Menno Simons (1496-1561)

A son of Witmarsum, in Friesland

Menno Simons was born in 1496 at Witmarsum, a small farming town in the province of Friesland, then under the authority of the dukes of Saxony and later the Habsburgs^[2]. His name is a patronymic: "Simons" means "son of Simon", his father being named Simon. Little is known of his family, except that it belonged to the peasant world of this region of polders and dikes, marked by a strong tradition of communal self-government^[3].

Ordained a priest without ever having read Scripture

In March 1524, at the age of twenty-eight, Menno Simons was ordained a priest at Utrecht and appointed vicar of Pingjum, his father's village, not far from Witmarsum^[4]. One fact, which he himself would confess years later in his long Reply to Gellius Faber (1554), shows the measure of the spiritual climate among the lower Dutch clergy on the eve of the Reformation:

"One was my pastor, the other was inferior to me in rank; both had partly read the Scriptures, but I had never touched them in my life, for fear that if I read them I might be led astray." — Menno Simons, Reply to Gellius Faber, 1554^[5]

This admission — a priest afraid to open the Bible — is crucial to understanding what follows: it was not a learned theologian who would break with Rome, but a poorly trained country vicar whose conscience would be worked upon, year after year, by a doubt he at first dared confide to no one.

Doubt about the host

From his very first year of priesthood, as he celebrated Mass, Menno was assailed by a thought he first judged diabolical:

"A thought came into my mind [...] that these were not the flesh and blood of the Lord. I took this to be a suggestion of the devil." — Menno Simons, Reply to Gellius Faber, 1554^[6]

He confessed this doubt on several occasions, without managing to shake it off. This unease about the Real Presence, it must be honestly noted, was not peculiar to Menno Simons: it is exactly the doubt that, elsewhere in Europe, pushed so many clerics toward Reformed theses. The difference with Menno is that he took more than ten years to draw a practical conclusion from it — and that all the while he went on celebrating Mass and exercising his ministry.

Parish priest of Witmarsum, a "whited sepulchre"

In 1531, Menno became parish priest of his native Witmarsum^[7]. On those years of ministry, which he retrospectively judged hypocritical, his own verdict is unsparing:

"I did all evil. I was like a carefully whitened sepulchre. Outwardly [...] I was honest, chaste, generous [...] but inwardly I was full of dead men's bones." — Menno Simons, Reply to Gellius Faber, 1554^[8]

This self-criticism, borrowed from the Gospel image of the whited sepulchre (Mt 23:27), must be read with caution: it was written after the event, by a man who had broken away and was constructing the narrative of his own conversion to justify his Anabaptist ministry before his opponents. It nonetheless reveals a real and documented unease of conscience, predating his actual break by several years.

The theoretical doubt about the Eucharist was not enough to tip Menno Simons over. It was a second shock, of a quite different nature, that would steer his questioning toward the question of baptism.

An execution at Leeuwarden

On 20 March 1531, a tailor named Sicke Freerks Snijder (or Sikke Freerks) was beheaded at Leeuwarden, the capital of Friesland, for having himself rebaptized as an adult believer^[9]. Menno reports the effect this execution had on him:

"It seemed truly strange to me to hear of a second baptism." — Menno Simons, Reply to Gellius Faber, 1554^[10]

The expression is measured, almost neutral — but it marks the starting point of an intensive scriptural inquiry into the baptism of little children, which Menno now pursues with the Fathers, the commentators and the New Testament, without finding, he says, any explicit biblical foundation for the practice he yet administers daily to his parishioners^[11].

Facing the revolutionary Anabaptists of Witmarsum

Around 1534-1535, Anabaptist preachers won over by the millenarian fever of Münster came to preach at Witmarsum itself. Menno, still parish priest, publicly opposed their excesses — but acknowledged, in his Reply to Gellius Faber, that this opposition rang hollow, since he himself, in conscience, was not doing what he knew to be right^[12]. The priest who preaches against Anabaptist disorder already knows, deep down, that he shares some of its doubts.

The Melchiorite fever in the Netherlands

The Anabaptist movement in the Netherlands in the 1530s was not the peaceful movement Menno Simons would later embody. It was then largely dominated by the disciples of Melchior Hoffman, a German preacher announcing an imminent reign of Christ and a violent purification of the world by the sword of the "saints"^[13]. This millenarian preaching inflamed part of the Frisian and Westphalian population, wretched and overtaxed by the Habsburg wars.

John of Leiden's kingdom at Münster

In 1534, radical Anabaptists seized the episcopal city of Münster, in Westphalia, expelled whoever refused rebaptism and set up, under the leadership of John of Leiden (Jan Beukelszoon), a theocratic kingdom founded on community of goods and polygamy^[14]. Besieged by the prince-bishop, the city fell on 24 June 1535; John of Leiden and two other leaders were tortured and executed on Münster's public square in January 1536, their bodies displayed in iron cages hung from the steeple of St Lamberti's Church — cages still visible today^[15].

