Van den Enden, the son of weavers, was baptized in Antwerp on 6 February 1602. He was a pupil at the Augustinian and the Jesuit colleges of that city. In 1619 he entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus, but in 1633 he was dismissed from the order. In the later 1630s he contributed some Neo-Latin poems to devotional works by the Spanish Augustinian Bartholomé de los Rios y Alarcón. In about the same period he also seems to have been active in the Antwerp art trade, in which his brother Martinus van den Enden played an important role, as a publisher of prints by Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. In 1640 Van den Enden married Clara Maria Vermeeren at Antwerp and in 1641 a first child was born, named after her mother Clara Maria. It is not clear where and when their second daughter Margereta Aldegonis was born.