A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe

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Author: Ulrich L. Lehner and Michael Printy (editors)

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A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe

Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition A series of handbooks and reference works on the intellectual and religious life of Europe, 500–1700

VOLUME 20

A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe Edited by

Ulrich L. Lehner & Michael Printy

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2010

Cover illustration: The marriage of Church and State in St. Veit Church, Straubing, Bavaria, by Georg Fux (1703), above a fresco depicting the Throne of Grace. Photo: Peter Schwarz, Straubing. Courtesy of the Pfarrei St. Jakob, Straubing, Germany. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe / edited by Ulrich L. Lehner & Michael Printy. p. cm. — (Brill’s companions to the Christian tradition ; v. 20) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-18351-3 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Catholic Church—Europe—History—18th century. 2. Enlightenment—Europe. 3. Europe—Church history—18th century. I. Lehner, Ulrich L., 1976– II. Printy, Michael O’Neill. III. Title. IV. Series. BX1365.C66 2010 282’.409033—dc22 2010006584

ISSN 1871–6377 ISBN 978 90 04 18351 3 Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS Introduction: The Many Faces of the Catholic Enlightenment ................................................................................ Ulrich L. Lehner

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The Catholic Enlightenment in France from the Fin de Siècle Crisis of Consciousness to the Revolution, 1650–1789 .......... Jeffrey D. Burson

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The Catholic Enlightenment in Austria or the Habsburg Lands ............................................................................................... Harm Klueting

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Catholic Enlightenment and Reform Catholicism in the Holy Roman Empire ............................................................................... Michael Printy

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The Catholic Aufklärung in Italy .................................................... Mario Rosa

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The Maltese Catholic Enlightenment ............................................. Frans Ciappara

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Catholicism and Enlightenment in Poland-Lithuania ................ Richard Butterwick

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The Catholic Enlightenment in Portugal ....................................... Evergton Sales Souza

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Luces por la Fe: The Cause of Catholic Enlightenment in 18th-Century Spain ....................................................................... Andrea J. Smidt

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Notes on Contributors ......................................................................

453

Index ....................................................................................................

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INTRODUCTION

THE MANY FACES OF THE CATHOLIC ENLIGHTENMENT Ulrich L. Lehner* Due to the rise of social history in the last decades, religion has become of interest once more for historians and is again regarded “as a form of knowledge and religious networks of communication as vehicles for exchanging and possibly reforming knowledge.”1 This shift in research interests has also allowed for a re-reading of 18th century religious thinkers and their contributions to intellectual and political life. The religious side of the Enlightenment was discovered, and there arose the conviction that modern culture has secular as well as religious roots.2 This religious Enlightenment shared some presuppositions with its better known “secular” twin “[. . .] but could not share them all, precisely because it was grounded in an ecclesiastical institution based on divine revelation of a personal God, and could not, except with the sacrifice of its very essence, accept the whole program of the philosophes.”3 The existence of a religious Enlightenment has meanwhile been established for Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism. Some scholars even argue

* A previous draft of this essay was presented at the Early Modern History Seminar of the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study. I am grateful for the helpful criticisms of Jonathan Israel, Peter Paret, Hamish M. Scott, François Rigolot, Regina Grafe, Giovanni Tarrantino, Aurelian Craitu, Martin Powers, David Moon and Edwin Curley. Moreover, I thank especially David Sorkin and Dale van Kley who also read previous versions of this chapter. I also thank Douglas Palmer, who initially served (2007–2008) as coeditor of this volume. Due to his administrative duties, he was not able to continue working on the project. 1 László Kontler, “What is the (Historians’) Enlightenment Today?” European Review of History 13 (2006) 357–371, at 359. Rudolf Schlögl, Glaube und Religion in der Säkularisierung. Die katholische Stadt—Köln, Aachen, Münster—1740–1840 (Munich: 1995) 80–109 shows, with reference to three major Catholic cities in the Empire, that the self-understanding of the bourgeoisie was strongly influenced by religion. 2 Cf. Reinhard Koselleck, “Aufklärung und die Grenzen der Toleranz,” in Trutz Rendtorff (ed.), Glaube und Toleranz. Das theologische Erbe der Aufklärung (Gütersloh: 1982), 256–271; Werner Schütz, “Die Kanzel als Katheder der Aufklärung,” Wolfenbütteler Studien zur Aufklärung 1 (1974), 137–171. 3 Samuel J. Miller, Portugal and Rome. An Aspect of the Catholic Enlightenment (Rome: 1978), 1–2.

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for the inclusion of esotericism into this group. Common to the whole movement was its aim to harmonize faith and reason. For Christians, the religious Enlightenment represented a renunciation of Reformation and Counter-Reformation militance, an express alternative to two centuries of dogmatism and fanaticism, intolerance and religious warfare. For Jews, it represented an effort to overcome the uncharacteristic cultural isolation of the post-Reformation period through reappropriation of neglected elements of their own heritage and engagement with the larger culture.4

However, research in the Catholic Enlightenment until now lacked a multinational and comparative history that pointed out intellectual similarities and national differences. This volume is the first step in this direction.5 After examining the term Catholic Enlightenment and its history, this essay will argue that the conceptualization of a uniform Enlightenment has been transformed into a multitude of Enlightenments. Among these the specific leitmotifs of the Catholic Enlightenment will be outlined. 1. What is Catholic Enlightenment? The term Catholic Enlightenment is a heuristic concept that describes the diverse phenomenon that mainly took hold of Catholic intellectuals in the 18th century and early 19th century.6 It combines a multitude of different strands of thought and a variety of projects that attempted to renew and reform Catholicism in the 18th century. The Catholic Enlightenment was an apologetic endeavor defending the essential dogmas of Catholic Christianity against indifferentism, agnosticism, and atheism, or, as Mario Rosa puts it, “a composite and also a contradictory movement characterized by a dual tension: cultural dynamism and a commitment to apologetics, or defense of the

4 David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment. Protestants, Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: 2008), 6. 5 Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment, 6–11. Cf. Catherine Northeast, The Parisian Jesuits and the Enlightenment, 1728–1762 (Oxford: 1991); Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: 2001), 48–49. 6 The end of the Holy Roman Empire (1806) and the beginning of 19th century Ultramontanism give some indication as to when the Catholic Enlightenment ceased. Cf. Harm Klueting, “Aufklärung, katholische,” in Helmut Reinalter (ed.), Lexikon zum aufgeklärten Absolutismus in Europa (Vienna et al.: 2005), 127–131.

the many faces of the catholic enlightenment

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faith.”7 It was inspired by the reforms of the Council of Trent but also by modern Protestant thought, e.g. Locke, Wolff, Newton and others. Moreover, it desired to show that Catholicism could be appealing to the academic and political elite, and that it was compatible with rationality, and able to embrace modern theories of economy, science, and constitutional changes.8 “The Catholic Enlightenment was, therefore, a reform movement within the Church that was linked, though in discordant harmony, with the Enlightenment reform movement and with interventions by reforming sovereigns who were inclined to welcome the collaboration of religious forces with the state in a more general process of cultural and social transformation.”9 Only the umbrella term Catholic Enlightenment seems able to convey that the Catholicism under investigation was in discourse, not only with a modern understanding of the Tridentine reform and Jansensim, but also with a movement that tried to “renew” and “reform” the whole of society. That this movement does not easily fit into a neatly defined conceptual category, that its “light” shone less brightly and less distinctly in different contexts, but was nevertheless projected, refractured and refocused in others, makes it very much like the often neglected peripheries of the Enlightenment, a subject worthy of intensive research.10 2. History of the Term In 1908 the German church historian Sebastian Merkle introduced the term Catholic Enlightenment into historiography, thereby insisting that it had to be taken seriously as a historical phenomenon and

7 For example, while Catholic Enlighteners tried to implement Locke’s empiricist philosophy, his rationalist theology, which did not leave much room for the Catholic dogma of “faith,” was not well received. Mario Rosa, “Roman Catholicism,” in Alan Charles Kors (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, vol. 3, (Oxford: 2002), 468– 472; cf. Idem, ibid., vol. 1: 134–136 (Benedict XIV), 261–262 (Clement XIV); vol. 3, 461–462 (Ricci, Scipione de’). 8 Locke’s works were even used as positive inspiration for ascetical and mystical theology, therefore the late ban of his main works in 1734 and 1737. See Gustavo Costa, “La santa sede di fronte a Locke,” Nouvelles de la République des Lettres 1/2 (2003): 37–122. 9 Mario Rosa, “Roman Catholicism,” 472. 10 That many of these reforms were entangled with absolutist reforms was a property of ecclesiastical and political structures existing at the time. On the Peripheries of the Enlightenment see the recent volume by Richard Butterwick et al. (eds.), Peripheries of the Enlightenment (Oxford: 2008).

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rejecting the Neo-Scholastic claim that it should be dismissed as the source of the Revolutionary onslaught on the Mother Church. For Merkle, the Enlightenment had an important and positive impact on ecclesiastical life and theology. This proved for him that the Catholic Church was able to come to terms with modernity.11 Merkle’s critics, on the other hand, rejected the new concept because it associated the Catholic Church not only with the alleged agnostic and atheist streams of the Enlightenment, but also with the Protestant Churches and their enlightened theologies. For them, heavily relying on the work of the Ultramontane church historian Heinrich Brück, the Enlightenment was associated with militant atheism and the destruction of faith.12 Despite heavy criticism from his fellow Catholics, but also from Protestant historians, Merkle was convinced that neither the secular Enlightenment nor the other religious Enlightenments (Jewish, Protestant) could be the measuring sticks for Catholic thinkers, since the latter, had produced something innovative that deserved to be called enlightened in its own right.13 In the decades following Merkle’s important speech a greater appreciation for the achievements of 18th century Catholicism began to grow. Scholars started to use the term Reform Catholicism, which is still in use.14 The problem with the term lies in the fact that it was developed by both 19th century liberal and Ultramontane scholarship—each with

11 Sebastian Merkle, Die katholische Beurteilung des Aufklärungszeitalters (Berlin: 1909) [Merkle’s speech was given on 12 August 1908]. Cf. Grete Klingenstein, Staatsverwaltung und kirchliche Autorität im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: 1970), 88–130; Bernhard Schneider, “Katholische Aufklärung. Zum Werden und Wert eines Forschunsgbegriffs,” Revue d’Histoire Ecclesiastique 93 (1998): 354–397, at 359. 12 Schneider, “Katholische Aufklärung. Zum Werden und Wert eines Forschungsbegriffs.” See Heinrich Brück, Die rationalistischen Bestrebungen im katholischen Deutschland (Mainz: 1865); Idem, Geschichte der katholischen Kirche im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, 5 vols. (Mainz: 2nd ed., 1902–1908); Idem, Lehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte für academische Vorlesungen und zum Selbststudium (Mainz: 1872; 8th ed., 1902). Cf. Andreas Holzem, Weltversuchung und Heilsgewißheit. Kirchengeschichte im Katholizismus des 19. Jahrhunderts (Altenberge: 1995), 140–180. The main critics of Merkle were Sägmüller, Unwissenschaftlichkeit und Unglaube; Idem, Wissenschaftlichkeit und Glaube; Rösch, Ein neuer Historiker der Aufklärung. 13 Schneider, “Katholische Aufklärung. Zum Werden und Wert eines Forschungsbegriffs,” 361. 14 Schneider, “Katholische Aufklärung. Zum Werden und Wert eines Forschungsbegriffs,” 363; cf. Rudolf Schlögl, “Secularization: German Catholicism at the Eve of Modernity,” German Historical Institute/London Bulletin 25/1 (2003), 5–21.


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different agendas—to describe the 18th century.15 Furthermore, the term does not take into account that this movement was influenced by the European Enlightenment process.16 Gustav Schnürer and Max Braubach, scholars of the generation following Merkle, came to a more differentiated view. For Schnürer, all those who did not reject revelation can be regarded as ecclesiastical Enlighteners.17 It was equally problematic to reserve the term Catholic Enlightener to men who were obedient to the magisterial teachings and to disallow it to them who no longer embraced the singularity of the Catholic Church and of Christian revelation, like Valjavec did.18 This concept is insufficient because it denies the Catholicity of a number of important thinkers of the time who understood themselves as ardent Catholics despite their papal censoring or even excommunication.19 In the francophone world of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Catholic Enlightenment began to be taken seriously owing to the research of L. J. Rogier and Bernard Plongeron.20 Both criticized the term enlightened Catholicism (catholicisme éclairé), developed by some of

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Anton Schindling, “Theresianismus, Josephinismus, katholische Aufklärung,” in Würzburger Diözesangeschichtsblätter 50 (1988): 215–244; 217; Elisabeth Kovacs, “Katholische Aufklärung und Josephinismus,” in Klueting, Harm (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung (Hamburg: 1993), 246–259, at 249. 16 Cf. Schneider, “Katholische Aufklärung. Zum Werden und Wert eines Forschungsbegriffs,” 384–385. That the Enlightenment in fact has the dynamics of a process is shown in Horst Möller, Vernunft und Kritik. Deutsche Aufklärung im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: 1986), 16–18 and, more recently, Helmut Reinalter (ed.), Aufklärungsprozesse seit dem 18. Jahrhundert (Würzburg: 2005). 17 Schneider, “Katholische Aufklärung. Zum Werden und Wert eines Forschungsbegriffs,” 369. 18 Fritz Valjavec, Geschichte der abendländischen Aufklärung (Vienna: 1961), 174– 187. Schneider, “Katholische Aufklärung. Zum Werden und Wert eines Forschungsbegriffs,” 377. 19 Cf. Ludwig Hammermayer, “Aufklärung im katholischen Deutschland des 18. Jahrhunderts. Werk und Wirkung von Andreas Gordon OSB (1712–1751), Professor der Philosophie an der Universität Erfurt,” Jahrbuch des Instituts für deutsche Geschichte 4 (1975): 53–109; Georg Schwaiger, “Die Aufklärung in katholischer Sicht,” in Concilium 3 (1967): 559–566; Harm Klueting, “Der Genius der Zeit hat sie unbrauchbar gemacht. Zum Thema Katholische Aufklärung—Oder: Aufklärung und Katholizismus im Deutschland des 18. Jahrhunderts. Eine Einführung,” in Idem (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung, 1–35; Schneider, “Katholische Aufklärung. Zum Werden und Wert eines Forschungsbegriffs,” 378. A good example for an excommunicated Catholic Enlightener is Valentin Eybel, cf. Sorkin, Religious Enlightenment, 215–261. 20 Louis J. Rogier, “L’Aufklärung catholique,” in Nouvelle Histoire de l’Église vol. IV (Paris: 1966), 137–161; Bernard Plongeron, “Wahre Gottesverehrung und das Problem des Unglaubens. Debatten um Inhalte und Wege von Religiosität und Seelsorge,” in Idem, (ed.), Geschichte des Christentums, vol. 10 (Freiburg: 2000), 233–293.

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their colleagues, since it narrowed the researcher’s focus on the trends towards secularization within Catholicism and eclipsed the religious renewal. However, the aggiornamento of Vatican II and the church history textbooks written in its aftermath allowed for an unprejudiced investigation of 18th century events as a process of inner reform, a reform that was influenced by philosophers outside the Church. In this regard, the Catholic Enlightenment of the 18th century can be seen as an anticipation of Vatican II that tried to bring the Church up-to-date while still respecting the doctrines of the Church, the teachings of the Councils and the opinions of the saints.21 However, it was not until the mid 1970s that the Catholic Enlightenment was considered to be a worthwhile project of investigation by non-Church-historians. Anton Schindling’s theses about the essential features of the Catholic Enlightenment were among the first: (1) an optimistic view of humanity, (2) a more rationalist and utilitarian view of theology, (3) a general desire for reform.22 Quite contrary to this, Karl Otmar von Aretin and Peter Hersche thought that the Catholic Enlightenment project was doomed from the very beginning because Enlightenment and religion were irreconcilable.23 In 1988, the discussion in Germany reached a new level in a symposium that investigated whether the use of the term Catholic Enlightenment was more justified than the use of Enlightenment in Catholic Germany. Whereas the first implied a strong assertion and appreciation of the originality of Catholic Enlightenment ideals, the latter understood the Enlightenment to be an alien import. Harm Klueting stated at that symposium that the Catholic Enlightenment tried to reconcile the Tridentine Church with the Enlightenment for a brief period of time, without any enduring success. Nevertheless, Klueting defended the use of the term. His main argument was that the Catholic theologians of the 18th century were innovative thinkers, not merely passive imitators of their Protestant peers.24 A few years later the question arose as to whether

21 Plongeron, “Wahre Gottesverehrung,” 253. The careful German translation— edited by Bernhard Schneider—distinguishes between “Christian” and “Catholic” Enlightenment and is therefore—in my view—preferable to the French original. 22 Schindling, “Theresianismus,” 218–219; Plongeron, “Was ist katholische Aufklärung,” 12. 23 Karl Otmar von Aretin, “Katholische Aufklärung im Heiligen Römischen Reich,” in Idem, Das Reich. Friedensgarantie und europäisches Gleichgewicht 1648–1806 (Stuttgart: 1986), 403–433. Hersche, Der Spätjansenismus, 390–405. 24 Klueting, “Der Genius,” 8–9.


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the reforms of the 18th century Church could be differentiated from the spirit of the Council of Trent. Bernhard Schneider has argued convincingly that if we understand the term Catholic Enlightenment as the description of a process similar to other Enlightenments, but shaped by specific Catholic characteristics regarding content and structure, then a differentiation between Enlightenment reforms and the spirit of Trent is impossible.25 Likewise, Dieter Breuer stated that a differentiation between the late implementation of the teachings of Trent and the Enlightenment was not helpful. Such an isolation of 18th century Catholicism would strip from it all its confessional aspects and would not do justice to the Catholic Enlightenment. Catholicism in the 18th century was essentially shaped by confessional impulses that had their roots in Trent or its aftermath, e.g. the popular Jansenist tradition of a personal, individual piety; the realization of the reform decrees of Trent; the theological doctrines of the light of reason and free will; the historical diplomatic scholarship of the Maurists; the critique of Jesuit scholasticism and education (especially by lawyers); the Counter-Reformation tradition in Bavaria, Austria, Spain, and Portugal; as well as the unsettled relationship between national episcopal councils and the Pope. These peculiarities shaped the Enlightenment and turned it into a uniquely Catholic Enlightenment. As a consequence, one is not merely dealing with a Catholic philosophy or theology of the Enlightenment, but with a Catholic Enlightenment culture.26 A great deal of the history of eighteenth century religion has been written from a confessional standpoint, and this has served further to marginalize discussion of the subject in a period of history concerning which secular interpretations continue to prevail. A reunion of the religious and the secular is a major desideratum in the writing of eighteenth century history, and this applies not only to historians of religion but also, a fortiori, to political, social, and cultural historians.27

25 Schneider, “Katholische Aufklärung. Zum Werden und Wert eines Forschungsbegriffs,” 390. Cf. Horst Stuke, “Aufklärung,” in Otto Brunner et al. (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: 1972), 243–342, at 265–266. 26 Breuer, “Katholische Aufklärung und Theologie,” 78: “The overwhelming majority of the population regarded the Church as the most important space for intellectual formation.” Heribert Raab, “Das Fürstbistum Fulda (1752–1802/03),” in Archiv für Mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte 41 (1989): 173–201, at 179–180. 27 Brian Young, “Religious History and the Eighteenth-Century Historian,” The Historical Journal 43 (2000): 849–868.

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Unfortunately, ignorance of religious influence, especially of Catholic influence, still prevails. A History of German Literature from the year 2002 (!) states that Catholic philosophers and scholars did not play a role in 18th century intellectual life.28 If one looks at 18th century German review journals, it is striking that, in the last third of that century, Catholic books were only seldom positively reviewed and the Catholic states, which once were highly praised for their scholarship, were declared backwaters of ignorance. Two groups were responsible for this: Protestant thinkers, who claimed the sovereign right to interpret the Enlightenment and considered their religious belief to be the only ones compatible with the new ideas, and conservative Catholics, who denounced the new theology. Yet if we stick to Germany as our example, Friedrich Nicolai’s growing anti-Catholicism also had economic motives. The Catholic Enlightenment broke the monopoly that the Protestants had on Enlightenment literature. Catholics now produced their own literature and no longer had use for imported, albeit identical ideas. Sadly, though, Nicolai’s declaration of war against Catholicism contributed to a splitting of the Republic of Letters and to the victory of Protestant historiography and left the enemy, Catholic erudition, in the shadows of history until Sebastian Merkle called for a re-evaluation of the Catholic Enlightenment.29 Another reason for the tension between Catholic and Protestant erudition—at least in the Holy Roman Empire—was the fact that both parties used different methodologies and lived in different academic cultures. This forced historians over the last decades to take the Catholic Enlightenment seriously, to “historicize” it, rather than judging it according to what extent it followed its Protestant counterpart or contributed to a secular, national culture.30

28 Heinz Schlaffer, Kurze Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (Munich et al.: 2002), 54–55, quoted in Wilhelm Haefs, “Reformkatholizismus und Komödien der Religion, Katholische Aufklärung als Gegenstand literaturwissenschaftlicher Forschung,” in Konrad Feilchenfeldt et al. (eds.), Zwischen Aufklärung und Romantik. Neue Perspektiven der Forschung. Festschrift für Roger Paulin (Würzburg: 2006), 255–288, at 255. Heribert Raab provides an excellent overview of fields and problems of study related to the 18th-century Reichskirche, as well as the biased scholarship up to the 20th century, in Clemens Wenzeslaus von Sachsen und seine Zeit (1739–1818), vol. 1 (Freiburg: 1962), 9–21. 29 Haefs, “Reformkatholizismus und Komödien,” 257; Benz, Zwischen Tradition und Kritik, 529–539. 30 Hermann Lübbe, Säkularisierung. Geschichte eines ideenpolitischen Begriffs (Freiburg: 1965). Breuer, “Einleitung,” 1–48; Anton Schindling, Bildung und Wissen-


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3. The Multitude of Enlightenments and the Rehabilitation of Religion Until a few decades ago, it seemed clear to historians that the Enlightenment was a movement that propagated free thought and personal liberty and fought against religion. Voltaire and, especially, Immanuel Kant were the alleged heroes. Ernst Troeltsch’s article on the Enlightenment (1897) still seemed to be right when he called the essential characteristics of this era its anti-supranaturalism and its reaction against the preeminence of revelation in the order of life.31 Despite Ernst Cassirer’s attempted corrections, such was the mainstream view of the Enlightenment until the 1970s, when Hugh Trevor-Roper’s notion about the “religious origins of the Enlightenment” began to receive more recognition.32 What was once seen as a uniform event is now considered a multiperspectival, multi-layered and multi-centered movement “in which similar sets of questions about man and the universe were answered in different ways.”33 As J. G. A. Pocock commented, “We can no longer write satisfactorily of the Enlightenment as a unified and universal

schaft in der frühen Neuzeit 1650–1800 (Munich: 1994); Notker Hammerstein and Hermann Ulrich (eds.), Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte: 18. Jahrhundert, vol. 2 (Munich: 2005). 31 Ernst Troeltsch, “Die Aufklärung,” in Ernst Troeltsch, Aufsätze zur Geistesgeschichte und Religionssoziologie. Gesammelte Schriften vol. 4 (Tübingen: 1925), 338–375, at 340; see especially ibid., 370–375. Voltaire’s works were put on the Index of Forbidden Books between 1753 and 1757 (see Hans Gross, Rome in the Age of the Enlightenment. The Post-Tridentine Syndrome and the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: 1990), 261 and Peter Godman, Die geheimen Gutachten des Vatikan. Weltliteratur auf dem Index (Wiesbaden: 2nd ed., 2006), passim). Cf. also Klaus Scholder, “Grundzüge der theologischen Aufklärung in Deutschland,” in Franklin Kopitzsch (ed.), Aufklärung, Absolutismus und Bürgertum in Deutschland (Munich: 1976), 294–318. 32 Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (London: 1967), ch. 4. This classic is also presently available online through http://oll.libertyfund.org (retrieved: 10 April 2008). Cf. also Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment. 33 Kontler, “What is the (Historians’) Enlightenment Today?” 360; Peter F. Barton, Jesuiten, Jansenisten, Josephiner (Vienna: 1978), 166–167. John Robertson, in The Case for the Enlightenment. Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge: 2005), tries to convince the reader of the coherence of the Enlightenment and is rather critical of the “diversity”approach (esp. 1–51; 377–405). Another critical voice is that of Robert Darnton, e.g. in his essay “The Case for the Enlightenment: George Washington’s False Teeth,” in Idem, George Washington’s False Teeth: an Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century (New York/London: 2003), 3–24.

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intellectual movement.”34 The Enlightenment can no longer be identified with an “age of reason,” nor seen as simply a homogenous or antireligious movement, but rather as a process of cultural and sociological diversity,35 a movement with cosmopolitan and nationalist, devout and skeptical, erudite and ignorant tendencies.36 However, it was not until the early 1980s that, due to emphasis on social history, research of religious phenomena like the Catholic Enlightenment was rehabilitated in the Anglophone world (earlier in Italy)37 and that the peripheries of Enlightenment Europe became a focus of investigation.38 4. Enlightenment Bashing From the 1950s onwards, both liberal and conservative thinkers alike started to blame the Enlightenment for almost everything that had gone wrong in the Western World since 1750. In the last two decades, however, “Enlightenment bashing” has “developed into something of an intellectual blood-sport” that has lost academic integrity.39 Such postmodern or conservative critiques of the Enlightenment do not take into account the fruits of this movement, e.g. its contributions to the abolishment of torture, the deterrence of violent religious outbursts, the ending of the Inquisition, the prohibition of witch hunts,

34 John G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon (Cambridge: 1999), 13. Critical of this approach is, again, John Robertson, in “The Enlightenments of J. G. A. Pocock,” Storia della storiografia—History of Historiography 39 (2001): 140–151. 35 Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, 16–18. “If no single philosophy characterizes Enlightenment thinking, they ask, why should any area of intellectual activity be excluded? [. . .] Ultimately it becomes impossible to exclude any not obviously reactionary form of thought from the Enlightenment’s liberal embrace. But there is a price to pay: an Enlightenment so inclusive is in danger of losing any coherent, distinctive, intellectual identity.” (Ibid., 16). 36 Giorgio Tonelli, “Lumiéres, Aufklärung: A Note on Semantics,” International Studies in Philosophy (Studi internazionali di filosofia) 6 (1974): 166–169, at 166). Cf. Norbert Hinske, “Die Grundideen der deutschen Aufklärung,” in Raffaele Ciafardone (ed.), Die Philosophie der deutschen Aufklärung. Texte und Darstellung (Stuttgart: 1990), 407–458, at 411–412. 37 Cf. Miller, Portugal and Rome; Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore, 5 vols. (Torino: 1969–1990). 38 Cf. Charles W. J. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment. Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (Chicago: 2007). 39 Darrin McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York et al.: 2001), 12.


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and the move towards more religious freedom, tolerance, and freedom of speech, all of which helped to truly civilize Europe.40 Jonathan Israel and Stephen Bronner have recently spoken out in defense of the Enlightenment, especially the so called Radical Enlightenment, as the true foundation of progressive thought, including the idea of the equality of human beings.41 Israel also reminded scholars to “get a clearer picture of the tremendous intellectual and ideological battles taking place within every single one” of the national and probably also religious Enlightenments.42 Moreover, if authors like Spinoza, d’Alembert or d’Holbach are the measuring sticks for the Enlightenment, as Jonathan Israel argues, then Locke must indeed be seen as “the pillar of eighteenth century mainstream conservative thinking”43 and the Catholic Enlightenment a “defensive modernization.”44 This, however, seems unsatisfactory since much content of the Catholic Enlightenment actually predates the Enlightenment and thus cannot be considered a reaction to it. Others have added to this criticism that the Catholic Enlightenment was not distinguishable from an 18th century Tridentine but also Jansenist renewal. It seems equally problematic to label Catholics who paid respect to the tradition but were interested in new ways of doing theology as members of the “CounterEnlightenment”45 simply because they did not follow certain radicals.46

40 The abolition of torture happened in Prussia (only when state security was not involved) in 1740, in Sweden in 1772, in Tuscany in 1786, and in France in 1788. See Bernhard Plonergon, “Einleitung,” in Bernard Plonergon (ed.), Geschichte des Christentums (Historie du christianisme des origins à nos jours), vol. 10 (Freiburg: 2000), 1–9. Cf. Angenendt, Toleranz und Gewalt, 342–343; cf. Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: 2007). 41 Stephen Bronner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment. Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement (New York: 2004); Jonathan Israel, “Enlightenment! Which Enlightenment?” Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006): 523–545. It is remarkable that the Catholic Church opposed as early as 1683 racial discrimination against candidates for the priesthood (see Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution (Oxford: 1981), 133 with a reference to Benedict XIV, De synodo dioecesana libri tredecim, vol. 1: c. 2–4). 42 Israel, “Enlightenment!” 528. 43 Israel, “Enlightenment!” 529. 44 Heinz Duchhardt, Europa am Vorabend der Moderne 1650–1800 (Stuttgart: 2003), 165. 45 Cf. John G. A. Pocock, “Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in England,” in Raffaele Ajello et al. (eds.), L’età dei lumi. Studi storici sul Settecento europeo in onore di Franco Venturi, 2 vols, (Naples: 1985), 523–562. 46 Cf. Israel, “Enlightenment!” 542; McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment. In the Anglophone world, the important and excellent studies of Christoph Weiß and

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Yet Israel reminded us that membership in a Counter-Enlightenment group can only be ascribed with a great caveat since established criteria are lacking. Moreover, a close look at the primary sources tells us that Catholic publications from the 18th century were only to a negligible degree directed against the Enlightenment as a whole. What we nevertheless can detect is a fight against certain radical Enlightenment ideals and values, indicating that many of these Catholics actually fought for a moderate or conservative Enlightenment rather than against it. This calls for a further clarification of the term Counter-Enlightenment, but also for a reconsideration of what we understand by mainstream and conservative Enlightenment. Recently, Sylviane Albertan-Coppala also has spoken in favor of reconsidering the role, importance, and impact of the religious, and especially the Catholic Enlightenment without evaluating religious Enlighteners based on the extent they followed their secular counterparts, but also without downplaying the ideological schisms within these religious Enlightenments.47 5. Some Enlightenment Influences on the Catholic Enlightenment The natural sciences and the foundation of academic societies and new universities forced Catholics in the 17th and 18th century to reshape their view of education in order to keep up with scientific achievements. As a result, theology gradually underwent an inversion of teleology that favored a more mechanistic explanation of nature.48 Around

Wolfgang Albrecht (eds.), Von “Obscuranten” und “Eudämonisten”. Gegenaufklärerische, konservative und antirevolutionäre Publizisten im späten 18. Jahrhundert (St. Ingbert: 1997); and of Michael Schaich, Staat und Öffentlichkeit im Kurfürstentum Bayern (Munich: 2001), have been overlooked. See also Rosenblatt, “The Christian Enlightenment,” 284. 47 Sylviane Albertan-Coppola and Catherine Porter, “Counter-Enlightenment” in Alan Charles Kors (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, vol. 1 (Oxford: 2002): 307–311. 48 Beutel, Aufklärung in Deutschland, 226–228; Helga Dirlinger, “Das Buch der Natur. Der Einfluß der Physikotheologie auf das neuzeitliche Naturverständnis und die ästhetische Wahrnehmung von Wildnis,” in Michael Weinzier (ed.), Individualisierung, Rationalisierung, Säkularisierung. Neue Wege der Religionsgeschichte (Vienna and Munich: 1997), 156–185; Helga Dirlinger, “Physikotheologie: Der Wandel des religiösen Weltbildes im aufgeklärten Diskurs,” in Johannes Dantine/Klaus Thien/ Michael Weinzierl (eds.), Protestantische Mentalitäten. Aspekte europäischer Geschichte (Vienna: 1999), 156–185.


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the same time, the idea of a natural religion began to gain acceptance among theologians and even found its way into Catholic textbooks.49 Political philosophy ceased to see the sovereign as the guarantor of supernatural salvation for his people, and instead saw him as a caretaker of public welfare and earthly happiness, which led to rationalist territorialism that authorized the State to interfere in ecclesiastical decisions or even to take possession of its property for the common good. Enlightened skepticism also had its impact on Catholic thinkers and motivated the Benedictines of St. Maur to defend the possibility of historical certainty.50 When one calls the 18th century the “age of reason,” this is certainly correct if one understands this to mean a rediscovery of the sovereignty of reason. However, it would be a complete misunderstanding to believe that Enlightenment thinkers were naïve optimists about their mental faculties. Only a few, e.g. Christian Wolff (1679–1754), considered the powers of knowledge to be limitless.51 Most of the Enlighteners and also such prominent figures as Kant worked for the clear and careful establishment of a realm of possible human knowledge versus one beyond the limits of understanding, and thus shared the Catholic idea that unlimited reason leads to anarchy.52 Around 1740–1750, theological Wolffianism, which applied the so called scientific method to the Bible and tried to verify the harmony between reason and revelation,53 was introduced to Catholic institutions of higher education, primarily by Benedictines and Piarists.54 In 49

Beutel, Aufklärung in Deutschland, 203–206. Lehner, “Ecumenism and Enlightenment Catholicism.” Cf. Richard H. Popkin and Ezequiel de Olaso (eds.), Scepticism in the Enlightenment (Dordrecht: 1997); Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: 2003); Markus Völkel, Pyrrhonismus historicus und Fides historica. Die Entwicklung der deutschen historischen Methodologie unter dem Gesichtspunkt der historischen Skepsis (Frankfurt: 1987). 51 Wolff, Discursus Praeliminaris, § 5: “Nullos cognitionis rationum decernimus limites.” See also Giorgio Tonelli, “The Weakness of Reason in the Age of the Enlightenment,” Diderot Studies XIV (1971): 217–244, at 225–227. Thomasius, on the other hand, had a much humbler understanding of reason. 52 Tonelli, “The Weakness of Reason,” 218; cf. Ulrich L. Lehner, Kants Vorsehungskonzept auf dem Hintergrund der deutschen Schulphilosophie und-theologie (Leiden: 2007), passim. 53 Beutel, Aufklärung in Deutschland, 243–245. 54 One has to mention, though, that some disciples of Wolff became pure rationalists and regarded revelation as unnecessary, e.g. Johann Lorenz Schmidt (1702–1749). See Ursula Goldenbaum, “Der Skandal der Wertheimer Bibel. Die philosophischtheologische Entscheidungsschlacht zwischen Pietisten und Wolffianern,” in Idem, 50

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the last two decades of the 18th century, the primary interest of Catholic theologians shifted from Wolff to the thought of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) whose work was considered valuable in the fight against atheism. Again, it was mostly the Benedictines who accomplished this.55 Nevertheless, it was not until the 1780s that a general consciousness of a new era began to take root among religious and secular Enlighteners. No longer did European intellectuals consider themselves as disciples of certain schools of thought, but as defenders of a common heritage and patrimony, the Enlightenment.56 Despite the numerous differences between the European states and the development of the Enlightenment in these countries, one can determine a number of common characteristics or leitmotifs, which work as heuristic and pragmatic tools for further research.57 One can distinguish the Enlightenment’s programmatic ideas and positive goals from the ideas against which it fought and its silent “background” ideas.58 The word Enlightenment meant, first and foremost, shedding light on dark conceptual language and substituting confusing terms with distinct and clear ones.59 This first programmatic idea was that the Enlightenment was originally understood as extending only to individual scholars. However, in the second half of the 18th century, the Enlightenment was popularized and extended to a general public, where social and political structures, states and society became the main concern of the Enlightenment.60 Besides this, eclecticism, autonomous judgment and intellectual maturity can be identified as positive goals and ideas. All three imply (relatively) unrestricted, independent think-

Appell an das Publikum. Die öffentliche Debatte in der deutschen Aufklärung 1687– 1796, vol. 1 (Berlin: 2004), 175–508. 55 Ulrich L. Lehner, “Theologia Benedictina ac Kantiana. Zur Kant-Rezeption der Benediktiner Ildefons Schwarz und Ulrich Peutinger,” in Norbert Fischer (ed.), Kant und der Katholizismus (Freiburg: Herder, 2005), 234–261; cf. Paul R. Blum, Philosophenphilosophie und Schulphilosophie, passim. 56 Werner Schneiders, Hoffnung auf Vernunft. Aufklärungsphilosophie in Deutschland (Hamburg: 1990), 44–45. 57 Beutel, Aufklärung in Deutschland, 145–165. 58 Hinske, “Die Grundideen,” 412. 59 Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia, 3rd meditation. Kant also understood it this way, see AA XV, 669. 60 Hinske, “Die Grundideen,” 416; Werner Schneiders, Die wahre Aufklärung. Zum Selbstverständnis der deutschen Aufklärung (Freiburg et al.: 1974); Goldenbaum, Appell an das Publikum.


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ing without prescribed conclusions.61 The belief in perfectibility, especially of structures and organizations, is another programmatic idea.62 Such belief in progress was inherent in the majority of Enlightenment publications,63 although the conceptualization of this progress varied.64 For most Catholic Enlighteners, progress always relied on the supernatural help of the Church because without such assistance, progress would only encompass mundane reforms.65 The idea of progress was intimately connected with a more optimistic approach to anthropology.66 This new insight even changed the theological approach to apologetics in the 17th and 18th century: no more was the demonstratio evangelica the center of research and writing, but religion as the true fulfillment of human destiny and as the basis of society. This growing interest in the anthropological dimension of theology continued into the 19th century, but was brought to an abrupt halt with the rise of intransigent

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Eclecticism was closely related to criticism: it meant the unbiased scrutiny of authors and arguments and presupposed faith in the capacity of reason as well as the courage to accept new conclusions. This is a biblical principle, cf. 1 Thess 5: 21. See also Horst Dreitzel, “Zur Entwicklung und Eigenart der ‘eklektischen Philosophie,’ ” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung, 18 (1991), 281–343; Michael Albrecht, Eklektik. Eine Begriffsgeschichte mit Hinweisen auf die Philosophie- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: 1994); Martin Mulsow, “Eclecticism or Skepticism? A Problem of the Early Enlightenment,” Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (1997): 465–477; Klaus-Gert Lutterbeck, Staat und Gesellschaft bei Christian Thomasius und Christian Wolff. Eine historische Untersuchung in systematischer Absicht (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: 2002), 44–45.This eclecticism can be observed among Catholic intellectuals in the 18th century but also in the early 19th century. The famous exegete Johann Stoppani (1778–1836) even called a certain stream of 18th century Catholicism an artificially construed “eclectic Catholicism.” Johann Stoppani to Bernard Bolzano (5 July 1833), in Eduard Winter (ed.), Über die Perfektibilität des Katholizismus. Grundsätzliche Erwägungen in Briefen von Pascal, Bolzano, Brentano und Knoll (Berlin: 1971), 107. 62 This thought has also Christian roots. Hinske, “Die Grundideen,” 417–426. 63 Cf. Reinhard Koselleck, Kritik und Krise. Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt (Frankfurt/M.: 1959; 7th ed., 1992). 64 E.g. Christian Wolff on one end of the scale (Wolff, Philosphia practica universalis, vol. 1: § 374; cf. Clemens Schwaiger, Das Problem des Glücks im Denken Christian Wolffs (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: 1995), passim) and Kant/Lessing on the other (Lehner, Kants Vorsehungskonzept, passim). 65 Aretin, “Katholische Aufklärung im Heiligen Römischen Reich,” 415. 66 An example for such an optimist anthropology can be found in the work of the Camaldolese monk Isidoro Bianchi, Meditazioni su vari punti di felicità pubblica e privata (Palermo: 1773). To a great extent inspired by Pufendorf, Bianchi advocated that Christianity would help to create a more humane civilization. Cf. Rosa, “Der zersplitterte Katholizismus in Italien,” 29.

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Neo-Scholasticism in the second half of the 19th century.67 If one regards the belief in perfectibility and optimism about the potential of human nature as core concepts of the Catholic Enlightenment, it becomes obvious that this movement was more influenced by the Early Enlightenment (which itself was shaped by Pietism) than by later thinkers who possessed more pessimistic views about human nature.68 The ideas the Enlighteners fought against are easier to identify: one had to resist everything that worked against programmatic ideas such as dogmatism,69 “dark concepts,” prejudice, superstition, and enthusiasm (seen as total subjectivism).70 This also fits with what we know about the self-understanding of religious Enlightenment thinkers as reformers who did not desire (at least in most cases) a revolution, but the abolition of certain established structures.71 Numerous Catholic Enlighteners fought against superstition, enthusiasm,72 philosophical dogmatism, and alleged episcopal or papal despotism. In most cases, however, the latter battle did in most cases not entail an attack on sacred doctrine and the hierarchy per se, but was meant as a constructive critique of outdated ecclesiastical structures and theologies as well as the abuse of power by bishops. Instead of blind faith and obedience—concepts that allegedly could be found in the constitutions of

67 Plongeron, “Wahre Gottesverehrung,” 282–284; Schäfer, Kirche und Vernunft (Munich: 1974), passim. For the Tübingen School see now Grant Kaplan, Answering the Enlightenment. As an example of such a new approach to apologetics the works of the Irish theologian Luke Joseph Hooke (1714–1796) may suffice, cf. Thomas O’Connor, An Irish Theologian in Enlightenment France. Luke Joseph Hooke (1714– 1796) (Dublin: 1995). 68 Barton, Jesuiten, Jansenisten, Josephiner, 165–171. 69 When Catholic Enlighteners fought against dogmatism, this did not mean that they fought against dogmas of faith, but against a certain style of philosophizing and theologizing. Dogmatism can mean the method by which deductions are exercised and connected with each other, based on a few “certain” principles, or the uncritical presupposition that knowledge of things is possible and reliable etc. See Max Apel and Peter Ludz (eds.), Philosophisches Wörterbuch (Berlin, New York: 1976), 71. 70 Hinske, “Die Grundideen,” 427–434. Lehner (ed.), Benedikt Poiger, passim; Aretin, “Katholische Aufklärung im Heiligen Römischen Reich,” 403–404. For the decline of magic as early as the 16th and 17th centuries see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: 1971). 71 E.g. Christian Thomasius understood himself, as such, to be a successor of Luther’s Reformation, see Werner Schneiders, “Reformaufklärung in Deutschland,” 23–41. 72 Plongeron, “Wahre Gottesverehrung,” 258; Richard Butterwick, “What is Enlightenment (oświecenie)? Some Polish Answers, 1765–1820,” in Central Europe 3 (2005): 19–37, at 23.


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the Jesuits—Catholic reformers propagated an enlightened and rational obedience and faith (obsequium rationabile; Rm 12: 1).73 The programmatic ideas were based on a common anthropology that stemmed from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Two of its essential components were the belief in an ultimate goal of human life and belief in human reason. The Early Enlightenment in particular had a positive view of human beings and their capacities. The concepts of the public sphere, freedom of expression, liberality, and tolerance were all derived from the idea that reason is equally bestowed on all human beings.74 This confidence in reason gave rise to the scientific study of human cognitive faculties and their value, human beings’ needs and actions, etc., and anthropology gradually became the focus of philosophical and theological thought. As a consequence of this, the practical side of intellectual endeavors was stressed. Thus, ethics became very important, while systematic theories of theology became rarer and rarer. Jesus was thought of as a moral teacher of virtue, freedom, and happiness.75 An overly self-confident optimism about human nature led certain groups of Protestant Enlighteners to deny original sin. Although Catholic Enlighteners could accept the new insights about the malleability of human nature in the face of social and natural changes, almost none shared the denial of such a central Christian doctrine. However, such thinking was nothing new for Catholics. Free will, or more explicitly, posse dissentire, si velit, had been Catholic dogma since the sixth session of Trent (1547).76 Nevertheless, the Council left it to theologians to determine the relationship between freedom and grace, and, although the controversies on grace were supposed to have officially ended in 1611, they continued as a dispute between the

73 Plongeron, “Wahre Gottesverehrung,” 258–262. This reorientation of theology led to a critical view of miracles, and only those that were rationally defensible were considered authentic. Cf. Rebekka Habermas, Wallfahrt und Aufruhr. Zur Geschichte des Wunderglaubens in der frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt et al.: 1991); Alfonso Prandi, Cristianesimo offense e difenso. Deismo e apologetica Cristiana nel secondo Settecento (Bologna: 1975). 74 Hinske, “Die Grundideen,” 435–439. 75 Beutel, Aufklärung in Deutschland, 159. 76 DH (= Heinrich Denzinger and Peter Hünermann (eds.), Kompendium der Glaubensbekenntnisse und kirchlichen Lehrentscheidungen, 41st ed. (Freiburg: 2007), 1554–1555. Cf. See Frederick C. Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason: the Defence of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment (Princeton: 1996), 20–24 and Schneiders, “Reformaufklärung,” 24–26.

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religious orders (especially Jesuits vs. Dominicans) until well into the 17th and 18th centuries. It was the Jesuits, however, who defended the most liberal concept of freedom (Molinism) and who argued for a more favorable outcome for deceased unbaptized children (unlike strict Thomism or Augustinianism).77 Furthermore, Catholic anthropology already maintained a belief in the natural light of reason (lumen naturale), affirming that creation is intelligible, because it was brought into existence by truth and wisdom personified, i.e. God.78 5.1. One Root of the Catholic Enlightenment: The Application of the Tridentine Reform The Catholic Enlightenment did not have to reinvent the wheel. It stood on the shoulders of an old theological tradition that can be traced back to the reforms of Trent.79 However, it took almost 200 years until the time was ripe to fulfill the Tridentine reforms with the help of new spiritualities, new media, a rediscovered optimism about social change and a new view of the role of the state. In the 18th century the popes, as well as the national churches, increasingly took care to implement these reforms. Once confessional boundaries settled down after the Thirty Years War, the Catholic Church finally achieved a wider and more profound implementation of the decrees of Trent. At the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century, a few decades before explicit Enlightenment influences were fermenting in the Church, the spirit of Trent was in full force. The Catholic Enlightenment reformers

77 See Sven Knebel, Wille, Würfel und Wahrscheinlichkeit. Das System der moralischen Notwendigkeit in der Jesuitenscholastik 1550–1700 (Hamburg: 2000); Ulrich L. Lehner (ed.), Geschichte der scholastischen Theologie im Zeitalter der Gnadenstreitigkeiten, vol. 1 (Nordhausen: 2007). For a discussion of the fate of unbaptized children see Martin Stone, “The ‘Antiquarian’ and the ‘Moderniser’: Giovanni Lorenzo Berti (1696–1766), Pietro Tamburini (1737–1827), and Contrasting Defenses of the Augustinian Heritage in Eighteenth-Century Italy,” Quaestio: A Yearbook of the History of Metaphysics, 6 (2006): 335–372. 78 An example for this rational outlook on creation is the Jesuit defense of certain Chinese traditions as a kind of pristine, natural theology. Another is their initial reluctance to accept Newton’s theories, since the master of physics did not give a rational, ontological explanation of gravity. For Jesuits in early modern science see Marcus Hellyer, Catholic Physics (Notre Dame: 2005); John O’Malley et al. (eds.) The Jesuits. Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, 2 vols. (Toronto: 1999–2006); Mordechai Feingold, Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MS: 2003). 79 Breuer, “Einleitung,” 12.


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“coordinated, rationalized and deepened” these reform attempts.80 Nevertheless, the Peace of Westphalia also implied the end of the vision of the unity of Christendom. This had drastically reduced the power of the papacy on the European political stage, and the Holy See had also lost some of its strength internally. A good example for this was the trouble that Pope Gregory VII caused, even a thousand years after his death. In 1606 Paul V, without any problem, was able to canonize the former German monk Hildebrand, who had so ferociously defended the rights of the popes. However, in 1728/29, Benedict XIII (1724– 1730) was unable to enforce the extension of this holy day to the whole Church. The breviary text for the commemoration day mentioned the virtues of Gregory VII and his fight for the primacy of the pope over secular power, which was an offense to Gallicans and to most Catholic monarchs.81 In 1725, the same pope established the Congregatio Seminariorum, which was supposed to foster the education of the clergy, and, in 1728, he issued an encyclical about erecting new seminaries. Benedict XIV (1740–1758) considered it necessary to remind the bishops of their duties—also in regard to seminary education—in his first encyclical, Ubi Primum (1740): “Bishops usually complain that the harvest is indeed great, but the laborers are few. Perhaps it also ought to be lamented that the bishops did not extend the necessary efforts in order to prepare enough good laborers for the harvest.”82 However, the bishops gradually lost touch with Rome and “around the midst of the 18th century they were no longer as ready to accept papal interventions

80 Plongeron, “Wahre Gottesverehrung,” 268. See also Peter Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung. Europäische Gesellschaft und Kultur im Barockzeitalter, vol. 1 (Freiburg: 2006), 155–161; Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution, 94–95. Gabriele de Rosa even spoke of the pontificate of Pope Innocent XI (1676–1689) as a “second Tridentine era” (ripresa tridentina), Gabriele de Rosa, Chiesa e religione popolare nel Mezzogiorno (Bari: 1978), 103–143. Section 5.1 relies heavily on the excellent overview of this period by Bernard Dompnier, “Die Fortdauer der katholischen Reform,” in Bernard Plongeron (ed.), Geschichte des Christentums vol. 9 (Freiburg: 1998), 211–300 as well as on Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung, vol. 1: 152–211. 81 Gustav Schnürer, Katholische Kirche und Kultur im 18. Jahrhundert (Paderborn: 1941), 8–9; Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution, 294; Cottret, “Der Jansenistenstreit,” 390. Similar pressure was put on Benedict XIV when he desired to canonize Robert Bellarmine in 1753. 82 Benedict XIV, “Ubi Primum,” in Claudia Carlen (ed.), The Papal Encyclicals 1740–1878 (Wilmington: 1981), § 4, 6. In France over 100 new seminaries were founded between 1642 and 1700. In 1760 there were 150 in the whole country. See Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung, vol. 1: 132.

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as they had been at the beginning of the 17th century.”83 Trent had strengthened their position considerably, and in the course of the 18th century many more realized their responsibility for the pastoral care of their flock than in the centuries before. The ideal of a bishop as a pastor and an administrator was taken more seriously, while the worldly aspect of the episcopal office gradually declined, despite the fact that most bishops were still recruited from noble families. Nevertheless, their education increasingly meant earning a university degree. After Trent, the diocesan bishop was better able to control the clergy by making use of an administrative presbyterian council, and through diocesan synods and regular parish visitations, the limitation of exemptions for religious orders, and better seminary education. Such efforts made the parish the center of religious activity and helped the clergy to develop a new identity that imitated the ideals of Bérulle’s Christocentrism.84 Additionally, priestly congregations (French and Italian Oratorians, Sulpicians, Lazarists, Eudists, Barthelemites, etc.) came into being and instead of requiring special privileges or monastic seclusion, these men wanted to serve at the pleasure of the bishops and to help them in their dioceses. Moreover, the Counter-Reformation orders, like the Capuchins, participated in a reform of the Church, and with their zealous preaching and austere life-style they contributed to a renewal of the ideal of saintly religious life. Also, religious orders for women were founded that required only simple vows and did not follow the monastic ideal of the Middle Ages, emphasizing instead practical care of the needy, sick and uneducated. Many of them even gave up the cloistered life and had constitutions very similar to 20th century secular institutes. To a certain extent, they revived the tradition of the medieval beguines.85 Last but not least, the Benedictine reform congregations that, through the spirit of St. Maur, contributed so much

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Dompnier, “Die Fortdauer der katholischen Reform,” 233. For an overview of the state of the research on the clerical states in Germany see Wolfgang Wüst (ed.), Geistliche Staaten in Oberdeutschland im Rahmen der Reichsverfassung. Kultur-Verfassung-Wirtschaft-Gesellschaft. Ansätze zu einer Neubewertung (Epfendorf: 2002). 84 Pierre Cardinal de Bérulle (1575–1629), founder of the French Oratory, understood the priest as representing Christ. Through this, the priest participated in the mediation of grace, wherefore he had to adhere to Christ’s nature and become holy like him. See William Thompson (ed.), Berulle and the French School: Selected Writings (New York: 1989), 3–104; Raymond Deville (ed.), The French School of Spirituality (Pittsburgh: 1994), 29–57. 85 Elizabeth Rapley, The Devotees. Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France (Montreal: 1990).


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to the Enlightenment of Catholicism, were seen by contemporaries primarily as champions of monastic renewal and only secondarily as places of academic scholarship.86 Peter Hersche estimates that, in the years 1770–1780, approximately 400,000 members of religious orders were living in Europe (compared to probably one million in the 17th century).87 5.2. Another Root of the Catholic Enlightenment: New Approaches to Spirituality and Theology The calmer, more individualistic approach to spirituality that one encounters in the 18th century was, as Derek Beales pointed out, a reaction against the “dominant and aggressive cultural and intellectual movement of [baroque Catholicism].”88 As for most historical phenomena, a single explanation would not do justice to the facts, especially in this case. It was not only Jansenism that contributed to this new understanding of the interior life, but also the classical schools of mysticism and ascetic theology.89 5.2.1. Jansenism90 With regard to the relationship between the Catholic Enlightenment and Jansenism, Owen Chadwick astutely observed that “we cannot

86

Wallnig, Gasthaus und Gelehrsamkeit, 89. Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung, vol. 1: 321; see also ibid., 318–383 for an excellent overview of monastic life in baroque Europe. 88 Derek Beales, “Religion and Culture,” in Timothy C. W. Blanning (ed.), The Eighteenth Century: Europe 1688–1815 (Oxford: 2000), 131–177, at 156; cf. Breuer, “Einleitung,” 12. 89 See the magisterial overview Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung. Helpful for a first (theological) orientation is Jose Pereira and Robert Fastiggi (eds.), The Mystical Theology of the Catholic Reformation. An Overview of Baroque Spirituality (Lanham: 2006). A still very valuable treatment of baroque spirituality in Vienna is Gerhardt Kapner, Barocker Heiligenkult in Wien und seine Träger (Vienna: 1978). 90 The best English account is Strayer, Suffering Saints. An excellent overview of the streams of Jansenism is provided by Monique Cottret, “Der Jansenistenstreit,” in Geschichte des Christentums, vol. 9 (Freiburg: 1998), 348–408 and Jean-Pierre Chantin, Le jansénisme (Paris: 1996). See also Ernesto Codignola, Il giansenismo toscano nel carteggio di Fabio de Vecchi, 2 vols, (Florence, 1944), vol. 1: 85–89; Pierre Blet, Le clergé du Grand Siècle en ses assemblées: (1615–1715) (Paris: 1995); Idem, Le clergé de France, Louis XIV et le Saint Siège de 1695 à 1715 (Vatican City: 1989). Still important for the Holy Roman Empire (besides the studies of Peter Hersche) is Wolfgang Deinhard, Der Jansenismus in deutschen Landen (Munich: 1929). See also the bibliographical information in the other articles of this Companion, especially in the contributions on France, Spain and Italy. 87

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define where one movement ends and the other begins.”91 Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694), Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) and Pasquier Quesnel (1634–1719) were some of its most famous advocates. It had its greatest stronghold in the Abbey of Port Royal. Rome’s failure to engage wholeheartedly in reform contributed to the rise of Jansenism and its idea of reforming the Church in the spirit of the Early Church Fathers.92 The attempt to revive the Church of the first centuries was accompanied by a more irenic reception of Protestant thought that was centered on the idea of Christian practice.93 Jansenism soon spread in various degrees to Italy, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire, and thus became a European movement.94 Since the movement also emphasized the particular national churches, it gradually became politicized after the dissolution of its main religious enemy, the Jesuits, and no longer restricted itself to moral rigorism and the critique of baroque spirituality.95 Jansenism started in the 18th century to bring about a radical reform of the Church, in many countries in collaboration with Christian princes. This reform aimed at a reorganization of Church practices according to nostalgic ideals that were based on the Church of the first four centuries. “In point of fact, one of the most striking aspects of Reform Catholicism was the rigor with which [the Jansenists] applied all their forces in seeking salvation.”96 They fought for a decentralized Church, an increase in monastic discipline in light of excessive privileges and scandals, better education and pay for the clergy, practical education of the laity, and a certain liberality concerning individual religious practices (including the use of the vernacular in the liturgy).97

91 Owen Chadwick, “The Italian Enlightenment,” in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (eds.), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: 1981), 90–105, at 103; see also Steven J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion. The Myths of Modernity (Manchester: 2003), 169. 92 Aretin, “Katholische Aufklärung im Heiligen Römischen Reich,” 403–405; 423. 93 Cf. Fania Oz-Salzberger, “Aufklärung,” in Alan Charles Kors (ed.), Oxford Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, vol. 1 (Oxford: 2003), 97–100. 94 Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution, 392–395. 95 This called for an austere conversion and contrition, and had predestinarian tendencies. Jesuits accorded greater efficacy to the will. See David Bell, Lawyers and Citizens. The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France (New York and Oxford: 1994) on the public support for the Jansenists. Cf. Schindling, “Theresianismus,” 217. Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung, vol. 1: 137 calls Jansenism an essentially “antiBaroque” movement. 96 Samuel J. Miller, Portugal and Rome, 3. 97 Samuel Miller, “Portugal and Utrecht. A Phase of the Catholic Enlightenment,” The Catholic Historical Review 43 (1977), 225–248. On the use of the vernacular within


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After the great crisis of Unigenitus (1713), the declaration of the papal constitution as royal law by Louis XV in 1730, and the closing of the cemetery where deacon François de Paris was buried, the Jansenists learned to use politics, e.g. the parlements, to exercise their resistance to Rome and governmental oppression. Nevertheless, they lost influence and the broader public did not show as much interest in the group as before. The tide changed in Paris in 1749 when the viaticum was denied to dying Jansenists. Now, political Jansenism triumphed and in 1763, it defeated its greatest enemy—the Society of Jesus—when the Jesuits were expelled from France.98 Jansenist ideals were soon adopted by Enlightenment Catholics like Muratori, himself deeply influenced by the erudition of Leibniz,99 who had already called for a reduction of the cult of the saints and of pilgrimages and for the discouragement of superstitious religious practices and the exaggerated style of many preachers. They also found a supporter in Pope Benedict XIV—to a certain degree—because the pontiff allowed the use of vernacular translations of the Bibles for all the faithful on 13 June 1757.100 The reformers, influenced by Jansenism’s admiration of the Early Church, renounced both recently introduced and medieval forms

the Enlightenment see also Sebastian Neumeister and Conrad Wiedemann (eds.), Res Publica Litteraria: Die Institutionen der Gelehrsamkeit in der frühen Neuzeit, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: 1987); Beutel, Aufklärung in Deutschland (Göttingen: 2006), 170–202. 98 Dale Van Kley, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France, 1757– 1765 (New Haven: 1975). 99 Sergio Bertelli, Erudizione e storia in Ludovico Antonio Muratori (Naples: 1960); Fabio Marri, Maria Lieber, and Christian Weyers (eds.), Lodovico Antonio Muratori und Deutschland: Studien zur Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte der Frühaufklärung (Frankfurt/Main: 1997); Fabio Marri and Maria Lieber (eds.), Die Glückseligkeit des gemeinen Wesens: Wege der Ideen zwischen Italien und Deutschland im Zeitalter der Aufklärung (Frankfurt/Main: 1999). 100 Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution, 396–399; Bertrand, “Modelle und Entwürfe,” 847–848; Plongeron, “Wahre Gottesverehrung,” 274. For an overview of critiques of pilgrimages from the Middle Ages to the Catholic Enlightenment, see Bernhard Schneider, “Wallfahrtskritik im Spätmittelalter und in der Katholischen Aufklärung. Beobachtungen zu Wandel und Kontinuität,” in Bernhard Schneider (ed.), Wallfahrt und Kommunikation—Kommunikation über Wallfahrt (Mainz: 2004), 281–316. A good overview of pilgrimages in Early Modernity is provided by Habermas, Wallfahrt und Aufruhr. For a detailed account of reforms of Catholic piety in the Holy Roman Empire, see Müller, Fürstbischof Heinrich von Bibra, 214–418. Bernhard Schneider, “Katholische Aufklärung: Etikettenschwindel, Illusion oder Realität?” in Reinhold Bohlen (ed.), Dominikus von Brentano 1740–1797. Publizist, Aufklärungstheologe, Bibelübersetzer (Trier: 1997), 229–246.

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of devotions (e.g. the veneration of the Sacred Heart),101 called for a limitation of the veneration of saints, and heavily criticized monastic— especially mendicant—asceticism.102 They argued for a less ostentatious, more individualistic and more praxis-oriented piety, which is one of the reasons that they wanted to use the vernacular in the liturgy. The Jansenist cry for a more individualistic approach to spirituality was a religious phenomenon that was also sociologically influenced by the rise of “bourgeois self esteem.”103 The latter also gave rise to a new ideal of aesthetics that was independent of the Church. The wealthy members of the bourgeoisie gave up collecting religious art and concentrated on other pursuits.104 5.2.2. Ascetic Theology However, one must not forget the influence of classical ascetic theology on the Catholic Enlightenment and on Jansenists themselves.105 After the theological battles of the 17th century, especially the controversies on grace, 18th century mystical theology was a time of calm. Scholasticism and Cartesianism became less and less popular, while the new mystical theology that propagated a personal relationship to Christ, absolute abandonment to God and his providence, and the perception of God’s grace in one’s own soul soon took their place.106

101 Heribert Raab, “Zur Geschichte der Herz-Jesu-Verehrung im Mittelrheingebiet während des 18. Jahrhunderts. Ein Beitrag zum Problem: Katholische Aufklärung und Frömmigkeit,” in Rudolf Reichert (ed.), Beiträge zur Mainzer Kirchengeschichte der Neuzeit. Festschrift für Philipp Brück (Mainz: 1973), 177–190. 102 The alleged ignorance and violence of the mendicant orders (monastic prisons) were only two charges among many. See Barton, Jesuiten, Jansenisten, Josephiner, 225–246; Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution, 239–242. 103 Cf. Bernhard Groethuysen, Die Entstehung der bürgerlichen Welt- und Lebensanschauung in Frankreich, 2 vols. (Halle: 1927–1930; Frankfurt: 1978) [engl.: The Bourgeois. Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (New York: 1968)]. 104 Rudolf Schlögl, “Geschmack und Interesse. Private Kunstsammlungen zwischen ästhetischen Idealen und sozialer Repräsentation,” in Michael North (ed.), Kunstsammeln und Geschmack im 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin: 2002), 55–68. 105 Even Robespierre’s belief in a “highest being” can be traced back to the mystical theology of the Oratorian Pierre de Bérulle (1575–1629)—which also shaped his disciple, the Jansenist leader Saint-Cyran (1581–1643)—rather than to deist or Jansenist works. Jean Deprun, “A la fête de l’Etre supreme. Les ‘noms divins’ dans deux discourse de Robespierre,” in Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française 44 (1972): 161–180. 106 A good example of this new theological approach is the publication of the Cursus theologiae mystico-scholasticae (1740–1745) by the Discalced Carmelite Joseph of the Holy Spirit (1667–1736). For an overview of Catholic spirituality in Early Modernity see Régis Bertrand, “Modelle und Entwürfe zum christlichen Leben. Die katholische Spiritualität und ihre Vermittler,” in Geschichte des Christentums vol. 9 (Freiburg:


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The debate over Quietism in the last two decades of the 17th century also led a majority of theologians to maintain that contemplation is only a gift for a few chosen souls, but not for the community as a whole. With Giovanni Scaramelli S.J. (1687–1752) and his handbook, the differentiation between asceticism and mysticism was universally accepted, the former embodying the attempts of the ordinary faithful to achieve salvation, the latter the contemplative way of a few. The trend in canonization processes towards an emphasis on heroic virtues accessible to all, instead of mystical union, visions, and extraordinary gifts (e.g. levitation or the ability to live on no food other than the Eucharist), had begun with the case of St. Charles Borromeo in 1610. Also, a number of the new religious orders, like the Vincentians of St. Vincent de Paul (1581–1660), started to regard charitable works, and thus heroic virtues, as prayer.107 This theological shift increased over the next 150 years until it became institutionalized in academic theology when Prospero Lambertini’s standard work on the canonization of saints, De servorum Dei beatificatione et beatorum canonizatione (1734), was published. When Lambertini became Pope Benedict XIV in 1740, this view began to shape the whole Catholic Church.108 After 1750, Catholic spirituality rediscovered the public, i.e. the people of God, and considered it of the utmost importance to educate and promote true devotion among all people, not just the elite.109 This was also necessary because of sociological and economic changes: as city

1998), 823–865; Louis Dupre and Don E. Saliers (eds.), Christian Spirituality, vol. 3 (New York: 1989); Raymond Deville, The French School of Spirituality (Pittsburgh: 1994; French orig.: 1987); Michel Olphe Galliard, La théologie mystique en France au XVIIIe siècle. Le Père de Caussade (Paris: 1984). 107 Bertrand, “Modelle und Entwürfe,” 942–843; Dompnier, “Die Fortdauer der katholischen Reform,” 240; Christian Renoux, “Une source de l’histoire de la mystique moderne revisitée: les procès de canonisation,” in Mélanges de l’École française de Rome, Italie et Méditerranée 105 (1993), 177–217; Dompnier, “Die Fortdauer der katholischen Reform,” 293–296. 108 Romeo de Maio, “L’ideale eroico nel processo di canonizzazione della Controriforma,” in Idem, Riforme e miti nella Chiesa del Cinquecento (Naples: 1973), 257–258; Catrien Santing, “Tirami su: Pope Benedict XIV and the beatification of the flying Saint Guiseppe da Copertino,” in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds.), Medicine and Religion in Enlightenment Europe (Aldershot: 2007), 79–99. See also Anne Jacobson Schutte, Aspiring Saints: Pretense of Holiness, Inquisition, and Gender in the Republic of Venice, 1618–1750 (Baltimore: 2001); Idem, “Pretense of Holiness in Italy: Investigations and Persecutions (1581–1876),” in Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa 37 (2001): 299–321. 109 Martin Papenheim, “Die katholische Zensur im Reich im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Wilhelm Haefs and York Mix (eds.), Zensur im Jahrhundert der Aufklärung (Göttingen: 2007), 79–98, at 92–95.

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populations increased, capitalism grew stronger, and a broader section of society had access to education. Moreover, the clergy was better educated than ever before. Now was the time to catechize the world, a goal that Trent had not been able to fulfill.110 5.3. The Desire for Practicability, Criticism, Reason The fervent anti-religious sentiment of the Radical Enlightenment helped the Church to create its own Enlightenment. Catholic doctrine was considered irrational and impractical, and the Church was criticized for not providing enough support to its new apologists. When the Catholic Enlightenment suggested making the faith more useful and practical, it was able to use, to a certain extent, already existing traditions and institutions that stemmed from the Catholic Reform.111 Some bishops took the lifestyle of their priests so seriously that they erected correctional facilities for problematic clergymen.112 Furthermore, the religious orders of the Catholic Reform were already focused on charitable works in schools and hospitals.113 These fast growing orders were especially needed in the course of the 18th century due to a number of significant social changes, e.g. an economic decline in Italy between 1630 and 1720 and the inability of small villages and confraternities to provide for the needy.114 Moreover, the Holy See initiated some minor reforms concerning religious life in accordance with the spirit of Trent, but mostly done in response to the harsh critique by enlightenment thinkers.115 Consequently, “practicability”

110

Plongeron, “Wahre Gottesverehrung,” 264–278. E.g. the urge for better pastoral care (cura animarum), see Konrad Baumgartner, Die Seelsorge im Bistum Passau zwischen barocker Tradition, Aufklärung und Restauration (St. Ottilien: 1975); Anton Zottl and Werner Schneider (ed.), Wege der Pastoraltheologie. Texte einer Bewußtwerdung, vol. 1, 18th Century (Eichstätt: 1987); Plongeron, “Was ist katholische Aufklärung,” 24. 112 Cf. Müller, Fürstbischof Heinrich von Bibra, 168–175; cf. Rupert Struber, Priesterkorrektionsanstalten in der Erzdiözese Salzburg im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Die Priesterhäuser von Maria Kirchenthal, St. Johann in Tirol, St. Ulrich am Pillersee und Schernberg (Frankfurt et al.: 2004); Georg May, Das Priesterhaus in Marienborn (Mainz: 2005). 113 For example St. Vincent de Paul (1580–1660) and St. Camillus de Lellis (1550– 1614). 114 Rosa, “The Italian Churches,” 72. 115 For example, new constitutions for the Discalced Carmelites and Capuchins, two orders that were constantly mocked for their backwater spirituality, were approved in 1776, see Marcel Albert, “Die Orden am Vorabend der Säkularisation (1775–1800),” in Erwin Gatz (ed.), Geschichte des kirchlichen Lebens in den deutschsprachigen Län111


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was not something foreign to Catholic thought, but was rather more a rediscovery of Trent with the help of the Enlightenment. However, the increased concern for the welfare of parishes was also a result of a more pragmatic and secular approach of the state to spiritual topics. The state was responsible for the pursuit of happiness and for proper worship, the Church for the interior spiritual welfare of the faithful. If the Church wanted to retain any influence on society at all, it had to prove the usefulness of religion by making a contribution to the moral welfare of the state. Pursuing such a contribution required educated and committed clergymen whose first concern was not for their own income, but for the needs of their parishioners. Yet, to control the religious development of local communities, the bishops’ authority had to be strengthened; thus, all popular devotional practices that lacked episcopal supervision became suspect in the eyes of the bishops. Parishioners were allowed to practice their faith only in the approved ways, so that the parish became the center of worship and of moral surveillance.116 In the last quarter of the 18th century the clergy were increasingly seen as a class of educators and moral teachers. Theologians advocated the view that priests should be the servants of society, instead of some of its most privileged members.117 Protestant and Catholic reformers alike preached on the importance of vaccinations, midwifery, hygiene, and the disastrous consequences to the economy of taking too many holidays.118 This practical religion of the Catholic Enlightenment, which is so easily dismissed as doctrinally insufficient or ridiculous in content, gave rise to a new awareness of social problems and the responsibility of Catholicism to social ethics.119

dern seit dem Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts, vol. 7: Klöster und Ordensgemeinschaften (Freiburg: 2006), 49–110, at 53. For the critique of monasticism, see Hans Wolf Jäger, “Mönchskritik und Klostersatire in der deutschen Spätaufklärung,” in Harm Klueting (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung—Aufklärung im katholischen Deutschland (Hamburg: 1993), 192–207; for the impact of Josephinism, Catholic Enlightenment and secularization on the religious orders in the Empire, see Anja Ostrowitzki, “Aufklärung, Josephinismus, Säkularisation,” in Erwin Gatz (ed.), Geschichte des kirchlichen Lebens, vol. 7, 11–148. See also Frans Ciappara, Enlightenment and Reform in Malta 1740–1798 (Malta: 2006), 12, as well as his contribution to this Companion. 116 Schlögl, Glaube und Religion in der Säkularisierung, 140–142. 117 Schlögl, Glaube und Religion in der Säkularisierung, 148–150. 118 For the charitable works of the French clergy see Bernard Plongeron, La vie quotidienne du clergé français au XVIIIe siècle, (Paris: 3rd ed., 1989), passim. 119 Scholder, “Grundzüge der theologischen Aufklärung,” 307–308 (on Protestants). For an investigation of Catholic pastoral care in the Prussian diocese of Breslau, see

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Thus the transforming power of religion regarding the lifestyle of the faithful was rediscovered. The more the Enlighteners pushed for a practical Christianity, however, the closer their movement came to rationalism, because in order for doctrinal and moral teachings to be practical, they need to be understandable.120 If they are not, one could easily consider them dispensable. One of the bestsellers of this new practical theology was Jan Opstraet’s (1651–1720) Jansenist Pastor Bonus.121 Another successful and groundbreaking book was Muratori’s (1672–1750) Della regolata devozione dei cristiani (1747), which, between 1751 and 1795, went through twenty editions in the Holy Roman Empire alone.122 The ideals of Opstraet and Muratori were quite often connected to Richerism123 and Episcopalism, since the reformers felt abandoned by Rome and embraced the state as the only force capable of bringing about a renewed Church.124 One only had to look to France to see such stateimposed religious reforms: Louis XV issued a royal decree in 1766/68 that led to the suppression of 458 monasteries.125 Something similar happened in the duchy of Milan, a Habsburg territory, where the number of monks and nuns decreased by 74 percent between 1770 and 1790.126 The same can be said about the reforms of Emperor Joseph II,

Rainer Bendel, Der Seelsorger im Dienst der Volkserziehung. Seelsorge im Bistum Breslau im Zeichen der Aufklärung (Cologne et al.: 1996). 120 See Plongeron, “Was ist katholische Aufklärung,” 53. 121 Jan Opstraet, Pastor bonus seu idea, officium, spiritus et praxis pastorum (Louvain: 1689. Other editions, Louvain: 1690, 1705; Passau: 1764; Venice: 1771; French Translation, Rouen: 1702–1703). See Anton Schuchart, Der “Pastor Bonus” des Johannes Opstraet. Zur Geschichte eines pastoraltheologischen Werkes aus der Geisteswelt des Jansenismus (Trier: 1972). For a detailed study of the new image of the clergy, and reforms of the diocesan clergy and the religious orders (Jesuits, Benedictines, Franciscans, Capuchins, Mary Ward Sisters) in the sovereign Bishopric of Fulda, see Müller, Fürstbischof Heinrich von Bibra, 124–213. 122 Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Della regolata devozione dei cristiani, edited and introduced by Pietro Stella (Milan: 1990; orig., Venice: 1747; First German transl., Aschaffenburg: 1751; abridged English transl., Dublin: 1789). Eight of twenty German editions appeared in Vienna, see Barton, Jesuiten, Jansenisten, Josephiner, 139. 123 On Edmund Richer, see the contribution of Jeffrey Burson in this Companion. 124 Barton, Jesuiten, Jansenisten, Josephiner, 144. 125 Pierre Chevalier, Lomenie de Brienne et l’Ordre Monastique (1766–1789), 2 vols, (Paris: 1958–1959). 126 Mario Rosa, “Der zersplitterte Katholizismus Italiens,” in Bernard Plongeron (ed.), Geschichte des Christentums, vol. 10 (Freiburg: 2000), 25–30, at 28. Even in South America, religious life was in a crisis, cf. Yves Saint-Geours, “Lateinamerika. Die Krise der Kolonialkirche,” in Geschichte des Christentums, vol. 10 (Freiburg: 2000), 71–93, at 75–76.


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which forced religious orders to conform to the decrees of Trent and reduced the number of religious houses and religious by 50 per cent.127 5.4. Philosophy and Higher Education Jesuit scholasticism, with its many distinctions (e.g. qualitates obsurcae) and its disregard for the importance of experience, was looked upon by more and more thinkers as a fruitless enterprise. The first attack against this method of theology and philosophy came in the 17th century with the reception of Gassendi (1592–1655) and Descartes (1596–1650).128 The Oratorian Nicholas Malebranche (1638– 1715) and the Benedictine Robert Desgabets (1610–1678) followed in their footsteps and likewise found followers in the next generation of academics.129 Gianvicenzo Gravina (1664–1718) affirmed the liberation from Aristotelian slavery in his Oratio de sapientia universa (1700).130 Soon, though, Catholic theologians became dissatisfied with Cartesianism as well. The Italian Benedictine Celestino Galiani (1681– 1753) introduced his fellow monks to a more up-to-date approach to science, namely, the thought of Newton and Locke, as early as 1713.131 Also, high-ranking Cardinals like Domenico Passionei (1682–1761)132

127 Albert, “Die Orden am Vorabend der Säkularisation,” 54–55; Derek Beales, “Joseph II and the Monasteries of Austria and Hungary,” in Nigel Aston (ed.), Religious Change in Europe (Oxford: 1997), 161–184. 128 Francois Laplanche, “Die Kirchen und die Kultur des 17. Jahrhunderts,” in Bernard Plongeron (ed.), Geschichte des Christentums, vol. 9 (Freiburg: 1998), 932–986. 129 For Desgabets, see Jean R. Armogathe, Theologia Cartesiana. L’Explication physique de l’Euchariste chez Descartes et dom Desgabets (The Hague: 1977); Leinsle, Einführung in die scholastische Theologie, 330–333; Tad M. Schmaltz, Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception of Descartes (Cambridge: 2002). For Malebranche see Steven Nadler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche (Cambridge: 2000). The eminent study of Emmanuel J. Bauer, Thomistische Metaphysyik an der alten Benediktineruniversität Salzburg. Darstellung und Interpretation einer philosophischen Schule des 17./18. Jahrhunderts (Innsbruck: 1996) did not gain the attention it deserves. On Malebranche’s reception in the French Catholic Enlightenment, see Jeffrey Burson’s contribution in this Companion. 130 Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 113. 131 Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 113; Gross, Rome in the Age of the Enlightenment, 252; Rosena Davison, Diderot et Galiani: etude d’une amitié philosophique (Oxford: 1985); John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment. Scotland and Naples 1680– 1760 (Cambridge: 2005). 132 See Alfredo Serrai, Domenico Passionei e la sua Biblioteca (Milano: 2005). An overview can be found in the brief biographical entry Hermann Schwedt, “Passionei, Domenico,” Bibliographisch-Biographisches Kirchenlexikon, vol. 6 (Nordhausen: 1993), 1582–1588.

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and Angelo Maria Quirini (1680–1755)133 were, to a certain degree, enchanted by the philosophia recentiorum, even with the French philosophes. However, even the higher appreciation of experiential knowledge among Catholics, especially of Locke and Newton, led only a few to pure empiricism. Most Catholic Enlighteners tried, nevertheless, to combine some of the new ideas with traditional ways of achieving rational knowledge, especially concerning the existence and the nature of God.134 Due to the quasi monopoly of the Jesuits in education and the overall unwillingness of the order to replace the Ratio Studiorum (1599) with a more modern curriculum, the Jesuits attracted a lot of anger and disappointment.135 All attempts by Catholic princes to replace theology with jurisprudence as the leading university discipline, which, under the influence of Locke, Pufendorf, and Wolff, focused on the common good of society, were rebuked due to the intransigence of the Jesuits. Successful reforms of law programs or other studies at Catholic universities (e.g. Innsbruck) were the exception.136 It was no surprise, then, that João Baptista de São Caetano, Procurator General of the Benedictines in Portugal, described the Jesuit educational system as being full of darkness. The expulsion of the Order from Portugal (1758/59) was, according to him, the first step towards academic recovery and Enlightenment.137 Consequently, Portuguese theologians gradually became interested in Bacon, Newton, Locke, Descartes, Leibniz and Wolff.138 In Spain, the Benedictines Diego Zapata (1644– 1745) and Benito Jeronimo Feijoo (1676–1764) broke with Jesuit scholasticism.139

133 Johannes Madey, “Quirini, Angelo Maria,” Bibliographisch-Biographisches Kirchenlexikon, vol. 16 (Nordhausen: 1999), 1305–1307; Nikolaus Schöch, “Der Streit zwischen Angelo Maria Querini und Antonio Muratori um die Reduktion der Feiertage,” in Antonianum 70 (1995): 237–297. 134 See Hellyer, Catholic Physics; Feingold, Jesuit Science. 135 Breuer, “Einleitung,” 12; 14. In his remarkable book Catholic Physics, Hellyer lists quite a number of Jesuit scientists to disprove the charge that the Jesuits were opposed to modern science. 136 Hammerstein, Aufklärung und katholisches Reich, 215–220. 137 Miller, “Portugal and Utrecht,” 239. 138 José Sebastião da Silva Dias and Manuel Augusto Rodrigues, Portugal e a cultura europeia: séculos XVI a XVIII (Porto: 2006), passim; Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750 (Stanford: 1996). 139 Richard Herr, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton, N.J.: 1958), passim.


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Over the course of the 18th century, critique of Jesuit scholasticism grew exponentially. Moreover, governments throughout the Catholic world became increasingly uncomfortable with the political and economic influence of the order, its strict defense of papal prerogatives and its jurisdictional exemption. This was the best time for the other religious orders to challenge the Jesuit monopoly on education:140 the Oratorians in France and Portugal, the Piarists141 in the Habsburg territories and Poland, Augustinian Canons Regular and Benedictines in the Holy Roman Empire. However, only the suppression of the Jesuits (1759: Portugal; 1762 and 1764: France; 1767: Spain; 1773: Papal suppression) allowed for serious reforms.142 Such reforms were brought about, for example, in the Habsburg countries (1782), by the Benedictine Franz Rautenstrauch (1734–1785), who introduced church history, practical theology, and other new disciplines into the curriculum of theological studies.143 It would seem that anti-Jesuitism was a defining characteristic of the Catholic Enlightenment. Anti-Jesuitism entailed a critique not only of the Society’s education and their de facto education monopoly, but also

140 It is still insufficiently researched as to what extent the mendicant orders contributed to the Enlightenment. There are a number of German mendicants, including Thaddäus Dereser, Eulogius Schneider, Ildefons Kobel, Ignaz Aurelius Fessler, and Korbinian Luydl, who passionately propagated Enlightenment ideals. 141 The Piarists introduced the philosophy of Malebranche quite early into their curriculum. See Gross, Rome in the Age of the Enlightenment, 251. The Order itself has not attracted as much attention from historians as it deserves. Cf. William J. Rose, Stanislaus Konarski (1700–1773). Reformer of Education in 18th century Poland (London: 1929); Jerzy Lukowski, “Recasting Utopia: Montesquieu, Rousseau and the Polish Constitution of 3 May 1791,” The Historical Journal 37 (1994): 65–87; István Kilián (ed.), A Magyarországi Piarista Iskolai Színjátszás Forrásai és Irodalma 1799–ig: Fontes Ludorum Scenicorum in Gymnasiis Collegiisque Scholarum Piarum Hungariae (Budapest: 1994); Gerald Grimm, Die Schulreform Maria Theresias (1745–1775). Das österreichische Gymnasium zwischen Standesschule und allgemeinbildender Lehranstalt im Spannungsfeld von Ordensschulwesen, theresianischem Reformabsolutismus und Aufklärungspädagogik (Frankfurt et al.: 1987); Otto Biba, Der Piaristenorden in Österreich. Seine Bedeutung für bildende Kunst, Musik und Theater im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Eisenstadt: 1975). 142 See also Christine Vogel, Der Untergang der Gesellschaft Jesu als europäisches Medienereignis (1758–1773). Publizistische Debatten im Spannungsfeld von Aufklärung und Gegenaufklärung (Mainz: 2006). 143 Robert Haaß, Die geistige Haltung der katholischen Universitäten Deutschlands im 18. Jahrhundert (Freiburg: 1952); Friedrich Walter, Die theresianische Staatsreform von 1749 (Vienna: 1958); Beda Menzel, Abt Franz Stephan Rautenstrauch von Brevnov-Braunau. Herkunft, Umwelt und Wirkungskreis (Königstein/Ts.: 1969).

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of its (allegedly lax) moral theology and spirituality.144 To state that such a position was a characteristic of the Catholic Enlightenment, as the late Richard van Dülmen did, is certainly correct. The sentiment against this order can be found in innumerable sources. Moreover, ever since the expulsion of the Jesuits from France in 1763 and their churchwide suppression in 1773, the previously latent differences in the camps of the Catholic Enlightenment, between a more pessimistic Augustinian and a more optimistic Jesuit anthropology, become increasingly polarized and politicized. However, anti-Jeusitism was not an essential characteristic of the Catholic Enlightenment, since one can find enlightened supporters of the Jesuit scientists. Moreover, one can even detect some Enlighteners among the Jesuits themselves. Particularly in the second half of the 18th century (and in France in the first half ), a minority of Jesuits became quite fond of the Enlightenment.145 However, until today confessional polemics regarding the Jesuits still influence historians’ judgment about the Society of Jesus despite the fact that their stance towards the Enlightenment has not been sufficiently researched. The “record” of the Jesuits is still in need of further correction.146 Although the forerunners of historical-critical scholarship in the beginning of the 17th century were Protestants,147 Benedictine Jean Mabillon (1632–1707) soon caught up with his investigations of

144

See Richard van Dülmen, “Antijesuitismus und katholische Aufklärung in Deutschland”, in Idem, Religion und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: 1989), 141–171; Reinhart Meyer, “Norddeutsche Aufklärung versus Jesuiten,” in Rudolf Vierhaus et al. (eds.), Jenseits der Diskurse: Aufklärungspraxis und Institutionenwelt in europäisch komparativer Perspektive (Göttingen: 2007), 99–132. With Hellyer, Catholic Physics, 203–216; Wolfgang W. Priglinger, “Verdrängter Humanismus und verzögerte Aufklärung. Auf der Suche nach der österreichischen Philosophie,” in Michael Benedikt et al. (eds.), Verdrängter Humanismus—Verzögerte Aufklärung. Österreichische Philosophie zur Zeit der Revolution und Restauration (Vienna: 1992), 31–91, at 66–71. 145 Antonio Trampus, I gesuiti e l’Illuminismo (Florence: 2000); Hellyer, Catholic Physics, 203–216; Jeffrey D. Burson, The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment: Jean-Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France (Notre Dame, IN: 2010); Robert R. Palmer, “The French Jesuits in the Age of Enlightenment,” American Historical Review 45 (1939): 44–58. See also Jeffrey Burson’s article in this Companion. 146 See Vogel, Der Untergang der Gesellschaft Jesu. 147 For an overview of historiographical scholarship between Humanism and the Enlightenment, see Ulrich Muhlack, Geschichtswissenschaft im Humanismus und in der Aufklärung (Munich: 1991). For a critique of Muhlack see Benz, Zwischen Tradition und Kritik, passim.


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monastic history.148 But why did critical thinking in Catholic circles start so abruptly in the last quarter of the 17th century? Certainly, Spinoza’s insights in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), especially about the historicity of the Bible, were one reason. The second might have been the growing historical Pyrrhonism seen after François de La Mothe Le Vayer formulated his Du peu de certitude qu’il y a dans l’histoire (1668). The monks of St. Maur, the Maurists, answered the challenge of radical skepticism by affirming the right of criticism for judging historical traditions, but insisted that with such a methodology probabilities could be established that would lead to ultimate certainty in historical judgments.149 The question as to why this new approach to history150 spread so fast within the Benedictine Order and, closely connected with this, why the Benedictines in particular were so open to Enlightenment ideas is not easy to answer. Nevertheless, it is certain that the Benedictines had two advantages over most other orders: they had an organization that was decentralized and they never developed their own theological schools. Thus, each abbot could arbitrarily allow new ideas to be taught. By monastic law, they were not obliged to follow a watertight curriculum of academic theological texts. Thus they could—like Mabillon— open themselves to the diversity of academic scholarship and to the rediscovery of the Fathers and the traditions of the Church.151 Only a few decades after their first printing, the Renaissance-like spirit of St. Maur and the works of the Bollandists ignited the landscape of European Catholic scholarship and thus paved the way for the reception of Enlightenment ideas.152 For the first time in history, the Church

148 Cf. Odon Hurel and Henri Leclercq (eds.), Jean Mabillon: Œuvres choisies (Paris: 2007); Marius Reiser, Bibelkritik und Auslegung der Heiligen Schrift (Tübingen: 2007), 185–218; 219–276. 149 The programmatic work of this school were Jean Mabillon’s (1632–1707) De re diplomatica (1681) and his Traité des Etudes Monastiques (1691). Gross, Rome in the Age of the Enlightenment, 263–265; Lehner, “Introduction: Ecumenism and Enlightenment Catholicism: Dom Beda Mayer,” passim. 150 However, one could also exaggerate such a methodology, as was the case with the eccentric Jesuits, Jean Hardouin S.J. (1646–1729) and his follower Isaac-Joseph Berruyer S.J. (1681–1758). Cf. Jean Hardouin, Ad censuram scriptorium veterum prolegomena (London: 1766), 2. 151 Raab, “Das Fürstbistum Fulda,” 184. 152 Breuer, “Einleitung,” 12; Eduard Winter, “Die katholischen Orden und die Wissenschaftspolitik im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Erik Amburger et al. (eds.), Wissenschaftspolitik in Mittel-und Osteuropa. Akademien und Hochschulen im 18. und beginnenden 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: 1976), 85–96.

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became aware of the fact that beliefs and traditions from the past were not static but developed and grew over time.153 Historical-critical Bible scholarship, together with Mabillon’s historical erudition, was the catalyst for a renewal of all theological disciplines.154 It helped to show the limitation and lifelessness of purely speculative theology, which was associated with the Jesuits. Bible scholarship linked dogmatic theology once more to the holy scriptures and the ecclesiastical tradition. This new emphasis on what was called positive theology, or theology of revelation, was pioneered by the Benedictines, such as Bernard Lamy (1640–1715) with his Apparatus Biblicus (1687/96), together with the Oratorians, especially Richard Simon (1638–1712) with his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1680) and the Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament (1689).155 Unfortunately, not all orders stressed the importance of biblical studies. Despite the expressed wishes of the Council of Trent,156 the Bible was almost never studied within the mendicant men’s orders in the 18th century. During the 18th century, too, moral theology became a discipline of its own, as did liturgical theology. Theologians needed to be educated men who were able to fully understand and properly tend to the needs of their contemporaries. Clergy were expected to be not only

153 For the change from a universalist theory to a secular theory of history, see Adalbert Klempt, Die Säkularisierung der universalhistorischen Auffassung. Zum Wandel des Geschichtsdenkens im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: 1960). Robert R. Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (New York: 2nd ed., 1961; 1st ed., 1939), 53–76. 154 For example, see the life and works of Leander van Ess O.S.B. (1772–1847), cf. Johannes Altenberend, Leander van Eß (1772–1847). Bibelübersetzer und Bibelverbreiter zwischen katholischer und evangelikaler Erweckungsbewegung (Paderborn: 2001). Cf. also Norbert Wolff, “Bibel und Bibelwissenschaft in der Aufklärungszeit,” in Reinhold Bohlen (ed.), Dominikus von Brentano 1740–1797. Publizist, Aufklärungstheologe, Bibelübersetzer (Trier: 1997), 205–227. 155 See Laplanche, “Die Kirchen und die Kultur,” 975–976; Müller, Kritik und Theologie, passim; Patrick J. Lambe, “Biblical Criticism and Censorship in Ancien regime France: the Case of Richard Simon,” Harvard Theological Review 78 (1985): 149–177; Siep Sturman, “From Feminism to Biblical Criticism: The Theological Trajectory of François Poulain de la Barre,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33 (2000): 383–400. See Sascha Müller, Kritik und Theologie. Christliche Glaubens- und Schrifthermeneutik nach Richard Simon (1638–1712) (St. Ottilien: 2004); Idem, Richard Simon (1638–1712). Exeget, Theologe, Philosoph und Historiker. Eine Biographie (Würzburg: 2005). 156 Sessio V, Decr. 2: Super lectione et praedicatione.


