Predestination and the Quarrel with Jaques Bernard

Abstract

De Vallone’s second major quarrel began, surprisingly enough, in a place far distant from The Hague. There was what appears to have been a petty but acrimonious exchange between the Calvinists and Lutherans in the neighbourhood of Nuremburg, and that about the time that de Vallone was living near that Lutheran city. There are two accounts of the trouble, that of de Vallone, in his Defense de l’Apologie pour les Réformez au Sujet de la Prédestination,¹ and that of his adversary, Gustav Philip Morl, the Inspector for the students from Nuremburg in the University of Altdorf, in the “Epilogus” to his Vindiciae Doctrinae Lutheranorum de Gratia Praedestinationis.² The two, as one might expect, do not agree, nor do the details particularly matter. As far as one can gather, the more sober among both religious communities were on the side of restraint. The chief protagonists were a Calvinist preacher Schmidmann, and a Lutheran, Feuerlin. Others were drawn into the fray, which began in 1696, among them Mori himself, but the matter seemed to have died down fairly amicably when suddenly, and as late as 1702, a new gladiator, no less than de Vallone himself, stepped into the ring, with an attack on Mori, the Apologie pour les Réformez. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the original cause of contention, this intervention seems to have been quite unsolicited. According to Morl, even Schmidmann wrote disowning it, though whether this were true or false one cannot tell.