Pietas Ordinum

Ordinum Hollandiae ac Westfrisiae pietas (The Piety of the States of Holland and Westfriesland) is a 1613 book on church polity by Hugo Grotius. It was the first publication of Grotius, a prominent jurist and Remonstrant, concerned with the Calvinist-Arminian debate and its ramifications, a major factor in the politics of the Netherlands in the 1610s. The Ordinum pietas, as it is known for short, gave a commentary on the Five Articles of Remonstrance of 1610 that were the legacy of the theological views of Jacobus Arminius, who died in 1609.

In arguing for a relaxation of orthodox Calvinism, or from another perspective against the hardening of Reformed theology along the lines proposed by his colleague and opponent Franciscus Gomarus, Arminius had appealed to the secular authorities. As a tactical move this appeal had brought advantages; but in the following years the Remonstrants, as the followers of Arminianism became called, had to face great resistance both to their views and to their approach to settling a dispute within the Dutch Reformed Church that was theological by recourse to the civil powers.

Grotius held a prominent legal office, being Advocate General to the States of Holland and Zealand. In the period from the Hague Conference of 1611 between Remonstrants and their opponents the Contra-Remonstrants, the views of Grotius were not widely known. It was with the publication of the Ordinum Pietas that he came off the fence, and became identified with the Remonstrant cause. The consequences on a personal level for the author were serious: six years later he was under a death sentence, after the religious conflict became a matter of high politics.

Grotius visited England for two months in the spring of 1613, taken there by legal issues centred on Dutch and British trading in the East Indies. He moved in the highest circles, meeting both James I of England, and George Abbot the Archbishop of Canterbury. He began the composition of the Ordinum Pietas after his return, making use of Calvinist theological reading which he had spent time on after the Conference. Particularly useful to the debate and relevant for citation were John Calvin, Pierre Du Moulin, David Paraeus, William Perkins, Johannes Piscator, and William Whitaker.

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