Daniel Zwicker, 1612-1678: Peace, Tolerance and God the One and Only.

Peter T. Bietenholz. (Studi e Testi per la Storia della Tolleranza in Europa nei Secoli XVI-XVII.) Florence: Olschki, 1997. viii + 330 pp. IL 62,000. ISBN: 88-222-4561-X.

The present study is a handsomely published, very thorough examination of the life and controversial writings of a second-tier religious radical of seventeenth-century Amsterdam.

Relatively little is known of the life of Daniel Zwicker. Bietenholz organizes biographical data into an introductory chapter of 53 pages. Born in Gdansk, the son of a Lutheran pastor, Zwicker studied medicine and received university degrees in Konigsberg and Leiden. He joined a Socinian circle in Gdansk at age thirty in 1642 and was expelled together with other Socinians in the following year. Zwicker's next fifteen years in Poland were interrupted by a visit to the Hutterite community in Sobotiste in Slovakia, which impressed him greatly. Intellectual differences with the Polish Socinians led him in 1657 to emigrate to Amsterdam, where he spent the last twenty-one years of his life, apparently no longer practicing medicine but engaging himself in controversial discussions that spanned a diversity of issues: most importantly, Christology, Christian unity, toleration, and pacifism. At the time of his death he left a modest estate, of which his books were the most valuable asset. Bietenholz has reproduced a facsimile copy of the inventory of Zwicker's books made at the time of his death (183-215) and identified 90% of the titles (216-59).

In Amsterdam Zwicker interacted with Collegiant, anti-Trinitarian and Mennonite groups and individuals. Out of their concerns and ones he brought with him from Poland he developed the themes of his controversial publications, which are discussed in three of Bietenholz's five chapters. His distinctive contribution to anti-Trinitarian discussion was his study of ante-Nicene church fathers, among whom he argued that there was no Trinitarian consensus. Since Polish Socinians granted no authority to church tradition and paid it scant attention, this was an original approach to discussion of Christology and one that would be substantially confirmed by future patristic scholarship. In his early years in Amsterdam Zwicker drafted projects for Christian unity based on proposals for merger of various contending groups. Eventually he was impressed sufficiently by the pluralist atmosphere of Amsterdam to seek his solution to Christian unity rather in universal toleration. He thought of the true church as an assemblage of persons from all churches and traditions, in each of which he acknowledged definite strengths and weaknesses. Despite his monarchian stress the supremacy of God the Father, he did not consider the merits of other monotheistic traditions such as Judaism and Islam - his spirit of inclusiveness stopped short of non-Christian religions and atheists. It also stopped short of the spiritualist tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Like conservative members of the Anabaptist sects, he insisted on the importance of baptism and the Lord's Supper as essential Christian ceremonies and upheld the authority of ministerial leadership, in opposition to groups like the Quakers who thought that any member of the congregation might be a medium of the Holy Spirit. In all these respects he was anabaptist rather than spiritualist. On the matter of coercion he held to a strict nonresistance that separated true Christians from the use of force and the holding of magisterial office. He continued throughout his life to regard Hutterite communism as a high Christian ideal, which he did not, however, practice himself. Bietenholz emphasizes that the spirit of Zwicker's writings was utopian rather than apocalyptic.

Apparently Zwicker's writings lacked organizational power or stylistic grace. Bietenholz certainly does not exaggerate either his subject's originality or his importance. To the extent he is representative it is as a product of the radical ferment in the immigrant community of cosmopolitan seventeenth-century Amsterdam.

The book is a work of meticulous scholarship in all its parts, which include, beyond the sections discussed, appendices on a bibliography of Zwicker's writings and controversies and on the writings on tolerance of the sixteenth-century Sienese exile Mino Celsi.

Queen's University