What Is Catholic Enlightenment? Reflections on a First Overview

Ulrich L. Lehner, Michael Printy, eds.. A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe. Brill's Companions to the Christian Tradition Series. Leiden: Brill, 2010. 468 pp. $233.00, cloth, ISBN 978-90-04-18351-3. Reviewed by Carolina Armenteros Published on H-Albion (August, 2016) Commissioned by Jefrey R. Wigelsworth (Red Deer College) If the concept of Enlightenment is much con‐ hibited throughout Catholic Europe from Poland- tested, the Catholic Enlightenment that Sebastian Lithuania to Spain, and including Malta and Por‐ Merkle first introduced to historiography in 1908 tugal. is still being defined. The same interpretive issues In his introduction to the volume, Lehner lo‐ that render the concept of Enlightenment a sub‐ cates the movement’s dual roots in the reforms of ject of debate also affect its Catholic variety: the Council of Trent and in the spiritual and theo‐ whether to grasp the movement from a philosoph‐ logical currents—influenced by Jansenism and ical (especially epistemological), sociocultural, or the rise of bourgeois self-esteem—that sought to political point of view; whether to understand recapture the spirit of the early church, rejecting these various aspects of it as mutually influential, modern and medieval forms of devotion along or as convergent and context-dependent; and with monastic and mendicant asceticism. For whether to break up the movement in separate Lehner, the anti-Jesuitism that was integral to national varieties or to understand it as an all-em‐ Jansenism was also a defining, if unessential, bracing European whole. The debate is unlikely to characteristic of Catholic Enlightenment, though settle down in the foreseeable future, but for those as we will see—and this will become theoretically seeking to refine Enlightenment’s definition as an crucial—some of the volume’s authors consider analytical tool, Catholic Enlightenment can offer the Jesuits as participants in the Catholic Enlight‐ a good laboratory. As a more confined movement, enment, to the point of putting them forward, in it is more readily coherent. And as a varied—even various contexts, as paradigms of it. In this re‐ fragmented—one, it can mirror many of the ambi‐ spect, Lehner’s Catholic Enlightenment—condi‐ guities of its larger counterpart. This review both tioned perhaps by his past work on the Bene‐ summarizes and engages with the Catholic En‐ dictines, who produced, at Saint Maur, moderni‐ lightenment’s very first overview: Ulrich L. Lehner ty’s first path-breaking critical works on the mon‐ and Michael Printy’s Companion to the Catholic uments of tradition—seems implicitly defined as Enlightenment. Its chief aim is to assess what, if the (frequently anti-Jesuit) drive to eliminate all any, concept of Catholic Enlightenment can en‐ compass the wide diversity that the movement ex‐ H-Net Reviews cultural, intellectual, and ecclesiastical innova‐ ish emancipation; the “reduction of monks”; the tions that postdated antiquity. legalization of “secret Protestantism”; and the for‐ Jeffrey Burson writes, by contrast, on the bidding of pilgrimages, of lights inside churches, largely pro-Unigenitus and pro-Jesuit Catholic En‐ and of the sale of rosaries. Such policies had pre‐ lightenment that developed in France from the dictable intellectual roots in French Jansenism mid-seventeenth century to the Revolution of and Protestant theology, and Klueting closes with 1789. Molinism, he points out, allowed for specula‐ the escalation of the revolt of the Catholic clergy tion about a pure state of nature succeeding the against Protestantism and Josephinism that be‐ fall and preceding corrupt civilization that drew came the Brabant Revolution of 1787. the Jesuits close to those epitomes of Enlighten‐ The understanding of Catholic Enlightenment ment, the philosophes. For Burson, in fact, the So‐ as fundamentally political returns in Printy’s ciety of Jesus was Catholicism’s enlightened van‐ chapter on the Holy Roman Empire, which bor‐ guard in epistemology and scientific innovation. rows a phrase from J. G. A. Pocock to characterize Attempting a via media between René Descartes Catholic Enlightenment as a “series of pro‐ and Baruch Spinoza, the Jesuits combined John grammes for reducing the power of either church‐ Locke with Nicolas Malebranche, extolled Newto‐ es or congregations to disturb the peace of civil so‐ nian physics, and validated church doctrine em‐ ciety by challenging its authority” (p. 171). Despite pirically in order to lend it historical certitude, go‐ this definition, though, Printy takes an intellectual ing so far as to argue that Catholicism had been historical approach, helpfully reviewing the work the natural religion of humankind. The Jansenists, of the theologians who propagated Catholic En‐ of course, also approached Enlightenment lightenment: Eusebius Amort, who attacked super‐ through science: their idea of the hidden nature of stition while professing anti-Jesuitism and an in‐ divine causality was readily consonant with En‐ terest in science, and Anselm Desing, who studied lightenment empiricism. One may surmise, as Protestant