Oldeklooster: the death of Peter Simons (7 April 1535)

The backlash from Münster struck a few miles from Menno Simons' parish. On 7 April 1535, a group of radical Anabaptists seized the monastery of Oldeklooster, near Bolsward, a few miles from Witmarsum, in support of the Münster cause. The emperor's militia retook the monastery after a bloody assault: some 300 besieged were killed in the battle, 37 were beheaded on the spot, and 132 others, men and women, were taken to Leeuwarden, where 55 more would be executed after a summary trial^[16]. Among the Oldeklooster dead was Peter Simons, presented by part of the tradition as Menno's own brother — a kinship that is, however, disputed: the GAMEO Oldeklooster notice holds it to be erroneous, while the GAMEO Menno Simons notice and McGinnis's study retain it only conditionally ("may have been", "quite likely")^[17][18].

The effect on Menno, still parish priest of Witmarsum, is described by himself in shattered terms:

"The blood of these people [...] became such a burden to me that I could no longer bear it nor find rest in my soul." — Menno Simons, Reply to Gellius Faber, 1554^[19]

He adds, examining his own responsibility as a pastor who had stayed in post despite his doubts:

"If I continue thus and do not follow the Word of the Lord [...] how will their shed blood not rise up against me at the judgment?" — Menno Simons, Reply to Gellius Faber, 1554^[20]

"My heart trembled in my body"

Nine months after the Oldeklooster massacre, around 30 January 1536 — the exact date of the decisive scene he reports is 12 January 1536 for the formal abandonment of his office^[21] — Menno Simons took the step. He describes his own inner tipping point in the same terms as his terror before the blood that had been shed:

"My heart trembled in my body." — Menno Simons, Reply to Gellius Faber, 1554^[22]

He began to preach repentance openly, denouncing what he now called "idolatry and false worship" — meaning the Mass, infant baptism and his own past life, which he judged "useless"^[23]. On 12 January 1536, he formally renounced his ecclesiastical benefice and his priesthood:

"I voluntarily renounced my good name, my honour and my reputation [...] and freely submitted to wandering and poverty under the cross of my Lord Jesus Christ." — Menno Simons, Reply to Gellius Faber, 1554^[24]

Baptism and Anabaptist ordination by Obbe Philips

Shortly after his break, Menno Simons was rebaptized — the exact date is not known with certainty, but it falls in early 1536, shortly after his departure from Witmarsum^[25]. Around 1537, he was ordained elder of the Anabaptist movement by Obbe Philips, one of the few leaders of the Dutch movement to have already distanced himself from the violence of Münster^[26]. Obbe Philips and his brother Dirk Philips would be, with Menno, the architects of a Dutch Anabaptism refocused on non-violence^[27].

Against the violent brethren: Jan van Batenburg

Menno's break with Rome put him at odds not only with the Catholic and imperial authorities, but also with the most radical wing of the Anabaptist movement itself. After the crushing of Münster, a group known as the Batenburgers, after their leader Jan van Batenburg, perpetuated violent, polygamous millenarianism, judging itself entitled to use force against anyone outside its sect^[28]. Menno Simons, Obbe and Dirk Philips devoted part of their preaching to combating these "brethren of the sword" (zwaardgeesten), whom they judged a murderous betrayal of the Gospel^[29]. It was this internal struggle, as much as Catholic and Lutheran persecution, that shaped Menno's insistence on absolute non-resistance.

A body of writing produced underground

As early as 1539-1540, in full hiding, Menno published his major work, the Foundation of Christian Doctrine (see below), followed by many other treatises and pamphlets, written from hiding place to hiding place across the Netherlands and northern Germany: Groningen, East Friesland (Emden), then further south, the Cologne region^[30].

The price put on his head (2 December 1542)

On 2 December 1542, with the backing of Emperor Charles V, the authorities of the Netherlands officially put a price on his head: one hundred gold florins, together with a pardon for any past crime, were promised to whoever would hand over Menno Simons^[31]. An imperial edict further threatened severe penalties against anyone who would shelter or help him^[32]. Repression indeed struck those who protected him far more harshly than himself: Tjard Reynders, who had given him lodging, was broken on the wheel; a ferryman who had taken him across the Meuse was executed^[33]. As early as 1541, the Leeuwarden authorities had offered a pardon to any imprisoned Anabaptist who would denounce him — an offer no prisoner accepted^[34].

