Advocate of Free Thought

Advocate of Free Thought

Adriaan Koerbagh, preface to the reader in Light Shining in Dark Places

The exhibition Advocate of Free Thought: Adriaan Koerbagh (1633–1669) was open to the public at the Embassy of the Free Mind from 17 September 2021. The exhibition, an initiative of Vereniging Het Spinozahuis in Rijnsburg, opened there in the autumn of 2019 and travelled to the Elisabeth Weeshuis Museum in Culemborg in the autumn of 2020. The exhibition then came to Koerbagh’s native city Amsterdam.

Adriaan Koerbagh: More Radical Than Spinoza?

In a sense Koerbagh was more radical than Spinoza. Unlike Spinoza, who wrote in Latin, Koerbagh deliberately wrote in the vernacular, to enlighten the people of the Dutch Republic. Belief, he said, is based on approval, which implies that you must have some knowledge of what you approve. You can believe what you want, but knowledge offers greater certainty. That is why he advocated a reasonable religion, as he held that reason was the only and most reliable word of God. It also created greater mutual tolerance.

In his own time, Koerbagh was regarded as an ‘atheistic monster’, as were philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and Spinoza. Now he is rightly acclaimed as a free thinker. Koerbagh himself referred to free thought as follows:

‘Not all new and strange things must be rejected without cause, they must first be examined with an open and unbiased mind, and that which is true must be accepted and cherished. If we fail to do so, we will continue to wallow in the mire of ignorance.’

Koerbagh, who debuted as a lexicographer, elaborated his ideas in A Light Shining in Dark Places, which was only first published in the 21st century. In 1668 the printer, afraid he might be charged as an accessory to disseminating Koerbagh’s radical ideas, stopped printing halfway through the book and handed the copy to the authorities. Koerbagh was arrested in the summer of 1668 and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, a punishment he would not survive.

The exhibition honours the original freethinker Koerbagh. The light which he had wanted to shine on dark places has not been extinguished. Visitors to the exhibition could print a page from Koerbagh’s confiscated work, two copies of which have been preserved, part print, part manuscript. ‘Every religion needs a Koerbagh’, were the memorable words of his translator Michiel Wielema.

Listen here to a Dutch podcast on Adriaan Koerbagh, by curator Hannah Laurens.