organized religion. Yet so ardent was his evolutionary vision that Haeckel eventually imputed religious purpose, even divinity of sorts, within the material stream. The Christians’ personal God, Kuyper quoted him saying, was a “gaseous vertebrate” that should be more properly understood as “the sum of all atomic powers and oscillations of the ether.” Haeckel thus proposed a new cult of Monism that would worship the Evolutionary trinity of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” Kuyper appealed to his audience,
I do not hesitate a moment to brand such reckless play with the holiest things as the most cowardly quasi-religious invention ever put into words. Why not be honest, have the courage of one’s conviction, and frankly admit that [such] Evolution is not only atheistic but anti-theistic. . . . Then you would know that you’re dealing with men, and both sides could prepare for the newly defined condition.
Accordingly, Kuyper concluded, “Evolution is a newly conceived system . . . a newly formed dogma, a newly emerged faith . . . diametrically opposed to the Christian faith.” Nor was this merely a projection of his own fears. Haeckel was only the most popular of a phalanx of German voices who for a generation had been pushing “Darwinism” (actually, a variety of evolutionary schemes) as a comprehensive worldview grounded in philosophical materialism and dedicated to supplanting Christianity in the minds of the populace. They did not lack for success. Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century was, despite or because of the pretentiousness of its title, the most popular work of German nonfiction prior to World War I, selling 300,000 copies. Surveys of the German working class at the time discovered that most of those who considered themselves socialists had been converted from their native Christianity not by Marx but by “Darwin” as transmitted by interpreters like Haeckel. His Monist League functioned as a latter-day Masonic order, providing a ritual home for anticlericalism and seeking to solidify the already considerable educational successes that radical science had attained in broader circles.
Critics of Haeckel, Spencer, and other systematizers of Darwinism often criticized them for extrapolating the master’s insights beyond biology into realms where they had no scientific warrant. Kuyper joined this chorus, but then interestingly departed from it. Yes, Evolutionaries were arrogant in pretending to sweep all the domains of social science and the human spirit into their tent. Yes, they were “insolent and condescending, lik[ing] to wound pious feelings” in reducing everything to carbon and motion. No, such claims had no demonstrated, perhaps even demonstrable, proof. “Yet,” Kuyper argued, “the German evolutionists rather than the English have undoubtedly derived the correct consequences from their principle.” Remaining with the strict “facts” of biology sold short the human spirit, which always yearned for larger meanings. It did not even build true science, which “is consumed with passion for the general . . . law that governs the particular case.” Logic and psychology alike need system, holistic and consistent explanations of reality from top to bottom. That was what the “dogma of evolution” had provided for the higher forms of unbelief; for that reason it had attracted widespread allegiance; and only by refusing to make “peace for even a moment with this system as system” but rather opposing it with the fully articulated consequences of the doctrine of Creation could Christianity have a chance in the war of the spirits.
Once again, for Kuyper, the matter came down to root principle. Behind the rival schools of Evolutionism lay philosophical materialism, the derivation of life from non-life, the triumph of the mechanistic over the organic, the eclipse of the transcendent. In this connection, Kuyper had compliments for the Pantheism and Modernism that he had attacked on earlier occasions, for these at least maintained, even extended, the realm of the spirit, the autonomy of ethics, the dignity of humankind. They both held to “the idea of a guiding purpose” which Darwinians uniformly denied. Implicitly Kuyper was converging as well with contemporary vitalist thinkers such as French philosopher Henri Bergson and American pragmatist William James. Bergson’s irrepressible “life force” Kuyper would locate ultimately in divine rather than human activity, and James’s authentication of human freedom he would correlate with God’s will rather than the forces of probability. But their scorn for Spencer’s blank determinism and Haeckel’s reductive materialism he shared in full.