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administers of sacraments, but also teachers and advisors in economic, hygienic, and agricultural questions.157 5.5. Unresolved Position of Particular Churches towards the Papacy The desire for independence from Papal interventions and prerogatives was very much alive in the Catholic intellectual world, despite the ultimate failure of conciliarism at the Council of Basel (1431–1449) and the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517).158 In France, this movement for autonomy was called Gallicanism and found its codification in the Declaration of the Clergy of France in 1682. In the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Jansenist movement appealed successfully to the Gallican tradition of a free National Church and even gained parliamentary support in crucial moments. Curiously, such Catholic reformers had a strange bedfellow in their anti-Roman counterpart, namely the philosophes. Gallicanism, combined with Jansenist ideas, spread throughout Europe partly due to the monastic correspondences and exchanges of the Benedictines. Abbots and priors of different orders—often supported by the Curia—fought against the attempts of the bishops and the state to restrain their monastic sovereignty.159 On 7 February 1765, the Cardinal Secretary of State, Torrigiani, an outspoken friend of the Jesuits, wrote to the Nuncio in Cologne: “The Benedictines are among the greatest enemies that the Apostolic See has today [. . .] but a Pope who wished to punish/reform them could do so very easily.”160 The circulation of the numerous Gallican and Jansenist pamphlets that were distributed all over Europe through the literary exchange of individuals, societies, monasteries, or regular book trade, helped many

157 Johann Michael Feder, Soll ein Theologe auch ein Belletrist sein (Würzburg: 1787). Cf. Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton: 1985). 158 Breuer, “Einleitung,” 12. 159 Cf. Gustave Leclerc, Zeger-Bernard van Espen (1646–1728) et l’autorité ecclésiastique (Zurich: 1964); Guido Cooman, Maurice van Stiphout, and Bart Wauters (eds.), Zeger-Bernard van Espen at the Crossroads of Canon law, History, Theology, and Church-State Relations (Leuven: 2003). 160 Ludwig Cardanus, Zur Geschichte der kirchlichen Unions- und Reformbestrebungen von 1538 bis 1542 (Rom: 1910), 290 n. 4. Cf. Bertram Resmini, “Klöster zwischen Aufklärung und Säkularisation. Die kurtrierischen Männerabteien in den letzten Regierungsjahren des Erzbischofs Clemens Wenzeslaus,” Archiv für Mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte 41 (1989): 243–273.

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intellectuals to articulate their dissatisfaction with curial interferences in ecclesiastical affairs and, consequently, their anti-Roman feelings. In a sense, it brought forward a renaissance of Conciliarism and a rediscovery of the humanist influence in the Counter-Reformation.161 This dissatisfaction had already brought Protestants and Catholics closer in Germany, e.g. when the Frankfurt Election Council, with Prince Electors from both confessions, asked Rome in 1741–42 to give the German Church its old rights back.162 The author of the groundbreaking Febronius, Johann N. von Hontheim, realized the ecumenical implications of the concept of a National Church and that such a construction might be able to continue in existence despite the harsh criticism of the philosophes. A number of progressive canonists followed Hontheim and tried to inspire a reform movement within the Church that would strengthen the position of the bishops and the secular sovereigns. Samuel Miller even regarded this kind of Episcopalism a common thread of all forms of the Catholic Enlightenment.163 Episcopalism and other reforms seemed necessary due to the fact that since 1751, the year of the condemnation of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws and the second condemnation of freemasonry, an official dialogue between the papacy and the Enlightenment almost entirely ceased, and finally faded away with the death of the relatively open-minded pope Benedict XIV.164 5.6. Interest in Peaceful Interdenominational Dialogue With Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), theological discourse reached a new level. He stressed Christ as the unique mediator of salvation and

161 Nikolaus von Hontheim’s book, De Statu Ecclesiae (1763) and Pereira’s Tentativa Theologica (1766) are some of the most famous examples of this. See Miller, “Portugal and Utrecht,” and Lehner, “Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim and his Febronius.” 162 This did not result from a sudden approval of Catholicism but had political causes: The Protestant rulers had no interest in strengthening their Catholic opponents. Therefore, they tried to keep a balance of powers by supporting the bishops. See Aretin, “Katholische Aufklärung im Heiligen Römischen Reich,” 414–419. 163 Samuel J. Miller, Portugal and Rome, 6–7. 164 Benedict XIV also reformed the Index of Forbidden Books and the methods of Church censorship. See Mass, “Kirchliche und weltliche Zensur in Frankreich,” 346–353; Schneider, “Sollicita ac provida vigilantia” demonstrates that the reform was not as liberal as previous generations of historians have assumed. On the papacy and the Enlightenment see the essay of Mario Rosa in this volume. On the Index of Forbidden Books see the works of Hubert Wolf and his research center “Roman Inquisition and Index-Congregation” at the University of Münster: http://www.buchzensur .de (retrieved 5 December 2009).


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teacher of ethics, and thereby bypassed all other disputed confessional questions. Even the Benedictine Jean Mabillon considered Grotius’ book, De veritate religionis Christianae (1627), to be insightful reading for every monk. Mabillon’s advice can be seen as evidence for a growing irenical movement in the Catholic Church that not only wanted to keep the Peace of Westphalia, but also tried to avoid polemics. Such ideas gradually made their way first to Protestant schools and then to Catholic schools all over Europe.165 Despite the fact that a number of Catholic Enlighteners were very interested in ecumenism, one cannot go so far as to say that ecumenism was an essential characteristic of the Catholic Enlightenment, since ecumenism entails the will to compromise. However, if we strip the term ecumenism of its contemporary implications, which includes the will to compromise for the sake of an ecclesiastical reunion, and understand by it a growing interest in putting aside denominational polemics, then we can indeed label this interest a characteristic of the Catholic Enlightenment.166 This peaceful interdenominational dialogue included, in some instances, the reduction of papal powers, the emphasis on the particular, national church with a strengthening of the position of the bishops (Episcopalism), but extended also to questions about sacramental union, the abolition of celibacy for priests,167 and the subjugation of the Church under the state (Gallicanism, Febronianism,168 Theresianism, Josephinism). Sometimes enlightened irenicism was primarily interested in a political tolerance for Protestants.169 Nevertheless, the policy of tolerance was also influenced by economic considerations.170 However, three hundred

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Scholder, “Grundzüge der theologischen Aufklärung,” 302–303. See Raab, “Das Fürstbistum Fulda,” 190; Lehner (ed.), Beda Mayr—Vertheidigung der katholischen Religion. 167 Paul Picard, Zölibatsdiskussion im katholischen Deutschland der Aufklärungszeit. Auseinandersetzung mit der kanonischen Vorschrift im Namen der Vernunft und der Menschenrechte (Düsseldorf: 1975), 187, reports that many canon law specialists regarded celibacy as the true stumbling rock for a reunification. 168 See Ulrich L. Lehner, “Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim and his Febronius,” Church History and Religious Culture 88 (2008): 93–121. 169 See Müller, Fürstbischof Heinrich von Bibra, 268–272; András Forgó, Kirchliche Einigungsversuche in Ungarn. Zu den Unionsverhandlungen des Christophorus Rojas y Spinola in der zweiten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Mainz: 2009). For an overview of European approaches to “toleration” see Roy Porter and Ole Peter Grell (eds.), Toleration in Enlightenment Europe (Oxford: 2000); Angenendt, Toleranz und Gewalt; Kaplan, Divided by Faith. 170 France suffered significant financial losses due to the revocation of the edict of Nantes in 1685 that drove about 200,000 Huguenots out of the country. See Hersche, 166

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years after the Reformation, it was individual Catholics, rather than the Roman Curia, who began to see Luther’s revolution for the first time in a more positive light, and did not shy away from demanding a “reformation,” not only a reform, for Catholicism.171 5.7. Structural parallels to the Enlightenment 5.7.1. Dynamics of the Catholic Enlightenment The Catholic Enlightenment had an awkward dynamic. On the one hand it was a cosmopolitan force; on the other, it was national. It was also both radical and conservative. It was cosmopolitan in the sense that enlightened Catholic theologians throughout Europe started from the same imperatives, as Plongeron called them, namely the JudeoChristian revelation in scripture and tradition. From this they drew their conclusions, under the influence of some Enlightenment thinkers. Changes to this concept could be made, but the main premises were impossible to give up. It was national, since every Catholic country provided a different setting for the Church: in France, it was Gallicanism; in the Holy Roman Empire, it was the Reichskirche, etc. The Catholic Enlightenment was radical: once certain traditions were identified as contrary to “true” belief or the pristine Church and as impediments for the flourishing of society, they were abandoned. Nevertheless, Catholic Enlighteners understood themselves not as inventors but as reformers, since their work had been an adaptation or a development of what the Church originally believed. There is in this regard, as Plongeron observed, a gulf that separates the Radical Enlightenment from the Religious and, in our case, the Catholic Enlightenment. Whereas the former was concerned with turning politics into a completely secular endeavor without reference to God as Designer, Judge, and Sovereign over the universe, the latter adhered to the principle gratia supponit

Muße und Verschwendung, vol. 2: 991. Rare examples for complete tolerance of other faiths are Benedikt Werkmeister’s Über die christliche Toleranz. Ein Buch für Priester und Mönche (Frankfurt et al.: 1784) and Bishop Johann Leopold Hay (1735–1781), cf. Reinhold Joseph Wolny, Die josephinische Toleranz unter besonderer Berücksichtigung ihres geistlichen Wegbereitsers Johann Leopold Hay (Munich: 1973). 171 Aretin, “Katholische Aufklärung im Heiligen Römischen Reich,” 410–411. Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung, vol. 2: 1025; Peter Hersche, “Lutherisch machen— Rekonfessionalisierung als paradoxe Folge aufgeklärter Religionspolitik,” in Hanns Haas and Gerhard Ammerer (eds.), Ambivalenzen der Aufklärung (Vienna and Munich: 1997), 155–168.


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naturam. In this context, this meant that religion presupposes a civil society that is brought to perfection through it. Even if there were passionate discussions about the essence of ecclesiology, its basic principle, the hierarchy, was almost never denied. Therefore, the Catholic Enlighteners could not meet their secular colleagues on the same ground, and therein lays one of the reasons for the drama of this movement.172 Although Catholic Enlighteners used the principle of perfectibility, it was soon transformed by the political philosophy of the Enlightenment; the state became secularized and tried to use religion to control the masses. Certainly, Catholic Enlighteners stressed the importance of religion for the state, but all too often they forfeited the welfare of the Church in favor of the state.173 Ironically it was the Catholic Enlightenment which brought about the social discipline of the masses that Trent had failed to achieve.174 Two different hierarchical groups were the supporters of the Catholic Enlightenment: the clergy and the laity. Not only in the Holy Roman Empire was the clergy much more diverse within Catholicism than in the Protestant Churches. The higher ranks of clergymen were (in most cases) reserved for the nobility who were often well educated. The lower ranks included some erudite priests, but many were uneducated. It was only within the religious orders that social rank became less important, but even then not everywhere.175 One can find clergy of all ranks among the Enlighteners. Of particular importance for the spreading of the Catholic Enlightenment movement were, of course, bishops, university professors, and governmental employees. Among the laity, it was especially those with governmental, administrative or educational duties (e.g. von Ickstatt), who saw the need for reform of the Catholic Church and dedicated themselves to state-sponsored Church reforms.176

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Plongeron, “Was ist katholische Aufklärung,” 27. Plonergon, “Was ist Katholische Aufklärung,” 37. 174 See Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung, vol. 2: 745; cf. Isabel V. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca: 1996). 175 Luise Schorn-Schütte and Walter Sparn (eds.), Protestantische Pfarrer. Zur sozialen und politischen Rolle einer bürgerlichen Gruppe in der deutschen Gesellschaft des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: 1997), passim. 176 Plonergon, “Was ist Katholische Aufklärung,” 46; on Ickstatt see Fritz Kreh, Leben und Werk des Reichsfreiherrn Johann Adam von Ickstatt, (1702–1776) (Paderborn: 1974). 173

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5.7.2. Communication networks of the Catholic Enlightenment Like the secular Enlightenment, the Catholic Enlightenment was also eager to build up new structures of communication, to understand and to be understood. Even its efforts to combine tradition and innovation and its use of new forms of self-expression (liturgy, architecture, theater, etc.) can be seen as integral parts of this communication process. Communication was now organized, no longer just within the narrow confines of clerical circles but also within interlocked social groups according to their interests and needs.177 The 18th century was also the century of rising literacy, a factor that eroded exclusive ecclesiastical competency in cultural affairs. Knowledge was now accessible to a larger portion of the faithful, and the Church had to support better education in the seminaries and a more rational approach to theology if it did not want to lose its connection to the laity.178 The most important modes of communication for Catholic Enlighteners were learned societies and monastic networks.179 However, the importance of salons, taverns, coffeehouses, public libraries and private reading circles are being increasingly acknowledged for the Cath-

177

Schlögl, Glaube und Religion in der Säkularisierung, 63–72. Rudolf Schenda, “Alphabetisierungsprozesse in Westeuropa im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert,” in Ernst Hinrichs and Günter Wiegelmann (eds.), Sozialer und kultureller Wandel in der ländlichen Welt des 18. Jahrhunderts (Wolfenbüttel: 1982), 1–20; Schlögl, Glaube und Religion in der Säkularisierung, 39–44; 45–72 (literacy). 179 Again, the Benedictines were leaders in this regard. See Wallnig, Gasthaus und Gelehrsamkeit, 93–103. It is not surprising that the secular Enlighteners did not recognize the monastic exchange network (see Wallnig, ibid.). There is neither a synthesis on the impact of learned societies on 18th-century Catholicism nor on specifically “Catholic” societies. A good overview of the Holy Roman Empire is provided by Breuer, “Einleitung,” 13–34. For other societies see Roger Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666–1803 (Berkeley et al.: 1971); Ludwig Hammermayer, Geschichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. 1 (Munich: 1983); Ludwig Hammermayer, “Akademiebewegung und Wissenschaftsorganisatoon während der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Erik Amburger et al. (eds.), Wissenschaftspolitik in Mittel-und Osteuropa. Akademien und Hochschulen im 18. und beginnenden 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: 1976), 1–84; Laetitia Boehm et al. (eds.), Universitá, Accademie e Societá scientifiche in Italia e in Germania dal Cinquecento al Settecento (Bologna: 1981); Harald Dickerhoff, “Gelehrte Gesellschaften, Akademien, Ordensstudien und Universitäten,” Zeitschrift fur Bayerische Landesgeschichte 45 (1982): 37–66; Jürgen Voss, “Die Akademien als Organisationsträger der Wissenschaften im 18. Jahrhundert,” Historische Zeitschrift 44 (1980): 43–74; Martha Ornstein, The Role of Scientific Societies in the 17th Century (London: 4th ed., 1963); F. Hartmann and R. Vierhaus (eds.), Der Akademiegedanke im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Bremen: 1977); Notker Hammerstein and Ulrich Herrmann (eds.), Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte, vol. 2: 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: 2005). 178


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olic Enlightenment.180 Even masonic lodges and other secret societies,181 played a decisive role within the Catholic Enlightenment, especially in the last quarter of the 18th century, despite Clement XII’s clear condemnation of masonry in his bull, In Eminenti (1738).182

180 See James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: 2001), 195–225 (salon culture), 226–251 (taverns and coffeehouses), 252–272 (Freemason lodges); Marlies Prüsener, Lesegesellschaften im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: 1972); Hilmar Tilgner, Lesegesellschaften an Mosel und Mittelrhein im Zeitalter des Aufgeklärten Absolutismus. Ein Beitrag zur Sozialgeschichte der Aufklärung im Kurfürstentum Trier (Stuttgart/Wiesbaden: 2000). For Catholic reading circles see also Bernhard Schneider, “Lesegesellschaften des Klerus im frühen 19. Jahrhundert. Ein Beitrag zur historischen Kommunikationsforschung,” Archiv für mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte 49 (1997): 155–177. For the importance of erudite journals for the Catholic Enlightenment and Roman theology as a whole, see Bernward Schmidt, Virtuelle Büchersäle. Lektüre und Zensur gelehrter Zeitschriften an der römischen Kurie 1665–1765 (Paderborn et al.: 2009). 181 On the Illuminati see Müller, Universität und Orden. Die bayerische Landesuniversität Ingolstadt zwischen der Aufhebung des Jesuitenordens und der Säkularisation (Berlin: 1986), 103; 261–262, and Marian Füssel, “Societas Jesu und Illuminatenorden. Strukturelle Homologien und historische Aneignungen,” Zeitschrift für Internationale Freimaurerforschung 10 (2003): 11–63. 182 Ex-Jesuits, e.g. Augustin Barruel (1741–1820), joined their ranks as well, just as the ex-Barnabite (and then Protestant) Karl Leonhard Rheinhold (1757–1823). Cf. Melton, The Rise of the Public, 254–272; Antonio Trampus, I gesuiti e l’Illuminismo (Florence: 2000); Ludwig Hammermayer, Der Wilhelmsbader Freimaurer-Konvent von 1782 (Heidelberg: 1980); Reinhard Markner, Monika Neugebauer-Wölk, Hermann Schüttler (eds.), Die Korrespondenz des Illuminatenordens, vol. 1: 1776–1781 (Tübingen: 2005); Monika Neugebauer-Wölk, Reichsjustiz und Aufklärung. Das Reichskammergericht im Netzwerk der Illuminaten (Wetzlar: 1993); Monika Neugebauer-Wölk, Esoterische Bünde und bürgerliche Gesellschaft. Entwicklungslinien zur modernen Welt im Geheimbundwesen des 18. Jahrhunderts (Wolfenbüttel: 1995); Helmut Reinalter (ed.), Aufklärung und Geheimgesellschaften (Munich: 1989); Jérôme Rousse-Lacordaire, Rome et les Francs-Maçons: Histoire d’un conflit (Paris: 1996). The Benedictine Abbey of Melk even had its own lodge. Cf. Albert, “Die Orden am Vorabend der Säkularisation,” 109. Jose Antonio Ferrer-Benimeli, Les Archives secrètes du Vatican et la franc-maçonnerie. Histoire d’une condamnation pontificale (Paris: 2002), 728–854 lists 45 clergymen (in the 18th century), who founded lodges and 68 who became Grandmasters. For Melk during the Enlightenment, see the new study Johannes Frimmel, Literarisches Leben in Melk. Ein Kloster im 18. Jahrhundert im kulturellen Umbruch (Vienna—Cologne—Weimar: 2005). An even more intriguing example of the compatibility of Catholicism and Freemasonry was the Catholic Scotsman Charles Radcliffe (1693–1746), Earl Derwentwater, who was a former Grandmaster, a practicing mason, but also a devout Catholic until he was executed by the British. See Bernard Plongeron, “Kirche, Freimaurerei und Illuminatentum im Schmelztiegel der Aufklärung,” in Bernard Plongeron (ed.), Geschichte des Christentums, vol. 10 (Freiburg: 2000), 211–222, at 213. Plongeron’s view that In Eminenti (1738) did not state explicitly why Freemasonry was incompatible with Catholicism is incorrect. The bull states that because of its secrecy the Church expects masonry to be contrary to the faith. However, Plongeron is right that Clement XII’s reference to the judgments of other governments “[. . .] shows an authority [i.e.,

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Other structural factors in the Catholic Enlightenment were the academic libraries of societies, monasteries, clergymen, and the laity. By analyzing the holdings and the extent and kinds of acquisitions at various times, historians can determine the level of knowledge of the institutions or individuals in question, and their openness to new ideas and cultural exchange.183 However, in most areas of Europe, such investigations are still desiderata.184 Rudolf Schlögl has shown that 48 percent of the books in the private libraries of the diocesan clergy of Cologne, Aachen, and Münster were religious, whereas the rest consisted of books on history, politics, literature, and science— clear evidence that the clergy opened itself to a new culture of learning and study. Compared to the variety of reading interests among the affluent laity, priests were rather illiterate. The library holdings of the monasteries in these areas were rather conservatively centered on religious topics.185 However, a recent study found that the Benedictines in Southern Germany had not only an effective network of communication through letters, but also an interlibrary loan system that enabled the transfer of knowledge.186 5.7.3. Appeal to the Public The Catholic Enlightenment had only a relatively narrow basis, chiefly among bishops and cardinals, the well-educated clergy and a few laymen. However, certain Enlightenment reforms, e.g. better pay and education for priests, were often accepted by the mostly overworked and underpaid rural clergy, who were lacking time, money, and education to engage academically with the new ideas. Soon the secular clergy

papal authority, U.L.] that is no longer self confident” (ibid., 215); for a correct canonist reading of In Eminenti see the recent study of Klaus Kottmann, Die Freimaurer und die Katholische Kirche (Frankfurt et al.: 2009), 149–153. 183 See the analysis of monastery libraries in Westphalia by Harm Klueting, “Klosterbibliotheken im Herzogtum Westfalen am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 7 (1980): 77–111. For an investigation of private and clergy libraries in Cologne, Aachen, and Münster see Schlögl, Glaube und Religion in der Säkularisierung. 184 Breuer, “Einleitung,” 34–47, which also provides an outline of the methodological questions that have to be answered. 185 Schlögl, Glaube und Religion in der Sakularisierung, 109–124; Klaus Graf, “83 Tonnen Bücher als Müll,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 21 February 2007, Nr. 44, 35. 186 Wallnig, Gasthaus und Gelehrsamkeit, 92–98.


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replaced the monastic orders as propagators for a modernization of the Church. Only by winning over public opinion could the reform movement achieve its goals. This is further explained by research into the Enlightenment’s public sphere. The latter has proved that the new public sphere was not subversive per se, but fostered “more inclusive practices of sociability, and, by widening the sphere of discussion and debate, it did have the potential to challenge the prerogatives of traditionally dominant institutions and elites.”187 This rise of the public was therefore not essentially anti-ecclesiastical or anti-monarchical. Both the Pope and the Crown appealed increasingly to the public as an infallible tribunal.188 Catholic reformers published journals and left behind their lingua franca, Latin, in order to spread their ideas, especially in the second half of the 18th century, with the help of the vernacular (e.g. the Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques, 1728–1803).189 Nevertheless, all attempts to make the Catholic Enlightenment a popular movement like the Catholic Reform of the 17th century failed because the masses could not get excited by the new ideals.190

187

Melton, The Rise of the Public, 11. Melton, The Rise of the Public, 12; 52–54. 189 Hans-Erich Bödeker, “Die Religion der Gebildeten,” Karlfried Gründer and Karl Heinrich Rengstorf (eds.), Religionskritik und Religiosität (Heidelberg: 1989), 145–196. For Germany see Karl Otto Wagner, “Die Oberdeutsche Allgemeine Literaturzeitung,” Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Salzburger Landeskunde 48 (1908): 89–221; Wilhelm Forster, “Die kirchliche Aufklärung bei den Benediktinern der Abtei Banz im Spiegel ihrer von 1772 bis 1798 herausgegebenen Zeitschrift,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens 63 (1951): 172–233 u. 64 (1952): 110–233; Ludwig Hammermayer, “Salzburg und Bayern im 18. Jahrhundert. Prolegomena zu einer Geschichte ihrer Wissenschafts- und Geistesbeziehungen im Spätbarock und in der Aufklärung,” Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Salzburger Landeskunde 120/121 (1980/81): 129–218; Bernhard Schneider, “Katholische Aufklärung als Kommunikationsgeschehen. Überlegungen zur Entwicklung und Bedeutung der aufklärerischen Presse im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Albrecht Beutel et al. (eds.), Religion und Aufklärung. Studien zur neuzeitlichen Umformung des Christlichen (Leipzig: 2004), 215–227; Niklas Raggenbass, Harmonie und schwesterliche Einheit zwischen Bibel und Vernunft. Die Benediktiner des Klosters Banz: Publizisten und Wissenschaftler in der Aufklärungszeit (St. Ottilien: 2006). However, even the Jesuits propagated the vernacular—but only in their missionary stations, e.g. in Illyria, see Bernard Plongeron, “Über den Fanatismus im katholischen Europa,” in Bernard Plongeron (ed.), Geschichte des Christentums, vol. 10 (Freiburg: 2000), 165–173, at 166. 190 See William J. Callahan and David Higgs, “Introduction,” in William J. Callahan and David Higgs (eds.), Church and Society in Catholic Europe of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: 1979), 9; Schneider, “Katholische Aufklärung als Kommunkationsgeschehen.” 188

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Another means of educating the laity about the Church’s fight for reform and renewal, and against atheism and superstition were parish missions. These had already been successful one hundred years earlier and had established “a new relationship between the clergy and the faithful” by “giving the church at the parish level a new social function.”191 However, the Catholic Enlightenment proved unable to make efficient use of this tool of communication, again due to a lack of empathy for the needs of the rural population. Thus, traditional forms of Baroque piety, such as indulgences, were continuously asked for in great numbers until the end of the 18th century.192 In many places throughout Europe the public looked with distrust upon the reforms that were started by enlightened bishops. The faithful even charged their pastors as heretics behind their backs. Instead of trusting the local reforms, they grew more and more supportive of Rome and its popes, and the successors of St. Peter happily made use of this new phenomenon.193 This new public support of the Papacy was given the name Ultramontanism. It grew at the same time that the influence of the noble clergy was decreasing and the episcopate was becoming more and more centered on the spiritual jurisdiction of the bishop.194 The popes, from that point on, trusted the public more than before and began to see it as an independent and incorruptible judge.195 Consequently, when the structure of the State Churches, which had defied Rome, was about to be destroyed, the Holy See made no protest against it. When subtle attempts were made to restore the old ecclesiastical structure after 1806, e.g. in the Holy Roman Empire, Rome did everything it could to prevent this from happening.196

191 Mario Rosa, “The Italian Churches,” in Callahan and Higgs (eds.), Church and Society, 67–76, at 72. 192 Cf. M.-H. Froeschlé-Chopard, “Indulgences et confréries. Tests de l’évolution des dévotions au XVIIIe siècle,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 2000/02: 75–94. 193 Elisabeth Kovacs, Der Pabst in Teutschland. Die Reise Pius VI. Im Jahre 1782 (Vienna: 1982); Barton, Jesuiten, Jansenisten, Josephiner, 236–237; Daniel Drascek, “Der Papstbesuch in Wien und Augsburg 1782. Zum Wandel spätbarocker Alltagsund Frömmigkeitskultur unter dem Einfluß süddeutscher Gegenaufklärer,” in Burkhart Lauterbach (ed.), Volkskundliche Fallstudien, Profile empirischer Kulturforschung heute (Münster: 1998), 25–44. 194 Raab, “Zur Geschichte und Bedeutung des Schlagwortes”; Schlögl, Glaube und Religion in der Säkularisierung, 131–135. 195 Melton, The Rise of the Public, 52. 196 Aretin, “Katholische Aufklärung im Heiligen Römischen Reich,” 419. A brief and thorough cultural history of ultramontane Catholicism in the 19th and early 20th centuries is provided by Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung, vol. 2: 1029–1078.


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5.7.4. Appeal to the State The support of the secular government for ecclesiastical reform was due to the Church’s own failure to address the most pressing issues. Therefore, in the Holy Roman Empire enlightened Prince-Bishops started their own initiatives, while Josephinists who had to live in areas without such pastors supported the secular government as the only possibility for reform.197 Some thinkers of the Catholic Enlightenment saw the unreformed Church and the nobility as the last strongholds of the feudal system, and impediments to a modern, national welfare state, which was going to be established with the means of economic and social reforms. One can find, especially among lawyers and barristers, a great number of committed Catholics who tried to bring about a reform of Church and State. In numerous cases, they were influenced by Jansenist piety or even “judicial Jansenists” (Dale Van Kley).198 That the Jesuits and the other religious orders were on the frontline with the reformers, secular clergy and bishops alike, was also due to their exemptions from episcopal jurisdiction, which made it almost impossible to enforce certain reforms. This is the reason why one can find Gallicans, Febronians, Josephinists, and Jansenists united in battle against the Society of Jesus and other religious communities.199 Moreover, the numerous annexations of church property and the absorption of ecclesiastical rights by the secular government which increased over the course of the 18th century found a culmination point in the overall secularization during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. However, the more the Church Enlighteners gave in to the demands of the State, the less credible they became in the eyes of the faithful. Some priests embraced the French Revolution; some openly denied the primacy of the Pope, the validity of monastic vows, doubted the indissolubility of marriage and regarded Jesus as teacher of moral wisdom. Consequently, through the support of the laity, Roman politics

197 For an excellent overview of Josephinism see now Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung, vol. 2: 979–1012; Derek Beales, Joseph II, vol. 2 (Cambridge: 2009). 198 Aretin, “Katholische Aufklärung im Heiligen Römischen Reich,” 423; Barton, Jesuiten, Jansenisten, Josephiner, 239–269; Melton, The Rise of the Public, 54–55; Van Kley, The Religious Origins, 137–160. 199 Bernard Plongeron, “Bedeutende Kulturräume und Glaubenssysteme: Das gallikanische System,” in Bernard Plongeron (ed.), Geschichte des Christentums, vol. 10 (Freiburg: 2000), 9–15; Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung, vol. 1: 130–132.

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prevailed and marginalized the Enlighteners. In such a hopeless situation, many became frustrated and left the Church. 6. Outlook The focus of this Companion is restricted to the development of the Catholic Enlightenment in the predominantly Catholic countries of Europe. Therefore, the British Isles, the Dutch Republic, and even Ireland were not included in this book, since the social and political dynamics of these states would be dissimilar to nations ruled by Catholic sovereigns and administrations.200 This exclusion also covers all other non-Catholic (sometimes confessionally mixed) countries, in which individuals worked in the spirit of the Catholic Enlightenment. The authors of this book, however, did not lose sight of the importance of the interaction between these Catholic countries and the Protestant world. However, in order to give a fair presentation of the Catholic Enlightenment in Protestant countries or areas, more research has to be done that can demonstrate clearly the different levels of exchange between Protestant and Catholic areas. There is insufficient knowledge about the various communication structures and channels amongst Catholics, and we know even less about the various forms and grades of bi-confessional communication throughout Europe. It is only once further insight is gained into these networks that the bi-confessional, irenic erudite culture of religious Enlightenments in Europe will become understandable. Therefore, it is the hope of the editors that this Companion will be able to rouse the necessary interest for such research.201

200 Were limitations of space not an issue, a much larger book could have discussed the Catholic Enlightenment in countries where Catholicism was not the predominant or official religion. 201 Nevertheless, the Catholic Enlightenment in England, Scotland and Ireland plays an important but still undervalued role in European history. Recently, great interest in the Catholic Enlightenment in the British Isles has surfaced. See Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology (Rochester, NY: 2009); Geoffrey Holt, The English Jesuits in the age of reason (Tunbridge Wells: 1993); Joseph P. Chinnici, The English Catholic Enlightenment: John Lingard and the Cisalpine Movement, 1780–1850 (Shepherdstown, WV: 1980); Christine Johnson, Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, 1789–1829 (Edinburgh: 1983). See also the important articles of Mark Goldie, “The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment,” Journal of British Studies 30 (1991): 20–62; Idem, “Common sense, philosophy and Catholic theology in the Scottish enlightenment,” Studies on Voltaire &


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Moreover, this Companion does not see the Enlightenment as a “national” phenomenon only. Rather, the authors have portrayed it as a cosmopolitan and patriotic intellectual process within Catholicism, which is crucial for a proper understanding of the role and place of Catholicism in the 18th century and the social and religious history of Modern Europe.202 This volume is also the first overview of this intellectual movement. That it took 100 years to bring international scholars together for such a project may be due to the fact the Catholic Enlightenment is practically the only period of Church History for which no research institution exists.203 Another unacknowledged reason might be because there is a certain discomfort with the Enlightenment within the Church, combined with the embarrassing realization that a number of Enlightenment reforms were implemented as a consequence of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). It should also be noted that this Companion is not a homogenous work, partly because the field of Catholic Enlightenment scholarship is still in the process of gaining definite shape. Thus, it is not surprising that the contributors of this volume have different methodologies and therefore different ways of presenting and interpreting the Catholic Enlightenment. For example, while the author of the introduction sees it as a leitmotif and heuristic concept, others regard it as a given starting point. Rather than imposing a false uniformity, these minor variations in conceptualization, style, and terminology were left untouched in order to demonstrate

the Eighteenth Century 321 (1992): 281–320; Brian Carter, “Controversy and conciliation in the English Catholic enlightenment, 1790–1840,” Enlightenment and Dissent 7 (1988): 3–24; James F. McMillan, “Jansenists and anti-Jansenists in eighteenth century Scotland : the Unigenitus quarrels on the Scottish Catholic Mission 1732–1746,” Innes Review 39 (1988): 12–45. Due to length restrictions, the chapter on the Habsburg Lands in this Companion only focuses on the German speaking lands and Belgium. For the Holy Roman Empire, remarkable research has been done on Enlightenment communication networks, although the bi-confessional networks have been neglected. The Catholic Enlightenment becomes even more complicated when one attempts to integrate the European colonies of Catholic states. Among the most recent studies on the Catholic Enlightenment in the colonies are Margaret R. Ewalt, Peripheral Wonders: Nature, Knowledge, and Enlightenment in the eighteenth-century Orinoco (Lewisburg: 2008) and Gabriel Paquette (ed.), Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750–1830 (Aldershot: 2009). 202 See John Robertson, “Enlightenment Above the National Context: Political Economy in Eighteenth Century Scotland and Naples,” Historical Journal 40 (1997): 667–697; William J. Callahan and David Higgs (eds.), Church and Society in Catholic Europe of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: 1979). 203 Schneider, “Katholische Aufklärung. Zum Werden und Wert eines Forschungsbegriffs,” 376.

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the differences of the authors. Moreover, the editors understand this book in the truest sense of the word as a Companion and not as a manual. As a first step towards a more nuanced understanding of the Catholic Enlightenment, it is a contribution to the long-term goal of a detailed comparison between the radical/moderate Enlightenment narrative and its religious counterparts, as well as to a history of 18th century Christianity that takes into account the multi-confessional religious Enlightenments.204 Bibliography Albert, Marcel, “Die Orden am Vorabend der Säkularisation (1775–1800),” in Gatz, Erwin (ed.), Geschichte des kirchlichen Lebens in den deutschsprachigen Ländern seit dem Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts, vol. 7: Klöster und Ordensgemeinschaften (Freiburg: 2006), 49–110. Albertan-Coppola, Sylviane and Porter, Catherine, “Counter-Enlightenment” in Kors, Alan Charles (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, vol. 1 (Oxford: 2002): 307– 311. Albrecht, Michael, Eklektik. Eine Begriffsgeschichte mit Hinweisen auf die Philosophieund Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: 1994). Alden, Dauril, The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750 (Stanford: 1996). Altenberend, Johannes, Leander van Eß (1772–1847). Bibelübersetzer und Bibelverbreiter zwischen katholischer und evangelikaler Erweckungsbewegung (Paderborn: 2001). Andermann, Kurt, Die geistlichen Staaten am Ende des Alten Reiches. Versuch einer Bilanz (Epfendorf 2004). ——, Die geistlichen Staaten am Ende des Alten Reiches, in: Historische Zeitschrift 271 (2000): 593– 619. Angenendt, Arnold, Toleranz und Gewalt. Das Christentum zwischen Bibel und Schwert (Münster: 2007). Aretin, Karl Ottmar von, “Katholische Aufklärung im Heiligen Römischen Reich,” in Idem, Das Reich. Friedensgarantie und europäisches Gleichgewicht 1648–1806 (Stuttgart: 1986), 403–433. ——, Das Alte Reich 1648–1806, 4 vols. (Stuttgart: 1992–2000). Armogathe, Jean R., Theologia Cartesiana: L’Explication physique de l’Euchariste chez Descartes et dom Desgabets (The Hague: 1977). Bahlcke, Joachim, Ungarischer Episkopat und österreichische Monarchie. Von einer Partnerschaft zur Konfrontation 1686–1790 (Stuttgart: 2005). Bantle, Franz Xaver, Unfehlbarkeit der Kirche in Aufklärung und Romantik (FreiburgBasel: 1976). Barnett, Steven J., The Enlightenment and religion. The myths of modernity (Manchester: 2003). Barton, Peter F., Jesuiten, Jansenisten, Josephiner (Vienna: 1978).

204 Plongeron, “Was ist katholische Aufklärung,” 48. See the instructive article of Carla Hesse, “Towards a New Topography of Enlightenment,” European Review of History 13 (2006): 499–508.


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Schenda, Rudolf, “Alphabetisierungsprozesse in Westeuropa im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert,” in Hinrichs, Ernst and Wiegelmann, Günter (eds.), Sozialer und kultureller Wandel in der ländlichen Welt des 18. Jahrhunderts (Wolfenbüttel: 1982), 1–20. Schindling, Anton, “Theresianismus, Josephinismus, katholische Aufklärung,” in Würzburger Diözesangeschichtsblätter 50 (1988): 215–244. ——, Bildung und Wissenschaft in der frühen Neuzeit 1650–1800 (Munich: 1994). Schlaffer, Heinz, Kurze Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (Munich et al.: 2002). Schlögl, Rudolf, “Geschmack und Interesse. Private Kunstsammlungen zwischen ästhetischen Idealen und sozialer Repräsentation,” in Michael North (ed.), Kunstsammeln und Geschmack im 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin: 2002), 55–68. ——, “Secularization: German Catholicism at the Eve of Modernity,” German Historical Institute Bulletin 25/1 (2003), 5–21. ——, Glaube und Religion in der Säkularisierung. Die katholische Stadt—Köln, Aachen, Münster—1740–1840 (Munich: 1995). Schlumbohm, Jürgen (ed.), Mikrogeschichte—Makrogeschichte, komplementär oder inkommensurabel? (Göttingen: 1998). Schmaltz, Tad M., Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception of Descartes (Cambridge: 2002). Schmidt, Bernward, Virtuelle Büchersäle. Lektüre und Zensur gelehrter Zeitschriften an der römischen Kurie 1665–1765 (Paderborn et al.: 2009). ——, “Sollicita ac provida vigilantia. Die Indexreform Benedikts XIV.” in Wolf, Hubert (ed.), Verbotene Bücher. Zur Geschichte des Index im 18. Jahrhundert und 19. Jahrhundert, (Paderborn et al.: 2008), 345–360. Schneider, Bernhard, “Katholische Aufklärung als Kommunikationsgeschehen. Überlegungen zur Entwicklung und Bedeutung der aufklärerischen Presse im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Beutel, Albrecht et al. (eds.), Religion und Aufklärung. Studien zur neuzeitlichen Umformung des Christlichen (Leipzig: 2004), 215–227. ——, “Katholische Aufklärung. Zum Werden und Wert eines Forschunsgbegriffs,” Revue d’Histoire Ecclesiastique 93 (1998): 354–397. ——, “Lesegesellschaften des Klerus im frühen 19. Jahrhundert. Ein Beitrag zur historischen Kommunikationsforschung,” Archiv für mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte 49 (1997): 155–177. ——, “Wallfahrtskritik im Spätmittelalter und in der Katholischen Aufklärung. Beobachtungen zu Wandel und Kontinuität,” in Schneider, Bernhard (ed.), Wallfahrt und Kommunikation—Kommunikation über Wallfahrt (Mainz: 2004), 281–316. Schneiders, Werner, “Reformaufklärung in Deutschland,” in Geyer, Paul (ed.), Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert: Aufklärung (Regensburg: 1995), 23–41. ——, Die wahre Aufklärung. Zum Selbstverständnis der deutschen Aufklärung (Freiburg et al.: 1974). ——, Hoffnung auf Vernunft. Aufklärungsphilosophie in Deutschland (Hamburg: 1990). ——, (ed.), The Enlightenment in Europe/Les lumières en Europe.Unity and Diversity/ Unité et Diversité (Berlin: 2003). Schnürer, Gustav, Katholische Kirche und Kultur im 18. Jahrhundert (Paderborn: 1941), Schöch, Nikolaus, “Der Streit zwischen Angelo Maria Querini und Antonio Muratori um die Reduktion der Feiertage,” Antonianum 70 (1995): 237–297. Scholder, Klaus, “Grundzüge der theologischen Aufklärung in Deutschland,” in Kopitzsch, Franklin (ed.), Aufklärung, Absolutismus und Bürgertum in Deutschland (Munich: 1976), 294–318. Schorn-Schütte, Luise and Sparn, Walter (eds.), Protestantische Pfarrer. Zur sozialen und politischen Rolle einer bürgerlichen Gruppe in der deutschen Gesellschaft des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: 1997).

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THE CATHOLIC ENLIGHTENMENT IN FRANCE FROM THE FIN DE SIÈCLE CRISIS OF CONSCIOUSNESS TO THE REVOLUTION, 1650–1789 Jeffrey D. Burson 1. Introduction This chapter argues three related points.1 First, a plurality of intersecting Catholic Enlightenment movements co-existed in eighteenth century France. While multiple strands of Catholic Enlightenment interacted in Old Regime France, at this point at least two widespread forms of Catholic Enlightenment discourses are evident in France: proUnigenitus and pro-Augustinian Catholic Enlightenments. The catalyst for this distinctively French pluralization of Catholic Enlightenment was the papal bull Unigenitus (1713) that yielded a French Catholic Enlightenment both prematurely and acutely divided against itself.2 The first half of the eighteenth century was an era of uneasy coexistence

1 Due to the length of a primary source bibliography, titles of primary sources are contained only in footnotes. I wish to gratefully acknowledge the generous help of the following libraries, archives, and special collections: the Clementine Collection and the Special Collections Division of the Mullen Library, Catholic University of America; the Georgetown University Library and Special Collections; the Archives and Special Collections of Gelman Library, George Washington University; the Archives and Special Collections at the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne; Archives and Special Collections of Cambridge University Library; Archives and Special Collections of the Bibliothèque Sant-Geneviève; the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, especially their reproductions division and the helpful staff of the Tolbiac facility and Western Manuscripts reading room; the Library of Congress; Kress Library of Business and Economics, Harvard University; London’s Goldsmith-Kress Library of Economic Literature; Yale University; Harvard University; Université de sciences humaines de Strasbourg; Universiteitsbibliotheek van Amsterdam; Cornell University. Special thanks are, as ever, due to the generosity and input of Dale Van Kley, Ulrich Lehner, Emmet Kennedy, Jacques Gres-Gayer, William Doyle, Peter Campbell, Darrin McMahon, Margaret Jacob, Bernard Plongeron, and Lenore Rouse I also wish to acknowledge Notre Dame University Press, for those portions of this chapter wherein I have adapted previously published material from my book, Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment (Notre Dame: 2010). 2 J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge: 1999); Roy Porter, “The Enlightenment in England” in Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (eds.), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: 1981).

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and occasional conflict among strands of a pro-Augustinian, Jansenist self-consciously Gallican Enlightenment on the one hand, and a proUnigenitus Catholic Enlightenment on the other. The pro-Augustinian Catholic Enlightenment has received much historical attention since the 1970s. But despite a wealth a of historical scholarship on the significance of the Jesuits to the Enlightenment, no consensus has emerged even on such indispensable issues as the extent to which Jesuits were Aristotelians, Cartesians, or full-blown sensationalists in the mold of John Locke (1632–1704).3 Yet, the first half of the eighteenth-century was the apogee of rich and still under-studied Catholic Enlightenment discourses galvanized, if not created, by Jesuits and then creatively utilized by vernacular apologists (lay and clerical ), some university faculties, and many seminaries. pro-Unigenitus Catholic Enlightenment tended toward Molinism and humanism in its moral philosophy and soteriology, and was anti-Spinozan to a degree. Yet, it also had made peace with Lockean sensationism and Newtonian physics by synthesizing these newer perspectives with Nicholas Malebranche (1638–1715)—all with a view to resuscitating the Thomistic arguments so badly damaged by the three-fold challenges of Descartes (1596– 1650), Bayle (1647–1706), and Spinoza (1632–1677) during the fin de siècle European crisis of consciousness (ca. 1650–1700) (P. Hazard).

3 Robert R. Palmer, C&U (Princeton: 1939); Ross Hutchison, Locke in France, 1688–1734, SVEC 290 (Oxford: 1991); Catherine M. Northeast, The Parisian Jesuits and the Enlightenment, 1700–1762, SVEC 288 (Oxford: 1991), 55, 63, 217; Gaston Sortais, Le Cartésianisme chez les Jésuites français au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: 1929); L.W.B. Brockliss, FHE (Oxford: 1987); François de Daineville, L’education des jésuites (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Paris: 1978); R. R. Palmer (ed.), The School of the French Revolution: A Documentary History of the College of Louis-le-Grand and Its Director, Jean-François Champagne, 1762–1814, trans. R. R. Palmer (Princeton: 1975); René Taton et al., Enseignement et diffusion des sciences en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: 1964); Gustave Dupont-Ferrier, Le Collège sous les Jésuites, 1563–1762 & le Collège et la Révolution, 1763–1799, vol. 1, Du Collège de Clermont au Lycée Louis-le-Grand: La vie quotidienne d’un collège parisien pendant plus de trois cent cinquant ans (1563– 1920) (Paris: 1921); Jean de Viguerie, “L’Enseignement des jésuites et les progrès du déisme en France aux dix-septième et dix-huitième siècles.” Pour qu’il règne (November 1969): 9–23; most recently, Marcus Hellyer, Catholic Physics: Jesuit Natural Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Notre Dame: 2005); John Pappas, Berthier’s Journal de Trévoux and the Philosophes, SVEC 3 (Geneva: 1957); Harro Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought: The Society of Jesus and the State, c. 1540–1630 (New York: 2004); Eric Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy: Catholic Reform and Political Authority in France (1590–1615) (Aldershot: 2005), 1–9, 240–244; Mordechai Feingold, Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA: 2003).

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Because leading Jesuits, like Claude G. Buffier (1661–1737) and RénéJoseph Tournemine (1661–1739) associated with the Mémoires de Trévoux and Collège Louis-le-Grand were so active in the republic of letters of the first third of the eighteenth-century, and because they were significant pioneers in disseminating these synthetic discourses, one may speak of the resulting apologetical synthesis of Locke, Newton (1643–1747), and Malebranche as the Jesuit Synthesis. As such after 1730, Catholic Enlightenment writers most heavily influenced by the Jesuit Synthesis included many vernacular apologists, bishops, university faculties, seminarians, and a host of theology students, some of whom, like Morellet and Turgot, proceeded to become philosophes. These partisans of pro-Unigenitus Catholic Enlightenment were receptive to new developments in physiology, mechanics, and natural history, but were also optimistic about the moral progress of human society despite the Church doctrine of original sin. In nearly constant tension with the pro-Unigenitus form of Catholic Enlightenment pioneered by Jesuits, however, was the pro-Augustinian, often pro-Jansenist Catholic Enlightenment. More pessimistic about the depravity of human nature and reason, this Augustinian Catholic Enlightenment stressed social reformism and individual moral improvement through discipline and self-examination, a conciliarist, republican ecclesiology, fear of papal or monarchical innovations in Church and state, and, ironically, greater oversight of the sacred sphere by secular bodies like the parlement of Paris. Secondly therefore, this chapter shows that, for many reasons analyzed in what follows, the long 1750s, which began with the publication of the first volume of the Encyclopédie (1751) and ended with the expulsion of the Jesuits, led to the polarization of Catholic Enlightenments, followed by the undermining of Jesuit-inspired Catholic Enlightenment and of the epistemological syntheses of Locke, Descartes and Newton. Finally, from 1765–1789, as a result of the polarization of the 1750s, France witnessed four interlocking Catholic Enlightenment trends: first, the mainstreaming of Radical Enlightenment tendencies; second, the ascendency of the socio-political and utilitarian reformism of a more moderate Catholic Enlightenment that drew from both pro-Augustinian and pro-Unigenitus discourses; third, the cooling of doctrinal tensions, and considerable pluralization of Catholic Enlightenment perspectives among individual writers in the last two decades before the 1789. Fourth and finally, in reaction to the mainstreaming of the once Radical Enlightenment, other writers

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joined the variegated ranks of disgruntled writers, staunch Jansenists, and Jesuit dévots who slowly created Counter-Enlightenment ideologies that shaded into Counter-Revolutionary perspectives by the time of the Restoration. Throughout, this chapter contends that Radical and Catholic Enlightenments evolved dialectically, at once creative of and created by the perceived opposition. Contingencies unique to France generated this dialectical process that divided the Catholic Enlightenment against itself, and in so doing, ironically fueled the mainstreaming of a more radically secular, anti-clerical French Enlightenment after the 1750s.4 Much research remains, however, because the dynamics of Catholic Enlightenment remain uncharted paths of undiscovered country. 2. Clash and Climax of Catholic Enlightenments in France, c. 1700–1750 The Catholic Enlightenment in France, as in the rest of Catholic Europe, was a child of the sixteenth-century Catholic Reformation. After the Council of Trent, a process of confessionalization had occurred which at once disciplined and changed traditional forms of piety while also reinvigorating medieval Catholicism in France and elsewhere. By the dawn of the eighteenth-century, Post-Tridentine Catholicism had been internalized by French elites, and urban centers in France were both more literate and far more replete with seminaries, Jesuit colleges, and convents of regular orders.5 The priesthood overall was more disciplined and literate, yet at the cost of widening the gap separating the clerical elite of bishops, university professors, and theologians from popular, rural forms of piety that, in their own right, had transformed considerably during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.6 The

4 Kathleen Perry Long (ed.), Religious Differences in France: Past and Present, (Kirksville, MO: 2006); Annie Jourdan, La Révolution, une exception française? (Paris: 2004), 375–405. 5 Joel F. Harrington and Helmut Walser Smith, “Confessionalization, Community, and State Building in Germany, 1555–1870,” Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 77–101. 6 David A. Bell, “Culture and Religion,” in ORF (Oxford: 2001), 85–86; R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge: 2005; 1998); Jean Delumeau, Le Catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire (Paris: 1971); Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, N.C.: 1991), 104; Louis Châtellier, “Introduction: le paradoxe des Lumières;” M.-H.


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most privileged orders of the Old Regime increasingly monopolized university enrollment, a process which fueled a parallel monopoly by the same groups over the high clergy overall under Louis XV, as sons of the high nobility (both épée and robin), grands bourgeois, officiers, and gens de loi dominated the episcopacy and proved themselves by achieving a licence or doctorate in theology.7 In a way that paralleled the wider European Enlightenment, the clerical elite of the eighteenth century prized learning and sociability; they were often zealous about reviving what they considered the natural traditions of the early Christian Church.8 2.1. The Augustinian Enlightenment to ca. 1750 But, in the late 1500s through the 1600s, France remained suspicious of the Jesuits, who were tainted with memories of tyrannicide and Catholic League extremism lingering from the end of the Religious Wars, but under Louis XIV and a succession of late seventeenth-, and early eighteenth-century popes, the Jesuits were institutionally favored in a way that alarmed many French Catholics, especially among royal jurists and university faculty who believed that the highest authority for solving doctrinal matters was the General Assembly of the French Clergy in concert with the pope. Such conciliarist conceptions of papal doctrinal authority were further legitimized by publication of De ecclesiastica et politica potestate (1611), written by the syndic of the Paris Faculty of Theology, Edmond Richer (1559–1631), who controversially argued that even parish clergy rightfully shared the authority claimed by bishops. These colloquial conceptions of so-called Gallican Liberties—thought to derive from medieval relationships between the Church and the French monarchy—were additionally defended by

Froeschlé-Chopard, “Indulgences et confréries: tests de l’évolution des dévotions au dix-huitième siècle;” Philippe Martin, “Des livres de piété éclairés?” in Louis Châtellier (ed.), Religions en transition dans la seconde moitié du dix-huitième siècle, SVEC 2000/02, 1–10; 75–94; 109–122. 7 John McManners, CSEF (Oxford: 1998), vol. 1:625–626, vol. 1:641–643; Laurence V. W. Brockliss, “Patterns of Attendance at the University of Paris, 1400–1800,” The Historical Journal 21 (1978): 503–44; Joseph Bergin, Crown, Church, and Episcopate under Louis XIV (New Haven: 2004), 81–115; also Joseph Bergin, The Making of the French Episcopate, 1589–1661 (New Haven: 1996) Roger Chartier, Dominique Julia, Marie-Madeleine Compère, Education en France du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: 1976), 192–93. 8 McManners, CSEF, vol. 1:148; Bergin, French Episcopate, 543–45.

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Antoine (1612–1694) and Jacqueline Arnauld (1591–1661), and her confidant, the abbé de Saint-Cyran (1581–1643). Their reforms associated with the Port Royal convent readily dovetailed with both Gallicanism and a festering theological dispute inherited from the Council of Trent concerning Augustine’s theology of grace. For Saint-Cyran and the Arnauld were partisans of the Post-Pelagian Augustinian view that the essence of human nature changed after the original sin of Adam; humanity was thus considered naturally depraved. French Augustinians associated with Port Royal shared much with SaintCyran’s friend, the Dutch theologian Cornelius Jansen, Bishop of Ypres (1585–1638), who also believed that free will was powerless to affect salvation—a fate predestined by the absolute free will of God. But, Jansen’s doctrine, articulated in his Augustinus, was problematic for the Post-Tridentine Roman Catholic Church, and for Jesuit soteriology in particular, because Trent and the Jesuits had re-emphasized the capacity of human free will to discern the good and accept divine grace mediated by the Church.9 When Augustinian doctrines of grace were seamlessly combined with the Gallicanism of Port Royal stressing pious works, self-examination as a necessary prerequisite to Communion, and a highly exalted role of bishops (and perhaps even lower clergy) relative to the pope in matters of doctrine, Jansen was posthumously condemned by the Papacy in 1643. But Port Royal Augustinianism remained popular in many urban centers of Northeastern France, and among educated bishops and Sorbonne faculty. Jansenism was a minority movement, but its influence outweighed its numbers thanks to its geographical proximity to the centers of power, and to networks of exchange shared with French jurists in the parlements, and with like-minded clerics in the Low Countries.10 As such, Jansenist tendencies were perceived as threatening by Cardinal Mazarin, the young Louis XIV, and the papacy, especially since all papal bulls customarily required acceptance by the French king and registration by the parlement of Paris only after the king had sought the consent of the French prelacy. So, when the pope issued a further bull in 1653 condemning five propositions extracted from Jansen, the Sorbonne bogged down in gridlock. The Gallican

9

William Doyle, Jansenism (New York: 2000), 12–38. Ibid.; Dominique Julia, “L’affaiblissement de l’Eglise gallicane,” in Philippe Joutard (ed.), Histoire de la France religieuse vol. 3 [RTCàLR ] (Paris: 1991), 4, 16–21. 10


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bishops for whom the Sorbonne spoke de facto did not object to the censure of the five propositions, but many of the faculty did not think the propositions were what Jansen had actually argued.11 The entire dispute raised a host of issues left dangling after Trent—what was the relationship of episcopal to papal authority? What was the place of medieval university faculties like the Sorbonne in a more centralized Post-Tridentine Church that relied heavily on new orders, societies like the Jesuits, and seminaries? For that matter, how was papal primacy to be interpreted in light of a bull that accurately condemned doctrinal propositions, but falsely attributed them to Jansen?12 Deeply distrustful of Jansenist tendencies for their popularity during the Fronde, however Mazarin (1602–1661) and the young Louis XIV (reign 1643–1715) overrode Gallican opposition in the Paris Faculty and the parlement of Paris, insisting that a 1655 Formulary mandating acquiescence to the 1653 bull be made binding on all France. But after Mazarin’s death, Louis XIV then set up him and his successors for endless strife by reasserting the Gallican Liberties of the Church in France against the pope in the Declaration of the Gallican Clergy Concerning Ecclesiastical Power (1682). Yet, to appease the papacy after 1682, the Sun King turned on both Protestants and Jansenists with a vengeance, issuing the Edict of Fountainbleau in 1685 against the Huguenots, and closing Port Royal with destructive fury in 1709. The popular publication of Pasquier Quesnel’s Nouveau Testament en françois avec des réflexions morales[. . .](1692) merely complicated matters further. Not only was Quesnel staunchly Augustinian and Gallican in his ecclesiology, he was also connected with a continent-wide network of Augustinians and Jansenists, based in the Spanish Netherlands, which seemed threatening to both Louis XIV and the pope. After Louis XIV invaded the Spanish Netherlands and discovered Quesnel’s papers in 1701, Pope Clement XI (1700–1721) issued two bulls under considerable pressure from Louis XIV: Vineam Domini (1705) and the more comprehensive Unigenitus (1713). Unigenitus re-affirmed all previous bulls and condemned Quesnel by associating him with Port-Royal and

11 “Precis de Doctrine rapports à la Constitution Unigenitus partagé en 8 articles auxquelles on a reduit la Constitution [1714],” B.S., Ms. 239, Fol. 4, pp. 1–32. Cf. Françoise Hildesheimer, Le Jansénisme en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, (Paris: 1991). 12 McManners, CSEF, vol. 1:23; Henry Phillips, Church and Culture in SeventeenthCentury France (Cambridge: 1997), 156–57.

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the five condemned propositions of Jansen; it was forced down the throats of the reluctant French clergy by royal fiat, over the additional objections of the parlement of Paris. This last act of religious polity by the aging Sun King was regaled as a new and despotic “constitution” of Church and state in France, and it unleashed a fury of protest from both Jansenist and partisans of France’s supposedly traditional monarchical limitations and Gallican liberties.13 The furor over Jansenism in France was uniquely acute for reasons additionally rooted in the history of the Sorbonne. In Rome, widespread opposition to the Jesuit missionaries’ pragmatic acceptance of Chinese state and ancestral rites dovetailed with opposition to Molinism (discussed subsequently) and with concerns over Jesuit powergrabs for oversight of universities and lucrative church benefices. As a result, a self-consciously Augustinian faction of anti-Jesuit theologians anti-Jesuitism became active in both Rome and France around 1700. Unigenitus served to stoke a theological crisis of serious magnitude by associating anti-Gallicanism with anti-Jansenism in a way that intersected with growing criticisms of Louis XIV for his high-handed erosion of traditional intermediary bodies in both Church and state (i.e. the Gallican Liberties of the French bishops which Louis had asserted in 1682, and the judicial privileges of the parlement of Paris and provincial estates which drastically eroded under Louis Quatorzian absolutism).14 As a result, the Sorbonne began a subtle but significant Enlightenment of its own, initially beholden to the Augustinian side of Catholic Enlightenment (it would continue and change direction under the aegis of the pro-Unigenitus Catholic Enlightenment after 1730). The Faculty of Theology thus became all the more conscious of its institutional history of providing doctrinal clarification in matters of theological controversy. By the 1600s, moreover, the Sorbonne faculty reasserted itself as the “Ordinary Council of the Gallican Church,”

13 Doyle, Jansenism, 12–38; Phillips, Church and Culture, 105–108; William Doyle, “Politics: Louis XIV,” in ORF, 178–192; Catherine Mairie, DIEU/NATION, 36–44; David Hudson, “The Regent, Fleury, Jansenism, and the Sorbonne,” French History 8 (1994): 135–36; Julia, “L’affaiblissement de l’Eglise gallicane,” in RTàLR, 4, 12; cf. Blet, Le clergé de France. 14 Jacques M. Gres-Gayer, “The Unigenitus of Clement XI: A Fresh Look at the Issues,” Theological Studies 49 (1988): 259–282; Idem, Autour de l’Unigenitus: Recherches sur la genèse de la constitution (Louvain: 1986); Idem, Le jansénisme en Sorbonne, 1643–1656 (Paris: 1996), 145–216.


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charged additionally by the King of France and his parlement of Paris with defending the customary liberties of French Catholicism.15 But, the privileges of Sorbonne theologians had been problematized after Trent by a more hierarchical ecclesiology that reasserted papal absolutism as normative. No less threatening now was the encroachment of royal absolutism that sought to subordinate the Sorbonne to the parlement of Paris and the Paris Archbishop. The Sorbonne finally fought back; it asserted its right to censure suspect books in 1696, and in 1700 it disagreed openly with the Vatican and the Jesuits over the Chinese Rites Controversy. Finally (January 1716), the Sorbonne turned on Unigenitus, annulled its earlier acceptance, and appealed the matter to a General Council of the Church in 1717.16 This appeal—the last act of Sorbonne revival under Jansenist/Augustinian dominance—was, as Jacques Gres-Gayer argues, a conscious attempt to revive a tradition of consensual deliberation over doctrinal matters, and with it, the faculty’s avowedly traditional privileges within the French Church and state. Anti-Jesuit, pro-Jansenist, proAugustinian and pro-Gallican sentiments intersected at the Sorbonne, galvanizing one strand of Catholic Enlightenment in France into conflict with another; but whereas pro-Unigenitus Catholic Enlightenment, discussed in what follows, would focus upon advances in Newtonian science, new physiology, and Lockean psychology theologically juxtaposed with occasionalism, the Catholic Enlightenment of the pro-Augustinians and radical Gallicans represented by the Sorbonne before 1730, as both Gres-Gayer and Dale Van Kley have argued, sought a confederal republic of individual churches, and a mutuallylimiting balance of sacred and secular jurisdictions.17 Dominated initially by pro-Augustinian, sometimes Jansenist faculty, the Sorbonne was attempting to historicize the doctrine and practice of the postTridentine Church, unmask superstition, promote “an ecclesiology

15

Gres-Gayer, “The Magisterium of the Faculty of Theology of Paris in the Seventeenth Century,” 426–427. 16 Ibid., 443. 17 Dale Van Kley, “Civic Humanism in Ecclesiastical Garb: Gallican Memories of the Early Church and the Project of Primitivist Reform, 1719–1791,” Past and Present 200 (2008): 77–120; Van Kley, “The Religious Origins of the French Revolution, 1560–1791,” in OFR, 160–191; Brian Tierney, Foundations of Conciliar Theories (Cambridge: 1968).

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of dialog and participation,” and lead the charge toward a revived Catholicism self-consciously imitating the original church.18 The appellants of 1717 simply refused to yield, leaving themselves vulnerable to accusations of eroding the peace of the Church and fueling the fires of skepticism. pro-Unigenitus forces on the other hand— otherwise known as constitutionaires in Jansenist literature—were accused of undermining the foundation of the Church by subverting its traditions and doctrine.19 Cardinal Fleury (1653–1743), royal favorite of Louis XV from 1726 to 1743, thus began a frontal assault on the institutional position of appellants within the university, the French episcopacy, and the royal court.20 On 1 June 1721, six appellants were excluded from the Sorbonne, and the faculty prohibited from further discussion of Gallican Liberties or the legitimate limits of sacred and secular authority in its theological theses without the approval of the faculty syndic and the chancellor of the University of Paris.21 Continuing Jansenist influence on the Sorbonne throughout the 1720s, however, forced Cardinal Fleury to exclude one hundred appellants from the Sorbonne by October 1729. By 1730, the Sorbonne again accepted Unigenitus as Church dogma and state law, and throughout the period 1730–1743 Fleury systematically reclaimed as many parishes and religious orders afflicted by Jansenism as possible, while relying upon his clients within the Sorbonne to stock the University of Paris faculty with scholars favorable to the bull, and to the pro-Jesuit, pro-Unigenitus Catholic Enlightenment. After approximately 1730, therefore, the once proudly Gallican and occasionally pro-Jansenist Sorbonne became a setting for the fullest flowering of the Catholic Enlightenment proffered by Jesuits (a development taken up in Section 2.2). The mutual recriminations in this polemical war between pro-Unigenitus and pro-Appellant forces did irreparable damage to the Catholic Church in France and created a kind of exceptional Catholic Enlightenment milieu in France.

18 Jacques M. Gres-Gayer, Théologie et pouvoir en Sorbonne: la faculté de théologie de Paris et la bulle Unigenitus, 1714–1721 (Paris: 1991), 203–10. 19 “Lettre de M. l’évêque de Montpellier [Charles-Joachim Colbert de Croissy] et à M. le cardinal de Noailles [12 mars 1720],” BSG, D 4 1580 (109) inv. 1701 FA, pièce 2; “Lettre de Monseigneur l’archévêque d’Embrun, à Mr. d’Angeruilliers, secretaire d’état à Embrun [10 août 1731],” BSG, D 4 1580 (79) inv. 1670 FA, pièce 51”; also Julia, “L’affaiblissement de l’Eglise gallicane,” in RTCàLR, 4, 14. 20 Julian Swann, “Politics: Louis XV,” in ORF, 176–212. 21 Hudson, “Regent Fleury,” 138–145.


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But even as the Jansenists remained on the defensive throughout the 1730s–1740s, their organizational development nourished both their popular resurgence and their burgeoning alliance with the parlement of Paris during the 1750s.22 Theologically, the discourses of Catholic Enlightenment in France grew more opposed, and Jansenist Augustinian discourses at least rhetorically more defensive between 1730 and 1750. For outright Jansenists especially, Adam had been created with an essentially perfect human nature. Consequently, original sin resulted in an essential, irrevocable change to that human nature. On the other hand, Jesuit perspectives (pejoratively if not always accurately attributed by Jansenists to Luis de Molina, as “Molinism”) argued that with Adam’s disobedience, God simply revoked efficacious grace. The implication of these socalled Molinist perspectives characteristic of pro-Unigenitus Catholic Enlightenment was, then, qualitatively different. Human nature for pro-Unigenitus Catholic Enlightenment was essentially unchanged— accidentally but not essentially depraved. Therefore, an individual could still choose to know and do the good, with efficacious grace serving only to sanctify and render salvific such choices intended for good ends.23 The theological chasm separating Augustinian from “Molinist” perspectives became nearly insurmountable as contending factions of Catholic Enlightenment theologians viewed one another’s moral theology as heterodox departures from the natural state of the primitive Church. Moreover, the Molinist perspective left open by Unigenitus allowed for speculation about a pure state of nature succeeding the fall, but preceding the fullest extent of human psycho-social corruption. This distinction between the post-lapsarian state of nature and the pre-lapsarian paradise remained central to pro-Unigenitus Enlightenment Catholicism, and, in many respects, its favorability to a primitive state of nature united the pro-Unigenitus Catholic Enlightenment more closely with the philosophes than with the Augustinians. The still generous place for the essential goodness and reform of humanity

22 JL, 14–15; “Protestation publique de soumission au doyen de la Faculté de théologie de l’Université de Paris [1 février 1730],” BSG, D 4 1580 (49) inv. 1640 FA, pièce 13; Peter Campbell, Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 1720–1745 (London and New York: 1996), 197, 203; see Julia, “L’affaiblissement de l’Eglise gallicane,” in RTCàLR, 24. 23 Jean Ehrard, L’idée de Nature en France dans la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle (Geneva, Paris: 1981; 1969), 438–440.

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permitted by the pro-Unigenitus position was therefore highly conducive to Lockean sensationism and Newtonian science. On the other hand, Jansenism became increasingly millenarian and affective in the 1730s, and its Gallican ideology became increasingly radical as a consequence of Fleury’s anti-Jansenist “crusade,” which outlasted the Cardinal himself. After 1732, Jansenist literature spoke of Port-Royal, the Sorbonne, and the parlement of Paris as, successively, elect repositories of the true faith, and the veritable protectors of the constitutional privileges of French nation.24 More extravagant still was the convulsionnaire movement arising from the death of the Jansenist deacon, François de Pâris, in 1727, whose followers attributed miraculous healings and convulsions to the sacrality of the Cemetery of Saint Médard, where he was interred. Partisans of the convulsionnaires saw these events as divine favor toward the Jansenist-Augustinian cause, but the emotional zeal of the convulsionnaires horrified pro-Unigenitus prelates and hardened their stances toward Jansenism. In effect, the successors to Cardinal Fleury at court, Archbishop of Paris Christophe de Beaumont (1703–1781) and Jean-Francisque de Boyer, Bishop of Mirepoix and Confessor to the Dauphin (d. 1755), were afflicted with an anti-Jansenist zeal of their own.25 The degeneration of the French Catholic Enlightenment as a result of such polemical posturing inadvertently stimulated the radicalization of the French Enlightenment.26 Yet the neo-Augustinian pessimism concerning the perfectibility of human nature, and the very transcendence of the Jansenist God made him seem distant and inscrutable; this hidden nature of divine causality was often ironically conducive to the Enlightenment penchant for empirical, natural science. Similarly, the moral discipline demanded by introspection and Scriptural study made Jansenists conducive to the view that the true Church enhanced the moral improvement

24 DIEU/NATION, 47–48; Norman Ravitch, The Catholic Church and the French Nation, 1589–1989 (London and New York: 1990); David A. Bell, CN. 25 Hudson, “Regent Fleury,” 144, 148; Julia, “L’affaiblissement de l’Eglise gallicane,” RTCàLR, 4, 20–21. 26 Bell, “Culture and Religion,” in ORF, 88–89; also Jeffrey D. Burson, The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment: Jean-Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France (Notre Dame: 2010), 68–96, 173–199; EC, 699– 732; RC, 599–623, 684–714; Jean-Francisque de Boyer, marquis d’Argens, Preface to Mémoires secrètes de la République des Lettres ou le théatre de la vérité par l’auteur des Lettres juives (Amsterdam: 1744), vol. 1:1–12, vol. 1:40; Bernard Cottret, Le Christ des lumières: Jésus de Newton à Voltaire, 1680–1760 (Paris: 1990), 96–118.


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of individuals and the well-being of society. In that sense, Jansenist and more broadly Augustinian discourses of Catholic Enlightenment directly informed French Enlightenment apologetics after 1765, and were still embodied in the work of the abbé Grégoire, which so often focused on religious toleration and national regeneration between the 1780s and 1815.27 Moreover, though the clandestine Jansenist periodical, Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, dwelt obsessively after 1732 on older Cartesian and Augustinian works produced by partisans of PortRoyal while regularly denouncing even moderate writings of philosophes [like Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois (1748)] alongside any work favorable to the Jesuits, the Jansenists did see themselves as locked in a life or death struggle against ignorance and superstition. Even if the content of their conceptions of living in a siècle des lumières differed profoundly, Jansenists, no less than pro-Unigenitus Jesuits and rather more secular Enlightenment writers, were also self-proclaimed prophets pursuing the illumination of society. True religion and true reason Jansenists viewed as one and the same—the corrupted Jesuits and partisans of Unigenitus, no less than the corrupted proponents of Radical Enlightenment, they demonized as power-depraved prophets of popular superstition.28 2.2. The Pro-Unigenitus Enlightenment to c. 1750 Much work on “Catholic Enlightenment,” “Reform Catholicism,” or the “Religious Origins of the French Revolution” in the past four decades has focused on the role of Gallicanism and Jansenism in promoting individualistic piety, proto-national identities, patriotic opposition to despotism, and practical reform in church and state. To various extents, such a focus surfaces in recent works on French religious history of the eighteenth century.29 These perspectives remain

27 Emmet Kennedy, A Cultural History of the French Revolution (New Haven: 1994), 59–76; Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: 2005), 231. 28 DIEU/NATION, 48; Bell, “Culture and Religion, in ORF, 89; Marie-Hélène Froeschlé-Chopard, “Les Nouvelles ecclésiastiques et les lumières (année 1750),” Dixhuitième siècle 34 (2002): 77–89. 29 Bernard Plongeron, “Recherches sur l’Aufklärung catholique en Europe occidental, 1770–1830,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 16 (1969): 555–605; also Plongeron, Conscience religieuse en Révolution: regards sur l’historiographie religieuse de la Révolution française (Paris: 1969); Mairie, De la cause de Dieu à la cause de la Nation; Cottret, JL (Paris, 1998); Bell, CN; Samuel J. Miller, ‘Enlightened Catholicism’

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important, and many scholars have provided numerous and nuanced treatments of Jansenist and Gallican Catholic Enlightenment. But a holistic approach to Catholic Enlightenment history requires a similarly nuanced evaluation of Jesuit contributions to pre-Revolutionary and Catholic Enlightenment history.30 Indeed, Jesuit philosophical and political contributions to Old Regime education, the republic of letters, and political reform were arguably the most socio-politically resonant discourses of Catholic Enlightenment in France throughout the period from c. 1730 to 1750. The Jesuits were both participants and critics in the socio-cultural milieu of the early Enlightenment; they held a complex, Janus-faced position as both institutional pillar of crown and mitre and against Jansenism and heterodoxy on the one hand, and vanguard of Catholic Enlightenment scientific and epistemological innovation on the other. The supple sophistication of their positions has not been fully studied as catalysts for change in both the Catholic and Radical Enlightenment histories in France. Contrary to recent work by Jonathan Israel, moreover, the ways in which Locke, Newton, Descartes, and a host of other Enlightenment figures were employed by pro-Unigenitus Catholic Enlightenment writers in the first half of the eighteenth century were fluid and adaptive; they were also not inherently doomed to philosophical contradiction when confronted with increasingly vital, often Spinozist discourses of Radical Enlightenment which became more prevalent during the 1730s. Because of the coalescence of several disparate factors including the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), the British Revolutionary era (1641– 1688), the exploitation of the New World, and the escalation of state centralization resulting from the militaristic and meteoric ascent of Louis XIV to hegemony, Europe was emerging from a fin de siècle crisis by c. 1700.31 Following the death of Louis XIV, the Regency

in Portugal and Rome, c. 1748–1830: An Aspect of the Catholic Enligthtenment (Rome: 1978), 1–27; Carlo Fantappiè, Riforme ecclesiastiche e resistenze sociali: la sperimentazione institutionale nella diocese di Prato alla fine dell’antico regime (Bologna: 1986), 399–403; Francis Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church, 1300–1870 (Oxford: 2003), 141–181; Charles C. Noel, “Clerics and Crown in Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808: Jesuits, Jansenists, and Enlightened Reformers,” in RPEE, 119–153; EXPULSION; ROFR; Van Kley, “Religion and the Age of ‘Patriot’ Reform,” Journal of Modern History 80 (2008): 252–295. 30 John O’Malley et al. (eds.), The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540– 1773, 2 vols., (Toronto: 1999–2006). 31 Paul Hazard, La crise de la conscience européene, 1680–1715 (Paris, 1961; orig.: 1935); Jean Rohou, Le XVIIe siècle: une révolution de la condition humaine (Paris,


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government of Phillippe d’Orléans over the young Louis XV (reign 1715–1774) was more tolerant, not simply of diverse opinions on the administration and finance of the French state, but of innovative religious speculation.32 Until the late 1720s, in such places as the home of the Duc de Noailles, the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres, the home of Cardinal de Rohan, the salon of Mme de Lambert, and the Club de l’Entresol, clandestine treatises fashioned coherent ideologies of Radical Enlightenment in France, because many of these manuscripts favored a materialistic view of man and nature where God was a vital force intrinsic to matter itself.33 But, such issues raised by clandestine manuscripts were also addressed and incorporated into a project of new Catholic biblical criticism partly inspired by Richard Simon (1638–1712), and undertaken within these same networks of cultural exchange. Many institutions of the Regency republic of letters involved considerable clerical participation, even by Jesuits associated with the Mémoires de Trévoux. For reasons explained in what follows, then, these Regency-era networks of intellectual exchange were early crucibles of both Radical and Catholic Enlightenment discourses. And, among the many intellectual and political debates of the first third of the eighteenth century was the central and complex problématique opened by Cartesianism. Though revered by Jansenists at least until 1760, the innatism of René Descartes was controversial for many pro-Unigenitus writers because it had redefined the Thomistic notion of “soul” as a disembodied spiritual substance, cognitive in its essence and active in its principle. Matter, on the other hand, was conceived in Cartesian physics to be

2002); William Doyle, The Old European Order, 1660–1800, 2nd. ed. (Oxford: 1992; 1978), 221–264; Theodore K. Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: 1975). 32 Swann, “The State and Political Culture,” in ORF, 154–155; 196–201; Nick Childs, A Political Academy in Paris, 1724—1731: The Entresol and its Members, SVEC 10 (2000), 3; also more broadly, Timothy C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe, 1660–1789 (Oxford: 2002); L. W. B. Brockliss, Calvert’s Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth–Century France (Oxford: 2002); Antoine Lilti, Les monde des salons: sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: 2005). 33 Robert Shackleton, “When Did the French ‘Philosophes’ Become a Party?” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 60 (1977): 184–185; Ira O. Wade, The Clandestine Organization and Diffusion of Philosophic Ideas in France from 1700 to 1750 (New York: 1967), 266; RE, 566; Childs, A Political Academy in Paris, 3.

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inert, intrinsically extended in space, and substantially other than soul.34 But Thomistic substantial causality was not rejected by Descartes. Thus in one philosophical stroke, causal interaction between mind and matter became impossible to conceive because substantial causality made it impossible for spiritual substances to cause movement or purposive action in material substances. Accordingly, spirit was disembodied from matter, the mind from the body, human free will from action upon matter, and divine causality from the natural laws by which the universe moved and persisted. Many late seventeenth-century writers, then, sensed themselves nudged toward fideistic trust in revelation and providence, even as the “world picture” provided by natural philosophy seemed ever more explicable by mechanical laws.35 Providence, itself, was also problematized by a philosophy reviled pejoratively as “materialist,” and often associated with Baruch Spinoza’s Tractatus theologo-politicus (1679) in Northwestern Europe. Though many writers (Catholic and Protestant alike—most famously in the Protestant case, Pierre Bayle, in his Dictionnaire historique et critique) worked overtime to refute him, Spinoza was extensively abridged in the critiques by these very same writers.36 Spinoza thought he had solved the dilemmas of Cartesian dualism by arguing that human reason could fully apprehend divine reason (i.e. natural law of the universe) because all being—God, man, and universe—was consubstantial. The Amsterdam rabbis (1656) censured Spinoza, and the Catholic Church condemned his works because his monistic notion of substance also implied that all revealed religions and sacred scriptures served largely as ethical instruction and legal coercion for the ignorant. True religion, Spinoza implied, was natural religion—the ethics and piety suggested by natural law and reason.37

34 Jean Perkins, The Concept of the Self in the French Enlightenment (Geneva: 1969), 11–12, 15–16. 35 Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 216–217; Descartes, METHOD, IV.33; Fransique Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (Paris: 1868), vol. 1:553–607; E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture, trans. Dikshoorn (Princeton: 1986). 36 Pierre Bayle, “Article Spinoza;” rpt. in Françoise Charles-Daubert and Pierre François Moreau (eds.), Ecrits sur Spinoza, (Paris: 1983), 21–110; [Bayle, Pierre], Pierre Bayle’s Philosophical Commentary: A Modern Translation and Critical Interpretation, trans. Amy Godman Tannenbaum (New York: 1987). 37 Spinoza, TRACTATUS, IV–VI, 62–103; also Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (Oxford: 2001), 1–40, 68, 93, 131–81, 182–84; Alan Charles Kors, Atheism in France, 1650–1729, vol. 1, The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief


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But, from within the Regency milieu as early as the turn of the eighteenth century, French Jesuits who published the Mémoires de Trévoux made use of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding in crafting a Catholic apologetical via media between the philosophical extremes that had evolved from Cartesian and Spinozan positions.38 One such Jesuit response to both Spinoza and Descartes, sculpted and refined in various forms by Claude Buffier and Réné-Joseph Tournemine, was widely appropriated, and endured throughout the early eighteenth century at least until the 1750s. This “Jesuit Synthesis” followed limited Cartesian occasionalism inherited from Malebranche, and it entailed that God himself directly causes the perception of thought, will, and movement at the occasion of our sensation, thought, action, or desire.39 Divine providence acts with the predictability of natural law, such that our desires and free will seem our own, and our ideas can still be said to arise from the senses. Moreover, even if true metaphysical causality is God’s, the regularity of his providence allows for useful empirical study of nature.40 But Buffier and Tournemine rhetorically tempered their occasionalism by combining it with a Lockean reinterpretation of the Cartesian cogito—a self-perception

(Princeton: 1990), 288–356; Marie-Helène Cotoni, L’Exégèse du Nouveau Testament dans la philosophie française du dix-huitième siècle, SVEC 220 (Oxford: 1984); Bernard Cottret, Le Christ des lumières (Paris: 1990); Paul Vernière, Spinoza et la pensée française avant la Révolution, 2 vols. (Paris: 1954). 38 Claude G. Buffier, TPV, I.i.9, 7; I.ii.17, 10; I.v.41.45, 18–19; Buffier, “Remarques sur la métaphysique de M. Locke,” in TPV 132–33; Kathleen Sonia Wilkins, A Study of the Works of Claude Buffier. SVEC 66 (Oxford: 1969), 15–19; Hutchison, Locke in France, 200–201; John Locke, ESSAY, II.viii.7.8.15, 134; III.ix.15, 484; III.ix.20, 486– 487; III.ix.21, 488; III.ix.23, 489–90; Bouillier, Introduction to Oeuvres philosophiques de Père Buffier (Paris: 1843), 131; Sophia Rosenfeld, “Before Democracy: The Production and Uses of Common Sense,” Journal of Modern History 80 (2008): 1–54; see also from a philosophical if not precisely historical or history of religion perspective, Louise Marcil-Lacoste, Claude Buffier and Thomas Reid: Two Common-Sense Philosophers (Toronto: 1982), 1–73. 39 Jeffrey D. Burson, “Towards a New Comparative History of European Enlightenments: The Problem of Enlightenment Theology in France and the Study of Eighteenth Century Europe,” Intellectual History Review 18 (2008): 173–187; also Burson, “The Crystallization of Counter-Enlightenment and Philosophe Identities: Theological Conflict and Catholic Enlightenment in Pre-Revolutionary France,” Church History 77 (2008): 1–47; Burson, Theological Enlightenment. 40 Nicholas Malebranche, EMRM, vol. 2: 649–1040; Malebranche, MCM, vol. 2: 191–419; note especially MCM V.xv; see also VI.xi, V.vi–vii, xii; and Malebranche EMRM , I.i., III.vii, IV.x, IV.xvii–xi X.i–xvii, XII.v, vii; see also Steven Nadler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche (Cambridge: 2000).

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of the substantial difference between one’s spiritual, immortal, thinking soul on the one hand, and one’s physical being on the other. This fusion of the Lockean notion of sensation as “first idea” with the Cartesian cogito is key to how many pro-Unigenitus Catholic Enlightenment apologists re-invigorated the scholastic common consent-based proofs of God that were so badly shaken by Descartes. Adapting Malebranche and Descartes to Aquinas, by way of Locke, made it possible, as Buffier contended, to deduce from a common-sense experience, first, that the spiritual mind and material body were separate, and, second, that matter behaved according to general principles amenable to science even if substantial causality were unverifiable. Both Locke and Buffier thus insisted that experience is not knowledge of substances as Aquinas had argued following Aristotle, but it is useful knowledge.41 In other words, perception, first of one’s existence as a being that thinks, then of the rest of the world via the experientially derived conclusion that other human beings share that same intimate self-awareness, is the foundation for Buffier’s philosophy. The whole of this epistemological synthesis had the potential to effect a substantial overhaul of Thomistic sensationism rephrased in Lockean as well as Cartesian terms—i.e. that all ideas (even our ideas of God and the cogito itself ) derive from sense perception.42 Thanks to Jesuit innovation, many Catholic Enlightenment apologists therefore assumed that the corpus of Church doctrine could be empirically validated a posteriori as special revelation because the historical authenticity of its sacred texts, their corroboration by other ancient sources, and a living tradition embodied in the Church itself could be verified on the basis of Lockean proofs of historical certitude. Following the first generation of Jesuit editors of the Mémoires de Trévoux, then, Jesuits invoked Locke just as regularly as many other early eighteenth-century writers had done.43 In effect, Malebranchian or Lockean arguments were adapted as rhetorical occasion demanded, frequently in a way that updated Thomistic

41 Emmet Kennedy, “Enlightenment Anticipations of Postmodernist Epistemology,” in Sven-Eric Liedman (ed.), The Postmodernist Critique of the Project of Enlightenment. Poznań Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 58 (1997): 105–121. 42 TPV, I.i.9, 7; I.ii.17, 10; I.v.41.45, 18–19. 43 Burson, “Use and Abuse of Locke,” SVEC 2005/7: 297–327; Palmer, “The French Jesuits in the Age of Enlightenment,” American Historical Review 47 (1939): 44–46, 49, 51–58; TPV, I.i.9, 7; I.ii.17, 10; I.v.41.45, 18–19; II.xviii.305, 134–35; Ibid., II.xix.322–23, 139.


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sensationism which had been damaged by Cartesianism.44 Theological argumentation could now focus more confidently upon the reliability of the New Testament as a historical account, and the extent to which the Church had faithfully transmitted the New Testament through the ages. From the Jesuit Collège Louis-le-Grand, where the widely disseminated Mémoires de Trévoux 45 were published, the Jesuit synthesis was broadly appropriated in the academies, salons, colleges, and seminaries of the Old Regime, especially after Fleury’s expulsion of the Jansenists from the University of Paris. Manifestly apologetical and focused directly on the communication of doctrine in dialogue with skeptics, the pro-Unigenitus Catholic Enlightenment nourished by the Jesuit synthesis conditioned many clergy to teach that if Catholic revelation passed common-sense tests of historical certitude amenable to common sense then the corpus of doctrine must be true—reasonable in toto even if each mystery was not strictly rational.46 Moreover, because of the pervasive influence of the Jesuits in higher education—especially after Cardinal Fleury crushed the appellants and marginalized pro-Augustinian perspectives—the discourses of pro-Unigenitus Catholic Enlightenment such as the Jesuit Synthesis achieved a brief period of hegemony over theological education in seminaries, and many universities including the famous Paris Faculty of Theology. This process of dissemination was hastened as many students attended Jesuit colleges before finishing just enough of their philosophy to be eligible for a degree at the University of Paris. In addition, the French capital city was replete with opportunities for interaction among theology students (Jesuit or otherwise) via the

44

Kors, Atheism in France, 288–356. Palmer, “French Jesuits in the Age of Enlightenment,” 44–46, 49, 51–58. 46 ESSAY, II.viii.5, 133; IV.xviii.4, 690–91; IV.xix.14, 704; Samuel J. Pearson, “Religion of John Locke,” in Journal of Religion 58 (1978): 44; Richard Ashcraft, “Faith and Knowledge in Locke’s Philosophy,” in John W. Yolton (ed.), John Locke: Problems and Perspectives: A Collection of New Essays, (Cambridge: 1969), 198; Maria-Cristina Pitassi, Le philosophe et l’écriture: John Locke exegète de Saint Paul (Geneva: 1990); Maria-Cristina Pitassi, “Le Christ Lockien à l’épreuve des textes: de la Reasonableness aux Paraphrase and Notes,” in Idem (ed.), Le Christ entre orthodoxie et lumières: actes du colloque tenu à Geneva en août 1993, (Geneva: 1994), 101–122; Victor Nuovo, “Locke’s Christology as a Key to Understanding His Philosophy,” in Peter Anstey (ed.), The Philosophy of John Locke: New Perspectives, (London and New York: 2003): 129–153; Kim Ian Park, The Biblical Politics of John Locke (Waterloo: 2004), 65–66; G. A. J. Rogers, “Locke and the Sceptical Challenge,” in G. A. J. Rogers and Sylvana Tomaselli (eds.), The Philosophical Canon in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Essays in Honour of John W. Yolton (Rochester: 1996), 49–66. 45

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seminaries. Finally, the influence of key individuals like masters of conference (maîtres de conférence) in seminaries could be crucial.47 The most significant complements to the theology faculty at the Sorbonne were the diocesan seminaries which by 1762, were increasingly dominated by Jesuit and Sulpician influence. Technically, the faculty of theology at Paris held the privileged right to examine bachelors for degrees, but since the Council of Trent, academic theological instruction became more common in the seminaries, spreading with uncommon vitesse through the Parisian seminaries in order to enhance the efficacy of priests against the swelling vogue for Radical Enlightenment.48 Seminaries often evolved symbiotically with the Sorbonne and other colleges, thus providing opportunities for theological students from many backgrounds to meet in discussion sessions led by directors known as maîtres de conférence. Conférences reinforced and challenged university examination curricula, for maîtres de conférence in various seminaries, Jesuit pensions, and residential University of Paris colleges were mentors who figured prominently in the intellectual formation of pupils by allowing seminarians to discuss philosophical and theological topics alongside one’s peers.49 Supplemental readings, selected at the discretion of the master of conference, deeply influenced the careers of later theologians and philosophes alike.50 Writing some forty years after his experience of the late 1750s–1763, abbé Baston recalled that works by “Buffon concerning the formation of our Earth,” [Rousseau’s] “Confession du Vicaire Savoyard,” the “Pensées philosophiques of Diderot, and many other works of the same genre” were commonplace. The abbé Baston’s recollection demonstrates how frequently even skeptical or suspect writers were read and discussed by clergy during the early Enlightenment in France.51 Seminaries also provided conduits through which clergy of all orders and backgrounds could share ideas among themselves and with other philosophy students who proceeded to a variety of occupations. In this way, the boundary between Parisian seminaries and the Enlightenment world of Paris—especially the pro-Unigenitus Catholic Enlight47

Verger et al. (eds.), Histoire des Universités en France, 224. Gres-Gayer, “Magisterium of the Faculty,” 425 n. 8. 49 C. Ronald Miller, The French Seminary in the Eighteenth Century (Ph.D. Diss., Catholic University of America, 1988), 133–139, 167–170; Antoine Degert, Histoire des seminaries française jusqu’à la Révolution (Paris: 1912), 5–17; FHE, 34. 50 FHE, 88–89; Miller, French Seminary, 244; CSEF, vol. 2: 518. 51 BASTON, vol. 1:55–59. 48


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enment—was quite permeable. The Sulpicians, for example, founded by Jean-Jacques Olier (1608–1657) were second only to the Jesuits in prestige and access to centers of political power. Like the Jesuits, Sulpician seminaries often drew from a predominantly noble clientele jointly enrolled at the Sorbonne and anxious for choice benefices. Sulpician seminaries were also points of contact between Jesuits and theological students from other backgrounds, including the Sorbonne.52 Because students often lived together in seminary while preparing the same courses and theses in common conférences, the seminaries (Sulpician and Jesuit seminaries especially) could be important institutions mediating networks of cultural exchange linking town, gown, enlightenment, and the Sorbonne.53 Throughout this period from 1729 to 1752, the university was also quite open to incorporating new advances in science and epistemology discussed in the salons, academies, clubs, and even asonic lodges of Paris. In fact, many Sorbonne theologians were, like the Jesuits, reservedly favorable to the Encyclopédie until 1752.54 In so far as factions existed within the Sorbonne of the 1740s, they were chiefly based on institutional alignments bearing upon acceptance of the Bull and the autonomy of the Sorbonne relative to the parlement, the episcopacy, and the papacy. An assessment of networks of interaction among the Sorbonne, the Parisian seminaries, the episcopacy, and the court shows that such interference eroded the institutional autonomy of the faculty while paradoxically facilitating their creative adaptation of proUnigenitus Catholic Enlightenment from 1730s through the 1750s. The sway that Jesuits and their form of Catholic Enlightenment held over the Sorbonne was no organized conspiracy by the court, pro-Bull bishops, and philosophes. Instead, Jesuit influence derived, first, from ties of patronage among doctors of the Sorbonne, prominent bishops, and Jesuits close to court; second, from the constantly overlapping training 52

Ibid., vol. 1:38–41. Miller, French Seminary, 91, 202; François Lebrun, Histoire des Catholiques en France du XVe siècle à nos jours (Toulouse: 1980), 152; François-Joachim de Pierres, Cardinal de Bernis, Mémoires et Lettres (Paris: 1878), vol. 2: 17, 24, 27–29. 54 Tuilier, Histoire de l’Université de Paris et de la Sorbonne, vol. 2: 150–51. Both Thomas O’Connor’s recent work on one Sorbonne theologian, Luke Joseph Hooke, my book The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment deal extensively with Catholic Enlightenment at the Sorbonne. See Thomas O’Connor, HOOKE; Burson, “Crystallization of Counter-Enlightenment and Philosophe Identities,” Idem, “Enlightenment Confrontations and Theological Renewal at the Sorbonne, 1729–1750,” French History 23 (2009): 467–490. 53

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that faculty theologians received at seminaries dominated especially by Jesuits and Sulpicians through the early 1750s. With the re-acceptance of the Bull by the Sorbonne, Syndic Romigny (1721–1737) proved instrumental in perfecting a strategy of peaceful coexistence with the parlement of Paris, while positioning the Sorbonne squarely behind Fleury’s anti-appellant campaign. Romigny’s successor, Antoine Le Rouge, assisted Fleury, first by collaborating in the exclusion of one hundred appellants, and, second, by approving theses obliquely favorable to Molinism, papal infallibility, and the legitimacy of Unigenitus. Between 1729 and 1737, however, the Parliament of Paris acted against the Sorbonne only when theology theses openly violated the “Law of Silence” on the legitimacy of Unigenitus. After 1730, the faculty realized that, should the parlement of Paris succeed in censuring a thesis over the objection of the Sorbonne, a dangerous precedent would thereby exist for the expansion of royal judicial power over the very definition of heterodoxy—and that by a body increasingly influenced by jurists and clerics of a pro-Jansenist persuasion. By maintaining the initiative in censuring their own theses when overtly in violation of the Law of Silence, the Sorbonne secured royal favor, and kept the pro-Jansenist parlement of Paris at bay for another twenty years. The faculty therefore worked together with the parlement to enforce the Law of Silence in moments of potential controversy, while steering away from thesis topics that challenged the Law of Silence. 55 After 1729–30, the Sorbonne faced a choice between the loss of its privileged autonomy relative to the parlement of Paris, and cessation of direct confrontation with the crown over Unigenitus, the faculty opted for the latter option as the means of preserving the former, even at the risk of greater manipulation by powerful bishops and pro-Unigenitus interests close to the royal court.56 The fruits of this new stratagem are evinced by the growing number of theology theses that used arguments from vernacular apologists or Jesuits like Buffier in order to obliquely defend the theology of grace and Church authority. Doctoral majeure theses like the 1739 thesis of Luke Joseph Hooke addressing the historicity of the evidence for Christ’s resurrection were passed with honors, and their authors 55

NN. EE., 24 août 1740: 172; NN. EE., 31 janvier 1731: 21–22; NN. EE., 4 juillet 1733: 106; NN. EE., 7 février 1734: 26; NN. EE., 18 août 1734: 141. 56 Copie de la letter écrite à son Eminence Monseigneur Le Cardinal de Fleury par la Faculté de Théologie (18 octobre 1741), AN, MM 257, fol. 261.


