Spiritualists and the Devil
After Münster, Dutch and German
Anabaptists on the whole turned away from physical fulfillment of biblical
prophecy to an emphasis on creating the godly community of faith based on the
Gospels, as in the case of Menno Simons (1496–1561), or by turning to an
interiorized faith wherein external confessions and rituals were of little
import. This inner turn especially had a profound impact on beliefs about the
Devil. Faced by severe persecution, some Anabaptists adopted an approach to
religious identity known as spiritualism, which taught that only one’s inner
beliefs mattered and that external religious forms and confessions were
inconsequential. Some of them extended that internalization to the Devil.
The most controversial proponent
of an entirely internalized Satan was the glass painter and Anabaptist David
Joris (1501–56). Inspired in 1536 by visions convincing him that he would be
revealed on Christmas Day 1538 as the next messianic king after Münster,
Joris’s hopes were dashed when in late 1538 the authorities cracked down on his
movement, forcing him to flee to Antwerp. Here he abandoned physical
fulfillment of scriptural prophecy and began reshaping his propensity for
mystical interpretation of Scripture into a full-blown spiritualism. Around
1540 he began publishing works arguing that neither demons nor angels had any
independent existence outside of the individual person. His language at times
could imply an external reality, but his central assertion was that demons “are
nothing, without any ability of their own, outside of humanity.… People are an
enemy and devil to themselves, they have to guard themselves from no one more
than from themselves.”
No Latinist, it is unlikely that
Joris had encountered Pompanazzi’s denial of demons. He may, however, have
first come across the idea of restricting the Devil to the inner voice of evil
from a fellow spiritualist, Clemens Ziegler of Strasbourg (1480–1535), for in
1538 Joris travelled there to meet with Hoffman’s followers. Among Ziegler’s
surviving manuscripts predating Joris’s visit is one entitled “Of the Salvation
of all Men’s Souls,” in which Ziegler argues that the Devil was “nothing more
than the inclination to sin.” The internalizing motif of the drama of the
Chambers of Rhetoric may have also shaped Joris’s unorthodox idea, for Joris
composed songs and dialogues in their style. In their serious plays,
rhetoricians transformed the character of the Devil into individual Vices,
disposing Dutch viewers to imagine Satan as something other than a real
external being. It was, however, Joris who first explicitly published the idea
of an internalized Devil in a tract called Behold, the Book of Life is
Opened to Me, printed about 1540. From that time, the idea was attached to
him, so that some labelled Joris the “Devil of Delft” on the principle that
only someone inspired by Satan would deny his existence. While many Dutch
writers condemned such theology as a form of atheism, others found Joris’s idea
attractive; one printer saw its value when he reissued Joris’s booklet during
the height of the witch hunts as A Brief and Instructive Tract: wherein is
treated what the word Devil means. Reformed and Catholic polemicists
assumed that Joris’s demonology could be discredited simply by revealing that
its author was a notoriously disgraced Anabaptist prophet with a reputation for
sexual immorality. This, however, proved not to be the case. Instead, Joris’s
idea sparked a major debate among Dutch writers that contributed to the
relative skepticism toward diabolical witchcraft in the Northern Netherlands
where spiritualism proved an immensely popular approach to religious identity
and diversity. (Gary K. Waite, “The Devil in the Reformations,” in A Companion
to the Devil and Demons, c. 1100-1750, ed. Kathryn A. Edwards [Brill’s Companions
to the Christian Tradition 111; Leiden: Brill, 2025], 133-34)