If the ultimate issue was philosophical, for Kuyper the pressing issue was ethical. “The emergence of a new faith has usually gone hand in hand with a certain elevation, a certain ennobling of human life,” he said. “This time, however, the ‘new faith’ is closely followed by the shadow of Decadence.” In casting life as a struggle in which the weaker necessarily gave way to the stronger as “the only road to higher development,” “the Evolution system” was only too fit for the passion, violence, and “usurpation of power” upon which the nineteenth century was ending. For the personal future it warranted the conquest by Nietzsche’s superman over all “lower” forms of human life. For the collective future it spelled the power state crushing the rights of smaller nations. That Nietzsche in fact had scorned Darwinism for rooting human excellence in the muck and that Spencer opposed resurgent imperialism as a throwback to a more primitive stage of history Kuyper simply attributed to their inconsistency. He agreed instead with “Darwin’s bulldog,” T. H. Huxley, that ethics and evolution were set on diverging paths. Whatever beneficence Western societies exhibited “we owe not to the ethics of the Evolution-system but precisely to the ethical powers that Evolution excludes,” Kuyper insisted. Those powers were rooted, finally, in the principles of the Christian religion, which, while acknowledging full well the corporate dimension of life, still preserved rather than submerged the individual within the species, and which, while grateful for the progress of modern life, still held to the example of “the Christ of God who seeks the lost and has mercy on the weak.”
The South African War
All that said, Kuyper’s thinking still drafted considerably off evolutionary models. To be sure, the “stronger” might not crush the “weaker,” but what about the “higher” over against the “lower”? Christianity insisted that the cosmos was “precipitate of the spirit” rather than “sublimate of physical atoms,” Kuyper said, because it would not countenance that “all higher organized life be pulled down to the spheres of lower inorganic life.” Rather, “the lower [must] be subsumed under the higher.” Did that apply in sociology as well as cosmology, as systematic consistency would seem to require? South Africa, where war had broken out the week before Kuyper gave his address in Amsterdam, offered a ready place to find out.
South Africa had receded in Kuyper’s mind since the mid-1880s, when the Boers and their Dutch supporters decided upon an ecumenical alliance rather than one defined by Calvinist orthodoxy. Its Liberal leadership gave top priority to rapid economic development instead of focusing on language and culture as Kuyper advocated. The economic strategy played right into Britain’s hands, he complained, since both were ridden by “the virus of materialism.” The disease exploded into a pandemic with discovery of gold in the heart of Transvaal in 1885. Thousands of fortune-seekers poured into the goldfields from around the world, and thousands more were pulled in from the African countryside. From a backwater that the Boers had settled to avoid modernization, the region became a vital spot in the global industrial order, supplying 20 percent of the world’s gold. In a parody of the values of that order, Johannesburg burgeoned in little more than a decade from a village to a city of 75,000. One observer said it resembled “Monte Carlo imposed on Sodom and Gomorrah.” Little wonder that by the early 1890s Kuyper was recommending the United States over South Africa as an emigrant destination.
But there were limits to his disaffection, and they were breached in early 1896. Working at the behest of the imperial strategist Cecil Rhodes, an adventurer named Leander Jameson led an armed invasion of the Transvaal in hopes of triggering a revolt by the recently arrived “outlanders” against the Boer government. Rhodes in turn was colluding with Joseph Chamberlain, colonial secretary in the new Conservative regime in London. Kuyper cast them as the two arms of a once-again “perfidious Albion.” Rhodes was the tentacle of greed and corruption. Having established monopolies in South African diamonds and gold, he won British charter status for his corporation and the prime-ministership of Cape Colony besides. Chamberlain, on the other hand, represented betrayal of principle. Once a follower of Gladstone, he had broken with his leader’s proposal for Irish home rule and hitched his ambitions to the star of imperial expansion. Even though the Jameson raid was a fiasco, the Transvaal government recognized the plot in the air and began a dance of negotiation and war preparation to defend its independence. The maneuvers ended with its declaration of war on October 11, 1899.
