Spiritualism and Rationalism in Early Modern Europe The Case of David Joris

Despite his reputation as a narcissistic Anabaptist messiah, after 1544 David Joris became an influential spiritualist who abandoned claims of a unique possession of the Holy Spirit and promoted the Spirit as active within the mind of all believers, just as he had already internalized demons and angels to the inner person. He only fully elaborated his mature pneumatology in the 1550s, and since none of those writings were printed in his lifetime, outside of correspondence and conversation it became known only when printers produced these late works starting in the 1580s. In the Dutch Republic, where spiritualism flowed freely, Joris's creative approach to the Spirit helped shape discourse on religion and philosophy among nonconformists such as the Doopsgezinden (baptism-minded people, i.e., Mennonites) and Collegiants. These in turn contributed to the conversations of early Enlightenment philosophers, such as Descartes and Spinoza.