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appointed to prominent royal professorships at the Sorbonne.57 The rising influence of Parisian seminaries over the Sorbonne student body furnishes additional evidence for the faculty’s changed orientation after 1730. A Jesuit and Sulpician hegemony is evident among Parisian seminaries by the 1730s, particularly concerning the theology of grace and free will, but after the expulsion of the Jansenists, individual Sorbonne professors and seminary maîtres des conférences taught whatever theology of grace they preferred from their own seminary training; in this way, eclecticism and creative appropriation of pro-Unigenitus Catholic Enlightenment discourse abounded. At least thirty Sorbonne theses between 1730 and 1751 speak of the possibility of universal salvation, good works rendered even without divine grace, and a state of pure nature antecedent to civil society.58 Such cross-fertilization among Jesuits, Sulpicians, and the Sorbonne was additionally accelerated by the nepotism afflicting the Sorbonne in the 1730s–40s. Jesuits and Sulpicians frequently packed the faculty of the University of Paris with graduands favorable to their own views. M. Couturier, Superior of Saint Sulpice, wielded his own influence with Cardinal Fleury to secure valued benefices for Sulpician seminarians, and Doctor Jean-Noël Gaillande, another client of Cardinal Fleury within the Sorbonne proved a staunch Jesuit ally. After 1734 Gaillande gathered a faction of supporters within the Sorbonne, and used his considerable influence at court to pack the Paris arts faculty with his former students favorable to Unigenitus and the Jesuits.59 With the election of Gaillande’s protégé, Antoine Le Rouge, as syndic in 1739, Sorbonne theses almost entirely skirted controversial questions of Church governance by focusing even more frequently on historico-empirical proofs of Christianity and moral theology.60 This apologetical focus, built into the conventions of theses for the Doctor of Theology itself, inclined graduates to adapt Catholic Enlightenment tendencies associated with pro-Newtonian, pro-Lockean Jesuits. Nearly every syndic elected from 1737 to 1751 owed his position to the machinations of Gaillande, the rabidly pro-Unigenitus Bishop Boyer, and two Archbishops of Paris,

57

HOOKE, 9, 40, 60. NN. EE., 20 novembre 1741: 186–87. 59 NN. EE., 20 novembre 1741: 186–187; 16, 30 avril 1744: 64, 69; 4 février 1738; 28 novembre 1740; 27 juin 1745; 2 octobre 1745: 17; 192; 101; 159. 60 FHE, 254–57; HOOKE, 81; NN. EE., 20 novembre 1741: 186–87; NN. EE., 29 avril 1742: 67. 58

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Charles-Gaspard Vintimille du Luc (1655–1746), and his successor Christophe de Beaumont. Gaillande, Vintimille, and Mirepoix in turn owed their positions to Cardinal Fleury.61 As a result, the Jesuit and Sulpician appropriation of Enlightenment flourished at the Sorbonne during the 1730s-1740s. Some Sorbonne professors after 1746 even taught directly from Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, a work very similar in its 1746 edition to that of Buffier, and praised accordingly in the Mémoires de Trévoux.62 Still, the rise of the Gaillandistes and Sulpicians was detrimental over the long-term, because the Sorbonne was left vulnerable to attacks from the Jansenists who saw in the Molinist, sensationist, and synthetic apologetics of the pro-Unigenitus Catholic Enlightenment the pernicious influence of Jesuit despotism, moral relativism, and outright unbelief.63 But Jesuit influence transcended changes to university education. As a consequence of pro-Unigenitus Catholic Enlightenment in theological education by the 1740s, and in response to a surge in the publication of previously clandestine manuscripts based in materialist positions, popular apologists for Catholicism in France used aspects of the Jesuit synthesis in their arguments against a radicalizing Enlightenment.64 Writers like Abbé Claude-François-Alexandre d’Houtteville (1686– 1742) and other vernacular apologists relied upon apologetical utility as the paramount criteria for defending the Church against the rising tide of Radical Enlightenment. Throughout the four-volume edition of La Religion chrétienne prouvée par les faits (1744), Houtteville traces the history of the early Church as a veritable tour de force of wellwrought theological arguments versus ineffective ones. Hitherto controversial authors like the Protestant Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) were treated favorably, while Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) and other apologists acceptable to neo-Augustinian theologians were criticized.65 Arguments like those of Abbé d’Houtteville abounded during the 1740s, and many pro-Unigenitus Catholic apologists considered a proof to be salutary largely in so far as it mollified the apparent distinction

61 CSEF, vol. 2: 481–82; Beaumont was also a personal friend of Guillaume-François Berthier, editor in chief of the Journal de Trévoux after 1745. Pappas, Berthier’s Journal de Trévoux, SVEC 3, 165, 171–202, 213–223. 62 HOOKE, 76. 63 NN.EE., 13 février 1752: 26. 64 Wade, Clandestine Organization and Diffusion, 263–73; RE, 684–701. 65 The abbé d’Houtteville, La Réligion Chrétienne prouvée par les faits, nouvelle edition (s.l., s.n., 1722; Amsterdam, 1744); Mercure de France (juin 1749 ii), 145.


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between divine mysteries and reason by validating the historicity of the revealed tradition as a whole (as opposed to earlier apologetical preoccupations with speculative proofs of individual doctrines). These arguments based on historical “facts” became so common during the period 1720–1745 that Houtteville thought of his work as “neither new nor curious,” and proofs of religion based on common sense written in French were sold in cheaper, abridged form as early as 1747, and frequently translated into other languages.66 Many apologists (not all of them Jesuits, but many influenced by the Jesuit synthesis) regularly argued that the Catholic religion was actually the original “natural” religion of humankind. In a multi-volume apologetic Spectacle de la nature that sold over twenty-thousand copies in multiple editions spanning twenty years, Abbé Pluche (who was deeply enamored with Enlightenment scientific progress and regularly cited Houtteville and Grotius), argued that special revelation was at once supernatural and natural. Through a succession of patriarchs-cum-high priests, Abraham, Moses, Levites, Prophets, Jesus, the apostles, and their Catholic successors, God had republished what, before the Fall, was the natural religion of humanity. The republication was made necessary because the degeneration of natural reason and upright action required it.67 Thus, the Radical Enlightenment concept of natural reason as uncorrupted and consubstantial with divine reason seemed chimeric to proUnigenitus Catholic Enlightenment because the fall had meant the loss of God’s special grace, leaving human reason captive to the senses. This inherently corruptive quality of sensationalist psychology had been described by both Locke and Malebranche and emphasized by pro-Unigenitus writers who found the explanatory paradigms of both to be useful for interpreting the doctrine of original sin. Natural reason

66 Houtteville, Réligion Chrétienne prouvée par les faits, vol. 1:182, vol. 1:260; See advertisement for “La Réligion Chrétienne, prouvée par les faits, par M. l’Abbé Houtteville de l’Académie française, nouvelle edition . . . [1749],” Mercure de France (janvier 1750), 182; see the review of “Système du Philosophe Chrétien, par M. de Gamaches de l’Académie Royale des Sciences . . .,” Mercure (février 1747), 96–97; also advertisement for “Exposition abregée des preuves historiques de la Religion Chrétienne, pour lui server d’apologie contre les sophisms de l’irréligion, ouvrage destiné à l’éducation de la jeunesse, par M. Beauzée . . . [1747],” Mercure (janvier 1750), 182; also Roger Mercier, Le Réhabilitation de la Nature Humaine, 1700–1750 (Villemomble: 1960), 352–60; William R. Everdell, CA, 27–183, 281–85; ANTIPHILOSOPHIE, 209–273, 420–421. 67 Abbé Pluche, Spectacle de la nature (Paris: 1736; 1754), 8:75–76, 8:329.

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after the fall could thus inevitably, but only imperfectly, imprint the notion of God into the tabula rasa of the human mind and heart. The Jesuit synthesis not only made university faculty, Jesuits, seminarians, and apologists more compatible with the utility of Lockean empiricism and historico-empirical apologetics; it also dovetailed with the vogue for Newtonian science. Newtonian mechanics and its application to the science of physiology had many partisans within the arts faculty of the University of Paris and other colleges throughout France by the late 1740s. During the 1730s–1740s, even the Sorbonne was packed with numerous theologians who were not only pro-Jesuit, but often favorable to Newton’s Principia mathematica, and the Jesuits themselves had presided over some of the first university theses devoted entirely to experimental physics in 1731 at Louis-le-Grand (a date that coincided with the popularization of Newton by Voltaire and the Marquise du Châtelet).68 By 1740, the University of Paris Collège du Plessis inaugurated a pro-Newtonian experimental physics course taught by Pierre Sigorgne.69 After studying philosophy and theology at the University of Paris, Sigorgne proved a formidably outspoken AntiCartesian voice at the University, but he was not alone.70 As doctrinal tensions at the Sorbonne temporarily relaxed, and Jesuit influence became more pervasive at Paris, Newtonian physics became prevalent. Thanks in part to the influence of Mme de Pompadour, Louis XV patronized advances in Newtonian physics at the University, and remained himself quite favorable to the Encyclopédie. The king even

68 See Israel, EC, 772–781; CSEF, vol. 2: 481–82; Pappas, Berthier’s Journal de Trévoux, 165, 171–202, 213–223; NE.EE. (14 octobre 1740): 171; FHE, 254–57; Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746), in Oeuvres philosophiques de Condillac, 2 vols. (Paris: 1746; Paris: 1795/Année 3), Part I, Sec, 1, Chap. i. 6–8, vol. 1:5–10; for use of Condillac at the Sorbonne see “Explication de l’abbé de Prades sur les Propositions de sa thèse,” BN, Joly de Fleury 292, fol. 346. 69 Mme de Châtelet [Gabrielle Emilie du Châtelet-Lomont, 1706–1749], Lettre 357 à Johann Bernoulli, Paris, 6/7 septembre 1746 in Theodore Besterman (ed.), Les Lettres de la marquise du Châtelet, (Geneva: 1958), vol. 2: 152–54; also Roger Pearson, Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom (New York and London: 2005), 109–196. 70 Joseph Delort, Histoire de la detention des philosophes et des gens des lettres à la Bastille et à Vincennes (Paris: 1829; Geneva: 1967), vol. 2: 190–191; Tuilier, Université de Paris et de la Sorbonne, vol. 2: 151–152; also Verger et al., Histoire des Universités en France, 218–219; Review of [Pierre] Sigorgne, Institutions Newtonniens, ou Introduction à la philosophie de Newton . . . (Paris: 1747), in Mercure (août 1747), 97–100.


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drew up letters patent for the establishment of a Royal Chair of Experimental Physics at Collège de Navarre. After 1753, Abbé Nollet, the new Royal Professor of Experimental Physics at Navarre.71 Among the Jesuits themselves there was also Louis-Bertrand Castel, who taught at Louis-le-Grand, was a friend of Montesquieu and Diderot, and served as an editor of the Mémoires de Trévoux. Although Castel was not entirely favorable to Newton’s optics, he was otherwise a great admirer of Newtonian science.72 In general, moreover, the Jesuit Mémoires de Trévoux consistently devoted extensive, nuanced, and only lightly critical attention to a variety of scientific works throughout the first half of the eighteenth century. By the 1750s, an average of 13% of this leading Jesuit journal érudit (a category to which the Mércure de France and the Journal des Sçavans also belonged) was devoted to scientific topics. Works by, or in some sense inspired by, Newton received considerable attention as early as the 1710s.73 Newton and many of his clerical supporters believed that the mechanical order of the universe and the theory of universal gravitation demonstrated the existence and lordship of God as creator; this Newtonian “physico-theology” was thus embraced as a form of occasionalism in physics by many in Western Europe after Richard Bentley’s Boyle Lectures.74 Thanks also, both to Newton, and to the pro-Newtonian Samuel Clarke many French clergy considered Newtonian gravity to be a universal force that miraculously infused matter, much as the interaction of the human mind with the material world and the body was considered to be a constant miracle.75 Thus, just as knowledge,

71 Tuilier, Université de Paris et de la Sorbonne, vol. 2: 152–153; Palmer, School of the French Revolution, 29; see also throughout Mercure (janvier 1749–mars 1750). 72 Louis Bertrand Castel, L’Optique des couleurs fondée sur les simples observations, & tournée sur-tout à la practique de la peinture, de la Teinture & des autres arts colorists (Paris: 1740), 1–6, 408–447; Paul Bastid, “Montesquieu et les Jésuites,” in Actes du Congrès Montesquieu réuni à Bordeaux de 23 au 26 mai 1955 pour commémorer le deuxième centenaire de la mort de Montesquieu (Bordeaux: 1956), 313. 73 Christian Albertan, “Entre foi et sciences: les Mémoires de Trévoux et le mouvement scientifique dans les années 50,” Dix-huitième siècle 34 (2002): 92–93; for the “literary philosophical press” to which the Mercure, Mémoires de Trévoux, and Journal des Savants all belonged, see Jack R. Censer, The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment (London and New York: 1994), 5, 87–118. 74 EC, 201–221; 751–781. 75 This convergence between the Lockean-Malebranchian synthesis and the “Newtonian-Lockean synthesis” to which Israel refers is covered in greater depth in Burson, Theological Enlightenment. Brockliss touches lightly upon the issues; see FHE, 193.

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in effect, derived from perception in a Lockean vein, and certain laws of physiology based in Newton’s physics showed how sense impressions appeared to be in the nervous system, so also was gravitation capable of study as a ratio between mass and distance, even if gravitational causality was ultimately divine. pro-Unigenitus French theologians, in short, preferred the physico-theology of Newton because it proved capable of synthesis with Cartesian physics, just as Locke had proven capable of synthesis with Malebranche.76 Yet as Israel argues, Newton’s metaphysical presupposition that motion is a separate, divinely-granted quality of essentially inert matter given by God at creation and conserved in the everyday mechanics of the universe left Newton open to criticism by others who conceived gravity as a force intrinisic to matter itself. This reading of Newton, increasingly common to Diderot, Buffon, Holbach, and d’Argens, seemed risky for theologians. Gravity could not be “an occult quality” intrinsic to matter, as Abbé Foucher, Doctor of the Sorbonne, asserted, because the metaphysical liason between will, action, motion, and matter rested only with God.77 In a sense therefore the deepening fissure between “Moderate” and “Radical” Enlightenment that Israel describes had deeper roots in the epistempological assumptions governing the pro-Unigenitus Catholic Enlightenment rooted in Jesuit synthetic discourses on the one hand, and the increasingly materialist assumptions of writers like Diderot and Helvétius, on the other.78 This engagement with the epistemological and scientific innovation characteristic of the Jesuits contrasts sharply with Augustinian approaches to moral theology and the still intensely Cartesian orientation of most Jansenist philosophy. After 1730, Jansenists were compelled to regroup as they became theologically and philosophically

76 “Rapport du censeur M. l’abbé Foucher sur L’Origine de l’univers expliqué par un principe de la matière (31 décembre 1750),” BN, A-D. 22137, fol. 89. 77 Ibid., 201–209. 78 Tournemine, “Lettre 1530 à Voltaire, Paris, 28 août [1738],” Correspondance, ed. Theodore Besterman, (Geneva, 1954), 7:343; see also [Foucher], “Origine de l’univers explique par un principe de la matière (31 decembre 1750),” in BN, A–D 22137, fol. 88–89; Ehrard, L’idée de Nature, 155; “Lettre du P. Tournemine . . . sur l’immaterialité de l’âme, et les sources de l’incredulité,” MT (mai 1735): 1915–1917; John W. Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis: 1983); Yolton, Locke and French Materialism (Oxford, 1991), 39–52, 55–57; Burson, “Abdication of Legitimate Heirs,” SVEC 2005: 7(Oxford: 2005): 297–327; Israel, EC, 840–862.


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marginalized after their forced exclusion from the Sorbonne.79 While the Jansenists remained on the defensive throughout the period from 1729 to 1751, however, their ideological and organizational development during these years formed the basis of, both, their resurgence during the refusal of the sacraments controversy (1749ff.), and of their alliance with the parlement of Paris from 1751 to 1764.80 In addition, the Jansenists’ Cartesian orientation continued to develop in opposition to the increasingly sophisticated use of Locke by pro-Unigenitus writers preferring the Jesuit synthesis. As late as 1761, for example, Jansenist expositions of Christian doctrine, like that of Méseguy, continued to be written and widely read.81 3. The Crucible of Catholic Enlightenment, ca. 1750–1764 The 1750s emerges as a period in both the French Catholic Enlightenment and the identity formation of the philosophes. Certainly, tensions with the new philosophy had been building since the 1730s, and individual writers had been censured for particular works, such as Voltaire for Lettres angloises (1734), or Montesquieu for Lettres persanes (1723). Still before the period separating the first volume of the Encyclopédie (1751) from the expulsion of the Jesuits (1764) various writers had yet to rally behind the persecuted Encyclopédie and a selfconsciouly shared esprit de corps bent on fighting superstition, and crushing infamy in the name of reason. Similarly, many readers and most clergy (Jansenist and Jesuit alike), had yet to consistently detect strategic or rhetorical coherence in any kind of parti philosophe before the 1750s. Contingent factors contributed to the mainstreaming of Radical Enlightenment in France by the 1750s, while arming the most intense period of struggle and ideological polarization between rival Catholic Enlightenments in France. Fearful of the radicalizing materialism and pantheism of many Enlightenment writers after the

79 Hudson, “Regent Fleury,” French History 8 (1994): 145, 148; for “purifying” the “citadel” and “sanctuary,” see Antoine Le Rouge eulogizing the Faculty Syndic Romigny, in NN.EE. (14 octobre 1740): 171. 80 Campbell, Power and Politics, 197, 203; Julia, “L’affaiblissement de l’Eglise gallicane,” in RTCàLR, 24. 81 Mésenguy, Exposition de la doctrine chrétienne (Paris, 1761); also [Claude Mey], “Remarques sur une thèse soutenue en Sorbonne [20 octobre 1751], par M. l’abbé de Loménie de Brienne . . .,” BN, Joly de Fleury 292 fol. 291, pp. 1–3.

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1750s, and deeply divided against itself, Catholic Enlightenment partisans and apologists often argued for the social utility and rationality of Church history and mystery, while retrospectively condemning the epistemological bases for such arguments deriving from the early proUnigenitus Catholic Enlightenment that had rhetorically synthesized Lockean, Newtonian, and Cartesian principles. This Gallican religiophilosophical crisis was rooted in a controversial milieu beset by fiscal crisis, sacrament refusal controversies, and a struggle between Church factions for influence in the courts of the king and of public opinion. The crisis evolved across several causes célèbres: first, the censure of Abbé de Prades and the Encyclopédie in 1752; second, the Damiens Affair (1757); third, the condemnations of Helvétius’ De l’Esprit and the resultant retrospective and global censures of earlier enlightenment works (1758–1759), including again the Encyclopédie; finally, the expulsion of the Jesuits. The Catholic Enlightenment discourses that emerged from the crucible of the long 1750s were considerably changed and apologetically compromised, but they set the tone for the unfolding of religious and secular enlightenment debates in preRevolutionary France. In certain ways, the turn of the 1750s seemed to be the apex of Catholic Enlightenment in France. The Catholic Enlightenment at the Sorbonne, for example, had reached a peak by 1750. Many Paris faculty members, like other French clergy of the day, believed that providence would enlighten the understanding of the world through the Church, and tend toward the moral improvement of humankind once the processes of defining orthodoxy were purified and ideally functioning within the Church itself.82 Several prominent royal ministers and philosophicallyminded ecclesiastics including Loménie de Brienne and Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot, alongside a few later philosophes like André Morellet, passed through the Sorbonne in the late 1740s and early 1750s. Having previously attended the Jesuit collège Louis-le-Grand before residing at the Paris Sulpician seminary complex, Turgot matriculated at the Sorbonne where he delivered an originally Latin discourse in July 1750 that was later renamed Discours sur les avantages que l’établissement du Christianisme a procurés au genre humaine. In this, Turgot synthesized the Radical Enlightenment focus on the inevitable progress of the human mind for the utility of individuals and society, with Bossuet’s

82

Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman: The Idea of Doctrinal Development (Cambridge: 1957).


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argument in L’Histoire universelle that Catholic religion, when rightly taught, was responsible for individual and social progress.83 But, changes were afoot; France and its Catholic Enlightenment was not immune. Having scored a stunningly rapid series of victories in the Austrian Netherlands beginning at Fontenoy in 1745, Louis XV had personally captured Brussels in 1746. But although poised at the throat of Dutch and British power on the Continent by the end of the War of the Austrian Succession, Louis XV was naively generous at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748.84 French public opinion was incensed at the royal recklessness, and the popular mood was not improved when Finance Minister Machault proposed ameliorating the crushing debt of the war by raising a vingtième (or 20 percent direct income tax) on previously exempt clergy and the seldom-taxed nobility of the pays d’états. But, by the close of 1749, only the Church, led by the pro-Unigenitus high clergy, had refused the vingtième. Such blatant arrogance by the bishops drew the ire of Enlightenment writers, as well as Jansenists, who, since Fleury took power in 1726, had been increasingly alienated systematically from universities, the court, and most key benefices. Adding insult to injury were the policies of Fleury’s successors, Christophe de Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris after 1746, and his patron, the pro-Unigenitus Jean-Francisque de Boyer (who like Fleury, was a royal favorite and held the feuille des bénéfices). These two clerics pursued the Jansenists with a ruthlessness that would have made Fleury blush, and throughout the 1750s, Jansenists were systematically deprived of the sacrament of Last Rites if they could not produce a billet de confession attesting to their external and conscientious acceptance of Unigenitus as orthodox doctrine. This new policy appeared to strike at the very identity and eternal well-being of French Catholics—even very pious and loyal ones—while simultaneously stoking the flames of philosophic disgust brought about by attacks on Jansenist miracle claims ongoing since the 1730s. Criticisms of the seemingly autocratic alliance between throne and high clergy brought together an unlikely chorus of pro-Augustinian Gallicans, Jansenists, parlementaire jurists, princes of the blood, and writers (the latter of whom were now more willing to publish Radical

83 Discours de Turgot, vol. 2: 586–97; Mémoires de l’abbé Morellet de l’Académie française, sur le dix-huitième siècle et sur la Révolution (Paris: 1821), vol. 1:12–13; HOOKE, 31; also Fréret, Faculté de Théologie de Paris et ses docteurs, vol. 6: 200. 84 Swann, “Politics: Louis XV,” in ORF, 206–212.

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Enlightenment, semi-Spinozan works).85 Destruction of the rightful constitution of both Church and state seemed a real possibility; accordingly, the pro-Jansenist Catholic Enlightenment answered the burgeoning public anxieties with a revival of semi-republican modes of political thought not widely considered since the Fronde, when controversial writings such as Judicium Francorum had revived Huguenot contract theories in order to resist the king and his high-handed Cardinal-Minister Mazarin. In a somewhat novel twist on Hotman’s Francogallia, Judicium Francorum argued that the Estates-General had evolved from early medieval Frankish parlements. As the very first of these parlements, the parlement of Paris was the rightful representative institution of the French nation, possessing the constitutional role of deliberating and registering edicts, while channeling grievances from subjects to the monarch. By 1732, the Judicium was reprinted by proJansenist jurists in the parlement of Paris with the dual purpose of limiting Bourbon absolutism and opposing Cardinal Fleury’s pro-Unigenitus policies; its publication was an early harbinger of ever more pervasive and strident ideologies of French constitutional monarchism and republicanism during the 1750s. For these many reasons (religious, fiscal, and political) the parlement of Paris, popular opinion, and pro-Jansenist sympathies coalesced as vocal forces of royal and papal opposition by the turn of the 1750s. Between 1751 and 1758, the parlement of Paris was steered by an ideologically-charged, at times quite popular Jansenist minority bent on restoring the balance of the ancient French constitution by curbing royal absolutism and the excesses of the clerical despotism they blamed upon the pro-Unigenitus wing of French Catholicism.86 An unintended consequence of the long-lasting Jansenist-Jesuit bickering also arose from the dawn of the 1750s as still a second set of contingencies that altered the French Catholic Enlightenment. Galvanized by the absorption of the Church in a second round of JesuitJansenist conflict by the 1740s, an explosion of Radical Enlightenment texts were published. Between Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) and Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des lois (1748) over a hundred manuscript treatises circulated widely within France, but until 85

Ibid. Julian Swann, “The State and Political Culture,” in ORF, 157; Johnson Kent Wright, A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France: The Political Thought of Mably (Stanford, CA: 1997). 86


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the 1730s–1740s, these treatises were circulated among a very select group of grand bourgeois, nobles, and priests in the academies, salons, clubs, and (after the 1730s) Masonic Lodges of Louis Quinzian France. But, increasingly after the late 1730s (especially from 1748–1750), many such manuscripts were published as censorship temporarily relaxed thanks to the relative liberality of Louis XV and Pope Benedict XIV.87 Many of these works were hackneyed abridgements or translations from Latin, Italian, or English works. Among their number were the earliest French translations of Spinoza, hermetic works by Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), civic humanist works by Bruni (1369–1444) and Pomponazzi (1462–1525), and Bernard Mandeville’s (1670–1733) manuscript version of Pensées libres sur la religion. To these last, and after the 1730s especially, were added translations of English deist works (in manuscript) including John Toland’s Panthéisticon, Le Nazaréen, and La Constitution primitive de l’Eglise; and Collins’ Discours sur les miracles de Jésus Christ and Esprit du Judaisme. The matter certainly warrants greater consideration, but it does seem that some popularized ideology favorable to the influence of Spinozan materialism became increasingly paramount even among more mainstream secular Enlightenment writers by mid-century.88 Similarly, evidence for the changing tastes of French readers can also be glimpsed by the post-1748 published output of Diderot, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and d’Alembert. All were all able to publish material written earlier; much of it—especially in the case of Diderot—was more acerbic, anti-clerical, and at least ambivalent if not directly favorable to Spinozan materialism.89 The reasons for this shift in French reading tastes are partially rooted in the sweeping changes to French Catholic Enlightenment currents that had occurred slowly since c. 1730, but with escalating rapidity by c. 1750. Ironically, the interaction of Radical and Catholic Enlightenment appears recursive. The dueling of Gallican Church factions and the consequent division of the French Catholic Enlightenment across pro-Unigenitus and pro-Augustinian camps alienated many writers who then turned to the Radical Enlightenment. Fear of this nascent radicalization of Enlightenment, then, further fueled changes to eighteenth-century French Catholicism. 87

CSEF, vol. 2: 502–503, 507–508; also Laurence Macé, “Les Lumières françaises au tribunal de l’Index et du Saint-Office,” Dix-huitième siècle 34, 13–26. 88 RE, 688–689; Wade, Clandestine Organization and Diffusion, 263–273. 89 CRE, 70.

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These intermediate causal contingencies rooted in the 1730s–1740s converged in the form of two events that intervened to shift the balance of forces between the rival Catholic Enlightenments in France. The first event was the publication of volume one of the Encyclopédie by Denis Diderot (1713–1784), the maverick author of Pensées philosophiques (1746), whose growing popularity, fascination with Spinozan materialism, physiological vitalism, and abiding distaste for Old Regime Catholicism had recently drawn the ire of even liberally-minded Jesuits like Father Berthier (1704–1784), new editor of Mémoires de Trévoux.90 In early 1751, the Jesuits and the Sorbonne were in fact more concerned by Diderot than by the Encyclopédie project as such, but the second event, circumstantially related to the first, changed all that.91 Rising concerns over Diderot’s leadership of the Encyclopédie colored the judgment of pro-Unigenitus clerics and Jesuits when one of the Sorbonne faculty, Abbé Jean-Martin de Prades (1724–1784), wrote a controversial doctoral thesis. After Prades was resoundingly passed by the faculty, the Jansenists and a handful of more Augustinian Sorbonne faculty fell upon the twenty-seven year old bachelor for plagiarizing Diderot, d’Alembert, and Voltaire in his thesis, supposedly for the three-fold purpose of using Lockean arguments to deny the intrinsic divinity of Jesus’ miracles, question the soul’s spirituality, and deny the validity of revealed religion. In fact, as I argue in my recent book on the subject, Prades’ epistemological perspective was a prime example of the Jesuit synthesis inasmuch as it integrated Lockean, Newtonian, and Cartesian perspectives alongside passages by d’Alembert, Buffon, Voltaire, and others, all in order to refute Radical Enlightenment materialism. Prades also did nothing more than apply to all miracle claims the refutations of the Jansenist miracles of Saint Médard written by two famous doctors of the Sorbonne, Bernard La Taste, and the younger Antoine Le Rouge (son of the famous pro-

90 Paul Vernière, Spinoza et la pensée française avant la Révolution (Paris: 1954), vol. 2: 560–564; Denis Diderot, Pensées philosophiques, in OCD, 10: 127–170. 91 Berthier, “Article 19,” in MT (January 1751): 302–327; republished in Discours préliminaire des éditeurs de 1751 et articles de l’encyclopédie introduits par la querelle avec le Journal de Trévoux, ed. Martine Groult (Paris and Geneva: 1999), 33–42; Pappas, Berthier’s Journal de Trévoux, 171–172; ANTIPHILOSOPHIE, 19, 23; René de Messières, “L’Encyclopédie et la crise de la Société au milieu du XVIIIème siècle,” French Review 24 (1950): 395; Jacques Proust, Diderot et l’Encyclopédie (Paris: 1967), 276–277; René Tarin, Diderot et la Révolution française (Paris: 2001), 46.


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Bull syndic and client of Gaillande and Fleury).92 The Jesuits saw their influence over the Sorbonne threatened in the court of public opinion when Prades was popularly demonized by Jansenists and Augustinians for being a contributor to volume two of the Encyclopédie, released concurrently with the scandal of Prades’ thesis. The ensuing assault on the Sorbonne’s credibility for passing Prades was, in effect, an assault on the Jesuits and the politics of sacrament refusal supported by their pro-Unigenitus supporters at court and among the bishops. The Jesuits therefore strong-armed the Sorbonne into using Prades as a cause célèbre for ruining Diderot’s Encyclopédie.93 Caving to Jesuit pressure and adrift in the choppy waves of popular disgust stirred by Jansenist writings,94 the Sorbonne retrospectively censured Prades’ thesis and revoked his degrees on 26 January 1752. Not to be outdone by the Jesuits and the Sorbonne, the largely pro-Jansenist parlement of Paris censured the whole Encyclopédie two weeks later and ordered Prades’ arrest (he had already fled to the Netherlands via Prussia).95 In the aftermath of the Prades affair, and in response to the revival of Jansenist opposition to fiscal despotism and sacrament refusal, the Jesuits, the Archbishop of Paris, Mirepoix, and the Sorbonne closed ranks against the Encyclopédie on the one hand and the Jansenists on the other. In so doing, more liberally-minded Jesuits and apologists were alienated, and dévot tendencies became dominant for a season on all sides, pro-Unigenitus and Augustinian. Though a comprehensive study of the dévot movement in eighteenth-century France remains

92 Louis Bernard La Taste, Lettres théologiques aux écrivains, défenseurs des convulsions, et autres prétendus miracles du temps (Paris: 1740), vol. 1:10, vol. 1:26–28, vol. 1:230–36. 93 See Burson, Theological Enlightenment. Israel’s CE, 850–862 similarly addresses the importance of the Affaire de Prades, though he exaggerates the extent of Prades’ own indebtedness to Newton, neglects to consider the nuanced and compromised position of the Sorbonne vis-à-vis the Jesuits, and fails to consider the philosophical depth of the Jesuits’ own engagement with Malebranche, as well as Locke. 94 Mona Ozouf, “ ‘Public Opinion’ at the End of the Old Regime,” Journal of Modern History 60, Supplement: Rethinking French Politics in 1788 (1988): 1–21; and Jack R. Censer, “The Public Divided: How Contemporaries Understood Politics in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Christiane Adams, Jack R. Censer, and Lisa Jane Graham (eds.), Visions and Revisions of Eighteenth-Century France, (University Park, PA: 1997), 191–205. 95 John Spink, “L’Affaire de J.-M. de Prades,” Dix-huitième siècle 3 (1971): 150–80; Spink, “The Clandestine Book Trade in 1752: The Publication of the Apologie de l’abbé de Prades,” in J. H. Fox et al. (eds.), Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature Presented to Robert Niklaus, 243–256.

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to be written,96 the germ of a nascent ideology of Counter-Enlightenment arose among both pro-Jansenist and pro-Jesuit dévots during the 1750s as a common convergence between the two varieties of dévot sentiment (Jansenist and Jesuit) appears to have arisen from 1755 to 1765 in the aftermath of the Helvétius and Encyclopédie condemnations.97 By swiftly mobilizing their clients within the Sorbonne, both Beaumont and Mirepoix had rescued the pro-Unigenitus factions within the Sorbonne from disgrace.98 But the price for the Sorbonne was henceforth that the Jesuit campaign against the Encyclopédie was to be its own, for the faculty now needed to appear all the more diligent in its pursuit of suspect writers. If it did not, the similar efforts of the parlement of Paris, steered by zealous Jansenist clergy anxious to discredit Mirepoix, Beaumont, and the Sorbonne would be seen as more proactive in protecting the faith from the threat of radical writers. The parlement ’s attempt to lead in protecting true Catholicism in France dovetailed nicely with its self-fashioned role as protector of the traditional French constitution against encroaching royal and papal despotism.99 The Sorbonne’s redoubled efforts on behalf of the Jesuits notwithstanding, the initiative in the fight against radical philosophy was in the process of shifting toward the pro-Jansenist parlement of Paris on the one hand and to the pro-Unigenitus bishops on the other, as part of the wider conflict over secular versus clerical jurisdiction of the sacraments. The bishops rallied behind Archbishop Beaumont’s call for spiritual jurisdiction over the sacraments and pleaded with the king to defend them against the parlement. The parlement, in turn, stood firmly in opposition to clerical enforcement of Unigenitus by the denial of Last Rites to those without billets de confessions.100 Moreover, the abil-

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One dissertation by Agnes Ravel concerns the dévot party. See as cited in Van Kley, “The Religious Origins of the French Revolution,” in OFR, 325–328. 97 Burson, “Counter-Enlightenment and Philosophe Identities.” ANTIPHILOSOPHIE, 19–21. 98 “Sacrae facultatis theologiae Parisiensis commentarii opera . . . [1 March 1752],” BN, MS. MM 257, fols. 392–393. 99 Swann, “Politics: Louis XV,” in ORF, 207–212. 100 “Procès verbale de l’assemblée de messeigneurs les archévêques et évêques tenue à Paris, en l’année 1752,” BS MS. 258 (St. Sulpice Ms. II, 71), pp. 10–11, 16–17; Argenson, Journal et Mémoires, 17 mars 1753, 7:427; Barbier, Journal historique et anecdotique du régne de Louis XV, mars 1753, vol. 3: 450; “Mémoire de la Faculté de Théologie de Paris depuis 1751 jusqu’à 1786,” AN MS. M 71 fol. 195, 4–7; Barbier, Journal


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ity of bishops and Jesuits to censor philosophical books and enforce Unigenitus in defiance of the royal privileges vested in the parlement of Paris alarmed Jansenists and encyclopédistes alike. For both of these considerably different opposition forces, the hardline, increasingly dévot pro-Unigenitus element seemed “to harass kings and endanger magistrates” in a way that tended toward royal and papal despotism, even as that same pro-Unigenitus faction also held within its ranks the majority of theologians and bishops hitherto most favorable to new styles of Catholic Enlightenment apologetics and modified Lockean epistemology. Nevertheless, the sacraments controversy, the sparring between the Sorbonne and the parlement over thesis and book censorship, and subsequent conflicts over clerical immunities from 1749 to 1758 provided pro-Unigenitus factions close to the Archbishop and the Jesuits with the opportunity to consolidate their influence at court and over the Sorbonne.101 Because the Sorbonne was still a bulwark of support for proUnigenitus factions throughout 1752–1753, it was therefore all the more crucial for the parlement to undercut faculty privileges decisively, and by such means, challenge the sphere of influence that the court and the pro-Unigenitus episcopacy had so recently fortified within the faculty. In the attendant crossfire, the Sorbonne’s attempt to reclaim the initiative in the attack on unbelief by further reliance upon Beaumont and the Jesuits collapsed between 1753 and 1756. By May 1755, the parlement demanded that a series of decrees, tantamount to a de facto capitulation of the Sorbonne’s right to censor its own theses, be placed in the faculty registers. Over faculty protest, the Sorbonne was compelled to register the decrees from the floor of the parlement, itself.102 This capitulation of the Sorbonne before the parlement of Paris directly coincided with the latter’s frontal assault on the pro-Unigenitus hegemony, for the parlement of Paris’ Grand Remonstrances (May 1753) had denounced the king’s support of sacrament refusal policies on the grounds that the parlement was the protector of the fundamental liberties of the Gallican Church and French nation. historique, mars 1753, vol. 3: 450–452; Argenson, Journal et Mémoires, 5–6 avril 1753, vol. 3: 445–446. 101 DAMIENS, 126–140. 102 “Avis et Mémoires sur les affaires publiques,” BN MS. Joly de Fleury 311, fols. 80–206; also “Mémoire de la Faculté de Théologie de Paris depuis 1751 jusqu’à 1786,” AN, MS. M 71 fol. 195, pp. 7–8; also “Extrait des Registres de Parlement du 6 mai 1755,” BN MS. Joly de Fleury 311 fols. 290–291.

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Exiled for close to a year thereafter, the parlement returned in 1754 with even more assertive remonstrances (November 1755) based upon the pro-Jansenist political thought of Adrien Le Paige (1712–1802). The 1755 Remonstrances denied the king’s ability to enforce a new Law of Silence (1754) concerning Unigenitus, condone sacrament refusal, or levy taxes without proper consent; they did so by invoking Le Paige’s “union of classes” theory of limited monarchy—that the parlement of Paris could rightfully speak for all provincial parlements and peers of the realm and oppose any royal or papal attempts to corrupt the French Church and state.103 Even with the Sorbonne cowed into submission by the newly assertive pro-Jansenist parlement of Paris in 1755, the position of the proJansenist factions in the Church took a sudden turn for the worse when the Seven Years’ War in 1754 made the King’s financial situation ever more dangerously strained. With the parlement of Paris effectively on strike from 1753 to 1754, and continually recalcitrant throughout 1755–1756, Louis XV had to secure badly needed revenue by accepting a free gift from the 1755 General Assembly of the Clergy. In exchange for the timely generosity of the episcopacy, the high clergy were granted full exemption from the vingtième, and the bishops not only rallied behind Beaumont, but championed the Sorbonne’s right to censor philosophical works against the claims of the parlement of Paris.104 Indeed, the collaboration between many bishops and the Jesuits remained close into the early 1760s, as evinced by the rallying of the General Assembly of Clergy behind the Jesuits after the king’s request for investigation of Jesuit doctrine and constitutions (a request which ultimately led to their expulsion).105 Throughout the troubled 1750s, moreover, French bishops were increasingly able to control the content of theological education, even as their concern for safeguarding the clergy against unbelief grew precipitously.106 The resulting growth of dévot sentiment among both Jesuits and bishops, and their redoubled efforts to regulate Old Regime theological education

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Swann, “Politics: Louis XV,” in ORF, 209–210. DAMIENS, 126–154; CSEF, vol. 2: 499–508; John Rogister, Louis XV and the Parlement of Paris, 1737–1755 (Cambridge: 1995), 176–180. 105 “Bulles, lettres des papes, actes du clergé de France, et témoignages de plusieurs hommes célèbres en faveur des jésuites,” in CERUTTI, 8. 106 Miller, The French Seminary in the Eighteenth Century. 104


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were not uniformly positive.107 Increasingly dominated by the prelacy’s enhanced control of seminaries after 1755, theological instruction in France grew more remote from the otherwise gradual adaptation of Enlightenment thought into French university education during the 1750s to 1760s.108 Yet from the triumphal arch way of victory for the pro-Unigenitus element, defeat suddenly emerged between 1757–1759, originating in an attempt on the life of Louis XV by Pierre Damiens.109 Despite the lack of substantive connection between the assassination attempt and the Jesuits, Jansenists and the parlement again gained the upper hand in the fight against unbelief and philosophical skepticism by blaming the assassination attempt first on the philosophy of the Encyclopédie (suddenly under more strident assault in conjunction with the censure of Helvétius’ De l’Esprit the following year) and second on the Jesuits because of their earlier liberality toward the philosophes.110 The earlier association of the Jesuits with the regicidal politics of the League and Ravillac’s successful assassination of Henri IV in 1613 had made Jesuit political thought an especially easy target (although they had long abandoned Catholic monarchomach discourses in favor of natural law absolutism akin to Francisco Suarez).111 Still, the Jesuit attack on the Encyclopédie was effectively portrayed by Jansenists as just one more form of chicanery—a ruse designed to cover their own similarities to deists and philosophes. The campaign against the Jesuits suddenly became more credible after the attempted royal assassination, and this time it found additional support from the angry writers incensed by a half decade’s worth of persecution. The balance of cultural power had decisively shifted toward the Jansenists, the parlement of Paris, and the

107 CSEF, vol. 2: 518; BASTON, vol. 1: 30; see also Mémoires de l’abbé Millot (1726– 1785), ed. Leonce Pingaud, Nouvelle revue retrospective 8 n. s. (January–June 1898) (Paris: 1898): 73–80. 108 Tuilier, L’Université de Paris, la Sorbonne, et la Revolution, 58; Jourdain Histoire de l’Université de Paris au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle, 390–391; HOOKE 55–56; Miller, French Seminary, 62–83, 138, 196, 223; “Bulles, lettres des papes, actes du clergé de France . . . en faveur des jésuites,” in CERUTTI, 8. 109 DAMIENS, 150–154. 110 Simon Nicholas Henri Linguet, Histoire impartialle des jésuites depuis leur établissement jusqu’à leur première expulsion, 2 vols. (Paris: 1768), X. xxvi, vol. 2: 397–400; DAMIENS, 155–162; Douglas H. Gordon and Norman L. Forrey, The Censoring of Diderot’s Encyclopédie and the Re-Established Text (New York: 1947), 18. 111 SuarezDFC, II.ii.8, 24: 208–209.; SuarezDLacDLegislatore, V. 3–4, 364; FMPT, vol. 2: 135–185.

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philosophes who managed to orchestrate the expulsion of the Jesuits from France (1762–1764).112 But the Damiens Affair would not have resulted in a lasting change to Catholic Enlightenment France were it not for its conjuncture with a renewed assault on the Encyclopédie made possible by the scandal of Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771) and his book, De l’Esprit. De l’Esprit posed the question of whether the attributes of mind (thought, passion, volition) were “modifications of a spiritual or material substance.”113 In response to this query, Helvétius asserted that the essence of mind was a matter of faith, but he nevertheless took a subtle position in implicit opposition to the Catholic Enlightenment hitherto acceptable to Jesuits, vernacular and university apologists, and pro-Augustinians when he celebrated human passions, linked them directly to physical sensibility, and considered them more foundational to human behavior than Lockean ideation. What for Locke had been first ideas had become, in De l’Esprit, instinctive or affective drives. Helvétius’ most alarming departure was his open articulation of the principle that the sovereign judge of any philosophical viewpoint, of true religion, or of justice, was nothing but social utility.114 He argued that “the whole of the lawmaker’s art consists in forcing men via their sentiment of amour-propre to be forever more just to one another;” thus, social morality needs no organized religion, Helvétius contended.115 By stressing personal interest as the basis of morality and social utility as the “principal of all human virtues and the foundation of all laws,” Helvétius rendered the Church socially irrelevant and leveled a charge against it that could not be refuted once utility was accepted as the measure of all things.116 For the singular focus on social utility as the quintessential criterion of truth immediately gave the philosophes the upper hand, as any religion that created strife, division, or endemic warfare at any point in history could not thence be considered true religion. In a France still reeling from the religious

112 “Arrêt definitif contre les jésuites du novembre 1763,” BN, MS. Joly de Fleury 1614 fols. 156–157; “Arrêt de la Cour de Parlement qui juge l’appel comme d’abus interjetté par M. de Procureur general, des bulles, brefs, constitutions, & autres règlemens de la Société soi-disans Jésuits . . . (6 août 1762),” BN, MS. Joly de Fleury 1609, fols 280–301, N.B. fol. 284 (p. 10); EXPULSION, 4–5, 230–235. 113 Helvétius, ESPRIT, I.ii, 15. 114 Ibid., I.ii, 15; II.i, 43; II.vi, 71–76. 115 Ibid., II.xxiv, 217–218. 116 Ibid., II.vi, 74.


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and political divisions over Unigenitus, Helvétius seemed very credible to some, and very dangerous to others. Deny Helvétius his focus on utility, and the Church would look hypocritical; concede Helvétius’ point—that social utility is the measure of all truth—and Christian apologetics would collapse. The only immediate response to Helvétius was to condemn him. As in 1752 then, the Helvétius Affair displays the same headlong race toward condemnation by Old-Regime religious authorities that had characterized the censure of Abbé de Prades.117 An Arrêt du Conseil du Roi (10 August 1758) ordered De l’Esprit suppressed; afterwards, just days after the Jansenist Nouvelles ecclésiastiques had attacked Helvétius for the first time, Archbishop Beaumont issued his own condemnation of Helvétius, calling for suppression of De l’Esprit along with as many irreligious writings as possible.118 Not to be outdone, the Jansenists now took to attacking Beaumont’s own pastoral instruction in the form of two articles that appeared in the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques (1 January and 13 February 1759); both were at least partially written by the famous avocat of the parlement of Paris, Adrien LePaige.119 These articles in the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques had little to do with Helvétius at all, and almost everything to do with tying Beaumont’s own condemnation of Helvétius to the perceived hypocrisy of the Jesuits, already erroneously suspected of abetting Damiens’ attempted regicide. The condemnation of Helvétius, therefore, became a sort free-for-all, with the archbishop, the Jansenists, and the parlement all rushing headlong into the fray in order to trump the opposing faction’s zeal against Radical Enlightenment. The last act of this censurious leap-frogging was occasioned by the sweeping 22 January 1758 arrêt of the parlement of Paris drawn up by a commission that, as Malesherbes later wrote, was packed with jurists known for their political devotion to the Jansenists.120 The arrêt saw affinities between the 117

ANTIPHILOSOPHIE, 133. Mandement de Monseigneur l’Archévêque de Paris portant condemnation d’un livre qui a pour titre, De l’Esprit (Paris: 1758), 28 pp., BN, MS. Joly de Fleury 352, fol. 18; D. W. Smith, Helvétius: A Study in Persecution (Oxford: 1965), 67–68; ANTIPHILOSOPHIE, 132; a formal papal condemnation also followed in 1759: Damnatio et prohibitio operas, cui titulus: De l’esprit: à Paris chez Durand, in-4, 1758, Clemens Papa XIII [Rome: 1759], 4 pp., BN, MS. Anisson-Duperron 22094, fol. 6. 119 J. M. J. Rogister, “Louis-Adrien Lepaige and the Attack on De l’esprit and the Encyclopédie in 1759,” English Historical Review 92 (1977): 526. 120 Mémoires sur la Librairie et la liberté de la Presse (Paris, 1809; Geneva, 1969), 351–352; Arrest de la Cour de Parlement , portant condemnation de plusieurs livres 118

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utilitarian morality and glorification of the passions in De l’Esprit, and statements by Diderot in Pensées philosophiques and Promenade du sceptique (despite Diderot’s own attack on Helvétius). The parlement proceeded to argue that De l’Esprit was the inevitable consequence of the materialism of the Encyclopédie.121 Brought to heel by the parlement of Paris from 1755 to 1757, the Sorbonne could only extend the parlement ’s arrêt by censuring a vast assortment of books upheld as “poisoned sources” from which Helvétius and the Encyclopédie had drawn their inspiration.122 The 1759 Sorbonne censure manifests the extent to which hitherto tolerated works were tainted as heterodox by 1759. Eight years after the Prades Affair, the Jansenists finally exacted their revenge on the years of pro-Unigenitus Catholic Enlightenment hegemony at the Sorbonne, for the faculty had issued a sweeping censure of writings once considered foundational to many discourses of Catholic, Moderate, and Radical Enlightenments alike. No one author was treated systematically in the Sorbonne censure; instead, all the works were censured globally for their supposedly common credo of Lockean epistemology now vilified as tending toward heresy.123 Such persecution merely affirmed Diderot’s crusading zeal to keep the Encyclopédie afloat, and the persecution he sustained accelerated a considerable change in his philosophical views already underway by 1746.124 Diderot concluded by 1760 that the Church had proven itself incapable of living by Gospel morality and could not be a valid revelation.125 At the heart of Diderot’s judgment of Catholicism (despite & autres ouvrages imprimés (22 janvier 1759)(Paris: 1759), 31 pp., BN, MS. AnissonDuperron 22094 fol. 1ff. 121 [Diderot] “Métaphysique,” in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers, (Neufchastel: 1765), 10:440; Gordon, Forrey, Censoring of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, 19; Wade, The Structure and the Form of the French Enlightenment (Princeton: 1977), vol. 1:50–52. 122 Even a partial list of the works mentioned in the Sorbonne’s censure is sufficient to demonstrate the sweeping breadth of this campaign against “impiety.” See BN, MS. Anisson-Duperron 22094, fol. 10ff. 123 Determinatio Sacrae Facultatis Parisiensis super libro cui titulus De l’Esprit . . . (Paris, 1759), 79 pp., BN, MS. Anisson-Duperron 22094, fol. 10ff, pp. 1–11; ANTIPHILOSOPHIE, 139–141. 124 Proust, Diderot et l’Encyclopédie, 296–298; Shackleton, “When did the Philosophes Become a Party,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 60 (1977): 197; Messières, “L’Encyclopédie et la crise de la Société,” French Review 24 (1950): 393. 125 “Lettre 54 àu Damilaville (12 septembre 1765),” in Correspondance inédite, 279; a similar transformation of d’Alembert’s religious views appears evident beginning between 1752–1765; see also transformation of Jean le Rond d’Alembert, in “Fragment


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his own polemical rebuttal to Helvétius’ work) was the conviction he shared with Helvétius: that passions constituted the basis of society and morality. If the human quest for the moral life were, as Diderot held, the highest incarnation of the biological instinct of self-preservation and the pursuit of happiness, then Christianity could be neither true nor useful.126 In addition to radicalizing the French Enlightenment as Israel argues, the occasionally vicious extent of political infighting within the French Church and the resultant harshness of the Church’s reaction to Enlightenment writers after the 1750s also alienated many moderate Catholic Enlightenment clergy, Jansenist and Jesuit alike.127 The abbé de Condillac, for example, had had his earliest works approved and taught by Sorbonne faculty. Yet, after 1755 with the publication of Traité des sensations, Condillac was making his peace with a more materialist causality of human perception.128 The discrediting of the Jesuits and the disintegration of the proUnigenitus Catholic Enlightenment began with their justifiable distrust of Diderot’s editorial practices, and their single-minded pursuit of the Encyclopédie in the aftermath of the Prades Affair. Thereafter, the intellectual and political position of the Jesuits in France became untenable. With their left hand, the Jesuits continued to act with some indulgence toward Enlightenment sensationism, physics, and medical advances in their Mémoires de Trévoux throughout the 1750s.129 But, with their right hand, they supported pro-Unigenitus dévots in leading the charge against the Encyclopédie while ruthlessly backing

sur la veritable religion” in Oeuvres et correspondences inédites, ed. Charles Henry (Geneva: 1967), 1,3. 126 Proust, Diderot et l’Encyclopédie, 303–305; 313–323. 127 “Letter of Turgot to l’abbé Millot à Paris 2 September 1762,” in Mémoires de l’abbé Millot, 164–165; André Latrelle, in L’Eglise Catholique et la Révolution Française: Le pontificat de Pie VI et la crise Française (1775–1799) (Paris: 1946), vol. 2: 21–2. 128 Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746), in Oeuvres philosophiques de Condillac, Part I, Sec, 1, Chap. i. 6–8, vol. 1:5–10; John C. O’Neal, The Authority of Experience: Sensationist Theory in the French Enlightenment (University Park, PA: 1996), 22, 246. 129 See in “Article: 41: Medecine de l’esprit, où l’on traite des dispositions & des causes Physiques, qui, en consequence de l’union de l’âme avec le corps, influent sur les operations de l’esprit, &c. par Antoine le Camus,” MT (May 1753): 883–886, 899–901; “Article 66: Medecine de l’esprit par Camus, suite de l’article 41 au moins d’avril,” MT (August 1753): 1392, 1395; “Article 30: On Explication physique des sens, des idées, des mouvements, tant volontiers qu’involontiers, traduite de l’Anglois de M. Hartley par M. l’Abbé Jurain,” MT (June 1756): 703–713, 725.

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high-handed policies of sacrament refusal emanating from Archbishop Beaumont and Bishop Boyer throughout the 1750s. Thus between 1750 and 1765, the Catholic Enlightenment as it had evolved in the previous half century fractured, became more eclectic, and ceded the initiative over an expanding public sphere to more pro-Jansenist, Gallican Catholic Enlightenment writers on the one hand and more anticlerical Enlightenment writers on the other. 4. The Late Catholic Enlightenment in France, c. 1765–1789 Since Damiens’ attempt on Louis XV’s life, the political clout and intellectual viability of the Jesuits had been compromised, while Jansenists, the parlement of Paris, and the philosophes gained ground, and managed to orchestrate the expulsion of the Jesuits from France. By 1762, the pro-Jesuit dévots were no longer dominant at court after Mme de Pompadour began to lean upon the more anti-clerical Choiseul, whose prosecution of the Seven Years War required improved relations with Spain. As it happens, Carlos III was gravitating toward his own proJansenist Catholic Enlightenment reformers, who were themselves in contact with likeminded colleagues in France, Italy, and the Low Countries, and leaning toward their own anti-Jesuit policies.130 Thus, when the French Jesuits were defended by the 1762 General Assembly of the Clergy, only to be attacked with a compendium of condemned teachings (Molinism, moral laxity, crypto-materialism, and regicide) by the parlement of Paris, Louis XV did not defend them. The king needed the parlement ’s support and the good graces of the Spanish crown for the war effort more than he needed the Jesuits. As a result, an avalanche of exclusion orders came down from the parlements of the realm, and by 1764 the Jesuit order was effectively disbanded in France, its many seminaries, convents, and colleges—including the

130 Van Kley, “Jansenism and the International Expulsion of the Jesuits,” in Stewart J. Brown and Timothy Tackett (eds.), Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 8: Reawakening Revolution, 1660–1815, (Cambridge: 2006), 302–328; Van Kley, “Civic Humanism in Ecclesiastical Garb;” also Van Kley, “Catholic Conciliar Reform in an Age of Anti-Catholic Revolution,” RPEE, 46–118; also Antonio Mestre Sanchis, “Reaccciones en españa ante la expulsión de los jesuitas de Francia,” in Enrique Giménez López (ed.), Expulsión y exilio de los jesuitas españoles, (Alicante: 1997), 15–39; Noel, “Clerics and Crown in Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808: Jesuits, Jansenists, and Enlightened Reformers,” in RPEE, 119–153.


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mighty Louis-le-Grand—were at the mercy of a new order of public instruction in France spearheaded by the parlement of Paris directly.131 With the Jesuits gone from France, philosophes like d’Alembert (1717–1783) felt free to appeal to moderate jurists of the parlement of Paris in the name of education reform and toleration as, in Didier Masseau’s words, an estate “situated above parties and base quarrels” reminiscent of the 1750s.132 This mainstreaming of heretofore Radical Enlightenment noted both by Darnton and Israel would not have been possible without public support garnered during the period of intense disillusionment with the doctrinal and socio-political factionalism characteristic of the 1750s. Yet this very mainstreaming provoked grave concern. As a result of the furor over De l’Esprit, the Jesuit expulsion from France, and the rise to prominence of a mainstream secular Enlightenment in France, a convergence of dévot sentiment emerged during the 1750s–80s. In other words, the jeremiads of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques dating from approximately 1748 against the upsurge in radical philosophical works, and the dire warnings to Louis XV by the pro-Unigenitus Bishop of Mirepoix against the Encyclopédie, converged once the sacrament refusal controversy waned, and the intensity of anti-Jesuit hatred ebbed after 1763.133 In effect, the esprit-fort emerged from sermons after 1760 as a reified typology— a symbol for individual libertinage, social and political corruption, courtly and private interest versus public-spiritedness.134 France’s lackluster military performance during the Seven Years War was even attributed to the corruption of society occasioned by the philosophes.135 This convergence of Jansenist and Jesuit antiphilosophie was joined by a chorus of Protestant critics and otherwise fairly secular critics like Fréron, who was disgruntled by the stranglehold on royal patronage enjoyed by more famous philosophes. Though this assortment of critics

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CSEF, 550–557. Jean le Rond d’Alembert, “Troisième et dernière lettre à M. ***, conseiller au parlement de ***, pour server de supplement à l’ouvrage: Sur la destruction des Jésuites” in Oeuvres & correspondence complètes d’Alembert, ed. Charles Henry, (Geneva: 1967), 27–34; also ANTIPHILOSOPHIE, 158–161. 133 Mémoires du Duc de Luynes sur la cour de Louis XV, 1735–1758, 8 mars 1752; 8 février 1753, (Paris: 1863), 11:437–439; 12: 324. 134 Philippe LeFebvre, “Le regard sur l’incrédule dans les sermons de la deuxième moitie du dix-huitième siècle: évolution,” in Châtellier (ed.), Religions en transition dans la second moitié du dix-huitième siècle, 95–107; also Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Le Tableau de Paris, 1781–1788 (Paris: 1982), 258–63. 135 Cor.L, 238–241. 132

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mostly attacked the increasingly mainstream secular Enlightenment writers from vastly different motives and to vastly divergent ends, a strong component of the burgeoning Counter-Enlightenment identity studied by Darrin McMahon derived from former members of both pro-Augustinian and pro-Unigenitus Catholic Enlightenment writers. This reality, and the fact that clerical critics of the philosophes did not self-identify as anti-Enlightenment as such, inclines this author to favor Masseau’s term, antiphilosophe.136 Several milestones throughout the period 1762–1770 galvanized antiphilosophie and late Catholic Enlightenment apologetics. The first was publication of Rousseau’s Emile and Contrat social. Rousseau’s willingness to define conscience and judgment as innate principles of the heart, and sentiments and passion (when rightfully instructed in accordance with their nature) as the inner revelation from God and true nature of Christian teaching alarmed many, even among philosophes.137 In Rousseau, it seemed, Helvétius was taken to extremes—all religion was true in so far as it appealed only to human passions, considered by Rousseau to be naturally good. Thus, when in 1762 Rousseau was condemned by Beaumont, the parlement of Paris, and the Sorbonne for his sentiments in Emile, the same leap-frogging of censorious public pronouncements prevailed. Rousseau himself acknowledged this and attacked Archbishop Beaumont for issuing his mandement against Emile only because the parlement of Paris acted first.138 Similarly scandalous was Voltaire’s attempt to capitalize on and compete with the increasingly acclaimed Encyclopédie by championing civil toleration and reform of the legal system and publishing the Dictionnaire philosophique—a work which provoked additional scandal and coalescence of antiphilosophique sentiment.139 Though a deleteriously defensive convergence of antiphilosophe apologetics from both the Jansenist and pro-Unigenitus Catholic dévots

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ANTIPHILOSOPHIE, 20–21; COUNTER ENLIGHTENMENT, 7–48. CA, 94–95. 138 See Claude Yvon, Lettres à Monsieur Rousseau, pour servir de repose à sa lettre contre le mandement de Monsieur l’archévêque de Paris (Amsterdam: 1763), 109. 139 ANTIPHILOSOPHIE, 25–26, 157; also David D. Bien, The Calas Affair: Persecution, Toleration, and Heresy in Eighteenth-Century Toulouse (Princeton: 1960); Sara Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Pre-Revolutionary France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: 1993). 137


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is evident after 1757–1763, it must not be exaggerated. Catholicism did not become synonymous with Counter-Enlightenment leadership. The life of the famous apologist, Abbé Bergier, exemplifies the nuanced ambivalence of late Catholic Enlightenment writings.140 In response to Rousseau’s Emile and his Contrat social of 1762, and Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique in 1764, Beaumont commissioned the former Jesuit Nicholas-Sylvestre Bergier (1715–1790) to write a monumental refutation of Rousseau. The result, Bergier’s Le Déisme réfuté par lui-même ou examen en forme de lettres des principes d’incrédulité répandus dans les divers écrits de M. Rousseau (1765), was republished in five editions, and translated into both German and Italian. In this two-volume work, Bergier accused Rousseau of an absurd distinction by arguing that the “sublime moral teachings of the gospel come from God” but “the absurd doctrines it contains do not.”141 Bergier then directly tackled the question that had become the great divide separating Catholic from secular Enlightenment in France: “Could God . . . oblige us to believe in incomprehensible dogmas which do not appear in accord with our natural ideas?” Bergier’s answer was identical to those of Buffier and Houtteville—that the corpus of Catholic “revelation is an event which is not proven by reasoning but by the deposition of witnesses.”142 Against Rousseau, Bergier even cited Abbé de Prades’ own censured opinions against Rousseau’s attack on Catholic mysteries and doctrine.143 Bergier’s defense rested without attribution, therefore, upon an opinion that the Sorbonne had adjudged heterodox in 1752, yet his criticisms of Rousseau were highly regarded by bishops, apologists, and philosophes alike.144 So popular was Bergier that, for a benefice worth 20,000 livres and an additionally lavish royal pension, the 1770 General Assembly of the Clergy commissioned him to write the Examen critique ou réfutation du Système de Nature (1770)—a rebuttal to Baron d’Holbach’s work of the same year which touched off a firestorm of apologetics.145 Nevertheless, Bergier was a paragon of Enlightenment learning. Bergier may even have referred preliminary drafts of his Examen critique to Holbach 140 141 142 143 144 145

COUNTER ENLIGHTENMENT, 13. Bergier, DRPL, Lettre III, vol. 1:108. Ibid., III, vol. 1:116–19. Ibid., III, vol. 1:133–48. Ibid., III, vol. 1:149–50. ANTIPHILOSOPHIE, 166.

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(1723–1789) and Diderot for comment.146 As Bergier’s career demonstrates, even as Catholic defenders condemned the very Lockean sensationism so many had supported in the 1740s, and warned against the socially-corrosive effects of materialism, they still used fragments of earlier Catholic Enlightenment discourses to attack the likes of Diderot and D’Holbach for themselves being doctrinaire in their joint assertion that the mind is material and that human reason is transcendent above all epistemological limitation. The rhetorical excesses and tactical carelessness of some Catholic Counter-Enlightenment writers notwithstanding, many were prescient in their warning that a limitless apotheosis of human reason would ultimately lull it to sleep. Despite the rise of a Counter-Enlightenment ideology by the 1770s from the convergence of dévot criticisms by Jansenists and Jesuits alike after the 1750s, striking convergences and moderating trends are also evident after 1760.147 As McManners notes, “Jansenist pastoral ideals” became more widespread throughout the dioceses and parishes of France, even as conformity to Unigenitus orthodoxy became less problematic.148 A certain mainstreaming of Jansenism and a loss of ideological or polemical edge accompanied its loss of political relevance after 1763 with the Jesuits gone. Bishops who were reservedly favorable to moderate Jansenist Gallicanism were invested at Marseille (1755), Lyon (1758), and Blois (1776), and moderates like Malvin de Montazet, Bishop of Lyon, patronized Augustinian catechisms, quietly relaxed censorship of Jansenist works, and promoted Oratorians to positions of prominence over clerical education. In these years, the Oratorians for their part had much to do with the continued modernization of university science education and pastoral training.149 Many of these new moderate Catholic Enlightenment reformers were “popular teachers,” reasoned “ministers of charity,” and promoters of the role of the bon curé, so dear to late Catholic Enlightenment clerical ideals.150 Quite a number were also trained by Lazarist Seminaries, which even

146 Ibid., 161–70; Alan Kors, D’Holbach’s Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris (Princeton: 1976), 114–17. 147 Ibid., 7–48. 148 CSEF, 662. 149 Ibid., 662, 667. 150 Bernard Plongeron, La vie quotidienne du clérgé français au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: 1974), 200, 211; René Taton et al. (eds.), Enseignement et diffusion des sciences en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: 1964).


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by the 1750s had acquired the reputation as a breeding ground for pastoral reformers untainted by Jesuit-Jansenist polemics.151 Also worthy of further study are post-1760 convergences of proAugustinian and pro-Unigenitus perspectives. For example, the abbé Pluche, famous apologist of the 1740s-1750s who was so deeply imbued with the Jesuit Synthesis and was in many respects similar to Houtteville, also had Jansenist connections.152 Indeed, moderate Jansenists like Etienne Mignon argued that the whole of Christian ethics was accessible to natural reason alone, and Christ was merely republishing ethical principles lost by the corruption of mankind after the fall. This view was nearly identical to perspectives offered up by apologists influenced by the pro-Unigenitus Enlightenment (from Buffier to Houtteville). At least in Mignot’s case, the affinitites led to more sweeping applications of human reason to Catholic teachings, and to agricultural and commercial reforms.153 Convergence of dévot sentiment into the makings of a CounterEnlightenment on the one hand and the blunting of the polemical edge associated with the era of pro-Jansenist and pro-Jesuit Catholic Enlightenements on the other hand arose in response to the mainstreaming of more secular Enlightenment perspectives. In a way that threatened Counter-Enlightenment writers and challenged the more moderate Catholic Enlightenment apologetics after 1760, it was stylish even at court to be a supporter of reason, sensationism, the new science, social utility, and the pursuit of happiness. As a result, many defenses of Catholicism participated in the “taste and style of the times”154—a point long noted by historians of Catholic apologetics from André Latrelle, Bernard Plongeron, William Everdell, Didier Masseau, and others. Often lost however is the extent to which the barage of censorship associated with the 1750s (from Prades to the Encyclopédie to Helvétius) forced the surrender of the epistemological

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Miller, French Seminary ,58–60, 113–114, 209. Ehrard, L’idée de Nature, 80–81. 153 Monique Cottret, “Du Jansénisme au libéralisme: itinéraire e quelques abbés du siècle,” Dix-huitième siècle 34 (2002): 53–66; Dale Van Kley, “Pierre Nicole, Jansenism, and the Morality of Enlightened Self-Interest,” in Alan Charles Kors and Paul J. Korshin (eds.), Anticipations of the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany (Philadelphia: 1987), 69–85; Bernard Groethuysen, The Bourgeois: Catholicism versus Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France, trans. Mary Ilford (London: 1968). 154 Latrelle, L’église Catholique et la Révolution française, vol. 1:22. 152

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high ground to the philosophes in favor of the new principle of utility.155 The Archbishop of Paris, the Sorbonne, the parlement of Paris and the crown, had lept together into wholesale condemnation of Lockean sense-based psychology in order to prove their zeal of their faith to both king and public. With syntheses of Locke and Malebranche all on the outs, Catholic writers found themselves using Lockean sensationism while simultaneously condemning Locke, by name, as deistic, or, far more commonly, by abandoning historico-empirical apologetics based in the Lockean-Newtonian-Malebranchian Synthesis altogether.156 Where Helvétius and Diderot attacked the Catholic Church as false because it was not socially utilitarian, Catholic Enlightenment writers responded by demonstrating that the Church was individually or socially indispensible. Implicit in the late eighteenth century apologetics of the French Catholic Enlightenment, however, is a perilous concession to the governing paradigm of the Radical Enlightenment: that if the Church cannot be validated as morally progressive and necessary, it cannot be true. Yet the course of Catholic Enlightenment from about 1760 to 1789 was predominantly set by different forms of Christian utilitarian apologetics which followed in the footsteps of Turgot. Writers such as the Abbé Gourcy in Essai sur le Bonheur (1777), and Abbé Rose in La morale évangelique (1772) all argued that Christianity literally linked society together, promoted philosophical and moral progress of the individual, and boasted a distinctively superior gospel morality that was itself the highest evidence of its veracity. The monumental threevolume Esprit des apologistes by Jean Bardou portrayed a purified Catholic Christianity as most prone to tolerance, civic virtue, mercy, opposition to slavery, and respect for law. Ironically however, Bardou used Locke and his conspiratorial association with the Earl of Shaftesbury as the archetype of the way in which philosophes can be dangerous to society.157 In the aftermath of Baron d’Holbach’s atheistic writings, and with the Maupeou “revolution” temporarily abolishing the parlements in the interest of a kind

155 CA, 87; Bernard Plongeron, “Bonheur et ‘civilisation chrétienne’: une nouvelle apologétique au XVIIIème siècle,” in Theodore Besterman (ed.), Transactions of the Fourth International Congress on the Enlightenment VI, SVEC 154 (Oxford: 1976) 1637–1655. 156 See Burson, “Abdication of Legitimate Heirs,” SVEC 2005:7, 316–325. 157 CA, 120–122.


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of French Enlightened aboslutism (1774), the apologetical connection between the Church as socially vital “glue” that holds state and society together, and the esprit-fort as socially corrosive grew in importance.158 Catholic Enlightenment apologists even began to link purified Catholic Christianity with pre-Revolutionary French patriotism. At least according to William Everdell, “patriotic untilitarianism” prevailed especially during the reign of Louis XVI and was evinced by such works as Sur la réligion (1787) by Abbé de Boulogne.159 A common concern of the 1770s–1780s in France (as indeed throughout the whole of Europe) was the pervasive despotism of Old Regime absolutism—in the form of ministerial or royal despotism in France, Josephine despotism in Austria, or Parliamentary despotism in Britain and its empire. The manner in which Catholic Enlightenment writers both participated in and linked up with what Dale Van Kley has recently called “patriotic opposition” throughout Europe in these years continues to be a vitally significant avenue of research. It is an additionally significant entré into investigating convergences between Jansenists, former Jesuits, and various forms of Protestant Enlightenment discourses.160 But, at least in France, as Everdell notes, “after 1774” Catholic apologists “were willing to set aside the old problem of proving the Christian revelation to be universally valid for all societies as long as they might thereby prove it to be especially valid for French society.”161 While this development is a fascinating prelude to attempts during the French Revolution by Catholic Enlightenment priests to make the best of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and revive the medieval conciliarist ideal of national Catholic Churches doctrinally loyal to the pope but socio-politically tied to a particular component of the congretio fidelium—the state or nation162—the development signals a rather sweeping retreat from epistemologically rigorous apologia designed to prove a posteriori the “reasonableness” of the Catholic revelation in a universal sense. A patriotic apologetic accomplished little more than tacitly capitulating to a key Spinozan argument—that revealed religions

158 Durand Echeverria, The Maupeou Revolution: A Study in the History of Libertarianism: France, 1770–1774 (Baton Rouge: 1985). 159 CA, 125–135. 160 See Van Kley, “Religion and the Age of ‘Patriot’ Reform,” Journal of Modern History 80 (2008): 252–295. 161 CA, 136. 162 Van Kley, “Catholic Conciliar Reform in an Age of Anti-Catholic Revolution,” in RPEE, 46–118.

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are perhaps socially useful, but rationally indefensible. Events do not suggest that this apologetical capitulation was a philosophical inevitability, contrary to what Israel and so many historians have argued. Rather, it was a contingent eventuality resulting from the doctrinal and apologetical options that remained after so much of the French Church’s earlier, more open epistemological engagement with Locke, Newton, Bayle, and Malebranche had been problematized by the wave of censorship spanning the period from 1752 to 1762. Utility (individual, social, patriotic) was the most fashionable, safest apologetical criterion remaining to the Catholic Enlightenment from the middle 1760s to the Revolution. In so many ways, however, it was also the least defensible, most philosophically sterile option.163 Many Catholic Enlightenment authors, lay and clerical alike, realized the depth of the impasse, and in a somewhat ironic twist, found their inspiration for a new via media apologiae in Rousseau. Though he was condemned by the Church, a certain irony of the Catholic Enlightenment in France that connects it to pre-Romantic and Restoration-era Catholicism as well is the significant change in Catholic apologetics that Rousseau himself occasioned. While Everdell’s assertion that Rousseau was “a one-man evangelical movement and founder of Counter-Enlightenment in France” is highly exaggerated, he and other historians have astutely noted a kind of new third way hewn via Rousseau’s belief that society and citizenship could be most surely safeguarded by a true Christianity (i.e., natural religion for Rousseau), validated not by utility or any synthetic sensationism like the Jesuit Synthesis, but by inner feeling and amour de soi (“love of self ”). Catholics and Protestants did see in Rousseau a new and dangerous variety of deism, and encyclopédistes considered Rousseau a “dévot,” yet some apologists, like Pompignan (1709–1784), in fact, found in Rousseau a way of circumventing the difficulties of proving the veracity of Catholicism by appealing to its social utility—something that had become an ambivalent, dubiously convincing, and hackneyed proof for many in the secularized Enlightenment public in France by the 1760s–1780s.164 As such, Pompignan, Le Large de Lignac (1710–1763)

163 CA, 140–141; Everdell has a similar prognosis, but does not connect it to the socio-political contingencies of the 1750s as I do. See Burson, Theological Enlightenment; also Burson, “Counter-Enlightenment and Philosophe Identities.” 164 Ibid., 89–103; also [Para du Phanjas], Les principes de la saine philosophie, conciliés avec ceux de la religion: ou la philosophie de la Religion, par l’auteur de al Théorie


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as early as c. 1760, Chateaubriand and the Rosières Movement somewhat later (1774–1791), emphasized an apologetic tradition of affective utility—that the teachings and practices of the Catholic Church were resonant with one’s interior sentiment of amour de soi and virtue that, once purified of superstition, was the inner light of the heart connecting humanity to the beatific vision of God revealed in Christ’s gospel.165 With the mollified Rousseuism of the Rosières Movement then, Catholic Enlightenment shades ever so gently toward Restoration and Romantic Catholicism, much as Rousseau and the biological vitalism of the late Enlightenment connects secular Enlightenments with the Romantic nationalism, aesthetics, and utopianism of the nineteenth century.166 Everdell maintains that a close examination of what I would call affective utiliarianism reveals “its resemblance to the [R]evolutioanry cults of Reason, the Supreme Being, and Theophilanthropy.”167 The affinities require much further investigation, but far from insignificant is the circumstantial reality that many of those influenced by the Rosières movement went on to become Catholic Revolutionaries like the abbé Gregoire. Still more met their deaths as Girondistes during the Terror for “trying to combine Catholicism with republicanism.”168 5. Conclusion Historians are now very alert to the reductionism and teleology that beckon each time the question, “What is Enlightenment?” is answered in a way that privileges monochromatic taxonomies of “commerce,” “republicanism,” “Spinozism,” “empiricism,” or one national context to the exclusion of others. Similar risks of reification arise in the burgeoning historiography of Catholic Enlightenment too. While

des étres sensibles, 2 vols. (Paris, 1774), vol. 1: 129–131 [cited from the Clementine Collection by permission of the Special Collections Division of the Mullen Library, Catholic University]; Hisayasu Nakagawa, “J.-J. Rousseau et J.-G. Le Franc de Pompignan: La ‘Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard,’ et ‘De la religion civile critiqués par l’Instruction pastorale,” Dix-huitième siècle 34 (2002): 67–76. 165 POMPIGNAN, 119–137; Le Large de Lignac, Le Témoignage du sens intime et l’expérience opposé à la foi profane et ridicule des fatalistes modernes, 3 vols. (Auxerre, 1760); ANTIPHILOSOPHIE, 58; CA, 152–53, 183–196. 166 Franklin L. Baumer, Modern European Thought: Continuity and Change in Ideas, 1600–1950. (New York and London: 1977), 237–336. 167 CA, 194. 168 Ibid.

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Catholic Enlightenment does have a taxonomy of sorts which Ulrich Lehner deftly traces in the introduction to this volume, each national, socio-cultural, and dynastic-state context produced contingencies that, in turn, generated competing Catholic Enlightenment discourses that privileged some elements of Catholic Enlightenment over others. While much work remains, and the plurality of French Catholic Enlightenments sketched above should not be prematurely reduced to two rigid polarities of pro-Jansenist and pro-Jesuit Enlightenment, a vital issue at the heart of the story of Catholic Enlightenment in preRevolutionary France must be addressed. Specifically, future research needs to contend with the extent to which the desacralization of the French dynastic state, supposedly presaging the Revolution, may have been far less the desacralization of the monarchy and far more the final throes of an accidental desacralization of the post-Tridentine Gallican Church in the eyes of public opinion. The Gallican-conciliarist tradition of the French dynastic state, the erratic and often high-handed religious policies of three successive Bourbon kings from 1660 to 1789, and the issues relating to the role of free will, sin, and human reason left contentiously applied after the Council of Trent, all intersected in unique ways. The result was a highly contentious socio-political and religious factionalism that gave rise to a Catholic Enlightenment divided against itself in France. The infighting between pro-Unigenitus and pro-Augustinian writers—even when both sides in one way or another earnestly wanted a century of Enlightenment—often allowed philosophical radicals and secular writers to harness public opinion and claim the moral high ground above doctrinal and metaphysical disputes that were tearing the fabric of society asunder. As such, they were gradually written out of the very definition of modern science and human epistemology by those same philosophes. The decade of the 1750s was the climax of desacralization, when the zeal for enlightening the Church led pro-Unigenitus and pro-Augustinian Catholics to compete for royal and public favor by a wave of censorship that did little but strengthen the philosophes’ position and force the Late Catholic Enlightenment in France into ironic and eclectic directions that defended the faith based on epistemological assumptions set by a more mainstream secular Enlightenment. Social, intellectual, or affective utility, and questions of state and economic reform, education reform, and moral instruction dominated the 1760s–1780s. The Catholic Enlightenment movements of the period after the 1750s were thus qualitatively different from those


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of the earlier French eighteenth century—qualitatively different from related Catholic Enlightenment milieu in other European states. As such, the Enlightenment desacralization of the French monarchy is open to debate,169 but a uniquely acute socio-cultural and contingent desacralization of the post-Tridentine Catholic Church did occur in the eyes of French public opinion as a result of the furor over Unigenitus. The attendant French Catholic Enlightenment—and indeed, the whole of the Pre-Revolutionary century of lights in France—was therefore a distinctive national variant, nourishing a plurality of tendencies. The philosophical rigor and vitality of Catholic Enlightenment in France was not an inevitable failure as Israel argues, but it did fall victim to uniquely problematic socio-political and cultural contingencies in Old-Regime France. List of Abbreviations AN = Archives Nationales ANTIPHILOSOPHIE = Masseau, Didier, Ennemis des philosophes, l’antiphilosophie au temps des Lumières. (Paris: 2000). BASTON = Mémoires de l’abbé Baston, chanoine de Rouen (Paris: 1897). BN = Bibliothèque Nationale de France B.S. = Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne B.S.G. = Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève C&U = Palmer, Robert R., Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (Princeton: 1939). CA = Everdell, William R., Christian Apologetics in France, 1730–1790: The Roots of Romantic Religion (Lewiston/Queenston: 1987). CERUTTI = Cerutti, Antoine Joachim de, Apologie de la doctrine morale des jésuites ou exposé de la conduite que les pères de la compagnie de Jésus ont toujours tenue dans l’énseignement de la morale, et sentimens qu’ils ont professés sur le precépte de l’amour de Dieu, sur le péché philosophique et sur le probabilisme de l’Institut des Jésuites (Avignon: 1828). COUNTER ENLIGHTENMENT = McMahon, Darrin, Enemies of Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: 2001). CN = Bell, David A., The Cult of the Nation: Inventing French Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard: 2001). Cor.L = Grimm, Diderot, Raynal, Meister, Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, 16 vols. (Paris: 1878; repr. Nendeln/Liechtenstein: 1968).

169 Jeffrey Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: 1990); for criticisms, see Simon Burrows, Blackmail, Scandal and Revolution. London’s French Libellistes 1758–92 (Manchester, U.K.: 2006); also William Doyle, “Une desacralisation a desacraliser? a propos d’une interpretation recente de la monarchie francaise au xviiie siecle,” in Anne-Marie Cocula and Josette Pontet (eds.) Itinéraries spirituels, enjeux matériels en Europe: mélanges offerts à Philippe Loupes, 2 vols. (Bordeaux: 2005), vol. 2: 383–390.

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CRE = O’Keefe, Cyril, Contemporary Reactions to the Enlightenment (1728–1762): A Study of Three Critical Journals: the Jesuit Journal de Trévoux, the Jansenist Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, and the secular Journal de Savants (Geneva Paris: 1974). CSEF = McManners, John, Church and Society in Eighteenth Century France (Oxford: 1998). DAMIENS = Van Kley, Dale K., The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Ancien Regime, 1750–1770 (Princeton: 1984). DIEU/NATION = Mairie, Catherine, De la cause de Dieu à la cause de la nation: le jansénisme aux XVIIIe siècle (Paris: 1998). Discours de Turgot in Ouevres = [Turgot, Jacques], Discours de Turgot alors prieur de Sorbonne, pour l’ouverture et la cloture des Sorbonniques de l’année: prémier discours, sur les avantages qui l’établissement du christianisme a procurées au genre humain pronouncé le 3 juillet 1750, in Oeuvres de Turgot, vol. 2, ed. Daire, Eugène and Dussard, Hippolyte (Paris: 1844). SuarezDFC = Suarez, Francisco, Defensio fidei catholicae adversus Anglicanae sectae errores, cum responsione ad apologiam pro juramento fidelitatis et epistolam ad principes christianos serenissimi Jacobi Angliae Regis, in Opera omnia (Paris: 1859). SuarezDLacDL = Suarez, Francisco, De Legibus ac Deo legislatore in decem libros distributus utriusque fori hominibus non minus utilis quam necessarius (Leipzig: 1619). DRPL = Bergier, Nicholas-Sylvestre, Le Déisme réfuté par lui-même ou examen en forme de lettres des principes d’incrédulité répandus dans les divers écrits de M. Rousseau, 4th. ed., 2 vols. (Paris: 1768). EC = Israel, Jonathan I., Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1672–1752 (Oxford: 2006). EMRM = Malebranche, Nicholas, Entretiens sur la métaphysique, sur la religion, et sur la mort (1696; 1711), in Oeuvres complètes du Malebranche, ed. Rodis-Lewis, Geneviève, Bibliothèque de la Pléïade 390 (Paris: 1992), vol. 2: 649–1040. ESPRIT = Helvétius, Claude Adrien, De l’Esprit, vol. 1, Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1818). ESSAY = Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Nidditch, Peter H. (Oxford: 1975). EXPULSION = Van Kley, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France, 1757–1765 (New Haven: 1975). FHE = Brockliss, L.W.B., French Higher Education in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Cultural History (Oxford: 1987). FMPT = Skinner, Quentin, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: 1978). HOOKE = O’Connor, Thomas, An Irish Theologian in Paris, 1714–1796 (Dublin: 1995). JL = Cottret, Monique, Jansénisme et Lumières: pour un autre XVIIIe siècle (Paris: 1998). MCM = Malebranche, Niclas, Méditations chrétiennes et métaphysiques (1707), in Oeuvres completes du Malebranche, ed. Rodis-Lewis, Geneviève, Bibliothèque de la Pléïade 390 (Paris: 1992), 2:191–419. METHOD = Descartes, René, Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la vérité dans les sciences, vol. 1, Oeuvres philosophiques de Descartes, ed. Alquié, Ferdinand (Paris: 1988). MT = Mémoires de Trévoux NN.EE. = Nouvelles ecclésiastiques ORF = Doyle, William (ed.) Old Regime France. (Oxford: 2001). OCD = Œuvres complètes de Diderot, ed. Assézat, Jean and Tourneux, Maurice (Paris: 1875). OFR = Campbell, Peter R. (ed.), Origins of the French Revolution, (Houndsmills: 2006). POMPIGNAN = Jean-Georges Le Franc de Pompignan, Questions diverses sur l’incrédulité, 3rd. ed. (Paris: 1757).


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RE = Israel, Jonathan I., Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: 2001). ROFR = Van Kley, Dale K., The Religious Origins of the French Revolution from Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven: 1996). RPEE = Bradley, James E. and Van Kley. Dale K. (ed.), Religion and Politics in Enlightenment Europe, (Notre Dame: 2001). RTCàLR = Joutard Philippe (ed.), Du Roi Très Chrétien à la laïcité républicaine, vol. 3, Histoire de la France religieuse (Paris: 1991). SVEC = Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century. TPV = Buffier, Claude G., Traité des Premières vérités et de la source de nos jugements, in Oeuvres philosophiques du Père Buffier (Paris: 1843). TRACTATUS = Spinoza, Benedict [Baruch] de, Tractatus Theologo-politicus [1679], vol. 3, Opera quae supersunt omnia, ex editionibus principibus, ed. Charles Hermann Bruder (Leipzig: 1843–1846).

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THE CATHOLIC ENLIGHTENMENT IN AUSTRIA OR THE HABSBURG LANDS Harm Klueting 1. The Part of Europe in Question Before1 1804 “Austria” was the name of the Habsburg dynasty, the “House of Austria”. However there were also the “German hereditary lands” or the “Austrian lands”—the archduchies of “Austria under the river Enns” (Lower Austria) and “Austria above the river Enns” (Upper Austria), the duchies of Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola and lands such as Tyrol or the later Vorarlberg. These “Hereditary lands” under the rule of the Habsburg “archduke of Austria” or—in case of Maria Theresa (1717–1780) the archduchess of Austria—were united with the kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary. Another part of the “Austrian lands” were the territories of the so-called “Austrian Vorlande” and “Swabian Austria” in the southwest of Germany. Since 1714 the former Spanish Netherlands—the “Austrian Netherlands”—and the duchies of Milan and Mantua—the “Austrian Lombardy”—were parts of the “Austrian Monarchy”. In 1772 parts of Poland became Austrian before Joseph II occupied Bukovina in 1774. The western part of the “Austrian Monarchy” including Bohemia was a constituent part of the Holy Roman Empire. The Austrian Netherlands were connected with this Empire in a loose way, whereas for the Italian territories in Lombardy these connections were no more than traditions of feudal law. The Habsburg archdukes were Roman emperors from the coronation of Frederick III in 1452 to the decline of the Empire in 1806, except the years 1740 to 1745. The German-speaking Hereditary lands with their capital in Vienna were regarded culturally as parts of Germany,

1 The author apologizes for the lack of details in this article and in its notes. Due to limitations of space he eliminated many items his first draft contained. He deleted a great number of names of 17th and 18th century persons, many titles of 17th and 18th century books and many particular points concerning personal networks or theological and philosophical ideas. Moreover he removed many quotations taken from original sources. In the notes he deleted references to sources (mostly from his own edition Der Josephinismus (1995) and bibliographic information.

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with an especially close relationship to the Catholic parts of Germany like Bavaria, the Rhineland, and the Catholic countries of Southwest Germany which were partly provinces of the Austrian Monarchy. 2. Foreign Influences and Austrian Formations The wide expanse of the Austrian Monarchy resulted in various influences on thought and ideas, knowledge and intellectual life, philosophy and theology. But there were also special Austrian conditions and formations grown up since the 17th century. Perhaps the most important was the “Austro-Catholicism” that arose as a result of the Counter-Reformation in Austria since its beginning in the later 16th century and of the decline of the Bohemian opposition of the noble estates and the Bohemian Protestantism by the victory of Ferdinand II on the White Mountain in 1620. Thereafter Catholicism and Habsburg autocracy had triumphed elsewhere in the Habsburg dominions except Hungary, which was mostly under Turkish rule until the end of the 17th century. R. J. W. Evans has written about the alliance of the Habsburg dynasty, the new Catholic aristocracy, and the Catholic church.2 The result of this triple alliance was what he called “AustroCatholicism”. Another specifically Austrian formation was the “Pietas Austriaca”, i.e. the baroque form of Catholicism and Catholic piety with its culmination under Leopold I (1640–1705).3 The close connection between the Hereditary lands and Italian territories like the duchy of Milan appears to be the most important reason for Italian influences on Austria. In Italy began the “Innocentian turn”, first under Innocent XI, elected pope in 1676, who was one of the most important popes of the 17th century, and afterwards under Innocent XII. The “Innocentian turn” was a turn against baroque Catholicism in remembrance of the 16th-century Council of Trent and its mostly unfulfilled reformatory efforts.4 This re-establishment of the Tridentine reforms was one of the foundations and motifs of Catholic

2 Robert John Weston Evans, The Making of the Habsburg monarchy, 1550–1700, (Oxford: 1979), 169. 3 Anna Coreth, Pietas Austriaca (Lafayette, Ind.: 2004; orig., Munich: 1959). 4 Peter Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung. Europäische Gesellschaft und Kultur im Barockzeitalter 2 vols., (Freiburg: 2006), vol. 2: 953.