Wismar, expulsion, and twenty years of wandering

From the mid-1540s, Menno spent some time in the Wismar region, on the Baltic, where he met among others the reformer Martin Micron; he was expelled from it in 1544^[35]. For nearly twenty years, from refuge to refuge, he went on preaching, writing, ordaining ministers and arbitrating the movement's internal disputes — a movement that began, in his own lifetime, to bear his name: as early as 1544, official letters speak of "Mennists" or "Mennonites" to designate his disciples^[36].

The Fresenburg-Wüstenfelde haven (1554-1561)

In 1554, at fifty-eight, after more than twenty years on the run, Menno Simons finally found a stable asylum: the nobleman Bartholomäus von Ahlefeldt, who in his youth had witnessed the execution of Anabaptists he judged innocent of any sedition, offered him refuge on his Holstein lands, at the hamlet of Wüstenfelde, near Fresenburg^[37]. Ahlefeldt even had a house built for a small printing press, set up at Fresenburg, where four of Menno's works — including a new revised edition of his Foundation — were printed between 1554 and 1556^[38]. That house, the Menno-Kate, is today a museum of religious history near Bad Oldesloe^[39].

It was there, surrounded by his wife Geertruydt and their three children — one daughter surviving him — that Menno Simons died on 31 January 1561, aged sixty-four or sixty-five^[40]. He was buried in his garden; his remains would later be transferred to Bad Oldesloe^[41].

To judge a doctrine honestly, one must first set it out accurately. Menno Simons' theology, consolidated in his writings of 1539-1558, is coherent and pastoral: it aims less at speculation than at building a visible Church of committed believers, separated from the world and from violence.

The Foundation of Christian Doctrine (1539-1540)

Menno's summa, Dat Fundament des Christelycken leers ("Foundation of Christian Doctrine"), appeared in Dutch in 1539-1540, shortly after the Münster disaster^[42]. It treats, in order, the time of grace, true repentance, faith, apostolic baptism, the Supper, separation from the world and true ministers, before closing with distinct appeals to the authorities, the learned, the people, the "heretics" and "the bride of Christ"^[43]. This book became, for the Dutch peaceful Anabaptists orphaned by the Münster disaster, the reference manual that definitively distinguished them from the revolutionaries of John of Leiden^[44].

Believers' baptism against infant baptism

The practical starting point of Menno's whole system remains the refusal of infant baptism. For him, the true Church can only be composed of believers who have voluntarily and consciously embraced the faith and sealed that commitment by baptism; the child, incapable of personal faith, cannot receive a sacrament that presupposes conversion of heart^[45]. On the biblical and patristic foundation of the opposite practice — the baptism of little ones, attested as early as the 2nd century in St Irenaeus, Origen and St Cyprian, well before any Anabaptist controversy — see the article Infant Baptism: A Practice Without Foundation?, which treats the question in detail and needs no repetition here.

The Church of the pure and the discipline of the ban

Menno organized his communities around a strict discipline: the ban (excommunication) strikes any member in manifest and unrepented fault, accompanied by shunning (Meidung) — including, in its harshest form defended by some of his disciples, between spouses^[46]. This rigour, meant to keep the Church "without spot", would become one of the main causes of the internal schisms that divided the Mennonite movement after his death, between supporters of a lenient ban (Waterlanders) and supporters of an uncompromising ban (Frisians and Flemings)^[47].

Reading the table: on the question of the subject of baptism, Menno Simons joins none of the great currents of the magisterial Reformation — Catholics, Lutherans and Reformed all agree, despite their other disagreements, in retaining infant baptism.

Non-resistance: returning good for evil

Faced with the trauma of Münster and the Batenburgers, Menno made non-resistance an absolute pillar of his doctrine: the Christian must neither bear arms, nor hold public office involving coercion (magistracy, criminal justice), nor swear oaths, in literal obedience to the Sermon on the Mount^[48]. Recent academic work stresses that Menno went, on this ground, further than most of his contemporaries: he came to reject even the execution of criminals by the civil power, a rare position for his time^[49]. This integral non-resistance, though springing from an understandable horror at the blood shed at Münster, ends in a conception of civil society at odds with the Church's traditional teaching on the legitimacy of the temporal sword (Rom 13:1-4).

The celestial flesh of Christ: a troubling Christology

The most problematic point of Menno Simons' theology, from the standpoint of Catholic faith, concerns not ecclesial discipline but the very heart of the mystery of the Incarnation. Following Melchior Hoffman, whose teaching he took up and systematized, Menno held that the flesh of Christ was not drawn from Mary's substance, but created directly by God and merely carried by her, without her contributing anything of her own nature — Mary being, in this doctrine, "no more active than a glass of water through which a sunbeam passes"^[50]. Menno and his colleague Dirk Philips grounded this thesis in a reading of John 6 and 1 Corinthians 15, as well as in an Aristotelian conception in which the maternal seed would be purely passive in generation^[51].