natural law. Printy also examines the well, that their exclusion from the universities juridical theories of the Febronian canonists who made it difficult for them to develop intellectually expanded the concept of the church law’s sources on a par with their enemies. Comparatively, in in order to diminish Rome’s power. As for the fact, Burson’s French Jansenists seem little rele‐ monastic orders, they were, for Printy, heirs of a vant to Catholic Enlightenment. Even their tri‐ German Catholic tradition that preceded the Ref‐ umph over the Jesuits in 1762, when the Society of ormation and that made possible the anti-Jesuit‐ Jesus was expelled from France, stripped them of ism that was the unifying feature of the German their significance, since on entering the main‐ Catholic Enlightenment. stream they lost their political clout. Of all European Catholic Enlightenments, per‐ The pendulum swings back to Jansenism in haps the most fertile was the Italian one, which the essay on the Catholic Enlightenment in the Mario Rosa recounts in this volume, using the Ger‐ Austrian Habsburg lands. Harm Klueting recounts man concept of Aufklärung rather than the the anti-baroque and Tridentine concern with the French Lumières to emphasize the less ideological improvement of pastoral care that characterized and polemical connotations that Enlightenment the reign of Maria Theresa, as well as its famously had in its Italian setting—and to avoid the defini‐ radical continuation under Joseph II. For this ex‐ tions that Italian research rejects: “Catholic En‐ ceedingly statist emperor, worship was synony‐ lightenment,” “enlightened Catholicism,” “re‐ mous with usefulness to the state, and Klueting un‐ formist Catholics.” Ludovico Muratori famously derstandably focuses on government policy: Jew‐ inaugurated the Italian Catholic Aufklärung, rec‐ 2 H-Net Reviews ommending that religion’s regulation of daily No such struggle occurred in Poland-Lithua‐ rhythms be reduced in favor of the disciplinary re‐ nia, where more religious than secular ideas came form of social life by stressing interior over exteri‐ in from western Europe, and where the nobility or discipline. One might argue that such emphasis stood unchallenged as the major wielder of politi‐ on interiority was not entirely compatible with cal power. Richard Butterwick tells the story of the Benedict XIV’s diffidence toward mysticism in Catholic Enlightenment in this part of the world as preference of medical and scientific literature, but one of parish reforms by bishops who sought to the Italian Catholic Enlightenment that Rosa de‐ improve the quality of seminary education, make scribes followed a fluctuating and trying course, worship more accessible to the common people, opening the century by engaging with science, go‐ and encourage charity over external devotion. ing through an eudaemonist phase in the middle Far from being the enemies that defined these ef‐ decades, and intertwining with political and reli‐ forts, the Jesuits led them in the 1750s through an gious reforms in the 1780s, especially as Habsburg intellectual renewal that reduced philosophy to reforms resumed in Tuscany and Lombardy, and logic and natural science while avoiding the literal Bourbon ones in Naples and Sicily. It was in these interpretation of scripture. In literature, however, regions, Rosa remarks, that Jansenism emerged as the Polish Catholic Enlightenment seems to have a defning feature of the Catholic Enlightenment. produced little besides the Monachomachia (1778) The case of Malta, recounted by Frans Ciappa‐ —the mock-epic of Ignacy Krasicki, prince-bishop ra, is perhaps most interesting given the Knights of of Warmia, whose title (War of the monks) sug‐ Malta’s theocratic government of the island. Con‐ gests all—and novels by bishops depicting plain- sidering their order’s Crusading origins, one might speaking hero-priests. expect them to have preserved the medieval devo‐ Evergton Sales Souza’s account of the Catholic tional practices that many Catholic enlighteners Enlightenment in Portugal, by contrast, opens sought to extirpate, and this is indeed the case, as with a remark on the formative importance of a the cult of the Sacred Heart and the via crucis not book (and one, too, with an eminently intellectual only continued but even intensified in eighteenth- preoccupation): Verney’s The True Method of century Malta. In their relations with the papacy, Study (1746), which argued that theological and however, the Grand Masters, who styled them‐ canonical studies should be grounded in history selves as philosopher-kings, followed the lead of and erudite critique. That such methods had long other European monarchs in attempting to limit been employed by the Augustinians already an‐ ecclesiastical jurisdiction, going so far as to dis‐ nounced Verney’s theological preferences, and his credit the pope’s representatives in their adminis‐ book’s critique of scholasticism and proposals for tration of justice. Nor were the papist Jesuits the the reform of religious studies only confirmed Knights’ friends: the Society of Jesus had already them.

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