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Enlightenment5—the other was Jansenism.6 Another Italian influence upon Austria was Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750) and his Philo-Jansenist ideas. With the Spanish Netherlands the Austrian Monarchy inherited the tradition of Jansenism, because Jansenism originated in the Netherlands. The Dutch-born Cornelius Jansenius the Younger (1585–1638), the theologian after whom Jansenism was named, was a professor at the university of Leuven. His book Augustinus, published in 1640, was the first important work of the Jansenist theology of divine grace. At Leuven Zeger-Bernard van Espen (1646–1728)7 was a professor of canon law and an exponent of Jansenist-Gallican canonical ideas. However, the Austrian Netherlands brought Austria into close contact not only with French Gallicanism but also with the Jansenist Church of Utrecht in the Dutch republic. The membership of the Hereditary lands and Bohemia in the Holy Roman Empire, the role of the archdukes as heads of the Empire, and the role of Vienna as a seat of important institutions of the Empire brought about powerful influences of the Protestant Enlightenment of the northern parts of Germany on Austria and resulted in close connections between the Catholic culture of South Germany, the Hereditary lands and Bohemia. There were close relations between South German Benedictine abbeys like St. Blasien, St. Emmeram or Banz and the Benedictines of Melk or Goettweig in Lower Austria. Wallnig speaks about “a network of Upper German Benedictines”.8 The archbishopric of Salzburg was one of the most important German ecclesiastical principalities but not a part of Austria. But the see and the chapter of

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Harm Klueting, “‘Der Genius der Zeit hat sie unbrauchbar gemacht’. Zum Thema ‘Katholische Aufklärung’—Oder: Aufklärung und Katholizismus im Deutschland des 18. Jahrhunderts. Eine Einführung,” in Klueting (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung— Aufklärung im katholischen Deutschland (Hamburg: 1993) 1–35, especially 7; Heribert Raab, “Die ‘Katholische Ideenrevolution’ des 18. Jahrhunderts. Der Einbruch der Geschichte in die Kanonistik und die Auswirkungen in Kirche und Reich”, in Klueting (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung, 104–118, especially 104 f.; Andreas Holzem, Religion und Lebensform. Katholische Konfessionalisierung im Sendgericht des Fürstbistums Münster 1570–1800 (Paderborn: 2000), 456–470. 6 For both “Innocentian turn” and Jansenism, Hersche, Muße, vol. 2: 952–959. 7 Michel Nuttinck, La vie et l’oeuvre de Zeger-Bernard van Espen. Un canoniste janséniste, gallican et régalien à l’Université de Louvain (1646–1728) (Leuven: 1969). 8 Thomas Wallnig, Gasthaus und Gelehrsamkeit. Studien zu Herkunft und Bildungsweg von Bernhard Pez OSB vor 1709 (Vienna: 2007), 92–98.

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the cathedral of Salzburg were domains of the Austrian nobility. The university of Salzburg with Benedictines as professors, mostly of South German monasteries, was the alma mater of many Austrian priests and higher clerics and contributed eminently to Austrian culture.9 Parts of the archdiocese of Salzburg belonged to the Hereditary lands. Subordinate sees of the metropolitan archdiocese of Salzburg were the sub-dioceses of Gurk, Lavant and Seckau in Carinthia and Styria, three of the four sub-dioceses of the archdiocese of Salzburg beside the subdiocese of Lake Chiem in Upper Bavaria. Also the bishopric of Passau was an ecclesiastical principality of the Empire and not a part of the Habsburg countries. But almost six-sevenths of the diocese of Passau was Austrian because most parishes in Lower and Upper Austria stood under the authority of Passau. It is impossible to separate the Catholic Enlightenment in Germany from the Catholic Enlightenment in Austria or vice versa. The links, connections, influences, relations, and networks were too strong. Some persons were proponents of the Catholic Enlightenment in Germany and Austria, and many ideas and characteristics were prevalent in the Catholic parts of Germany and in the Hereditary lands. Nevertheless there were differences. The most important difference seems to be the great importance of Jansenism in the Austrian Monarchy and the lack—or slightness—of Jansenist influences in Germany outside the Hereditary lands. The other important difference was, despite Bavarian church policy, that Catholic Enlightenment in the Austrian Monarchy culminated in the autocratic and state-run church reform of so-called Josephinism.

9 Harm Klueting, “Die Bedeutung der Salzburger Spätaufklärung für die europäische Geistesgeschichte—oder: Salzburg als Zentrum der deutschen katholischen Aufklärung,” in Gerhard Ammerer and Alfred Stefan Weiss (eds.), Die Säkularisation Salzburgs 1803. Voraussetzungen—Ereignisse—Folgen (Frankfurt/Main: 2005), 37–55; Harm Klueting, “Salzburg und die Aufklärung,” in Laurenz Luetteken and HansJoachim Hinrichsen (eds.), Mozarts Lebenswelten (Kassel: 2008), 31–53.


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3. Jansenism in the Austrian Monarchy 3.1. Austrian First Jansenism or Philo-Jansenism There cannot be a doubt that there really was Catholic Enlightenment10 not only in Germany but also in the Austrian countries.11 At the beginning of Catholic Enlightenment in the Hereditary lands stood Jansenism12 although Jansenism was identical with the Catholic Enlightenment.13 The common element between Jansenism and Catholic Enlightenment was an anti-baroque sentiment. The first appearance of Jansenism in the Hereditary lands were the translations of Jansenist books from French into German published by Franz Anton von Sporck (1662–1738), for example Nicolaus Letourneux’s (1640–1686) Histoire de la vie de notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ (1678). Letourneux was a confessor of the nuns of Port-Royal near Paris, which Sporck had visited in 1680. Karl Theodor Otto prince Salm (1645–1710), responsible for the education of the later emperor Joseph I (1678–1711), or prince Eugène of Savoy (1663–1736), were more or less sympathetic towards Jansenism. The same applies to Johann Christoph Baron Bartenstein (1690–1767), a convert from Protestantism and secretary of state in Vienna under Charles VI and Maria Theresa from 1733 to 1753.

10 Hersche, Muße, vol. 2: 962 f. “Catholic Enlightenment” cannot be synonymous with “Reform Catholicism” if Ernst Wangermann, “Reform Catholicism and political Radicalism in the Austrian Enlightenment,” in Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (ed.), The Enlightenment in national context (Cambridge, UK: 1981), 127–140, here 133 is right that “Reform Catholics” were much closer to the main assumptions of the Enlightenment than the protagonists of Catholic Enlightenment. 11 Klueting (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung; Elisabeth Kovács (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung und Josephinismus (Vienna 1979); especially Bernard Plongeron, “Was ist Katholische Aufklärung?” ibid., 11–56; Plongeron, “Auf der Suche nach einer neuen religiösen Anthropologie der Aufklärung: die Überlegungen der katholischen Aufklärung,” in Plongeron (ed.), Aufklärung, Revolution, Restauration (1750–1830) (Freiburg: 2000), 252–264. See also Bernhard Schneider, “‘Katholische Aufklärung’. Zum Werden und Wert eines Forschungsbegriffs,” in Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 93 (1998), 354–397. 12 Peter Hersche, Der Spätjansenismus in Österreich, (Vienna: 1977); Hersche, “Der österreichische Spätjansenismus. Neue Thesen und Fragestellungen,” in Kovács (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung, 180–193. 13 Catherine Maire, De la cause de Dieu à la cause de la Nation. Le jansénisme au XVIIIe siècle, (Paris: 1998); Françoise Hildesheimer, Le Jansénisme en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: 1991); Louis Cognet, Le jansénisme (Paris: 1961); Augustin Gazier, Histoire générale du mouvement janséniste depuis ses origines jusqu’à nos jours, 2 vols. (Paris: 1924).

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Hersche calls the attitude towards Jansenism shared by these and other influential persons of the first half of the 18th century Philo-Jansenism or Austrian Early Jansenism, as opposed to Austrian Late Jansenism. But according to Hersche there was no direct connection between early Austrian Philo-Jansenism, which got its ideas from Paris and Leuven—Salm or Bartenstein were acquainted with Jansenism through their stays in Paris; prince Eugène’s friends were interested in the ideas of Port-Royal—, and Austrian Late Jansenism, which was under the influence of Muratori or the Church of Utrecht. 3.2. The Philo-Jansenist Bishops The proponents of the two generations of Austrian Early Jansenism, with the exception of the younger Bartenstein, died before Maria Theresa’s accession to the throne in 1740. After 1740 a younger generation of Philo-Jansenists appeared. In particular, some Philo-Jansenist bishops now became very important because their Philo-Jansenism was a different kind of Philo-Jansenism than that of the older generation— marked not only by Jansenist sympathies but also by practical measures which put anti-baroque Jansenist ideas into effect and prepared the later church reforms of Josephinism.14 The first such bishop was Joseph Maria Count Thun (1713–63), bishop of Gurk since 1741, and from 1762 until his death bishop of Passau. Born in Trent, he studied theology and canon law at Salzburg. During an educational journey through Italy he became acquainted with Muratori and was later a member of the Muratorian circle founded in Salzburg in 1739. From 1730 to 1744 he lived in Rome as extraordinary envoy of the emperor at the papal court and examining magistrate (“Auditor”) at the papal Court of Justice. During of the pontificates of Clement XII (1730–1740) and Benedict XIV (1740–1758) he associated with Philo-Jansenist circles of reform-minded higher clerics in Rome. As bishop of Gurk, Thun, who was a strong opponent of the Jesuits, founded a seminary for priests at Strassburg in Carinthia, where he taught as a professor of the New Testament, and employed the Benedictines Gregor Zallwein (1712–1766) of Wessobrunn and Benedict Oberhauser (1719–1786) of Lambach as professors of canon law, both later important voices of enlightened canon law. He also translated

14

The following mostly according to Hersche, Spätjansenismus.


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the Four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles into German (1762). As bishop of Passau Thun divested the Jesuits of the responsibility for the education of priests, founded a seminary in Passau with secular clergymen as professors, and established statutes for this seminary with an Augustinian and anti-Jesuit character. He wanted to introduce Jan Opstraet’s (1651–1720) Pastor Bonus as a textbook for pastoral theology but died before doing so. In both dioceses, Gurk and Passau, he arranged visitations, reformed and increased catechesis, and reduced baroque forms of piety and worship. According to Hersche there was a direct connection between Thun’s reform attempts and the later staterun church reform. Leopold Ernst Count Firmian (1708–1783), nephew of the archbishop of Salzburg—Leopold Anton Eleutherius von Firmian (1679– 1744), who had expelled the Salzburg Protestants in the 1730s—, studied at the Collegium Germanicum in Rome from 1726 to 1729, was a member of the Salzburg Muratori circle, and received the bishopric of Seckau in 1739 and, as Thun’s successor, that of Passau in 1763. He published a new edition of the Pastor Bonus, distributed one copy to each priest of the diocese of Passau, and desired to make Opstraet’s work a general guideline for pastoral care. After he became a cardinal in 1772 he put Jansenist ideas more into the background . Unlike him, his brother Vigilius Maria Count Firmian (1714–1788), bishop of Lavant from 1744 to 1753 and before that a student in Rome, probably held Jansenist ideas until his death. Johann Joseph Count Trautson (1704–1757), archbishop of Vienna since 1751 and cardinal since 1756, stood at the beginning of church reforms in Vienna. The archbishop’s pastoral letter of 175215 partly anticipated the state-run church reforms. Trautson was responsible for the first reform of theological studies in 1752. Karl Johann Count Herberstein (1719–1787), student in Salzburg, member of the Salzburg Muratori circle, and since 1772 bishop of Laibach in Carniola, stood up frankly for his Jansenist ideas, promoted the project of a union between the Catholic Church and the Jansenist Church of Utrecht alongside Ferdinand Count Hallweil or Joseph Philipp Count Spaur (1718–1791), the bishop of Seckau and since 1780 bishop of Bressanone, and also anticipated the church reform of Jopsephinism. Other Austrian bishops

15 Peter Hersche (ed.), Der aufgeklärte Reformkatholizismus in Österreich (Bern: 1976), 9–15.

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with Philo-Jansenist sympathies or ideas must remain unnamed in this article except Ferdinand Count Hallweil (1706–1773), bishop of Wiener-Neustadt since 1741. He studied at the Germanicum, was friendly with Vienna Jansenists like Ambros Simon von Stock, the Italian Giovanni Giuseppe Ramaggini (c. 1710/20–after 1788),16 Ignaz Müller (1713–1782) or the Dutch Anton de Haen (1704–1776), and tried to promote the Church of Utrecht. The Philo-Jansenist bishops did what they could to reform the education of priests, they rejected Jesuit moral theology—Molinism and Probabilism—and they propagated Jansenist books, which they distributed among young students of theology and priests. Moreover, they encouraged young Jansenist theologians, some of whom supported the idea of a reunification of the Church of Utrecht with the Catholic Church.17 Perhaps the most important (and at the same time ambivalent) figure under these bishops was Cardinal Christoph Anton Count Migazzi (1714–1803).18 He was a student of law at the University of Innsbruck while Paul Joseph Riegger (1705–1775),19 the main proponent of Enlightenment natural law theory in Austria, was a professor of canon law there. From 1751 to 1756 he served as coadjutor of the archbishop of Mecheln. In 1757 Migazzi ascended the chair of the archbishop in Vienna. He pursued a strongly reform-minded policy against baroque forms of piety and worship, and against the Jesuits and Jesuit moral theology. He prohibited the catechism of Petrus Canisius, introduced Jansenist textbooks at the seminary for priests and provided his clergy and the students with Muratori’s works in German translation. The archbishop cooperated with the state, above all as co-president of the ministry of education (“Studienhofkommission”)—together with Gerard van Swieten (1700–1772), personal physician to Maria Theresa and the other co-president—from 1760 until his resignation from this position in 1774. In this way he was a trailblazer of state-run church reform. But in 1767 he changed his mind to a strong conservative

16

Hersche, Spätjansenismus, 81, note 160. Peter Hersche, “Die österreichischen Jansenisten und die Unionsverhandlungen der Utrechter Kirche mit Rom,” in Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 82 (1971): 314–343. 18 Peter Hersche, “Erzbischof Migazzi und die Anfänge der jansenistischen Bewegung in Wien,” in Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 24 (1971): 280– 309. 19 Eckhard Seifert, Paul Joseph Riegger (1705–1775). Ein Beitrag zur theoretischen Grundlegung des josephinischen Staatskirchenrechts (Berlin: 1973). 17


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behavior20 in opposition to Josephinism. The breaking points were the policies of taxation of church property and of state intervention in the inner life of the church by chancellor Wenzel Anton Count (1764 prince) Kaunitz-Rietberg (1711–1794). 3.3. The First Reform of Theological Studies Aside from Leuven and Salzburg, all Catholic universities in the Empire including the Hereditary lands and Bohemia were universities with Jesuits as professors or Jesuit universities. This was the reason for the roles of Leuven and Salzburg as hotbeds of Jansenism, PhiloJansenism and Catholic Enlightenment, because Jansenism and Catholic Enlightenment were anti-Jesuit. In Vienna Migazzi’s predecessor as archbishop, Johann Joseph Trautson, established new course regulations for the faculty of theology of the university in 175221 through which the studies of Greek and Hebrew, the Bible, and church history were strengthened, although dogmatic theology retained its leading position. The Jesuit Ludwig Debiel (1697–1771), a lecturer in Hebrew, an outsider in his order and a critic of Jesuit moral theology, became director of the faculty of theology, but this half-hearted reform of 1752 was only the first step. More radical were the measures of Migazzi, who founded in the “Innocentian spirit” a seminary for priests in 1785. Before that, there had never been a seminary for the Vienna diocese. With the foundation of this seminary, Migazzi fulfilled the decree of the Council of Trent of 1563 that bishops had to establish a seminary in their diocese. The Jesuits had no influence in the new seminary. Migazzi introduced Jansenist textbooks for moral theology. He appointed the young Jansenist Melchior Blarer (1729–1796) as regent of the new seminary, who resigned in 1760 and was followed by Patricius Fast (1726–1790) until 1762 and then by Georg Mayer. Another teacher of the seminary was one of its first alumni, the church historian Ferdinand Stöger (1737–1816). In 1759 Migazzi’s reform of the theological studies at Vienna University was followed by a decree issued by Maria Theresa 20 Dieter Breuer, “Kardinal Migazzi, Förderer und Gegner des kulturellen Wandels im Theresanischen Zeitalter,” in Franz M. Eybel (ed.), Strukturwandel und kulturelle Praxis. Beiträge zu einer kulturwissenschaftlichen Sicht des Theresanischen Zeitalters (Vienna: 2002), 219–231. 21 Hermann Zschokke, Die theologischen Studien und Anstalten der katholischen Kirche in Österreich (Vienna: 1894), 15–25.

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and prepared by the “Studienhofkommission” under his co-presidency.22 Directors of the faculties of both theology and philosophy, Debiel and Joseph Franz (1704–76), were dismissed. Their successors were Ambros Simon Stock in the faculty of theology and Johann Peter Simen (1715–1775) in the faculty of philosophy. The Jesuit monopoly on the professorships was abolished. Now secular priests, but also Dominicans or Augustinians, could hold a chair not only at Vienna University but also at the other universities of the Austrian Monarchy. Probabilism was prohibited. Migazzi’s co-president Gerard van Swieten, head of the faculty of medicine since 1749 and responsible for the reform of medical studies, supported him, but the reform of the studies of theology was Miggazzi’s own work. Ambros Simon Stock studied theology at the Germanicum and at the Sapienza University in Rome since 1726 and received his doctor’s degree in 1732. This was the time after the death of pope Clement XI (1721), the pontificates of Benedict XIII (1724–1730) and Clement XII (1730–1740), when anti-Jesuitism became acceptable at the Holy See and Philo-Jansenist scholars found the protection of some cardinals, including some at the Sapienza or the Germanicum, although the latter was under Jesuit administration, but also at the Casanatense Library. Egidio Giuli, professor of canon law at the Germanicum, and Gregor Selleri were Stock’s teachers. Stock came back to Vienna as a devotee of Muratori and an adversary of baroque piety. Moreover, he was filled with the idea of Christian charity as the center of Christian belief. Long before becoming director of the Vienna faculty of theology, he had received the position of dean of that faculty in 1741 and rector of the university in 1746, always as a protégé of Archbishop Migazzi. As director of the faculty of theology since 1759 and responsible for censorship, Stock held a key position in which he pursued the circulation of Jansenist and anti-papal canonistic literature, such as Hontheim’s Febronius of 1763. He supported the Jansenist canonist Benedikt Oberhauser and propagated Paul Joseph Riegger’s ideas by his own but anonymous Synopsis doctrinae (1769). He set up the state measures against orders, monks, and monasteries and against Jesuits as professors at the universities everywhere in the Austrian Monarchy. Later Stock distanced himself from his mentor Migazzi, certainly since the Febronius controversy, and at the latest with the cardinal’s conser-

22

The decree of 10 September 1759 in Zschokke, Theologische Studien, 27 f.


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vative turn of 1767. Stock’s most important disciples were Melchior Blarer and Marc Anton Wittola (1736–1797).23 3.4. Ignaz Müller and his Jansenist Circle One of the Vienna Jansenists of the middle generation was the Augustinian canon Ignaz Müller (1713–1782), who was elected provost of St. Dorothee convent in Vienna in 1760. He organized a circle of Jansenist clerics and scholars which came together in St. Dorothee. Regular participants were Ambros Simon Stock, Anton de Haen, Giovanni Giuseppe Ramaggini and other Italians like Pietro Maria Gazzaniga (1722–1799), the professor of theology at Vienna University, Agostino Gervasio (1730–1806), the Augustinian friar and later archbishop of Capua who was a professor of Augustinian theology at Vienna University from 1763 to 1768, and Giuseppe Bertieri (1734–1804), also an Augustinian friar and Gervasio’s successor as professor in Vienna. After 1771 other occasional participants included Friedrich Karl von Erthal (1719–1802), who was in Vienna from 1769 to 1773 as an envoy extraordinary of the archbishop of Mainz and later archbishop of Mainz (since 1775), Karl Joseph von Firmian (1716–82), brother of the bishops Leopold Ernst and Virgilius Maria von Firmian and govenor-general of the Austrian Lombardy since 1756, Joseph von Sperges (1725–1791), who was appointed chief of the Italian department of the Austrian state chancellery in Vienna, responsible for Austrian Lombardy and bishop Ferdinand Count Hallweil. Moreover, Corneille de Neny (1718–76), Maria Theresa’s secretary coming from the Austrian Netherlands, sometimes Wittola, the satirical writer Gottfried Heinrich von Bretschneider (1739–1810), the writer and vice chancellor of the Bohemian chancellery in Vienna Tobias Philipp von Gebler (1726–1786), and possibly Giuseppe Garampi (1725–1792),24 nuncio in Vienna from 1776 to 1785, came to meetings. The Ignaz Müller Circle was influential on Catholic Enlightenment in Austria because it was the link between Jansenist individuals in the capital and an intellectual laboratory for Jansenism in the metropolis. But since the late 23 Manfred Brandl, Marx Anton Wittola. Seine Bedeutung für den Jansenismus in deutschen Landen (Steyr: 1974). 24 Derek Beales, “Nuncio Garampi proposes to excommunicate Joseph II, 1781,” in János Kalmár (ed.), Miscellanea fontium historiae Europaeae. Festschrift Eva Balázc (Budapest: 1997), 252–257; Dries Vanysacker, Cardinal Giuseppe Garampi (1725–92). An Enlightened Ultramontane (Turnhout: 1995).

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1770s, ten years later than Migazzi’s turnabout, the circle took a conservative turn—because of the the radicalization of Jansenism and the Catholic Enlightenment conducted by a younger generation, especially Melchior Blarer, Marx Anton Wittola, Franz Stephan Rautenstrauch (1734–1785) or Johann Baptist de Terme (1738–1787). The death of Maria Theresa in 1780, when Joseph II was 39 years old, marks the end of the older generation’s impact: under Migazzi’s influence Maria Theresa dismissed her Jesuit confessor Ignaz Kampmiller (1693–1777) in 1767. He was replaced by Ignaz Müller as confessor extraordinary in 1767 and as confessor ordinary after the abolition of the Jesuit order in 1773. Joseph II rejected him, and thus, the Jansenist provost of St. Dorothee lost his influence after the death of Maria Theresa. 3.5. The Second Reform of Theological Studies Ambros Simon Stock died in 1772. His favorite, Wittola, was left out of the appointment of the new director of the Vienna faculty of theology. Joseph Count Gondola (1711–1774), a Benedictine of Ettal, who was auxiliar bishop of Paderborn from 1751 until his resignation in 1765 and canon of St. Stephen in Vienna since 1765, received this influential position. According to Hersche, Gondola was a friend of the Jesuits. However, Gondola died in 1774, one year after the Jesuit order had been abolished by Clement XIV (1769–1774) in 1773. His successor as director of the Vienna faculty of theology was Franz Stephan Rautenstrauch until the latter’s death in 1785. The Benedictine Rautenstrauch of the Bohemian abbey of Braunau-Břevnov was a Philo-Jansenist in his theological ideas and in his practice of piety, but he tried to avoid committing himself to strong decisions for or against certain theological views. After Migazzi’s turn to theological conservativism in 1767, the Jansenist professors of his Vienna seminary gradually changed the seminaries of Brno and Laibach. With the abolition of their order, the Jesuit university professors lost their chairs at all universities of the Austrian Monarchy and also all Catholic universities in the Empire and were replaced by secular clergymen or monks of other orders. So the Dominican Gazzaniga and the Augustinian friar Bertieri exchanged their extraordinary professorships of Thomism or Augustinian theology at Vienna university for ordinary chairs of dogmatics. Migazzi appointed ex-Jesuits professors at the seminary. In 1774 Rautenstrauch


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produced his structure of theological curricula for all universities of the Monarchy, his so-called Entwurf einer besseren Einrichtung theologischer Schulen.25 In this curriculum, Rautenstrauch strengthened exegesis, church history, canon law, and in particular moral theology and pastoral theology. Some of the elder Jansenists were critical of the new curriculum. But when the bishop of Basel, Friedrich von Wangen-Geroldseck (1727–1782), responsible for parts of the Austrian Vorlande, resisted Rautenstrauch’s new curriculum in 1779, the Austrian regional government in Freiburg im Breisgau contradicted him. There was a direct connection between Rautenstrauch’s reform of theological studies and the state reform of the universities under Joseph II and Gottfried van Swieten (1733–1803), son of Gerhard van Swieten and president of the “Studienhofkommision” since 1781, with the closing of the universities of Graz, Innsbruck, and Brno and the transformation of the universities of Vienna, Prague, Freiburg im Breisgau, Leuven, Ofen (Budapest) and the new university of Lvov in the east into strongly-regulated institutions for the education of government officials.26 The reorganization of theological studies, made by the state according to Rautenstrauch’s curricula in 1782, was effective until 1857. 4. Josephinism as Church Reform 4.1. What is Josephinism? Josephinism nowadays is understood as the special Austrian manifestation of the European Enlightenment27 and as a special form of

25 Zschokke, Theologische Studien, 31–48; Josef Müller, Der pastoraltheologischdidaktische Ansatz in Franz Stephan Rautenstrauchs “Entwurf zur Einrichtung der theologischen Schulen” (Vienna: 1969), 143–158. 26 Harm Klueting (ed.), Der Josephinismus. Ausgewählte Quellen zur Geschichte der Theresanisch-josephinischen Reformen (Darmstadt: 1995), 10; Notker Hammerstein, “Besonderheiten der österreichischen Universitäts- und Wissenschaftsreform zur Zeit Maria Theresas und Josephs II,” in Österreich im Europa der Aufklärung (Vienna: 1985), vol. 2, 787–812; Ernst Wangermann, Aufklärung und staatsbürgerliche Erziehung. Gottfried van Swieten als Reformator des österreichischen Unterrichtswesens 1781–1791 (Munich: 1978). 27 Helmut Reinalter (ed.), Josephinismus als Aufgeklärter Absolutismus (Vienna, Cologne and Weimar: 2008); Christoph Gnant, “Der Josephinismus und das Heilige Römische Reich. ‘Territorialer Etatismus’ und josephinische Reichspolitik,” in Wolfgang Schmale, Renate Zedinger and Jean Mondot (eds.), Josephinismus—eine Bilanz,

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so-called “Enlightened Absolutism”,28 not restricted to the reign of Joseph II in the Austrian Monarchy from 1780 to 1790 nor only to church reform.29 So we can understand Josephinism as Theresan and Josephinist reform or Theresan and Josephinist reform absolutism.30 4.2.1. Josephinism before Joseph II—Except Church Reform There was Josephinism before Joseph II31—since the age of Charles VI and in particular under Maria Theresa. At the beginning of the important reforms stood the tax reform of 1748 with the restriction of the tax appropriation of the estates, the reform of the central board of administration by Friedrich Wilhelm Count Haugwitz (1702–1765) which fused the Vienna-based Bohemian and Austrian chancelleries as central authority for internal affairs of Bohemia and the Hereditary lands in 1749, and the reform of the regional and local administrations. The main reasons for these reforms were the indebtedness of the state32 at the end of the War of the Austrian Succession, the loss of Silesia to Prussia, defence expenditure and the policy of armament. The later reforms of the administration until Joseph II’s reform of the municipal administration in 1783, which replaced elected mayors by state officials, only modified the Haugwitz system. Joseph II was also

(Bochum: 2008), 35–51; Claude Michaud, “Der Josephinismus in der Habsburgermonarchie (1740–1792),” in Plongeron (ed.), Aufklärung, 15–25; Karl Otmar von Aretin, “Der Josephinismus und das Problem des katholischen aufgeklärten Absolutismus,” in Österreich im Europa der Aufklärung, vol. 1, 509–524; Elisabeth Kovács, “Was ist Josephinismus?” in Österreich zur Zeit Kaiser Josephs II., (Vienna: 1980), 24–30; Fritz Valjavec, Der Josephinismus. Zur geistigen Entwicklung Österreichs im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Brno: 1944, 2nd ed. 1945).—Sources with introductions: Klueting (ed.), Josephinismus; Ferdinand Maass (ed.), Der Josephinismus. Quellen zu seiner Geschichte in Österreich 1760–1790 (1850), 5 vols. (Vienna: 1951–1961). 28 Helmut Reinalter and Harm Klueting (ed.), Der aufgeklärte Absolutismus im europäischen Vergleich (Vienna: 2002). 29 Harm Klueting, “Der aufgeklärte Fürst,” in Wolfgang Weber (ed.), Der Fürst. Ideen und Wirklichkeiten in der europäischen Geschichte (Cologne: 1998), 137–167; Gottfried Niedhart, “Aufgeklärter Absolutismus oder Rationalisierung der Herrschaft,” in Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 6 (1979), 199–211; Karl Otmar von Aretin, “Einleitung. Der Aufgeklärte Absolutismus als europäisches Problem,” in Aretin (ed.), Der Aufgeklärte Absolutismus (Berlin: 1974), 11–51. 30 Anton Schindling, “Theresanismus, Josephinismus, katholische Aufklärung,” in Würzburger Diözesangeschichtsblätter 50 (1988): 215–224. 31 Derek Beales, Joseph II, vol. 1: In the Shadow of Maria Theresa, 1741–1780 (Cambridge: 1987); vol. 2: Against the World, 1780–1790 (Cambridge: 2009). 32 Peter G. M. Dickson, Finance and Government under Maria Theresa, 1740–1780 2 vols. (London: 1987).


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the founder of modern Austrian bureaucracy with the special social group of state officials. Matters of Theresan reform were also the system of justice, legislation, and especially civil law. The first codification of civil law since 1753 was the Codex Theresanus of 1766, which was replaced by the Josephinische Gesetzbuch of 1786 and later by Franz von Zeiller’s llgemeines Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch of 1811. For criminal law Maria Theresa enacted the Constitutio Criminalis Theresana in 1768, followed under Joseph II, after the abolition of torture in 1776, by the Josephinische Strafgesetzbuch of 1787. Of great importance were the state education reforms since the foundation of the “Studienhofkommission” under Migazzi and Gerard van Swieten in 1760, especially the Theresan reform of school education and schooling by Johann Ignaz Felbiger (1724–1788)33 since 1774. Most of the agrarian reforms took place after the onset of Joseph’s reign. These included the abolition of villeinage first in Bohemia in 1781 and in Hungary in 1785, the abolition of corveé (“Robot-Abolition”) in the Hereditary lands, Bohemia and Galicia since 1783, and the land register of real estate for taxation34 between 1784 and 1789. On the other hand, the reforms in public health and social welfare began under Maria Theresa with the introduction of compulsory smallpox vaccination in 1748 culminated under Joseph II in the foundation of the Vienna lying-in and foundling hospital and the Vienna General Hospital, both in 1784. 4.2.2. Josephinism before Joseph II—Church Reform Josephinism predating Joseph II also appeared in the field of church reform.35 The key figure at the beginning was Chancellor Kaunitz.36

33 Winfried Romberg, Johann Ignaz von Felbiger und Kardinal Johann Heinrich von Franckenberg. Wege der religiösen Reform im 18. Jahrhundert, Arbeiten zur schlesischen Kirchengeschichte, vol. 8 (Stuttgart: 1999). 34 Peter G. M. Dickson, “Joseph II’s Hungarian Land Survey,” in English Historical Review 106 (1991): 611–634. 35 Karl Vocelka, “Der ‘Josephinismus’ in der maria-Theresanischen Epoche,” in Österreich zur Zeit Kaiser Josephs II., 148–152; Ferdinand Maass, Frühjosephinismus (Vienna: 1969); Rudolf Reinhardt, “Zur Kirchenreform in Österreich unter Maria Theresa,” in Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 77 (1966), 105–119; Heinrich Benedikt, “Josephinismus vor Joseph II,” in Festschrift Hugo Hantsch (Graz: 1965), 183–201. 36 Grete Klingenstein and Franz A. J. Szabo (eds.), Staatskanzler Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz-Rietberg 1711–1794 (Graz: 1996); Harm Klueting, Die Lehre von der Macht der Staaten. Das außenpolitische Machtproblem in der ‘politischen Wissenschaft’ und in der praktischen Politik im 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin: 1986), 167–235; Grete Klingenstein,

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The state-run church reform was, for the most part, his work. Szabo sees the “first signs” of Theresan and Josephinist church reform policy in 1750,37 when Haugwitz successfully tried to get pope Benedict XIV’s consent to impose taxes on the clergy for five years, after using such “Quinquennia” for taxation of the clergy under Charles VI since 1731. In 1753 Kaunitz became chancellor. In November 1753 he defined the outlines of church policy for the following years. The aim was taxation of the clergy, which was normally exempted from taxes, but also avoidance of the conflict with Rome. Szabo speaks about the “new middle course” and calls Kaunitz the main proponent of this policy.38 According to Szabo the chancellor gave up this moderate course in the 1760s because of the indebtedness of the state as a result of the Seven Year’s War, but also because of the change of pope from Benedict XIV to Clement XIII in 1758, although this change affected the relationship first in 1766.39 Now Kaunitz defined the principles of church policy in the way in which Joseph II found them in 1780.40 These principles continued until the emperor’s visit in Rome in 178441 after Pius VI’s visit in Vienna in 1782.42 In the 1760s the first measures of state-run church reform began. Since 1762 the “reduction of monks” had been planned. Since 1767 the number of novices who were allowed to enter a monastery or an order was limited by the state. The Austrian Lombardy under Karl Joseph von Firmian as govenor-general since 1756 became the first stage of the state-run church reform in 1766 when after 1716 purchased ecclesiastical property was made taxable in the same way as

Der Aufstieg des Hauses Kaunitz. Studien zu Herkunft und Bildung des Staatskanzlers Wenzel Anton (Goettingen: 1975). 37 Franz A. J. Szabo, Kaunitz and Enlightened Absolutism, 1753–1780 (Cambridge: 1994), 213. 38 Ibid., 215 f. 39 Anton Ellemunter, Antonio Eugenio Visconti und die Anfänge des Josephinismus (Graz: 1963). 40 Harm Klueting, “ ‘Quidquid est in territorio, etiam est de territorio.’ Josephinisches Staatskirchentum als rationaler Territorialismus,” in Der Staat 37 (1998), 417–434, in particular 420f; Klueting, “Kaunitz, die Kirche und der Josephinismus. Protestantisches landesherrliches Kirchenregiment, rationaler Territorialismus und Theresanisch-josephinisches Staatskirchentum,” in Klingenstein and Szabo (eds.), Staatskanzler, 169–196, in particular 174. 41 Karl Renner, Der Standort des Kirchenvermögens im josephinischen System (Dissertation Vienna: 1974), 77 f.; 84. 42 Elisabeth Kovács, Der Pabst in Teutschland. Die Reise Pius VI. im Jahre 1782 (Vienna: 1983).


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secular property and when the Milan based Economic Council was founded in 1768. On the model of Lombardian state authority for the church, the “Geistliche Hofkommission” in Vienna was created in 1782. Since 1768 some monasteries were abolished in Lombardy. In his “Secret Instruction” of 1768, Kaunitz gave the reasons for the measures: “That all that not is established by God falls under the purview of the state, and that only what Jesus Christ has given to his Apostles is to be understood as having been established by God: the sermon of the gospel, the Christian doctrine, the worship, the holy sacraments, and the discipline of the clergy, but the latter only in field of conscience”43 In his German memorandum Von der oberherrlichen Gewalt der römisch-katholischen Fürsten in Bezug auf die Religion und die Clerisey of 176944 he said that monks were an invention of the 3rd century A.D. and that considerable damages to state and church had been caused by them. Thus, it would be desirable if the state abolished monasticism or at least reduced it.45 In Capra’s view this was not really radical in the sense of radical anticlericalism.46 If this is true it was more Catholic Enlightenment than Reform Catholicism in the sense of Wangermann47 but it is a question of what “radical anticlericalism” is and moreover it depends whether one considers Capra’s view to be right or not. I do not use the term “Reform Catholicism.” I speak about “Enlightenment in a Catholic country” contrary to “Catholic Enlightenment.”48 Catholic Enlightenment was anti-baroque and reform-orientated. Catholic Enlightenment sometimes overshot the mark but it was consistently Catholic. Therefore the Catholic Enlightenment was truly Catholic. Followers of radical anticlericalism and deniers of the dogmas of the church were not Catholic. They could not overshoot this mark because they had others. Therefore what some scholars call “Reform Catholicism” was not Catholic. It was heretical.

43 In German in Klueting (ed.), Josephinismus, no. 44 (118), in the original Italian in Maass (ed.), Josephinismus, vol. 1, no. 130a (288). 44 Maass (ed.), Josephinismus, vol. 1, no. 158/36 (368–384). 45 In German in Klueting (ed.), Josephinismus, no. 46 (128 and 130). 46 Carlo Capra, “Kaunitz and Austrian Lombardy,” in Klingenstein and Szabo (eds.), Staatskanzler, 245–260 (252). 47 See note 10. 48 See the title of Klueting (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung—Aufklärung im katholischen Deutschland.

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In the Hereditary lands the measures to reduce baroque piety started in the early reign of Maria Theresa: for instance the prohibition of “superstitious” calendar brochures in 1754, the prohibition of the encouragement of “superstition” by the clergy in 1755, or the prohibition of exorcism in 1758. The reduction of religious holidays took place under the reign of Maria Theresa. With the consent of Clement XIV she abolished numerous holy days in 1772. As reasons for the abolition of the other holidays, the decree of 1771 said: “To give the people more time and opportunity to earn a living and to avoid disastrous idleness and dissoluteness and all the excesses many holidays were used for in the past.”49 Already under Maria Theresa pilgrimages of several days were forbidden, with the exception of pilgrimages to Mariazell, which was the central place of the veneration of the Virgin Mary of the whole Austrian Monarchy. The reason for clerical taxation and partly for the secularization of monasteries in Lombardy was mainly economic, especially financial. Behind the reduction of religious holidays there was economic utilitarianism combined with Jansenist ideas which motivated the rejection of baroque piety in general, together with enlightened principles and prejudices. But all these reforms were always concerned with the spread of state sovereignty over the church and the integration of the church into the state. 4.3. Josephinism after the Death of Maria Theresa 4.3.1. Repression of Baroque Piety In the reign of Joseph II after the death of Maria Theresa, the measures against baroque piety continued in a more radical way. In 1783, even pilgrimages to Mariazell were prohibited, in 1784 the illumination of relics and the selling of consecrated candles or rosaries, and in 1786 most of the side altars in the churches and all lights except the sanctuary lamp near to the tabernacle were abolished. These measures also agreed with Jansenist principles, but Joseph II, like Kaunitz, was not a Jansenist. He only used Jansenist ideas.50 The abolition of religious holidays, processions, and pilgrimages, the disassembly of altars and

49

In the original German Klueting (ed.), Josephinismus, no. 61 (161). Karl Otmar von Aretin, “Katholische Aufklärung im Heiligen Römischen Reich,” in Aretin, Das Reich. Friedensgarantie und europäisches Gleichgewicht 1648–1806, (Stuttgart 1986), 403–433, in particular 404; Aretin, “Der Josephinismus,” 512. 50


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the nonobservance of the relics of saints—the loss of the sacred—was that what the people mainly perceived. 4.3.2. Foundation of New Dioceses by the State The character of the state-run church reform as the spread of state sovereignty over the church and the integration of the church into the state was very obvious in the case of the placet—papal or episcopal decrees needed the state acceptance before publication, first in 1748 and in 1776 and in general since 1781—and the foundation of new dioceses by the state in 1783.51 Most parts of the Hereditary lands, some parts of Bohemia, and the Austrian Netherlands belonged to foreign or non-Austrian bishops while the archdiocese of Vienna and the diocese of Wiener-Neustadt had only a few parishes. In 1783, Joseph II abolished the rights of chair of the bishop of Passau in Lower and Upper Austria. He established the new chairs and dioceses of Linz for Upper Austria52 and St. Pölten for the western part of Lower Austria. The eastern part of Lower Austria with the city of Vienna became the enlarged archdiocese of Vienna.53 The emperor abolished the diocese of Wiener-Neustadt and transferred the bishop of Wiener-Neustadt to St. Pölten. In 1786, by a treaty between Joseph II and archbishop Hieronymus Count Colloredo of Salzburg (1732–1812), the sub-dioceses Gurk, Seckau, and Lavant were transformed to the dioceses Gurk, Graz-Seckau and Lavant under the metropolitan archdiocese of Salzburg.54 The new dioceses of Linz, St. Pölten, Gurk, Graz-Seckau, and Lavant and also the archdiocese of Vienna were dioceses dependent on the state with bishops who were more state dependent bishops

51 Harm Klueting, “Die Diözesanregulierung unter Kaiser Joseph II. in der österreichischen Monarchie,” in Edeltraud Klueting, Harm Klueting and Hans-Joachim Schmidt (eds.), Bistümer und Bistumsgrenzen vom frühen Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Rome: 2006); Christoph Gnant, “Jede Diöces ist nichts anders als ein Teil des Landes. . . . Ausgewählte Fragen der josephinischen Diözesanregulierung und ihrer Auswirkungen auf Reich und Reichskirche,” in Reinalter and Klueting (eds.), Der aufgeklärte Absolutismus, 245–262. 52 Rudolf Zinnhobler, “Josephinismus am Beispiel der Gründung des Bistums Linz,” in Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 93 (1982): 295–311. 53 Johann Weissensteiner, “Die Diözesanregulierung Kaiser Josephs II. und das Erzbistum Wien,” in Jahrbuch für Landeskunde von Niederösterreich new series 52 (1986): 270–313. 54 Jakob Radoslav Kushej (Kušej), Joseph II. und die äussere Kirchenverfassung Innerösterreichs (Stuttgart: 1908, reprint Amsterdam: 1965).

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than bishops in the theological sense.55 Joseph II founded the new dioceses of Linz and St. Pölten and inaugurated the new bishops, without any participation of the pope but simply by state decree in 1783.56 The new dioceses were not canonically ratified by the holy See before 1785—after pope Pius VI visit in Rome in 1784. In the other parts of the Austrian Monarchy this policy, similar to French Gallicanism, Philip II’s Spanish-Dutch hierarchy of 1559 and the church policy of Peter the Great in Russia in 1721,57 failed because of political considerations and the objections of chancellor Kaunitz. But successful or not, two political reasons stood behind this reform, which were expressed clearly in the decree for St. Pölten of 178358 as well as in letters and memoria of chancellor Kaunitz of 1783 and 1785:59 first, to eliminate foreign or non-Austrian bishops, and, second, to adjust the boundaries of the dioceses to the boundaries of and between the Hereditary lands or to the boundaries of administrative districts. 4.3.3. Foundation of New Parishes by the State Besides the political reasons, there was another motive for the policy of this “Diözesanregulierung” which was connected with “Pfarregulierung” or the foundation of new parishes by the state.60 Improvement in pastoral care was a leading aim of the Council of Trent just as of the Catholic Enlightenment. For example: in the center of Vienna eight parishes—St. Stephen, St. Michael, the parish of the Benedictine abbey of Our Dear Lady of the Scots (“Schottenstift”), St. Peter, the church Am Hof, the church of the Augustinians, the church of the Franciscans, and the University-Church—replaced the three former parishes of St. Stephen, St. Michael and “Schottenstift”. In the countryside, new parishes were to be founded where more than 700 people

55 Knut Walf, Das bischöfliche Amt in der Sicht josephinischer Staatskirchenrechtler, (Cologne: 1975). 56 Klueting (ed.), Josephinismus, no. 148 (333). 57 Klueting, “Diözesanregulierung,” 181 f. 58 See note 53. 59 Klueting, “Diözesanregulierung,” 193 f. with reference to Maass, Josephinismus, vol. 2., no. 184 (401), no. 192 (412), no. 216 (435), and no. 224 (442). 60 Josephinische Pfarrgründungen in Wien, (Vienna: 1985); Herbert Krückel, “Beiträge zur Geschichte der josephinischen Pfarrerrichtungen im St. Pöltener Diözesangebiet,” in Jahrbuch für Landeskunde von Niederösterreich new series 52 (1986): 96–167; 373–381; Elisabeth Meister, “Die Neuorganisation des österreichischen Teils der Diözese Passau im Spiegel der Geistlichen Ratsprotokolle 1783–1785,” in Oberbairische Grenzmarken 28 (1986): 220–230, in particular 220–223.


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were living and the way to the next parish church was more than one hour. Because of the improvement of pastoral care that it caused, the “Diözesanregulierung” seems to be above criticism. But the main reason of the foundation of the new dioceses by the states was not the improvement of the cure of souls. 4.3.4. General Seminaries for Priests One of the basic items of the state-run church reform in the reign of Joseph II was regimentation and centralization of the education of future priests beyond the faculties of theology of the universities. This point concerned the ecclesiastical seminaries like Miggazi’s 1758– founded Vienna seminary. While Maria Theresa had only given orders that the education of future priests inside monasteries should follow the same principles and use the same textbooks as the Faculty of Theology of Vienna University in 1770, Joseph II first established the German-Hungarian College in Pavia in Austrian Lombardy in 1782 and prohibited studying at the Germanicum in Rome in 1783. The Pavia College was to produce well-educated priests, who were to be trained in pastoral care “for the benefit of the Austrian state in Germany and Hungary.”61 The curriculum emphasized church history and canon law instead of dogmatics and prescribed as textbooks, among other works, books of Jansenist and partly Protestant authors. In 1783 Joseph II abolished all philosophical and theological studies inside monasteries and founded state-controlled General Seminaries in Vienna and in other parts of the Hereditary lands and Bohemia for the secular and the regular clergy. In the seculary clergy no young man was to be ordained priest from then on without six years studying theology and training in the cure of souls at the General Seminary. In the regular clergy no young men except lay brothers were to be able to take vows in the future without these six years in the General Seminary. In 1786 the emperor abolished all episcopal seminaries in the Austrian Netherlands and founded a state-controlled General Seminary at Leuven and a filial at Luxembourg. The curricula of the General seminaries were based on Rautenstrauch’s Entwurf of 1774, but because of the practical training in the cure of souls in the sixth year and practical training in school teaching during the fifth year, the theological studies were reduced to four years in 1785.

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Klueting (ed.), Josephinismus, no. 138 (319).

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4.3.5. Prohibition of Direct Contacts of Bishops and Monasteries with the Roman Curia or Masters of Orders in Rome The spread of state sovereignty over the church and the integration of the church into the state was also the motive behind the prohibition of direct contacts of bishops and monasteries with Rome. For Roman Catholic bishops a regular correspondence in many affairs with the Holy See was necessary. The same applies to abbeys and monasteries concerning Rome-based curia of their order or congregation and to their contact with their masters or generals in Rome. In the future all this exchange of letters was to be conducted via state authorities. In 1781 all connections of abbeys and monasteries of the Austrian Monarchy with Rome and with non-Austrian institutions of their order, all participation in general chapters outside the Austrian Monarchy, all memberships of monasteries in provinces or congregations of their order which were not based in the Austrian Monarchy or the Hereditary lands, and all journeys of monks, friars or other members of an order to Rome or to other places outside the Monarchy were forbidden. This termination of the connections of all church institutions with Rome was not a manifestation of anti-Roman or anti-papal episcopalism or Febronianism; rather, it was territorialization or nationalization of church and clergy, bishops and monasteries. In the same way that “Diözesanregulierung” separated the church in the Hereditary lands from the “Reichskirche” of the Empire62 these measures separated church and monasteries from the universal church and from the supranational organisation of religious orders. 4.3.6. Secularization of Monasteries By the decree of 12 January 178263 the abolition and secularization of monasteries in the Austrian Monarchy begun. Monks and nuns affected by this first wave of secularization in the Austrian Monarchy under Joseph II were mendicants, especially some female mendicants, and hermits. In May 1783 the second wave of secularization started, which led to the abolition of 700 to 800 monasteries in the whole

62

Harm Klueting, “Zwischen wittelsbachischem Kaisertum und josephinischer Diözesanregulierung (1742/45–1783). Faktoren österreichischer Identitätsbildung im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Eybl (ed.), Strukturwandel, 15–44. 63 Klueting (ed.), Josephinismus, no. 115 (280–282).


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Austrian Monarchy until 1787.64 What preceded this policy had been the abolition of the Jesuit order in the whole Roman Catholic Church in 1773 when the Jesuit property came at the disposal of the states. In the Hereditary lands and Bohemia, the proceeds from the secularized Jesuit property flowed into the “ex-Jesuit fund”.65 On the model of this state special account and the Milan-based Economic Council, the Vienna-based “Geistliche Hofkommission” was organized in 1782 to administrate the property of the secularized monasteries, with the “Commission for Abolition” functioning as the department responsible for the abolition and secularization of the monasteries. The proceeds of the monasteries flowed into the “Religious funds” of the “Geistliche Hofkommission”, which paid for the pensions of the former monks and nuns. 4.3.7. Toleration for Protestants, Believers of the Orthodox Eastern Church, and Jews A particular manifestation of Josephinism was the Toleration Act of 1781, which was actually many different toleration acts for the different parts of the Austrian Monarchy and separated into toleration acts for Protestants, i.e. for Lutherans and Calvinists, for believers of the Orthodox Eastern Church in the east of the realm,66 and for Jews.67 Only some years before the toleration, there had been a persecution of the Austrian and Bohemian “Secret Protestantism” under Maria Theresa in 1777. Under Josephinist toleration Lutheran and Calvinist “Secret Protestantism” was legalized and Protestant parishes could be founded, although some restrictions remained until the Austrian

64 Ute Ströbele, Zwischen Kloster und Welt. Die Aufhebung südwestdeutscher Frauenklöster unter Kaiser Joseph II. (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: 2005); Derek Beales, Prosperity and Plunder. European Catholic Monasteries in the Age of Revolution, 1650– 1815 (Cambridge: 2003), 192–228; Beales, “Joseph II and the monasteries of Austria and Hungary,” in Aston Nigel (ed.), Religious Change in Europe, 1650–1914. Essays for John McManners (Oxford: 1997), 161–184; Elisabeth Kovács, “Joseph II. und die Aufhebung der kontemplativen Klöster in der österreichischen Monarchie,” in Mauerbach und die Kartäuser (Salzburg: 1984), 1–17; Kovács, “Josephinische Klosteraufhebungen 1782–1789,” in Österreich zur Zeit Kaiser Josephs II., 169–173; Gerhard Winner, Die Klosteraufhebungen in Niederösterreich und Wien (Vienna: 1967); Sieglinde Fuchs, Die in Niederösterreich unter Joseph II. aufgehobenen Klöster im Hinblick auf ihre Verwendung (Dissertation Vienna: 1967). 65 Kaunitz’s memorandum of 8 April 1773 in Klueting (ed.), Josephinismus, no. 65 (179–183) and Maass (ed.), Josephinismus, vol. 2, 172–177. 66 Peter F. Barton (ed.), Im Lichte der Toleranz (Vienna: 1981). 67 Josef Karniel, Die Toleranzpolitik Kaiser Josefs II. (Gerlingen: 1985).

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“Protestant law” of 1861. For the Jews, the Josephinist toleration brought their civil emancipation, but also with some strong restrictions. Joseph II’s main reasons for toleration were connected with the enlightened idea of natural right and with the aim of nationalization at the expense of the privileging of only one church—the Roman Catholic Church. Also, some historians speak about foreign-policy considerations concerning Protestant Prussia and Orthodox Russia or about toleration as “weak Counter-Reformation”. 5. Theology and Canon Law 5.1. Biblical Theology or Exegesis Both Trautson’s and Migazzi’s reforms of theological studies at Vienna University and Seminary in the 1750s and Rautenstrauch’s reform which began in 1774 promoted biblical studies, exegetics, and studies of Greek and Hebrew. The same applies to the curriculum of the Pavia College of 1782. According to Rautenstrauch’s Entwurf, “Hermeneutica sacra” should be basic because “the Holy Scripture is indisputably the main source of theology.”68 Because the bible is written in Hebrew and Greek, a theologian has to learn both languages, especially for discussions with enemies of the faith, but in Hebrew, this entailed only studying the principal rules of grammar and one of the historical books of the Old Testament, and in Greek, only biblical Greek and not the Greek of Homer or Plato. The exegetes among the authors of textbooks prescribed in the Pavia curriculum were scholars of Augustinian, Jansenist or Philo-Jansenist orientation. These prescribed textbooks did not represent any radical criticism of the Bible like that of, for instance, the German exegete Johann Lorenz Isenbiehl (1744–1818). 5.2. Dogmatics The Austrian reforms of theological studies were directed against dogmatic theology, especially against Jesuit dogmatics and moreover scholastic theology be it Augustinian, Thomistic or Scotist; they promoted other theological disciplines and reduced the prominence of

68

Müller, Pastoraltheologisch-didaktischer Ansatz, 148.


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speculative theology, although dogmatics remained important. In his curricula, Rautenstrauch understood dogmatics as the system of the doctrines of the teachings of Jesus Christ, the Holy Scripture and the tradition. He saw the function of dogmatics only in the education of perfect spiritual advisers and pastors and wanted to include new nonCatholic theological points of view in dogmatics to refute them. Obviously the books of non-Austrian Catholic dogmatists or theologians like the Benedictine professor of Salzburg University Jakob Danzer (1743–1796), who asked for secular eudemonism as the aim of ethics and who was removed from office in 1792 because of his rationalism, the professor at the University of Mainz and later Jacobin Felix Blau (1754–1798),69 who criticized infallibility, the Carmelite and rationalist Johann Anton Dereser (1757–1827), before he was appointed professor at Bonn university in 1786 lecturer at the Heidelberg monastery of the Teresian Carmelites, the Augustinian Eusebius Amort (1692– 1775) of Polling in Bavaria,70 or the Benedictine Dominicus Schramm (1723–1797),71 who was dependent on some Protestant theologians, were also read in Austria.72 The Augustinan friar Engelbert Klüpfel (1733–1811)73 was a professor of dogmatics at the Austrian university of Freiburg im Breisgau since 1767 and one of the leading theologians of the Austrian Monarchy. He criticized the rationalism of the Protestant theologian Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791). The Jesuit Sigismund von Storchenau (1731–1797) was a professor of philosophy at Vienna University until the abolition of the Jesuit order in 1773. He adopted ideas of the enlightened philosophy of the Protestant Christian Wolff (1679–1754).74 The most important proponents of dogmatic theology within the Catholic Enlightenment in the Hereditary lands were Gazzaniga, Gervasio, and Bertieri, all of them professors at Vienna university. These three men implemented the Rautenstrauch

69 Philipp Schäfer, Kirche und Vernunft. Die Kirche in der katholischen Theologie der Aufklärungszeit (Munich: 1974), 87–95. 70 Ibid., 13–16; Otto Schaffner, Eusebius Amort (1692–1775) als Moraltheologe (Paderborn: 1963): Karin Precht-Nußbaum, Zwischen Augsburg und Rom: der Pollinger Augustiner-Chorherr Eusebius Amort (1692–1775) (Paring: 2007). 71 Schäfer, Kirche, 41 f., 45 f. 72 Adam Seigfried, “Die Dogmatik im 18. Jahrhundert unter dem Einfluss von Aufklärung und Jansenismus,” in Kovács (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung, 241–265. 73 Schäfer, Kirche, 209 f. 74 Bruno Bianco, “Wolffianismus und katholische Aufklärung. Storchenau’s Lehre vom Menschen,” in Klueting (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung, 67–103.

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reform in their theology textbooks, however, Rautenstrauch favored Klüpfel’s works. 5.3. Moral Theology Moral theology in the 18th century was divide between Jansenist rigorism and Jesuit probabilism. The Jansenists promoted moral rigorism and an ascetic life-style not only in sexuality, theater, dancing, card-playing, smoking, eating and drinking alcohol but also in liturgy, in the decoration of churches with pictures, candles, relics, flags, columns, and side altars, in all the baroque forms of piety in veneration of saints, pilgrimages and processions, and in the practices surrounding the Holy Sacrament. They recommended receiving Communion only seldom, as was the practice in Protestant churches.75 For Rautenstrauch, who propagated not only Opstraet’s Pastor bonus but also the works of Protestant theologians,76 moral theology in his curricula was an anti-probabilist enterprise to educate priests as teachers of morality for the people. Moral theology should make the students of theology and, through these future priests, the people understand Christian virtues and duties, with Holy Scripture and the tradition of the church as the only “true” sources. But the Christian virtues and duties could be understood simply as good manners in church and society, obedience to divine and state law. This was the understanding of the state, and here was one of the connections between Philo-Jansenist moral theology and the state of enlightened absolutism. In this direction a second source, beside divine revelation, of that what were Christian virtues and duties came into power: nature and reason.77 Catholic theologians promoting this moral theology and opening themselves to the enlightenment became the moral theologians of the Catholic Enlightenment. But there were more “conservative” proponents of the Catholic Enlightenment and more radical rationalists.78 Men of this more “conservative” direction were the Vienna professors

75 Andreas Laun, “Die Moraltheologie im 18. Jahrhundert unter dem Einfluß von Jansenismus und Aufklärung,” in Kovács (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung, 266–294; Johann Theiner, Die Entwicklung der Moraltheologie zur eigenständigen Disziplin (Regensburg: 1970). 76 Laun, “Moraltheologie,” 281, note 92. 77 See the decree of 31 August 1776 in Zschokke, Theologische Studien, 41 f., especially 42, no. 6. 78 Laun, “Moraltheologie,” 288–293.


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Franz Hoffmann (d. 1776), Michael Domfort (d. 1807) Wenzel Schanza (1747–1787), Jansenist and promoter of Josephinism Joseph Lauber (1744–1810), who was a professor of pastoral and moral theology in Brno and later in Olomouc, and the professor of Graz University Anton Luby (1749–1802). These theologians, critical of Rome and the papacy, subordinated themselves under the Josephinist state. They adopted Protestant theology and the philosophy of Christian Wolff and later Immanuel Kant. On the other side stood the more radical rationalists Ignaz von Fabiani (d. 1789) or Anton Karl Reyberger (1757–1818), a Benedictine of Melk and, since 1788, professor of moral theology at Vienna University. Reyberger’s moral theology was founded on Protestant theologians and the Kant-influenced professor of philosophy of Salzburg University Augustin Schelle (1742–1802), a Benedictine of Tegernseee in Bavaria, Kant himself, but also the Kantian Erhard Schmid (1761–1812), a professor of Jena University. Reyberger derived morality from the principle of reason and from Kant’s categorical imperative. 5.4. Pastoral Theology Some of the moral theologians were at the same time pastoral theologians. But pastoral theology (or practical theology in Protestant nomenclature) was still unfounded, and its status as an academic discipline was unclear in the 18th century prior to Friedrich Schleiermacher, who founded Protestant practical theology as an academic subject at the new university of Berlin of 1810. Previously, there had been some attempts at practical theology in homiletics and catechetics at Protestant faculties of theology in Germany. In the Catholicism of the German-speaking countries, Rautenstrauch was one of the founders of pastoral theology. Müller has shown that Rautenstrauch was very influenced by these early models of Protestant practical theology, for instance of the Protestant faculty of theology of Göttingen University, of which he was informed by the periodical “Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen”.79 Rautenstrauch saw the duties of a pastor as consisting in teaching the people the doctrines of faith and manners as well as in admonishing, punishing, and comforting especially the sick and the poor. His concept of pastoral theology as an academic discipline was

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Müller, Pastoraltheologisch-didaktischer Ansatz, 73–88.

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realized by the “Studienhofkommission” in 1782 which called pastoral theology an important but hitherto neglected subject. 5.5. Liturgy The anti-baroque movement of Jansenism and Catholic Enlightenment showed itself especially in the liturgy. Hollerweger could say that reform of worship was the core of Josephinist church reform.80 There was not only the anti-baroque prohibition of pilgrimages and the abolition of religious holidays but also the simplification of worship, connected with its reduction to its essence—in the spirit of Muratori’s Rational Devotion, whose first German translation appeared in 1751, supported by Philo-Jansenist bishops like Trautson in Vienna or Thun in Gurk. The liturgical renewal was carried out by the state, which decreed the number and the solemnity of Masses in state-ordered rubrics since 1783. But there was no theological settlement of “the essence” of the liturgy. Only the will of the ruler was decisive. Worship was to be useful to the state. Therefore an important idea of Jansenism and Catholic Enlightenment—the Holy Mass in the language of the people instead of Latin—was rejected. Liturgy in the vernacular (Italian, French, Dutch, Bohemian, Hungarian, Polish and so on) could not be useful to the state because the Austrian Monarchy was multiethnic. 5.6. Canon Law The benefit of the state was also a decisive factor in canon law. The 18th century Austrian canonists were anti-papal or anti-curial. On the condition of anti-curialism and strict subordination to state authority, they accepted the lawgiving authority of bishops and synods. In particular, the Josephinist canon (or better: public church) law did not view the highest authority in the church as the pope but rather as the community of the bishops subordinated to the state.81 Zeger Bernard van Espen was the spiritual father, and both Rieggers were the main proponents of canon law in 18th century Austria. The elder, 80 Hans Hollerweger, “Tendenzen der liturgischen Reformen unter Maria Theresa und Joseph II.,” in Kovács (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung, 295–309; Hollerweger, Die Reform des Gottesdienstes zur Zeit des Josephinismus in Österreich (Regensburg: 1976). 81 Franz Pototschnig, “Die Entwicklung des Kirchenrechts im 18. Jahrhundert mit besonderer Berücksichtigung Österreichs,” in Kovács (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung, 215–233.


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Paul Joseph Riegger (1705–1775), professor of Innsbruck University and since 1753 professor and official with the Bohemian chancellery in Vienna, was the head of the theoreticians of Austrian state-run church reform.82 His son Joseph Anton Riegger (1742–1795) was a professor of the Universities of Freiburg im Breisgau since 1765 and Prague since 1778. Both father and son were champions of so-called “rational territorialism”.83 Eighteenth-century rational territorialism, coming from the 16th- and 17th-century “territorialism” of Theodor Reinkingk (1590–1664) and other Protestant scholars, and with the German non-Catholic philosopher Christian Thomasius as its main proponent, deduced the unlimited authority of the state over the church within the state from the Social Contract and accepted the church within the state only as a function of the welfare of the state.84 6. Pamphleteers against Monks and Nuns The reform of censorship85 under Joseph II in 1781 and the abolition and secularization of monasteries that began in 1782 unleashed in the Hereditary lands a new wave of anti-monastic pamphlets or booklets and satirical or otherwise critical writing against monks and nuns—after a first wave mainly in Bavaria in the 1760s and 1770s and followed by a third wave, again mainly in Bavaria, on the eve of the secularization in Germany in 1803.86 The anti-monastic publications ranged from juridical treaties on the right of the state to abolish monasteries and to dispose over their properties to trivial sensational 82

Seifert, Paul Joseph Riegger. Klaus Schlaich, “Der rationale Territorialismus. Die Kirche unter dem staatskirchenrechtlichen Absolutismus um die Wende vom 18. zum 19. Jahrhundert,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte. Kanonistische Abteilung 54 (1968): 269–340, again in Schlaich, Gesammelte Aufsätze (Tübingen: 1997), 204–266; Christoph Link, Herrschaftsordnung und bürgerliche Freiheit. Grenzen der Staatsgewalt in der älteren deutschen Staatslehre (Vienna: 1979), 292–321. 84 Klueting, “ ‘Quidquid est in territorio’,” 431. 85 Grete Klingenstein, Staatsverwaltung und kirchliche Autorität im 18. Jahrhundert. Das Problem der Zensur in der Theresanischen Reform (Munich: 1970); Beales, Joseph II., vol. 2. 86 Ernst Wangermann, Die Waffen der Publizität. Zum Funktionswandel der politischen Literatur unter Joseph II. (Vienna: 2004), 58–71; Hans-Wolf Jäger, “Mönchskritik und Klostersatire in der deutschen Spätaufklärung,” in Klueting (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung, 192–207; Irmingard Böhm, “Literarische Wegbereiter der Säkularisation,” in Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens 94 (1983): 518–537. 83

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literature, satirical poems like the anonymous poem “Nonnenlied von Kaiser Joseph” of 1782,87 scandal stories and satirical or critical novels in the style of French writer Denis Diderot but not as radical as his La Religieuse, which was published posthumously not before 1796 and translated into German in 1797. One of the most important of these Austrian booklets was the novel Faustin oder das philosophische Jahrhunderts (1783)88 by Johann Pezzl (1756–1823), a Bavarian living in Vienna, and chancellor Kaunitz’s private librarian since 1785.89 Other authors of this persuasion were the Vienna state official and librarian Anton Ferdinand von Geissau (1746–1809), the professor of philosophy Anton von Scharf, the writer Joseph Richter (1749–1813), the playwright and poet Johann Rautenstrauch (1746–1801), the head of the Vienna Illuminati Ignaz von Born (1742–1791), or the Capuchin priest and professor of Lvov university Ignaz Aurelius Fessler (1756– 1839),90 who left the Capuchin Order, became a Freemason and later a Lutheran general superintendent in Russia. Among the authors who argued against the monasteries for juridical reasons were the professor of canon law of the Universities of Innsbruck and Vienna Joseph Johann Nepomuk Pehem (1740–1799), the professor of canon law of Vienna University until his removal in 1779 and later state official in Innsbruck and Linz Josef Valentin Eybel (1741–1805),91 the professor of canon law and church history in Graz Franz Xaver Gmeiner (1752–1824), the professor of canon law in Graz and later in Vienna Franz Xaver Neupauer (1753–1835), or the high official (“Hofrat”) of the Ecclesiastical Department of the Bohemian-Austrian chancellery since 1769 and the “Geistliche Hofkommission” since 1782 Franz Joseph von Heinke (1726–1803), who was more or less responsible for organizing the state-run church reform.92

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Klueting (ed.), Josephinismus, no. 117 (285–287). Extract ibid., no. 136 (309–315). 89 Christoph Siegrist, “Antitheodizee und Zeitkritik. Zur Situierung von Pezzls Roman ‘Faustin’,” in Herbert Zeman (ed.), Die österreichische Literatur. Eine Dokumentation ihrer literarhistorischen Entwicklung, 2 parts (Graz: 1979), 829–851. 90 Peter F. Barton, Ignatius Aurelius Fessler. Vom Barockkatholizismus zur Erweckungsbewegung (Vienna: 1969). 91 Manfred Brandl, Der Kanonist Joseph Valentin Eybel 1741–1805. Sein Beitrag zur Aufklärung in Österreich (Steyr: 1976). 92 Maass (ed.), Josephinismus, vol. 3: Das Werk des Hofrats Heinke 1768–1790 (Vienna: 1956). 88


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7. The end of Jansenism and Catholic Enlightenment in the Austrian Monarchy 7.1. The Decline of Austrian Jansenism and Catholic Enlightenment Austrian Jansenism came to its end during the rule of Joseph II because of its inner conflicts and its connection to Enlightenment. Hersche speaks of the decline of Austrian Jansenism and by way of explanation he emphasizes that some Jansenists adopted Enlightened Protestant theology. But the radicalization of Enlightened Protestant theology confronted them with a difficult decision: if they did not want to abandon their Catholic principles, they could not go in the same direction as German Protestant neology or theological rationalism. Therefore Protestant Enlightened theology changed from a source of interesting stimula to a dangerous abyss of unbelief and to an enemy itself in place of the old enemies, Jesuitism and baroque Catholicism. According to Hersche, the late publications of Wittola demonstrate this change of antagonisms.93 On the other hand, the Austrian Jansenists could not remain in a moderate Catholic Enlightenment because Josephinism had adopted central positions of Jansenism and Catholic Enlightenment and had taken advantage of them for state-run church reform, and for its own benefit, namely for the benefit of power. There was no way back. 7.2. The Fall and Survival of Josephinism Joseph II’s reform policy was doomed to failure before the emperor died in 1790. That much is demonstrated in the uprisings in the Austrian Netherlands and in Hungary and the negative attitude of the people of Vienna and the Hereditary lands where the baroque forms of Catholic piety were still popular. Their revival eventually came. For instance, beginning in 1794 archduchess Maria Anna (1770–1809), daughter of Joseph II’s brother and successor Leopold II (1747–1792), demonstratively undertook pilgrimages to Mariazell. In doing so, she initiated the first Vienna pilgrimages after the death of Joseph II in 1796. In 1808 Clemens Maria Hofbauer (1751–1820) and the Italian Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer came to Vienna where Hofbauer was successful against Josephinism as the “Apostle of Vienna”. In 1855, because of the 1854 proclamation of the Dogma of the Immaculate 93

Hersche, “Der österreichische Spätjansenismus. Neue Thesen,” 191.

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Conception in 1854, there was a great celebration by state and church in Vienna, and a great veneration of the Virgin Mary at Mariazell in 1857. 8. The Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) The Austrian Netherlands94 were the country of origin of Jansenism, moreover home to the non-Jesuit university of Leuven. There, ZegerBernard van Espen worked for Jansenist-Gallican canon law until his death in 1728. In most parts of the former Spanish Netherlands, the adaptation of diocesan boundaries to political boundaries and the foundation of new dioceses had taken place under Philip II of Spain in the 16th century. Only the south—parts of what are now the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and the Belgian provinces of Luxembourg and Namur—belonged to the archdiocese of Trier, where Hontheim was auxiliar bishop since 1748. After the decline of Jansenism in France, the Austrian Netherlands became a place of refuge for French Jansenists under the first Austrian governor-general of the Netherlands until 1725, prince Eugène of Savoy, with his Philo-Jansenist sympathies. But because of the anti-Jansenist religious policy of the second governorgeneral, archduchess Maria Elisabeth (1680–1741), after 1725 most of them went to Dutch Utrecht. Although the southern part of the Austrian Netherlands was French-speaking, the French Enlightenment, “la lumière”, was not really popular, neither among the French-speaking upper class nor among the people,95 because of the wars of Louis XIV (1638–1715) of France in the second half of the 17th- and the first two decades of the 18th century and the French conquest of parts of the Spanish Netherlands (which are now part of northern France) during these wars, and because of the French military occupation of the Austrian Netherlands from 1746 to 1748, the last two years of the War of Austrian Succession. In particular, the high-ranking officials in Brussels saw France as something like a hereditary enemy.96 94 Hervé Hasquin (ed.), La Belgique autrichienne. Les Pays-Bas méridionaux sous les Habsbourg d’Austriche (Brussels: 1987). 95 Les Lumières dans les Pays-Bas autrichiens et la principauté de Liège (Catalogue, Brussels: 1983); Bruno Bernard, “Belgien im Zeitalter der Aufklärung,” in Erich Donnert (ed.), Europa in der Frühen Neuzeit. Festschrift Günter Mühlpfordt, vol. 3 (Weimar: 1997), 707–722. 96 Bruno Bernard, “Reform und Modernisierung in den österreichischen Niederlanden,” in Reinalter and Klueting (ed.), Der aufgeklärte Absolutismus, 263–273, especially 271.


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Political decisions for the Austrian Netherlands were made in Vienna, as well as decisions regarding religious policy. In Vienna there was the Netherlandish Council which was integrated in Kaunitz’s state chancellery in 1757. In Brussels there was the Austrian governorgeneral and an Austrian “ministre plénipotentiaire.” Brussels-based institutions for the Austrian Netherlands were the “Conseil d’Etat”, the “Conseil privé” and the “Conseil des Finances” or the “Chambre des comptes”. The “Conseil privé” was the most important of these institutions. Its president was from 1757 to 1783, Patrice-François de Neny (1716–1784).97 Neny—a man of the untitled upper class and a Philo-Jansenist intellectual, a follower of Zeger Bernard van Espen, reformer of Leuven University before the Josephinist reform, supporter of a “Belgian Church” in the Gallican way—was the key figure who implemented the Theresan and Josephinist reforms in the Austrian Netherlands and who tried to transform them through reforms concerning the conditions of the Austrian Netherlands. This transformation was important because the Vienna reform policy was perceived in the Netherlands as a policy of centralization and foreign rule which brought about opposition and resistance to these reforms. Therefore Neny modified Joseph II’s Toleration Act for the Austrian Netherlands of 1781 because he anticipated the resistance of clergy and universities in this country without Protestants. Nevertheless, the archbishop of Mecheln Cardinal Johann Heinrich Ferdinand Count Franckenberg (1726–1804) and all other bishops of the Austrian Netherlands except the bishop of Antwerp offered resistance to the Josephinist toleration for the Protestants,98 which was extended to the Jews in 1782. Because of the foundation of the General Seminaries of Leuven and Luxembourg in 1786, the resistance of the clergy escalated to revolt, which led to the Brabant revolution of 1787.99

97 Bruno Bernard, Patrice-François de Neny (1716–84). Portrait d’un homme d’État (Brussels: 1993). 98 Roland Crahay (ed.), La Tolérance civile (Brussels: 1982). 99 André Tihon, “Catholicisme et politique. Justifications religieuses de la Révolution brabançonne,” in Jean Lorette (ed.), Actes du colloque sur la Révolution brabançonne (Brussels: 1984), 93–113; Jan Rogiers, “Der Umsturz in Brabant (1789–1790),” in Österreich zur Zeit Josephs II., 266–270.

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Aretin, Karl Otmar von, “Der Josephinismus und das Problem des katholischen aufgeklärten Absolutismus,” in Österreich im Europa der Aufklärung, (Vienna: 1985), vol. 1, 509–524. ——, “Katholische Aufklärung im Heiligen Römischen Reich,” in Idem, Das Reich. Friedensgarantie und europäisches Gleichgewicht 1648–1806 (Stuttgart: 1986). ——, “Einleitung. Der Aufgeklärte Absolutismus als europäisches Problem,” in Idem (ed.), Der Aufgeklärte Absolutismus (Berlin: 1974), 11–51. Barton, Peter F. (ed.), Im Lichte der Toleranz (Vienna: 1981). ——, Ignatius Aurelius Fessler. Vom Barockkatholizismus zur Erweckungsbewegung (Vienna: 1969). Beales, Derek, “Joseph II and the monasteries of Austria and Hungary,” in Aston, Nigel (ed.), Religious Change in Europe, 1650–1914. Essays for John McManners (Oxford: 1997), 161–184. ——, “Nuncio Garampi proposes to excommunicate Joseph II, 1781,” in Kalmár, János (ed.), Miscellanea fontium historiae Europaeae. Festschrift Eva Balázc (Budapest: 1997), 252–257. ——, Prosperity and Plunder. European Catholic Monasteries in the Age of Revolution, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: 2003). ——, Joseph II., 2 vols. (Cambridge: 1987/2009). Benedikt, Heinrich, “Der Josephinismus vor Joseph II.,” in Festschrift Hugo Hantsch (Graz: 1965), 183–201. Bernard, Bruno, Patrice-François de Neny (1716–84). Portrait d’un homme d’État (Brussels: 1993). ——, “Reform und Modernisierung in den österreichischen Niederlanden,” in Reinalter and Klueting (eds.), Der aufgeklärte Absolutismus (Vienna: 2002), 263– 273. ——, “Belgien im Zeitalter der Aufklärung,” in Erich Donnert (ed.), Europa in der Frühen Neuzeit. Festschrift Günter Mühlpfordt, vol. 3 (Weimar: 1997), 707–722. Bianco, Bruno, “Wolffianismus und katholische Aufklärung. Storchenau’s Lehre vom Menschen,” in Klueting (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung (Hamburg: 1993), 67–103. Böhm, Irmingard, “Literarische Wegbereiter der Säkularisation,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens 94 (1983): 518–537. Brandl, Manfred, Der Kanonist Joseph Valentin Eybel 1741–1805. Sein Beitrag zur Aufklärung in Österreich. Eine Studie in Ideologie (Steyr: 1976). ——, Marx Anton Wittola. Seine Bedeutung für den Jansenismus in deutschen Landen (Steyr: 1974). Breuer, Dieter, “Kardinal Migazzi, Förderer und Gegner des kulturellen Wandels im Theresanischen Zeitalter,” in Eybel, Franz M. (ed.), Strukturwandel und kulturelle Praxis. Beiträge zu einer kulturwissenschaftlichen Sicht des Theresanischen Zeitalters (Vienna: 2002), 219–231. Capra, Carlo, “Kaunitz and Austrian Lombardy,” in Klingenstein and Szabo (eds.), Staatskanzler Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz, 245–260. Coreth, Anna, Pietas Austriaca, trans. William Bowman (Lafayette, Ind.: 2004; orig., Munich: 1959). Cognet, Louis, Le jansénisme, (Paris: 1961). Crahay, Roland (ed.), La Tolérance civile (Brussels: 1982). Dickson, Peter G. M., Finance and Government under Maria Theresa, 1740–1780, 2 vols. (London: 1987). ——, “Joseph II’s Hungarian Land Survey,” English Historical Review 106 (1991): 611–634. Ellemunter, Anton, Antonio Eugenio Visconti und die Anfänge des Josephinismus, (Graz: 1963).


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——, Die Lehre von der Macht der Staaten. Das außenpolitische Machtproblem in der ‘politischen Wissenschaft’ und in der praktischen Politik im 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin: 1986). ——, (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung—Aufklärung im katholischen Deutschland (Hamburg: 1993). ——, “‘Der Genius der Zeit hat sie unbrauchbar gemacht’. Zum Thema ‘Katholische Aufklärung’—Oder: Aufklärung und Katholizismus im Deutschland des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Klueting (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung, 1–35. ——, (ed.), Der Josephinismus. Ausgewählte Quellen zur Geschichte der Theresanischjosephinischen Reformen (Darmstadt: 1995). ——, “Kaunitz, die Kirche und der Josephinismus. Protestantisches landesherrliches Kirchenregiment, rationaler Territorialismus und Theresanisch-josephinisches Staatskirchentum,” in Klingenstein, Grete and Szabo, Franz A. J. (eds.), Staatskanzler Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz-Rietberg 1711–1794 (Graz: 1996), 169–196. ——, “Der aufgeklärte Fürst,” in Weber, Wolfgang (ed.), Der Fürst. Ideen und Wirklichkeiten in der europäischen Geschichte (Cologne: 1998), 137–167. ——, “Zwischen wittelsbachischem Kaisertum und josephinischer Diözesanregulierung (1742/45–1783). Faktoren österreichischer Identitätsbildung im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Eybl (ed.), Strukturwandel, 15–44. ——, “ ‘Quidquid est in territorio, etiam est de territorio.’ Josephinisches Staatskirchentum als rationaler Territorialismus,” Der Staat 37 (1998): 417–434. ——, “Die Bedeutung der Salzburger Spätaufklärung für die europäische Geistesgeschichte—oder: Salzburg als Zentrum der deutschen katholischen Aufklärung,” in Ammerer, Gerhard and Weiss, Alfred Stefan (eds.), Die Säkularisation Salzburgs 1803. Voraussetzungen—Ereignisse—Folgen (Frankfurt/Main: 2005), 37–55. ——, “Salzburg und die Aufklärung,” in Luetteken, Laurenz and Hinrichsen, HansJoachim (eds.), Mozarts Lebenswelten (Kassel: 2008), 31–53. Kovács, Elisabeth, “Joseph II. und die Aufhebung der kontemplativen Klöster in der österreichischen Monarchie,“ in Mauerbach und die Kartäuser (Salzburg: 1984), 1–17. —— (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung und Josephinismus (Vienna: 1979). ——, “Was ist Josephinismus?” in Österreich zur Zeit Kaiser Josephs II. (Vienna: 1980), 24–30. ——, Der Pabst in Teutschland. Die Reise Pius VI. im Jahre 1782 (Vienna: 1983). Krückel, Herbert, “Beiträge zur Geschichte der josephinischen Pfarrerrichtungen im St. Pöltener Diözesangebiet,” Jahrbuch für Landeskunde von Niederösterreich new series 52 (1986): 96–167 and 373–381. Kushej (Kušej), Jakob Radoslav, Joseph II. und die äussere Kirchenverfassung Innerösterreichs (Bistums-, Pfarr- und Klosterregulierung). Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des österreichischen Staatskirchenrechts (Stuttgart: 1908, reprint Amsterdam: 1965). Laun, Andreas, “Die Moraltheologie im 18. Jahrhundert unter dem Einfluß von Jansenismus und Aufklärung,” in Kovács (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung, 266–294. Link, Christoph, Herrschaftsordnung und bürgerliche Freiheit. Grenzen der Staatsgewalt in der älteren deutschen Staatslehre (Vienna: 1979), 292–321. Maass, Ferdinand, Der Frühjosephinismus (Vienna: 1969). —— (ed.), Der Josephinismus. Quellen zu seiner Geschichte in Österreich 1760–1790 (1850) 5 vols. (Vienna: 1951–1961). Maire, Catherine, De la cause de Dieu à la cause de la Nation. Le jansénisme au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: 1998). Meister, Elisabeth, “Die Neuorganisation des österreichischen Teils der Diözese Passau im Spiegel der Geistlichen Ratsprotokolle 1783–1785,” Ostbairische Grenzmarken 28 (1986): 220–230. Michaud, Claude, “Der Josephinismus in der Habsburgermonarchie (1740–1792),” in Plongeron (ed.), Aufklärung (Freiburg: 2000), 15–25.


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CATHOLIC ENLIGHTENMENT AND REFORM CATHOLICISM IN THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE Michael Printy 1. Catholic Enlightenment and Reform Catholicism The Catholic Enlightenment in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire was at once an episode specific to the intellectual and cultural conditions of early modern Germany and also part of a much broader shift in religion, politics, and culture in eighteenth-century Europe.1 As a disparate movement occurring in a polity that itself lacked a political center, the Catholic Enlightenment in Germany (more concisely katholische Aufklärung) has not yet been systematically integrated into any larger narrative of the three principle stories in which it may be situated: German history, the history of the Enlightenment, and the history of Catholicism.2 Partly at fault, of course, is the inherent weakness of these narratives themselves. Or rather, the story of the German Catholic Enlightenment as told here serves to disrupt all of these in some way and to show the fragility of many of the older accounts

1 Catholics made up about one third of the population of the Empire (excluding Austria). For a discussion of the complex relationship of Austria, the Habsburg hereditary lands, and the Empire, see Harm Klueting’s contribution to this volume. Catholic Germany was geographically diverse (and not limited to Bavaria, as is often assumed), including many important cities and episcopal foundations situated on the Rhine, dotted throughout Swabia and Franconia, with strongholds in Old Bavaria and Salzburg. For a good survey, see Marc Forster, Catholic Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Houndmills: 2008). 2 For a full account, with a slightly different emphasis, see my Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism (New York: 2009), from which this chapter partly draws. Important overviews include: Harm Klueting (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung: Aufklärung im katholischen Deutschland (Hamburg: 1993); Richard Van Dülmen, Propst Franziskus Töpsl (1711–1796) und das Augustiner-Chorherrenstift Polling (Kallmünz: 1967); Peter Hersche, Der Spätjansenismus in Österreich (Vienna: 1977); Idem, Muße und Verschwendung. Europäische Gesellschaft und Kultur im Barockzeitalter, 2 vols. (Freiburg: 2006). An important study of the theological issues is Philipp Schäfer, Kirche und Vernunft. Die Kirche in der katholischen Theologie der Aufklärungszeit (Munich: 1974). Specialized reference works useful for this work and further research includes the Biographish-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (Nordhausen: 1990ff.), also available and updated online at www.bautz.de, and Manfred Brandl, Die deutschen katholischen Theologen der Neuzeit: ein Repertorium, 3 vols. (Salzburg: 1978–2006).

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of modern German history and the relationship between Catholicism and Enlightenment.3 Because this chapter—and indeed this whole volume—serves as a recovery of a forgotten episode, attention is paid almost exclusively to the Catholic side of the story. But it should be emphasized that much of the intellectual renewal that laid the foundation for subsequent developments had its roots in an irenic intellectual culture both within Germany as well as internationally, and included common interest in new scientific ideas, historical criticism, and the foundation of scientific academies and journals. It is to be hoped that this work of recovery may lay the groundwork for future interpretation of the German Enlightenment that take its biconfessional origins seriously. In what follows, I will briefly elaborate three sets of related concepts that may serve as nodes connecting the history of the Catholic Enlightenment in the Holy Roman Empire to other historical movements and literatures, before moving on to a general survey of the topic. These sets of concepts may be loosely categorized as: Catholic Enlightenment and Reform Catholicism; Enlightenment and Religion in Germany; and Jansenism and Baroque Catholicism. Catholic Enlightenment and Reform Catholicism are two terms that may be considered separately for the purpose of analysis, yet which bear on overlapping problems and share the same basic historical period. Also, each of these terms brings its own set of historiographical and conceptual problems. Both terms will be employed throughout this essay, though it should be born in mind that they are not always interchangeable. Likewise, the decision to restrict this account to the lands of the Holy Roman Empire exclusive of the Habsburg Monarchy has its own logic, but again this separation is made for analytical purposes, not because of any absolute separation of events and ideas during the eighteenth century.4 After all, but for a brief interlude in the middle of the eighteenth century the Emperor was a Habsburg, and much of the Habsburg Monarchy itself was part of the Empire. Moreover, as an intellectual movement, the Catholic Enlightenment was spread, especially in the latter third of the century, in the German 3 For examples of other recent literature pointing in this direction see David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Catholics, and Jews from London to Vienna (Princeton: 2008) and Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible. Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: 2005). 4 The reform movement in the Habsburg territories is the subject of Harm Klueting’s contribution to this volume, pp. 127–164. I should note that I completely disagree with his assertion that reform Catholicism was “not Catholic” and “heretical,” and do not consider it the role of the historian to make such claims.

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vernacular, and discussion of Joseph II’s (reign 1780–1790) reforms were part of a wider German discourse. On the other hand, the peculiar relationship of the Habsburg Monarchy to the Empire, and of the nature of the Church in Habsburg territories, warrants separate treatment. By the eighteenth century, the Habsburgs had succeeded in shifting their attention southward and eastward, intent on consolidating their rule where they held direct sovereignty. To be sure, they still held significant sway in the Empire, especially in the Emperor’s role in appointments and confirmations to various courts and other positions. But contemporaries recognized that Habsburg territories were more or less separate from the Empire itself. As far as Church reform, Habsburg rulers could exercise far greater control, given that the bishops did not enjoy the same type of independence as the prince bishops in the Empire. Indeed, the Catholic Enlightenment in Germany was conditioned by the ways in which ecclesiastical politics were an inherent part of the Holy Roman Empire. One could not alter the Church without also touching the basic structures of society. As Peter Hersche has recently remarked of the Catholic Church in the baroque age: Too often it is not sufficiently noticed that “Church” in the early modern period cannot be reduced to apply only to “religion” and its ministers. “Church” was more: it served to demonstrate status, relationships and sociability. It was the major pillar of welfare, credit and education. Moreover, it was the only institution through which the culture of the upper classes also reached the common people. In the eyes of the laity, these profane functions were perhaps even more important than the strictly religious ones.5

Rethinking the Church, therefore, meant contemplating changes not only in religious practices and institutions, strictly defined, but also economic practices, local customs, courts and legal codes, education, and the myriad ways in which daily life was shot through with religious ritual. At a higher institutional level, the Reichskirche (Imperial Church) served as the backbone of the Empire, as supporters of the small ecclesiastical states were among the most vigorous defenders of the Imperial constitution. Such small states could not hope to compete directly with larger dynastic powers and saw in imperial assurances of mutual security their only chance for preservation. The German

5 Peter Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung. Europäische Gesellschaft und Kultur im Barockzeitalter, 2 vols. (Freiburg: 2006), vol. 1: 384.

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episcopate and cathedral chapters were populated almost exclusively by the nobility. To reform the Church, therefore, one needed to come to terms with long-held social privileges. The diffusion of political authority in the Empire—and here is where the contrast with the Habsburg Monarchy is most apparent—structured the nature of reform thinking. While a single unitary authority to carry out reforms was lacking, the plethora of smaller polities and territories also lent the movement an air of optimism that expressed itself in the public exchange of ideas and proposals. This brings us to the role of religion in the German Enlightenment, the second intellectual context in which the Catholic Enlightenment in the Holy Roman Empire should be considered. As the general topic of religion and Enlightenment have already been broached in the introduction to this volume, it remains to be asked what a consideration of the Holy Roman Empire can bring to this general revision. Karl Friedrich Stäudlin, professor of theology at Göttingen remarked in 1804 that the Germans are still on the whole a very religious nation, and true religious formation and Enlightenment have attained a higher level among them than among any other nation. Just as it was among the Germans that the Reformation had its beginnings, so too among them in the eighteenth century there began a new revolution in religious knowledge and in the theological sciences, only this time without disturbance, violence, and war. [. . .] No other nation has worked on the theological sciences with as much spirit, taste, and thoroughness as has the German.

A Protestant, Stäudlin nevertheless insisted that his statement referred to “all religious parties” in Germany, Catholics included.6 What rendered the German religious Enlightenment distinct from other such religious Enlightenments had to do with the political and confessional makeup of German society. At the Imperial level, the confessions enjoyed political parity given that each party could vote on religious matters by caucus at the Imperial Diet. While they shared a vernacular, Protestants had much earlier pioneered its employment in public discussion of theological matters. For their part, Catholic prelates and theologians were long suspicious of a language rooted in Luther’s biblical translations. But by the latter third of the eighteenth century,

6 Karl F. Stäudlin, Kirchliche Geographie und Statistik, 2 vols. (Tübingen: 1804), vol. 2: 324–325.


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German Catholics were making increasingly confident assertions in the vernacular. The German religious Enlightenment, moreover, was not as marked by defenses against atheism and the radical Enlightenment as elsewhere, though the controversy over Lessing’s supposed Spinozism is a notable exception.7 While some of this was due to censorship and repression, probably as important was biconfessional competition that had so long formed part of German experience and was now entering a new phase. By the middle of the eighteenth century, spurred on by the rising costs of war and the related drive toward rationalization and bureaucratic rule, German territorial states began to appeal to the same type of rational natural-law justifications for the exercise of political power. Whereas earlier princes and rulers had often cloaked their claims to power in confessional terms—whether as church reformers and defenders of gospel for Protestants, or as “advocates of the Church” for Catholics—the rise of abstract, utilitarian justifications for state power also meant that Protestants and Catholics who cared about such things increasingly saw their political and social life as more similar than different. Related to this sense of commonality, then, was the rise of a distinctive German public sphere in which law (especially concern with the Verfassung) and reform writings occupied a central role. Needless to say, this drive toward more rational administration, and, more importantly, the theoretical justifications that underpinned it, were more problematic for the small ecclesiastical states, which did not have, for the most part, either the resources or the inclination to undertake such extensive modernization programs as did their larger neighbors. The great exception was the Archbishopric of Mainz, where the bishop—as Archchancellor of the Empire—harbored political ambitions. Bishop Friedrich Karl von Erthal (reign 1774–1802) undertook an extensive and ambitious reform program in both secular and ecclesiastical matters, and above all in education.8 Germany’s unique confessional situation, it has long been acknowledged, shaped its Enlightenment. Ian Hunter has recently made the compelling case that rather than a unitary German Enlightenment that 7

A good account of this is Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: 1987). 8 See Timothy C. W. Blanning, Reform and Revolution in Mainz, 1743–1803 (Cambridge: 1974).

