Johannes Crell

After Fausto Sozzini, Johannes Crell (1590–1633) was the second mind of Socinianism — and the movement’s true systematizer. Sozzini had made the doctrinal decisions; out of them Crell built a doctrinal edifice, from the concept of God through the interpretation of Scripture to a complete ethics.

1. Origins and Flight

Johannes Crell — in Latin Johannes Crellius, in Polish Jan Crell — was born on 26 July 1590 in Hellmitzheim in Franconia, where his father of the same name was pastor. He thus grew up in a Lutheran parsonage, and it was from precisely this milieu that he departed: in 1612, at the age of 22, he left the Empire and went to Poland. The occasion was Lutheran orthodoxy, which left no room any longer for his convictions.

At that time Poland was the only country in Europe in which an anti-Trinitarian congregation could exist, print and teach openly. The Warsaw Confederation of 1573 had assured the nobility religious peace; the Polish Brethren lived under the protection of that assurance — and, as was to become apparent, only for as long as it held.

2. Raków — Academy, Congregation, Printing House

From 1613 Crell worked at the Academy of Raków, from 1616 to 1621 as its rector. Thereafter he remained attached to the congregation as its preacher, until he died in Raków on 11 June 1633 — forty-two years old, in the midst of his work.

Raków was at that time no out-of-the-way corner but a European address: congregation, printing house and academy in one, visited by students from Poland, Lithuania, Transylvania, Hungary, Germany, the Netherlands and England. Crell’s lectures are the reason we possess his ethics at all: they are teaching texts, grown out of instruction, and they carry its sense of order down into the syntax.

3. The Work

Crell’s writings appeared for the most part only after his death and almost throughout under invented places of printing — “Irenopolis”, “Cosmopoli” — because printing and owning Socinian books was punishable in many places. They were collected later in the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum quos Unitarios vocant (Amsterdam 1668), where they fill volumes III to V.

• Ad librum Hugonis Grotii quem de satisfactione Christi (1623) — the reply to Hugo Grotius’s defense of the doctrine of satisfaction. Grotius had written against Sozzini; Crell answered, and the exchange counts as one of the sharpest theological controversies of the century.
• De Deo et eius attributis (1630) — the doctrine of God and his attributes.
• De uno Deo Patre libri duo (1631) — Crell’s principal work on the doctrine of God: that the one God is the Father. It was read into the eighteenth century and was printed in English as well in 1665.
• Racovian New Testament, German version (1630) — prepared together with Joachim Stegmann the Elder.
• Prima ethices elementa (1635) — the concise textbook version of his ethics.
• Vindiciae pro religionis libertate (1637) — the defense of religious liberty, published posthumously: no faith is faith that has been compelled.
• Ethica Aristotelica and Ethica Christiana — the two ethics, since 2026 for the first time complete in German.

To these are added commentaries on New Testament writings and a great number of smaller treatises. The family remained attached to the cause: his son Krzysztof Crell-Spinowski (1622–1680) and the latter’s descendants, among them Samuel Crellius, carried the Socinian work on into the eighteenth century.

4. The Person: What Distinguishes This Mind

Crell is no polemicist. Anyone who sets him beside Sozzini’s polemical writings notices the different tone at once: he orders, distinguishes, weighs, and leaves his opponent his argument before he examines it. His procedure is always the same — first the words, then the matter. Before he says what a virtue is, he investigates in which senses Scripture uses the word; before he passes judgment on the oath, he clarifies what swearing means in the first place.

This seems laborious, and it is deliberate. Crell trusts no ethical statement that has not first shown where it takes its concepts from. In this he stands closer to scholastic philosophy than the reputation of the Socinians would suggest — he uses its technical vocabulary, habitus, voluntarium, mediocritas, as a matter of course — but he does not give it the last word.

5. His Philosophy in Six Sentences

Crell’s ethics hangs directly upon the doctrinal decisions of Socinianism. This is no incidental matter, but the reason why it turns out differently from every other Protestant ethics of his time:

1. One is God, the Father. The Trinity is not a biblical doctrine, but a later formula.
2. Christ is the exalted man — teacher, way and Lord, not a second divine being.
3. Vicarious satisfaction falls away. Whoever does not understand the atoning sacrifice as a payment cannot treat obedience as mere gratitude for a justification already accomplished — he must give it a weight of its own.
4. The will is free. Virtue is therefore not something brought about by an irresistible grace, but something that can be acquired, practiced — and lost.
5. There is no original sin as inherited guilt. Guilt presupposes a will of one’s own.
6. The Sermon on the Mount is binding law, not an unattainable counsel for the few. From this follow the renunciation of violence, the love of enemies, and reserve toward oath and sword.

The sixth point has the most practical consequences. Crell does not parade it before him as a program; rather it emerges where the matter demands it — for instance in the chapter on fortitude, in which the received doctrine of the just war is first set out in full and then dismissed:

But even if all this were observed in wars — which happens most rarely, or rather never — there is nevertheless today no sufficiently just ground that ought to move anyone to the shedding of blood, and that of so many human beings at that. … I do not repeat the commandments of God, which enjoin us to love our enemies. An acute love indeed, which utterly destroys the one it is supposed to love!Johannes Crell, Aristotelian Ethics — On Fortitude and Patience

The sentence is typical of him: not an authoritative pronouncement, but the result of a working-through. The conditions of the just war are conceded, and then it is shown that under them nothing remains.

6. The Two Ethics

Crell posed the ethical question twice — and answered it deliberately along two different paths. The difference between the two books is his real argument:

• Aristotelian Ethics — takes the framework of the Nicomachean Ethics (happiness, virtue, pleasure, friendship) and sets it right chapter by chapter along Scripture. 54 chapters in four parts.
• Christian Ethics — goes the opposite way: it asks which virtues and vices Scripture itself knows, how it names and orders them. Five books, from the concept of virtue to the duties of married people, magistrates and the poor.

Whoever reads only the one gets half the matter. The Aristotelian Ethics shows what remains of the ancient doctrine of virtue when one takes it seriously and at the same time contradicts it. The Christian Ethics shows what takes its place.

7. Afterlife

Crell’s name disappeared with the movement, his questions did not. The Vindiciae pro religionis libertate reached England by way of the Netherlands and belongs to the prehistory of the toleration debates of the late seventeenth century; De uno Deo Patre became the standard text of biblical Unitarianism. The two ethics, by contrast, lay untouched — for four hundred years in Latin only, in a volume that hardly anyone opened.

That they are readable today changes the picture of Socinianism. Whoever knows it only as a dogmatic quarrel over the Trinity finds here its other half: a thoroughly worked-out doctrine of action that becomes concrete precisely where doctrinal disputes leave off — with anger, with money, with the enduring of injustice, with the handling of power.