This doctrine, sometimes described by contemporary theologians as akin to ancient Docetism — the heresy that denied the reality of Christ's flesh — has no exact precedent in Church history, but it prolongs a very old reflex: the one which, to preserve the Saviour's divine purity, ends by withdrawing his true humanity from his Mother. A distant ancestor is found in Marcion of Sinope, who in the 2nd century already denied that Christ had taken truly human, carnal flesh. Notably, over the following generations, this "celestial-flesh Christology" lost ground until it disappeared from ordinary Mennonite theology, as the Dutch Mennonites drew closer to the Swiss Anabaptists, who had remained strangers to this speculation^[52].

An Ignispedia article does not merely narrate: it must also judge, in the light of the faith received from the Church.

What the Empire and the Church condemned

As early as 23 April 1529, the Diet of Speyer, bringing Catholics and Lutherans together in a rare accord, decreed the death penalty against whoever rebaptizes or lets himself be rebaptized, without prior ecclesiastical judgment — a law renewed in 1544 and then at the Diet of Augsburg in 1551^[53]. It was in this climate that Sicke Freerks was beheaded in 1531, and that Menno Simons' own head would be priced in 1542.

On doctrinal substance, the Council of Trent, in its 7th session (1547), devoted an entire canon to the question raised by the movement of which Menno became the leader:

"If anyone says that little children, because they have not the use of reason, are not to be counted among the faithful after they have received baptism, and that for this reason they are to be rebaptized when they have reached the years of discretion [...] let him be anathema." — Council of Trent, 7th session (1547), canon 13 on baptism^[54]

The same council reaffirmed, in another canon of the same session, that baptism imprints on the soul an indelible character forbidding any repetition of the sacrament^[55]. On the biblical and patristic foundations of this doctrine, far older than any Anabaptist polemic, see Infant Baptism: A Practice Without Foundation?.

The loss: the unity of baptism and Mary's true motherhood

Two points, in the eyes of the Catholic Church, mark Menno Simons' doctrine with a real loss, not a mere difference of sensibility.

The first is the unity of baptism. By deeming null the baptism received in childhood, Menno does not merely propose a different discipline: he denies, in effect, that God could have acted efficaciously in an infant's baptism through the sole faith of the Church presenting him — a position Trent judges incompatible with the one baptism confessed from the origins (Eph 4:5)^[56].

The second, graver still in its object, concerns Christology. By professing that Christ's flesh did not truly come from Mary, Menno deprives, unwittingly, the Virgin of her true divine motherhood: Mary is no longer the Mother according to the flesh of the Word made man, but a mere receptacle. The Church, since the Council of Ephesus (431) which proclaimed Mary Theotokos — Mother of God — holds on the contrary that the Son of God received from Mary a truly human flesh, consubstantial with ours, the very condition of our real redemption: what the Word did not assume, He did not save. On this precise point, the "celestial flesh" doctrine is not a disciplinary nuance but an attack, undeclared as such by Menno but real in its consequences, on the heart of the mystery of the Incarnation.

What a Catholic can acknowledge

Honesty nonetheless compels recognition, in Menno Simons, of traits that command respect. His courage in the face of twenty-five years of outlawry, his constancy in refusing violence — including against his most radical co-religionists — his sincere horror at the blood shed at Münster and Oldeklooster, and the pastoral care with which he organized communities of devoted believers: all this is no small thing. Unlike many of his opponents — Catholic as well as Protestant — who answered Anabaptism with stake, wheel or drowning, Menno Simons chose, at every stage of his ministry, to answer persecution with preaching and pen alone. The tragedy of his story is that of so many Reformation figures: real zeal and real suffering, placed in the service of a rupture which, on essential points of the deposit of faith, departs from what the Church received and kept.

Menno Simons can only be fully understood when placed within the constellation of 16th-century reformers and the doctrinal debates they reopened.

• On the great magisterial reformers from whom Anabaptism differs radically: Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin.
• On the Dutch reformer who, a generation later, would reopen the debate on grace and predestination in that same Dutch sphere: Jacob Arminius.
• On the ancient precedent of a Christology minimizing the real flesh of Christ: Marcion of Sinope.
• On the principle commanding every Reformation break with the Church's authority: Sola Scriptura.
• On the overall Catholic answer to Protestant theses: Answers to Protestantism.
• On Christ's Real Presence in the Eucharist, which Menno, like the other reformers, no longer acknowledged: The Real Eucharistic Presence.
• On the council giving the doctrinal answer to the Anabaptist and Protestant crisis: The Council of Trent.
• On the biblical and patristic foundation of infant baptism, which Menno Simons rejected: Infant Baptism: A Practice Without Foundation?.