Kuyper’s principal efforts in the Transvaal cause were journalistic, not only to his usual audience in De Standaard but to a broad European readership via the distinguished Paris semi-monthly, the Revue des Deux Mondes. Its editor, Ferdinand Bruntière, a Catholic sympathetic to Kuyper’s work, thought that he could make a good case for the Boers and contacted him to that effect while Kuyper was still mourning in Switzerland. Kuyper did not disappoint. The closest student of the case ranks his “La Crise Sud-Africaine” with essays by South African leader Jan Christiaan Smuts and Dutch journalist Charles Bossevain as the ablest presentations of the Boer cause in the court of general European opinion. The piece was soon translated into Dutch, German, Swedish, and English, the latter by the “Stop the War Committee” in London.
Kuyper’s success stemmed in part from his decision not to make military predictions. While he finished the piece in mid-January, at the high tide of Boer triumphs in the field, it appeared in February, when that tide began to quickly recede. More notably, Kuyper rotated from the religious angle he had previously followed to arguments from history, international law, and contemporary social theory. The latter, especially, showed the complications into which his theology could fall.
The core of Kuyper’s tract attacked the legal case that Britain had mounted to justify its actions. His argument here was an advocate’s, not a judge’s, and so mixed a ready command of international law and comparative immigration policy with special pleading. His appeal to history subjected English behavior to a relentless hermeneutic of suspicion, sometimes with good warrant. His most notable innovation was to turn upside down the praise he had given American Protestantism on his tour just the year before; now, at British missionary hands, activism became meddling, and humanitarianism hypocrisy. This held especially for the sort of English evangelicals he had once honored as co-workers in the sainted Réveil. He linked Methodists and the Clapham sect with Deists as sentimentalists suffering Rousseauian delusions about the noble savage. Indeed, “the Boers know too well that they have had no worse enemies than these gentlemen in clerical uniform,” Kuyper sniped. Since the gentlemen in question professed deep concern for native peoples, Kuyper scored good points on a quick tour of British colonial depredations as experienced by North American Indians, New Zealand Maoris, and the Zulu right next door. British missionaries cried piteously about native rights; British troops slaughtered those natives by the thousand.
Races and Racism
Thus Kuyper came to the issue of race, with a reverberation a hundred years later that is the opposite of what he intended. The most startling effect is the measure of his silence; in the eighty pages of his text, the native peoples get three paragraphs. The South African war was a race war, Kuyper asserted, but the “races” involved were the Dutch and Anglo-Saxon. The “tenacity of the race from the Low Countries” over against their English overlords stemmed from the “absolute incompatibility” between the national characters of the two. The English were activists, quick to organize but much given to show; the Dutch were slow and introspective, but persevering. The Boer branch on the Dutch tree might fall short (how far short, Kuyper was unwilling to admit) on education, political organization, and proper tone, but they had nothing to apologize for vis à vis the average denizen of Britain in terms of piety and morals. Indeed, they feared above all else that an invading British army would spread syphilis as wantonly as it had in India!
The rest of their profile approximated Kuyper’s own ideals. The Boers were hunter-pastoralists and pioneers. They were possessed of “natural sagacity,” fierce courage, and an “insatiable love of liberty.” They practiced decentralized, direct democracy. Rousseau’s noble savage lived after all — only in white skin.
For his polite European audience Kuyper gave the Boers’ religious character less attention than their republican virtue. He associated that virtue particularly with “Boer women,” who were
free from all desire of luxury . . . [and] almost exclusively devoted to their husbands and children. They are strong and courageous. Without dishonoring their sex they handle the rifle and mount the horse like men. The enthusiasm of their national feeling often surpasses even that of their husbands.
Above all they were fertile, and that spelled the doom of British policy. England might conquer their men, Kuyper predicted, but “will never destroy the fecundity of the Boer woman. In less than a century, from their former numbers of 60,000, the Boers . . . have grown to half a million. In the coming century, they will reach three, four, five millions, and South Africa will be theirs.”