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proceeded from Thomasius and Wolff to Kant, there were instead radically divergent, or “rival” Enlightenments.9 There was, Hunter argues, a civil or “jurisprudential” Enlightenment that proceeded from Pufendorf to Thomasius and was especially interested in keeping theology and, more importantly, metaphysics separate from the science of jurisprudence and civil governance. The metaphysical Enlightenment of Kant drew instead from Leibniz and Wolff, and continued a tradition of “moral grooming” rooted in a specific philosophical anthropology. In looking back to Thomasius and the early German Enlightenment, Hunter shows how Germany’s particular confessional and political conditions formed rival Enlightenments whose intellectual diversity and divergence has often been obscured in later scholarship that privileged the Kantian interpretation of Aufklärung. To this picture I would add an early Catholic Enlightenment that likewise grew from conditions particular to Germany and to the Catholic Church in the early modern period. Just as the standard accounts of the early Enlightenment in Germany (Frühaufklärung) indicate that it was marked by an overt turning away from confessional strife, so too did Catholic thinkers begin to turn away from strident confessional conflict and begin to open more to newer strains in philosophy and the sciences.10 Likewise, just as the Frühaufklärung was a matter much more restricted to smaller circles of scholars and clerics than the movement would become in the second half of the century, the early Catholic Enlightenment was restricted to the highly educated, usually monks or other Churchmen. What set the early Enlightenment in Catholic Germany apart from its Protestant counterpart, however, was the way in which Catholic thinkers and scholars were incorporated into a wider world of Catholic Latin learning and culture. A large part of the drama of the later Catholic Enlightenment in Germany was rooted in the tension that Catholic thinkers found themselves torn between national and universal cultures of Catholicism.

9 Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge; New York: 2001), 341f. On Thomasius see Thomas Ahnert, Religion and the Origins of the German Enlightenment: Faith and the Reform of Learning in the Thought of Christian Thomasius (2006). 10 Sebastian Merkle, Die katholische Beurteilung des Aufklärungszeitalters (Berlin: 1909).


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This drama, finally, alerts us to the third context in which we may situate Catholic Enlightenment and Reform Catholicism in the Holy Roman Empire. Namely, at work was a process of modernization and differentiation within the Catholic world, but one undertaken by rival groups and actors, at times proceeding on parallel tracks. As noted above, Peter Hersche reminds us that the Church in the early modern period was much more than an institution narrowly defined. “Religion,” too, cannot be seen neatly segregated from other social and cultural activities and perceptions. In his recent grand survey of early modern Catholic culture and society, Hersche makes a compelling case for using the baroque as an overarching conceptualization of Catholic culture, indeed a master category into which politics, religious practice, and style can be arranged. He thus appropriates the old charge that Catholicism fostered “leisure and waste” (Muße und Verschwendung), strips those terms of their pejorative connotations, and proceeds to offer up that culture as a detailed counterpoint to European Protestant culture. Hersche argues that, contrary to some versions of the confessionalization thesis, ecclesiastical and secular authorities in Catholic states were often at odds, even if they managed to maintain a rhetoric of harmonious cooperation. Nonetheless, both worked in their own ways to halt or reverse the progress of Protestantism. “Things came to a head in the eighteenth century,” Hersche writes, “when both state and Church began a new push for reforms, the former by means of ‘enlightened absolutism,’ the latter with a ‘reprise of Trent.’ ”11 The epoch of Catholic Enlightenment and Reform Catholicism did not on its own witness the shattering of a long-standing harmonious cooperation between Church and state, but as reformers appealed to the public sphere to make their case for reform—and this is what was qualitatively new about the Enlightenment—they did abandon the image and rhetoric of the baroque alliance of spiritual and secular. In this, the Catholic Enlightenment, in Germany as elsewhere, mirrored in its own way the process that J. G. A. Pocock has characterized as a “series of programmes for reducing the power of either churches or congregations to disturb the peace of civil society by challenging its authority.” Pocock continues by noting that this latter program was

11

Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung, vol. 1: 171.

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one in which “ecclesiastics of many confessions might and did join.”12 This last aspect, the active participation of ecclesiastics, is especially true in the Holy Roman Empire. Indeed, the early phase of the movement was populated almost entirely by Churchmen, with lay writers playing a more significant role really only in the last few decades of the eighteenth century. Hersche’s insights about the plurality of reform movements also reminds us that one should not simplify the motives of reformers: many of even the most strident reformers harbored deeply-felt religious convictions. This was particularly true of Jansenistinspired reformers,13 but also of moderate reformers like the Benedictine monk Beda Aschenbrenner, who admonished fellow monks: “Reform yourselves—and you will be treated mildly! Otherwise you are wishing upon yourself and your pupils your collapse—your suppression.”14 Needless to say, the efforts of Aschenbrenner and his fellow reformers to stave off suppression came to naught in 1803. But we should resist the temptation to read too much of the later history into the past and to recognize instead that what lent the period its vitality and dynamism was not a battle between a putatively progressive, secularizing Enlightenment, and a rearguard, defensive religious response. Rather, it was the competition between competing strains of reform—at times intertwining—flowing alternately from Jansenism and other less pronounced Augustinian sources, from curial initiative (starting with what Hersche labels the “Innocentian turn” and culminating in the pontificate of Benedict XIV),15 from lay princes and their ministers (bean-counters and pious reformers alike), as well as from a growing Catholic middle class that saw increasing opportunities to work in civil society, mostly as a result of the growing need for civil servants, and therefore did not feel the same pressure to take up careers as clergymen and monks. 12 J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Volume I: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon (Cambridge: 1999), 7. 13 As has been demonstrated for the Austrian reform by Hersche’s earlier work, Der Spätjansenismus in Österreich. 14 Beda Aschenbrenner, Aufklärungs-Almanach für Abbte und Vorsteher katholischer Klöster (s.l., 1784), 112; see also Anton Hoffmann, Beda Aschenbrenner (1756– 1817). Lezter Abt von Oberalteich: Leben und Werk (Passau: 1964). 15 Hersche argues that the reigns of Innocent XI (1676–89) and Innocent XII (1691– 1700) represented a decisive turning away from the baroque, and ushered in “a more sober, pious, and reforming spirit.” Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung vol. 2: 952.


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These aforementioned conditions had echoes in other Catholic cultures. But the inherent plurality of Catholic society was magnified and given its own unique institutional expression in the Holy Roman Empire. A final aspect to be considered, therefore, is the particular nature and strength of baroque Catholicism in Germany. As the product of educated Catholics, the reform program did not entail a rejection of the Catholic Church, but rather an effort to adapt it to new times. The Catholic Enlightenment in Germany was not merely the result of the importation of a certain set of anti-clerical and antireligious ideas that Catholics simply tried to re-articulate in language appropriate to their own situation. Instead, it was the culmination of several generations of pious renewal and revival. In many ways, the Catholic Enlightenment in Germany served to top off a long recovery that had begun toward the end of the seventeenth century. Like the rest of Germany, the Catholic Church had been laid low by the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War. Churches, monasteries, and other ecclesiastical foundations were left in ruins. The initial thrust of Tridentine reforms ground to a halt as grand plans of education and renewal were supplanted by more pressing needs to rebuild. Moreover, a Catholicism that drew its energy from vigorous resistance to Protestant advances and was most aptly represented by the Jesuits lost its force in the wake of a war that was seen by many as a result of such confessional fervor.16 Toward the end of the seventeenth century, signs of renewal were apparent, evidence of which is perhaps most readily seen in the profusion of churches and monasteries rebuilt in a distinctive baroque style that dot the south German landscape.17 Yet that rise coincided with papal withdrawal from the normal political process of the Empire in 1648. If the eighteenth century signaled the fulfillment of a long-standing process of religious renewal, the war— and more precisely, the peace—shifted the center of energy away from Rome—directed renewal back onto the German Church itself.

16

Forster, Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque. See in particular the discussion of monasteries in the German lands in Derek Beales, Prosperity and Plunder: European Catholic Monasteries in the Age of Revolution, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: 2003). See also Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Court, Cloister, and City: the Art and Culture of Central Europe, 1450–1800 (Chicago: 1995), 367f. 17

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The political and diplomatic consequences of the war were fundamental for the refashioning of German Catholicism in the Old Regime. Even as the energy of Catholic renewal driven by international confessional politics lost steam, local churches flourished. This is not to say that the Catholic Church in Germany became insular, given that religious orders such as the Capuchins were carrying out important missions.18 Yet the return to the local after 1648 reminds us in some ways just how innovative the Rome-led Catholic offensive had been in the wake of the Council of Trent. The century and a half between Westphalia and the dissolution of the Empire in 1806 presents a significant break in the progression from the Tridentine Counter-Reformation to the Ultramontane Catholicism of the nineteenth century. The defeat of the universalistic vision of a re-invigorated Catholic Empire in 1648 returned the German Catholic Church to its roots. This shift in political fortunes for the Church meant that German Catholicism in the Old Regime once again relied on the power of the nobility and the ecclesiastical states.19 It would build on that recovery well into the eighteenth century. German Catholicism in this period was marked by an especially strong and persistent baroque style that was firmly grounded in the countryside, but also in the context of local courts.20 Germany’s political decentralization and the relative strength and autonomy of cities, abbeys and smaller territories fostered a long-standing commitment to local religion, the most tangible manifestation of which was in a culture of pilgrimages and shrines. Catholic practices could also serve a political function, as they did especially in Bavaria, but also in other

18

Marc R. Forster, The Counter-Reformation in the Villages: Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560–1720 (Ithaca: 1992). 19 The ecclesiastical states made up the most distinctive element of the Reichskirche. With the exception of the papal state, they were the last remnants of a medieval system of governance in which temporal authority was in the hands of an ecclesiastic. Like the free imperial cities (Reichsstädte), these states were reichsunmittelbar—fully independent polities subject only to the emperor and Diet. While the most influential of these were the three Archbishoprics of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier (confirmed as electors by the Golden Bull of 1356) the other ecclesiastical foundations (Stifte) played an important role in imperial politics. Bishops were elected by the cathedral chapters, which had the right to select bishops to be later confirmed by Rome. Lawrence G. Duggan, “The Church as an Institution of the Reich,” in James A. Vann and Steven Rowan (eds.), The Old Reich. Essays on German Political Institutions 1495–1806 (Brussels: 1974), 151. 20 Marc Forster, Catholic Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment.


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territories.21 This continued vitality of popular and rural Catholicism would give the Catholic Enlightenment and its reform program in Germany a particular edge as educated Catholics sought to reform (which in many cases meant to suppress) practices and institutions that not only were dear to their co-religionists, but were themselves practices that had featured prominently in the historical evolution of the German Catholic Bürgertum. This dynamic emerged over the course of the recovery from the Thirty Years’ War, and was indeed a sign of the confidence of German Catholicism now firmly grounded in the Westphalian treaties. If, then, as Hersche has emphasized, the Catholic Enlightenment may be seen both as a rejection of the baroque, and as its own, religiously motivated reform program, it is also worthwhile to see it as a self-conscious elaboration of a distinct national Catholicism within the larger communion. It is important at the outset however not to confuse aspirations with outcomes. The following narrative will show how in the early Enlightenment, the combination of confident recovery and the rhetoric of spiritual and lay cooperation gave rise to a vigorous and wide-ranging intellectual renewal (largely situated in monasteries) that laid the foundation for further developments and also opened up a potential rift with the system of Jesuit education and learning. This confidence found its first and most lasting expression in canon law and the quest for Gallican-style legal autonomy for the Church in Germany. The latter portions of this chapter will then show how the rise of the state and the concomitant social changes—especially the rise of a new civil society and transformed possibilities for the secular clergy and the laity—gave way to a sharper conflict, which found its expression not only in diplomatic back-and-forth, but, most influentially, in the turn to the reading public and the elaboration of a comprehensive reform program in the public sphere. 2. Worlds of Learning The German Catholic Enlightenment was a movement of ideas, and like all such movements it was shaped by the educational and intellectual environment from which it emerged. Although difficult to 21 For a discussion of the “Pietas Austriaca” and its role in Habsburg rule, see Harm Klueting’s contribution to this volume, as well as Anna Coreth, Pietas Austriaca, trans. William D. Bowman and Anna Maria Leitgeb (West Lafayette: 2004).

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quantify, a reinvigorated intellectual atmosphere accompanied, and was perhaps fostered by, the economic recovery.22 Yet, as we shall see, this “early” Catholic Enlightenment harbored tensions which burst into the open toward the end of the century. But in the first half of the century, battle lines had not yet hardened, and various strands of reform had not yet come into open conflict. Much of this intellectual work was done by monks and other clergy who—with varying degrees of self-consciousness—sought to counteract the influence of the Jesuits on German Catholicism. In Germany, the growing opposition to Jesuit education came not from the type of Enlightenment anti-clericalism with which we are familiar in France, but from the “old orders,” that is to say from monastic institutions that had been cultivating libraries and scholarship to rival some of the best work of the Society of Jesus.23 The most influential of these were the Augustinian Canons Regular and the Order of St. Benedict. Monasteries are rarely thought of as intellectual centers in the age of Enlightenment, being seen instead as holdovers of medieval times from which little intellectual progress could be expected. However, cloisters provided the intellectual basis for German Catholicism and, indeed, European Catholicism as a whole. While we are accustomed to situating intellectual traditions in their national context, monastic learning linked Catholic scholars—who usually wrote in Latin long after others were writing in the vernacular—across Europe. Jean Mabillion (1632– 1707) of the Benedictine congregation of St. Maur is perhaps the most famous example of a learned monk whose reputation has, so to speak, escaped the cloister. There exists a wide-ranging specialized literature, usually biographical in nature, on various German clerical scholars in this period. In what follows, I will briefly discuss two prominent figures: Eusebius Amort (1692–1775) a Canon Regular from the cloister Polling, and Anselm Desing (1699–1772), a Benedictine who eventu-

22 On centrality of agriculture to Catholic regions, as well as the economic role of cloisters see Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung vol. 1: 358–365 and 442–499. 23 Richard van Dülmen stresses the importance of the cloisters for the Catholic Enlightenment in Germany. He also notes that in the early decades of the century, the leading reformers and writers were monks. By the 1780s, however, many of the most prominent reformers were secular priests such Michael Ignaz Schmidt or Anton Wittola. The early Catholic Enlightenment of the monks focused on scholarship and science, whereas the later Catholic Enlightenment shifted toward an emphasis on reform and education in conjunction with the state. See Van Dülmen, Propst Franziskus Töpsl, 4–5.


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ally served as abbot of Ensdorf. These figures will serve to demonstrate two central concerns of the early Catholic Enlightenment in Germany. Respectively, these are the encounter with Augustinianism and French spirituality (a broad category which includes Jansenism), and the encounter with Protestant natural law and its uses by the absolutist state. Both of these intellectual concerns would reveal deep fissures within the Catholic world later in the century. Amort stood at the summit of the last generation of monastic polymaths and made significant contributions in fields ranging from canon law and church history to moral theology and the natural sciences.24 Amort’s intellectual career and the breadth of his interest show the ways in which the early Catholic Enlightenment participated in the three broad contexts mentioned above, namely Germany history, the history of Catholicism, and the history of Enlightenment. He cofounded the first vernacular learned journal in Catholic Germany— Parnassus Boicus—and inspired the eventual founding of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (to which he was elected the first member).25 He engaged all the major controversies and issues in eighteenth-century Catholicism. An active reformer, Amort campaigned against Jesuit domination in education.26 He sought to limit certain devotional practices and to re-examine the history of Catholic theology with a goal toward its reform. He fought against the “private”—and therefore smacking of superstition—revelations of the bilocating Spanish mystic Maria de Agreda. Finally, Amort’s Enlightenment was one that saw reason and revelation as complementary, not antagonistic, and he sought to reconcile traditional Catholic views with newer epistemological and scientific ideas. Amort’s greatest influence was as a moral theologian. His Moral Theology (1758) sought to fulfill Pope Benedict XIV’s request for theologians to find a way out of the crisis of moral theology in the wake of the condemnations of laxism and rigorism.27 Amort addressed, in a

24 For a detailed account of his biography and career, see Karin Precht-Nußbaum, Zwischen Augburg und Rom. Der Pollinger Augustiner-Chorherr Eusebius Amort (1692–1775). Ein bedeutender Repräsentant katholischer Aufklärung in Bayern (Paring: 2007). 25 On the history of the academy, see Ludwig Hammermayer, Geschichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1759–1807, 2 vols. (Munich: 1983). 26 On the role of anti-Jesuitism, see Richard van Dülmen, “Antijesuitismus und katholische Aufklärung in Deutschland,” Historisches Jahrbuch 89: 1 (1969). 27 Eusebius Amort, Theologia moralis, 2 vols. (Augsburg: 1758).

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highly technical manner, the relationship between religious and moral laws, the faculty of conscience, and the role of the Church and its ministers in mediating between them. The genre of moral theology—and the profusion of handbooks and manuals in the early modern period attests to its social import—was geared toward helping priests and ministers apply the dictates of the Church (and to serve as gatekeeper to the sacraments) on a daily basis.28 Probabilist theologians had, in essence, argued that one might rightfully follow a judgment that, on the surface, seemed less strict, yet could still be seen as plausibly within the bounds of legitimacy. Rigorists, on the other hand, insisted that almost any doubt should lead one to follow the stricter path. Amort’s formulation of the doctrine of equiprobabilism—while still holding an austere moral stance—nonetheless defended the choice of a laxer path when true doubt existed. Although largely forgotten today, Amort was among the most influential Catholic theologians of his age. A student of Benedict XIV, he dedicated several works to the pontiff, and was cited well into the nineteenth century. The greatest beneficiary of Amort’s work in moral theology was none other than Alphonse of Liguori, founder of the Redemptorists and champion of the revival of probabilism.29 The direction taken by the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century has therefore colored the way the Catholic Enlightenment in Germany has been viewed.30 Eusebius Amort’s legacy has been wrapped up in this apparent conflict of values. But, for all his attacks on superstition, his criticism of the Jesuits, and his scientific interests, his work provided an essential defense of the Catholic principle upon which probabilism was based. By finding a middle way between rigorism and laxism, Amort enabled Liguori to fashion a moral theology that would serve the Church well in the age of popular religion.

28 While the mode of reasoning in these tracts was quite abstract, they ultimately related to concrete cases with real consequences. 29 For a detailed discussion, see Michael Printy, “The Intellectual Origins of Popular Catholicism: Catholic Moral Theology in the Age of Enlightenment,” Catholic Historical Review 91:3 (2005), 438–461. On Liguori, see Théodule Rey-Mermet, St. Alphonsus Liguori. Tireless Worker for the Most Abandoned, trans. Jehanne-Marie Marchesi (New York: 1989). 30 See especially Sebastian’s Merkle’s lecture on the “katholische Beurteilung des Aufklärungszeitalters” and his response to the criticisms by other Catholic scholars at the height of the anti-Modernist campaign in 1909–1910: Sebastian Merkle, Die katholische Beurteilung des Aufklärungszeitalters.


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A second area where the early Catholic Enlightenment showed a certain openness to new intellectual currents was in its treatment of Protestant natural law. As mentioned above, the turn away from strictly confessional defenses of political power was part of a larger reaction to the religious politics that had so damaged and destabilized Germany and Europe as a whole. Protestants had at first rejected many of the tenets of natural law based on a theological anthropology that denigrated any innate human freedom before divine grace. It was the Spanish scholastics, in particular, who had revived a Thomist discourse of natural law. Their ideas were introduced into Protestant jurisprudence by Hugo Grotius.31 It was to this largely secularized natural law that a significant cohort of Catholic thinkers turned starting in the early eighteenth century. The reception of Protestant natural law was seen as problematic by some orthodox Catholics, to say the least. Anselm Desing, who would later defend the wealth of the clergy against the policies of the Bavarian ecclesiastical council, worried that teaching natural law as found in the works of Pufendorf or Grotius to Catholic students was dangerous to Catholicism. Desing claimed to tear off the “mask” [larva] of natural law as taught in the works of Pufendorf and Wolff in his 1753 Juris naturae larva detractata.32 For Desing, the problem was not with natural law per se, but with interpretations that did not allow that revelation completed natural law. The Protestant jurists were working to rehabilitate the natural law tradition for their own ends. The modern books of natural law [neoterici juris naturae libri] do not claim Scripture as proof, Desing says, because Scripture was not revealed to all peoples.33 They include the works of pagans and poets, but not Moses, and write as if everyone between Christ and Grotius were ignorant of natural law.34 Desing is particularly concerned that this natural law not be taught to Catholic youth because its goal is to overturn the Catholic Church [nihil alius intendunt, quam Catholicae rei eversionem].35

31 See in particular Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Volume 2: The Age of Reformation (Cambridge: 1978); John Neville Figgis, From Gerson to Grotius: 1414–1625 (Cambridge: 1907). 32 larva can also mean “ghost” or “evil spirit.” 33 Anselm Desing, Juris Naturae Larva Detracta compluribus libris sub titulo Juris Naturae Prodeuntibus (Munich: 1753), 16. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 17.

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Desing labels the proponents of modern natural law “socialists.” He does so based on Pufendorf’s use of man’s natural “sociability” as the touchstone of his natural law theory.36 Desing argues that to declare sociability as the fundamental fact and standard of natural law removes God as the highest goal and head. For Desing, this attention to sociability alone would overturn society because religion would not be its basis. He accuses Pufendorf and the other proponents of natural law of adoring the absolutist prince, and of having replaced the love of God as the highest good with the love of the prince. While Desing was correct that modern Protestant natural law favored the growth of the secular state, he glossed over the principle reason why it did so without appealing to revelation. An essential feature of Protestant natural law was its aim to posit rules for civil society and secular ethics that would enable such systems to avoid the pitfalls and appeals to absolutes that its proponents saw as having led to the wars of religion. It was not Thomist because it assumed a radical separation of religion and civic life. This is precisely why it was so productive and fruitful across Europe after 1648. Desing does not accept this separation, and therefore cannot accept the principles that would come to undergird attempts to recast canon law in a manner more favorable to the state. He would also resist the economic and political rationale that led the state to encroach on the wealth of the Church. His resistance shows how the philosophical, legal, and moral understanding of the nature of the Church and the role of religion in civil society were bound up with the political understanding of the Church. Desing’s fears about the uses to which Protestant natural law could be put proved prophetic, as we shall see in a later section. Before turning to the consequences of territorial absolutism for the Church in the Holy Roman Empire, however, we must first explore a final aspect of the early phase of the Catholic Enlightenment, namely the elaboration of a canon law “accommodated to the German nation.”

36 On Desing, see Johann Baptist Schneyer, Die Rechtsphilosophie Anselm Desings O.S.B. (1699–1772) (Kallmünz: 1932); Manfred Knedlik and George Schrott (eds.), Anselm Desing (1699–1772). Ein benediktinischer Universalgelehrter im Zeitalter der Aufklärung (Kallmünz: 1999). On Desing as the first to use the term “socialist,” see Hans Müller, Ursprung und Geschichte des Wortes “Sozialismus” (Hannover: 1967); Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: 1971), 102.


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3. Febronianism and the Jurisprudential Foundations of the Catholic Enlightenment The political universe of German Catholics in the eighteenth century was shaped by the consequences of the Peace of Westphalia. Indeed, the German commitment—Protestant and Catholic alike—to the “constitution” (Verfassung) of the Empire may to a large degree be traced the success of the Westphalian treaties in more or less preserving confessional peace. The confessional stability provided by the Peace emboldened Catholics to clamor for more independence from Rome. This sense of security enabled German Catholics to consider seriously the proposition that they did not need Roman help in preserving their religion against the Protestants. Against this background German canon lawyers began to rethink the nature of the German Church’s relationship with the papacy. Their efforts culminated in a vision of German Catholicism that saw it as firmly rooted in the Empire, but also capable of change. Although first elaborated in the language of law, this Gallican idea of the German Church came to serve as a larger template onto which Catholic reformers in Germany outlined their aspirations for reform. The legal claim on the Church was dramatically stated in 1763 by Trier auxiliary bishop Nicholas von Hontheim, whose treatise On the State of the Church and the Legitimate Power of the Roman Pontiff [De statu ecclesiae] more than any other work brought historical canon-law scholarship into a very public debate in Germany over the nature of the Catholic Church.37 The underlying concepts of De statu ecclesiae—asserting the liberties of the German Church and decrying the papacy as an obstacle to German religious reunification—formed the basis upon which the German Catholic reform program would

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Niklaus von Hontheim, Justini Febronii jurisconsulti de Statu Ecclesiae et Legitima Potestate Romani Pontificis Liber Singularis, ad Reuniendos Dissidentes in Religione Christianos Compositus (Frankfurt: 1763). Many versions were printed in several languages. The best summary in English, with a list of further references, is now Ulrich L. Lehner, “Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim’s Febronius: A Censored Bishop and his Ecclesiology,” Church History and Religious Culture 88 (2008): 93–121. Hontheim’s two main works (De Statu and his commentary on his subsequent “retraction”) have been re-issued with an editorial introduction. See Nikolaus Hontheim, Commentarius in suam retractationem, ed. Ulrich L. Lehner (Nordhausen: 2008 [1781]), and Nikolaus Hontheim, Febronius abbreviatus et emendatus, ed. Ulrich L. Lehner (Nordhausen: 2008 [1777]).

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build. De Statu was not a wholly original work in the sense that its major premises could easily be traced to other works in canon law and Church history.38 Nevertheless, more than any other work Hontheim’s “single book” galvanized a generation of educated German Catholics. It built on foundations laid by canonists who had introduced historical methods into the study of canon law. Central to the conviction that the papacy had infringed on the liberties of the German Church was the historical thesis that much of what the popes claimed as their right was based on usurpation and, at best, pious fraud. This latter emphasis on the results of fraud arose largely from the controversy over the Pseudoisidorian Decretals, a set of letters purportedly from popes in the early centuries of the Church which seemed to confirm many of the powers and privileges claimed by the papacy. Intellectually, the German canonists were able to pull away from Rome by expanding their conception of the sources of Church law. In effect, this meant expanding the notion of valid Church law beyond the received boundaries of the corpus juris canonici. They sought to move beyond the papal decrees strictly defined. They were taking advantage of the potential openness of the system of canon law, which, until its codification in 1917, bore some similarities to a common-law system. Definitive opinions about interpreting the law required a clear sense of ultimate authority, in this case of course the pope. Furthermore, German canonists argued that national variations and customs superseded papal provisions. The introduction of a historical method into canon law provided a wedge to be used against the ultramontane canonists.39 The most wide-ranging and influential of these new approaches to the law of the Church was by Zeger-Bernard van Espen (1646–1728).40 His chief

38 This was part of Hontheim’s strategy: he tried to make his points by citing approved authors in order to avoid condemnation. 39 Ludwig. T Spittler, Geschichte des kanonischen Rechts, bis auf die Zeiten des falschen Isidorus (Halle: 1778), iii. Spittler considered this to constitute the beginning of the “intellectual revolution” for German Catholics. Heribert Raab, Die Concordata Nationis Germanicae in der kanonistischen Diskussion des 17. bis 19. Jahrhunderts. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der episkopalistischen Theorie in Deutschland (Wiesbaden: 1956), 132. 40 The Louvain canonist was very influential even after his principle work was placed on the Index. He had Gallican and Janenist sympathies, which eventually brought him afoul of the curia when he supported the election of the Vicar General of Utrecht, who had been consecrated without Roman approval. Soon after, van Espen refused to support the formulary of Alexander VII (a tool aimed at rooting out Jansenist sym-


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work, Jus Ecclesiasticum Universum (1700), broke new ground on several fronts, but his most important contribution was to integrate the “history of ancient discipline” into church law. He transformed the subject from a literary concern with the past, in which history served the function of critique, to the practical application of that critique in the law. Van Espen applied this approach systematically to the genre of canon law, thus transforming the history of the law into an interpretive principle to be used in courts and legal education. This legal sensibility proved appealing to German canonists, the most influential of whom were Johan Kaspar Barthel (1697–1771), Barthel’s student Georg Christoph Neller (1709–83), and the Benedictine Gregor Zallwein (1712–1766). In 1727, the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg and vice-chancellor of the Empire, Friedrich Karl von Schönborn, commissioned Barthel to “accommodate” canon law to the peculiarities of the Empire.41 Barthel had trained with Lambertini (the future Benedict XIV) in Rome, yet his intellectual lineage drew as much from the Gallicanism of van Espen.42 Barthel emphasized the need for cooperation between secular and clerical authorities and between the episcopate and the curia. In his 1762 Historical-CanonicalPragmatic Treatise . . . On the Concordat of the German Nation43 he noted that “the scope of this work is to defend the rights of the German nation while preserving the rights and authorities of the Roman pontiffs.”44 The main errors of the “Curialists” are that they neglect the ancient canons and the history of the Church. They assume that

pathizers in the Church) and the constitution Unigenitus. Rather than recant he fled from the Austrian Netherlands to the Dutch Republic, and died soon after. For a set of essays and further references, see Guido Cooman, Maurice Van Stiphout, and Bart Wauters (eds.), Zeger-Bernard van Espen at the Crossroads of Canon Law, History, Theology, and Church-State Relations (Leuven: 2003). 41 Karl Otmar Freiherr von Aretin, Das alte Reich, 1648–1806, vol. 2: Kaisertradition und österreichische Großmachtpolitik, 1684–1745 (Stuttgart: 1997), 396. 42 On Barthel, see Heribert Raab, “Johann Kaspar Barthels Stellung in der Diskussion um die Concordata Nationis Germanicae. Ein Beitrag zur Würzburger Kanonistik im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Raab, Reich und Kirche in der frühen Neuzeit (Freiburg, Switzerland: 1989), 127. For Barthel’s influence and a list of many of his student see Raab, “Der reichskirchliche Episkopalismus von der Mitte des 17. bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Jedin, (ed.) Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte vol. 5 (Freiburg: 1970), Chapter 22. 43 Full title: Tractatus Historico-Canonico-Pragmaticus Loco Dissertationis Tertiae de Concordatis Germaniae Specialis Exhibens Commentarium Hermeneuticum ad Eorundem Textum et Literam, Würzburg, 1762. In: Opsculorum Recentiorum, Pars I. 44 Barthel, Tractatus, 1f.

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the princes received all the Decretals without distinction, and they err in that they attribute too much authority to the decisions of the Rota and therefore to the approach of the Curia. Moreover, Barthel argues, they follow the assertions of scholars without adequate examination. Though not a major compendium on canon law in the style of van Espen, this collection served as a supplement for canonists who needed to know specifics about canon law as applied to German conditions. Throughout, Barthel is judiciously restrained on points of controversy. As with Eusebius Amort, Barthel and many of his generation wrote and acted in an age where compromise and accommodation between Rome and the national churches seemed possible.45 Barthel’s student Neller exercised a long-lasting influence on the study of canon law at the university of Trier.46 His most important work, Principia juris ecclesiastici catholicorum ad statum Germaniae accomodata (Frankfurt, 1746) insisted on the importance of historical research for a proper understanding of the law. Gregor Zallwein likewise emphasized history, but was particularly interested in exploring the specific legal background to the ecclesiastical province of Salzburg as well as the specific conditions of confessional co-existence in Germany. His Principia juris ecclesiastici universalis et particularis Germaniae (Augsburg, 1763) was widely cited, and Zallwein was named to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences soon after its foundation.47 The historical school of canon law gave the German canonists the intellectual and moral tools to question the Roman monopoly on the law of the Church. As the German canonists challenged the primacy of the pope in establishing the valid law of the Church, they turned to the imperial framework in order to define the German Church. The greatest example for the German canonists was the Gallican Church, which had by the middle of the eighteenth century fairly well established its

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Barthel’s epigoni included all sorts of canonists, some more radical than others. Georg Chrisoph Neller was perhaps his most important pupil, for he brought Barthel’s ideas from Würzburg to Trier, where they most likely influenced Hontheim. 46 On Neller, see Raab, 96–116. See also Paul Muschard, “Das Kirchenrecht bei den deutschen Benediktinern und Zisterziensern des 18. Jahrhunderts” in: Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens 47 (1929): 225–315 and 477–596. 47 Stephan Haering, “Der Salzburger Kirchenrechtler Gregor Zallwein OSB (1712– 1766). Ein Beitrag zur zur Gelehrtengeschichte des kanonischen Rechts im Zeitalter der Aufklärung,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens und seiner Zweige 103 (1992): 269–312.


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“liberties.” If German Catholics were to construct an alternative order for the ecclesiastical polity, they would need to elaborate just what exactly the German Church was. They did so historically, by looking to the century before the Reformation to the Conciliar era. They thus showed how two fundamental issues were intertwined: first, it was the Reformation (and specifically the politics of the Reformation—that is the struggles between dynasties, princes, estates, and the curia more than disagreement over dogmatic points) that had prevented the solidification of the German Church as a viable ecclesiopolitical entity. The second, related point, was that the lessening of confessional conflict could provide the basis for a reunion of the confessions within Germany. Fundamental to this Catholic attempt to construe the collection of German ecclesiastical provinces as a national Church was the rehabilitation of the office of bishop. This interest in ecclesiastical autonomy and reunion was taken up with great polemical and political effect by Hontheim’s 1763 legal broadside against papal privilege. Hontheim, writing under the pseudonym Febronius, argued that the pope should be granted only honorary primacy among bishops, and that the papacy had falsely accrued jurisdictional primacy over the Church through centuries of mistaken legal assumptions and forgery. Hontheim tried to restrict his discussion to the “legitimate power” of the pope by distinguishing between the primacy of the pope and what he saw as illegitimately accrued jurisdictional powers over other bishops. Most of his book dealt with the structures and laws of the Church, while two chapters outlined a program for “recovering” the original liberties of the Church. Although it precipitated a Europe-wide discussion, De Statu in many ways was mostly a culmination of a series of historical and jurisprudential moves that soon grew into something larger than the author perhaps intended. Nor should we forget that its essential target was the papacy and its role in the universal Church: Febronianism, though growing out of intellectual and jurisdictional concerns of the German episcopate, applied as well in theory to the Catholic episcopate in general. However, given that it called for increased authority for bishops, it was little suited to Gallican France or regalist Spain, where the monarchy already held significant control over the Church. Nevertheless, denouncing and refuting Febronianism became a key act in any assertion of papal authority. Indeed, in 1799, Mauro Cappellari (the future Gregory XVI) wrote that the election of Pius VII—in spite of the death

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in captivity of Pius VI—represented a veritable “triumph of the Holy See and the Church against the assaults of the innovators.”48 Through Hontheim, German Catholics were able to transform the old canon-law disputes about papal primacy into a greater struggle over the direction and control of the German Church. De Statu did not propagate many of the other essential elements of reform Catholicism in the areas of liturgical change, education of clergy, and so forth. But it was through these claims of jurisdictional autonomy that German Catholics sought to assert their rights to make such reforms, and represented the beginning of a process of rethinking the Church that would expand in the remaining decades of the century. Hontheim had a very specific thesis to explain how the papal monarchy assumed its current role. He laid the blame not only on the Curia and the partisans of the pope, but also on the learned men of Europe who came to study law at Bologna and subsequently assumed positions of influence in civil and ecclesiastical institutions all over Europe. He continued by noting that the papal system was especially propagated by the regular clergy in Italy and Germany, who passed on their ideas to generations of students.49 Hontheim made it clear that lawyers were both the root of the problem and the key to the solution. Importance was placed not just on the law per se, but on the overwhelming significance of right knowledge about the law. In Hontheim’s view, the canon lawyer belonged to those whose duty it was to be concerned about the public law of the Church. Hontheim allowed that the papacy enjoyed primacy in the Church, and indeed that this position was necessary for unity. There needed to be someone in the Church to keep watch over innovations and heresy. The pope executes Church laws and has the right to send ambassadors to help him with the primatial duties.50 Yet, Hontheim argued, Roman primacy has ballooned into a set of other rights and privileges. This often occurred because people had turned to Rome in difficult circumstances, thus increasing that see’s standing.51

48 Cappellari’s book was first published in Venice in 1799, but was reprinted many times, especially after his election as Pope Gregory XVI in 1831. The full title was Il trionfo della santa sede e della chiesa contro gli assalti dei novatori combattuti e respinti colle stesse loro armi. 49 See Brundage, Medieval Canon Law (London: 1995), 44f. 50 Hontheim, De Statu, 46; 72; 83. 51 Hontheim, De Statu, 125.


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Soon after its appearance, translations of De Statu appeared in several languages, including German, French, and Italian. Subsequent editions were published with additions. The first edition was placed on the Index, and many notable Catholic theologians penned refutations. Several prominent German theologians, notably Eusebius Amort and Martin Gerbert (the prince-abbot of St. Blasien), were suspected of being the author based on their earlier works, though both quickly repudiated the arguments of De Statu.52 Under intense pressure, Hontheim recanted in 1778, though he later issued an “explanation” of his recantation that seemed to reconfirm his original arguments. Febronianism as an ideology took on a scope far broader than the actual issues raised by Hontheim’s book.53 The two stated concerns of De Statu were for a constitutional reform within the Catholic Church (that is, the restoration of the rights of the bishops), and for a reunion with Protestants. This latter goal became overwhelmed by the constitutional controversy within the German Church and the international Catholic Church. Febronianism was increasingly associated (however unjustly) with Jansenist and later, anti-clerical, Enlightenment ideas. The expansion of “Febronianism” as a catch-all term of reproach shows how ecclesiastical and religious-cultural politics became polarized by the end of the eighteenth century. The episcopalian politics propagated by Hontheim and his predecessors provided the backing for a series of political efforts on the part of German bishops. At the Salzburg Congress in 1770 bishops in this province tried to defend their rights against the Church policies of the Bavarian state.54 The most notable outcome of Febronian ideas in the Empire was the conference of the four German metropolitans—the Archbishop-Electors of Trier, Cologne, and Mainz, and the PrinceArchbishop of Salzburg—at the German spa town of Ems in 1786. They hoped to form a coalition against the exercise of jurisdictional

52 In 1761, Gerbert had published De communione potestatis ecclesiasticae inter summos ecclesiae principes, pontificem, & episcopos, a work that was hardly an attack on papal privileges, but which did emphasize the sharing of power within the Church. 53 Volker Pitzer, “Febronius/Febronianismus,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie (1983). 54 Andreas Kraus, “Probleme der bayerischen Staatskirchenpolitik 1750–1800,” in Klueting (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung, 126. On the Congress, see Georg Pfeilschifter, Der Salzburger Kongreß und seine Auswirkung 1770–1777 (Paderborn: 1929).

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authority by papal nuncios in the Empire.55 These complaints had recently intensified following the establishment of a Munich nunciature in 1785. The political ambitions of each archbishop precluded any meaningful common action, especially because they did not have the support of the other bishops of the Empire, who saw little benefit in having papal “usurpations” replaced with increased control by their metropolitans. Papal diplomats skillfully exploited differences among German sovereigns and prelates, and did not hesitate to turn to Prussia for help. Like the Empire itself, the constitution of the Reichskirche was eminently suited for factional politics and the dispersion of power; it did not aid in the creation of grand coalitions. Of greater significance was that Catholic states had no particular desire to strengthen the independent position of the bishops. As mentioned above, the Catholic reform movement was constituted by a plurality of motivations. While these coincided at times, they could also be deeply at odds. Thus reform-minded lay princes may have been quite happy to see the privileges of the Church diminished in their territories, but they did not want to curtail the powers of the pope only to see them taken over by a neighboring bishop over whom they could exert little influence. Febronianism and the German school of canon law emerged largely from within an ecclesiastical intellectual milieu (albeit penetrated by outside influences). But it is worth pointing out that the rise of Febronianism coincided with a more aggressive attempt on the part of the secular state to seize control of many areas once under exclusive Church control, and that these actions by lay princes and states would help shape views of Church reform. 4. Staatskirchentum and the Catholic Enlightenment Reform Catholicism, as we have seen, grew from many sources. Some were mainly ecclesiastical, as in the Tridentine reprise or even the wave of Augustinian-inspired reforms. Others had a more worldly cause at their root, and chief among these were efforts to rationalize and standardize state finances, bureaucracies, laws, and territorial

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This summary follows the entry by Leo Just in the Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, (Freiburg: 1959), 3:856–857. The classic study is Fritz Endres, Die Errichtung der Münchener Nuntiatur und der Nuntiaturstreit bis zum Emser Kongreß (Erlangen: 1908).


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boundaries in the wake of the Seven Years’ War. The individuals who proposed and executed these reforms, it must be emphasized, had likewise mixed motives, although some were indeed strongly anti-clerical. For many though, official pronouncements about the need for the state to have more say over the control of the Church dovetailed with austere but genuine piety. In the 1760s and 1770s the Bavarian electors attempted to limit the wealth and independence of the richly endowed monastic foundations with laws that curtailed donations to monasteries (amortization laws) and limited their tax privileges. These laws unleashed a polemical controversy. In 1766, under the pseudonym Veremund von Lochstein, the ecclesiastical councilor Peter von Osterwald (1717–1778) justified the actions of the Bavarian state in a treatise on the question of ecclesiastical immunity in temporal matters.56 Specifically, Osterwald attacked the long-held privileges that had kept the state from taxing any ecclesiastical properties. He argued that canon law should have no say over the government of the state, and that the two powers—secular and ecclesiastical—occupied entirely separate spheres. The implication, Erastian in its roots, was that the state should naturally have jurisdiction over the temporal goods of the Church, stepping aside only when purely “religious” matters were are stake. As opponents recognized, however, determining those boundaries was difficult, and supporters of the state were not shy in claiming greater competence for it. A second pseudonymous pamphlet, either by Osterwald or his successor on the Ecclesiastical council, defended the amortization laws by arguing that an excess of ecclesiastical wealth was harmful to the common good, and moreover, that the monasteries and other foundations were relics reflecting an antiquated piety. As long as wealth and land given in earlier centuries could neither be sold nor taxed, it remained in the “dead hand” of the Church.57 These two pamphlets, while growing out of conditions and laws particular to Bavaria, were met with a flurry of printed responses and counter-responses, thus raising issues about the wealth of the Church and the competence of the state vis-à-vis canon law beyond the Bavarian context as part of an Empire-wide discussion. 56

Veremund von Lochstein [i.e. Peter Osterwald], Gründe sowohl für als wieder die Geistliche Immunität in zeitlichen Dingen (Munich: 1766). 57 Johann Georg Neuberger, Abhandlung von den Einkünften der Klöster und dem Amortizationsgesetze (1768).

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Another dramatic move toward the consolidation of the Church within state boundaries was the erection of a Munich Nunciature in 1784 by Pius VI in conjunction with the wishes of the Elector. This move unleashed a widespread controversy throughout the Empire. Bavarian rulers had long sought the creation of some sort of unified diocese or province for all their territories. Many different bishops had spiritual authority in Bavaria, but nowhere did diocesan boundaries entirely coincide with secular ones. The nuncio, as direct representative of the pope, would have authority over all Wittelsbach territory (including the Palatinate), thereby undercutting the rights of the local bishops and serving as a de-facto bishop.58 In this case, the Curia worked with the temporal authority, much to the consternation of the German episcopate as a whole. The drive toward a state church was even more pronounced in the Habsburg monarchy, a topic dealt with at length in the chapter on Austria and the Habsburg territories of this book.59 These policies were widely discussed in the printed literature throughout the Empire, meaning that the impact of Josephine reforms in the ‘Hereditary lands’ stretched far beyond their borders. From the outside, reform ideas and programs can seem rather contradictory. Many bishops, for example, looked to secular princes and the Emperor as an ally against the pope. But, as the erection of the Munich Nuntiature in 1784 showed, princes were quite happy to work with the pope and to weaken the bishops when their states stood to benefit. It is not necessary, however, to unravel the dizzying array of interests inherent in Old Regime politics. Instead, it suffices to note that these political and institutional struggles fostered a heated and public discussion about the nature of the Church, religious practices, and the constitution of the Reichskirche. On another level, a gradual restructuring of Catholic society meant that new opportunities existed to enter the services of the state or civil society. These same people would otherwise likely have entered a clerical career. Augustin Schelle (1742–1805), a Benedictine monk and professor of ethics, law, and history at the University at Salzburg, commenting on the decline of professions in monasteries, observed that 58

The Munich nuncio was to have spiritual authority—the power to grant dispensations and absolution, and to re-organize diocesan boundaries—that surpassed those of the permanent nuncios in Cologne, Vienna, and Lucerne. 59 For a more detailed account, see pages 127–164 in this volume.


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[in] addition to a change in the ways of thinking—which has its roots in a change in the education in the public, and especially Latin, schools— there are more opportunities to find an occupation in the secular estates. For a few years now, many more people than before can earn their bread in the expanded military, in newly-created factories, in expanded trade, or in toll service, etc. They prefer to enjoy more freedom and nurture the hope of becoming the head of a family than to live as celibate clergymen. [Josephine] restrictions therefore did not lead to the decline [in candidates]. The opportunities to make a living outside of the clerical estate contributed the most toward this phenomenon.60

There was then a complex interaction between the efforts of the state to limit the powers of the Church and the formation of ways of thinking that made such policies possible. While the various strains of reform thinking as outlined above could often point in contradictory directions, by the 1780s, there seemed to be a noticeable shift in the public literature favoring a more aggressive reform program as a critical mass of ministers and rulers attained positions of power not only in the larger states but even in the smaller principalities and ecclesiastical states. The high period of the Catholic Enlightenment—measured by the profusion of printed matter and public discussion—reflected this general trend. But the matters up for discussion ranged far beyond the Church-State issues and canon-law issues discussed so far. As Schelle rightly noted, central to this change in consciousness was a shift in Catholic education which many hoped would be transformed with the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773. This transformation did not occur as rapidly as many hoped, and the Jesuits proved hard to replace. The following sections will explore first the nature of German anti-Jesuitism, and then turn to the explosion of public literature pertaining to the reform of the Church and other aspects of Catholic life from 1773 to the final dissolving of the Reichskirche in 1803. This periodization admittedly telescopes what was in some ways the most active period of the Catholic Enlightenment. But most of the issues raised in this period built on the foundations laid out above.

60 [Augustin Schelle], Ueber den Cölibat der Geistlichen und die Bevölkerung in katholischen Staaten, aus Gründen der politischen Rechenkunst (Salzburg: 1784), 66f.

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If there were a unifying feature of the Catholic Enlightenment, not only in Germany but throughout Europe, it was its anti-Jesuit impulse. In its turn away from the Jesuits, the katholische Aufklärung mirrored—albeit in less dramatic fashion—the assault on the Jesuits that was common to the European Enlightenment. This animosity persisted even after the suppression of the Society in 1773. Partly, this was because the Jesuits proved hard to replace, and many ex-Jesuits were appointed to teaching and pastoral positions similar to those held before 1773. Moreover, a small group of vocal ex-Jesuits took up the pen and set themselves against much of the Catholic reform program.61 Beyond this conflict of institutions and personalities, the rejection of the Jesuits was bound up in two related issues: a desire to change education (especially at the university and secondary levels), and a fundamental turning away from the practices of baroque piety that the Society had intensively fostered, part of a larger trend away from certain expressive forms of devotion and traditional piety on the part of educated, urban Catholics.62 The Catholicism imagined by these reformers appealed to the educated, city-dwelling intellectual elite and opposed the vital baroque Catholicism of their rural compatriots. This situation provided the Catholic reform movement—as an

61 At Augsburg, the controversial preacher Alois Merz and Joseph Anton Weissenbach led an active group of ex-Jesuits. From 1787–1796, Weissenbach edited a journal entitled Kritik über gewisse Kritiker, Rezensenten und Broschürenmacher. One notable pamphleteer propounding traditional Catholicism was the ex-Jesuit Hermann Goldhagen. His Religionsjournal, published in Mainz from 1776 to 1792, vehemently opposed reformist theology, often attacking views advanced by his fellow Mainzers in the moderate Mainzer Monatsschrift von geistlichen Sachen. See Michael Schaich, “ ‘Religionis defensor acerrimus.’ Joseph Anton Weissenbach und der Kreis der Augsburger Exjesuiten,” in Von “Obscuranten” und Eudämonisten: Gegenaufklärische, konservative und antirevolutionäre Publizisten im späten 18. Jahrhundert, (ed.) Christoph Weiß (St. Ingelbert: 1997). Schaich also notes that Augsburg was an important center for the printing of anti-Aufklärung literature. This was commented on by the Aufklärer Lorenz Hübner, the editor of the Salzburg Oberdeutsche allgemeine Litteraturzeitung with a certain amount of dismay: “weite Kreise der Bevölkerung ‘von den neuen litterarischen Producten nichts kennen [lernen], als was ihnen die Mäckler der Augsburgischen Buchhändler auf dem Rücken zutragen.’” Citation from Oberdeutsche allgemeine Litteraturzeitung 1 (1788), np., Schaich, 87. On the role of ex-Jesuits in the French Counter-Enlightenment, see Darrin McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: 2002). 62 Rudolf Schlögl, Glaube und Religion in der Säkularisierung: Die Katholische Stadt—Köln, Aachen, Münster—1700–1840 (Munich: 1995).


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effort to reform piety and practice throughout the German Church— with its basic dynamic. Since the onset of the Counter-Reformation, the Jesuits had played an important role in the formation of Catholic identity in Germany, especially through their colleges and universities.63 The colleges (secondary schools) were built around a standard curriculum, but also put the religious formation of the student at the core of their program. Moreover, Jesuits put on religious theater and fostered sodalities in order to bolster the faith among the laity.64 By the eighteenth century many Catholics began to see the Jesuit approach to education as outmoded. There was a growing need on the part of the state for more pragmatically educated ministers and servants, particularly those welltrained in law, natural sciences and mathematics.65 The Jesuit Plan of Studies [Ratio studiorum] did not place much weight on legal education, nor, for that matter, on history or the sciences.66 By contrast, the historical approach to the law animated and inspired some of the greatest German Protestant jurists of the day, such as Johann Jacob Moser and Johann Stephan Pütter.67 The Jesuits had made some attempts to reform the curriculum, notably in Würzburg. But, to the consternation of their critics, they did not follow the shift toward jurisprudence and history that had characterized the dynamic changes in Protestant German universities, particularly Göttingen.68 At the center of the struggle was the nature and purpose of education. The Jesuits, committed as they were to traditional practices and devotions, did not see the need 63 For a comprehensive history of the role of the Society of Jesus in Germany see Bernhard Duhr, Geschichte der Jesuiten in den Ländern deutscher Zunge, 4 Volumes (Freiburg: 1907–13). 64 Louis Châtellier, The Europe of the Devout: the Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: 1989). 65 Notker Hammerstein, Aufklärung und katholisches Reich. Untersuchungen zur Universtitätsreform und Politik katholischer Territorien des Heiligen Römischen Reichs deutscher Nation im 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin: 1977), 42. 66 There were, however, quite a few individual Jesuits with great accomplishments in these fields. But their work did not fit into the normal curriculum. On Jesuit contributions see Mordechai Feingold (ed.), Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA: 2003) and John W. O’Malley, et al. (eds.), The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773 (Toronto: 2006). 67 Hammerstein, Aufklärung und katholisches Reich, 27–30. 68 Winfried Müller, Universität und Orden. Die bayerische Landesuniversität Ingolstadt zwischen der Aufhebung des Jesuitenordens und der Säkularisation, 1773–1803 (Berlin: 1986), 36–37; Hammerstein, Aufklärung und katholisches Reich; Charles E. McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 1700–1914 (Cambridge: 1980).

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to modify the training of priests to accommodate the administrative needs of the state and civil society. Anti-Jesuitism in Germany was not just a mask for anti-clericalism; it provided a unified front for a variety of Catholic reformers, many of them clergymen.69 It is true that some of the animosity can be viewed as a holdover from the conflict with the Jansenists in France. But where there were bona fide Jansenists in Germany, they often worked with the absolutist state, not against it as in France.70 The moralizing Augustinian rigorism of the Jansenists was put at the service of the centralizing, bureaucratic state, especially in Austria. Once educational reformers met resistance on the part of an entrenched Society of Jesus, their antipathy grew. The imagined alternative to Jesuit education, however, was not lay teachers but the involvement of the other major religious orders. Particular to German Catholicism was the existence of strong enough rival structures in the other orders and the state so that educated Catholic reformers did not feel compelled to reject the institutions of the Church altogether, but could realistically hope to reshape the Church after their own fashion. In his four-volume General History of the Jesuits (1789–1792), Peter Philip Wolf (1761–1808) denied that German Catholicism survived only thanks to the Jesuits: “it is nonsense to assert that Germany would not have become Catholic [after the Reformation] if they had not transformed all the monasteries into Jesuit colleges. One cannot deny the distinguished Benedictine Order—whose early members converted practically all of Germany to Christianity—its services to the Church.” Indeed, this Order continues to spread Christianity “without making as much noise as the Jesuits, who make themselves famous for the most insignificant things.”71 This attitude partly explains the popularity of Hontheim’s De Statu, and why it created such a stir in the literate Catholic world. In hindsight, Hontheim’s program was not realistic, but it was by definition

69 Richard van Dülmen, “Antijesuitismus und katholische Auflkärung in Deutschland,” Historisches Jahrbuch 89:1 (1969), 52–80. 70 See especially Peter Hersche, Der Spätjansenismus in Österreich. Hersche provides an important corrective to the charge that Theresian-Josephine Church policy was motivated by a purely instrumental and materialist Enlightenment. He focuses on the pious “Jansenist” motivations of several important advisors, notably Maria Theresa’s doctor, van Swieten. An important route of Jansenist thought into Austria was via the Austrian Netherlands. 71 Wolf, Jesuiten, Vol. 2, 145.


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imaginable. The German Catholic revolt against their Jesuit Fathers was not a Voltairian rejection of the institutional Church or a Catholic past. Instead, educated German Catholics perceived the Church as a constitutive element of society but were frustrated in their efforts to make the Church reflect their values, particularly when confronted with popular religious sentiments. Finally, we must also be careful not to create a false dichotomy between Catholic reformers and Jesuits in all matters. Benedikt Stattler (1728–1797) was no friend to much of the Enlightenment (especially Kantian philosophy), and wanted to maintain traditional Catholic practice and ritual. But he was committed to Wolffian philosophy, and in his practical suggestions for a reformation of the secular clergy he was free with his criticisms of the aristocratic Church in Germany. His student Johann Michael Sailer (1751–1832) was an irenic reformer and, as bishop of Regensburg, one of the most influential pastors of the nineteenth-century Church. 6. The Appeal to the Public “Religion,” an advisor to the Archbishop of Salzburg wrote in the late 1780s, “should serve as a support for the state. It should enlighten the citizen about his duties. It should foster in him love of his calling, domestic order, industry, exactitude and fidelity toward his trade. It must provide a doctrine of felicity for society and for each of its members.”72 The conviction that genuine religion could also be practical and useful pervaded much of Catholic Enlightenment writing. While conservative opponents would accuse many reformers of slavishly submitting the Church to the state, for their part reformers genuinely believed that the time had come to redraw boundaries between ecclesiastical and lay society. More importantly, they perceived in the state a genuine ally, given that the Roman hierarchy was unwilling to make the changes they sought. The pervasive attitude about the need for pragmatic reforms was articulated in a public discussion about specific reform programs as

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The quotation is from an unpublished report by Johann Michael Bönicke, Consitorial Councilor (and Chancellor) to the Archbishop of Salzburg, cited in Hans Hollwerger. Die Reform des Gottesdienstes zur Zeit des Josephinismus in Österreich (Regensburg: 1976), 297.

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well as about the Church in general. In this, the German Catholic Enlightenment partook of the “rise of the public” in eighteenth century Europe.73 It is widely accepted that with the rise of print journalism in the eighteenth century, an alternate public space was created and “public opinion” began to acquire a certain authority of its own. This same process was at work within German Catholicism as well, though it set in much later and was not really separate from the much broader and more vigorous northern German Enlightenment. In this case, the Catholic learned public saw itself as having claims of authority not on the moral dimensions of state policy (as in Reinhart Koselleck’s classic argument), but over the Church. As Hontheim said, “Scholars ought 74 to be considered the natural defenders of both the Church and State.” Or, as Felix Anton Blau wrote more provocatively some thirty years later, “the Church cannot judge itself. It must by judged by theologians, and even more by sound reasons.”75 While the diversity of visions prevents a monolithic account, a sample of the pamphlet literature lends insight into the shape of the religious world of German Catholic Enlightenment thinkers. This pamphlet literature constituted a Catholic subculture of the public sphere, and reflected the conditions of the literary world of Publizistik, the typically German discourse on public affairs.76 The educated German Catholics who participated in this forum considered the Church to be subject to public discussion and debate. This German Catholic public sphere was not hermetically sealed from the influence of Protestant German vernacular works, nor was it separate from the international Catholic public sphere, nourished by works in Latin, Italian, and French. The relatively recent emergence of a vernacular German Catholic discourse was grafted onto not only the longstanding Latin culture of international learning, but also the official Latin culture of

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James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (New York: 2001). 74 Hontheim, De Statu, IX, §2, 2, 562. “Eruditi debebunt censeri nati defensores Sacerdotii & Imperii.” 75 Felix Anton Blau, Kritische Geschichte der kirchlichen Unfehlbarkeit, zur Beförderung einer freieren Prüfung des katholizismus (Frankfurt: 1791), v. “Die Kirche darf nicht über sich selbst richten; sie muß sich durch Theologen, oder vielmehr durch Gründe, richten lassen.” 76 For a brief account and further references see James J. Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford: 1989), 190ff. On reading and writing publics, see Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe, 79–160.


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orthodox Roman Catholicism. New in the second half of the eighteenth century was the emergence of a self-conscious vernacular German Catholic literary scene.77 German Catholics were concerned principally with the public good, and in their writings on religion, they attempted to connect their visions of religious reform to the general welfare of society.78 The most pronounced element of reform Catholicism’s educational program was the moral instruction of the common people. In its extreme forms, Jesus was more often spoken of as a “teacher of virtue” than as a savior. The Catholic Aufklärer who praised simplicity in spoken and written style held that by “purifying” religious practices and buildings of their scholastic and sensual excess one could better communicate fundamental religious truths. Yet they were speaking to a religious sensibility that suited their own—mostly urban—educated tastes. Significantly, Catholic reformers had come to share this religious sensibility with the majority of the nobility as well. Together, they set their sights on the reformation of the practices and beliefs of the common people. For example, Franz Giftschütz’s (1748–88) lectures on pastoral theology, which were officially prescribed for Habsburg lands,79 stated that Jesus “taught true, practical philosophy and purified moral doctrine.”80 Pastors were warned off teaching casuistry to the common man, and were encouraged to emphasize the duties of the citizen.81 The Aufklärer were particularly aware of problems of communication and education, and they incorporated modern conceptions of psychology and epistemology into their suggestions for reform. Yet they also assumed that their own variety of religious experience was the most authentic. They

77 Not all contributions to the German Catholic discussion were original works, however, as translations and re-editions could appear at important times. 78 For an exhaustive discussion of reform literature, see Klaus-Peter Burkarth, “Raisonable” Katholiken. Volksaufklärung im katholischen Deutschland um 1800 (PhD diss., University of Essen, 1994). 79 Here, especially, it is difficult to separate the Catholic Enlightenment in the Empire from its counterpart in the Habsburg lands. Not only were the main concerns and attitudes of many Austrian reformers indistinguishable from those in the Empire, but public discussion of Joseph’s actions was a vital medium for disseminating new ideas. 80 Franz Giftschütz, Leitfaden für die in den k.-k. Erbländern vorgeschriebenen Vorlesung über die Pastoraltheologie (Vienna, 1785), 2. 81 Giftschütz, 67–68.

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were concerned, of course, with eliminating superstition, which they frequently saw as fostered by certain obscurities in the Church’s own teachings. Giftschütz saw in the teaching of miracles a chance to attack superstition: one should teach how seldom, indeed, God performed miracles.82 The Aufklärer tried to incorporate their reform program into the teaching of traditional doctrines. Abbot Johann Ignaz Felbiger (1724–88) of Sagan, an influential educational reformer in Silesia and, later, at Vienna, wrote that the “art” of catechizing needed to take into account the faculty of understanding.83 “Religion,” Felbiger proclaimed, “is not a work of memory or pure reason, but rather a work of the will . . . One should not present religion only as the means to eternal salvation, but also show how the observance of every duty also promotes our temporal happiness.”84 Likewise, the Würzburg priest and historian Michael Ignaz Schmidt was interested in incorporating new psychological ideas into catechetics.85 Felix Blau and Anton Dorsch in Mainz—later members of the Mainz Jacobin club during the French occupation—insisted that reforming efforts must distinguish between “internal” and “external” service to God. They acknowledged that “transcendental ideas lose all their power when they are not connected to sensory signs . . . The concepts of God’s qualities and influence on the universe are symbolized through pictures and the institutions of external devotion.”86 However, the external service [äusserer Gottesdienst] is a means and not an end, which they identified as true, inward devotion.87 The authors recommended that the Latin Mass should be abolished in favor of the vernacular, since it could not arouse the proper feelings among those who did not know the language.88 While, as I have noted, monks stood at the forefront of much of the reform movement, the institution of monasticism itself was also harshly 82

Giftschütz, 56. On school reform, see James Van Horn Melton, Absolutism and the EighteenthCentury Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria (New York: 1988). 84 Felbiger, Vorlesungen über die Kunst zu katechisierung, die er seinen jungen geistlichen zu halten pflegt (Vienna, 1774), 60. 85 On Schmidt see Michael Printy, “From Barbarism to Religion: Church History and the Enlightened Narrative in Germany,” German History 23:2 (2005), 172–201. 86 [F. Blau and A. Dorsch] Beyträge zur Verbesserung des äussern Gottesdienstes in der katholischen Kirche (Frankfurt: 1789), 12. 87 Blau and Dorsch, Beyträge, 15. 88 Blau and Dorsch, Beyträge, 22. 83


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criticized from some quarters.89 To the regular clergy were imputed many, if not all, of the failures and transgressions of the Church in the past. Except for a few radicals, the cry was not to destroy the influence of the institutional Church but to abolish the monastic spirit. With his On the Civil and Spiritual Improvement of Monasticism, Peter Adolf Winkopp (1759–1813) nodded to C. W. Dohm’s famous book on Jewish emancipation.90 Winkopp emphasized the need for priests to be moral instructors, and indicated that contemplative monks were not suited to such an important task. The mendicant orders were accused of corrupting the morality of the people through their preaching and educational missions.91 A review in the Salzburg Oberdeutsche Allgemeine Literaturzeitung criticized a set of published speeches for its use of the “unphilosophical term ‘monastic virtue’ [des unphilosophischen Begriffs Mönchstugend],” and concluded that an enlightened prince should reform the monasteries.92 For their part, reform-minded monks were aware of the dangers of the rising tide of anti-monastic feeling, as was the case with the above-mentioned Beda Aschenbrenner, who feared that unless monks reformed themselves, they would be suppressed.93 Although the appeal—and in many ways the driving force—of the later Catholic reform program was rooted in the lay piety of educated, urban Catholics, monastic institutions remained vital centers of learning and education. Especially given the semi-monopoly that Jesuits enjoyed over the universities, monastic academies served as important alternative sources of scholarship, and also places where many middle-class Catholics could secure a career in the Church. Monasticism, therefore, had a unique role in the Catholic Enlightenment in Germany, and made for a substantially different type of

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See Winfried Müller, Im Vorfeld der Säkularisation (Cologne: 1989) and Harm Klueting’s introductory essay to Katholische Aufklärung: Aufklärung im katholischen Deutschland. 90 Peter Adolf Winkopp, Über die bürgerlich und geistliche Verbesserung des Monchswesens (Gera: 1783); C. W. Dohm, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (Berlin and Stettin: 1781). 91 [Anon.], Freymüthige Bemerkungen über die Klosteraufhebung in Baiern, 1802, 5–6. 92 Oberdeutsche Allgemeine Literaturzeitung, 1. Vierteljahr, Jan.–Mar. 1788, 14. 93 Beda Aschenbrenner, Aufklärungs Almanach für Abbte und Vorsteher katholischer Kloster (s.l.: 1784), 112. Cited in Anton Hoffmann, Beda Aschenbrenner (1756– 1817). Lezter Abt von Oberalteich: Leben und Werk (Passau: 1964).

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clerical contribution in comparison with the role of the clergy in the Protestant Enlightenment. An example of this can be seen in Placidius Sprenger (1735–1806), a Benedictine monk of Banz in Franconia. In 1775, he began publishing a new journal entitled Literature from Catholic Germany, for its Honor and Use, Published by Catholic Patriots.94 He wrote that this new journal was proud to look beyond the borders of its Franconian home and serve as a “general library” of Catholic Germany, an “allgemeine Bibliothek des katholischen Deutschlands.”95 The reference was to Friedrich Nicolai’s Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, the most important source of reviews and a major organ of the Berlin Aufklärung.96 Sprenger complained that while “on the one side, Protestant Germany is almost suffocated by the number of its learned journals and newspapers, we, on the other side,” have almost nothing.97 Sprenger announced that his journal would contain reviews of books by German Catholics, news from Catholic universities and academies and from Catholic states outside of Germany, excerpts from recent Protestant journals, as well as refutations of errors in Protestant journals concerning Catholic literature.98 He continued: “it cannot escape those of our coreligionists who spend time reading Protestant journals that

94 Litteratur des katholischen Deutschlands, zu dessen Ehre und Nutzen, herausgegeben von katholischen Patrioten. Coburg: 1775–. The journal was offered as a continuation of the short-lived Fränkische Zuschauer. For a history of the journal in the context of the intellectual life of the abbey, see Wilhelm Forster, “Die kirchliche Aufklärung bei den Benediktinern der Abtei Banz,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens und seiner Zweige 63 (1951): 172–233 and 64 (1952): 110–233. A recent study is Niklas Raggenbass, “Harmonie und schwesterliche Einheit zwischen Bibel und Vernunft”: die Benediktiner des Klosters Banz: Publizisten und Wissenschaftler in der Aufklärungszeit (St. Ottilien: 2006). 95 Litteratur des katholischen Deutschlands, “Vorrede,” np. 96 On Nicolai, see Pamela Eve Selwyn, Everyday Life in the German Book Trade: Friedrich Nicolai as Bookseller and Publisher in the Age of Enlightenment, 1750–1810 (University Park, PA: 2000); Horst Möller, Aufklärung in Preussen: der Verleger, Publizist und Geschichtsschreiber Friedrich Nicolai (Berlin: 1974); and Rainer Falk and Alexander Košenina (eds.), Friedrich Nicolai und die Berliner Aufklärung (Hannover: 2008). 97 Litteratur, I, 1, 1775, “Vorrede,” np. [5]. On the influence of Protestant learned journals see Stefan Benz, Zwischen Tradition und Kritik: katholische Geschichtsschreibung im barocken Heiligen Römischen Reich (Husum: 2003). 98 In a later issue, the editors rescinded this request by giving nod to the growing volume of Catholic writings: “Die Herrn Mitarbeiter weden ersucht, künftighin keine Recensionen von protestantischen Schriften mehr einzusenden, indem der Raum für die täglich mehr anwachsenden katholischen Schriftsteller zu enge werden will,” Litteratur, III, iv, 1780, 598.


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one not seldom finds false representations of our literature, as well as hardly fair judgments about our writers.”99 The editor promised to scatter such errors and prejudicial reports “out of patriotic love.” The moderate Catholic Enlighteners represented by the journal held that matters of doctrine and belief needed to be simplified and stripped of their worldly accretions and modifications. The editors felt that false belief led to false behavior, which is why much energy of the Catholic Enlighteners was spent in attacks on the “superstition” they felt lay at the root of immorality. On the other hand, they saw Christianity as holding society together, as did their orthodox opponents. This meant that, to reform society, one needed to reform Catholic practice. But to do so required a certain level of authority and power that was not forthcoming from the Roman hierarchy. Reading the journal, one can glimpse the editors’ and reviewers’ sense of the shape of German Catholicism. To them, the Church was much more than its institutions and doctrines, and it was impossible for reformers to conceive of their culture as divorced from its religious context. There persisted the belief in the possibility of a harmony between the civil and religious authority in which the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. This is evident, first of all, in the reformers’ interest in ecclesiastical and religious history. Yet there was also a growing sense of disillusionment and anxiety after the 1780s, particularly in regard to anti-monasticism. This was undoubtedly fostered by Joseph II’s ecclesiastical policies, particularly his suppression of some 600 cloisters. Even im stiftischen Deutschland—that is, the Germany of the small ecclesiastical states—where the Austrian monarch had no such power to suppress religious foundations, Josephine policies and their attendant propaganda served to polarize discussions of Catholic reform. Joseph’s actions emboldened critics of monasticism. There arose an increasing note of disappointment over the rancorous antimonastic tone of reform pamphlets. For example, Martin Gerbert (1720–1793), abbot of St. Blasien, was sure to emphasize the practical contribution of the monks to German civilization in his History of the Black Forest: “One notes how from the beginning monks only practiced silent contemplation—or, as several scribblers of our enlightened century would have it, laziness—but that they mainly occupied themselves with preaching and pastoral work and

99

Litteratur, I, 1, 1775, “Vorrede,” np. [5].

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with projects that proved very useful for our fatherland.”100 The same Gerbert had also published studies of early Germanic liturgies and early Church music; the reviewer was careful to point to differences between the early German and the Roman liturgy.101 Anti-Jesuitism was in part sustained and made possible by the vision of a German Catholicism that predated the Reformation and was constituted in its monastic culture. Yet, as the anxieties of the writers in Litteratur des katholischen Deutschlands show, the historical contributions of these old orders were being dismissed, despite the rather active efforts of moderate and learned religious. Accompanying this sense of rising disrespect was a growing skepticism towards the state on the part of moderates. Aside from outright suppression, one method civil authorities used to limit the growth of monasteries and cloisters was to raise age limits for professing vows. Sometimes these laws could be quite absurd, such as when women were forbidden to take any vows until sometime in their forties, thus assuring that female cloisters would die out, or at least be populated solely by widows. These vows were socially and legally significant because they were accepted as binding for life by both the Church and the state, and they altered the juridical and civil status of the juror. Critics of any state involvement argued that the state thereby acquired authority over a purely religious matter. Yet it was becoming clear by the 1780s that something was bound to give in the efforts to reconceptualize the relative roles of the Church and the state. Litteratur des katholischen Deutschlands acknowledged that autonomy was of singular importance to the Church. Whereas in earlier opinions, comments in the journal had indicated that the state was the protector of the Church’s mission—and therefore could be trusted—the increasing and successful attacks on Church property gave pause to those moderate reformers who worried for the liberty of the Church. The dilemma faced by these reforming Catholics was that they envisioned a continuing role for themselves as the moral and intellectual

100 Litteratur, V, ii, 1785, 234. See similar comments in Litteratur VI, iv, 1786, 582. See Martin Gerbert, Historia Nigrae Silvae Ordinis Sancti Benedicti Coloniae, 2 vols. (St. Blasien: 1783). 101 Litteratur, III, iv, 1780, 535. See Martin Gerbert, Vetus liturgia alemannica, 2 volumes (St. Blasien: 1776), as well as De veteri liturgia Alemannica (St. Blasien: 1770), and Monumenta veteris liturgiae alemannicae (St. Blasien: 1777).


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leaders of the Catholic Church in Germany. Regardless of whether they accepted or rejected moves for legal and canonical distance from Rome (as advocated by Hontheim), they did at least tacitly embrace a form of cultural autonomy—hence the interest in historical forms of the German liturgy and local Church history. They sought to be “reasonable” Catholics, and assumed that they should naturally be the educators and leaders of the Catholic people. Signs that that independence, as embodied in the unmediated ecclesiastical states, enjoyed only fragile support among the learned reformers were apparent in the public discussion unleashed by an essay contest sponsored by the Journal von und für Deutschland.102 In 1785, the journal solicited essays on the topic of whether the constitution of the ecclesiastical states was responsible for their weakness: Given that the states of the ecclesiastical imperial princes are elective, and are among the most blessed provinces of all Germany, they should rightly enjoy the wisest and happiest governments. If they are not as fortunate as they should be, then the fault lies not with their rulers but with their internal constitution.

The prize essay question, therefore, was posed: “what are their actual deficiencies, and how can these be corrected?”103 The most radical solution was proposed by Carl Friedrich von Moser (1723–98), who advocated that the office of bishop be separated from the temporal rule of the ecclesiastical states. These states should retain their elective character, however, since that was the feature that assured they would be always wisely ruled and that the regent would not use his office to further the interests of his family alone. In Moser’s words they would become “elective aristocratic republics.”104

102 Peter Wende, Die Geistlichen Staaten und Ihre Auflösung im Urteil der Zeitgenössichen Publizistik [Historische Studien 396] (Lübeck: 1966). For a recent collection of essays on the ecclesiastical states see, Bettina Braun, Mareike Menne, and Michael Ströhmer et al. (eds.), Geistliche Fürsten und Geistliche Staaten in der Spätphase des Alten Reiches (Epfendorf: 2008). 103 Journal von und für Deutschland, 12 Stück, 1785, 552. The question in quotation marks was to be the basis of the essay. 104 Friedrich Karl Moser, Über die Regierung der geistlichen Staaten in Deutschland (Frankfurt: 1787). See Max Braubach, “Die kirchliche Aufklärung im katholischen Deutschland im Spiegel des ‘Journal von und für Deutschland’ 1784–92,” Historisches Jahrbuch 54:1 (1934), 1–63; 178–220. On the discussion over Imperial reform see Wolfgang Burgdorf, Reichskonstitution und Nation. Verfassungsreformprojekte für das Heilige Römische Reich Deutscher Nation im Politischen Schrifttum von 1648 bis 1806 (Mainz: 1998).

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Moser’s suggestion, as he was well aware, never had a chance since it would have eliminated the ecclesiastical nature of the states. Nevertheless, his essay is indicative of the feeling that these small aristocratic states provided a bulwark both against centralization in the Empire, and, perhaps more importantly by the later eighteenth century, against domination by the large dynastic states. The winning essay, by the imperial councilor Joseph Sartori (1750– 1812), was more in keeping with the moderate reform proposals of the later eighteenth century: namely that these states needed to “modernize” their governmental apparatus and foster industry.105 Many of the weaknesses could be traced to taxes and contributions that were beyond the power of the bishops to change short of entirely separating from Rome and the Empire. The most recent problem, according to Sartori, seemed to be a shortage of money: “only since the Seven Years’ War in Germany, which particularly in the ecclesiastical states brought with it an undeniable shortage of cash, can one sense a noticeable weakening of the foundation lands [Stiftland], on top of which comes the export of cash due to plurality.”106 Accordingly, Sartori’s suggestions oriented themselves on questions of economy in the ecclesiastical states. He suggested that spinning institutions and weaving factories (Strumpfstickerey) be set up.107 More important was the overall awareness of economic conditions on the part of the ruler, who could then foster trade: Every ecclesiastical prince, if he had an exact knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of his state and the conditions of his land, and if he examines the needs and relations of his neighbors, can find an area of trade for his land that would occupy his subjects, would fix his neighbor’s interests in his own, and would unleash a monetary circulation that is otherwise lacking in almost every German ecclesiastical principality.108

One of the main reasons for this lack of monetary circulation and general economic weakness, Sartori believed, was that industry had not been fostered in the ecclesiastical principalities. The fact that these states enjoyed high population did not make them prosperous. If these

105 Joseph von Sartori, Staatistische Abhandlung über die Mängel in der Regierungsverfassung der geistlichen Wahlstaaten, und von den Mitteln, solchen abzuhelfen (Augsburg: 1787). 106 Sartori, Staatistische Abhandlung, 18. 107 Sartori, Staatistische Abhandlung, 42. 108 Sartori, Staatistische Abhandlung, 44.


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state were sparsely populated but nevertheless encouraged their subjects to work hard, “then they would be much happier than they actually are, despite their high population, given that the largest proportion is made up of the lazy and of beggars.” He continued by arguing that “the art of begging has reached the highest level of perfection in the German ecclesiastical principalities.109 This harmed all the other German provinces as well since the beggars and “lazy people [Mußigänger]” unsettled the neighboring states.110 In sum, the main failures of these principalities were that they did not work to release the “inner forces [innere Kräfte]”, do not foster industry and trade, or focus on education as the motor of prosperity.111 In that, the criticism of the ecclesiastical states stood in for a larger critique on the part of Catholic Enlighteners who took it as their task to reform not just practical matters of law and ritual, but a baroque culture that they saw as backward and unprogressive for all of Catholic Germany. For German Catholics, this sense of being left behind in the wake of a flourishing Protestant learning and culture (and, in the case of Prussia, military power) spurred them to make their claims on the Church as the way to reform society and culture. Yet, despite their fears, there was also a sense of possibility. Peter Adolf Winkopp, for example, wrote that certain reforms “might allow the Catholic states to catch up to the Protestants. And maybe even jump ahead of them.”112 7. The End of Enlightenment This great leap forward, however, did not come to pass. If anything, the consequences of the French Revolution and especially the Secularization of 1803 brought the Catholic Enlightenment in Germany to a sudden halt. The state seizure, public sale, and even outright destruction of much ecclesiastical property set Catholic high culture and learning in Germany even farther back from its Protestant counterpart. German bishops who had previously agitated for a significant

109 On the embrace of “Muße” by Catholic culture in this period, and on the reform movement as an attempt to root this out in the name of progress and efficiency, see Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung, esp. vol. 2: 960–978. 110 Sartori, 48. 111 Sartori, 67. 112 Peter Adolf Winkopp, Über die bürgerlich und geistliche Verbesserung des Mönchswesens (Gera: 1783), 4r.

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degree of autonomy readily returned into the papal fold. Polemics against the Enlightenment took a sharper turn as it was blamed for the French Revolution and the Terror. But as we know from individuals such as the abbé Gregoire, Catholicism and Revolution, to say nothing of Enlightenment, were not always opposed, and we must avoid falling into the sway of a simplistic narrative of an ever-conservative Catholicism when that very narrative itself grows out of historical polemic. Indeed, reforms continued well into the nineteenth century, which is why the earlier-mentioned distinctions between reform Catholicism and Catholic Enlightenment are important to bear in mind. Many of the practical changes wrought by the nineteenth-century Church— such as the professionalization of the clergy—were entirely in keeping with the proposals of Catholic reformers and Enlighteners in the eighteenth century. What had changed was the political and ecclesiastical situation, not necessarily the content of the reforms. Soon after the fall of Napoleon, Archchancellor and Bishop of Mainz Karl Theodor von Dalberg (1744–1817) and his vicar Heinrich Ignaz Wessenberg (1774–1860) sought to establish a “national” Concordat with the pope that would bring about some measure of official unity for the German episcopate. But these plans were undermined at the Congress of Vienna by Pius VII’s secretary of state Ercole Consalvi as well as by the greater German powers: neither side wanted a strong—that is to say, independent—German episcopate. Instead, concordats with individual German states were concluded in the early nineteenth century. The papacy, despite public protests to the contrary, did not exactly long for the return of a politically independent Reichskirche and German episcopate. The Secularization was indeed a heavy blow to Catholic learning, but Catholicism as a whole proved remarkably resilient. Overnight, however, German Catholics found themselves almost everywhere in the political minority (in contrast to the near parity they enjoyed during the Old Regime). Bavaria was an exception—but under the fiercely anti-clerical minister Montgelas monasteries and other Catholic institutions had not fared much better. But popular baroque Catholicism remained strong in Germany, and, as the nineteenth century progressed, the Church became more ultramontane, populist, and even superstitious (by the standards of the katholische Aufklärung) than it had been at the close of the eighteenth century. It would seem that the break with the Catholic Enlightenment was total.


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But this does not mean that the Catholic Enlightenment was all for naught. Although opponents of the Catholic Enlightenment gained the upper hand in the seminaries, for example by pushing aside proponents of Hermesianism or in sidelining Wessenberg, the legacy of the Catholic Enlightenment in Germany was still felt in important ways.113 The irenic strain woven throughout the Catholic Enlightenment was taken up in the practical pastoral theology of reformer and bishop Johann Michael Sailer (1751–1832). A less obvious but longer lasting legacy of the Catholic rethinking of the Church was the deep impression that there existed a specifically German Catholicism. This Catholicism was not as far from Rome as Hontheim and his supporters would have liked. But even when German Catholics could enthusiastically embrace Roman supremacy, they could at the same time resist the coupling of Protestantism and the nation. This sense was not merely a reaction to the times; it had deeper roots in the creation of confessional identity in the eighteenth century. This confessional identity was formed within the confines of the legally secure Reichskirche but was strong enough to survive in the wake of the Secularization. Finally, there persisted well past the eighteenth century a small group of liberal Catholics in Germany who could rightfully claim the Enlightenment as their heritage. As Franz Schnabel suggested in his major survey of the “religious forces” of the nineteenth century, German Catholicism was characterized by a bewildering plurality of religious ideas and movements, which only later became winnowed down under the progressive and powerful centralization of the ultramontane Church.114 The dissident group of Old Catholics who formally left the Church after the proclamation of papal infallibility—with Döllinger

113 Georg Hermes (1775–1831) was a philosopher and theologian who sought to secure Catholic doctrine on rational grounds in light of Kantian philosophy. On the campaign against Hermesianiam, see Christoph Weber, Aufklärung und Orthodoxie am Mittelrhein, 1829–1859 (Munich, Paderborn and Vienna: 1973). 114 Franz Schnabel discusses the “deep contradiction within the Catholic revival,” and how the drive toward centralization gained the upper hand after mid-century in Franz Schnabel, Deutsche Geschichte im Neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Volume 4: Die Religiösen Kräfte (Freiburg: 1951), 261. In Schnabel’s view, Catholic culture moved from plurality to increasing centralization, whereas Protestantism in Germany tended toward fragmentation. Along similar lines, it is also useful to recall that ideas about the nature of German identity in the first half of the century were quite open. See, for example, Brian E. Vick, Defining Germany. The 1848 Frankfurt Parliamentarians and National Identity (Cambridge, MA: 2002).

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at their side (though not formally an Old Catholic)—could be seen as the last gasp of the Catholic Enlightenment. Subsequent polemics within German and universal Catholicism only served to sharpen these supposed dichotomies: chief among them the Kulturkampf and the Modernist controversy. The Kulturkampf represented the last— failed—attempt to solidify a notion of German loyalty as a rejection of Rome. While this episode had the opposite effect of consolidating Catholic loyalty, it also made dissent within the Catholic world more suspect. In a similar vein, when Sebastian Merkle gently tried to rehabilitate the Catholic Enlightenment before a general congress of historians in 1908, he was excoriated by his conservative Catholic peers. As a historical movement, then, the Catholic Enlightenment has long been held hostage to political, cultural, and religious struggles and has had a hard time escaping the grip of polemic. These battles are over. New views of the place of Catholicism in German national history were helped by the rise of the Bonn republic and a Germany in which Catholics were no longer a minority. Likewise, the Second Vatican Council embraced—or at least seemed to embrace—many of the calls of the Catholic Enlightenment. And even when it did not, its rhetoric of openness implied that the old rejection of Enlightenment and modernization tout court was a thing of the past.115 Scholarship, nevertheless, has been slower to catch up. In recent years, however, historians of Enlightenment have discovered the diversity of religion in the eighteenth century and have begun to paint more nuanced pictures of the place of religion in modernity. Now that we can recognize that the divisive issues of Church and State, Nation and Religion that were at the core of the Catholic Enlightenment are things of the past—for Western Europe and Christianity, in any case—we can come afresh to its history.116

115 On the rhetoric of Vatican II, see John O’Malley, “Vatican II: Did Anything Happen?” in David Schultenover (ed.), Vatican II: Did Anything Happen? (New York: Continuum, 2007). 116 This also means moving beyond the dichotomy of denunciation and apologia, an issue of particular import in assessing the significance of early modernity for subsequent German history. See Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History. Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: 2008).


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Stäudlin, Karl Friedrich, Kirchliche Geographie und Statistik, 2 vols. (Tübingen: 1804). Weissenbach, Joseph Anton, Kritik über gewisse Kritiker, Rezensenten und Broschürenmacher (Augsburg: 1788–1795). Winkopp, Peter Adolf, Über die bürgerlich und geistliche Verbesserung des Mönchswesens (Gera: 1783). Wolf, Peter Philipp, Allgemeine Geschichte der Jesuiten. Von dem Ursprung ihres Ordens bis auf gegenwärtige Zeiten, 4 volumes (Zürich: 1789ff.). Secondary Sources Ahnert, Thomas, Religion and the Origins of the German Enlightenment: Faith and the Reform of Learning in the Thought of Christian Thomasius (Rochester: 2006). Aretin, Karl Otmar von, Das Alte Reich 1648–1806, 4 vols. (Stuttgart: 1993–2000). Beales, Derek, Prosperity and Plunder: European Catholic Monasteries in the Age of Revolution, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: 2003). Beiser, Frederick C., The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: 1987). Benz, Stefan, Zwischen Tradition und Kritik: katholische Geschichtsschreibung im barocken Heiligen Römischen Reich (Husum: 2003). Biographish-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (Nordhausen: 1990–2007). Blanning, Timothy C. W., Reform and Revolution in Mainz, 1743–1803 (Cambridge: 1974; 2008). Brandl, Manfred, Die deutschen katholischen Theologen der Neuzeit: ein Repertorium, 3 vols. (Salzburg: 1978–2006). Braubach, Max, “Die kirchliche Aufklärung im katholischen Deutschland im Spiegel des ‘Journal von und für Deutschland’ 1784–92,” Historisches Jahrbuch 54 (1934): 1–63 and 178–220. Braun, Bettina, Menne, Mareike and Ströhmer, Michael (eds.), Geistliche Fürsten und Geistliche Staaten in der Spätphase des Alten Reiches (Epfendorf: 2008). Brundage, James A., Medieval Canon Law (London: 1995). Burgdorf, Wolfgang, Reichskonstitution und Nation. Verfassungsreformprojekte für das Heilige Römische Reich Deutscher Nation im Politischen Schrifttum von 1648 bis 1806 (Mainz: 1998). Burkarth, Klaus-Peter, “Raisonable” Katholiken. Volksaufklärung im katholischen Deutschland um 1800 (Ph.D. diss., University of Essen: 1994). Châtellier, Louis, The Europe of the Devout: the Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge and New York: 1989). Coreth, Anna, Pietas Austriaca, trans. William D. Bowman and Anna Maria Leitgeb (West Lafayette: 2004). Cooman, Guido, Van Stiphout, Maurice, and Wauters, Bart (eds.), Zeger-Bernard van Espen at the Crossroads of Canon Law, History, Theology, and Church-State Relations (Leuven: 2003). Duggan, Lawrence G., “The Church as an Institution of the Reich,” in Vann, James A. and Rowan, Steven (eds.), The Old Reich. Essays on German Political Institutions 1495–1806, (Brussels: 1974), 149–164. Duhr, Bernhard, Geschichte der Jesuiten in den Ländern deutscher Zunge, 4 vols., (Freiburg: 1907–1913). Endres, Fritz, Die Errichtung der Münchener Nuntiatur und der Nuntiaturstreit bis zum Emser Kongreß (Erlangen: 1908). Falk, Rainer and Košenina, Alexander (eds.), Friedrich Nicolai und die Berliner Aufklärung (Hannover: 2008). Feingold, Mordechai (ed.), Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA.: 2003).


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Figgis, John Neville, From Gerson to Grotius: 1414–1625 (Cambridge: 1907). Forster, Marc R., Catholic Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Houndmills: 2008). ——, Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque: Religious Identity in Southwest Germany, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: 2001). ——, The Counter-Reformation in the Villages: Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560–1720 (Ithaca: 1992). Forster, Wilhelm, “Die kirchliche Aufklärung bei den Benediktinern der Abtei Banz,” in Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens und seiner Zweige 63 (1951): 172–233 and 64 (1952): 110–233. Haering, Stephan, “Der Salzburger Kirchenrechtler Gregor Zallwein OSB (1712–1766). Ein Beitrag zur zur Gelehrtengeschichte des kanonischen Rechts im Zeitalter der Aufklärung,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens und seiner Zweige 103 (1992): 269–312. Hammermayer, Ludwig, Geschichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1759–1807, 2 vols. (Munich: 1983). Hammerstein, Notker, Aufklärung und katholisches Reich. Untersuchungen zur Universtitätsreform und Politik katholischer Territorien des Heiligen Römischen Reichs deutscher Nation im 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin: 1977). Hersche, Peter, Muße und Verschwendung. Europäische Gesellschaft und Kultur im Barockzeitalter, 2 vols. (Freiburg: 2006). ——, Der Spätjansenismus in Österreich (Vienna: 1977). Hoffmann, Anton, Beda Aschenbrenner (1756–1817). Lezter Abt von Oberalteich: Leben und Werk (Passau: 1964). Hollwerger, Hans, Die Reform des Gottesdienstes zur Zeit des Josephinismus in Österreich (Regensburg: 1976). Hunter, Ian, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: 2001). Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta, Court, Cloister, and City: the Art and Culture of Central Europe, 1450–1800 (Chicago: 1995). Klueting, Harm (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung: Aufklärung im katholischen Deutschland (Hamburg: 1993). Knedlik, Manfred, and Schrott, Georg (eds.), Anselm Desing (1699–1772). Ein benediktinischer Universalgelehrter im Zeitalter der Aufklärung (Kallmünz: 1999). Kraus, Andreas, “Probleme der bayerischen Staatskirchenpolitik 1750–1800,” in Klueting, Harm (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung: Aufklärung im katholischen Deutschland (Hamburg: 1993), 119–141. Lehner, Ulrich L., “Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim’s Febronius: A Censored Bishop and his Ecclesiology,” Church History and Religious Culture 88 (2008): 93–121. McClelland, Charles E., State, Society, and University in Germany, 1700–1914 (Cambridge: 1980). McMahon, Darrin, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: 2002). Melton, James Van Horn, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria (New York: 1988). ——, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (New York: 2001). Merkle, Sebastian, Die katholische Beurteilung des Aufklärungszeitalters (Berlin: 1909). Möller, Horst, Aufklärung in Preussen: der Verleger, Publizist und Geschichtsschreiber Friedrich Nicolai (Berlin: 1974). Müller, Hans, Ursprung und Geschichte des Wortes “Sozialismus” (Hannover: 1967). Müller, Winfried, Im Vorfeld der Säkularisation (Cologne: 1989). ——, Universität und Orden. Die bayerische Landesuniversität Ingolstad zwischen der Aufhebung des Jesuitenordens und der Säkularisation, 1773–1803 (Berlin: 1986).

