Dutch Millenarianism and the Role of Reason: Daniel De Breen and Joachim Oudaan

Abstract

In a famous article in 1992, Richard Popkin argued that philosophical rationalism was not the only intellectual reaction to the crisis of scepticism that swept Europe in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Another reaction, which Popkin referred to as the “Third Force in Seventeenth-Century Thought,” attempted to combat scepticism and find truth without using reason as its sole guiding principle. This Third Force involved what Popkin called “strange combinations” of empirical and rationalist thought with theosophic speculations and millenarian interpretations of Scripture.