But demography cut both ways, and it forced Kuyper finally to deal with the other “race” at hand. “The Blacks are increasing in South Africa to an extent which may well give cause for uneasiness,” he observed. “Profound anxiety” would have been more like it. Kuyper averred from his (otherwise unrecorded) “confidential conversations with men-of-color of all conditions” on his America tour that “conquest over the white man remains and always will remain their chimerical ideal.” Thus, the utter folly of British policy: “if, sooner or later, the struggle of extermination between Whites and Blacks breaks out afresh in South Africa, all the responsibility for it will fall upon Mr. Chamberlain and his Jingo journalists.” But how could race war break out “afresh” if, as Kuyper claimed in refutation of British “sentimentalists,” the Boer subjugation of the native peoples had been so mild and easy? Why so fearful a threat from so benighted a stock? In these contradictions Kuyper’s views were one with racist thinking everywhere, from the American South to Nazi Germany. More telling was his departure from some of his usual attitudes. His sympathies for the poor and weak went here to the Boers over against the British but not to the native population, which he derogated as perpetually childlike, “an inferior race.” In the United States and his native land, Kuyper applauded “commingling of blood” as the fount of social progress and cultural vitality. But in South Africa he praised the Boers’ absolute ban on “race” mixture (regarded as “incest”!) as their highest mark of morality and their only hope for the future.
The only explanation for such a reversal was Kuyper’s full-blown subscription to contemporary European race theory, to which he added a dollop of biblical imagery. The theory postulated first a stark hierarchy of fixed qualities, with the “Aryan race” on top and the “Negro” at the very bottom. It also interpreted history as a unified evolutionary development. Kuyper had recently repeated this heliotropic mantra in his first lecture at Princeton: “There is but one world-stream, broad and fresh, which from the beginning bore the promise of the future.” It followed an ever-westering course from the Middle East via Western Europe to the American West. Along the way Africa had been left on the margins as a stagnant marsh, supporting “a far lower form of existence.” Kuyper’s biblical addendum was “the prophetic blessing of Noah,” “in entire conformity” to which “the children of Shem and Japheth have been the sole bearers of the development of the race,” while “no impulse for any higher life has ever gone forth” from the children of Ham. It was as if, one observer has said, Kuyper rejected social Darwinism for a social version of Mendelian genetics, crossing “a materialistic theory of selection . . . with an idealistic theory of election.”
The South African case also illustrated Kuyper’s more general theory of peoples and group relations in light of the theology he was concurrently elaborating in Common Grace. In the Netherlands, part of the most advanced region of global development, the antithesis between Christians and others was most advanced, demanding that people sort themselves out according to their root religious principles. In the rising land of the United States — i.e., one less developed but also the land of the future — people might still mingle under the prosperity of common grace; yet the Christians among them were called to hone their religious consciousness in anticipation of the wars of principle to come. South Africa represented humanity at a much earlier stage, with tribes locked in a raw phase of mortal combat. The pastoral Boers and aboriginal peoples faced each other bearing racial seeds of “higher” or “lower” potential, the former settling among the latter as “a conquering race” just as the Normans had among the Anglo-Saxons centuries before. Boer vs. Briton, by contrast, amounted to a contest of national character, the more “natural” folk in this case deserving favor over the merely sophisticated. The observer might wonder if Kuyper was not copying the theory of the much-feared Haeckel that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Certainly he shared with the much-maligned Rousseau — and the soon-to-be controversial Freud — a real ambivalence about civilization and its discontents.