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Muschard, Paul, “Das Kirchenrecht bei den deutschen Benediktinern und Zisterziensern des 18. Jahrhunderts” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens 47 (1929): 225–315; 477–596. O’Malley, John W., “Vatican II: Did Anything Happen?” in Schultenover, David (ed.), Vatican II: Did Anything Happen? (New York: 2007), 52–91. Pfeilschifter, Georg, Der Salzburger Kongreß und seine Auswirkung 1770–1777 (Paderborn: 1929). Pitzer, Volker, “Febronius/Febronianismus,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie 11 (1983), 67–69. Pocock, John G. A., Barbarism and Religion. Volume I: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon (Cambridge: 1999). Precht-Nußbaum, Karin, Zwischen Augburg und Rom. Der Pollinger AugustinerChorherr Eusebius Amort (1692–1775). Ein bedeutender Repräsentant katholischer Aufklärung in Bayern (Paring: 2007). Printy, Michael, Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism (New York: 2009). ——, “From Barbarism to Religion: Church History and the Enlightened Narrative in Germany,” German History 23 (2005): 172–201. ——, “The Intellectual Origins of Popular Catholicism: Catholic Moral Theology in the Age of Enlightenment,” Catholic Historical Review 91 (2005): 438–61. Raab, Heribert, Die Concordata Nationis Germanicae in der kanonistischen Diskussion des 17. bis 19. Jahrhunderts. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der episkopalistischen Theorie in Deutschland (Wiesbaden: 1956). ——, “Johann Kaspar Barthels Stellung in der Diskussion um die Concordata Nationis Germanicae. Ein Beitrag zur Würzburger Kanonistik im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Idem, Reich und Kirche in der frühen Neuzeit (Freiburg, Switzerland: 1989), 121–138. ——, “Der reichskirchliche Episkopalismus von der Mitte des 17. bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Jedin, Hubert (ed.), Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte 5 (Freiburg: 1970), Chapter 22. Raggenbass, Niklas, “Harmonie und schwesterliche Einheit zwischen Bibel und Vernunft”: die Benediktiner des Klosters Banz: Publizisten und Wissenschaftler in der Aufklärungszeit (St. Ottilien: 2006). Rey-Mermet, Théodule, St. Alphonsus Liguori. Tireless Worker for the Most Abandoned, trans. Jehanne-Marie Marchesi (New York: 1989). Schäfer, Philipp, Kirche und Vernunft. Die Kirche in der katholischen Theologie der Aufklärungszeit (Munich: 1974). Schaich, Michael, “ ‘Religionis defensor acerrimus.’ Joseph Anton Weissenbach und der Kreis der Augsburger Exjesuiten,” in Weiß, Christoph (ed.), Von “Obscuranten” und Eudämonisten: Gegenaufklärische, konservative und antirevolutionäre Publizisten im späten 18. Jahrhundert (St. Ingbert: 1997), 77–125. Schlögl, Rudolf, Glaube und Religion in der Säkularisierung: Die Katholische Stadt— Köln, Aachen, Münster—1700–1840 (Munich: 1995). Schnabel, Franz, Deutsche Geschichte im Neunzehnten Jahrhundert, vol. 4: Die Religiösen Kräfte (Freiburg: 1951). Schneyer, Johann Baptist, Die Rechtsphilosophie Anselm Desings O.S.B. (1699–1772) (Kallmünz: 1932). Selwyn, Pamela Eve, Everyday Life in the German Book Trade: Friedrich Nicolai as Bookseller and Publisher in the Age of Enlightenment, 1750–1810 (University Park, PA: 2000). Sheehan, James J., German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford: 1989). Sheehan, Jonathan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: 2005). Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: 1978).


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THE CATHOLIC AUFKLÄRUNG IN ITALY Mario Rosa 1. A Historiographical Category The historiographical category of “katholische Aufklärung” was formulated by the German Catholic historian Sebastian Merkle in a lecture given at the international Congress of historians in 1909 with the intention of emphasizing, contrary to Protestant historiography, the non-reactionary characteristics of Catholicism in the century of the Enlightenment. Although not accepted without argument, this category had important influence on studies developed later in Germanspeaking countries, especially in those devoted, during the twentieth century, to the Hapsburg reforms of the period of Maria Theresa and Joseph II.1 In the 1940s, independently of Merkle’s position, the Italian scholar of Jansenism Ernesto Codignola instead used in his research the category of “Catholic Enlightenment” to distinguish an intermediate current between Jansenism and the Enlightenment and to individuate a series of figures taking part in the one or other orientation of thinking in the context of eighteenth century Italian reforming culture.2 After him, other Italian scholars such as Ettore Passerin and Vincenzo Ferrone preferred to speak instead either of “reformist Catholics” or “enlightened Catholicism,” since to them the category of “Catholic Enlightenment” seemed debatable. Moreover, it was totally rejected by someone like Giuseppe Ricuperati, who continued to offer new interpretations until recently. Likewise, the term “Catholic Enlightenment” was rejected by Franco Venturi—the greatest twentieth century scholar of the “reforming eighteenth century”—in his analysis of the most important themes of the Enlightenment and the boost given by them to reforming action.3 1 Bernhard Schneider, “ ‘Katholische Aufklärung’: zum Werden und Wert eines Forschungsbegriffs”, Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique 93 (1998): 354–395. 2 Ernesto Codignola, Illuministi, giansenisti e giacobini nell’Italia del Settecento (Florence: 1947). 3 Ettore Passerin, “Giansenisti e illuministi”, in Mario Fubini (ed.), La cultura illuministica in Italia (Turin: 1957), 189–207; Vincenzo Ferrone, Scienza natura religione.

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The French scholar Bernard Plongeron re-proposed and amplified Merkle’s definition, broadening the theme of “Catholic Aufklärung” in Western Europe and in Italy in two important review articles from 1969 and 1970.4 Around the same period, this theme was taken up, on an international level, in an autonomous and distinct fashion by numerous scholars: by the Jesuit historian Miquel Batllori, with regard to the culture drawn up by the ex-Jesuits after the suppression of their Society, by Antonio Mestre for Spanish culture of the Ilustración, by the American historian Samuel J. Miller for Pombaline Portugal and by myself for the development of ecclesiastic and religious reforms in different Italian States.5 A conference organized in Warsaw in 1978 by the international Commission for comparative ecclesiastic history that dedicated the entire third session to “Les courants chrétiens de l’Aufklärung en Europe de la fin du XVIIème siècle jusque vers 1830” sanctioned an interesting period of research and stimulated from then on new closer examination.6 Indeed the discussions and comments that followed the Warsaw Conference called attention to an interpretative category that is without doubt complex. Ambivalences were also found.7 But in recent years this new work has offered interestMondo newtoniano e cultura italiana nel primo Settecento (Naples: 1982); Ferrone, however, has recently expressed a clear refusal of the historiographical category of “Catholic Enlightenment”: Vincenzo Ferrone, “Chiesa cattolica e modernità. La scoperta dei diritti dell’uomo dopo l’esperienza dei totalitarismi,” in Franco Bolgiani, Vincenzo Ferrone, Francesco Margiotta Broglio (eds.), Chiesa cattolica e modernità, Atti del convegno della Fondazione Michele Pellegrino (Bologna: 2004), 17–131, esp. 20–21; Giuseppe Ricuperati, “Un lungo viaggio: il concetto di illuminismo negli anni ottanta”, in Alberto Postigliola (ed.), Un decennio di storiografia italiana sul secolo XVIII (Naples: 1995), 387–421, esp. 401. 4 Bernard Plongeron, “Recherches sur l’‘Aufklärung’ catholique en Europe occidentale (1770–1830)”, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 16 (1969): 555–605, and Plongeron, “Questions pour l’Aufklärung catholique en Italie”, Il pensiero politico 3 (1970): 30–58. 5 Miquel Batllori, La cultura hispano-italiana de los jesuitas expulsos. Españoles— hispanoamericanos—filipinos. 1767–1814 (Madrid: 1996); Antonio Mestre, Influjo europeo y herencia hispaníca. Mayans y la Ilustración valenciana (Valencia: 1987); Samuel J. Miller, Portugal and Rome c. 1748–1830. An Aspect of Catholic Enlightenment (Rome: 1978); Mario Rosa, Riformatori e ribelli nel ’700 religioso italiano (Bari: 1969). 6 Les courants chrétiens de l’Aufklärung en Europe de la fin du XVIIe siècle jusque vers 1830 (Wrocław-Bruxelles: 1987) (Bibliothèque de la Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, fasc. 68, Miscellanea Historiae Ecclesiasticae VI, Congrès de Varsovie 25 juin– 1 juillet 1978, sect. II). 7 Daniele Menozzi, “ ‘Aufklärung’ delle Chiese cristiane e ‘chrétiens éclairés’. In margine ai lavori della terza sezione del Congresso C. I. H. E. C. di Varsavia”, Critica storica 16 (1979): 150–161; Elisabeth Garms-Cornides, “Reform und Aufklärung. Zu

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ing views on the intertwining and osmosis among the different cultural and political-religious experiences in the eighteenth century. By singling out areas of agreement and forms of intersection the rigid contrast between conservative or reactionary thinking has been overcome. Moreover, the way has been opened for an interpretation of eighteenth-century ecclesiastic reformism that no longer sees it as exclusively tied to the premises of opposition to the Roman Curia, or to the state deciding between State and Church disputes, or to the urgings of Jansenism.8 Instead of the more ideological concept of Lumière (Lumi)—and in Italian research in place of the proposed but not accepted “Catholic Enlightenment”—the more neutral term of Aufklärung (in Italian “rischiaramento”) will be used in this article. This usage allows the singling out, in the wider context of Christian churches, of a rich movement of thinking, developed especially in the 1770s and 1780s, in many respects composite and contradictory, but characterized by a two-fold tension, that of cultural dynamism and apologetic commitment. As I have written elsewhere: “On one hand the Catholic Aufklärung is depicted as a moment of Christian religious consciousness that accepted reason as an instrument but not an end, and that was often spurred on—in accordance with Jansenism on the religious level and with reforming governments on the political level—to a revision of the structures and methods of the Church after the Council of Trent. In its struggle against baroque Catholicism (i.e. characterized by a strong devotion toward saints and the Virgin Mary), papal prerogatives, and the Society of Jesus (which it considered the epitome of current historical degeneration), the reformers took action for a return to the clarity and simplicity of an idealized primitive church—a return that scholars of ancient scriptural and patristic sources joined with a return, in the Enlightenment sense, to origins.”9

einigen Neuerscheinungen”, Römische Historische Mitteilungen 20 (1978): 253–267 and Garms-Cornides, “Benedict XIV.—Ein Papst zwischen Reaktion und Aufklärung”, in Gerhard Ammerer and Hanns Haas (eds.), Ambivalenzen der Aufklärung. Festschrift für Ernst Wangermann (Vienna and Munich: 1997), 169–186, esp. 176–178; Mario Rosa (ed.), Cattolicesimo e lumi nel Settecento italiano (Rome: 1981). 8 Mario Rosa, Settecento religioso. Politica della Ragione e religione del cuore (Venice: 1999), 149–184, esp. 150–151. 9 Mario Rosa, “Roman Catholicism”, in Alan Kors (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (Oxford: 2003), 468–472, esp. 469.

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On the other hand, worry over the impetuous development of “philosophic incredulity” stimulated an apologetic effort. The Catholic Aufklärung, reflecting on the relationship between religion and society and the fundamental sociability of Christianity, tried to work out a “Christian philosophy” in opposition to the Enlightenment. It tried— though without fully welcoming the great themes of the century, from tolerance to natural rights—to build the image of a church at the service of Christian people, the bearer of a reasonable, intelligent faith for everyone, open to dialogue with the world and with contemporary science.10 2. “Enlightened Catholics” from Modena, Rome, and Naples The start of the Catholic Aufklärung in Italy was not easy during the early decades of the eighteenth century, even if stimulated by cultural changes provoked by what has been defined as “the crisis of European conscience.”11 Immediately, its specific characteristics in the peninsula were outlined: it would never be a coherent, well-defined movement but would develop into individual cultural areas at the same time, from the political point of view, with the divisions of the ancient Italian States (the Duchy of Modena, the Papal State, the Kingdom of Naples, Tuscany, Lombardy). Thanks to the prestige and activity of some protagonists belonging to the secular ecclesiastic world, such as Muratori and Genovesi, and also to the mobility of those that took part among the ranks of the regular clergy, a large network of written correspondence and broad diffusion of information, books and journals assured a wide circulation of ideas. In an initial phase that can be defined as “enlightened Catholicism” rather than Catholic Aufklärung, the figure of the great Modenese scholar and historian Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750) is central. After a phase inspired mostly by the scholarly, literary interests he had developed in the Milanese environment of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, where he stayed from 1695 to 1700, he moved to Modena. It was there as archivist and librarian to Duke Rinaldo I d’Este that Muratori developed the critical historical interests to which his name is especially linked. This work owed its origins to his efforts in the “question 10 11

Ibid. Paul Hazard, La crise de la conscience européenne 1680–1715 (Paris: 1935).


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of Comacchio”—a territory belonging to the State of the Church and occupied for military reasons by the Habsburg imperial troops during the War of Spanish Succession. In the course of this dispute (1708– 1720) Muratori defended feudal, imperial, and d’Este rights against the Papal See. These initial investigations, although correlated to an important political and diplomatic episode, soon widened, as is well known, culminating in the magnificent collections of Rerum Italicarum Scriptores (17 volumes, 1723–38; volume 18 appeared posthumously in 1751) and in the Antiquitates Italicae Medii Aevi (6 volumes, 1738–42) with which Muratori is rightly considered to be the founder of Italian medieval studies.12 But already in the same years Muratori had begun his reforming arguments in the cultural, political, social, and religious field. De ingeniorum moderatione in religionis negotio (1714) which later came very close to condemnation by Rome, in fact laid down the basis for a Christianity that was without doubt orthodox, but also open to freedom of research and reason. Muratori laid out what, in his opinion, should be the cornerstones of a “moderate” constructive criticism for Catholic culture in controversy with the rationalistic criticism of the time. In the Protestant camp, this criticism was represented by the writings of the Arminian Calvinist Jean Leclerc, the publisher of the works of Erasmus and author, among other things, of an important Ars critica that was widely read especially in the first half of the eighteenth century. Revealed truth known by means of Holy Scripture and the teachings of the Church were to be aids to reason. Excluded were forms of individual examination and every expression of radical rationalism such as that marked by the “heresy of Lelio and Fausto Sozzini,” which, according to the popular conceptions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was the attitude personified by Leclerc. On the secure foundations of reason accompanied by the certainty of religion, the “freedom of minds” could therefore largely proceed and be expressed without hindrance or conditioning in all the sectors it was able to operate in, using the instruments of historical criticism, logic, and the new scientific discoveries. The best and most convincing pages of De ingeniorum moderatione are consequently those where Muratori defines with great clarity the many fields of research open or to be opened to a cultural “revival” against the excessive spread of intervention and censorship

12

Sergio Bertelli, Erudizione e storia in Ludovico Antonio Muratori (Naples: 1960).

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by the ecclesiastic authorities, who although endowed with “zeal” did not always have the necessary knowledge. These were biblical exegesis, especially with regard to the study of the historical Books of the Old Testament and the possibility of using historical-linguistic instruments in the analysis of the Holy Scripture; ecclesiastical history where the new critical or hermeneutic criteria could be widely used, as would soon be shown by the development of local ecclesiastical histories through the strong stimulus of Muratori’s lesson; the areas of research connected with art, science and civil history considered independent of religious and moral protection and having their own autonomy and specific identity. But beyond these obvious yet moderate positioning goes a brave comparison of Catholic culture with the Protestant and rationalistic one. In order to make room for a new cultural process there is implied in Muratori’s work a more general reformatory project of the ways of being, traditions, habits, worship and religious practices in the Catholic Church. These would find more extended and decisive declarations in some works of his old age in the 1730s and 1740s. Thus, from that point Muratori kept his distance from the excesses of the cult of the Virgin and in particular from the opinion, not yet defined as dogma, of the Immaculate Conception (support of which was widespread in these years in the so-called “votive offering of blood,” i.e. the commitment to spill blood, if necessary, to defend that belief ). In the same way he also did not fail to formulate strong criticisms to the “excesses” in the cult of saints and “superstitious” piety towards images and relics. These themes taken up again in the De superstitione vitanda sive censura voti sanguinarii (1739) and especially in Della regolata divozion de’ cristiani (1747) were to influence some of the reforms of Pope Benedict XIV. After other interventions, such as those regarding charity expressed in Della carità cristiana in quanto essa è amore del prossimo (1723), where Muratori outlined the image of an active, responsible Catholicism, alien to the baroque appearance of festivities and confraternities, it is indeed in Della regolata divozion de’ cristiani that with greater breadth and determination, compared to his formulations in De ingeniorum moderatione, he again set out his denunciation of the “excesses” in worship, ceremonies and popular superstitions. Condensed in this work are not only the reasons already given in De ingeniorum moderatione, but also the religious experience gained on the one hand in the controversy with the Jesuit Francesco Burgio, the author of Votum


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pro tuenda Immaculatae Deiparae Conceptione (1729) which Muratori had already addressed in the already mentioned De superstitione vitanda, and on the other hand in the course of the debate in the 1740s on the reduction of liturgical holy days of obligation which Benedict XIV was gradually bringing into effect. However, even more, in Della regolata divozion de’ cristiani, Muratori took up a position against the many forms of a widespread religiosity that at that time regulated the rhythm of daily life, in favor of a disciplinary reform of social life where religion, redefined in areas related to it, turned out at least to a large extent to be the love of God and moral values inspired by it. In other words the stress moved greatly for Muratori from an exterior to an interior discipline, from missionary preaching and collective penitence, from pilgrimages and simple prayers, to a reasonable religious upbringing and the spiritual life of faith both individual and collective, that had its founding basis in a strong centrality in Christ and the sacrifice of Holy Communion, through the personal responsibility of the faithful and the community cohesion of the parish. The final point in this itinerary was Muratori’s Della pubblica felicità oggetto de’ buoni principi of 1749. In this work, which was also his last, Muratori gave a comprehensive plan for a moderate transformation of society. If public happiness for him was still linked to the virtue of the sovereign, coinciding with the common good, it no longer depended on reasons of State but on justice that had to operate in different sectors of human activity, from agricultural to commerce, from the public debt to help the poor, in a wise mix made up of various interests. There are no revolutionary proposals in Muratori’s plan, but there are spurs forward and concrete practical indications, such as could be formulated around the middle of the eighteenth century, for a great change that stipulated that essential point of reference, not a policy of power, but an ideal of happiness where, although under the mantle of cautious paternalism, the human being acquired importance, in the perspective of a stable, shared foundation of living together.13 Muratori’s 13 Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi muratoriani Modena, 1972 (Florence: 1975–76): vol. 1, L.A. Muratori e la cultura contemporanea; vol. 2, L.A. Muratori storiografo; vol. 3, La fortuna di L.A. Muratori; vol. 4, Alphonse Dupront, L.A. Muratori et la société européenne des pré-Lumières. Essai d’inventaire et de typologie d’après l’Epistolario. For the difficulties met by Muratori regarding De ingeniorum moderatione faced with the Roman censorship: Paola Vismara, “Muratori ‘immoderato’. Le censure romane al De ingeniorum moderatione in religionis negotio”, Nuova rivista storica 83 (1999): 315–344. Regarding Regolata devozione cf. Pietro Stella, Introduzione

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work is very important for understanding the Catholic Aufklärung in Italy at its beginning because of his exceptional ability to bring together in a comprehensive project the need for critical revision and innovative drive. His is the central position, that of mediator: a “moderate” attitude which despite its limits—noticeable in its fondness in the sphere of philosophy of the Cartesian tradition and the exclusion of the “materialistic” suggestions in Locke’s thinking, in the paternalism of some political solutions and some uncertainties in the works of his old age—decidedly opens up towards the age of reforms.14 Alongside the scholarly historical culture and political and religious orientation to be found in Muratori, in the same 1720s to 1740s intense consideration was developing on the scientific and philosophical side around Newton and Locke. These interests often combined with scholarly historical commitment and led to new perspectives tending toward cultural change. The Benedictine monk Celestino Galiani (1681–1753), a man of science and of the Church destined to reach a high rank in the ecclesiastic hierarchy, made important strides in modernization.15 His work at Rome and Naples in the 1720s and 1730s was part of an effort that connected Rome with Florence, Pisa and Bologna, but also with Venice and Padua. Such work by laymen, scientists, and cultured ecclesiastics sought to redefine the possibilities and limits of reasons. Among such ecclesiastics in Rome figures an influential member of the Curia, Prospero Lambertini, who later became Pope Benedict XIV. Interest in Newton’s theories and in Gassendi’s philosophy, besides Locke’s, therefore fermented among these first enlightened Catholics not to break Catholic hegemony, inherited from the Counter-Reformation, but to reform it from within by means of another comprehensive project, different from Muratori’s, while however still aiming at creating a new frontier for Catholicism able to neutralize the most revolutionary aspects, already evident in Enlightenment culture.16 a Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Della regolata devozione dei cristiani (Cinisello Balsamo, Milano: 1990), but also Anna Burlini Calapaj, Devozione e ‘regolata divozione’ nell’opera di Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Contributo alla storia della liturgia (Roma: 1997). For Della pubblica felicità cf. Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Della pubblica felicità oggetto de’ buoni principi, Cesare Mozzarelli (ed.) (Rome: 1996). 14 Rosa, Settecento religioso, 152. 15 He became both titular Archbishop of Tessalonica and Cappellano maggiore or minister of the benefices of royal patronage in Naples under the Austrians and then the early Bourbon period. 16 Ferrone, Scienza natura religione, 317–454; but also Marina Caffiero, “Scienza e politica a Roma in un carteggio di Celestino Galiani (1714–1732)”, Archivio della Società romana di storia patria 101 (1978): 311–344.


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However it would be with Antonio Genovesi (1712–1769), like Galiani from Naples, that appeared the antinomy between an epistemological conception that wanted to be uniform under the sign of Newton’s natural theology and Anglo-Dutch philosophical thinking, on one hand, and the traditional Catholic credo, on the other, in the light of a close intertwining between science and religion. Genovesi was keen to develop after Muratori in another general cultural project, this time in Naples in the 1740s. It is well known how much he was affected in his metaphysical and theological works published or devised in the 1740s. Genovesi’s Elementa metaphysicae, which appeared in 1743, immediately met with great difficulties from the ecclesiastical censors for his tendency to create a modern cultural platform by the eclectic use of English, Dutch, and German Protestant authors and the conclusive acceptance of Locke’s ideas. These hostilities were not dispelled by an appendix in 1744 and a second part of the same Metaphysica in 1747, but indeed accentuated by a denunciation of the work in the Holy Office in 1755, from which Genovesi came out unscathed, and by the impossibility of publishing a Universa christianae theologiae elementa, which however Genovesi had worked on in the years 1743–1744 (and which was published posthumously in 1771), comparing himself with quite compromising deistic texts and among others with writers of the level of Hobbes and Toland. In this context, it is significant that his defeat in the open competition for the university chair of theology was resolved for Genovesi, who was already Professor of Ethics at Naples University, by the offer of the chair of “mechanics and commerce” and with his move to the study of economy and political economy which made him famous in the context of the Italian Enlightenment. This however did not dampen Genovesi’s metaphysical and apologetic interests from the 1740s. They continued to run through the later phases of his activity: with Meditazioni filosofiche sulla religione e sulla morale (1758), with Delle scienze metafisiche per gli giovanetti (1767) and with Diceosina o sia della filosofia del giusto e dell’onesto (1766 or 1767) where themes of the relationship between reason and religion and an optimistic view of Christianity open to humanity and society were taken up again.17 17 Paola Zambelli, La formazione filosofica di Antonio Genovesi (Naples: 1972); Giuseppe Galasso, “Genovesi: il pensiero religioso”, in Galasso, La filosofia in soccorso de’ governi. La cultura napoletana del Settecento (Naples: 1989), 369–399; Mario Rosa, “Le contraddizioni della modernità: apologetica cattolica e lumi nel Settecento”, Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa 44 (2008): 73–114, esp. 78. Of great importance

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What happened to Genovesi, and partly also to Muratori, lets us understand the obstacles in the relationship between Catholicism and Enlightenment in Italian culture over the course of the 1750s. These were the middle years of Benedict XIV’s long papacy (1740–1758). His first decade had been characterized by an important opening up both on the religious-ecclesiastical and the cultural levels.18 Already in the years preceding his accession to the papal seat, during his time in Rome when he had been part, as has been mentioned, of Celestino Galiani’s circle, absorbing from it innovative stimuli, Lambertini was promoter of the faith within the Congregation of Rites. There he had expressed positions which on one hand were inspired by moderate strictness and the results of Muratori’s criticism and on the other the acquisitions of modern philosophic-scientific thinking. The decision, at his suggestion, that the Congregation had formulated in 1729 rejecting the “new” devotion to the Sacred Heart is a double-check of this.19 Lambertini’s mediating position and attitude is to be seen above all his fundamental work on canonization, De servorum Dei beatificatione et beatorum canonizatione (1734–1737), a work which represented a synthesis of a century of tradition and his own actions in the Congregation of Rites about the procedures to be followed in beatification and canonization. Lambertini put the heroic virtues of the candidate for sainthood at the forefront, thus accepting one of the central Counter-Reformation canons for holiness. His attitude appeared much more cautious, if not sometimes diffident and even hostile, with regard to visions, ecsta-

the recent edition of Antonio Genovesi, Della Diceosina o sia della filosofia del giusto e dell’onesto, text and introduction by Niccolò Guasti, presented by Vincenzo Ferrone (Venice: 2008). As for Genovesi’s difficulties before Roman censorship: Nicola Borchi, “I guai di un apologista newtoniano. La ‘Metaphysica’ e l’‘Ars logico-critica’ di Genovesi processati dalla Congregazione dell’Indice”, Giornale critico della filosofia italiana 79 (81) (2000): 386–400, and Borchi, “Quando l’inquisitore si distrae: ancora sul processo alla ‘Metaphysica’ e all’‘Ars logico-critica’ di Genovesi”, ibid. 81 (83) (2002): 405–429. For a wider perspective: Patrizia Delpiano, Il governo della lettura. Chiesa e libri nell’Italia del Settecento (Bologna: 2007). 18 Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 8 (Rome: 1966), 393–408, s.v. Benedetto XIV, papa (by Mario Rosa); for an updated bibliography in Enciclopedia dei Papi, vol. 3 (Rome: 2000), 446–461. 19 Rosa, Settecento religioso, 17–46, esp. 28–30.


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sies and mystical expressions that had marked and were still marking numerous ancient and more recent experiences of holiness, and which were particularly frequent in the female religious world in the baroque period. With regard to the problem of visions and other miraculous occurrences, Lambertini took pains to refer to scientific and medical literature. With the intention of distinguishing between natural and supernatural phenomena, he continually referred both in the positive and negative senses to the results of the most accredited medical science, in the writing, by now a classic, of Paolo Zacchia (1584–1659), to the opinions of the most famous contemporary doctors especially to those linked to the University and Institute of Sciences of Bologna, cultural institutions to which Lambertini, closely tied to his city of origin, always devoted particular attention, even when he was pope. However, Lambertini’s position in this field was not static, and would not be so during the years of his papacy. Sometimes he made different choices, whose motivation it is opportune to clarify here. Thus, for example, he recognized, with the aims of defining holiness, the validity of the deep mystical experiences of Caterina de’ Ricci, beatified in 1732 and then canonized in 1746 by him, when pope, or the religious experiences of levitation of Giuseppe da Copertino, also beatified during his papacy in 1753, but canonized in 1767 by his successor Clement XIII. But he pronounced against the “visionary” quality of the seventeenth century Spanish mystic Maria d’Agreda definitively blocking her case. Several times he also pronounced, when he was promoter of the faith but also as pope, on cases he thought to be of “simulated holiness” on the part of nuns, who even in their lives had become reference points for wide forms of popular devotion.20 Against this background, two different and in a certain way heterogeneous trends tend to unite: one linked to a conception of the Tridentine and post-Tridentine Church, referring to its powers of intervention and control, but also to the pervasiveness of religious experiences that, especially in the baroque period, had worked it from the most violent mystical experiences to the strongest penitential forms. The other trend connected to a religious perception, permeated instead by a tenuous but consistent rationalism, that

20 In particular on Giuseppe da Copertino: Catrien Santing, “Tirami sù: Pope Benedict XIV and the Beatification of the Flying Saint Giuseppe da Copertino”, in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds.), Medicine and Religion in Enlightenment Europe (Aldershot: 2007), 79–99. On Maria d’Agreda: Rosa, Settecento religioso, 47–73.

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wanted the religious experience to be free from “excesses” and conforming to “moderate” models in the Muratori’s sense. And it is on this dichotomy or ambivalence that Lambertini’s positions, notwithstanding the different situations adopted, have allowed the Catholic Church to continue accepting, in time, in the cases of canonization of saints, even autonomous and radical forms of individual religiosity.21 An analogous discussion must be made about the acceptance by Lambertini of Tridentine models and ideals which, if they doubtless played a role in his activity as an important member of the Congregation of Rites, they formed even more so the great framework in which was shortly placed his pastoral activity as Bishop of Ancona (1727–1731) and especially as Archbishop of Bologna (1731–1740). His activities developed along the lines of what has been called the “Tridentine revival.” This revival, mainly, but not exclusively, on the pastoral plane, was carried out at the end of the seventeenth century by Pope Innocent XI (1676–89). It was part of an effort to concentrate and re-launch the forces of the Church and Catholic religious vitality as a reply to the isolation of Rome after the Treaty of Westphalia, as well as to aggressive European policy, especially that of Louis XIV of France. These activities were the result of stimulus given by Innocent XI to ecclesiastical institutions, religious culture, the responsibility of hierarchy, the training of the clergy, and of the faithful. They would be continued by his successors and would find close agreement and much successes in many Italian dioceses during the first half of the eighteenth century, despite the difficulties of the papacies of Clement XI and Benedict XIII. If elements of the “Tridentine reprise” shaped various Lambertini initiatives in his time as diocesan bishop, they certainly did not fail to suggest to him also many actions after his election to the papacy. Here the context of these reforms was no longer the climate delineated in the period of Innocent, but his actions must not be linked directly to late-eighteenth century reforming stimuli as would be realized later in the Catholic Aufklärung.22 The “Tridentine revival” of Benedict XIV in 21 Santing “Tirami sù”, 99. On the ambivalences of Lambertini cf. also GarmsCornides, “Benedict XIV.—Ein Papst zwischen Reaktion und Aufklärung”. 22 On the ‘Tridentine revival’ under Innocent XI: Peter Hersche, Muβe und Verschwendung. Europäische Gesellschaft und Kultur im Barockzeitalter, vol. 2 (Freiburg-Basel Vienna: 2006), 952–1028, esp. 952–959, but also Bruno Neveu, “Culture religieuse et aspirations réformistes à la cour d’Innocent XI”, in Neveu, Érudition et religion au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: 1994), 235–276.


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reference to the universal Church was the articulated reply, as it could be practiced around the middle of the century by someone of Benedict’s level and position, to the different tensions that had developed within and outside the Church: from Jansenism, expanding strongly in those years, to Muratori’s proposals, and to the first spreading of the ideas of the Enlightenment. It was therefore in the great capacity for mediation by the pope, in his skillful policy of absorbing new stimuli in a traditional context, that the “secret,” so to speak, of a figure consists, to which his contemporaries, first of all Voltaire, and later but not without some forcing historical reflection wanted to give him the characteristics of a philosopher.23 In fact, Benedict XIV, aware of the new role the Church would assume, with his openings and open tolerance, linked however to a cultural sensitivity that was more receptive than profound, was certainly not a “philosopher” in the eighteenth century sense of the word. But he did know how to move with skill between contrasting stimuli: between the recall to the past and tradition on one hand that he sought to enrich by the foundation of new cultural institutions and the development of ecclesiastical studies with a strong apologetic influence, and on the other the confrontation with the new needs that were presenting and imposing themselves on the Catholic Church. On a political level he was realizing a positive concordatory policy; on the cultural level he was showing himself to be particularly attentive to what was occurring in European society, starting with France as a result of the powerful flow of the new culture of the Enlightenment. And the latter aspect is the discriminating element in Pope Lambertini’s attitude. Training in rationalist scientific culture and the historical climate of which Muratori was emblematic tended to follow and welcome as far as possible the changes taking place, but always within a consolidated hierarchy of values and orientations which, although not prejudicially rigid and still open to discussion, remained tied to basic religious judgments. This balance initially (at least) allowed a dialogue at a distance with some of the main exponents of the Enlightenment, but was nevertheless destined to break down soon before the development of those ideological lines which, in the eyes of the Roman Curia and Benedict XIV himself, were

23 On the ”philosopher” pope: Renée Haynes, Philosopher King: the Humanist Pope Benedict XIV (London: 1970).

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becoming more and more threatening, as the change in the 1750s was about to show. The affair of the dedication to the pope of Voltaire’s Mahomet is well known, but it was, as we know, the result of a promotional operation by the author and reflects, especially in Benedict XIV’s answer to Voltaire, the image in the 1740s in Italy and the rest of Europe, of the writer to whom the pope could declare in complete sincerity to have “all the deserved esteem for your celebrated value to letters.” Once the misunderstanding was cleared up, Voltaire’s works would be condemned between 1753–1757 in the first complete edition of his works. This condemnation was preceded by that of Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois in 1751 that took place not by chance after long consideration and was expressed in a cautious form, i.e. without official publication, because of the “political” intervention to the pope by the French ambassador to Rome, the Duke of Nivernais, and was preceded by a second and this time very severe condemnation of freemasonry also in 1751, the first condemnation having been issued by Clement XII in 1738.24 However, it is not without significance that, while a different attitude to the Enlightenment was emerging in Rome, there persisted a more relaxed climate alongside these condemnations established among those heads of the Church by Benedict XIV. This led also through the direct commitment of the pope himself to an important reform of procedures that up to then had been followed by the Congregation of the Index. With Sollicita ac provida of 1753, Benedict XIV introduced a new notably liberal procedure within which figures, among other things, the rule of the direct defense by the author of a work submitted to close examination by the Congregation before the Congregation itself could proceed to a decision. This rule was soon to be disregarded in the stiffening of the climate among the heads of the Church after Benedict’s death. As a conclusion to this phase, in the new edition of the Index of prohibited books that appeared in 1757, the prohibition of works in defense of the Copernican system was

24 In general: Laurence Macé, “Les Lumières françaises au Tribunal de l’Index et du Saint-Office”, Dix-huitième siècle 34 (2002): 13–25; in particular: Mario Rosa, “Cattolicesimo e ‘lumi’: la condanna romana dell’ ‘Esprit des Lois’, in Rosa, Riformatori e ribelli, 87–118; Catherine Maire, “La censure différée de l’Esprit des Lois par Mgr. Bottari”, Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa 41 (2005): 175–191. On the condemnation of freemasonry: José Antonio Ferrer Benimeli, “Origini, motivazioni ed effetti della condanna vaticana”, in Gian Mario Cazzaniga (ed.), Storia d’Italia, Annali 21, La massoneria (Torino: 2006): 143–165.


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cancelled on the basis of results of new physical-astronomical studies. Symbolically this was the last act in the circulation of ideas and the relative openings towards the new culture with which the papacy of Benedict XIV ended. Without doubt he had contributed to opening up important spaces for these forms of “illuminated Catholicism” already in operation and destined to be defined autonomously from there in a short time in a wider Catholic Aufklärung. It is not by chance that very soon, faced with the frontal dispute of the Roman Church with the challenges of the Enlightenment, the age of Benedict XIV gave life to a myth, that of the “philosopher” pope, that has continued right up to the present. 4. The Crisis of the 1750s and the Difficulties of a Period The unstable balance broke definitively in 1759, after the death of Benedict XIV, under the papacy of his successor Clement XIII (1758– 1769) with the condemnation of Helvétius’s Esprit and especially the first seven volumes that had appeared up to then, of the Encyclopédie of d’Alembert and Diderot. It is significant that the Roman condemnation of the Encyclopédie also affected the work’s reprinting, with corrections and cautious open-mindedness towards the Enlightenment, which had been sent to Lucca by a small group of “enlightened Catholics,” laymen and ecclesiastics, among whom figure the Lucca patrician, Ottaviano Diodati (1716–1786), Filippo Venuti, the chief priest of the collegiate church in Livorno, and the great scholar Giovanni Domenico Mansi (1692–1769), the later Archbishop of the city. This condemnation marks, in many respects, the end of the phase that had opened up some decades earlier around the names of Muratori, Galiani and Genovesi.25 Despite this difficult moment for Italian Catholic culture, the critical impetus represented by Muratori’s combination of religious and historical scholarship did not entirely disappear. To this impetus in the decade 1740–1750 the most influential Italian periodical of the day, the Novelle letterarie of Florence directed with “enlightened Catholic”

25

Mario Rosa, “Encyclopédie, ‘Lumières’ et tradition au 18e siècle en Italie”, Dixhuitième siècle 4 (1972): 109–168; Catherine Maire, “L’entrée des Lumières à l’Index: le tournant de la double censure de l’Encyclopédie en 1759”, Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie 42 (2007): 107–140.

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spirit by Giovanni Lami (1697–1770) had given strong stimulus. This lesson continued to bear fruit to a greater or lesser extent, in the ecclesiastic culture of seminaries and especially in various local historical inquiries.26 The new climate that had somehow developed was urging, in the meantime, the cultural and pastoral commitment of various Italian bishops, among whom stand out Giuseppe Maria Saporiti, the Archbishop of Genoa from 1743 to 1767, Francesco Gaetano Incontri, the Archbishop of Florence from 1741 to 1781, and Giuliano Sabbatini, the Bishop of Modena from 1745 to 1757. It was not by chance that Saporiti, the day after the traumatic occupation of Genoa (1746) by Austrian troops and the rebellion of the city during the War of Austrian Succession, insisted on pastoral action more rigorous but above all more rational even in language. He relied on a catechistic activity that for the young was to be based on “clear and sensitive” formulae and expressions and for adults one inspired by an “orderly spiritual life.” Those words undoubtedly took up Muratori’s exhortations and are reflected also in the insistence with which the Archbishop recommended “reasonableness” in community and personal meditation and “clearly speaking” and “making the subject clear and intelligible” in preaching. Incontri was more dedicated to shifting reforming orientations from Muratori’s suggestions to a more rigorous appeal to the primitive Christian Church and the themes that would really be of “enlightened piety” at the end of the century. His Spiegazione teologica, liturgica e morale sopra la celebrazione delle feste (1762) was an out-and-out manifesto directed at the clergy to render to God “reasonable worship, not imposing by a trick of words or capricious and misleading ways, but by speaking with clarity and truth,” following a crucial theme of decreasing in number and regulated “sanctification” of Christian feasts, already proposed by Muratori in the 1740s and 1750s. A still more decided step towards the actual assumption of episcopal responsibilities, not called for only by immediate pastoral needs or by recent or older models, but referring to a general religious concept, of an orthodox Bossuet-type episcopalism, was taken by Sabbatini, bishop of the city where Muratori had been the parish priest of S. Maria della Pomposa, with his Omelie e lettere pastorali published in 1761. Coming

26 Mario Rosa, “L’‘età muratoriana’ nell’Italia del Settecento”, in Rosa, Riformatori e ribelli, 9–47.


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from the order of the Piarists, among the most famous preachers of his time, Sabbatini therefore marks in the Italian context an important passage from bishop of the Counter-Reformation to that of the age of the Enlightenment, not so much for the attention given to the themes of “regulated devotion” or the stimulus deriving from a new ethical and religious restraint, but relative to objective responsibility, that was beginning to call more and more the men of the Church to the sources of hierarchic power through the Catholic Aufklärung and the rigorous Jansenist conception of Christian “golden antiquity.”27 Still broader initiatives, marked by a more open cultural sensibility beyond the ecclesiastic world was to be met in the course of the 1750s at Livorno, a city involved in Mediterranean sea trade that had a lively cultural traffic because of the presence of English, French, Dutch, and Jewish communities. Here two journals were published, the Magazzino italiano (1752–1753) and the Magazzino toscano (1754–1757), both the work of Filippo Venuti (1706–1768) who had, during a long stay in France, been a friend of Montesquieu’s and secretary to the Academy of Bordeaux and who, having returned to Italy in 1750, had collaborated in the Lucca edition of the Encyclopédie. The two journals modelled on the English Spectator represent an important aspect of Tuscan culture through people like Venuti, a noble from Cortona, who had founded in 1726 with the brothers Marcello and Ridolfino the Etruscan Academy of Cortona for the study of Etruscan and Roman antiquities, an Academy that had early on assumed great importance in the Italian and European intellectual panorama in the 1730s and 1740s, and to which even Voltaire longed to be enrolled. Both the journals shows the extent, if only for a brief period of time, of the new stimulus that was circulating in scholarly culture, in literature, in scientific thinking, and in economic sciences.28 Moreover these are the years when among the ranks of the clergy and cultured laymen, especially in Tuscany, the Republic of Venice and the provincial areas of the State of the Church and the Kingdom of Naples there was lively development in

27

Rosa, Settecento religioso, 156–157, 191–199, 202–207. Mario Rosa, “Filippo Venuti tra apologeti ed enciclopedisti”, in Paola Barocchi and Daniela Gallo (eds.), L’Accademia Etrusca (Milan: 1985), 92–96; Pierre Musitelli, “Filippo Venuti, ami de Montesquieu et collaborateur de l’édition lucquoise de l’Encyclopédie”, Dix-huitième siècle 38 (2006): 429–448; Antonio Rotondò, “Lettere inedite di Montesquieu al suo corrispondente toscano Filippo Venuti”, in Miriam Michelini Rotondò (ed.), Riforme e utopie nel pensiero politico toscano del Settecento (Florence: 2008), 1–16. 28

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scientific thinking, in technical and practical applications particularly in the field of agriculture boosted by the diffusion of knowledge and experiments after the great European famine of 1764–1766. Thus it was not by chance that among the numerous foundations of agricultural academies and ones for economics, the Accademia dei Georgofili, instituted in 1752 by the Lateran regular canon Ubaldo Montelatici (1692–1776)29 had assumed a very important role in Florence, with repercussions throughout the peninsula. 5. Catholic Aufklärung and “Christian Happiness” The assumptions of a maturing Catholic Aufklärung found their most obvious impetus on the threshold of the 1770s, expressed again by individuals different from one another, but more closely linked by a common climate and method of planning than the figures of Muratori, Galiani and Genovesi had been in the previous generation. Above all the Catholic Aufklärung now found itself acting in a changed context compared to the 1750s. Faced with the accelerating development of the Enlightenment, the gap between Catholicism and the new culture had become wider in the 1760s and 1770s after further condemnation of Voltaire’s Candide (1762 and 1763), the Traité sur la tolérance (1766) and the Nouveaux Mélanges (1763). Adding to this growing alienation of Catholicism and Enlightenment was the condemnation of Rousseau’s Émile (1762) and the Contrat social (1766), Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene (1766), as well as the works of La Mettrie, d’Holbach and again Helvétius from 1770–1774. Two papal encyclicals, Clement XIII’s Christianae reipublicae salus (1766) and Pius VI’s Inscrutabile Divinae Sapientiae (1775) against the enlightened press definitively confirmed a general stance by the Roman Church. If relations with the Enlightenment had become more bitter and more complex, it is not surprising that a confrontation between Catholicism and modernity became more direct.30

29 Eric W. Cochrane, Tradition and Enlightenment in the Tuscan Academies 1690– 1800 (Rome: 1961). 30 Mario Rosa, “Le contraddizioni della modernità”, 83. In particular for the condemnation of Beccaria: Girolamo Imbruglia, “Illuminismo e religione. Il Dei delitti e delle pene e la difesa di Verri dinanzi alla censura inquisitoriale”, Studi settecenteschi 25–26 (2005–2006): 119–161; Giuseppe Orlandi, “Beccaria all’Indice”, Spicilegium Historicum Congregationis SS.mi Redemptoris 56 (2008): 179–218.


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Now the break-up of a world like the Italian Catholic one—still prevalently tied to the legacy of the Counter-Reformation, with a Church rigidly closed in defence of traditional ecclesiastic and religious values, despite the cultural assumptions provoked by the writing and discussions of the preceding decades—no longer followed scientific epistemology and rationalistic philosophy, as had happened with Galiani and Genovesi. Instead, this break-up was seen in the development of economic and social forces, made up in a general ethical vision and the new meaning that religion should assume in human experience, namely an evangelical Christianity and based on solidarity, that Genovesi had already explained in the “true cordial love of God and man.” This is when natural law, belonging to the Protestant tradition, opposed by a strong group of Dominican writers in the name of Thomism, after being accepted through a Pufendorf version “corrected” by Giambattista Almici (1717–1793) in Il diritto della natura e delle genti di Pufendorf rettificato, accresciuto e illustrato (1757–1759), found a new diffusion in the 1780s in Catholic culture. This was done through the arrangement made by Appiano Buonafede (1716–1793), a Benedictine monk like Galiani, with the Istoria critica del moderno diritto di natura e di genti (1789). In this work Buonafede tried to individuate a line of “Christian philosophy” derived from Pufendorf, Barbeyrac and Vattel, and from a specifically Italian tradition that connected Gravina to Genovesi and Filangieri.31 But above all, this is the moment when, on a wave of a eudemonistic conception of religion, the idea of “happiness” was being closely examined. It had already been linked by Muratori to the policy “of good princes” but now was seen in the social and political happiness linked to humanity and the mildness of religion, to the “good deeds of Christianity” and to its civilising function.32

31 Mario Rosa, Settecento religioso, 162–163. In particular: Diego Panizza, “La traduzione italiana del ‘De jure naturae’ di Pufendorf: giusnaturalismo moderno e cultura cattolica nel Settecento”, Studi veneziani 11 (1969): 483–528; Maurizio Bazzoli, “Giambattista Almici e la diffusione di Pufendorf nel Settecento italiano”, Critica storica 16 (1979): 3–100; Antonio Trampus, “La cultura italiana e l’Auflklärung: un confronto mancato?”, in Giulia Cantarutti, Stefano Ferrari and Paola Maria Filippi (eds.), Il Settecento tedesco in Italia. Gli italiani e l’immagine della cultura tedesca nel XVIII secolo (Bologna: 2001), 61–93. 32 Bernard Plongeron, “Bonheur et ‘civilisation chrétienne’: une nouvelle apologétique après 1760”, Studies on Voltaire and Eighteenth Century 154 (1976): 1637– 1655.

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Emblematic of this orientation is the Meditazioni su vari punti di felicità pubblica e privata (1774) by the Lombard Camaldolese Benedictine Isidoro Bianchi, drawn up in the environment of the Accademia degli Ereini of Palermo, where at that time Bianchi was staying as a teacher in the Monreale seminary, under the protection of Archbishop Francesco Testa. This writing is by one who was a friend of the greatest Italian followers of the Enlightenment, from the brothers Pietro and Alessandro Vetri to Cesare Beccaria, to Gaetano Filangieri. It had an extraordinary success with reprintings and translations and where the fusion of politics and morals, based on the great texts of the mature European Enlightenment, aimed at making a Christian “the most useful member of the Republic and the dearest in society.” Therefore it will not come as a surprise that while he was preparing the Meditazioni, Bianchi could write in 1773 to his Rome correspondent, Giovanni Cristofano Amaduzzi, how “between a sermon and his Meditazioni there was little gap” and how “from the pulpit one spoke as an orator and at the table as a philosopher.” He was able to conclude “I too as a philosopher in most places I come to speak of Christian morality, being so necessary for public and private happiness.”33 In other words a new cultural sensitivity was being consolidated that in Tuscany could allow Giuseppe Ippoliti, the Bishop of Cortona from 1755 to 1776, in a pastoral letter of 1772 for the opening of a new seminary, to indicate through the readings for the young clergy suitable for developing “a school of Christian piety” and a “modern” restrained “investigative spirit” a recent text that would become a classic of the economic thinking of the followers of the Enlightenment inspired by physiocracy, L’Ami des hommes by Victor Riqueti de Mirabeau. Even more interesting is another intervention by Ippoliti, also expressed in 1772 (not through a pastoral letter but under a transparent veil of anonymity) with the Lettera parenetica, morale, economica di un parroco della Val di Chiana a tutti i possidenti o comodi o ricchi concernenti i doveri loro rispetto ai contadini with which he bravely came to economic and social problems provoked by the famine of 1764–1766. In the letter, Ippoliti put forward a concrete and in many respects exceptional proposal of a social and political nature, based

33 Rosa, Settecento religioso, 141–142, also for the quotation of the letter of Bianchi to Amaduzzi of 13 August 1773; Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore, V, L’Italia dei lumi (1764–1790), vol. 1, La rivoluzione di Corsica. Le grandi carestie degli anni sessanta. La Lombardia delle riforme (Turin: 1987), 682–690.


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on the recognition of peasants’ work, on the right of the worker on the land to subsistence and the duty of the landowner to help him in the case of poverty, and invoked for this proposition the modification of the agrarian agreements in force through direct state intervention. These suggestions grew out of the first reformatory debates, and saw social relations between landowners and peasants based on traditional paternalism and the Christian concept of help for the needy in the case of necessity. Ippoliti’s position went beyond the debates on economic reforms and was bound to produce immediate reactions on the moderate front. This appears from a review from Novelle letterarie of Florence of 1772 with an invitation to the “good parish priest” to tie at the real point the interests of landowners and peasants and to tie together in an enlightened social knot two types of people that the public well-being demanded should be close friends and always disposed to cooperate with a single aim, i.e. for the maximum production of essential foodstuffs.

Forced to change his mind, Ippoliti published a second edition of the Lettera in 1774 with the addition of Istruzione morale-economica sull’educazione e sui doveri dei contadini that was greeted with satisfaction by the Giornale d’Italia of the Venetian Francesco Griselini. The Istruzione, according to the Giornale d’Italia, an expression of enlightened Venetian conservatism, demonstrated through a solution we would today call “inter-class,” the respective harmonic connection of two similar very important classes in society, the landowners and the peasants.34 If Ippoliti’s eyes were directed not without difficulty at the dangerous ground of “happiness” linked to the peasant world, the strong apologetic charge appeared to be more smooth-running and persuasively expressed in general terms, more or less in the same years, in the search for “Christian happiness” in the works of Luca Nicola De Luca. He was tutor to one of the greatest Neapolitan followers of the Enlightenment, Gaetano Filangieri, and later Bishop of the small dioceses of Muro Lucano (from 1778 to 1792) and Trivento (from 1792 to 1819) in the Kingdom of Naples. De Luca’s apologetic writings, beginning with the first, Il S. Libro dell’Ecclesiaste interpretato e illustrato di note che ne sviluppano il testo e di riflessioni politiche e morali (1776) against Voltaire’s Précis sur l’Ecclésiaste was followed by

34

Rosa, Settecento religioso, 204–207.

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translations of Books of Wisdom and Proverbs “with additions of many discourses on social, religious and political issues” (1782). These works were enlivened, in pages of moving eloquence, by a comprehensive view of universal history and teaching, the origins of society and religion, together with a view of human freedom, equality, and justice, which were to be found more strongly and clearly in the writing of his great disciple, perhaps allusively called by the name Filandro, “Man’s friend” at whom De Luca’s Il S. Libro dell’Ecclesiaste was directed. However much a concrete social proposal like Ippoliti’s is missing in De Luca, the full consideration he devoted to the verse Dulcis est somnus operanti (“the sleep of a laboring man is sweet,” Ecclesiastes 5:11) allows us, for example, to find, in the passionate denunciation of the hard feudal system existing in the Kingdom of Naples, almost an anticipation of themes of the political perspective and reforming impetus of Filangieri enriched a little later in Scienze della legislazione (1780–1783).35 If De Luca’s apologetics could result in the clear stream of Enlightenment civilising, some other southern contemporary bishops seem still more so than De Luca urged on by almost total naturalistic and optimistic adherence to the world of reason, as the figure of Giuseppe Capecelatro, Archbishop of Taranto from 1778 to 1817, shows. Indeed, it is significant that in Delle feste de’ cristiani published in Naples in 1771 and then in Rome in 1772 before his nomination to Taranto, Capecelatro not only radically dissolved Muratori’s old theme of “regulated devotion” in the enlightened, deistic view of man, “an animal naturally sociable, destined to be the soul, the voice, the priest, the interpreter of vows of nature” “in the obligation to appear in a solemn manner as the adorer of the common monarch and judge of the Universe,” but above all, in reducing the Christian message to natural religion presenting the figure of the Son, deprived of his saving, redeeming mission, uniquely as “the judge and reformer of mankind,” who knew how to restore religion to its highest degree and to pity and succour man in his infirmity.36 There was only one step to take in this direction and it was taken by a man of letters who moved on the border between the ecclesiastic and secular worlds, the abbé Giacinto Cerutti. Cerutti’s Ragionamento

35 36

Ibid., 167, 209–210. Ibid., 167–168.


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teologico sopra la evidente credibilità della religione cristiana appeared in Siena in 1779. In this work, written in the framework of a transfer in an apologetic key of the Rousseau figure of Legislator, the Christ Legislator takes on importance for Cerutti, being the “instructor” of a new alliance. The Christ Legislator “gently obliging in such a way came to establish the only true principle of human Happiness and to promote the solid perfect similarity of men to Him and the ultimate union of them no less among themselves than with Him and His holy Father, through the same constraint as his very upright charity.” In the light of this very general conception, Muratori’s concept of Christian charity “in that it is love of one’s neighbour” was transformed into a religious bond that could ensure the ordered coexistence of social life linked to the premises of a religion that is all goodness and care.37 These are the farthest points the Catholic Aufklärung was able to reach in the course of the 1770s and which present in an emblematic way the high degree of reflection and theorizing that Catholic Aufklärung had devised starting from Isidoro Bianchi’s Meditazioni and Ippoliti’s interventions at the beginning of that decade. 6. Religion and Society in the Rome of Pius VI At the end of the 1770s a “Christian philosophy” had taken shape, therefore, in various ways as the work of the Catholic Aufklärung from Sicily to Tuscany and Naples that was being reflected not only on the State and forms of political power, as Italian Jansenism of the same period was doing, but on society as well. Inevitably, such a program would look for a political outlet reducing the theoretical generalizations in the climate of reforms and giving life to an attempt at cultural hegemony inspired by the Catholic Aufklärung through a singular dynamic role to be attributed to Rome, after the suppression of the Society of Jesus and through Rome to Catholicism in its most enlightened forms. Indeed, after the suppression of the Jesuits and forced with a slowing down of reforming tension, before the new impetus of state reforms during the 1780s there was a phase when,

37

Ibid., 164–166; Daniele Menozzi, “Letture politiche della figura di Gesù nella cultura italiana del Settecento”, in Mario Rosa (ed.), Cattolicesimo e lumi nel settecento italiano, 127–176: Bernard Cottret, Le Christ des Lumières. Jésus de Newton à Voltaire 1660–1760 (Paris: 1990).

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despite repeated condemnation by Rome, the acquisition and consolidation of new cultural areas made a further step forward, in confirming these orientations that the Catholic Aufklärung had devised. The interpreter of this necessity in the Rome of Pius VI, was the enlightened anti-Jesuit and pro-Jansenist scholar Giovanni Cristofano Amaduzzi, whom we have already met in his exchange of correspondence with Isidoro Bianchi. A prominent person in the Rome of Clement XIII, Clement XIV, and Pius VI, a man of the Curia and a scholar of classical antiquities, Professor of Greek at the Università della Sapienza as well as superintendent of the printing-office of the Congregazione di Propaganda Fide, Amaduzzi had intensively taken part in the campaign that had brought about the suppression of the Society of Jesus, thanks to his links with his protector Cardinal Lorenzo Ganganelli (later Clement XIV). At the same time he had developed a vast journalistic business with extremely wide interests regarding the study of antiquity and erudition, literary and religious problems, collaborating with the most important periodicals of the day, from the Novelle Letterarie of Florence to the Efemeridi letterarie of Rome and the Antologia Romana. Amaduzzi’s exchange of letters with very many men of the Church and contemporary culture, among whom were also the Jansenist Bishop of Pistoia and Prato, Scipione de’ Ricci, had not only constituted over time a network of information that spread from the capital of Catholicism regarding the main orientations and Roman, Italian and European events, but had assumed the shape of an irreplaceable instrument for connections between individuals and groups by now spread throughout the peninsula. It is therefore understandable why it was Amaduzzi who tried a consecration, so to speak, of the tensions expressed by the Catholic Aufklärung by entrusting his reforming, cultural, and civil project to a lecture given in 1778 at the Accademia dell’Arcadia, the most important Roman cultural institution of the time. This lecture was subsequently published as La filosofia alleata della religione, with the eloquent subtitle of “philosophical, political lecture” and bore the false indication of the Livorno printworks where the second edition of the Encyclopédie (1770–1775) had been printed after that of Lucca, thus emphasizing the intertwining of his project with the world of the Enlightenment.38 La filosofia alleata della religione, not without reason

38 Rosa, Settecento religioso, 142–148, 177–180, 265–268, 282–284, 290–293; Marina Caffiero, “Cultura e religione nel Settecento italiano: Giovanni Cristofano Amaduzzi


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dedicated to a noteworthy exponent of the Curia and the Italian episcopacy, Cardinal Andrea Giovanetti, the Archbishop of Bologna, was the point of arrival of an ideological line that was placed in the context of a clash at the time begun, but had not yet exploded with all its violence, as was to happen in a few years, between the orientations of the Catholic Aufklärung and the conservative, pro-Jesuit and antiEnlightenment ones of large sections of the Roman Curia and Catholicism. This ideological line had already been exposed two years earlier, in 1776, in the Discorso filosofico sul fine ed utilità dell’Accademie that Amaduzzi himself had read again at the Arcadia, whose central pages, on a wave of praise for Newton, had all been a hymn to the enlightening strength of philosophy and organization of the new culture. With La filosofia alleata della religione Amaduzzi moved again, but with greater decisiveness within the framework of an obvious Enlightenment desire for cultural, social and political transformation, thanks to a philosophy which by works of Rousseau and Beccaria, and through the action of reforming sovereigns, “being arbiter of customs, laws and politics placed on the throne humanity and civil tolerance, legitimate ramifications of Christian charity, reinforced the social contract, abolished feudal rights, put an end to dishonourable slavery, reduced the atrocities of punishments and tortures and little was missing that did not make man return to his first natural rights.” The new civil and political responsibility of the man of culture who was at the same time a believer conclusively found therefore for Amaduzzi its roots in a pure religion, reinforced by philosophy and ready to come more closely to the same philosophy and recognize its same divine origin.39 Amaduzzi’s was a brave project for “Christian philosophy” that proved to be illusory when, already in 1779, with a rapidly changing religious and political climate in Pius VI’s Rome, Amaduzzi’s lecture was opposed to the Ragionamento sulla influenza della religione cristiana nella società civile of Nicola Spedalieri (1740–1795) also given in the Arcadia. With the character of the polemicist and a pro-Curia or

e Scipione de’ Ricci”, Rivista di storia della Chiesa in Italia 28 (1974): 94–126, and 30 (1976): 405–437; Caffiero, “Le ‘Efemeridi letterarie’di Roma’ (1772–1798). Reti intellettuali, evoluzione professionale e apprendistato politico”, in Marina Caffiero and Giuseppe Monsagrati (eds.), Dall’erudizione alla politica. Giornali, giornalisti ed editori a Roma tra XVII e XX secolo (Milan: 1997), 63–101. For the Academy of Arcadia: Annalisa Nacinovich, “Il sogno incantatore della filosofia.” L’Arcadia di Gioacchino Pizzi (Florence: 2003). 39 Rosa, Settecento religioso, 179, for the quotation from La filosofia alleata della religione.

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“Roman” controversialist, as Spedalieri was said to be, who was to have an important place in the anti-Enlightenment polemics at the end of the eighteenth century and in the political debates of the revolutionary years with I diritti dell’uomo (1791), by an instrumental opening to the Enlightenment Spedalieri reabsorbed Amaduzzi’s “enthusiasm.” According to him in a context that was certainly political, not without an authoritative basis, the “social machine” entrusted to the instability of amour-propre, found in Revelation and social links that had come from Christianity the reasons for its immutability and universality.40 In the two contrasting figures of Amaduzzi and Spedalieri we can find opposing aspects that the Catholic Aufklärung had assumed in its political outlet in Italy at the turn of the eighteenth century, a prelude to the divergent outcomes they would have in the revolutionary years. On one hand, the sincere ideal of progress and political and religious “rischiaramento” expressed by Amaduzzi could lead, as indeed it did, toward democratic sympathies and adhesions to patriotic and revolutionary Catholicism on the part of many exponents who had fully lived the experience of the Catholic Aufklärung. On the other hand, Spedialieri’s instrumental enlightenment, with its distinction between the political and the religious level, was able to demonstrate the compatibility of Christianity with the political democracy born from the Revolution and to theorize the acceptance di fatto of the new course opened in Italy by French forces.41 In the meanwhile, during the 1770s and 1780s, together with a moderate approach to the Enlightenment, the stimulus of the Catholic Aufklärung was spreading on a more general level through the network of Academies and cultural institutions that were developing and multiplying in numerous Italian centres, from the largest to the provincial ones. This is the time when a positive science, from the research of antiquities to historical erudition and philosophy, from studies of geology to experimental physics and chemistry directed by methodical and classifying knowledge, which had its monumental arrival in the Encyclopédie méthodique, found acceptance in the

40 Ibid., 180–182; Giuseppe Ruggieri, “Teologia e società. Momenti di un confronto sul finire del Settecento in riferimento all’opera di Nicola Spedalieri”, Cristianesimo nella storia 2 (1981): 437–486; Eluggero Pii, “Un aspetto della reazione cattolica. Il caso Spedalieri”, Cristianesimo nella storia 10 (1989): 251–272, republished in Daniele Menozzi (ed.), La Chiesa italiana e la Rivoluzione francese (Bologna: 1990), 47–74. 41 Rosa, Settecento religioso, 182.


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branches of ecclesiastic and cultured laymen in ways different from those that had given rise to the Academies and institutions in the 1750s.42 This science expressed itself in the organization of libraries that received a huge patrimony of books and manuscripts as a result of the dissolution of convents and monasteries in Tuscany and especially Lombardy and following the closing down of the Society of Jesus. This science expressed itself in the organization of museums and galleries that renewed with a more rational sense and an initial historical orientation the arrangements made up of ancient collections of princes or nobles, and in the creation of scientific cabinets, that acquired new instruments and developed new knowledge. In this very active cultural panorama numerous minor characters are often met who might be, as at times they were, restless and irregular people, ex-Jesuits after the disbanding of the Society and ex-religious people, after the suppression of many regular institutions, abbés and men of letters, occupied in journalism, publishing or teaching. It was not rare however to meet among them figures of high level and cultural importance, like the Theatine Paolo Paciaudi, who organized the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma, the ex-Jesuit Luigi Lanzi, who arranged the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and put on scientific bases the study of the Etruscan language and another ex-Jesuit Leonardo Ximenes who founded in Florence the astronomical Observatory that bears his name.43 7. From the Tuscany of Peter Leopold to the Pavia of Joseph II The 1780s witnessed the great resumption of the Habsburg reforms in Tuscany and Lombardy and the Bourbon ones in the Kingdom of Naples and in Sicily. In these regions the Catholic Aufklärung was

42 Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment. A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775–1800 (Cambridge: 1979); Claude Blanckaert and Michel Porret (eds.), L’Encyclopédie méthodique (1782–1832). Dès Lumières au positivisme (Genève: 2006); for the edition of the Encyclopédie méthodique printed in Padua: Piero Del Negro, “Due progetti enciclopedici del tardo Settecento: dal patrizio Matteo Dandolo all’abate Giovanni Coi”, Studi settecenteschi 16 (1996): 289–321. 43 Mauro Cristofani, La scoperta degli Etruschi. Archeologia e antiquaria nel ‘700 (Rome: 1983); Giulio Barsanti, Vieri Becagli, Renato Pasta (eds.), La politica della scienza. Toscana e stati italiani nel tardo Settecento (Florence: 1996); Niccolò Guasti, L’esilio italiano dei gesuiti espulsi. Identità, controllo sociale e pratiche culturali (1767– 1798) (Rome: 2006).

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coupled with Jansenism, lending a particular slant to the reforms. This was especially true of those inspired by “enlightened piety” and carried out by Peter Leopold in Tuscany and Joseph II in Lombardy and the Habsburg territories with regard to popular devotions, worship, and religious ceremonies, the training and integration of the clergy into the structure of the State. The Catholic Aufklärung had always been very sensitive to the demands of the state, and those demands strengthened and enriched the strongest rationalistic and enlightenment components and, inspired by Jansenism, were able to influence those reforms of the same period. This can be seen from the arrangements adopted by Scipione de’ Ricci, the Bishop of Pistoia and Prato from 1781 to 1791, and from the decrees of the Synod of Pistoia in 1786. At the height of the 1780s, in the context of ecclesiastical policies of enlightened governments and Jansenist religious reformism, no longer was the main concern re-casting Christianity as a religion interested in acting for the relief of one’s neighbour against the magnificent baroque cult of devotions or of “regulating” the “excesses” of prayers to the Virgin and the saints in the name of an interior piety that was sacramental and centred on Christ, as it had been with Muratori and the generation of bishops who had drawn inspiration from him, like Saporiti, Incontri, and Sabbatini. At issue now was channelling religious practice into the framework of a new socio-political system widening the basis of religious consensus especially in the countryside for the reorganisation of the structure of parishes, the teaching of the catechism, the transmission of the Christian message at a popular level, and accentuating more and more the themes of the usefulness and social benefit of religion. Illuminating in this regard are the words of Ricci’s pastoral instruction Sulla necessità e sul modo di studiare la religione of 1782 and even more those in the 1787 pastoral letter, when, after the Synod at Pistoia, the bishop, by now practically defeated in his project for reform, attempted an impassioned accounting for the entire period in which he had been the main protagonist. Ricci wrote on this occasion, “Enlightened and exact instruction is the most essential part of the pastoral ministry and is the most rigorous and difficult of obligations. The reasonable homage that St. Peter required of the faithful is not made by the prescribing and forcing on the intellect of a rough materialistic people but by instilling, persuading and instructing.” And this was exactly what he had done in a decade of intensive, pastoral work stimulated by the religious assumptions of Jansenism and the cultural ones of the Catholic Aufklärung.


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A similar spirit pervaded the almost contemporary Istruzione sopra molte ed importanti verità della religione ossia sulla sana dottrina (1786) of the Bishop of Chiusi and Pienza, Giuseppe Pannilini, who stood together with the Bishop of Colle, Niccolò Sciarelli, alongside Ricci in attempts at ecclesiastical and religious reform begun in those years and up to their final crisis. Striking in Pannilini’s Istruzione, is on one hand, the contrast he emphasized between a moment of “obscurity” of the truth of the Church and the faultlessness entrusted to the foundations of the Revelation, which was one of the central elements of ecclesiastic reflection in late French and Italian Jansenism. But on the other hand he stressed the deep conviction of the “enlightening” mission of the Church, derived from the Christian religious tradition but also from the Catholic Aufklärung and which he entrusted to the metaphor of light, in his forceful plea, so that the “obscured but not extinguished truths” could acquire again “their complete clarity, their full splendour and all their fame.” The “zeal to enlighten the people” for Ricci as for Pannilini had moreover formed one of the main nuclei of the Cinquantasette punti ecclesiastici that the Grand Duke Peter Leopold had sent for wide consultation to the Tuscan episcopate at the start of 1786. This zeal appears in the call to the opportunity to administer the sacraments in the vulgar tongue, “to make people ignorant of Latin enter into the spirit of the prayers of the Church” (point 4); in exhorting to “uncover” the sacred images “to which up to now it has been wrongly pretended to increase veneration by keeping them covered” (point 28); in the general recommendation to instruct the people “in the most useful and reasonable practices” (point 29); and to give clarity to religious practices especially in country parishes, as more useful for leading the people to true and enlightened devotion (points 37 to 39). That the majority of the Tuscan episcopate expressed perplexities, and even open hostility, to the Grand Duke’s proposals, accepting only some suggestions, showing themselves strong with respect to traditional habits and the most consolidated expressions of popular religion, makes us realize the importance of the dispute on a religious level that was going on between the rigorous Jansenist reform and that suggested by the Catholic Aufklärung, on one hand, and the traditionalist, conservative or the more moderate positions on the other. And it is not by chance that the main dispute at the top had set off, as is well known, a series of popular reactions, in the framework of a widespread crisis provoked by the reforms on an economic-social level, and that it

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caused a slowing down and then a reversal of the reforming process. The process was accentuated by the contemporary crisis of Joseph II’s reforms in the Habsburg territories and in the Austrian Low Countries, and then by the Joseph’s death and the passage of Peter Leopold from the Tuscan to the Imperial throne.44 In addition to Tuscany, the Italian Jansenist experience at the end of the century was present in Habsburg Pavia, in particular through Joseph II’s creation of a general seminary. Here the concluding phase of the Catholic Aufklärung in the peninsula found its final expression in the figure of Gregorio Fontana (1735–1803). A correspondent, like Bianchi, of Amaduzzi and a member of the Piarists Fontana, professor of mathematics at the University of Pavia, after the reforms by Maria Theresa and Joseph of the regulations for studies, seemed closely linked, in the course of the 1780s, to the period of Joseph’s state reform in Lombardy. From this he followed the most mature lines regarding religious tolerance and civil reforms, in a direction that was markedly lay and secular, in contrast to the religious and devotional worries of Leopold’s reformism on one hand and on the other the more and more rigid closures in Rome in the face of the epochal changes that the reforms were provoking in Italy and the rest of Europe. Already from the end of the 1770s, however, Fontana had adhered to the orientations of the Catholic Aufklärung. Originally from Rovereto, and therefore from the border between the Italian and Austro-German worlds, Fontana had edited in an annotated Italian translation an important example of scientific and rationalistic apologetics, the Saggio d’una difesa della divina Rivelazione (1777) by the Basel mathematician and philosopher Euler. But it was the French Revolution, ardently commented on in letters addressed to Amaduzzi, that led Fontana to develop more and more radical attitudes, provoking the final dissolution of the cultural, religious, and ideological components of the Catholic Aufklärung in his experience of the revolutionary period from 1796 to 1799.45

44 Rosa, Settecento religioso, 225–266, and Rosa, “La Chiesa toscana e la pietà illuminata”, Archivio storico italiano 159 (2001): 547–589. For the different attitude towards “popular religion” shown by Alphonsus Maria de’ Liguori: Michael Printy, “The Intellectual Origins of Popular Catholicism: Catholic Moral Theology in the Age of Enlightenment”, The Catholic Historical Review 91 (2005): 438–461. 45 Rosa, Settecento religioso, 143, 148, 227, 281–282, 288, 291–293; Rosa, “Le contraddizioni della modernità”, 97–98; Annibale Zambarbieri, “Lumi, religione, rivoluzione. Appunti su Gregorio Fontana (1735–1803)”, Archivio storico lombardo 120 (1994): 243–303.


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In this new context Fontana found himself thrown together with some figures who had shared with him the same events linked to reform, although with greater emphasis on Jansenism. These included a professor at the general seminary at Pavia, the Trent Barnabite Francesco Alpruni (1732–1814) and a pupil of the same general seminary, the Milan secular priest Gaetano Giudici (1776–1814). Alpruni, who was to have an important role in the politico-religious debates in the period of the Napoleonic occupation of Italy, adhered to evangelical— Jacobin positions, that is to a secular, rational, and democratic religiosity, without mysteries and hierarchies, united by evangelic values that allowed him to translate the historical experience of Jansenism into the field of “Christians outside the Church.” Giudici actively took part in the debates on the constitution of the Cisalpine Republic, pronouncing himself in favour of religious freedom and divorce. Later, the long-lived Giudici was an official in the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy as well as the restored Austrian Lombard-Venetian Kingdom. Furthermore, as a friend and adviser to the great Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni—a relationship that was to last more than forty years—he had the merit of transferring the experience of the Catholic Aufklärung or eighteenth century enlightened Catholicism into nineteenth century liberal Catholicism.46 Fontana, Alpruni and Giudici are the types of exemplary figures we meet at the end of the Catholic Aufklärung, when it concludes its historical parabola with the Revolution: not a total ending but rather a transformation of the ideals, sentiments, and aspirations that relevant sectors of Italian Catholicism had gone through throughout the eighteenth century. Distinct from the religious vision of Jansenism, for its anthropological optimism, confident in the strength of man and the light of Reason and culture, the Catholic Aufklärung in Italy had gone a long way from the proposals of Muratori, Galiani, and Genovesi from the 1720s to the 1740s to the “horizons of Christian happiness” of the 1770s, to the intertwining with the political and religious reforms of

46 Rosa, “Di fronte alla Rivoluzione: politica e religione in Italia dal 1789 al 1796”, Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa 26 (1990): 508–540. In particular on Alpruni I have used in a wide sense the category held by Leszek Kolakowski, Chrétiens sans Eglise. La conscience religieuse et le lien confessionnel au XVIIe siècle (Paris: 1969); on Giudici: Anna Zingale, Gaetano Giudici. Un giansenista lombardo tra riforme e rivoluzione (Rome: 1978) and Alcesti Tarchetti, “L’esperienza politico-religiosa di Gaetano Giudici, ‘cristiano illuminato’ ”, in Mario Rosa (ed.), Cattolicesimo e lumi nel Settecento italiano, 239–266.

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the end of the century. And it had done so by moving on two different fronts, although closely linked to each other, with regard to the Church and to society. At the beginning the Catholic Aufklärung had suggested to the Church a comparison and opening regarding the new scientific philosophic culture that developed between the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Later, with the cultural development of the century, the Catholic Aufklärung had proposed a “dialogue” with the Enlightenment in an attempt at reforming, together with the ecclesiastic institutions in their totality, a religious reality that was becoming more and more rigid in the face of the challenges and contradictions of “modernity.” To society the Catholic Aufklärung had offered a general vision that was to foster the search in all of the eighteenth century for “happiness” through the founding values of the Christian message, set in motion by a new religious and social conception. This Catholic Aufklärung had had a difficult course, in its different phases, having developed between the more and more intransigent defence of a centuries-long tradition on the part of the Church and the processes of secularization that were occurring in society. However, while oscillating between a limited and instrumental acquisition of the Enlightenment, and an open and often enthusiastic adherence to values of the new culture, the Catholic Aufklärung had substantially succeeded in depicting, for Catholicism, an image of the Church and some different perspectives regarding the needs that had developed in the course of the eighteenth century. In other words, it had given the Church a boost that would allow it over a long period to open itself up to the modern world, and to the Catholic Christian the awareness of an autonomous responsibility in the fields of political and social life. It has been this line with borders faded yet still perceptible, in the context of eighteenth century cultural and religious currents, that defined turmoil and attitudes, whose heredity, changed in name and symbol, passed into Catholicism and not only Italian Catholicism, in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bibliography Primary Sources Amaduzzi, Giovanni Cristofano, La filosofia alleata della religione (Livorno: 1778). Bianchi, Isidoro, Meditazioni su varj punti di felicità pubblica e privata (Palermo: 1774). Buonafede, Appiano, Della istoria critica del moderno diritto di natura e di genti (Perugia: 1789).


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THE MALTESE CATHOLIC ENLIGHTENMENT* Frans Ciappara Emperor Charles V gave Malta to the Knights Hospitallers as a fief in 1530.1 This was a significant event in the annals of the island because the arrival of these “haughty occupiers” meant that the inhabitants lost the self-government, or universitas, which they had enjoyed since 1428.2 Nevertheless, this oppressive government had several redeeming factors. First of all, it made Malta a nation. Before the arrival of the Order, the island was considered one of the cities of Sicily, such as Palermo and Messina.3 Now the knights guarded jealously the “independence” of the island fortress. Secondly, Malta became a secure place to live in. The great siege of 1565 was the last time the “Turks” assaulted the island. Instead, the war was taken into the enemy’s own territory and Maltese as well as foreigners armed their ships in search of rich booty in Ottoman waters. This security made the population grow fivefold, so that by 1798, when the Hospitallers were expelled by Napoleon, it amounted to 100,000. And, what is even more suggestive, the advent of the Order transformed the texture of Maltese society. Previously it was a rural, sparsely settled society. After two and a half centuries, it had become a mobile society, with densely populated urban centers, whose inhabitants were to be found all over the shores of the Mediterranean. This exodus of Maltese was counterbalanced by

* The author would like to thank Professor Derek Beales (Cambridge University) for his generous comments on this essay. Abbreviations: AAM—Archiepiscopal Archives, Malta; AC—Atti Civili; ACDF— Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede; ACM—Archivum Cathedralae Melitense; AIM—Archives of the Inquisition, Malta; AO—Acta Originalia; Arch.—Archives; AS—Archivio di Stato; ASV—Archivio Segreto Vaticano; Corr.— Correspondence; Libr.—Library; Mem.—Memorie; NLM—National Library, Malta; PA—Parish Archives; Proc.—Criminal Proceedings; RS—Registrum Supplicatiorum; SS—Segreteria di Stato; St St—Stanza Storica. 1 Roberto Valentini, I Cavalieri di S. Giovanni da Rodi a Malta: trattative diplomatiche (Malta: 1935). 2 Charles Dalli, “Medieval Communal Organisation in an Insular Context: Approaching the Maltese Universitas”, in John Manduca (ed.), The Making and Unmaking of the Maltese Universitas (Malta: 1993), 1–12. 3 Frans Ciappara, The Roman Inquisition in Enlightened Malta (Malta: 2000), 135.

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the influx of immigrants—artisans, soldiers, sailors, actors, musicians and, above all, corsairs, who with their spoils made Malta an active commercial centre.4 This exchange of people was complemented by books. There is ample evidence that Maltese culture was open to European movements and that Malta was by no means an intellectual backwater. At first this assertion seems strange because censorship left little place for independent thinking, as works for publication had to be scrutinized by the inquisitor, the bishop and the grand master. Besides, the clergy were a veritable army, constituting 1.3 per cent of the population. But if this meant the death knell of local literature, fierce intellectual yearning did survive among the privileged few. The literate sectors of society could not be shut off completely from access to the printed word, as the trials of the inquisition amply prove.5 However, this cosmopolitan openness did not stray from reference to God. Two examples from the “crises of the European mind”6 illustrate this point clearly. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) identified God as the “first and eternal cause of all things.” But nowhere did he suggest that the “First Mover” continued to direct the world and the affairs of men; that is, he made no mention of a divine providence.7 The Huguenot exile Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) not only argued that, since matter is eternal, providence is redundant, but even claimed that a society of atheists would be as civil and moral as any other.8 Such painful anxieties did not affect the Maltese intellectual scene in the eighteenth century. In the 1768 statutes of the newly erected university, there is a sustained engagement with the arguments of Hobbes. The professor of natural law was to start his lectures by establishing the principle that only God preserved created things. To this end He implanted natural law in men’s hearts, which urged them to

4

Frans Ciappara, Society and the Inquisition in Early Modern Malta (Malta: 2001), 46–56. 5 Frans Ciappara, Enlightenment and Reform in Malta 1740–1798 (Malta: 2006), 1–5. 6 For the significance of this term see Paul Hazard, La Crise de la Conscience Européenne, 1680–1715 (Paris: 1961; orig.: 1935). 7 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651; repr. London: 1914), ch. 12 “Of Religion”, 54–62. 8 Pierre Bayle, Pensées Diverses, Ecrites à un Docteur de Sorbonne, a l’occasion de la Comète qui parut au mois de Décembre 1680, vol. 2 (Rotterdam: 1721), section clxxii. This paragraph depends heavily on John Robertson, The case for the Enlightenment. Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge, Eng.: 2005), 211–255.

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organize themselves in a civil society. The theory that society is formed of free and equal men who voluntarily subject themselves to a ruler was debunked; it is providence that makes men do so. Nor do kings derive their right to govern from their own innate power, but from God; and whoever believes the opposite is guilty of treason against Him.9 Likewise, Baron Gaetano Pisani, in his Lettera di un Maltese ad un Cavaliere Gerosolomitano Professo, categorically asserted that there was no more potent means to make men act wisely than religion. Paraphrasing Giambattista Vico (1768–1744) he went on to assert that whoever pretended to form good citizens without any reference to religion was greatly mistaken, “as it has been clearly proven against Bayle, who held this to be realizable by atheism.”10 These two episodes make evident that Malta qualifies as one of those places in the eighteenth century where Catholicism, “far from being in discredited retreat, was still strengthening its intellectual hold on the elite as well as on the common people.”11 In other words, the Maltese reformers came down decidedly on the side of the conservatives in the theological debate then going on in Europe. This is far from suggesting that they did not criticize the Church. On the contrary, like other Catholic rulers in the late eighteenth century, they carried out an unrelenting assault on it, through the movement referred to as “Jansenism.”12 This term originally signified a corpus of religious belief inspired by St. Augustine (354–430) and supposedly revived by Bishop Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638) in his vast Latin treatise Augustinus (1640). It emphasized predestination, denied free will and maintained that human nature is incapable of good. By the eighteenth century, however, it had been fragmented into a diverse range of tendencies within the Catholic Church.13 This Reform Catholicism or Catholic Enlightenment was a diverse movement and drew on a number of traditions: Gallicanism, Muratorian piety, Febronianism

9

Valletta, NLM, Arch. 575, fol. 477r. Gaetano Pisani, Lettera di un Maltese ad un Cavaliere Gerosolimitano (Vercelli: 1783), 149. 11 Derek Beales, “Religion and culture,” in T.C.W. Blanning (ed.), The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: 2000), 138. 12 For a good summary of the history of this term, William Doyle, Jansenism (London: 2000). 13 The two indispensable books on this subject are Enrico Damming, Il Movimento Giansenista a Roma nella Seconda Metà del Secolo XVIII (Vatican City: 1945) and Emile Appolis, Le “Tiers Parti” Catholique au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris: 1960). 10

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and Josephism.14 It was no longer as much about grace and salvation as on a simplification of liturgical practices and a more informed spiritual life among the laity. This attempt to revive what Pietro Stella calls “the old trunk of the Church”15 also implied a return to the practices of the primitive Church, defending the authority of the bishops from the encroachments of Rome, castigating the religious orders as idle and corrupt and replacing them by a reformed secular clergy. Above all, it was an attack on the social, economic, political and cultural position of the Catholic Church.16 This chapter seeks to analyze whether religious discussion on the island of Malta was closely related to that in other European countries. That is, did it provide a microcosm of this European-wide movement? I will try to present a framework for all these queries by developing three arguments. Did simpler forms of religious expression replace the extravagances of baroque popular piety? To what extent did the grand masters assume control of the Church? And, finally, did they systematically erode papal jurisdiction in Malta? Data come chiefly from Maltese archives: the deposits of the Order of St John, the bishop’s ecclesiastical court and the Roman inquisition. They are supplemented with material at the state archives of Florence, Naples and Venice but especially at the Vatican—archivio della congregazione per la dottrina della fede and the archivio segreto vaticano. 1. Themes of the Maltese Catholic Enlightenment We can start our analysis by reference to the letter which Mgr Scipione de’ Ricci (1741–1810) sent to the Theatine Bishop of Malta Vincenzo Labini (1780–1807) on 6 May 1789. While reminding him of their old friendship at Rome, Ricci hoped that Labini would recognize “my Church’s orthodoxy and how much blame the enemies of every truth have laid on me.” He further asked him to give him support like so many other worthy pastors.17 The Maltese ordinary, in his answer of

14 For this term, Derek Beales, Joseph II, vol. 1, In the Shadow of Maria Theresa 1741–1780 (Cambridge, Eng.: 1987), 439–479. And now Idem, Enlightenment and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Europe (London and New York: 2005), 287–308. 15 Pietro Stella (ed.), Il Giansenismo in Italia, vol. 1/i (Zurich: 1966), 17. 16 Samuel J. Miller, “Portugal and Utrecht: A Phase of the Catholic Enlightenment,” Catholic Historical Review 63 (1977), 226. 17 Floriana, AAM, Corr. 20, fols. 323r–v.


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5 June, assured him that he never doubted his orthodoxy but he would not anticipate the judgment of the pope, who, as “the center of our Truth,” was duty-bound to “strengthen his brothers.” Labini’s only wish was to see Ricci use his eloquence and wisdom in the service of the Church against the enemies of the holy faith.18 This reply draws attention to three remarks. First, it was an indirect though firm disapproval of Jansenist thought and practice. Secondly, this censure had been foreshadowed in 1744 with the controversy over the arrangements for the funeral of Mgr Domenico Sceberras, the archdeacon of the cathedral. Bishop Alpheran (1728–1757) would have liked to give him only a private burial, as a Jansenist who had died in mortal sin.19 Thirdly, the Maltese bishops showed their total subjection to Rome by including in their title—unlike, for instance, the Jansenist Bishop Mgr Serafino Filangieri of Palermo20—the phrase sedis apostolicae gratiae.21 Nor did they take over any of the functions of the pope, such as issuing dispensations from diriment impediments to matrimony or to regulars from their solemn vows. In short, if the synod of Pistoia (1786) granted to the pope only “honorable primacy”22 the Maltese hierarchy ignored the Jansenist concept of episcopal independence and instead acknowledged the pontiff as its supreme head. This reluctance to assert the freedom of ordinaries in turn echoed the popular aversion to austere and enlightened Catholicism, so much at the heart of Jansenist doctrine. Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1740) in his Della Regolata Devozione de’ Cristiani, a highly influential book published in Venice in 1747 under the pseudonym of Lamindo Pritanio, had made a clear distinction between true and superficial devotion. The latter, he claimed, consists in decorating images, burning candles and practicing similar non-substantial signs of piety. In contrast, true devotion is expressed with sober inwardness, which Christians show when they meditate upon the life of the

18 Ibid., fols. 324r–v. For a copy of this letter see Florence, AS, Fondo Ricci, vol. 73, 765–766. 19 Mdina, AIM, Corr. 49, fols. 145r-46r, Margherita Sceberras to the pope, 5 Jan. 1745. 20 Domenico Ambrasi, Riformatori e Ribelli a Napoli nella Seconda Metà del Settecento. Ricerche sul Giansenismo Napoletano (Naples: 1979), 21. 21 See, for instance, Floriana, AAM Edicta Pellerano 11, fol. 4r. 22 Florence, AS, Fondo Ricci, vol. 74, 178, Cardinal Gioannetti to Ricci, 30 Oct. 1790.

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Redeemer, His teachings full of love and wisdom and most of all His passion and death.23 The Maltese in the second half of the eighteenth century were practically strangers to this movement of religious piety. They were committed to a vibrant Catholicism and expressed their emotions with outward, exuberant gestures. The baroque architectural style of their churches, dominant and aggressive, was a symbol of their devotion. This was contrary to what was happening on the continent, where simpler, more personal and less ostentatious devotion was paralleled by the neo-classical style of Ste-Geneviève in Paris, San Francisco el Grande at Madrid and St. Blasien in Germany. It was also the great age of pompous church music when the works of Michel’Angelo Vella (1715–1792), Benigno Zerafa (1726–1804) and Francesco Azzopardi (1748–1809) resounded in all churches, ignoring Benedict XIV’s prohibition of trumpets, a typical baroque instrument.24 Similarly, the feasts of the patron saints were celebrated on a grand scale, and statues were processed through the streets, accompanied by the firing of petards and the playing of instruments. Pilgrimages to the sites of miracles and holy relics still attracted several participants. The principal Marian shrine was at Mellieha. Like other popular shrines on the continent,25 it was believed to have been depicted by St Luke when he was shipwrecked on Malta together with St Paul in 60 A.D.26 If pilgrimages and festivals were an integral part of outward ceremonial observances, so were the relic processions in which, as in Bavaria, complete skeletons of martyrs (corpi santi) imported from Roman catacombs27 were carried in procession through the streets.28 The themes of sacrifice, martyrdom and triumph over death expressed 23 Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Della Regolata Divozione De’ Cristiani (Venice: 1780; orig.: 1747), 34–37. 24 See, among general works, Joseph Vella Bondin, Il-Muzika ta’ Malta sa l-ahhar tas-Seklu Tmintax [Malta’s Music till the end of the Eighteenth Century] (Malta: 2000) and John Azzopardi and Matteo Sansone (eds.), Italian and Maltese Music in the Archives at the Cathedral Museum of Malta (Malta: 2001). 25 Nicholas Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (Cambridge, Eng.: 1995), 25. 26 For this event: Acts 27–28. 27 Trevor Johnson, “Trionfi of the Holy Dead: The Relic Festivals of Baroque Bavaria,” in Karin Friedrich (ed.), Festive Culture in Germany and Europe from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (Lewiston: 2000), 31–56. 28 For a detailed description by the parish priest of the translation of S. Vittorio at Naxxar on Sunday, 23 September 1787: Naxxar, PA, Lib. Bapt. II, fols. 667r–682r.


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by these relic festivals supplemented the Good Friday pageants held in various towns and villages.29 This exterior and triumphalistic aspect of religion associated with baroque piety also comprised the flamboyant and theatrical style of popular sermons. Emphasis was put on gesture and ritual to impress and convince simple souls as well as to transmit essential truths. Here are just two instances. At Senglea in 1743, the capuchin preacher addressed the congregation barefoot and with a rope round his neck and a crown of thorns on his head.30 That same year, while the Jesuit padre Rossignoli conducted a mission at Valletta, he held a skull in his hand when preaching on death. In the sermon on hell, a man wearing a black robe brought to the scaffold on which the friar stood a painting of a damned soul with the words “Either Penitence or Hell” inscribed on it. Furthermore, the friar flogged himself so severely that the women started screaming and the bishop ordered him to desist.31 Closely associated with preaching was religious instruction. Contrary to the case in Lombardy where it was proscribed,32 in Malta the catechism of Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) was the only catechism in use. It had been translated by Bishop Alpheran’s confessor, Don Francesco Wzzino, and published in 1752. It was attacked by the Jansenists particularly “for not having the power to enkindle by instruction the love of God that is the fullness and sum of all the Law.”33 Yet, the Maltese ecclesiastical authorities not only stipulated this one catechism but furthermore directed the parish priests as to how it was to be taught: absolutely not in the form of a dialogue but based on rote learning through recitation by the whole class, a question-and-answer statement of Christian faith. Put another way, unlike the Reform Catholics

29

See, for instance Ġorġ Aquilina, Il-Gimgha l-Kbira tal-Belt [Good Friday at Valletta] (Malta: 1986). 30 Senglea, PA, Memorie Diverse 1, fol. 35r. 31 Valletta, NLM, Libr. 360, 602–608. The classical work on missions is Louis Châtellier, The Religion of the poor. Rural missions in Europe and the formation of modern Catholicism, c. 1500–1800 (Cambridge, Eng.: 1997). 32 Paola Vismara, Il “Buon Cristiano”. Dibattiti e contese sul catechismo nella Lombardia di fine Settecento (Florence: 1984). 33 Quoted in Charles A. Bolton, Church Reform in 18th Century Italy (The Hague: 1969), 18.

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in Germany,34 they relied rather on the children’s power of memory than on their understanding.35 We cannot say for Malta therefore, as has been claimed for the Habsburg Monarchy, that Church reform was “a movement inside the Church and by the Church to reform itself.”36 Muratori had foreseen this inability of church leaders to bring about change and called on the kings to perform this task. He expressed this program in his last work or spiritual testament, Della Pubblica Felicità, Oggetto de’ Buoni Principi. This book, published in 1749, a year before Muratori’s death, was formally dedicated to the prince-archbishop of Salzburg, Andreas Jakob von Dietrichstein (1689–1753), but in fact was addressed to all sovereigns and moderate reformers.37 2. The Knights’ Ambivalent Conduct as Sovereigns and Religious It will be argued in this chapter that in Malta the grand masters performed this task only in part. An investigation of their ambivalent conduct must take into account their unenviable position, unique in Europe. As Gasparo Soderini, the Venetian representative in Naples, correctly observed in 1781, they were the lay sovereigns of Malta, but they were also members of a religious order directly subject to the pope.38 They condemned in no uncertain way the theology of grace of Port Royal39 and expelled Jansenists who objected to Unigenitus from their commanderies or estates.40 34 Ernst Wangermann, “The Austrian Enlightenment”, in Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (eds.), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, Eng.: 1981), 131–133. 35 Floriana, AAM, RS 10, fol. 361v. 36 Timothy C. W. Blanning, Joseph II (London: 1994), 44. 37 For this point see Claudio Donati, “Dalla ‘regolato devozione’ al ‘giuseppinismo’ nell’Italia del Settecento,” in Mario Rosa (ed.), Cattolicesimo e Lumi nel Settecento Italiano, (Rome: 1981), 91. See also Adam Wandruszka, Pietro Leopoldo. Un Grande Riformatore (Florence: 1968), 27–29, which describes the work as “a manual program of enlightened absolutism”. 38 Michele Fassina (ed.), Corrispondenze Diplomatiche Veneziani da Napoli. Relazioni (Rome: 1992), 236–37. 39 See Pinto’s Lettre Circulaire pour les Grans Prieurs de St Giles de Toulouse, d’Auvergne, de France, d’Aquitaine, et de Champange, Mdina, AIM, Corr. 99, fol. 350r, 20 Dec. 1741. 40 Mdina, AIM, Corr. 27, f. 144r, Ruffo to Gualtieri, 22 Sept. 1742. See also Roderick Cavaliero, The Last of the Crusaders. The Knights of St John in Malta in the Eighteenth Century (London: 1960), 123.


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Indeed, the grand masters patronized several of the devotional practices of their subjects. They attended grand religious functions at St John’s as well as the feasts of the patron saints in the villages. They processed through the streets on Corpus Christi and 8 September, the feast of Our Lady of Victories, commemorating the great siege of 1565.41 As if the involvement in these ceremonies were not enough, Pinto in 1749 had the skull of the founder of the Order, Blessed Gérard, brought to Malta from Monosque in Provence.42 In 1765 he received as a gift from Louis XV a part of the rib of St Louis and pieces of the cranium and thigh bone of the martyrs St Valerian and St Innocent.43 He also paid for the translation of the corpo santo of St. Calcedonio from the Jesuit church at Valletta to S. Maria di Manresa at Floriana on a Sunday in May 1753.44 And, far from abolishing confraternities, he enhanced their importance. He was rector and a great benefactor of the brotherhoods of the Holy Sacrament45 and of the holy rosary at the Dominican church at Valletta. His joining the latter fratellanza on a Saturday morning, 18 October 1755, was an occasion for the display of baroque extravagance with the firing of petards, the ringing of bells, the playing of trumpets and the singing of minuets during Mass.46 However, if the grand masters refrained from dismantling baroque piety, they were in the mainstream of Reform Catholicism by their assertion of secular power over the Church. There were two motivating forces behind these “most incisive reforms in the relationship between civil and religious society”.47 First, it has been argued convincingly that the success of Protestant countries like Prussia and England made Catholic states examine their ecclesiastical policies.48 In confirmation of this thesis, there can be no denying that Protestantism offered a solution to most of the questions of the time. Was it not to Protestant North Germany that Austrian Aufklärer looked for

41

Valletta, NLM, Libr. 14, 492. Anthony Luttrell, “The Skull of the Blessed Gérard,” in John Azzopardi (ed.), The Order’s Legacy in Malta (Malta: 1989), 45. 43 Valletta, NLM, Libr. 14, 480–83. 44 Mdina, AIM, Corr. 100, fol. 122r, Passionei to Valenti, 26 May 1753. 45 Filipp Mallia, Il-Fratellanza tas-SS.Mu Sagrament fil-Parrocca ta’ S. M. tal-Portu Salvu il-Belt, 1575–1975 [The Confraternity of the Most Holy Sacrament at the Parish of Portu Salvu, Valletta, 1575–1975] (Malta: 1975), 334–35. 46 Valletta, NLM, Libr. 11, 638–41. 47 Franco Venturi, “Church and Reform in Enlightenment Italy,” Journal of Modern History 48 (1976), 215. 48 Beales, “Religion and culture,” 161. 42

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inspiration?49 Did not state chancellor Kaunitz propose to Maria Theresa (1717–1780) to invite renowned Protestant scholars from Germany to act as advisers in developing the new educational policies and curricula in Austria?50 Compared with the self-confidence of the Protestants, Catholic countries appeared too set in their ways. If they were to be as successful, they had to follow their example and reduce feast days, suppress monasteries, take away most Church land, introduce religious toleration, allow priests to marry and subject the Church to the State, diminishing the enormous influence it had acquired during the Counter-Reformation. Secondly, we should remember that Reform Catholicism was influenced not only by the political situation of the time but also by general political theories and intellectual developments. Several writers, like Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623), had long proclaimed the independence of the temporal from the spiritual power.51 The theme now attracted again all the passions of keen apologists. “Febronius” (Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim (1701–1790),52 following in the footsteps of van Espen (1646–1728), was a strong influence in this regard. In his De Statu Ecclesiae (1763) he vigorously attacked the development of papal monarchy within the Catholic Church, while advocating a central role for secular rulers in Church affairs.53 The argument became particularly significant after the pontificate of Clement XIII (1758–1769). In his encounter with the modern world, Pope Rezzonico appealed for the subordination of civil authority to Rome, which had found its highest expression in medieval Christendom.54 He had misread the times, and his way of governing the Church alienated the kings accustomed to the conciliatory methods

49

James Van Horn Melton, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria (Cambridge, Eng.: 1988), 202. 50 Ernst Wangermann, The Austrian Achievement 1700–1800 (London: 1973), 84. 51 Paolo Sarpi, Considerazioni sopra le Censure della Santità di Paulo V contro la Serenissima Republica di Venezia (Venice: 1606). 52 Ulrich L. Lehner, “Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim and his Febronius,” in Church History and Religious Culture 88 (2008): 93–121; Idem (ed.), Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim—Justinus Febronius Abbreviatus et Emendatus (1777) (Nordhausen: 2008). 53 Owen Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution (Oxford: 1981), 408–411. 54 L. Cajani and A. Foa, “Clement XIII,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani vol. 26 (Rome: 1982), 328–343.


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of his predecessor, Benedict XIV (1740–1758).55 The powers called his abrogation of all the legislation passed by the Prime Minister Du Tillot (1711–1774) against the Church in Parma an “insulting interference.”56 French troops occupied Avignon, Naples invaded Benevento and Pontecorvo while Modena menaced Ferrara.57 It was in this circumstance, too, that Voltaire (1694–1778) published Les Droits des Hommes et les Usurpations des Autres which opened with the query of whether a priest of Christ could be a sovereign.58 A new generation was coming up which abhorred the dramatic isolation of the Church. For instance, Cosimo Amidei (c.1725–c.1783) in his La Chiesa e la Repubblica dentro i loro Limiti (1768) proposed a lay monarchy founded on Christian principles, whose duty it was to oversee the Church by gentle and paternal means”. He applauded Charles V for having prohibited the works of Luther and Calvin but condemned the Index librorum prohibitorum, which included books extolling the jurisdiction of kings.59 This fresh wind of new ideas found a willing hearer in the next pontiff, Clement XIV (1769–1774). His first encyclical Cum summi apostolatus was particularly telling. He renounced the temporal pretensions of the Church and exhorted bishops to serve society, most of all the poor.60 Such public debate of Church reform was lacking in Malta. The three ecclesiastical writers of the period—canon Francesco Agius (1712– 1770), the capuchin padre Pelagio (1707–1781) and Don Ignazio Saverio Mifsud (1722–1773)—contributed nothing to the argument. For such criticism one must look outside the Church. Signor Paolo Ignazio

55 The best biography of Benedict XIV is Mario Rosa, “Tra Muratori, il giansenismo e i ‘lumi’: profilo di Benedetto XIV,” in Idem, Riformatori e Ribelli nel ‘700 Religioso Italiano (Bari: 1969), 49–85. See also Appolis, Le “Tiers Parti” Catholique, 155–367. 56 For a summary of these struggles: Dino Carpanetto and Giuseppe Ricuperati, L’Italia del Settecento: Crisi, Trasformazioni, Lumi (Florence: 1990), 234–39; Alba Mora (ed.), Un Borbone tra Parma e l’Europa: don Ferdinando e il suo tempo, 1751– 1802: atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Fontevivo, Parma, ex Collegio dei nobili, 12–14 giugno 2003 (Reggio Emilia: 2005). 57 Bianca Betto, “Papa Rezzonico attraverso le Lettere inedite del Confessore Apostolico”, Rivista di Storia della Chiesa in Italia (1974), 431. 58 Venturi, Settecento Riformatore, vol. 2, 230. 59 Ettore Passerin D’Entrèves, “Chiesa e Cattolicesimo fra Riformatori Illuministi e Stati Assoluti”, Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa 14 (1978): 58–67. 60 Daniele Menozzi, “Tra riforma e restaurazione. Dalla crisi della società cristiana al mito della cristianità medievale (1758–1848)”, in Giorgio Chittoli and Giovanni Miccoli (eds.), La Chiesa e il potere politico dal Medioevo all’età contemporanea, (Turin: 1986), 778.

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Gauci was one of these free spirits. In 1774 he congratulated kings who “stop money from their countries going to Rome” and “order the bishops in their dioceses to issue dispensations because ordinaries can do anything that popes can do”.61 Dr Michel’Angelo Grima (c.1731–1798), the foremost surgeon in late eighteenth century Malta, was another critic. He had studied at Florence and served in the French army in the Seven Years’ War.62 In 1775 he was reported to the inquisitor for having allegedly charged clergymen of being disturbers of the peace and of having predicted that one day they would lose all their privileges.63 These detractors did not constitute a party, a tightly knit group committed to the realization of a specific program of Church reform; they acted as single individuals and expressed their own personal opinions. The reform party, which led the charge on ecclesiastical power, was to be found only within the government. It was led by the two grand masters, Pinto (1741–1773) and Rohan (1775–1797), both self-consciously “philosopher kings,”64 who united in their persons the roles of head of the Order and prince of the Maltese, a distinction associated with the notion of the monarch’s “two bodies.” The former, a Portuguese, who closely followed events in his home country,65 was a firm believer in his absolute power: “I am the prince and master of the island,” he reminded Inquisitor Mancinforte (1767–1771) in 1768. The Frenchman Rohan, the correspondent of La Chalotais (1701–1785)66 and Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), whom he hailed as one of the great men of history,67 had been born in Spain but followed the Bourbon duke Philip to Parma (1720–1765). Here he was imbued with the spirit of the philosophes, especially Condillac’s (1715–1780)68 and, possibly, initiated into Freemasonry.69

61

Mdina, AIM, Proc. 131A, fol. 301r. Joseph Cassar Pullicino, “Michel’Angelo Grima Chirurgo Maltese del Settecento”, Rivista di Storia di Scienze Mediche e Naturali 40 (1949): 1–39. 63 Mdina, AIM, Proc. 131B, fol. 791r. 64 Hamish M. Scott (ed.), Enlightened Absolutism: Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe (London: 1990). For a recent analysis of the term: Beales, Enlightenment and Reform, 28–29. 65 In 1768 he sent the Hospitaller Pecci to be the director of the Academy of Nobles set up by Pombal at Lisbon—Mdina, AIM, Corr. 56, f. 2r, Torrigiani to Mancinforte, 10 Jan. 1769. 66 Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1581, 297–298, Rohan to la Chalotais, 21 Sept. 1782. 67 Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1582, 250–251, Rohan to Franklin, 21 June 1783. 68 Claire-Èliane Engel, Histoire de l’Ordre de Malte (Geneva: 1968), 282. 69 Mdina, AIM, Proc. 141, fol. 115r. 62


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An enlightened elite of government officials served both these grand masters. These professional bureaucrats were unquestionably aware of belonging to a distinct intellectual and political movement promoted by the Catholic Enlightenment. They harbored a self-conscious pride in Malta’s emergence as a nation, as well as a willingness to refashion the ideas coming from other European countries to Maltese needs. One of these Maltese Rucellais70 and Caracciolos,71 lawyers by training, was Fabrizio Grech (d. 1759), Pinto’s confidante.72 However, the more fearless uditore, Giovanni Nicolò Muscat (b. 1736), was the funnel through which much of Reform Catholicism entered Malta. It was mainly this Maltese Catholic philosophe,73 the correspondent of Kaunitz,74 who single-handedly forged the theoretical weapons with which to fight the claims of the Church. He was an avid reader of the natural law philosophers. In His Apologia he cites both Hobbes and Grotius (1583–1645), but especially Samuel Coccejus (1679–1755) and the “celebrated” Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694). His policy was to leave to the Church full responsibility only for the administration of the sacraments and for doctrine.75 Even marriage was a civil contract that did not pertain to the Church. The foundation of his reforms can best be expressed by such remarks as “this is no longer the Church’s century” and “I would like to leave to the bishop only the crosier and the miter!”76 The grand master, so he asserted in 1787, was devoted to the Holy See, but the secular power cannot appropriate to itself the stole to become a lawgiver; nor could the ecclesiastical power lawfully brandish the sword to make use of royal rights.77

70 Andrea Pasquinelli, “Giulio Rucellai, Segretario del Regio Diritto (1734–1778). Alle Origini della Riforma Leopoldina del Clero”, Ricerche Storiche 13 (1983): 259– 296. 71 Among other literature on this prime minister see Michelangelo A. Schipa, Nel Regno di Ferdinando IV Borbone (Florence: 1938) and Raffaele Ajello, “I Filosofi e la Regina. Il Governo delle Due Sicilie da Tanucci a Caracciolo (1776–1786)”, Rivista Storicia Italiana 13 (1991): 398–454, 657–738. 72 Ciappara, The Roman Inquisition in Enlightened Malta, 150–161. 73 For the meaning of this term see Beales, Enlightenment and Reform, 60–89. 74 Mdina, AIM, Corr. 102, fols. 27r–29v, Gallarati Scotti to de Zelada, 19 May 1792. 75 Mdina, AIM, Mem. 28, fols. 247v–48r. 76 Mdina, AIM, Corr. 102, fols. 14r–18v, Gallarati Scotti to de Zelada, 31 March 1792. 77 Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1585, 647–51, memoria by uditore Muscat attached to letter to M. Cibon, 25 Oct. 1787.

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In a word, he believed that the Church had overstepped its true sphere to the disadvantage of civil society. Driven by extravagant vanity and ambition, as Inquisitor Gallarati Scotti (1785–1793) claimed in his memoirs, Muscat imagined himself a great minister of state and had the presumption to introduce into Malta the most absurd regalism. In the words of Hamish Scott, “he was to an impressive extent a man fully aware of the ideas and arguments of the European Enlightenment.”78 It is somewhat curious, therefore, that hardly any of the writers who wrote about this period mentioned Muscat at all. Professor Andrew Vella, for one, dismissed him as “a certain Maltese lawyer”79 and it was only in 1993 that he started being rehabilitated.80 Muscat was certainly an anti-clerical but, like Antonio Genovesi (1712–1769), professor of commerce and mechanics at Naples,81 he hedged his campaign against the Church with solemn and consistent protestations of orthodoxy. He had the most interesting things to say on his faith. He never showed the least doubt in the absolute truth of Roman Catholicism, without which the Republic would be doomed, but expressed his belief in the unity of the Church and its one visible Head.82 He railed against Frederick the Great, who in a fit of “frenzied ambition” claimed that if he had been with God at the creation of the world he would have suggested to Him more refined ideas.83 In a word, Muscat belonged to that group of chrétiens éclairs84 whose enlightenment was neither “pagan” nor “radical.”85

78

Hamish Scott, “Foreword”, in Ciappara, The Roman Inquisition, xiv. Andrew A. Vella, The Tribunal of the Inquisition in Malta (Malta: 1964), 39. 80 Frans Ciappara, “Gio. Nicolò Muscat: Church-State Relations in Hospitaller Malta during the Enlightenment, 1786–1798”, in Victor Mallia-Milanes (ed.), Hospitaller Malta, 1530–1798. Studies on Early Modern Malta and the Order of St John of Jerusalem, (Malta: 1993), 605–658. See also Ciappra, Enlightenment and Reform in Malta 1740–1798, 21–37. 81 Giuseppe Galasso, “Il Pensiero Religioso di Antonio Genovesi”, Rivista Storica Italiana 82 (1970): 800–823. 82 Giovanni Nicolò Muscat, Apologia a Favore dell’Inclita Nazione Maltese, suoi Tribunali, Segnatura, e Legisti. Contro il Libello Famoso Intitolato Ragionamenti del Signor Cavaliere Gian. Donato Rogadeo (Rome: 1783), 25–26. 83 Ibid., 82. 84 For the evolution of this term see Daniele Menozzi, “Aufklaerung delle Chiese e ‘Chrétiens éclairés’. In margine ai Lavori della Terza Sezione del Congresso C.I.H.E.C. di Varsavia”, Critica Storica 1 (1979): 150–161. 85 Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 1: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: 1966). 79


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3. The Program of the Maltese Catholic Enlightenment Having introduced the dramatis personae, what was the program of the Maltese Catholic enlightenment? It must be at once acknowledged that it was much restricted when compared to other Catholic countries.86 For example, toleration never became a topic for discussion,87 and if the grand masters did diminish the number of feast days,88 they never hinted that the policy of churchmen could seriously limit or distort the economic development of the island. Unlike the case at Modena, they never prohibited their subjects from giving gifts of land to the church and endowing Masses for the dead.89 With the exception of the Jesuits’ property they did not tap the Church’s wealth for the advantage of the state.90 A plausible attempt to undermine the Church’s wealth was soon dropped, perhaps to avoid a head-on collision. On 18 December 1769 Inquisitor Mancinforte informed the cardinal secretary of state that in the previous November several Maltese who resided in Rome had sent the news that the grand master had asked the pope to impose a levy on church property at the rate of eight per cent.91 As it was also presumed that the pope had already complied with the suggestion, some priests presented a memorandum to the cathedral chapter, demanding the summoning of the clergy to halt such a “pernicious blunder.”92 The canons discussed the matter on Wednesday 6 November, but, having been assured by one of Pinto’s uditori, Carlo Ferruggia, that the rumor was false and “full of black lies,”93 the clergy were not convened.94

86 For an excellent study of Reform Catholicism in the Habsburg lands see David Sorkin, “Reform Catholicism and Religious Enlightenment”, Austrian History Yearbook 30 (1999): 187–219. 87 For this subject see Charles O’Brien, “Ideas of Religious Toleration at the Time of Joseph II. A Study of the Enlightenment among Catholics in Austria,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 59 (1969): 5–80. 88 Floriana, AAM, Editti 8, ff. 568r–v, 13 Sept. 1759. See also the letter dated 1763 from the Maltese commune to the pope—Floriana, AAM, Corr. 15, fol. 16v. 89 Susan N. Nicassio, “ ‘For the Benefit of my Soul’: a Preliminary Study of the Persistence of Tradition in Eighteenth-Century Mass Obligations,” The Catholic Historical Review 78 (1992): 75–96. 90 P. G. M. Dickson, “Joseph II’s Reshaping of the Austrian Church”, The Historical Journal 36 (1993): 89–114. 91 Mdina, AIM, Corr. 100, fol. 351r, Mancinforte to Pallavicini, 18 Dec. 1769. 92 Mdina, ACM 12, fol. 507r. 93 Ibid., fols. 510r, 514r–15v. 94 Vatican, ASV, SS (Malta), 161, fols. 23v–24v.

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This is far from saying that, if the state refrained from touching ecclesiastical wealth, it did not claim the right to interfere with the Church’s government, discipline and organization. On the contrary, the grand masters, like the other “enlightened despots,”95 set as one of their primary aims and their personal duty to improve the quality of the parochial clergy. When the Jesuits were expelled and their monopoly on education broken, their resources were used to set up a university. This institution was to initiate an educational system that would form the right kind of men for Church and State. Its protector was none other than Bailiff Guedes, the antagonist of the Jesuits, while Domenico Malarbì (1732–1784) was a rector. When this abate arrived in Malta in 1778, Inquisitor Zondadari (1777–1785) described him as being “very far from the spirit of novelty.”96 In fact, the pope’s delegate was grossly mistaken in this last remark. Malarbì was an intimate friend of Mgr Andrea Serrao, the regalist Italian bishop of Potenza, who was eventually murdered by the anti-revolutionaries of Cardinal Ruffo.97 Next to the choice of the best administrators and reliable teachers, the curriculum was to show no sign of narrow and pedantic scholasticism. The Jesuits had to come to grips with the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and clung obstinately to Cartesian metaphysics and the deductive method. On the contrary, the grand masters admired “the much-applauded” Newton, the hero of the age, who had laid bare the workings of Nature, which were both rational and intelligible.98 The university’s constitutions, which hailed the Copernican system and the modern physicists, described the contemplation of Nature as the food of souls and men of talent.99 In other words, knowledge could be gained only by induction, observation and experiment. Furthermore, several scholastic theological propositions were rejected as accretions to revealed truth. Like the humanists of the sixteenth

95 For the definition of this elusive term see Derek Beales, “Was Joseph II an Enlightened Despot”, in Ritchie Robertson and Edward Timms (eds.), The Austrian Enlightenment and its Aftermath (Edinburgh: 1991), 1–21. Also Catherine B. A. Behrens, “Enlightened Despotism”, Historical Journal 18 (1975), 401–408. 96 Mdina, AIM, Corr. 101, fol. 46v, Zondadari to Pallavicini, 5 Sept. 1778. 97 Elvira Chiosi, Andrea Serrao. Apologia e Crisi del Regalismo nel Settecento Napoletano (Naples: 1981). 98 Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, CT: 1932), ch. II, “The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”, 33–70. 99 Valletta, NLM, Arch. 575, fol. 477v.


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century, enlightened Catholics directed their attention to the core of their faith, the Gospel as taught by the early Church. Theology therefore was divested of scholasticism, a waste of time, which damaged the mind in a thousand ways.100 It was necessary, in the very words that the renowned padre Paolo Maria Paciaudi had used for the statutes of the university of Parma,101 “to keep away from the schools the subtleties and the quibbling, which the ignorance of time has introduced into the science of divinity”.102 Typical of this way of thinking was the choice of textbook for the course in moral theology. The professor was to lecture only on the book by Gabriel Antoine (1678–1743), Theologia Moralis Universa. Antoine was a Jesuit but an adversary of probabilism and let the anti-Jesuit Dominican Daniello Concina (1687–1756) dedicate his Theologia Christiana to him. It was also laid down that in all difficulties the lecturer must follow “the teachings of St Augustine or of his faithful interpreter, St Thomas Aquinas.”103 Needless to say, canon law, or “the code of the universal monarchy of the Church of Rome,” was a bone of contention among regalists. Genovesi asked that it be dropped, as it “disunites people and subverts sovereignty.”104 It still continued to be taught in Malta but, as a concession to the spirit of the Catholic Enlightenment, it was to be interpreted in the context of ecclesiastical history.105 Simply put, it provided the raw material from which students were to learn what abuses had been introduced into the Church and how the realms of Church and State were to be differentiated. Its lecturer was no other than Fra Prospero Grech, a solitary representative of the Catholic Enlightenment in clerical garb. According to the biased Inquisitor Gallarati Scotti, in addition to his effrontery and ignorance, he was known for his hatred and contempt of the Holy See.106

100

Venturi, Settecento Riformatore vol. 1, Da Muratori a Beccaria (Turin: 1969),

179. 101 Widar Cesarini-Sforza, “Il padre Paciaudi e la riforma dell’Università di Parma ai tempi del Du Tillot”, Archivio Storico Italiano 74 (1916), 121. 102 Valletta, NLM, Arch. 575, fol. 480v. 103 Damming, Il Movimento Giansenista a Roma, 382–383. For Concina as an apologist for Catholicism see Alfonso Prandi, Religiosità e cultura nel ‘700 italiano (Bologna: 1966), 193–224. 104 Franco Venturi (ed.), Illuministi Italiani, vol. 5, Riformatori Napoletani, (Milan: 1962), 318–330. 105 Valletta, NLM, Arch. 575, fol. 480v. 106 Mdina, AIM, Corr. 101, fol. 184v, Gallarati Scotti to Boncompagni, 2 Oct. 1786.

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It was not enough for the clergy to be educated; only those who were worthy of their calling were to join the priesthood. This meant a reduced “clerical army,” but, to Pinto’s complaint in 1767 about the excessive number of clerics, the sacra congregazione dell’immunità ecclesiastica replied that the bishop was to follow the decrees of Trent and that priests were to be ordained according to the needs of the Church.107 Rohan, however, succeeded where Pinto had failed, and ten years later a motu proprio reduced the number of clerics drastically. It laid down that to receive the tonsure one had to be at least ten years of age; one would also have to be endowed with a benefice worth 80 scudi a year and would have to have resided in a seminary for three years.108 These measures had the intended effect. In 1758 the number of those receiving the tonsure had amounted to 223. Between 1777 and 1797 the average was only 10.1 so that in 1787 Bishop Labini lamented the scarcity of priests.109 As we should expect, the government extended its authority over every aspect of ecclesiastical life. In 1749 Pinto backed the joining at St Helen’s of the prepositura with the arcipretura in the hope that the long-standing disputes between the provost and the archpriest would come to an end.110 The good administration of the Maltese Church also demanded that it be financially well governed. In 1751 Pinto reported Don Deodato Formosa to Rome for financial embezzlement when he was procuratore of the collegiate church at Gozo.111 And, since according to the inquisitor “not a few irregularities” were found, he succeeded in having him replaced by Don Giovanni Maria Stellini.112 Unlike the case in the Habsburg Empire, the government was not involved in the reorganization of the parishes.113 But Rohan on 29 March 1788 wrote to his ambassador in Rome, Labrillanne, recommending the erection of the parish of St Publius. He listed the usual reasons which parishioners gave for the founding of new parishes. Floriana was quite dis-

107 Floriana, AAM, Corr. 15, fols. 539r–540v, S. Congzne. dell’Immunità Ecclesiastica to Bishop Rull, 24 Sept. 1768. 108 Valletta, NLM, Arch. 273 fol. 161r. 109 Vincent Borg, The Diocesan Priests in the Maltese Islands: 1550–1950 (Malta: 1982), 8. 110 Vatican, ASV, SS (Malta) 157, fol. 22r, Valenti to Passionei, 12 Aug. 1749. 111 Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1509, fols. 268v–69r, Pinto to d’Armenia, 11 Oct. 1751. 112 Mdina, AIM, Corr. 100, fol. 111v, Passionei to Valenti, 23 Oct. 1751. 113 For the case of Milan see Lucia Sebastiani, “La Riorganizzione delle Parrocchie Milanesi nel Periodo Giuseppino”, Quaderni Storici 1 (1970): 866–910.


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tant from the mother church of St Paul’s at Valletta; at night the city gates were closed so that people could not ask for the sacraments; and, finally, the population had risen to 3000 souls.114 The notion of an autonomous clergy was a myth, since a wellordered state was responsible for the supervision of everyone who held any office in that state. The grand masters did not express their ideas in a coherent theological or historical formula. That is, they never produced the like of Pombal’s (1699–1782) Dedução chronológica with its devastating conclusions that ecclesiastical interests should be subordinate to those of the State.115 Even so, their actions proceeded along similar lines. One way of limiting the jurisdiction of the Church was to secure control over appointments to major ecclesiastical benefices. The grand masters held the right of presentation to the Maltese bishopric116 and kept the ordinaries under continual supervision. Bishop Carmine Giovanni Pellerano (1770–1780) is an extreme example of this tight control. He was accused of inciting the clergy against the government and was recalled to Rome. The details of how this was done need not detain us too long. When in 1774 he imprisoned some galley soldiers who had beaten up one of his alarii (marshals), some twenty knights forced the prisons open and set them free. The ordinary took fright and retired to his palace at Mdina. Representatives of the clergy from all the parishes gathered in front of his residence and demanded the convocation of a chapter general, pledging to defend ecclesiastical privileges with all their power and means. The government put the blame for these disturbances on the bishop and, on the grand master’s insistence, Mgr Pellerano had to leave the island.117 The case of Mgr Bartholomew Rull (1757–1769) is different in detail but similar in concept. As he suffered from ill health, he transferred all responsibility to his vicar general, Mgr Giovanni Maria Azzopardi Castelletti.118 This “corrupt and capricious” man, as Inquisitor Durini (1760–1766) described him,119 boasted that he was inflexible, even if

114

Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1538, fols. 33v–34v. Samuel J. Miller, Portugal and Rome c. 1748–1830. An Aspect of the Catholic Enlightenment (Rome: 1978), 212–217. 116 Antonio Zammit Gabarretta, The Presentation, Examination and Nomination of the Bishops of Malta in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Malta: 1961). 117 Philip Callus, The Rising of the Priests. Its Implications and Repercussions on Ecclesiastical Immunity (Malta: 1961), 17–21. 118 Valletta, NLM, Libr. 12, 259. 119 Mdina, AIM, Corr. 100, fol. 242v, Durini to Torrigiani, 4 April 1761. 115

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hell rose up against him.120 Everything was for sale; the tonsure was “sold” for twelve and a half scudi while prostitutes could “buy” the bolettino or communion ticket at will.121 In an undated document entitled Ristretto delli aggravi e violenze fatte da Mons. Vescovo, e Vicario di Malta al clero e popolo Azzopardi is described as vindictive and violent, besides having turned the diocese upside down.122 On 2 June Pinto sent a memorial to the Holy See showing the “imbecility” of the bishop and the “insolence” of his vicar and asked the pontiff to have mercy on this “abandoned diocese.”123 Following this lurid description of ecclesiastical chaos, Rome, with the approval of the grand master, chose Don Giuseppe Vella, parish priest of St George’s (Qormi), in his stead.124 In contrast, if the weight of the government bore down with relentless strength on the upper clergy, in the best Catholic Enlightenment tradition there was much cooperation between the grand masters and the parish priests.125 Did not Rohan have Don Antonio Muscat of Cospicua as his confessor?126 The reason for this understanding is easy to locate. In Malta, unlike Spain, the government did not use the pastors to foster, for instance, cottage industry among the faithful.127 Still, they were the government’s public officials or unpaid agents of the state, “a kind of second arm of the state.” More to the point: in the absence of local government, parish priests provided the bond between the parish and the government.128 The ways in which the grand masters lent their help to the parish priests were several. In the first place, the incumbents needed support against their own parishioners. Two cases illustrate the nature of this intervention. In 1783 Rohan issued a bando threatening with exile

120

Valletta, NLM, Libr. 14, 143–146. Valletta, NLM, Libr. 9, 648–650. 122 Valletta, NLM, Libr. 13, 633–652. See also “Copia di un Manifesto presentato in Roma nell’anno 1760, circa li trascorsi del Canco. D. Gio. Ma. Azzopardi Castelletti, Vicario Generale di Malta”—NLM, Libr. 2, 703–727. 123 Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1519, Pinto to de Breteüil, 2 June 1763. 124 Mdina, AIM, Corr. 100, fols. 271v–272r, Durini to Torrigiani, 20 June 1763. 125 Beales, Enlightenment and Reform, 232. 126 Cospicua, PA, Lib. Matr. (1760–1780), fol. 1r. 127 C. C. Noel, “The Clerical Confrontation with the Enlightenment in Spain”, European Studies Review vol. 5, no 2 (1975), 112. 128 Frans Ciappara, “Parish Priest and Community in 18th century Malta: Patterns of Conflict”, Journal of Early Modern History 9 (2005), 345. See also ibid., “Intercessory Funerary Rites in Malta”, Nuova Rivista Storica 91 (2007), 150–151. 121


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from Malta the members of the confraternity of the Holy Crucifix at Cospicua if they held their meetings in the absence of the parish priest. And the next day, 1 May, the rector of the fratellanza and four other members were summoned to the court of justice to be handed a copy of the law. They were to keep it in their archives so that no one would be ignorant of its contents.129 In another instance, Rohan defended Don Francesco Maria Xuereb of St Catherine’s (Zejtun) against the hatred and “malign lies” of his parishioners.130 In 1785 he published an edict which ordered all who had information on whoever had prevented their parish priest from entering his parochial church to report them within four days.131 Secondly, these financially well-off132 priests of the “second order” found the support of the grand masters in the keen contests in which they were engaged with the bishop. In Malta it was a far cry from the union of parts “of the same edifice, of branches of one trunk, of limbs of one body”, which Mgr Scipione de’ Ricci proclaimed at Pistoia.133 These struggles were an expression of the spirit of richerism or the assertion of the parish priests’ newly found strength. Parish priests aimed at the elevation of their status and consequent power to a level from which they could participate in the administration of the diocese.134 Their aspirations were symbolized by the comfortable parsonages they built anew or, as in the case of St Mary’s (Qrendi), enlarged.135 The case of Don Tommaso Cirillo Formosa of casal Tarxien is the best example of the government’s patronage for incumbents. This resolute man had founded a sodality of parish priests and led them in their struggle against the bishop over the exorbitant expenses they were being made to pay during pastoral visitations.136 He had also been behind the parish priests’ victory in 1759 gaining them the right to wear the rochet and the cape,137 achieved in the face of strong opposition

129

Valletta, NLM, Libr. 429 (vii), fol. 149r. Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1532, fol. 102v, Rohan to Labrillanne, 10 July 1780. 131 Valletta, NLM Libr. 429 (viii), fol. 44r. 132 Frans Ciappara, “The Financial Condition of Parish Priests in Late EighteenthCentury Malta”, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53 (2002): 93–107. 133 Scipione de’ Ricci, Lettera Pastorale (Pistoia: 1786), 9. 134 Richard M. Golden, “Jean Rousse, Religious Frondeur”, French Historical Studies 12 (1982): 461–485. 135 Ciappara, “Parish Priest and Community in 18th century Malta: Patterns of Conflict”, 331–332. 136 Valletta, NLM, Libr. 9, 639–641. 137 Mdina, CEM, AO 666, fols. 358r–389v. 130

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from the cathedral chapter.138 This was a challenge to Bishop Rull, who discontinued the pastoral visitation he was conducting in order to humiliate Don Cirillo.139 He accused him of governing the parish badly and deprived him of his position.140 Don Cirillo appealed to the metropolitan court of Palermo,141 where he found the full support of Pinto, who, on 26 June 1762, wrote to Marquis Stefano Airoldi, president of the tribunal, recommending his cause.142 The parish priest won the case, and, when he returned to Malta in 1763, the grand master sent him his personal carriage to bring him to the grand master’s own palace to congratulate him.143 Having said this, it cannot be imagined that the grand masters would ever have allowed untrustworthy priests to govern a parish. Appointment to a vacant parish was complex, though the bishop often chose incumbents after a written examination.144 All the same, the grand masters did recommend their favorites so that in 1780 Rohan expressed his pleasure to his ambassador at Rome that Don Giuseppe Raffaele Camilleri had won the parish of St Mary’s (Gudja).145 And, in any case, they still reserved to themselves the right of confirmation. The case of Don Giovanni Sant is a good instance of this fundamental way in which the government was able to make its mark on the diocese. This priest had been installed as parish priest of St Savior’s (Lija) in 1770 but had to be removed on the insistence of Pinto, who considered him an unworthy incumbent.146 The example of the parish of Zebbug casts that of Lija into relief. In 1762 Don Felice Borg, on Pinto’s recommendation, won the cure of St Philip’s against the other nominee, Don Giuseppe Agius. The latter appealed to the Holy See, but Pinto sent a dispatch to Cardinal Derossi, the prefect of the sacra congregazione del concilio, to restrain what he termed the temerity of the pretender. The latter’s appeal was both unfounded and calumnious147 since the bishop, as the grand

138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147

Mdina, ACM 9, fols. 13v, 17r. Mdina, AIM, Mem. 16, fol. 134r. Naples, AS, Affari Esteri, fasc. 708, Fogliani to Tanucci, 30 Sept. 1763. L. Fiteni, Giornale Cattolico (Malta: 1841), 200. Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1518, fols. 151v–152r. Valletta, NLM, Libr. 14, 37–38. Ciappara, “The Financial Condition of Parish Priests”, 95 Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1532, fol. 103r, Rohan to Labrillanne, 15 July 1780. Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1526, fols. 76r–v, Pinto to Orengo, 2 April, 1770. Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1518, fols. 148r–149v, Pinto to de Breteüil, 8 June 1762.


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master pointed out, had acted according to his conscience on the unfavorable information he had about Don Giuseppe. Furthermore, the people of Zebbug were not easy to govern. They were so happy with their new parish priest that unrest would follow if he were to be removed.148 Eventually, a compromise was reached, and Don Felice kept the incumbency while Don Giuseppe was compensated for his legal expenses, 119 Roman scudi.149 Hitherto, the discussion has focused upon the secular clergy and ignored the religious. There is a compelling reason for this, because the friars, with the exception of the Dominicans at Valletta, were not involved in parish provision. What is worth doing now is to examine the Maltese government’s relations with them. In his De L’esprit des lois Montesquieu congratulated Henry VIII, who, “resolving to reform the Church of England, ruined the monks, of themselves a lazy set of people”.150 Kaunitz fleshed out his ideas in his memorandum of 1769, where he denounced monks as the cause of the corruption of the patristic Church and of the Reformation. He also argued that celibacy was a serious threat to the propagation of the human race and that monasteries represented a brain drain, in which talented people removed themselves from useful social functions.151 No such criticism of monasticism can be detected in Malta. The expulsion of the Jesuits, it will be argued later on, was an act of state in which popular feeling played no crucial role. Nor did it open up any debate. All this suggests that Pinto and his advisers were jealous of their power but not hostile to monasticism in general. This is only natural since, it hardly needs repeating, the Hospitallers were a religious order themselves. Indeed, Grand Master Hugues de Loubens de Verdalle (1582–1595) founded in 1583 the monastery of the contemplative Hospitaller nuns of S. Ursola at Valletta, which remained ever since under the jurisdiction of the grand masters, who funded it

148

Ibid., fols. 155r–v, Pinto to de Rossi, 17 July 1762. Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1359, fols. 121v, 24 Sept. 1764, de Breteüil to Pinto. 150 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws vol. 2, trans. Thomas Nugent (New York: 1949), Book xxiii, ch. 29. 151 Franz A. J. Szabo, Kaunitz and enlightened absolutism, 1753–1780 (Cambridge, Eng.: 1994), 237–238. For the suppression of monasteries in the Habsburg Empire see the magisterial book by Derek Beales, Prosperity and Plunder. European Catholic Monasteries in the Age of Revolution, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, Eng.: 2003). 149

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frans ciappara Table 1. Male religious houses in Malta in the 18th century Valletta Rabat Mdina Cospicua Vittoriosa Senglea Gozo Total

Augustinians Capuchins Carmelites Conventuals Discalced Carmelites Dominicans Jesuits Minims Oratorians

1 1 1 1 –

1 – – 1 –

– – 1 – –

– – – – 1

– 1 – – –

– – – – –

1 1 – 1 –

3 3 2 3 1

1 1 1 –

1 – 1 –

– – – –

– – – –

1 – – 1

– – – 1

– – – –

3 1 2 2

Total

7

4

1

1

3

1

3

20

generously.152 It is true that Rohan in 1790 demanded the suppression of the minims at Rabat. But this was only because the convent had only three inmates, who left pious legacies unfulfilled and neglected liturgical services, including the administration of the sacraments.153 In the late eighteenth century there were twenty male religious houses in Malta (Table 1), but the government’s preoccupations with them concerned neither their wealth nor their utility to the community. They expected them, however, to lead the flock with their exemplary life. In 1764, therefore, Pinto accused the minims of only thinking about how to raise money disgracefully and asked for the removal of the guardiano Fra Giovanni Felice from the convent at Rabat.154 It would be easy to widen the range of evidence in support of this argument. In a 1791 case, it was being rumored that Padre Gian Carlo, the superior of the Capuchin convent at Vittoriosa, was having relations with prostitutes. Rohan reported him to his general, who recalled the friar to Rome. Gian Carlo was acquitted of the charge but Rohan still refused to let him return to Malta.155

152 Gorg Aquilina, Is-Sorijiet Gerosolimitani, il-Knisja u l-Monasteru ta’ Sant’Ursola, Valletta [The Hospitaller Nuns, the Church and the Monastery of Saint Ursula, Valletta] (Malta: 2004). 153 Vatican, ASV, SS (Malta) 182, fols. 278r–288r—“Soppressione del Convento dei Minori Osservanti della C. Notle (1790)”. 154 Valletta, NLM. Arch. 1520, fols. 104v–105r, Pinto to padre commissario, 20 June 1764. 155 Mdina, AIM, AC 534, fol. 110r.


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Secondly, the grand masters held themselves responsible for the tranquility of convents. Hence, Pinto felt greatly irritated when the general commissioner of the capuchins nominated without his knowledge the new custode and other officials of the convents of Malta.156 He set down his objection in a note to his ambassador at Rome. Not only did he demand the reason for such a new procedure, but he also claimed that the friars chosen were unsuitable. As this did not make for the internal peace of the communities, he refused to recognize them and instead sent his own list with his choices.157 The chief cause of faction within the monasteries was the rivalry between Sicilian and Maltese religious, particularly in the convents of the minims. Troublesome friars, like Padre Salvatore of Syracuse, whom Pinto reported to his general for his “restive spirit,”158 were expelled, but harsher measures were needed to bring the strife to an end. A good solution would have been to separate Maltese convents from their Sicilian provinces and place them instead under the direct supervision of their generals.159 It was only because Naples resisted the attempt that the government backed down.160 4. The Limitation of Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction This last incident underlines the obstacles faced by the government. But with all these difficulties the grand masters continued to take the initiative and succeeded in achieving one more essential element of a “well-ordered state”: the limiting of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. In fact, the Maltese Catholic enlightenment, as has been observed for Italy,161 was concerned to an exceptional extent with this matter. It meant leaving the Church in control only of matters of doctrine and stopping the pope from interfering in the affairs of Malta. The issue of the pope’s claim to universal sovereignty will be investigated first. The question at stake was: would the grand masters 156

Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1521, fols. 77v–78v, Pinto to de Breteüil, 26 March 1765. Ibid., fols. 139r–140v, Pinto to de Breteüil, 27 June 1765. 158 Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1520, fol. 5r, Pinto to general of minor observants, Madrid, 7 Jan. 1764. 159 Mdina, AIM, Corr. 96, fols. 172r–v, Durini to S. Congzne. dei Vescovi e Regolari, 30 Nov. 1765. 160 Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1511, fols. 49v–55v, Pinto to d’Armenia, 6 March 1754. 161 Arturo Carlo Jemolo, “Il Giansenismo Italiano”, Rivista Storica Italiana 40 (1923): 268–284. 157

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demand that Rome discard that “air of superiority and despotism” which harked back to past ages and was no longer permitted elsewhere? Or would they recognize the pontiff as the chief ruler of their subjects, the “supreme prince within their dominion?”162 A symbol of this war against what Ricci called “the ancient machine of papal monarchy”163—and in a way symptomatic of the half measures that the government for the most part had to be content with— was the attempt by the grand masters to proscribe the bull In Coena Domini. This charter, with its overtones of medieval nostalgia, asserted the Holy See’s supremacy over civil power.164 It is no wonder, therefore, that in this classic age of the power-state, which began its relentless progress in just this period, several countries, including Venice, France and Spain, prohibited its reading in their territories.165 In 1768 it was the turn of Naples. This was an excellent opportunity for Pinto to inform Inquisitor Mancinforte on 28 December that he wished to do the same. It is hard to exaggerate the impact of this petition on the inquisitor. The grand master was made to see the irregularity of such a step, along with the seriousness of the matter. Moreover, it would be a grave scandal, and the pope would be forced to institute reprisals. Pinto derisively dismissed Mancinforte’s response with a roar of laughter. Besides, the prelate was kept under pressure by it being rumored that the metropolitan of Palermo had forbidden the public reading of the bull under threat of confiscating the lands of the Maltese Church in Sicily. This was a bold attempt at blackmail but Labini refused to give in.166 Still, the secular government always hoped to do away with this charter which “tries to overthrow the authority of kings and judge the world”. In 1771 Pinto disallowed its being read at St John’s, the Order’s church,167 and in 1789 Rohan once more requested its sup-

162

Ciappara, The Roman Inquisition, 133. Quoted in Bolton, Church Reform, 55. 164 Tomaso A. Contin, Riflessioni sopra la Bolla In Coena Domini (Venice: 1769). See also Massimo Carlo Giannini, “Tra politica, fiscalità e religione: Filippo II di Spagna e la pubblicazione della bolla: ‘In Coena Domini’ (1567–1570),” Annali dell’Istituto Storico italo-germanico in Trento 23 (1997): 83–152. 165 Janus [i.e. Ignaz von Döllinger], The Pope and the Council (London: 1869), 384–87. 166 Vatican, ACDF, St St HH4—a, Mancinforte to Pallavicini, 29 Dec. 1768, 30 Dec. 1768, 2 Jan. 1769, 27 March, 1769. 167 Vatican, ASV, SS (Malta), 167, Mancinforte to Pallavicini, 1 April 1771. 163


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pression.168 On Wednesday, 8 April, as Mgr Labini was about to leave his palace at Valletta for Mdina for the Easter service, there arrived Dr Muscat, who enjoined him not to read the bull the following day. The bishop could not execute an illegitimate order that would make him guilty of disobeying the pope to whom he had sworn allegiance. He stood his ground well and published it to the great satisfaction of the cathedral chapter.169 Forbidding appeals to the Holy See was another way of eliminating the pope’s interference in the affairs of Malta. Appellants to the court of Rome were labeled rebels, while those lawyers who gave them legal advice had their warrants withdrawn170 or, like Dr Alessandro Moneta, were exiled.171 It is informative to see what reasons the grand masters brought to defend their actions. They affirmed that stopping knights from having recourse to Rome was a matter of discipline. This Roman practice had to be eradicated, Rohan claimed, or else “it will destroy us.” What would become of military discipline, he asked rhetorically, if insubordination, disobedience and contempt of the laws were countenanced in Rome?172 The pope was strongly urged to refer such lawsuits back to the Order’s tribunals, and, in addition, European powers were requested to make Rome desist from taking cognizance of such affairs.173 Nor was this all. In a further piece of scornful defiance, clearly seeking to cause maximum offence, Rohan declared in unambiguous terms that the Holy See’s authority would soon come to an end in Malta with the help of the kings of Europe.174 The assumptions behind the government’s prohibiting the Maltese from appealing to the pope were three. First, being judged in foreign courts would have meant a great expense for them. More immediately to the point, if they were judged in Malta, the government would have recovered the money carried away to Roman tribunals.175 Stopping such appeals represented in a most forceful way, therefore, the 168

Mdina, AIM, Corr. 76, fol. 55v, Boncompagni to Gallarati Scotti, 31 March

1789. 169 170 171 172 173

Mdina, AIM, Corr. 101, fol. 257, Gallarati Scotti to Boncompagni, 11 April 1789. Valletta, NLM, Libr. 13, 252. Mdina, AIM, AC 539 (i), fols. 95r–100v. Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1585, fol. 711r, Rohan to de Suffren, 15 Dec. 1787. Mdina, AIM, Corr. 101, fol. 236v, Gallarati Scotti to Boncompagni, 30 Aug.

1788. 174

Ibid., fol. 249v, Gallarati Scotti to Boncompagni, 17 Jan. 1789. Mdina, AIM, Corr. 17, fol. 9v—Memoriale by Nicola and Orsola Bonafue (1709). 175

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Order’s subtle attack against the presence of Rome in the economic life of Malta. It would have been difficult to spell this out more clearly, but the Order brought another reason why foreign judges should not harass Maltese citizens.176 In an undated document which, however, internal evidence suggests was contemporaneous with Pinto’s magistracy, it was claimed that the subjects surrendered their rights only to the prince, who could allow nobody to govern them without breaking these agreements. In other words, the grand masters were bound to bequeath to their successors the rights of the principality in the same condition they had received them. This duty derived from the oath they swore before the giurati (aldermen) of the Mdina commune to defend the inhabitants’ privileges.177 One of these fundamental freedoms, given to the Maltese by the sovereigns of Sicily, was never to sustain litigation outside their country.178 Besides reserving their right to hinder recourse to Rome, the government subjected papal documents to the exequatur, or, as it was called, the vidit. This “wall of sovereignty,” or the “great fortress from which spiritual shots are fired on all sides,” was published on 6 November 1786.179 A measure of its significance is the considerable resentment it stoked up in both the bishop and the inquisitor. This was to be expected, because it was upon their shoulders that the burden of the protection of the Church’s interests principally fell. They protested, therefore, that it was an attack upon the Church’s independence and the power of the Roman curia to intervene in Maltese ecclesiastical affairs.180 As a result, several lawsuits could not start or continue, since the ecclesiastical authorities refused to recognize documents which had been presented to the advocate general to be marked with the vidit.181

176

Mdina, AIM, Corr. 13, fols. 207r–208v, Barberini to Pallavicino, 25 June, 1678. Valletta, NLM, Libr. 751, 52. 178 Giovanni Francesco Abela, Della Descrittione di Malta (Malta: 1647), 423. 179 Valletta, NLM, Lib. 429 (viii), ff. 189r–190r. See also Paolo De Bono, Sommario della Storia della Legislazione in Malta (Malta: 1897), 209. 180 Floriana, AAM, Corr. 19, fols. 754r–v, undated letter from Labini to Boncompagni. 181 Mdina, AIM, Corr. 80, fols. 82v–83r, de Zelada to Camille de Rohan, 21 May 1793. 177


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5. Conflicts with Jesuits and Papal Inquisitors So far we have observed the government’s efforts to stop Rome’s direct interference in Maltese affairs. There remains one further aspect of the changing character of the relationship between throne and altar to analyze: the conflict with the pope’s representatives, the Jesuits and the inquisitors. It is to this two-pronged offensive against these formidable opponents that we must now turn. The Jesuits stood vulnerable on several accounts. Besides pillorying their relaxed morality and probabilism, their enemies denounced them for promoting papal supremacy. More significant was the fact that by their personal obedience to a “foreign prince” they repudiated the sovereignty of the throne and challenged the rights of the nation. These were heavy charges against the Company, but Clement XIII further provoked the major Catholic powers by his brief Apostolicum pascendi (1765), which described the Jesuits as “pious, praiseworthy and useful to Religion, the Church and Society.”182 He and his secretary of state, Cardinal Torrigiani (1758–1769)—“a person with a red habit but a black soul,” as the pope’s confessor Borini described him183—had overreached themselves. The Jesuits were expelled first from Portugal184 and then from all Bourbon lands.185 Tanucci (1698–1793), who called for “the rod of Spain and France on the shoulders of the Torrigianis and the Rezzonicos,”186 ordered Malta, whose Jesuits fell under the Sicilian superior, to banish them as well.187

182

Mdina, AIM, Mem. 16, fols. 431r–435r. Bianca Betto, “Papa Rezzonico attraverso le lettere inedite del Confessore Apostolico”, Rivista della Storia della Chiesa in Italia, Anno 28, no. 2 (1974), 411. 184 The classical work is Miller, Portugal and Rome. See also Kenneth Maxwell, Pombal: Paradox of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Eng.: 1995), 82–83. 185 Dale van Kley, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits in France (New Haven: 1975). Richard Herr, The Eighteenth Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton: 1969), 19–24. Egidio Papa, “I Beni dei Gesuiti e i Preliminari della loro Espulsione dal Regno di Napoli nel 1767”, Rivista di Storia della Chiesa in Italia (1976): 81–113. Giovanni Gonzi, “L’Espulsione dei Gesuiti dai Ducati Parmensi”, Aurea Parma, Anno 50 (1966), 154–68; Anno 51 (1967), 3–62. For a general survey, Pastor, Storia dei Papi dalla fine del Medioevo, vol. 16, part 1, Benedetto XIV e Clemente XIII, 1740–1769 (Rome: 1933), 576–997. 186 On this main representative of Catholic Enlightenment at Naples see Rosa Mincuzzi, Bernardo Tanucci ministro di Ferdinando di Borbone, 1759–1776 (Bari: 1967). 187 Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1993, fols. 1r–2v, Tanucci to Pinto, 19 March 1768. 183

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Loyola’s followers had been sent to the island in 1582 by Gregory XIII “for the reform of the city.”188 Here they set up a college, but they enlarged their influence by their missions189 and confraternities,190 as well as the direction of the retreat house at Floriana.191 They had already been expelled once in 1639, and it appears that this hostility still rankled.192 Thus, in November 1767, Inquisitor Mancinforte reported to Rome that the grand master was not at all favorable to “these unfortunate friars”. Pinto, who was kept abreast with the Jesuits’ vicissitudes by his ambassador in Rome,193 was surrounded by archenemies of the Company. Chief among these was the vice-chancellor, Pinto’s compatriot, Guedes, “who talks openly against the Holy See and the members of the Society and with malevolent courage endeavors to expel them”.194 Moreover, Tanucci’s ordering their expulsion was an excellent opportunity for the grand master to earn the king’s approval, besides sequestrating the Jesuits’ property.195 Running through the correspondence, one readily discerns that the inquisitor’s fatal pessimism was well founded. On 22 April 1768, troops surrounded the college. A few hours after midnight, between two and three in the morning, the vice-prior of the conventual church, the public prosecutor and a notary summoned the Jesuits to the rector’s room, and the fiscale read them the grand master’s decree of expulsion.196 All twenty of them remained under arrest until 29 April when, towards 2:30 a.m., all but three were put in carriages and taken

188

Pio Pecchiai, “Il Collegio dei Gesuiti a Malta,” Archivio Storico di Malta 9 (1937– 1938), 135–136. 189 Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1993, fol. 8r. 190 Daniel M. Glavina, “Ignatian Devotion to Our Lady and the Jesuits in Malta,” in Vincent Borg (ed.), Marian Devotions in the Island of Saint Paul 1600–1800, (Malta: 1983), 358–368. 191 Pier Francesco Rossignoli, Relazione della pia Casa in Malta per gli Esercizi Spirituali di S. Ignazio (Naples: 1753). 192 For this event: David F. Allen, “Anti-Jesuit Rioting by Knights of St John during the Malta Carnival of 1639”, Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 65 (1996), 3–30. Pio Pecchiai, “La Sommossa dei Cavalieri di Malta contro i Gesuiti nel Carnevale del 1639”, Archivio Storico di Malta 9 (1938), 429–432; Vincent Borg, Fabio Chigi Apostolic Delegate in Malta (1634–1639). An Edition of his Official Correspondence (Vatican City: 1967), 99–104. 193 Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1523, fol. 79r, Pinto to de Breteüil, 11 May 1767. 194 Alfredo Mifsud, “L’Espulsione dei Gesuiti da Malta nel 1768 e le loro Temporalità,” Archivum Melitense 2 (1913), 116–17. 195 Venice, AS, Senato. Dispacci, filza. 161. A. Alberti to the Senate. Naples, 9 Dec. 1783. 196 A. Mifsud, “L’Espulsione dei Gesuiti”, Appendix II, 154–58.


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to the harbor. Here they boarded Le Soleil, a French pollacca, and were shipped out of the country to Civitavecchia, where they arrived on 7 May, towards midnight.197 The government had got rid of the pope’s chief defenders, but the Roman presence in Malta was still visible in the person of the inquisitor, who was also the pope’s nuncio in Malta. The grand masters had no say in the appointment of these prelates, but they could still apply pressure to have them replaced. This point is well illustrated by Pinto’s success in having Mgr Mancinforte, whom he called “a liar and a hypocrite,” recalled to Rome in 1771,198 together with his “ignorant” and “fanatic” uditore, Abate de Dominicis.199 The next best thing would have been to suppress the Tribunal altogether, “this hydra, which often destroys their (the inhabitants’) wealth as well as their happiness.”200 This was the appropriate time to strike at the Holy Office, since in the late eighteenth century most of the tribunals in Europe were either reduced to a shadow of their former selves or, as in the case of Parma201 and Modena,202 closed down. The closure of the tribunal in Sicily in 1782203 had a direct bearing on that of Malta. In November 1783 Malta’s representative in Naples, Gaetani, was told that once the inquisition stopped functioning in Sicily the king would no longer tolerate it in Malta.204 The Venetian representative in Naples, Andrea Alberti, who passed on this piece of information to his superiors in Venice, could not fathom the reason for this. Some suspected that it had been Rohan himself who had demanded the Tribunal’s

197 P. A. Leanza, I Gesuiti in Malta al Tempo dei Cavalieri Gerosolimitani (Malta: 1934), 27, note 1. 198 Mdina, AIM, Corr. 58, fol. 30r, Pallavicini to Mancinforte, 25 Feb. 1771. 199 Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1363, fol. 14r, de Breteüil to Pinto, 22 Jan. 1771. 200 Naples, AS, Affari Esteri, fasc. 6832, Grimaldi to Acton, 23 July 1792. 201 Venturi, Settecento Riformatore, vol. 2, La Chiesa e la Repubblica dentro i loro Limiti (Turin: 1976), 234. 202 G. Salvioli, “La Legislazione di Francesco III di Modena,” Deputazione di Storia Patria per le Antiche Provincie Modenesi. Atti e Memorie. Modena, serie IV, ix (1899), 33. Albano Biondi, “Lunga Durata e Micoarticolaznine nel territorio di un Ufficio dell”Inquisizione: Il Sacro Tribunale a Modena (1292–1785)”, Annali dell’Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trento vii (1982): 73–90. 203 Vito La Mantia, Origine e Vicende dell’Inquisizione in Sicilia (Palermo: 1977), 146. For the political and cultural significance of this event see F. Renda, “Società e Politica nella Sicilia del Settecento”, in Gianvito Resta (ed.), La Sicilia nel Settecento vol. 1, (Messina: 1986), 25–26. 204 Venice, AS, Senato. Dispacci, filza 161. A. Alberti to the Senate. Naples, 9 Dec. 1783.

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suppression.205 At first, Inquisitor Zondadari could foresee no successful solution, but eventually the matter was dropped and the holy office continued to function till 1798. Why the Order should have dreaded the inquisitors is an intriguing question.206 For one thing, it considered the number of their dependants exorbitantly high. It was believed in 1760, for instance, that the island had been “inundated” by some two hundred patentati who, including their dependants, perhaps added up to a thousand. Behind this exaggeration lay a certain amount of truth, because the number of these patentees “was hidden with so much skill” that it was impossible to know it for sure. The government had repeatedly petitioned Rome that, as in the case of the bishop’s dependants, and as was the practice in Sicily and Sardinia,207 a list with their names be exhibited in a public place. Such demands, however, came to nothing. This hampered the course of justice, since it was not unusual for a patentee to be identified only when he was cited to appear in the secular courts.208 Sometimes this happened when a lawsuit was already in progress and had to be transferred to the inquisitor’s tribunal.209 One must also bear in mind that all kinds of stratagems were devised for increasing the number of patentees. The gabellotti, or tenant farmers, for instance, sublet their plots to other tenants or else took on castaldi, or bailiffs.210 Disputes over number were linked to issues over quality. The patentati were the members of the principal families of the island, so that the grand masters claimed that among people of substance there were hardly two families that were not outside their jurisdiction.211 Allowing for exaggeration, they did include nobles like Testaferrata, Manduca, Xara, Mompalao, Xeberras and de Piro, as well as leading merchants

205 For this argument, see Frans Ciappara, “Malta, Napoli e la Santa Sede nella seconda metà del ’700”, Mediterranea. Ricerche Storiche 12 (2008): 173–188. 206 For the government’s grievances against the inquisition, see Mémoire Présenté au Roy Tres Chrétien sur les entreprises des Inquisiterus députez à Malthe (s.a.; s.l.). 207 Carlo Alberto Garufi, Fatti e Personaggi dell’Inquisizione in Sicilia (Palermo: 1978), 214; Romano Canosa, Storia dell’Inquisizione Spagnola in Italia (Rome: 1992), 177. 208 For the case of Felice Portelli: Mdina, AIM, AC 502, fols. 383r–v. 209 For one such instance: Mdina, AIM, Corr. 94, fols. 279v–282r, Stoppani to Ottoboni, 15 Sept. 1731. 210 Mdina, AIM, Registrum Actorum Civilium C4, fol. 443r. 211 Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1577, fol. 203r, Pinto to Labrillanne, 28 Nov. 1755.


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like Mannarino and one Arena, a rich draper in contact with merchants in Genoa, Lyons and Sedan.212 Even more serious was the government’s attack on the Tribunal’s jurisdictional claims. Did not Pinto claim that “this principality is being ruined by the Tribunal of the holy office”?213 This wish “to take shelter under the protection of the Tribunal” was so strong that it led to some landowners donating their own plots of land to the holy office to receive them back in return as the inquisitor’s tenant farmers.214 Other such cases of “inexcusable absurdities” included people like Salvatore Magro, a grocer from Zebbug, who was supposed to be the castaldo of Giuseppe Farrugia but who never moved out of his village.215 It is significant that this fraudulent practice concerned not only “peasants” but served also as an excuse for, say, a wool merchant to take the patent of the Tribunal’s doctor.216 In much the same way, Giacinto Testaferrata, the depositario dei mobili, was in charge of a few chairs, some small tables, beds and kitchen utensils. The truth was that, on the evidence of Inquisitor D’Elci (1711–1715), he rendered no service at all to the holy office, since it was the duty of the chamberlain to look after such furniture.217 We may wonder how the grand masters faced this challenge to their authority. As the only sovereigns of Malta, should not their laws be binding on all? On 18 August 1755, therefore, Pinto asked the cardinal inquisitors for a perpetual and stable agreement that would bring a “sure peace to this small state”.218 The bargaining dragged on for five years. Eventually, with the help of the government’s Jansenist friends at Rome like Cardinal Corsini, a concordat was signed on 31 July 1760, which almost coincided with another agreement over sanctuary.219 The details of its clauses can be extracted from the dossier at the archivio della congregazione per la dottrina della fede at the Vatican. The number of patentees was fixed at sixty-eight. It could not be

212

Mdina, AIM, AC 543, fols. 1r–2v. Naples, AS, Affari Esteri, fasc. 720, Parisio to Tanucci, 20 Aug. 1759. 214 Mdina, AIM, Corr. 94, fol. 165, D’Elci to Marescotti, 5 Sept. 1711. 215 Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1526, fol. 154r, Pinto to de Breteüil, 18 June 1770. 216 Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1366, fols. 417r–v, Labrillanne to Pinto, 28 July 1778. 217 Mdina, AIM, Corr. 94, fol. 173r, D’Elci to Marescotti, 23 Jan. 1712. 218 Vatican, ACDF, St St HH4—d, Pinto to Corsini, 18 Aug. 1758. 219 Frans Ciappara, “Non Gode l’Immunità Ecclesiastica: Sanctuary in Malta, c.1740– 1828”, European History Quarterly 38 (2008): 227–243. 213

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increased on any account, and the inquisitors were to keep a catalogue of their names, which they dispatched annually to the cardinal inquisitors. When a patentee died or renounced his patent, he was to be replaced by someone who lived in the fear of God and was not of ill-repute, quarrelsome or dissolute. The rich imparted dignity to the Tribunal, but the inquisitors were reminded that they should not give the impression that they were looking for the wealthiest inhabitants. Neither were patentees to hunt in areas reserved for the knights or to be involved in the slave business—“so odious to God’s and man’s laws.”220 This agreement was a great political victory for the government, but it did not bring the jurisdictional squabbles with the inquisition to an end. Patentees in the lucrative insurance business, for instance, appealed to the inquisitor whenever an unfavorable verdict was pronounced against them in the lay courts.221 Guided by the enlightened vision of the public good and of the country’s general interests, Pinto could not connive at such disorder without “destroying the commerce of these islands with which, more than any other means, the inhabitants maintain themselves”. Foreign merchants would be deceived and cheated if, after they had sustained their suit in the commercial court, they found themselves dragged to church tribunals and finally to those of Rome or Palermo.222 At last a compromise was reached in 1772, and a patentee could now act as an insurer on condition that he presented a government’s subject as a surety.223 Other sources of contention remained, and the Church in Malta sustained a ferocious attack in the 1780s. The direction of reform was the same, but the pace was quicker. Why? In attempting to answer this question, a great part of the explanation must lie in Rome’s hopelessly divided forces after Clement XIV’s demise. Pope Ganganelli’s way of government had been innovative. It gave a breathing space to intellectual forces favorable to the reform of the Church. We should not make too much of this fresh approach, though, which met with firm resistance. Prophesies and visions announced terrible punishments by 220 See dossier in Vatican, ACDF, St St HH3—g. Also Naples, AS, Affari Esteri, fasc. 721, Parisio to Tanucci, 24 Sept. 1760. For the whole episode in detail: Ciappara, The Roman Inquisition, 170–181. 221 For such an incident involving a merchant from Maone, see Mdina, AIM, Corr. 100, fols. 411r–v, memoria attached to letter from Lante to Pallavicini, 6 April 1772. 222 Valletta, NLM, Arch. 1528, fols. 88v-98r, Pinto to de Breteüil, 6 July 1772. 223 Mdina, AIM, Corr. 33, fol. 91r, Stoppani to Lante, 10 Oct. 1772.


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God, angry at the pope’s consenting to the anticlerical policies of the kings. The secret Amicizie Cristiane, founded by the ex-Jesuit N. Diessbach in north Italy, were the most significant reaction. Their members condemned the satanic refusal by kings to recognize the supreme authority of the Church in the direction of man. The election of Pius VI (1775–1799) confirmed this conservative movement. Pope Braschi compared the times with the end of the world as described by St Paul to Timothy224 and prepared for a frontal clash with the forces of the modern world. However, his visit to Vienna in 1782 to persuade Joseph to modify his dash for Church reform was a diplomatic disaster. Chronicling this extraordinary tale of rivalry, one must also say that Joseph II was not the pope’s sole hurdle. At that time, the papacy was also engaged in a bitter encounter with the kingdom of Naples over a renewed concordat to decide whether the clergy were “citizens of Naples or a colony of Rome”.225 Relations became so bitter and reached such an impasse that on 17 October 1787 Cardinal Boncompagni (1785–1789) came to Naples for discussions.226 Such was the atmosphere when the Maltese government assailed with renewed vigor ecclesiastical jurisdiction in temporal affairs. Marc’Antonio, who had fallen in arrears in his rents to the bishop, was a case in point. In 1788 the curia ordered the auction of his animals, but on Thursday, 10 July, uditore Muscat reminded the bishop that Marc’Antonio was a particolare (private person) and could be cited only before the secular court. In response, Mgr Labini sent his assessor, Simone Biagio, that same day to Rohan, informing him that the peasant had been given a respite. The ecclesiastical court believed that the matter was over, but the next morning the advocate general dispatched a letter “not very consonant with the bishop’s honor” declaring that Mgr Labini had not understood anything. The laws of Malta prohibited the auction of debtors’ oxen or agricultural implements,227 and, on the authority of Grotius and van Espen, the bishop was reminded that the ecclesiastical judge should obey the laws of the prince in temporal affairs.228 Furthermore, the court, in another show of defiance, 224

2 Tim. 3:1–5. Cited in Schipa, Nel Regno di Ferdinando IV Borbone, 92. 226 Venice, AS, Senato. Dispacci Napoli, vol. 31, filza 165, 718, Francesco Alberti al Senato, 30 Oct. 1787. 227 Del Dritto Municipale di Malta (Malta: 1784), 91. 228 Vatican, ASV, SS (Malta) 182, fols. 196r–202v, Gallarati Scotti to Boncompagni, 19 July 1788. 225

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and with “abominable and inexcusable temerity”, as the inquisitor put it, advised the grand master to punish the bishop for his “daring.”229 This episode was significant, but equally so was the government’s order to witnesses not to answer citations by the civil court of the holy office. Furthermore, patentees were made to renounce their patents because these availed them nothing. In one such instance, Muscat warned Saverio Alessi, a marshal of the Sant’Ufficio, that the grand master could send him into exile even for minor offences.230 Above all, the wish to denigrate the inquisitors was so keen that they were discredited in their administration of justice by being charged with excessive severity or lack of judgment.231 Nevertheless, no better illustration of the government’s animosity towards the Church can be chosen than the Fenech case. On 3 September 1791, Count Giuseppe Fenech petitioned the grand master to transfer his lawsuit from the ecclesiastical to the government’s court.232 Both Mgr Gallarati Scotti and Mgr Labini raised a number of objections and accused the count of violating ecclesiastical liberty and usurping the Church’s immunity. The count refused to be subdued and submitted a second petition to the government on 8 October in an extraordinary document of seventeen folios. First, the count argued that the two prelates injured the grand master’s sovereign authority and the rights given to him by God as his vice-regent on earth. Secondly, he claimed that Malta had always been the last country to emulate the example of other European states. Thirdly, he contrasted Malta with the grand duchy of Tuscany and the kingdom of Naples, where such practices, reminiscent of past centuries of rude ignorance, had been repealed.233 The grand master referred the matter to the supreme court of justice, which issued its report on 23 November. It was nothing more than a summary of Muscat’s own ideology regarding Church-State affairs: all authority and jurisdiction exercised by the sacerdozio in temporal matters was only a concession given by the imperio.234 Faced with this challenge, the pope’s reaction as defender of Church immunity was instant. Pius VI, who already had the civil constitu229 Floriana, AAM, Corr. 22, fols. 26r–28v, undated memoria by Bishop Labini to Pius VI. 230 Mdina, AIM, Corr. 101, fol. 203r, Gallarati Scotti to Federici, 15 Sept. 1789. 231 Ciappara, “Gio. Nicolò Muscat”, 615–618. 232 Mdina, AIM, Mem. 28, fols. 234r–238v. 233 Ibid., fols. 240r–256r. 234 Ibid., fols. 258r–271v.


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tion of the clergy in France on his hands, demanded on 29 November 1791 the removal of Muscat—“the principal author and cause of all the exorbitant novelties promoted in the island of Malta”—from his posts of general advocate and uditore. 235 Muscat gave full vent to his offended dignity. There are several interesting points to note in his defense against the charge of fomenting dissension between “stole and sword”. If in the exercise of his arduous office he had sinned and violated Church laws, so he claimed in an assertive and strident tone, it was only because he believed that his prince’s supreme dignity had been offended. And he once more expressed his Catholic faith and his wish to die in the bosom of the Church.236 However subservient Muscat appeared to be, though, he did not convince Mgr Gallarati Scotti (1785–1793), who expressed his surprise at such sentiments of respect and veneration. There was no person in Malta, so the inquisitor informed the papal secretary of state, who was not fully aware of Muscat’s antagonism. On receiving the pope’s demand for his removal, he had exclaimed, “I would eat with no less appetite!”237 All Muscat could do now was to provoke a decisive decision. With this object, in July 1792, on a Tuesday, towards midnight, he sailed to Naples. The pretext was that he wanted some peace of mind that his enemies denied him. But documents at the state archives of Naples reveal that he had a more urgent practical reason. He wanted to give to the king an account by word of mouth of the “strange vehemence” with which Rome battled against the rights of Malta.238 In support of this view, he had summoned before his departure all the judges in an extraordinary session and advised them how to proceed in his absence. Nothing was to be changed in the relations between Church and State. He expressed his firm belief that he would return after fifty days and restore with royal support the tranquility of the Order and the inhabitants, continually harassed by church courts. But even if this did not materialize, he would still have felt proud of having undertaken a glorious confrontation with the pope.239 235

Mdina, AIM, Corr. 78, fols. 237r–v, Boncompagni to Gallarati Scotti, 28 Nov.

1791. 236 237 238 239

1792.

Vatican, ASV, SS (Malta) 165, Boncompagni to Gallarati Scotti, 31 Jan. 1792. Mdina, AIM, Corr. 102, fol. 3v, Gallarati Scotti to de Zelada, 7 Jan. 1792. Naples, AS, Affari Esteri, fasc. 6829, Grimaldi to Acton, 19 July, 1792. Mdina, AIM, Corr. 102, fols. 35v–37r, Gallarati Scotti to de Zelada, 19 July

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For this purpose, on 1 September he sent a dispatch to Acton, the foreign minister of Naples. He did not want to annoy him unduly, but here he paused to explain that “if Hannibal is in the harbor how can I not hasten the defense of the besieged city?” He proceeded to implore him to cast his eyes on his island home and reach some agreement with the Holy Father to prevent further disturbances.240 Such strong language demonstrates both the extent to which Muscat was ready to go as well as the vigor of his purpose. This “declared enemy of the pope”—so was he identified by the cardinal secretary of state241—returned to Malta by way of Messina less than four months later in October 1792. Did he not fully appreciate the difficulties he had created? Did it not cross his mind that his victories could tumble down almost overnight? However that may be, he did not see the writing on the wall. And his downfall, however dramatic in itself, came as a perfectly logical conclusion. There were several reasons for this. By this time the Order’s power of maneuver had been greatly diminished. The challenge of the French revolutionaries weighed heavy on the minds of all monarchs. Was it not easy to argue that the cause of religion was the cause of sovereigns as well, and that attacks on the altar were aimed at the throne? The Order was on its knees and in need of the support of the Holy See. On 19 September 1792, the National Assembly had confiscated the Order’s lands in France;242 and, to make matters worse, the island was strangled by a shortage of corn.243 It is well to remember, too, that Pius VI very keenly felt the necessity of striking back at what appeared to be a disintegration of the centralized ecclesiastical system so painstakingly built up since the sixteenth century. To strengthen the pope’s hand, on Tuesday, 15 October 1793, Prince Camille, the Order’s ambassador in Rome, arrived in Malta. He inveighed strongly against “this rascal,” whom he would have liked to see hanged and warned the grand master that if Muscat were to remain in office, he would not dare to present himself before the

240

Naples, AS, Affari Esteri, fasc. 6829, Muscat to Acton, 1 September 1792. Mdina, AIM, Corr. 79, fols. 178v, de Zelada to Gallarati Scotti, 14 Aug. 1792. 242 Frans Ciappara, “La peur de la Révolution française à Malte”, Annales historiques de la Révolution française 341 (2005): 53–68. 243 Venice, AS, Senato, Secreta. Dispacci dei Consoli, Malta 1793–1797, filza 9, Miari to Senate, 17 April 1793. See also Mdina, AIM, Corr. 80, fol. 167v, de Zelada to Carpegna, 15 Oct. 1793. 241


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pope.244 He had pledged his word to the pontiff that never would the Holy See have any further cause to complain against the Hospitaller Government.245 Under this pressure, Rohan gave in and dismissed Muscat, who was replaced by Benedetto Schembri.246 The Holy See agreed with the choice of the new advocate general, even though it would have preferred that Muscat had not been pensioned off at his own request.247 6. Conclusion To conclude, as in Spain,248 the skeptical Enlightenment of the philosophes had no place in Catholic Malta. The university’s metaphysics lecturer explained the spirituality or immortality of the soul, thereby firmly confuting the errors of those authors who attacked that truth.249 Similarly, a philosophy student in 1789 defended his thesis that atheists were “horrible monsters.” The whole universe, he asserted, “is like a book in which he who does not read God’s existence is absolutely stupid.”250 However, if Malta was closely allied with Catholic European trends, the program of the Maltese reformers did not suggest any Muratorian kind of piety. It did entail, though, the improvement of the clergy’s education to promote the spiritual well-being of the faithful, the crackdown on the bishops and the alignment of the grand masters with the parish priests as their representatives in the parishes. Even so, the Maltese government was much more willing to take on the Church. If the grand masters did nothing to transfer resources from Church to State, they did attempt to free the Maltese Church from the bureaucratic centralization of the Roman curia and place it under their own control, leaving it with purely spiritual authority. It meant making the clergy servants of the state in ecclesiastical matters and preventing the pope and his representatives, the Jesuits and the inquisitors, from exercising their authority in Malta. Such a program

244 245 246 247 248 249 250

Mdina, AIM, Mem. 36, fol. 108r. Mdina, AIM, Corr. 102, fol. 97v, Carpegna to de Zelada, 24 Oct. 1793. Mdina, AIM, Corr. 102, fols. 96v–97r, Carpegna to de Zelada, 21 Oct. 1793. Vatican, ASV, SS (Malta) 165, de Zelada to Carpegna, 19 Nov. 1793. Noel, “The Clerical Confrontation with the Enlightenment in Spain”, 108–122. Valletta, NLM, Arch. 575, fols. 476r–v. Aloysius Assenza, Conclusiones Philosophicae (Malta: 1789), iv.

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did not lead, as it did in Portugal between 1760 and 1770, to a breakdown of relations between the two sides. Nevertheless, it was a sustained attack causing foreign observers to “remain surprised by how much of an assault on Church power there was in eighteenth century Malta.”251 Part of the explanation of course lies in the fact that the Maltese Church had acquired so much power that the break with the past had to be severe, abrupt and violent. One final question deserves our attention: did this massive change lead to some kind of secularized anti-clericalism? The answer is a definitive no. The attempt to restrict the pope’s authority over the Maltese Church was confined to a tiny, limited circle. It was wholly the affair of the government, which did not affect the people at large. In fact, as in Mainz,252 the Maltese Church succeeded in preserving and even deepening its hold on the devotions of the people. The cult of the Sacred Heart and the devotion of the via crucis bear eloquent witness to this. Bibliography Primary/Archival Sources Cospicua, PA, Lib. Matr. (1760–1780). Senglea, PA, Memorie Diverse 1 Floriana, AAM, Corr. 12, 15, 19, 20, 22. ——, PV 36. ——, RS 10. Mdina ACM 9 AIM, AC 502, 516(i), 534, 539(i), 543. ——, Corr. 13, 17, 33, 57, 58, 69, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 82, 94, 95, 96, 101, 102. ——, Mem. 11, 16, 22, 28, 36. ——, Misc. 9. ——, RAC, C4 CEM, AO 666, 693. Valletta, NLM, Arch. 273, 575, 1515, 1518, 1519, 1520, 1521, 1528, 1363, 1366, 1370, 1509, 1511, 1523, 1526, 1532, 1535, 1536, 1538, 1539, 1577, 1585, 1993. ——, Libr. 9, 12, 13, 14, 429 (vii), 429 (viii), 751.

251

Personal communication by Professor Derek Beales to the author, 13 March

2008. 252 Timothy C. W. Blanning, Reform and Revolution in Mainz, 1743–1803 (Cambridge, Eng.: 1974), 121–122.


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Vatican, ACDF, St St HH3, HH4. ASV 157, 161, 165, 167, 182. Naples, AS, Affari Esteri, fasc. 708, 720, 721, 6829, 6832. Florence, AS, Fondo Ricci, vols. 73, 74. Venice, AS, Senato. Dispacci, filza 161. ——, Dispacci, Napoli, vol. 32, filza 165. ——, Secreta. Dispacci dei Consoli, Malta 1793–1797, filza 9. Secondary Sources Abela, Giovanfrancesco, Della Descrittione di Malta (Malta: 1647). Ajello, Raffaele, “I Filosofi e la Regina. Il Governo delle Due Sicilie da Tanucci a Caracciolo (1776–1786)”, Rivista Storica Italiana 13 (1991): 398–454, 657–738. Allen, D. F., “Anti-Jesuit Rioting by Knights of St John during the Malta Carnival of 1639”, Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 65 (1996): 3–30. Ambrasi, D., Riformatori e Ribelli a Napoli nella Seconda Metà del Settecento. Ricerche sul Giansenismo Napoletano (Naples: 1979). Appolis, Émile, Le “Tiers Parti” Catholique au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris: 1960). Aquilina, Ġorġ, Il-Gimgha l-Kbira tal-Belt [Good Friday at Valletta] (Malta: 1986). ——, Is-Sorijiet Gerosolimitani, il-Knisja u l-Monasteru ta’ Sant’Ursola, Valletta [The Hospitaller Nuns, the Church and the Monastery of Saint Ursula, Valletta] (Malta: 2004). Assenza, A., Conclusiones Philosophicae (Malta: 1789). Azzopardi, John and Sansone, Matteo (eds.), Italian and Maltese Music in the Archives at the Cathedral Museum of Malta (Malta: 2001). Bayle, Pierre, Pensées Diverses, Ecrites à un Docteur de Sorbonne, a l’occasion de la Comete qui parut au mois de Décembre 1680 vol. 2 (Rotterdam: 1721). Beales, Derek, Enlightenment and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Europe (London, New York: 2005). ——, Joseph II, vol. 1, In the Shadow of Maria Theresa 1741–1780 (Cambridge, Eng.: 1987). ——, Prosperity and Plunder. European Catholic Monasteries in the Age of Revolution, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, Eng.: 2003). ——, “Religion and culture”, in Blanning, Timothy C.W. (ed.), The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: 2000), 131–177. Becker, Carl L., The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven: 1932). Behrens, Catherine B. A., “Enlightened Despotism”, Historical Journal 18 (1975): 401–408. Betto, Bianca, “Papa Rezzonico attraverso le lettere inedite del Confessore Apostolico”, Rivista della Storia della Chiesa in Italia 28 (1974): 388–464. Biondi, Albano, “Lunga Durata e Microarticolazione nel territorio di un Ufficio dell’Inquisizione: Il Sacro Tribunale a Modena (1292–1785)”, Annali dell’Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trento 7 (1982): 73–90. Blanning, Timothy C. W., Joseph II (London: 1994). ——, Reform and Revolution in Mainz, 1743–1803 (Cambridge, Eng.: 1974). Bolton, Charles A., Church Reform in 18th Century Italy (The Hague: 1969). Borg, Vincent, Fabio Chigi Apostolic Delegate in Malta (1634–1639). An Edition of his Official Correspondence (Vatican City: 1967). ——, The Diocesan Priests in the Maltese Islands: 1550–1950 (Malta: 1982). Cajani, L. and Foa, A., “Clement XIII”, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani vol. 26 (Rome: 1982), 328–343.

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Callus, Philip, The Rising of the Priests. Its Implications and Repercussions on Ecclesiastical Immunity (Malta: 1961). Canosa, Romano, Storia dell’Inquisizione Spagnola in Italia (Rome: 1992). Carpanetto, Dino and Ricuperati, Giuseppe, L’Italia del Settecento: Crisi, Trasformazioni, Lumi (Florence: 1990). Cassar Pullicino, J., “Michel’Angelo Grima Chirurgo Maltese del Settecento”, Rivista di Storia di Scienze Mediche e Naturali 40 (1949): 1–39. Cavaliero, Roderick, The Last of the Crusaders. The Knights of St John in Malta in the Eighteenth Century (London: 1960). Cesarini-Sforza, Widar, “Il padre Paciaudi e la riforma dell’Università di Parma ai tempi del Du Tillot”, Archivio Storico Italiano 74 (1916): 109–136. Chadwick, Owen, The Popes and European Revolution (Oxford: 1981). Châtellier, Louis, The Religion of the poor. Rural missions in Europe and the formation of modern Catholicism, c. 1500–1800 (Cambridge, Eng.: 1997). Chiosi, Elvira, Andrea Serrao. Apologia e Crisi del Regalismo nel Settecento Napoletano (Naples: 1981). Ciappara, Frans, Enlightenment and Reform in Malta 1740–1798 (Malta: 2006). ——, “Gio. Nicolò Muscat: Church-State Relations in Hospitaller Malta during the Enlightenment, 1786–1798”, in Mallia-Milanes, Victor (ed.), Hospitaller Malta, 1530–1798. Studies on Early Modern Malta and the Order of St John of Jerusalem, ed., Victor Mallia-Milanes (Malta: 1993), 605–658. ——, “Intercessory Funerary Rites in Malta”, Nuova Rivista Storica 91 (2007): 145–172. ——, “La peur de la Révolution française à Malte”, Annales historiques de la Révolution française 341 (2005): 53–68. ——, “Malta, Napoli e la Santa Sede nella seconda metà del ’700”, Mediterranea. Ricerche Storiche 12 (2008): 173–188. ——, “Non Gode l’Immunità Ecclesiastica: Sanctuary in Malta, c.1740–1828”, European History Quarterly 38 (2008): 227–243. ——, “Parish Priest and Community in 18th century Malta: Patterns of Conflict”, Journal of Early Modern History 9 (2005): 329–347. ——, Society and the Inquisition in Early Modern Malta (Malta: 2001) ——, “The Financial Condition of Parish Priests in Late Eighteenth-Century Malta”, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53 (2002): 93–107. ——, The Roman Inquisition in Enlightened Malta (Malta: 2000). Contin, Tomaso A., Riflessioni sopra la Bolla In Coena Domini (Venice: 1769). Dalli, Charles, “Medieval Communal Organisation in an Insular Context: Approaching the Maltese Universitas”, in Manduca, John (ed.), The Making and Unmaking of the Maltese Universitas (Malta: 1993), 1–12. Damming, Enrico, Il Movimento Giansenista a Roma nella Seconda Metà del Secolo XVIII (Vatican City: 1945). De Bono, Paolo, Sommario della Storia della Legislazione in Malta (Malta: 1897). Dickson, P. G. M., “Joseph II’s Reshaping of the Austrian Church”, The Historical Journal 36 (1993): 89–114. Donati, Claudio, “Dalla ‘regolato devozione’ al ‘giuseppinismo’ nell’Italia del Settecento”, in Rosa, Mario (ed.), Cattolicesimo e Lumi nel Settecento Italiano, (Rome: 1981), 77–98. Doyle, William, Jansenism. Catholic Resistance to Authority from the Reformation to the French Revolution (London: 2000). Engel, Claire-Èliane, Histoire de l’Ordre de Malte (Geneva: 1968). Fassina, Michele (ed.), Corrispondenzi Diplomatiche Veneziani da Napoli. Relazioni (Rome: 1992). Fiteni, F., Giornale Cattolico (Malta: 1841). Galasso, G., “Il Pensiero Religioso di Antonio Genovesi”, Rivista Storica Italiana 82 (1970): 800–823.


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Garufi, G. A., Fatti e Personaggi dell’Inquisizione in Sicilia (Palermo: 1978). Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 1: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: 1966). Giannini, Massimo Carlo, “Tra politica, fiscalità e religione: Filippo II di Spagna e la pubblicazione della bolla: ‘In Coena Domini’ (1567–1570),” Annali dell’Istituto Storico italo-germanico in Trento 23 (1997): 83–152. Golden, Richard M., “Jean Rousse, Religious Frondeur”, French Historical Studies 12 4 (1982): 461–485. Gonzi, Giovanni, “L’Espulsione dei Gesuiti dai Ducati Parmensi”, Aurea Parma 50 (1966): 154–168; 51 (1967): 3–62. Hazard, Paul, La Crise de la Conscience Européenne, 1680–1715 (Paris: 1961; orig.: 1935). Herr, Richard, The Eighteenth Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton, New Jersey, 1969). Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (1651; repr. London: 1914). Janus [i.e. Döllinger, Ignaz von), The Pope and the Council (London: 1869). Jemolo, A. C., “Il Giansenismo Italiano”, Rivista Storica Italiana 40 (1923): 268–284. Johnson, Trevor, “Trionfi of the Holy Dead: The Relic Festivals of Baroque Bavaria”, in Friedrich, Karin (ed.), Festive Culture in Germany and Europe from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (Lampeter: 2000), 31–56. La Mantia, Vito, Origine e Vicende dell’Inquisizione in Sicilia (Palermo: 1977). Leanza, P. A., I Gesuiti in Malta al Tempo dei Cavalieri Gerosolimitani (Malta: 1934). Lehner, Ulrich L. “Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim and his Febronius,” in Church History and Religious Culture 88 (2008), 93–121. —— (ed.), Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim—Justinus Febronius Abbreviatus Et Emendatus (1777) (Nordhausen: 2008). Luttrell, Anthony, “The Skull of the Blessed Gérard”, in Azzopardi, John (ed.), The Order’s Legacy in Malta (Malta: 1989), 45. Mallia, F., Il-Fratellanza tas-SS.Mu Sagrament fil-Parrocca ta’ S. M. tal-Portu Salvu il-Belt, 1575–1975 [The Confraternity of the Most Holy Sacrament at the Parish of Portu Salvu, Valletta, 1575–1975] (Malta: 1975). Maxwell, K., Pombal: Paradox of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Eng.: 1995). Melton, James Van Horn, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria (Cambridge, Eng.: 1988). Menozzi, Daniele, “Aufklaerung delle Chiese e ‘Chrétiens Éclairés’. In margine ai Lavori della Terza Sezione del Congresso C.I.H.E.C. di Varsavia”, Critica Storica 1 (1979): 150–161. ——, “Tra riforma e restaurazione. Dalla crisi della società cristiana al mito della cristianità medievale (1758–1848)”, in Chittoli, Giorgio and Miccoli, Giovanni (eds.), La Chiesa e il potere politico dal Medioevo all’età contemporanea (Turin: 1986), 767–806. Mifsud, A., “L’Espulsione dei Gesuiti da Malta nel 1768 e le loro Temporalità”, Archivum Melitense 2 (1913), 113–166. Miller, Samuel J., Portugal and Rome c. 1748–1830. An Aspect of the Catholic Enlightenment (Rome: 1978). ——, “Portugal and Utrecht: A Phase of the Catholic Enlightenment”, The Catholic Historical Review, vol. 63 (1977): 225–248. Mincuzzi, Rosa, Bernardo Tanucci ministro di Ferdinando di Borbone, 1759–1776 (Bari: 1967). Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws vol. 2, trans. Thomas Nugent (New York: 1949). Mora, Alba (ed.), Un Borbone tra Parma e l’Europa: don Ferdinando e il suo tempo, 1751–1802 (Reggio Emilia: 2005). Muratori, Ludovico Antonio, Della Pubblica Felicità, Oggetto de’ Buoni Principi (Lucca: 1749).