Legacy
In any case, the history at hand in South Africa proved harsh for Kuyper’s favorites. In February 1900, the month his essay appeared, the Boers lost a whole army and two city sieges. In mid-March British forces took Bloemfontein, and so symbolically the Orange Free State; in early June, Pretoria and the Transvaal followed. Just as Kuyper had anticipated from the cases of Aceh and the Philippines, however, the Boers resorted to highly mobile and effective guerrilla warfare. Britain responded with a scorched-earth policy that laid waste some 30,000 farms, and an internment strategy that deposited the guerrillas’ dependents in concentration camps. Some 28,000 Boer civilians died there, three-quarters of them children; likewise nearly 20,000 of the 115,000 people of color who had also been confined. Kuyper’s essay had opened on a note of rhetorical astonishment that the nineteenth century, which had dawned on the “splendid promise of liberty,” was passing away “disgraced . . . by a war of aggression.” On another view, the twentieth century had dawned on all too prophetic a note.
Kuyper caught the auguries right. He forecast that Britain would pay enormously before the war was through. It ultimately had to field some 450,000 troops, nearly as many as the entire Boer population, at a cost of 22,000 dead and 200 million pounds in expenditures. Such a course, he continued, “would undoubtedly presage the beginning of the end” of the British Empire — and so, most historians agree, it turned out to be. The follies that British officers Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener, General John French, and Major Douglas Haig committed in South Africa these same officers would repeat twenty-five years later against German lines in France. In South Africa they ran troops directly at Boer entrenchments at the cost of hundreds of casualties per battle; on the Western front the count would run to the hundreds of thousands, decimate the English elite, and thus weaken the head as well as the arms of British imperial power. Even with all that sacrifice, Kuyper predicted, the conquest would avail nothing in South Africa, for British arms and administration galvanized Afrikaner nationalism as nothing else could do. Meanwhile, demography worked much as Kuyper anticipated. Not even ten years after the peace, the Union of South Africa was constituted on a white-supremacist basis, “Boer” consolidating with “Brit” against London’s influence abroad and the native majority at home.
If Kuyper might take this as vindication, he could take only mixed pleasure in the state that white South Africans made. He decried the anglophilic language and culture policy upon which the new government set out. He decried as well, and quite contrary to his theory of pluriform development, the Boers’ commitment to cultivating a distinct Afrikaner nationalism centered on Afrikaans as a language. The nationalism was derivative and the language but a patois, he opined; they should rather aspire to be truly Dutch, and Calvinist too.
Key leaders in the Reformed churches in South Africa would work their way to Amsterdam to study at the Free University, and they would have considerable impact in shaping Afrikaner thought and identity in the 1920s and 1930s. They magnified the suggestion Kuyper had taken up from S. J. Du Toit that Afrikaners had a holy calling in their land. They savored the biblical warrant that Kuyper gave to the pluriformity of human cultures, giving the Tower of Babel episode normative status for human history and interrelationships. Most crucially, they adapted philosopher H. J. Stoker’s addition of the volk to the sovereign “spheres” ordained of God. With that, Romantic sociology and European racism received a warrant beyond appeal — and quite beyond what Kuyper had accorded them.
The results were startling: a system of separate organization based on race instead of religious confession, reflecting and magnifying a gross maldistribution of resources, and embodied in an institutional apparatus that was the nightmare of Antirevolutionary thought. The state under South African apartheid became the single largest employer of the white population in the nation. Schools begun under parental control were seized and subordinated to uniform curricula dictated from the top down. The volk-church ideal predominated in the largest Afrikaner denomination; indeed, apartheid was arguably rooted more in the national theology of Utrecht than in the neo-Calvinism of Amsterdam. In any case, under Stoker’s doctrine of “interpenetration,” all the separate Kuyperian spheres were infused with volkish spirit — that is to say, served its hegemony. The 1899 text behind this development was not Kuyper’s “Evolution” but Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s proto-fascist scripture, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. That the ethics of righteousness Kuyper defended in his tract could be brought captive by other themes in his system to the purposes of Chamberlain’s racism revealed the central blindness in Kuyper’s eye, and bequeathed the greatest tragedy of his influence.