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CATHOLICISM AND ENLIGHTENMENT IN POLAND-LITHUANIA Richard Butterwick Interest in a “Catholic Enlightenment” among Polish ecclesiastical and intellectual historians dates from the Second Vatican Council.1 Research has been concentrated in two main areas. The first encompasses the reform of the schools and seminaries run by some of the religious orders, and the further development of those reforms under the Commission for National Education after 1773. The second has focused on bishops’ efforts to improve the pastoral care of souls. Significantly fewer historians have examined the religious and confessional aspects of state policy and public discourse. Overall, the attention devoted to the “Catholic Enlightenment” in Poland-Lithuania falls behind that conducted on the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy. The reasons for this gap deserve an excursus, before we survey the field. 1. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: a Confessional Noble Republic The first point is simply to emphasize the otherness of the past. The Commonwealth of the Two Nations, Polish and Lithuanian (Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodów, Polskiego i Litewskiego), was founded in 1569 by the Union of Lublin between the Polish Crown (Corona Regni Poloniæ) and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It was partitioned for the third and final time in 1795. It differed greatly from the independent Polish and Lithuanian states reborn in 1918, and still more from those that reclaimed their sovereignty in 1989 and 1991.2 On the eve of the First Partition in 1772, the territory of the Commonwealth

1

Georg Schwaiger, “Oświecenie a katolicyzm”, Concilium (1966/67): 373–382. Robert Frost, “Ordering the Kaleidoscope: The Construction of Identities in the Lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth since 1569”, in Len Scales and Oliver Zimmer (eds.), Power and the Nation in European History (Cambridge: 2005), 212–231. 2

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encompassed most of modern Latvia, almost all of modern Lithuania, all of modern Belarus, half of modern Ukraine, and two thirds of modern Poland. The wider population of about fourteen million included Poles, Ruthenes, Lithuanians, Jews, Germans, Latvians, Armenians, Tatars, and Scots: Catholics, Orthodox, Old Believers, Calvinists, Lutherans, Hasidists, Frankists, and Muslims. Just under half habitually spoke a form of Polish. Just over half were Roman Catholics of the Latin rite, while a further third were, however nominally, Catholics of the Ruthenian rite (which was often called the Uniate Church).3 The Commonwealth was dominated by its nobility (szlachta), which made up about seven per cent of the population.4 Much of the nobles’ economic, social, and cultural hegemony endured the rule of the partitioning monarchies, before being destroyed by Communism in stages between 1918 and 1948. The nobles considered themselves, and themselves alone, to constitute the Polish nation, although many also considered themselves Lithuanians, or took pride in their Ruthenian descent. They spoke (and about half could read) a Latinized form of Polish.5 They commonly referred to the Commonwealth as a whole as “Poland”.6 At the time of the Union of Lublin, a substantial minority of nobles, drawn disproportionately from the elite, had adhered to the reformed confessions, while in the eastern territories many, perhaps most, nobles still adhered to Orthodoxy. The Confederacy of Warsaw, formed by nobles to safeguard the Commonwealth during the first interregnum of 1572–1573, declared that its members, although “dissidentes de religione”, would neither spill blood, nor punish each other by imprisonment, exile, or confiscation of property on account of religion.7 3 Józef Andrzej Gierowski, “Przestrzeń etnograficzno-geograficzna Rzeczypospolitej Polsko-Litewskiej”, in Stanisław Wilk (ed.), Chrześcijaństwo w dialogu kultur na ziemiach Rzeczypospolitej (Lublin: 2003), 33–52. 4 Emanuel Rostworowski, “Ilu było w Rzeczypospolitej obywateli szlachty?”, Kwartalnik Historyczny, 94:3 (1987), 3–40. 5 See Robert I. Frost, “The Nobility of Poland-Lithuania, 1569–1795”, in Hamish M. Scott (ed.), The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, vol. 2, Northern, Central and Eastern Europe (Harlow: 1995), 183–222. 6 So did foreigners: “Poland-Lithuania” is a twentieth-century neologism, intended to distinguish between modern Poland and old “Poland”. To avoid anachronism, all place names in the Commonwealth are given in Polish, except for Warsaw, Cracow, and the largely Germanophone city of Danzig (Gdańsk). After 1686 the city of Kiev (Kyiv) lay outside the Commonwealth and the Catholic dioceses of that name. 7 The text and a translation may be found in M. B. Biskupski and James S. Pula (eds.), Polish Democratic Thought from the Renaissance to the Great Emigration: Essays

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 299 Thereafter every king swore to maintain religious peace as a condition of his election. By the early eighteenth century, however, all but a few hundred families were Catholics of the Latin rite. Although Catherine the Great coerced the Commonwealth into readmitting non-Catholic nobles to the legislature in 1767–1768, the dominance of Catholics in public life was both obvious and unalterable. For all of what would much later be called its ethnic diversity, the Commonwealth was both Catholic and Polish, but not in the ways imagined by later generations of Romantics and nationalists. The eighteenth-century Commonwealth could be called a confessional noble republic.8 Across early modern Europe, monarchies, nobilities, and churches were locked into an embrace, but nowhere was the balance of political, economic, and cultural power so weighted towards the nobility as in Poland-Lithuania. Far more has been written on the restrictions imposed by the nobles on their monarch than on the szlachta’s relationship with the Roman Catholic Church. Although the Church owned perhaps one tenth of the land in the Commonwealth (a similar proportion to France, but far less than in Bohemia or Bavaria) the clergy was neither numerous nor wealthy by European standards. The Commonwealth had only seventeen bishops of the Latin rite and eight of the Ruthenian rite. At most, eight of the former and the Uniate metropolitan archbishop of Kiev had the wherewithal to live as magnates, with only the bishop of Cracow ranking among the richest men in the land. He drew as much as one million Polish złotys per annum, equivalent to 55,556 Roman ducats. The annual revenues of the other nine Latin bishoprics probably did not exceed 90,000 złotys (5000 ducats). The dioceses were also hugely unequal in population and parishes.9 Even in the Latin rite, most clergymen were indigent. 2000 złotys (111 ducats) was regarded as a modest but respectable annual income. and Documents (Boulder, CO: 1990), 131–136. A confederacy was a league of nobles, formed in a national emergency, such as an interregnum. 8 On “confessionalization”, see Wolfgang Reinhard, “Was ist katholische Konfessionalisierung?”, in Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling (eds.), Die katholische Konfessionalisierung (Münster: 1995), 419–452. In this context, see Karin Friedrich, “Polish-Lithuanian Political Thought, 1450–1700”, in Howell Lloyd et al. (eds.), History of European Political Thought, 1450–1700 (New Haven, CT: 2007), 435–445, and Richard Butterwick, “Deconfessionalization? The Policy of the Polish Revolution towards Ruthenia, 1788–1792”, Central Europe 6 (2008): 92–97. 9 Stanisław Litak, Od Reformacji do Oświecenia. Kościół katolicki w Polsce nowożytnej (Lublin: 1994), 146–182.

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Most parish priests had less. Plum benefices were scarce and keenly contested; most parish work was onerous and poorly rewarded. In 1772 the Commonwealth contained 3995 parishes and 2157 filial churches in the Latin rite. Around Cracow and Poznań, most parishes were 30 to 70 square kilometres in size. They were roughly double that in Mazovia, Podlasia, and the palatinate of Lublin, and four times that in the western parts of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Volhynia, and Podolia. Further east, Latin parishes covered thousands of square kilometres. Here the great majority of the population was Uniate, and in places, Orthodox.10 On the eve of the First Partition and the suppression of the Jesuits, about two thirds of the clergy were regular. In 1772–1773 the papal nuncio, Giuseppe Garampi, counted 14,601 monks in 995 houses and 3211 nuns in 152 houses. The best estimate for the number of secular clergy is 8400. Since 1700 the number of male houses had risen by 48 per cent and the number of female houses by 40 per cent. The religious clergy had grown in proportion. Moreover, the growth had accelerated in the middle decades of the century. Truly, the orders were at “at the brim of prosperity”.11 Most of the growth had come in the teaching and mendicant orders. More than half of the regular clergy were mendicant friars. In comparison with southern Germany the abbeys of the true monastic orders and regular canons were few in number and modestly endowed.12 Spokesmen for the clergy did not hesitate to point all this out; just as predictably they were answered by tales of clerical sloth and luxury. By the end of the seventeenth century, the clergy was being taxed more heavily than the lay nobility, the reverse of the position a century earlier. The nobility had also imposed tight restrictions on mortmain in 1635—at a time when the “Counter-Reformation” was supposedly in full cry. The szlachta guarded its immunity from the execution of the verdicts of ecclesiastical courts, an immunity won in 1555, shortly before the highwater mark of the Reformation. Tithes were often bitterly contested or in arrears, while the nobility also reduced the interest

10 Ibid., 153–55. Stanisław Litak, Kościół łaciński w Rzeczypospolitej około 1772 roku, (Lublin: 1996), 55–67. Idem, Parafie w Rzeczypospolitej w XVI–XVIII wieku. Struktura, funkcje społeczno-religijne i edukacyjne (Lublin: 2004), 45, 56–68. 11 The title of part 1 of Derek Beales, Prosperity and Plunder: European Catholic Monasteries in the Age of Revolution, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: 2003). 12 Litak, Od Reformacji do Oświecenia, 183–189.

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 301 payable on capital sums, which had been located on noble estates and bequeathed to the Church (wyderkafy).13 Another stock argument for clerical apologists was that the Church propped up noble families. Nobles monopolized bishoprics, prelatures, and canonries. Many Latin-rite bishops were the sons of magnates, but men of parts from obscure families could ascend the summits. Konstanty Szaniawski (1668–1732), a scion of the notoriously poor szlachta of the Łuków district, ended his career as bishop of Cracow. Research on the social origins of the parish clergy reveals regional variations. Districts inhabited by large numbers of petty szlachta had an overwhelmingly noble parish clergy. In the richer lands around Cracow and Poznań, a significant proportion of parish priests were of burgher origin. The mountainous terrain of the far south contained the most priests hailing from the peasantry. The situation in the east is less well known. But as there were few Latin parishes, the proportion of nobles must have been high. The rising noble population in the eighteenth century led to increasing numbers of noble plebani (the pleban was the parish priest, the equivalent of the curé, parocco, or Pfarrer). But most of them came from poor families. Plebeians typically rose no higher than wikariusz (an assistant or deputy priest, the equivalent of a vicaire, vicario, or Kooperator).14 Among the regulars, commoners were more numerous, although not among the Jesuits. Talented burghers might even become priors or claustral abbots (the governors of those abbeys where the bulk of the revenues went to a commendator, who was usually a prelate in royal service or a less well endowed bishop). In general the noble-born were more numerous in the female than the male orders, a reflection of the much smaller number of nuns, the requirement in most orders of a dowry, the economic interests of noble families with several daughters, and also of expectations of female piety.15 In the eastern territories, some noble families would baptize one or more sons into the Ruthenian rite. They could rise in the sole religious

13 See Janusz Tazbir, “Staropolski antyklerykalizm”, Kwartalnik Historyczny 109 (2002): 13–22; Urszula Augustyniak, “Wzajemne pretensje szlachty i duchowieństwa katolickiego w związku z ‘compositio inter status’ w latach trzydziestych XVII w.”, Kwartalnik Historyczny 114/4 (2007): 43–59. 14 Litak, Parafie, 181–187. 15 Id., “Duchowieństwo polskie w okresie Oświecenia”, Wiek Oświecenia 5 (1988): 93–94. Małgorzata Borkowska, Panny siostry w świecie sarmackim, (Warsaw: 2002), 13–41.

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order of Eastern Christianity, the Basilians (who considered themselves a most superior ordo praelaticus) and thence be elevated to the Uniate episcopate. The Uniate parish clergy was largely hereditary, as most priests married, but otherwise its social status differed little from the Ruthene peasantry.16 In the Commonwealth’s institutions, the position of the Catholic Church was weak, compared to the Holy Roman Empire or France. The clergy was not the first estate. Three estates constituted the Sejm (diet or parliament): the king, the senate, and the knighthood, whose delegates sat in the chamber of envoys. Only the seventeen bishops of the Latin rite sat in the senate: about a tenth of its complement. Some titled themselves princes, but none, save the prince-bishop of Warmia, had a substantial secular jurisdiction to compare with those of the Reich. The Commonwealth’s abbots had no role comparable to that of their German counterparts. In the Polish Crown one of the lesser bishops was by turns the chancellor or vice-chancellor, the tenure of the offices alternating with the laity. Clergymen, usually prelates tipped for the episcopate, were also appointed to dignities such as the referendary (referendarz), secretary (sekretarz), and scribe (pisarz), whose functions were to assist the chancellors. In the Grand Duchy of Lithuania the principal officers were all laymen. Canons and prelates were elected by their chapters as deputies (deputaci) or judges in the supreme courts of appeal, the tribunals of the Polish Crown and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The strength of the Catholic Church was more cultural than institutional. The clergy educated the great majority of the nobility. The Society of Jesus in some ways exercised more influence in PolandLithuania than anywhere else in Europe. One eighth of the regular clergy (of both sexes) were Jesuits on the eve of their suppression, compared to the mid-eighteenth-century European average of one in eighteen. The Jesuits ran 66 colleges, whereas their nearest competitors, the Piarists, ran 27.17 The ablest pupils were encouraged to stay on for the final classes of philosophy and theology, and to become Jesuits themselves. For most nobles Latin grammar and rhetoric sufficed

16

See Ludomir Bieńkowski, ‘Organizacja kościoła wschodniego w Polsce’, in Jerzy Kłoczowski (ed.), Kościoł w Polsce, vol. 2, Wiek XVI–XVIII (Cracow: 1969), 781– 1049. 17 Litak, Od Reformacji do Oświecenia, 189. Beales, Prosperity and Plunder, 2; 147.

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 303 to cut a figure at a gala, law court, or sejmik (dietine).18 Having first arrived in 1565, by the early seventeenth century the Society of Jesus had adapted to the szlachta’s republican values.19 Suitable edification could be found in the annals of republican Rome. The Catholic Church provided the nobles with the theatre and rites for baroque piety. The Marian cult flourished. Most pilgrimages centred on pictures of the Madonna, believed to be miraculous channels of Divine grace. These pictures were adorned with crowns and bejewelled silver raiments in ceremonies that attracted tens of thousands. The greatest of these “coronations” took place at the Pauline monastery at Częstochowa in 1717, following decades of wars and plagues that had drained the strength from the Commonwealth. The Church encouraged nobles to believe that their tolerance of heresy had provoked Divine wrath. Willingness to defend Faith and Fatherland was symbolized by gestures such as the drawing of sabres during the reading of the Gospel during Mass. However, no events demonstrated the symbiosis of Catholic worship and noble self-affirmation as spectacularly as funerals. For magnates they typically included extravagant verbal and visual encomia, and were accompanied by libations and banquets that could last for several weeks.20 The most magnificent baroque architecture was erected by the religious clergy, usually as a result of bequests by magnates. Such men and women wished to build monuments to themselves on earth, while speeding their souls’ passage through purgatory. These diverse foundations testify to the plurality within post-Tridentine Catholicism, which has perhaps been underplayed in the Jesuit-centred historiography of the “Counter-Reformation” in Poland-Lithuania.21

18 A local assembly of the nobility. Some sejmiks elected envoys to the sejm and deputies to the tribunals. 19 Stanisław Bednarski, Upadek i odrodzenie szkół jezuickich w Polsce, 2nd ed. (Cracow: 2003), 24–25. 20 Andrzej Józef Baranowski, Koronacje wizerunków maryjnych w czasach baroku. Zjawisko kulturowe i artystyczne (Warsaw: 2003); Juliusz Antoni Chróścicki, Pompa funebris. Z dziejów kultury staropolskiej (Warsaw: 1979). 21 But now see Piotr Stolarski, “Dominican-Jesuit Rivalry and the Politics of Catholic Renewal in Poland, 1564–1648”, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, forthcoming.

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A persistent feature of the Polish historiography of the relationship between Catholicism and Enlightenment has been a gulf between what might be called “secularist” and Catholic schools. The most important “secularist” was Władysław Smoleński (1851–1926), a scientifically-minded adherent of a “positivist” approach to the Polish nation’s social and economic problems (as opposed to those who sought solace in Romanticism and risings). He posited an “intellectual revolution” in the eighteenth century, in which the forces of secularizing rationalism battled those of a superstitious “Catholic reaction”.22 Before the Second Vatican Council, most Catholic historians also interpreted the period as a struggle between light and darkness, but for them the true light shone from Catholicism, while the torch of the so-called “philosophers” brought smoke and shadow.23 The advent of Communist rule in 1944–1948 made existing barriers between historians employed at state universities and research institutes and those associated with the Catholic University of Lublin (KUL, founded in 1918), almost impassable. For the former, many of them believing and practising Catholics, the choice lay between avoiding research topics connected with the Roman Catholic Church and writing the kind of vulgar-Marxist anti-clerical propaganda desired by the Communist regime.24 Historians of education tended to be more prone to bow to such pressure, but their “secularist” interpretations differed little from those written before the Second World War.25 Most openly Catholic historians withdrew into their shell. At KUL, with few exceptions, narrowly focused doctoral and habilitational dissertations

22

Władysław Smoleński, Przewrót umysłowy w Polsce wieku XVIII. Studia historyczne [1891], 4th ed. (Warsaw: 1979). 23 E.g. Józef Pelczar, Zarys dziejów kaznodziejstwa w Kościele katolickim, vol. 2, Kaznodzieje polscy (Cracow: 1896). 24 Such as Łukasz Kurdybacha, Dzieje Kodeksu Andrzeja Zamoyskiego (Warsaw: 1951). 25 E.g. Stanisław Tync (ed.), Komisja Edukacji Narodowej (Pisma Komisji i o Komisji). Wybór źródeł (Wrocław: 1954); Kamilla Mrozowska, Walka o nauczycieli świeckich w dobie Komisji Edukacji Narodowej na terenie Korony (Wrocław: 1956). Cf. Władysław Smoleński, “Żywioły zachowawcze i Komisya Edukacyjna”, in Idem, Pisma Historyczne, vol. 2, (Cracow: 1901), 95–206; Stanisław Kot, Komisya Edukacyi Narodowej 1773–1794 (Cracow: 1923).

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 305 were accompanied by platitudinous syntheses.26 Only in the 1980s, in an atmosphere transformed by John Paul II’s pilgrimages to his homeland and “Solidarity”, were significant bridges built between the two camps.27 Even then, by no means all historians crossed those bridges. The two decades since Poland’s recovery of sovereignty in 1989 have exacerbated tensions between “secularist” and “Catholic” ideologues, but they have also brought opportunities for scholars employed in state institutions to publish on ecclesiastical and religious topics.28 Although historians working at Catholic institutions have produced much impressive research on the eighteenth century, those with a positive slant on a “Catholic Enlightenment” have been in the minority. The chief reasons may be sought in the Church’s response to pressure from the Communist-ruled state. By and large, it closed ranks under the leadership of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński (1901–1981). Most of the Polish clergy treated the reformist impulse associated with Vatican II with caution. Wyszyński’s espousal of a rural and Marian model of piety could not have been further from a quest for intellectual novelties. A justifiable fear of the infiltration, blackmail, and seduction of the Catholic clergy and laity by the Communist regime only entrenched his convictions. These were expressed in his “theology of the nation”: a reading of history in terms of the special relationship of the Polish nation with the Holiest Virgin Mary (proclaimed “Queen of Poland” in 1656) in heaven, and with the one true Holy, Apostolic, and Roman Catholic Church on earth.29 It was a vision that owed much to one of his predecessors as primate, Jan Paweł Woronicz (1757–1829).

26 Litak, Od Reformacji do Oświecenia, and Jerzy Kłoczowski, Dzieje Chrześcijaństwa polskiego, 2 vols. (Paris: 1987–1991), trans. as A History of Polish Christianity (Cambridge: 2000), are among the exceptions. 27 For example at a conference held in Lille in 1981, whose proceedings were published as Les Contacts religieux franco-polonais du moyen age à nos jours. Relations, influences, images d’un pays vu par l’autre (Paris: 1985). Ch. 3, “L’Ere des lumières. Mutations religieuses et ruptures politiques” includes: Zofia Libiszowska, “L’Eglise et les lumières en Pologne au XVIIIe siècle”, 199–203; and Ludomir Bieńkowski, “Le Siècle des lumières Catholiques en Pologne”, 203–210. See also “Débats” and “Discussion”, 259–268. 28 For example in Teresa Kostkiewiczowa (ed.), Motywy religijne w twórczości pisarzy polskiego Oświecenia (Lublin: 1995), vol. 6 of Stefan Sawicki (ed.), Religijne Tradycje Literatury Polskiej. The series was planned and published by KUL, but this volume was dominated by state-employed scholars. 29 See Jerzy Lewandowski, Naród w nauczaniu kardynała Stefana Wyszyńskiego, 2nd ed. (Warsaw: 1989).

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Europe’s Catholics in the nineteenth century tended to view the “Age of Enlightenment” through the prism of French Revolutionary dechristianization. The attitudes of Polish Catholics were complicated by their nation’s loss of statehood in 1795. The hopes placed in the French as potential liberators from foreign rule made condemnations of the Napoleonic regime problematic. At the same time, prominent preachers and poets interpreted the partitions as an expression of divine wrath, visited on a sinful nation. The sins in question were those of the so-called “enlightened age”. The key voice in this discourse belonged to Woronicz. He had first articulated a covenantal view of the nation’s history when writing speeches and pastoral letters for bishops in the early 1790s. Many government policies in the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw (1807–1813) were antithetical to the interests and doctrine of the Church, but Woronicz refrained from opposition to that regime in the hope that Napoleon might restore an independent Poland in her former borders. Later, as bishop of Cracow and finally as archbishop of Warsaw, he intoned the prayers of national expiation.30 The core of these attitudes was transmitted to posterity by the national bard, Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855). His elegiac tribute to his childhood in the Lithuanian countryside, Pan Tadeusz, was set in 1811–1812. On the one hand, the local szlachta have heard tales of French godlessness. They are reassured that the emperor is an exemplary Catholic on good terms with the pope (!) by a mysterious Bernardine friar. Father Robak is a battle-hardened emissary for the Napoleonic and Polish cause. Napoleon himself is treated in messianic terms: “God is with Napoleon, and Napoleon is with us”. On the other hand, the chief dignitary of the locality ironically recalls the fashions of the 1770s and 1780s, before concluding: Była to maskarada, zapustna swawola, Po której miał przyjść wielki post—niewola! It was a carnival of knavery, Soon followed by a Lent of slavery.31

30

Zofia Rejman, “Tematyka religijna w twórczości Jana Pawła Woronicza”, in Motywy religijne, 215–240. 31 Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz [1834], trans. Kenneth R. MacKenzie, 5th ed. (London: 2002), lib. 4, 166–169, lib. 11, 486–487, lib. 1, 24–25.

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 307 The implications of a covenantal vision of the Polish nation for the reputation of the “enlightened age” are thus distilled into an easily remembered couplet. In sum, in Poland (and also in modern Lithuania)32 the idea of a “Catholic Enlightenment” has had to scale obstacles the like of which have not been encountered in Germany or Austria. A case in point are the few Polish historians who have worked on the impact of “Josephinism” on the Church in Galicia (the part of Poland that fell to the Habsburgs in 1772). The hostility to “Enlightenment” common to most Polish ecclesiastical historians has been compounded by the perceived “Germanizing” character of the Theresian and Josephine reforms.33 3. Definitions and Periodization Having inspected the underlying canvas and removed most of the golden-brown varnish so beloved of nineteenth-century tastes, we may be startled by the newly revealed colours and details. But with which conceptual framework should we analyse the picture? The trouble with “Catholic Enlightenment” is that it compresses a spectrum of positions. It may help to observe that semantically, “enlightened Catholicism” is one species of the Catholic genus, whereas “Catholic Enlightenment” conveys the reverse. The substance of “enlightened Catholicism” is Catholicism; that of “Catholic Enlightenment” is Enlightenment. I contend that much that has been written about “Catholic Enlightenment” would be better classified under “enlightened Catholicism”.34 The question hinges on a philosophical and theological problem—whether

32 Under the Soviet regime such research was impossible. The trail has been blazed by Eligijus Raila, “Vilniaus vyskupas Ignotas Masalskis ir katališka apšvieta: edukacijos ir pastoracijos simbiozė”, in Kultūros istorijos tyrenėjimai, vol. 3 (Vilnius: 1997), 92–146. 33 The classic work is Władysław Chotkowski, Historya polityczna Kościoła w Galicyi za rządów Marii Teresy. Kościól w Galicyi 1772–1780, 2 vols. (Cracow: 1909), supplemented by his polemical Grabieże kościelne w Galicyi, vol. 1 (Cracow: 1919). In the same tradition is Jacek Krętosz, Archidiecezja lwowska obrządku łacińskiego w okresie józefinizmu (1772–1815) (Katowice: 1996). Cf. Horst Glassl, Das österreichische Einrichtungswerk in Galizien (1772–1790) (Wiesbaden: 1975). 34 This argument was first presented in Richard Butterwick, “Between Anti-Enlightenment and Enlightened Catholicism: Provincial Preachers in Late Eighteenth-Century Poland-Lithuania”, in Richard Butterwick, Simon Davies, and Gabriel Sánchez Espinosa (eds.), Peripheries of the Enlightenment, Studies on Voltaire & the Eighteenth Century 2008:1 (Oxford; 2008), 201–228.

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Catholicism was or was not an integral part of the Enlightenment. The working assumption here is that it was not, and that the chief sources of the Enlightenment derive from the anthropocentric and neo-pagan aspects of the Renaissance and the anti-Trinitarian elements of the Protestant Reformation. But it does not follow that compromise or alliance between Catholicism and “enlightenment” was impossible. Attempts to cleanse the Catholic Church of “superstitious” practices, to encourage Christian charity without recourse to the terror of fire and brimstone, to understand God’s creation better through scientific enquiry, and to appropriate developments in philosophy (philosophia recentiorum) using revelation to distinguish between helpful and harmful ideas, are best described as “enlightened Catholicism”. Such a stance was personified by the Piarist, Stanisław Konarski (1700–1773).35 If, on the other hand, the principles of “the Enlightenment” take first place, and the Catholic Church is seen chiefly as means to their dissemination and implementation; if the context is that of a Catholic country, and if the proponents are Catholic clergy or practising laity, then it is better to speak of a “Catholic Enlightenment”. This involves an avoidance of such Christian and Catholic doctrines as the Incarnation, the Redemption, and mediation, which are particularly difficult to reconcile with a rational understanding of the universe. Such a stance was epitomized by Reverend Hugo Kołłątaj (1750–1812), the theologically unorthodox visitor and rector of Cracow University in 1777–1786. Kołłątaj briefly achieved high office in 1791–1792, when he stood on the verge of implementing some of his enlightened vision for Poland. It was a vision that assigned the clergy a prominent role.36

35 Here I endorse the usage of Irena Stasiewicz-Jasiukowa, “Der aufgeklärte Katholizismus im Polen der Frühaufklärung”, in Erich Donnert (ed.), Europa in der Frühen Neuzeit. Festschrift für Günter Mühlpfordt, vol. 3 (Weimar, Cologne, and Vienna: 1997), 555–564, as opposed to that of Stanisław Janeczek, Oświecenie chrześcijańskie. Z dziejów polskiej kultury filozoficznej (Lublin: 1994) and others. For another exemplar of a stance better characterized as “enlightened Catholicism”, see Mark O’Connor, “Oświecenie katolickie i Marcin Poczobut SJ”, in Ludwik Grzebień and Stanisław Obirek (eds.), Jezuici a kultura polska (Cracow: 1993), 41–49. 36 Emanuel Rostworowski, “Ksiądz pleban Kołłątaj”, in Barbara Grochulska et al. (eds.), Wiek XIX. Prace ofiarowane Stefanowi Kieniewiczowi w 60 rocznicę urodzin (Warsaw: 1967), 49–63.

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 309 If “the Enlightenment” is considered a foreign seed planted in Catholic Polish soil, then we have “the Enlightenment in Catholic Poland”.37 Many foes and some friends of “the enlightened eighteenth century” treated such “enlightenment” as an import, usually from France. Some still do. Those few whose “enlightened” principles led them to reject much of Catholic doctrine, mock or criticize the Church from such positions, and strive to diminish its political and social influence, may be considered representatives of an “Anti-Catholic Enlightenment”. An example of such a position is Stanisław Kostka Potocki (1755–1821), an aristocratic connoisseur of the arts who kept his libertine and anticlerical views largely private, until he came to direct educational and confessional affairs in the Duchy of Warsaw and the tsarist Kingdom of Poland.38 “Counter-Enlightenment” implies not only an utter rejection of “Enlightenment”, but the building of an alternative to it—for example in revivals of medievalism, monasticism, mysticism, and Mariology. “Anti-Enlightenment” is a less problematic term, at least until the Napoleonic era. It simply means some degree of opposition to an age that considered itself “enlightened”. It can be argued that critics of the “enlightened eighteenth century” established a coherent image of a “philosophic”, rationalist, sceptical, godless, and anti-clerical “enlightened age” before “the Enlightenment” became self-conscious.39 Moreover, if Enlightenment in Poland-Lithuania was partially of French provenance, so was Anti-Enlightenment. In the 1770s and 1780s, far more religious than secular work was translated from French, with an increasing proportion of refutations.40 It was possible to attack anti-Catholic manifestations of Enlightenment in an “enlightened” manner—formulated within the linguistic and mental horizons of the age. Secular learning, rational and utilitarian arguments, and quotations from the era’s favourite philosophers 37 Cf. Harm Klueting (ed.), Katholische Aufklärung—Aufklärung im katholischen Deutschland (Hamburg: 1993). 38 Barbara Grochulska, “Potocki, Stanisław Kostka”, PSB, vol. 28 (Wrocław: 1984– 1985), 158–170. On the philosophically radical adherents of the Enlightenment in Poland-Lithuania, see Jerzy Snopek, Objawienie i oświecenie. Z dziejów libertynizmu w Polsce (Wrocław: 1986), and Smoleński, Przewrót umysłowy, 167–170, 177–194. 39 See Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French CounterEnlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York: 2001), and Didier Masseau, Les Ennemis des philosophes. L’Antiphilosophie au siècle des lumières (Paris: 2000). 40 Emanuel Rostworowski, “Les Auteurs de la littérature religieuse française traduite en Pologne au XVIIIe siècle”, in Les Contacts religieux, 211–214.

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involved fighting the Church’s cause on the territory of the foe. “Catholic Enlightenment” and “Anti-Enlightenment” cannot overlap; “enlightened Catholicism” and “Anti-Enlightenment” can, and so “enlightened Anti-Enlightenment” is not a contradiction in terms. This stance is represented by Reverend Wojciech Skarszewski (1742– 1827), a prolific pamphleteer who entered the episcopate as bishop of Chełm and Lublin in 1790 and ended his controversial career as archbishop of Warsaw.41 However, one price to be paid for adopting this polemical position was that secular discourses of “enlightenment” might by degrees permeate one’s theology. Beginning in the mid-1760s, these discourses swiftly transformed the meaning of the word “enlightenment” (oświecenie) from a metaphor of divine revelation and grace into a synonym for secular learning and education. But “enlightenment” and religion continued to be allied to each other, more frequently than they were cast in mutual opposition, into the early nineteenth century.42 These four stances suggest a process of estrangement between Catholicism and “Enlightenment”, and between clergy and laity. They suggest a periodization in 1740–1773, 1773–1794 and 1795–1820. First, and later by at least a generation than in western Europe, an “early Enlightenment”, mostly filtered through “enlightened Catholicism”, would begin with the first reformed Piarist school and end with the First Partition, Konarski’s death, and the suppression of the Jesuits. Second, a “high Enlightenment”, in which the forces of “enlightened Catholicism” and “Catholic Enlightenment” generally held the upper hand against “anti-Catholic Enlightenment”, would coincide exactly with the existence of the Commission for National Education. Third, a “late Enlightenment” would encompass the post-Partition trauma, the expansion of education in the partitioning monarchies, and acrimonious clashes between Polish statelets and the Catholic clergy, embodying the forces of “Anti-Catholic Enlightenment” and “Anti-Enlightenment”. It would end with Tsar Alexander I’s dismissal of Stanisław Kostka Potocki at the behest of the episcopate. The process would pivot in the years 1788–1794, spanning the Four Years’ Sejm (1788-92) and the insurrection led by Tadeusz Kościuszko 41

Martyna Deszczyńska and Ewa Zielińska, “Skarszewski, Wojciech”, PSB, vol. 38 (Warsaw and Cracow: 1997), 50–61. 42 Richard Butterwick, “What is Enlightenment (Oświecenie)? Some Polish Answers, 1765–1820”, Central Europe 3 (2005): 19–37.

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 311 (1746–1817), when a rupture between Church and state was narrowly avoided. The Church’s participation in the dramatic spasms and final demise of the Commonwealth allowed the contemporary and subsequent controversies to be written out of the nation-building myth to which Wyszyński gave the fullest expression.43 These contours smooth out varied terrain. Signs of the Enlightenment can be found in the Commonwealth before 1740 (although most of them were filtered through Germanophone Protestantism). The “early Enlightenment” was also affected by the personal union of the Commonwealth with the electorate of Saxony, and the upheavals that followed. 4. The Early Enlightenment and the Religious Orders, c. 1740–1773 The role of Saxony, with its glittering court in Dresden, as a conduit for the ideas and culture of western Europe to Poland-Lithuania has long been recognized. Between 1697 and 1763 two electors of Saxony reigned in the Commonwealth as Augustus II (1670–1733) and Augustus III (1696–1763). The Catholic dimension of these links has rarely been stressed. The Wettin rulers of the staunchly Lutheran electorate had converted to Catholicism in order to win the Polish throne. This facilitated a Catholic presence at court, creating a generation of loyal supporters of the Wettin dynasty among the bishops. Men influenced by this environment, such as Andrzej Stanisław Załuski (1695–1758), successively bishop of Płock and Cracow, could act as agents of wider change.44 The election to the throne of Stanisław August Poniatowski (1732– 1798) in 1764 undoubtedly heralded a cultural shift, one that was selfconsciously “enlightened”, but we should bear in mind that the first

43 See also Christoph Schmidt, “Von der Schaukel aufs Schafott: Die polnische Aufklärung” in Alexander Kraus and Andreas Renner (eds.), Orte eigener Vernunft. Europäische Aufklärung jenseits der Zentren (Frankfurt am Main: 2008), 143–157. 44 Jerzy Dygdała, “Episkopat rzymsko-katolicki doby saskiej. Aktywność w życiu publicznym Rzeczypospolitej”, in Anna Sucheni-Grabowska and Małgorzata Żaryn (eds.), Między monarchą a demokracją. Studia z dziejów Polski XV–XVIII wieku (Warsaw: 1994), 332–376; Idem, “U początków katolickiego oświecenia w Polsce? Z działalności kościelnej biskupów Andrzeja Stanisława Załuskiego i Adama Stanisława Grabowskiego”, in Krystyna Stasiewicz and Stanisław Achremczyk (eds.), Między Barokiem a Oświeceniem. Nowe spojrzenie na czasy saskie (Olsztyn: 1996), 181–188.

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years of the new reign saw a substantial continuity of personnel from the previous one. They also brought a brief opportunity to try out in practice ideas that had been conceived and mulled over in previous decades. In 1764 and 1766 Catherine the Great demanded the restoration of equal political rights for non-Catholic nobles. Requests for greater tolerance, including unfettered public worship, might well have been granted. The readmission of “dissidents” to the legislature could not. Twice rebuffed, in 1767 the tsaritsa ordered her ambassador to coerce the Sejm into passing the desired laws. It did so only after two bishops, a lay senator, and his son were arrested by Russian troops and taken into captivity in the Russian Empire. This blatant violation of the Commonwealth’s sovereignty, as well as hatred towards the king and his reforms, provoked a widespread rising of the szlachta in defence of “Faith and Liberty” in February 1768. Known as the Confederacy of Bar, it precipitated war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, and set in train the events that led to the First Partition in 1772. The treaties of partition were forced on the Commonwealth the following year. The shocks of 1766–1773 brought a confessional edge back into politics, before a new political order was built within the Commonwealth’s truncated boundaries.45 In the religious and educational spheres, a cæsura was marked by the suppression of the Jesuits. It also seems to herald a sea-change in attitudes towards monks. Without the overwhelmingly noble Jesuits, the regular clergy may have seemed less useful in noble eyes. Images of eighteenth-century Polish monasticism owe much to the lapidary poetry of Ignacy Krasicki (1735–1801), prince-bishop of Warmia between 1766 and 1795. His mock-epic Monachomachia (1778) was set in a town where Było trzy karczmy, bram cztery ułomki, Klasztorów dziewięć i gdzienigdzie domki. [. . .] W tej zawołanej ziemiańskiej stolicy Wielebne głupstwo od wieków mieszkało. There were three taverns, of three gates traces, Nine monasteries and scattered small houses. [. . .]

45

2–4.

Jerzy Lukowski, The Partitions of Poland: 1772, 1793, 1795 (Harlow: 1999), chs.

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 313 So in this splendid country capital Reverend senselessness settled for long.46

The monks’ gluttony, stupour, and quarrels were depicted with irony rather than venom. Krasicki, like many of his contemporaries, was dismissive of the intellectual level of most religious orders. Many historians have considered the regulars more learned than the diocesan clergy. The most able scholars were sent abroad. But traditional monastic scholarship rarely met the expectations of a self-consciously “enlightened age”. In the later eighteenth century, the studies followed by most regular clergymen showed some tendencies common across Catholic Europe, such as the raising of the status of Greek, Hebrew, pastoral theology, and ecclesiastical history. Regulars also became more likely to learn modern languages. The principal impulse came from the Piarists.47 In Warsaw in 1740–1741, the Piarists established a “Collegium Nobilium”, intended for the sons of the aristocracy and wealthy nobility. Its curriculum was laid down by the order’s brightest talent, Stanisław Konarski.48 Konarski had studied at the Collegium Nazarenum in Rome in 1725–1729, where he had encountered philosophia recentiorum. Having gained the approval of his superiors and Pope Benedict XIV, Konarski went on in 1753–1754 to reform all the Piarist schools in the Commonwealth, under the strong influence of the pedagogical thought of John Locke. The remodelled curriculum included selected elements of philosophia recentiorum and modern languages. Konarski also campaigned for the purification of the Polish language from Latin macaronisms. He sought the healing of the Commonwealth’s paralysed body politic by demolishing the justifications for the liberum veto (the right of a single envoy to curtail parliamentary proceedings and nullify legislation) in his treatise O skutecznym rad sposobie (On the Means to Efficacious Councils, published in four

46 [Ignacy Krasicki], Monachomachia, in Ignacy Krasicki, Dzieła zebrane, vol. 1, Poematy, ed. Zbigniew Goliński (Wrocław: 1998), 143. Translation according to Michael J. Mikoś, Polish Baroque and Enlightenment Literature. An Anthology (Columbus, OH: 1996), 240. 47 See Jerzy Flaga, Formacja i kształcenie duchowieństwa zakonnego w Rzeczypospolitej w XVII i XVIII w., (Lublin: 1998). However, there seems to be no trace of such changes in the studies of Polish Benedictines. Marian Kanior, Polska kongregacja benedyktyńska Świętego Krzyża 1709–1864 (Cracow: 2000), 123–151. 48 See, essentially, Władysław Konopczyński, Stanisław Konarski (Warsaw: 1926). More recent work can be accessed via a special issue of Wiek Oświecenia 20 (2004).

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volumes in 1760–1763). Public disputes, sometimes conducted by pupils, on questions ranging from Copernicus’s Heliocentric theory to the liberum veto contributed to the intellectual and civic formation of young nobles. Konarski was followed by a generation of enlightened Piarists, such as Samuel Chróścikowski (1730–1799), who advocated aspects of Newtonianism in his Fizyka, doświadczeniami potwierdzona (Physics, Verified by Experiments, 1764). Contrary to some older views, the tempered rationalism of Christian Wolff did not dominate the teaching of philosophy. By the mid-1740s some Piarists had worked out an eclectic philosophical system, in which divine revelation served as an arbiter between the claims of rival philosophers.49 Towards the end of his life, Konarski himself wrote a work of refutation against deists and libertines, O religii poczciwych ludzi (On the Religion of Honnêtes Hommes, 1767). While he exalted the role of reason in discovering and propagating God’s truth, he still used “enlightenment” as a religious metaphor: God “enlightened” the erring human mind by revelation and Scripture.50 Konarski’s death on 3 August 1773 came just after the suppression of the Jesuits. At the time, Clement XIV’s decision was unpopular in the Commonwealth. Only two or three decades later was it portrayed as a victory for “enlightenment”. Several key figures of the “late Enlightenment” were critics of the Jesuits. Looking back in the early nineteenth century, Kołłątaj depicted the old Jesuit schools as citadels of obscurantism.51 Modern Jesuit historians concede that by the mid-seventeenth century, the Jesuit colleges, like other Catholic institutions, had fallen into a rut, unwilling to move beyond rhetorical Latin and scholastic philosophy. The first sign in Poland of a programmatic Catholic response to the Enlightenment may be dated to 1717, when the head of the Jesuit college in predominantly Protestant Danzig, Jerzy Gengell (1657–1727), published a hostile commentary on Descartes, entitled Gradus ad atheismum. His Lithuanian colleague Jan Poszakowski (1684–1757), the author of several polemical works against Protestantism, seems to have been the first Pole to have used

49

See Janeczek, Oświecenie chrześcijańskie, passim. Butterwick, “What is Enlightenment (oświecenie)?”, 22. 51 Hugo Kołłątaj, Stan oświecenia w Polsce w ostatnich latach panowania Augusta III (1750–1764), ed. Jan Hulewicz (Wrocław: 2003). Barbara Grochulska, “Miejsce Kościoła w polskim Oświeceniu”, Mówią wieki (1990:11), 19–22. 50

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 315 the word deista in print. He was also an adherent of Christian Wolff’s philosophy.52 The 1750s saw an acceleration in the Jesuits’ intellectual renewal, rather than a complete change of direction. Most teachers moved away from the literal interpretation of Scripture. Philosophy was essentially reduced to logic and natural science. None of this should surprise those familiar with work on Jesuits in eighteenth-century France. Indeed French Jesuits taught modern languages in Polish-Lithuanian colleges from the early decades of the eighteenth century; their numbers increased after the proscription of 1764.53 By the 1760s, the Jesuits had met the Piarist challenge. They excelled in the natural sciences, and inculcated renewed civic values through didactic theatre. King Stanisław August enlisted Jesuits as his allies in his campaign to “create anew the Polish world”. Among other tasks, he entrusted to them the accurate mapping of the Commonwealth.54 Two other orders were in the vanguard of “enlightened Catholicism” in Poland-Lithuania. The Theatine order ran a school in Warsaw between 1737 and 1785 that catered for the sons of the aristocracy. It featured an eclectic curriculum including modern languages and elements of philosophia recentiorum. The pupils briefly included the future King Stanisław August. The king’s longtime confessor was Hiacynt Śliwicki (1705–1774), the head of Warsaw’s foremost seminary, run by the Priests of the Mission (also known as the Lazarists). They educated many prominent eighteenth-century churchmen, including Primate Michał Jerzy Poniatowski (1736–1794). Stanisław August, his younger brother Michał, and many others among the elite, saw the other orders as disseminators of “unenlightenment” (nieoświecenie)—a pejorative compound of fanaticism, superstition, barbarism, and ignorance.55

52

Litak, Od Reformacji do Oświecenia, 142. Roman Darowski, “Filozofia jezuitów w Polsce od XVI do XVIII wieku—próba syntezy”, in Ludwik Grzebień and Stanisław Obirek (eds.), Jezuici a kultura polska (Cracow: 1993), 67–68; Idem, “Działalność jezuitów polskich na polu szkolnictwa (1565–1773)”, in Jezuici a kultura polska, 243–259. Cf. Cyril B. O’Keefe, Contemporary Reactions to the Enlightenment (1728–1762) (Paris: 1974). 54 Bednarski, Upadek a odrodzenie szkół jezuickich. See also Jerzy Paszenda (ed.), Z dziejów szkolnictwa jezuickiego w Polsce. Wybór artykułów (Cracow: 1994); Irena Stasiewicz-Jasiukowa (ed.), Wkład jezuitów do nauki i kultury w Rzeczyspospolitej Obojga Narodów i pod zaborami (Cracow and Warsaw: 2004). 55 Butterwick, “What is Enlightenment (Oświecenie)?”, 23. 53

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Even before the words “enlightened” and “unenlightened” acquired secular connotations in 1760s, “enlightened Catholicism” can be discerned in the work of the episcopate. The long-drawn out endeavour to implement the Tridentine reforms largely depended on the determination of individual bishops—many of whom were politicians and providers for their families first and second, and pastors a distant third. However, from the end of the seventeenth century the number of conscientious pastors increased. In the early eighteenth century, some of the zeal of men such as Konstanty Szaniawski manifested itself in harassing Protestants and Jews. However, most bishops were generally content to live and let live, and by the 1740s the tide of persecution was ebbing.56 Most of the anxiety felt by the more dedicated bishops concerned the ignorance displayed by millions of nominally Catholic peasants. Given the shortage of parish priests and the size of parishes, bishops relied on missions conducted by the regulars to catechize the rural populace. It is revealing that Ignacy Massalski (1727–1794), whose diocese of Wilno was the most far-flung of all, was concerned that the level of teaching during a mission should be appropriate. Only after making sure that the peasants knew the sign of Cross and their basic prayers could they be taught the commandments and doctrines such as the Holy Trinity, the Redemption, grace, and the sacraments. Both he and Michał Poniatowski were concerned that missionaries should not excite mass hysteria, but aim at greater understanding of the Faith, religious observance, and communal harmony.57 The Jesuits, who had conducted about 1500–1600 missions a year, were much missed after

56 See Wojciech Kriegseisen, Ewangelicy polscy i litewscy w epoce saskiej (1696– 1763). Sytuacja prawna, organizacja i stosunki międzywyznaniowe (Warsaw: 1996), 169–226; Idem, “Between Intolerance and Persecution. Polish and Lithuanian Protestants in the 18th Century”, Acta Poloniae Historica 73 (1996): 16–17; Magda Teter, Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-Reformation Era (Cambridge: 2006); Gershon Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: 2004), ch. 3. 57 Tadeusz Kasabuła, Ignacy Massalski, biskup wileński (Lublin: 1998), 440–449. Michał Grzybowski, “Kościelna działalność Michała Jerzego Poniatowskiego biskupa płockiego”, Studia z Historii Kościoła w Polsce 7 (1983): 174–176.

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 317 1773. Only the Priests of the Mission enjoyed an equal measure of episcopal trust.58 Even before the 1770s, that part of the Tridentine agenda concerned with raising the standards and status of the clergy was revealing some of the preoccupations of enlightened Catholicism. The model of an enlightened Catholic bishop was Michał Poniatowski. His was a reluctant vocation. But once he succeeded to the see of Płock in 1773, he did the job to the utmost of his ability. Having become coadjutor of Cracow in 1776, from 1782 Poniatowski administered that diocese on behalf of its incapacitated bishop, Kajetan Sołtyk (1715–1788). In 1784/85 Poniatowski was elevated to the primacy and archbishopric of Gniezno. He energetically chaired the Commission for National Education after 1776, and by the mid-1780s he was the Commonwealth’s leading politician after the king.59 As a bishop, Poniatowski formulated his policies and supervised their execution via his Warsaw chancellery. Although he visited few churches in person, he chose his helpers well. Following his translation to Gniezno, his ordinances for Płock were published in four volumes; they served as a manual for his former diocese and a model for other bishops.60 Not everyone applauded. In his memoirs, Reverend Jędrzej Kitowicz (1727/28–1804) ridiculed some of Poniatowski’s instructions, such as that to peasants not to let their children eat unripe fruit. He also complained of the time-consuming monthly reports to the (rural) dean expected of parish priests, and the annual reports sent in by deans to the archbishop’s chancellery, alleging that they piled up unread.61 Across the Commonwealth, the reformed episcopal seminaries, as well as those run by the Priests of the Mission, sought to train priests to provide parishioners with moral leadership and temporal guidance.

58 Jerzy Flaga, Działalność duszpasterska zakonów w drugiej połowie XVIII wieku. 1767–1772 (Lublin: 1986), 159–185. 59 Zofia Zielińska, “Poniatowski, Michał Jerzy”, PSB, vol. 27 (Wrocław: 1983), 455– 471. He formally became chairman of the commission in 1778. 60 Grzybowski, “Kościelna działalność Michała Jerzego Poniatowskiego”, chs. 3, 5, 6. Magdalena Ślusarska, “Oświeceniowe modele biskupa, plebana i parafii. Kontynuacja czy zmiana tradycji?”, in Magdalena Ślusarska (ed.), Dwór, plebania, rodzina chłopska. Szkice z dziejów wsi polskiej XVII i XVIII wieku (Warsaw: 1998), 37–53. Michał Jerzy Poniatowski, Rozporządzenia y pisma pasterskie za rządów [...] do diecezyi płockiey wydane. Dla wygody teyże diecezyi zebrane y do druku wydane, 4 vols. (Warsaw: 1785). 61 Jędrzej Kitowicz, Pamiętniki czyli historia polska, ed. Przemysława Matuszewska and Zofia Lewinówna, (Warsaw: 1971), 423–424.

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The programmes included geometry and geography. Ludovico Muratori’s Della regolata divozione dei Cristiani (1747) was usually among the works recommended. It was translated into Polish in Massalski’s circle.62 Ecclesiastical history and dogmatic theology were intended to help priests refute critics of the Church in a rational manner, as Bishop Skarszewski explained in a pastoral ordinance: Although healthy philosophy can adequately refute atheism, polytheism, deism &c., yet especially in this weakly believing age it falls to the theologian to turn his greatest powers to that direction, whence they attack the Christian religion most, in order thoroughly to take up and answer the accusations in so many books. It is necessary to prove revelation from reason, to explain its character.63

Seminarians were encouraged to strive for a simple dignity in administering the sacraments and for clarity in preaching.64 Reforming bishops expected their clergy to maintain their dignity by dress and sober conduct, and to keep church buildings clean and in good repair. They should not allow vagrant priests to use their altars without a letter from a bishop or the head of a religious house. They should closely monitor private chapels, which were seen as distracting to parish life. Nothing should disrupt the principal Mass, the summa, and priests should try to ensure that taverns were kept shut until after it had ended. The Eucharist should be the focus of parish worship, not the cult of saints or relics. Pictures and sculptures in churches should stimulate piety, not mirth. Priests were not to order public humiliations and corporal punishments as penance. The model parish should have an elementary school, and perhaps a small hospital. Peasants would also benefit from priests’ knowledge of modern agriculture and grasp of elementary hygiene. Priests’ libraries should include the Bible, the breviary, the Tridentine decrees, the catechism, and works by Piotr Skarga, Augustine of Hippo, and Thomas à Kempis. As with the bishops’ own role, the emphasis seemed to be on adapting the

62 Ludovico Muratori, O porządnym nabożeństwie chrześcijan, trans. Mateusz Tokałło (Wilno: 1787). 63 Wojciech Skarszewski, Rozporządzenie pasterskie na diecezyą hełmską i lubelską roku 1792 (Warsaw: 1792), 22–23. This was a modified version of a pastoral ordinance he had drafted for the bishop of Cujavia, Józef Rybiński, in 1778. 64 Józef Wysocki, Józef Ignacy Rybiński biskup włocławski i pomorski 1777–1806 (Rome: 1967), 136–137. Grzybowski, “Kościelna działalność Michała Jerzego Poniatowskiego”, 135–142. Kasabuła, Ignacy Massalski, 315–331, 423.

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 319 post-Tridentine tradition in an enlightened manner. These desiderata were comparable to those all over Catholic Europe.65 Such too were the ideal parish priests depicted in novels written by bishops. In Krasicki’s Pan podstoli (Mr Pantler, 1778), the local pleban “faithfully interpreted the words of the Gospel and from these he took incentives for his listeners to carry out their duties, respect the Creator, and love their neighbour.”66 The plain-speaking, plain-living hero of Xiądz pleban (The Parish Priest, 1786), written by the bishop of Livonia, Józef Kazimierz Kossakowski (1738–1794), was contrasted with “a learned philosopher” who neglected his parish, a polite canon who praised Franklin and Washington, kept Dutch dairy cows, and drove the poor from his windows, and a choleric preacher of fire and brimstone who publicly thrashed his parishioners for drinking in taverns run by “foreign Jews” instead of in his own.67 These models were not wholly divorced from reality. An exemplary priest was recorded in the diocese of Cujavia in 1779. The 45 year-old Franciszek Machajewski was reported to reside in his parish of Ciechocin, dress and conduct himself appropriately, keep parish records in perfect order, and administer the sacraments with priestly dignity. He preached the Gospel and taught the catechism without adding false interpretations. Although there were flagellants during Holy Week, it was said that the practice reflected piety rather than perversion. Machajewski did not baptize Jewish children without their parents’ permission. He intoned prayers together with the common folk and their children, and reproved drunkenness and violations of the Sabbath. He applied the bishop’s tariff of surplice fees and frequently buried the dead without charge. He did not allow other priests to use his church without proper documents. The inventory reveals a church in good repair and clean vestments and artifacts. However, there was no parish school, and the former hospital lay in ruins. Machajewski was also the dean. He made annual visitations and held twice-yearly congregations. The same visitation reported shortcomings in other

65 Ślusarska, “Oświeceniowe modele biskupa, plebana i parafii”, passim. Wysocki, Józef Ignacy Rybiński, ch. 4; Grzybowski, Kościelna działalność Michała Jerzego Poniatowskiego, chs. 5–6; and Kasabuła, Ignacy Massalski, chs. 4–6. Nigel Aston, Christianity and Revolutionary Europe c. 1750–1830 (Cambridge: 2002), 79–82. 66 Ignacy Krasicki, Pan podstoli, in Idem, Pisma wybrane, ed. Tadeusz Mikulski et al., vol. 3 (Warsaw: 1954), 259–260. 67 [Józef Kazimierz Kossakowski], Xiądz pleban (Warsaw: 1786), quotations at 11 and 33.

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parishes, and ordered repairs to buildings, regular sermons, assiduity in administering the sacraments, and occasionally—reformed lifestyles.68 Bishops had an uneasy relationship with the religious clergy. Nuncios warned Rome that bishops sought to end the independent jurisdiction of provincials and generals, and subordinate the orders to themselves. Many bishops resented the alternative modes of religiosity promoted by the orders. Yet given the shortage of suitable candidates for meagrely endowed parishes, they needed the regulars.69 Massalski’s response was to facilitate regulars who wished to become secular clergymen.70 But this could never yield a significant stream of recruits without the scale of dissolutions seen in the Habsburg Monarchy. There, it was normal for monasteries to supply parishes with priests, and the houses that survived Joseph II’s closures henceforth sent most of their members into the parishes.71 Poniatowski belied his reputation by asking Rome for permission to turn some parishes over to the regulars.72 On the eve of the First Partition, 389 parishes and 54 filial churches were run by regulars, a tenth of the total. The sparser the parish network, the greater was the proportion of parishes in the hands of the orders. Conversely, 35 per cent of all male monastic houses or outposts were responsible for parishes. These proportions rose further after 1772. The orders most heavily involved in parish work were the Benedictines, Cistercians, Dominicans, and the various regular canons.73 In addition, 526 regulars were employed in 1772 as helpers by the secular clergy. They included one eighth of all Bernardine friars. Regulars also helped out at times of intense pastoral work, such as Easter.74 The ambivalence of episcopal attitudes was summed up by Skarszewski. Addressing the regular clergy in his diocese, he emphasized the importance of maintaining discipline, setting an example to the laity by virtue, harmony, work, and prayer, as opposed to vanity, pride,

68

Wysocki, Józef Ignacy Rybiński, 73–84. Litak, “Duchowieństwo polskie”, 101–104. 70 Kasabuła, Ignacy Massalski, 352–353, 375–376. 71 Beales, Prosperity and Plunder, 46, 195–204, 227. 72 Grzybowski, “Kościelna działalność Michała Jerzego Poniatowskiego”, 67. 73 Statistics from Litak, Kościół łaciński, 98–101. See Flaga, Działalność duszpasterska zakonów, 41–80. 74 Flaga, Działalność duszpasterska zakonów, 121–128. 69

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 321 discord, and worldliness. They should be benefactors of humanity, not a burden. He appealed to them to make use of their libraries to cultivate learning, and to refute attacks on the Faith and morals in print. If only, he sighed, the spirit of useful sciences and educating youth would spread to all orders! But he also warned them not to interfere in matters reserved for the secular clergy, not to send priests to parishes unless they were asked, and then to send only those distinguished by “virtue, piety, enlightenment”.75 In contrast, Skarszewski wanted to keep nuns firmly inside their convents: “O! how sweet to you should be this temporal prison, this regular enclosure, through which you have an open way to heaven, beyond which you are protected from the dangers of the world.”76 6. Changes in Religiosity In their endeavours to channel and discipline religiosity and piety, reforming bishops enjoyed mixed fortunes. Hierarchs have had an uncomfortable relationship with popular beliefs and customs for as long as Christianization has been attempted. By the later eighteenth century, however, the gap between elite and popular religiosity had widened, and bishops were more likely to view expressions of popular beliefs as “superstitions”. An instruction issued in 1781 in the diocese of Cracow forbade gunfire at Easter and Corpus Christi, extravagantly decorated Christmas cribs, covering the church in hay at Christmas, throwing oats at the priest on St Stephen’s Day (in commemoration of his stoning), parading “Jesus” on a donkey on Palm Sunday, and re-enacting the funeral of the Virgin Mary.77 Some bishops frowned on the disruption to the rural economy and parish life caused by pilgrimages, but they continued to be popular. Coronations of miraculous pictures continued to attract great crowds but became less frequent and splendid after the First Partition.78 Other manifestations of baroque piety were in retreat among the elite. Flagellation ceased at the Lazarists’

75

Skarszewski, Rozporządzenie pasterskie, 56–63, quotation at 61. Ibid., 64–68, quotation at 68. 77 Michał Pęckowski, Józef Olechowski, archidiakon i suffragan krakowski 1735–1806 (Cracow: 1926), 67. According to the poem Xiądz pleban w przyzwoitym myślenia sposobie praktyk (s.l.: 1787), 25, parishioners occasionally threw real stones, rather than oats, leading Bishop Okęcki of Poznań and Warsaw to ban such “licence” in 1781. 78 Baranowski, Koronacje wizerunków maryjnych, 26–72. 76

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church in Warsaw in 1762,79 but the practice was too well established across the countryside for bishops to eradicate it altogether.80 Not all change involved pruning, however. Some bishops sought to make worship more participatory, following a general European tendency. In 1777, Poniatowski ordained that during the Gloria, Credo, and Sanctus, the congregation were to sing in Polish.81 Confraternities of laymen and women had grown in popularity during the post-Tridentine period. Most were devotional or penitential. The Jesuits had promoted confraternities of charity, which gave loans and alms to the needy, and after 1773 bishops pursued this model. Paupers were becoming an increasingly intractable problem, whereas devotional confraternities were associated with disruptive wandering friars. In 1777 Poniatowski decreed that all existing confraternities in his diocese of Płock were to be subordinated to an overarching confraternity of charity in each parish. Many traditional confraternities withered.82 Few reformers went as far as Kołłątaj. He rebuilt and refurbished his parish church at Krzyżanowice in a manner which has recently been dubbed a model for the “Catholic Enlightenment”. Large-scale paintings by the Commonwealth’s finest painter, Franciszek Smuglewicz (1745–1807), depicted God creating, teaching, and rewarding. The former was placed above the main altar. But there was no depiction of either the crucifixion or the Mother of God. The theological problems of the Incarnation, the Redemption, and mediation were thereby avoided. As in the early centuries of Christianity, an episcopal cathedra took the place of a pulpit. It is difficult to judge how receptive parishioners were to such innovations. Kołłątaj rarely visited his

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Kitowicz, Pamiętniki, 352. Grzybowski, “Kościelna działalność Michała Jerzego Poniatowskiego”, 157. Kasabuła, Ignacy Massalski, 515–532. Jędrzej Kitowicz, Opis obyczajów za panowania Augusta III, ed. Maria Dernałowicz, 2nd ed. (Warsaw: 1999), 42–44. 81 Grzybowski, “Kościelna działalność Michała Jerzego Poniatowskiego”, 165. Cf. Aston, Christianity and Revolutionary Europe, 87. 82 Stanisław Litak, “Bractwa religijne w Polsce przedrozbiorowej XIII–XVIII wiek. Rozwój i problematyka”, Przegląd Historyczny 88 (1997): 499–523. Tomasz Wiślicz, Zarobić na duszne zbawienie. Religijność chłopów małopolskich od połowy XVI do końca XVIII wieku (Warsaw: 2002), 63–71. Grzybowski, “Kościelna działalność Michała Jerzego Poniatowskiego”, 179–185. 80

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 323 parish. His scheme first attracted scholarly attention in the aftermath of Vatican II.83 Reforming bishops attempted to allay fears of devils and sorcery, evil omens, and curses. Poniatowski and others placed exorcisms under strict episcopal control. He recommended the Jesuit Jan Bohomolec’s (1724–1795) Diabeł w swoiey postaci (The Devil in his Own Form, 1772), a book which, without explicitly contradicting Scripture, explained most cases of “possession” rationally.84 Among the better educated szlachta, beliefs do seem to have changed. The poet Franciszek Karpiński (1741–1825) recalled a childhood full of spectres, witches, and lunatics, before adding: “Our fathers, like the ancient Greeks and Romans, saw almost everything in imagined miracles, and the more today we laugh at such superstitions, the more in those times they were believed in, and feared.”85 Enlightened opinion celebrated a triumph in 1776 after the sejm abolished the death penalty for sorcery, along with the use of judicial torture. The laconic law neither formally abolished witchcraft trials, nor denied the existence of magic and Satanic intercourse. That would have contradicted the teaching of the Church.86 Official witch trials do seem to have ended, although sporadic lynchings of suspected witches continued.87 Among the peasantry, magic and religion continued to merge seamlessly. A rare instance of a peasant who rejected prognoses in favour of prayer, and so provoked a brawl, is recorded for 1788.88 As far as the elite is concerned, the later eighteenth century has sometimes been written off as an age of spiritual desiccation and indifference.89 Yet the era saw some developments in spirituality. Jansenism, although never publicly acknowledged, exercised influence, especially on a number of aristocratic women renowned for their strict morality and undemonstrative piety.90 Much of the literature of the era crossed

83

Rostworowski, “Ksiądz pleban Kołłątaj”. Ryszard Mączyński, “Kościół w Krzyżanowicach. Modelowa światynia katolickiego oświecenia w Polsce”, Wiek Oświecenia 23 (2007), 25–94. 84 Grzybowski, “Kościelna działalność Michała Jerzego Poniatowskiego”, 158. 85 Franciszek Karpiński, Historia mego wieku i ludzi, z którymi żyłem, ed. Roman Sobol (Warsaw: 1987), 26–27. 86 VL, vol. 8, 547. 87 Małgorzata Pilaszek, Procesy o czary w Polsce w wiekach XV–XVIII (Cracow: 2008), 322–332. 88 Wiślicz, Zarobić na duszne zbawienie, 161–199, at 167. 89 Karol Górski, Zarys dziejów duchowości w Polsce (Cracow: 1986), 213–281. 90 Ibid., 264–265.

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from a rational to a transcendental plane. The period’s characteristic cult of Divine Providence did more than acknowledge a distant clockmaker.91 Some writers condemned the waning of traditional piety among the elite. The Reformed Franciscan Florian Jaroszewicz (1694–1771) described the ‘delicate’ observance practised by some of Warsaw’s ladies, without leaving the comfort of their salons. They gather, along with gentlemen, they hear the bell for Mass being rung in the nearby church (the last one, because to go to the first, or another morning Mass is for cooks, waitresses, and street vendors), and they send out their footmen in a dense relay from the palace to the church; some are still getting dressed, others drink coffee, others recount their dreams, others flirt with the gentlemen, and all chatter like jackdaws. Thus the first footman makes a sign to the second, the second to the third, and so on, and the last to the pious company. The offering is made—nothing. And now the elevation, and so one of the ladies nods (though none of the suitors). Then comes communion—again they nod, and already these pious Catholic ladies have heard Mass.92

This critic of Copernicus also warned of a dastardly Jansenist plot to open the way to libertinism, deism, and atheism by sowing scruples about frequent communion. He alleged that the treatise De Tribus Impostoribus was circulating in Warsaw. Naturally, he regarded the insult to Mahomet as far less important than that to Jesus and Moses, but he forecast—presciently—that if the “Mahometans” found out, they would sharpen their swords.93 Not all of those who uttered the refrain “O tempora! O mores!” resembled Jaroszewicz. Ignacy Krasicki’s attacks on sceptics and sardonic private reflections on the “enlightened age” more than balanced his satires on “reverend stupidity” and hypocritical piety.94 The verdict

91 See Teresa Kostkiewiczowa, Polski wiek świateł. Obszary swoistości (Wrocław: 2002), 344–393, and Janusz S. Pasierb, ‘Religijność polska w okresie Oświecenia’, in Marian Marek Drozdowski (ed.), Życie kulturalne i religijność w czasach Stanisława Augusta Poniatowskiego (Warsaw: 1991), 49–58. 92 Florian Jaroszewicz, Stare błędy światowey mądrości przeciw powściągliwości panieńskiey, wdowiey, kapłańskiey, y zakonney przez wolnowierców odnowione [. . .] prawowiernym katolikom z fałszem swoim oczywistym pokazane (Lwów: 1771), 88. 93 Ibid., foreword, 64–65, 96–97, 144–145, and passim. 94 Teresa Kostkiewiczowa, “Krasicki a oświecenie”, in Idem, Studia o Krasickim (Warsaw: 1997), 135–162.

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 325 of a Protestant observer on the religiosity of the fashionable world is noteworthy. Despite individual abuses, . . . it has to be admitted that in general Poles of the upper classes know how to maintain external propriety. They do not mock their own Faith, they do not speak against it; they participate in Church rites when they have the occasion, they show respect for the servants of the altar, they do not even let slip that they despise the outcasts of the clergy—the monks.95

In one respect, however, elite mores provoked international scandal. The Commonwealth was notorious for the frequency of “divorce”, so much so that curiosity was aroused in the National Assembly, when it was intended to introduce civil divorce in Revolutionary France.96 When the nuncio, Ferdinando Saluzzo, reported to Rome that the Sejm’s response to the French enquiry explained that Poland was a Catholic realm, where there were no divorces, only canonical annulments, he added that such annulments were scandalously easy to obtain.97 Not only morality, but papal jurisdiction and revenues were at stake. There was much demand for “divorce” to be handled locally.98 Indifference towards confessional differences was also permeating the metropolitan elite. The king and other leading Catholics were present at the wedding party of the daughter of the Jewish financier Szmul Zbytkower (1727–1801/02) in March 1792. The dances were held at Łazienki, Stanisław August’s private residence on the outskirts of Warsaw. The monarch’s business interests with Szmul did little to weaken the impact of his participation. A newsletter recorded: “The Jews and others are inexpressibly content, that the king was there in his own person for the breaking down of prejudices.”99

95 Friedrich Schulz, Podróże inflantczyka z Rygi do Warszawy i po Polsce w latach 1791–1793, trans. Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, ed. Wacław Zawadzki (Warsaw: 1956), 293. 96 Stanisław August to Filippo Mazzei, 7 Apr. 1790, BN, Akc. 11,356, vol. 1, fol. 252. 97 Ferdinando Saluzzo to Cardinal Francesco Zelada, 12 May 1790, ASV ANV 67, fols. 21–22. Quoted by Larry Wolff, The Vatican and Poland in the Age of the Partitions: Diplomatic and Cultural Encounters at the Warsaw Nunciature, (Boulder, CO: 1988), 207, but misdated as 5 May 1790. Cf. Zelada to Saluzzo, 5 June 1790, ASV ANV 52, fol. 350. 98 Saluzzo to Cardinal Opizio Pallavicini, 9 Mar. 1785, Saluzzo to Carlo Federici, 27 Apr. 1785, ASV ANV 66, fols. 20, 25–26. 99 31 Mar. 1792, BN, Akc. 9830, fols. 39–40.

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They did things differently in provincial towns. An accusation of sacrilege was made against a Protestant noblewoman in Rawa in 1791. Anna Wilcke’s children were seen placing a picture of the Madonna around the neck of a doll. The local Civil-Military Commission100 started legal proceedings, “even booking the executioner”. Torture was banned by the law of 1776, but not the death penalty for sacrilege. Wilcke was freed after an intervention from the king, but she had to flog the children and burn the doll publicly. The reformist Gazeta Narodowa i Obca (National and Foreign Gazette) reported the story as an example of “fanaticism”.101 The reporting and reaction to this incident testifies to the gulf between provincial worthies and the Warsaw elite. There was even an apocalyptic fringe. The burgrave of Liw in Mazovia, Jacek Więckowski, was the author of several devotional and controversial books, following earth tremors in 1786. He sought signs of the impending Apocalypse, and wrote of holy pictures weeping and of witnesses to apparitions. He related a heavenly warning against “Franc Massonia”: the groans of a dead Mason’s soul in eternal torment were heard by a priest praying for him in a country church.102 The trenchant expression of similar views saw the Reformed Franciscan Karol Surowiecki (1750–1824) banned from Warsaw’s pulpits by his bishop, Antoni Onufry Okęcki (1729–1793).103 Surowiecki’s reaction may be gauged from his satire of metropolitan sermons. The delicate “souls” of the age desired that preachers and writers . . . should reprove by titillating, and punish by stroking, that they should flog libertine souls with foxes’ tails. Why? Because these are political souls, enlightened souls—so they have to be treated smoothly, modestly, carefully. And as the tone of the Holy Gospels (which is supposed to serve as the rule for these preachers and authors) is ah! so gracious! so delicate! so sweet! and so full of love! especially love, which Christ recommends to us above all, love, which he left in his Testament to us, love, with which he commanded us to sweeten all encounters with

100

On such commissions see page 346 below. Smoleński, Przewrót umysłowy, 260. Józef Wojakowski, Straż Praw (Warsaw: 1982), 181–182. Gazeta Narodowa i Obca, 10 Sept., 14 Sept. 1791. 102 Jacek Więckowski, Tarcza mocna dla obrony rzymskiey religii wystawiona roku 1790. Odpowiedzi na pięć naypublicznieyszych heretykostwa zarzutów (s.l.: 1790). 103 See Smoleński, Przewrót umysłowy, 368–373; Butterwick, “Between Enlightened Catholicism and Anti-Enlightenment”, 206–208. 101

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 327 our neighbours. Thus, in their modish booklets, do today’s over-subtle scribblers argue.104

Freemasonry allowed Poles and foreigners, royalists and republicans, laymen and clergymen, Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox, patrons and poets, nobles and a few wealthy burghers, to mix, albeit within strict hierarchies. Ladies were accommodated in separate lodges. Freemasonry undoubtedly carried the cachet of Enlightenment; it was fashionably philanthropic, and it was a form of sociability restricted to those who were consciously opposed to “fanaticism”, “superstition”, and “darkness”. Its discourse and symbols were full of light—not least the triangular eye of Divine Providence. But not all that was “enlightened” was rational. Freemasonry was liturgical and, after a fashion, mystical. It was of course condemned by papal bulls of 1738 and 1751, and the likes of Więckowski and Surowiecki denounced it as a conspiracy against the Catholic faith. But in the eighteenth century, such assailants were far away from the ecclesiastical mainstream. For their part, the Masons prohibited all religious and political discussions at their meetings. At this stage Freemasonry was too broad a church, if the metaphor may be forgiven, to be of much use in explaining policies towards the Church.105 A more significant field of co-operation, between political opponents, and between clergymen and laymen, was education. 7. Ex-Jesuits and the Commission for National Education, 1773–1794 Clement XIV’s suppression of the Society of Jesus on 21 July 1773 automatically transformed the Jesuits into secular clergymen. They survived as Jesuits only in the domains of two non-Catholic monarchs who refused to allow the bull of suppression to be published. Frederick the Great delayed his placet until he had secured papal agreement to ex-Jesuits continuing their pedagogical work on his terms. In Prussia

104 [Karol Surowiecki], Python lipsko-warszawski diabeł. Kontr-tragedya na tragedyą Saul wyjęta z Pisma Świętego, grana przez aktorów tamtego świata w roku 1789; a w roku 1792. światu ziemskiemu obiawiona (s.l.: 1792), 150–151. 105 See Ludwik Hass, Sekta farmazonii warszawskiej. Pierwsze stulecie wolnomularstwa w Warszawie (1721–1821) (Warsaw: 1980), and Smoleński, Przewrót umysłowy, 199–228.

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the Society of Jesus was wound up in stages between 1775 and 1780. Catherine the Great also refused to allow the suppression of the Jesuits in the lands she acquired by the First Partition. Initially, she seems to have wanted to put pressure on Rome to recognize her ecclesiastical arrangements, but she was pleased by the Jesuits’ loyalty and seems to have admired their learning. In 1779, the Jesuits opened a noviciate at Polotsk. The order had a future.106 The news of the suppression was generally unwelcome in PolandLithuania. After attempts to halt the publication of the bull of suppression, the Sejm voted to turn the Jesuit estates over to education on 27 September 1773. It elected eight men to a newly-established Commission for National Education on 14 October 1773 (the number of commissioners was later increased to twelve).107 However, many of the properties were looted under the cover of an inventory by the cronies of the treasurer of the Polish Crown, Adam Poniński (1732/33–1798), who was paid handsomely by Russia for procuring the ratification of the partition. Although the holders of ex-Jesuit properties were supposed to pay 3.5 and 5 per cent of their revenues to the Educational Fund in the Crown and Lithuania respectively, the values assigned to estates were often far below their real worth. The malefactions continued under the chairmanship of Ignacy Massalski, and only when Michał Poniatowski took the helm in 1776 were they halted. By this time the Educational Fund had been stripped of at least a third of the Jesuit legacy. Gradually the financial situation improved under Poniatowski’s stewardship.108 The depleted funds proved insufficient to establish a new university in Warsaw, so the old academies of Cracow and Wilno became the “principal schools” of the Polish Crown and Lithuania respectively. Cracow University had long since been an impoverished backwater, unable to attract the sons of the wealthy szlachta, and reluctant to update its teaching. Things changed radically after 1776, when an alumnus,

106 Maciej Loret, Kościół katolicki a Katarzyna II 1772–1784 (Cracow and Warsaw: 1910). Stanisław Załęski, Historya zniesienia zakonu jezuitów i jego zachowanie na Białej Rusi, vol. 2, Zniesienie zakonu jezuitów w Polsce (Lwów: 1875). Marek Inglot, La Compagnia di Gesù nell’Impero Russo (1772–1820) e la sua parte nella restaurazione generale della Compagnia, Miscellanea Historiae Pontificae 63 (Rome: 1997). 107 Smoleński, “Żywioły zachowawcze”, 99–105, 120–122. 108 See Władysław M. Grabski, U podstaw wielkiej reformy. Kartka z dziejów Komisji Edukacji Narodowej (Łódź: 1984).

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 329 Hugo Kołłątaj, persuaded the cash-strapped Educational Commission that Cracow University could fulfil its aims. He was influenced by his own study at the reformed University of Vienna in 1771–1772. With Poniatowski’s backing Kołłątaj was appointed visitor. He identified, employed, and promoted local talent. Scholasticism was banished. The threat to the university’s existence concentrated the minds of reluctant professors, and the reforms were secured during Kołłątaj’s rectorship in 1780–1786. Poniatowski endowed the university with its observatory and cabinets for chemistry and natural history. One his fiercest battles was fought for the clinical hospital he founded in former monastic buildings, but his idea of using the university to train priests was torpedoed by Nuncio Giovanni Archetti.109 The reform of the University of Wilno has long been compared unfavourably with that of Cracow.110 Much of the responsibility for this tradition rests with Kołłątaj. Jesuit historians have concentrated on the Jesuit academy of 1579–1773.111 Undoubtedly, the suppression was morally and materially debilitating. However, after the distinguished astronomer, Marcin Poczobut (1728–1810), was appointed rector in 1780, things improved rapidly. The ex-Jesuits and Piarists among the professors worked together fairly harmoniously. The latter included Hieronim Stroynowski (1752–1815), one of the few Polish-Lithuanian political thinkers to reject the republican paradigm that individual liberty depended upon the collective liberty of the “nation”.112 A secular priest, Michał Karpowicz (1744–1803), became professor of dogmatic theology. Like others in Massalski’s circle, Karpowicz was influenced by the Physiocrats and in 1776 had preached a series of sermons strongly critical of serfdom.113 Visitations of secondary schools were facilitated by contacts between former Jesuits.114

109 Mirosława Chamcówna, Uniwersytet Jagielloński w dobie Komisji Edukacji Narodowej, vol. 1 (Wrocław: 1957). 110 E.g. Ambroise Jobert, La Commission d’Education Nationale en Pologne (1773– 1794). Son oeuvre d’instruction civique (Paris: 1941), 253–261. 111 Ludwik Piechnik, Dzieje Akademii Wileńskiej, 4 vols. (Rome: 1983–1990). 112 Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, Regina libertas. Wolność w polskiej myśli politycznej XVIII wieku (Gdańsk: 2006), 37, 41, 43. 113 Magdalena Ślusarska, “Michał Franciszek Karpowicz”, in Pisarze polskiego oświecenia, vol. 2 (Warsaw: 1994), 74–98. 114 Janina Kamińska, Universitas Vilnensis. Akademia Wileńska i Szkoła Główna Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego 1773–1792 (Pułtusk and Warsaw: 2004). Irena Szybiak,

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Many ex-Jesuits found places as chaplains to noble families. Others were granted pensions from the Educational Fund. Some found benefices, and two, Adam Naruszewicz (1733–1796) and Jan Albertrandi (1731–1808), became royal historiographers and archivists, before becoming bishops. Two former Jesuits became gazetteers. The first was Stefan Łuskina (1725–1793), formerly principal of the Society’s Warsaw college, who in 1773 secured a monopoly to publish a newspaper in Warsaw. For the next two decades Gazeta Warszawska (the Warsaw Gazette) filled its columns with funerals and marriages, tardily reprinting news from abroad. Apart from the Educational Commission’s activities, generally reported favourably, the only seasoning of this dull fare came from the editor’s condemnations of “freethinking” and sardonic asides on the suppression of the Jesuits.115 The second was Piotr Świtkowski (1744–1793), who launched the Pamiętnik Historyczno-Polityczny (Historical and Political Recorder) in 1782. It featured developments abroad that might serve as models for the Commonwealth, including Joseph II’s reforms. Świtkowski campaigned for religious toleration and freedom of the press, and hailed the work of the Educational Commission. For him “enlightenment” (oświecenie) was an autonomous force combating the forces of ignorance, superstition, barbarity, and fanaticism.116 Most of the 417 former Jesuit teachers stayed at their posts to staff those secondary schools and colleges directly subjected to the Commission. Ex-Jesuits also constituted the majority of the members of the Society for Elementary Books, school rectors and pro-rectors, and visitors. Their role was greatest in Lithuania. The number of ex-Jesuits employed by the Commission fell as they retired or died—from 294 in 1773/74 to 90 in 1790/91. Their places were taken by young laymen trained as teachers by the two universities.117 Other orders continued

Szkolnictwo Komisji Edukacji Narodowej w Wielkim Księstwie Litewskim (Wrocław: 1973), 44–67, 117–194. 115 See Jerzy Łojek, ‘Gazeta warszawska’ ks. Łuskiny (Warsaw: 1962); Irena Łossowska, “Kontrowersje wokół Stefana Łuskiny SJ—dziennikarza i redaktora”, in Wkład Jezuitów, 663–682. Cf. Smoleński, “Żywioły zachowawcze”, 105–106, 112–119. 116 Irena Homola Dzikowska, Pamiętnik Historyczno-Polityczny Piotra Świtkowskiego (Cracow: 1960); Irena Łossowska, “Piotr Świtkowski”, in Pisarze polskiego Oświecenia, vol. 2, 305–331. Butterwick, “What is Enlightenment (Oświecenie)?”, 23–24, 29. 117 Jan Poplatek, Komisja Edukacji Narodowej. Udział byłych Jezuitów w pracach Komisji Edukacji Narodowej (Cracow: 1974), 388–389.

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 331 to maintain exclusively religious schools under the supervision of the Commission.118 No serious historian would now describe the Educational Commission’s work as the “the secularization of schools”.119 It was founded on ecclesiastical property, conceived by clerical pedagogues, presided over by two bishops, and at least until the late 1780s, carried out overwhelmingly by clerical teachers. Religious education was built into the secondary curriculum from the very first proposals for “civic education” made in 1774 by the Piarists Antoni Popławski (1739–1786) and Adolf Kamieński (1737–1781), and Ignacy Potocki (1750–1809), a former pupil of the Piarists. These authors built on the foundations laid by Konarski. They sought to inculcate a fervent, yet enlightened republican patriotism.120 They also distinguished between “moral” and an overarching “Christian” education, tended to stress the temporal benefits of practising Christianity, emphasized the rational as well as the revealed bases for faith in God, and discouraged insincere piety and “superstitions”. Kamieński summed up their credo: “So let education enlighten the mind, form the character, incline the heart, and make a man a true citizen.”121 Provision in the school statutes for the regular receipt of the sacraments of penance and the Eucharist by pupils and teachers alike did not prevent nobles grumbling at the “irreligion” of lay teachers. These young men graduated from the universities during the 1780s. They predictably objected to attempts to force them into quasi-clerical dress

118 Andrzej Meissner, “Szkoły zakonne wobec Komisji Edukacji Narodowej”, in Kamilla Mrozowska and Renata Dutkowa (eds.), W kręgu wielkiej reformy (Warsaw and Cracow: 1977), 241–254. Smoleński, “Żywioły zachowawcze”, 136–141. Szybiak, Szkolnictwo, 34, 228–229. Kamilla Mrozowska, Funkcjonowanie systemu szkolnego Komisji Edukacji Narodowej na terenie Korony w latach 1783–1793 (Wrocław: 1985), 171. 119 The title of ch. 7 of Smoleński, Przewrót umysłowy. 120 Czesław Majorek and Tadeusz Słowikowski, “Wkład pijarów w teorię wychowania patriotycznego i obywatelskiego w Polsce w XVIII wieku”, in Irena StasiewiczJasiukowa (ed.), Wkład pijarów do nauki i kultury Polsce XVII–XIX w. (Warsaw and Cracow: 1993), 433–450. 121 Adolf Kamieński, Edukacya obywatelska (Warsaw: 1774), foreword. See Wojciech Pawlik, “Religia w projektach urządzenia szkół średnich”, Roczniki Humanistyczne 42:2 (1994): 123–154, and Stanisław Janeczek, “Antoni Popławski SchP a problem religii w szkołach Komisji Edukacji Narodowej”, in W kręgu dziejów Kościoła i rodziny franciszkańskiej (Warsaw: 1999), 99–114. Cf. Jobert, La Commission d’Education Nationale, 314–323.

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and lifestyle. Their presence grated on ex-Jesuits and parents.122 Accusations of irreligious lifestyles were not always unfounded. An instruction from the Commission, dated 9 March 1789, reacted to reports of the scandal caused by lay teachers not being seen at confession for a year by reiterating the requirement that they confess monthly, on the same day as their pupils.123 Latin was now taught according to the Piarist Onufry Kopczyński’s (1735–1817) grammar, in order to facilitate pupils’ appreciation of classical literature. Many parents complained that their offspring had no “useful” knowledge of Latin. As a result, the more traditional education offered by schools now in Austrian, Russian, or Prussian territory, based on “Alwar” (greatly simplified versions of Emanuel Alvárez’s Latin grammar of 1572) attracted students away from the Commission’s schools.124 Further away from the frontiers, competition came from Protestant schools, and unauthorized schools run by some of the orders, often under the cover of elementary schools. The school at Kroże in Samogitia lost pupils to nearby schools run by the Dominicans and (illegally) by the Basilians. Nevertheless, the former Jesuit pro-rector could report in 1783: “The school is ever more populous. Already the former opinion about schools is in constant retreat, and the good opinion grows. They speak better of us. Patientia omnia vincit.” On the other hand, the school at nearby Wornie was under pressure, because “new things in the country, even the best, draw the criticism of unenlightened people.”125 One of the Commission’s visitors, Franciszek Salezy Jezierski (1740– 1791), a secular priest, caused grave offence in 1785 when he criticized quarrelsome, drunken teachers of the school in Łęczyca, accusing them of sabotaging the curriculum. His speech there, contrasting the new pedagogy favourably with the old, stressing that pupils “should not despise any other class of citizens”, outraged those whom he called the “prejudiced publicum”. Michał Poniatowski defused the affair, remov-

122 Poplatek, Komisja Edukacji Narodowej, 395–397. Cf. Mrozowska, Funkcjonowanie systemu szkolnego, 75–87, 145–169, 175–186, and Szybiak, Szkolnictwo, 218–230. 123 “Pisma oryginalne Komissyi Edukacyi Narodowey do Szkoły Główney W. X. Litewskiego z l. 1781–1794”, Vilniaus Universiteto Biblioteka, Fondas 2, DC 30, fol. 109. 124 Smoleński, “Żywioły zachowawcze”, 159–178. 125 Mikołaj Wieliczko to M. Poczobut, quoted after Poplatek, Komisja Edukacji Narodowej, 298–299.

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 333 ing Jezierski from the list of visitors. But he also got him the coadjutorship of a canonry of Cracow Cathedral.126 Nobles voiced their resentment in the instructions given by sejmiks to their envoys to the sejm in 1788 and 1790. Because of the political “ferment” of these years, these instructions were exceptionally authentic expressions of the prevailing mood.127 For example, in 1788 the Wieluń sejmik desired, “as virtuous souls are to be found among the mendicants, that the said education be permitted to them, and that they give education according to the old customs in Latin, history, geography, and in that which concerns the order of religion”.128 The principal inspiration for such demands was fiscal. Nobles wanted the clergy to bear the main burden of paying for the expanded army that they almost universally demanded. Among the funds they targeted were those that had formerly belonged to the Jesuits. When, shortly before the sejmiks of November 1790, Łuskina published an offer that the ex-Jesuits would take on the task of educating noble youth, the response was overwhelming. A clear majority of sejmiks desired the restoration of the Society of Jesus, thereby allowing the Educational Fund to be applied to the army.129 Although Poczobut, who co-ordinated the campaign in Lithuania, was anxious that the instructions should not impugn the Commission, several did just that. The sejmik of Wołkowysk, for example, demanded that the Educational Commission supervise “the most exact teaching of Latin according to the old forms”, and that it would permit the orders to run schools, thereby saving large sums for the army. The former Jesuit rector of the local schools at Pińsk warned Poczobut that “here the envoys were told in the instruction to make a lot of noise against the Educational

126 Władysław Smoleński, Kuźnica kołłątajowska. Studium historyczne, 2nd ed. (Warsaw: 1949), 30–40. 127 Emanuel Rostworowski, Sprawa aukcji wojska na tle sytuacji politycznej przed Sejmem Czteroletnim (Warsaw: 1957), 227–229. 128 Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, Wrocław, 6848, pp. 42–45. 129 The fullest analysis yet published, based on 43 out of 56 sejmiks, shows that 24 of those 43 instructions unequivocally called for the restoration of the Jesuits and 28 called for the Educational Fund to be transferred to the Treasury. 14 wanted the Educational Commission to be restricted to a supervisory role, while three explicitly called for its abolition. No contemporary doubted that most sejmiks had called for the Jesuits’ return. See Richard Butterwick, “Sprawa wskrzeszenia zakonu jezuickiego w dobie Sejmu Czteroletniego”, in Wkład Jezuitów, 89–114, including references to the 1790 instructions.

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Commission, to take its fund and hand it over it to the Treasury Commission, indeed, if at all possible, to destroy its existence”.130 Stanisław August was alarmed by this “renaissance de barbarisme”. Although he knew the ex-Jesuit offer lacked substance, he pledged his utmost efforts to resist the consigning of schools to “dark” orders such as the Franciscans.131 Many of these sejmik instructions seem eloquent testimony to the limited impact made by the Enlightenment on provincial noble mentalities. But there were exceptions. The king’s feelings were spared at Łęczyca, where the postulate to bring back the Jesuits was preceded by thanks to His Majesty for his efforts “to make the nation enlightened” by introducing “such a beautiful taste for learning”. In the event the king easily defused the question of the Jesuits when it was raised in the Sejm in June 1791.132 While new-fangled methods of teaching Latin and experimental science provoked bewilderment and derision among much of the szlachta, the reformed schools’ patriotic ethos does seem to have taken root. It was grounded in republican virtues, which were in turn explicitly founded on religion. Although very few envoys at the Four Years’ Sejm had attended the Commission’s schools, significant numbers of those who fought during the Insurrection of 1794 had done so. The fruits would ripen after the Third Partition. Elementary schooling, intended for all social strata, remained in a much worse condition than secondary education. This was despite the short-lived but intense zeal of Massalski in his diocese of Wilno, and ambitious guidelines in the 1783 school statutes. Qualified teachers were in short supply, and only rarely were they paid a living wage. Schools had to contend with the suspicion of the szlachta, the indifference and economic interests of the peasantry, and the lack of enthusiasm of much of the clergy. The Commission failed to provide adequate financial, administrative, and even moral support.133 Although the 130 Józef Wiszniewski to Poczobut, Pińsk, 20 Nov. 1790, quoted after Poplatek, Komisja Edukacji Narodowej, 410–411. 131 Stanisław August to Michał Poniatowski, 20 Nov. 1790, AGAD AGhig. 801b, vol. 1, fol. 106. Stanisław August to Augustyn Deboli, 21 Nov. 1790, AGAD, Zbiór Popielów, 420, fols. 1092–1093. 132 Butterwick, “Sprawa wskrzeszenia zakonu jezuickiego”, 106–115. 133 Litak, Parafie, 251–299, 315–316. Kasabuła, Ignacy Massalski, 561–583. Raila, Vilniaus vyskupas Ignotas Masalskis. See also Jobert, La Commission d’Education Nationale, 203–210, 275–282; Szybiak, Szkolnictwo, 97–116, 230–239; Jacek Chachaj, Łacińskie szkolnictwo parafialne na Rusi Koronnej od XVI do XVIII wieku (Lublin: 2003).

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 335 Commission’s scanty visitation records led some historians of education grossly to underestimate the number of parish schools, in this regard the Prussian and Austrian monarchies did much better than the Commonwealth.134 8. God and Caesar, 1764–1788 Until the mid-1760s, controversy between Church and state was confined to problems such as taxes, mortmain, tithes, interest payments, jurisdiction, taxes, and the rights of the nunciature.135 These traditional frictions continued through the reign of Stanisław August. Nevertheless, defenders of ecclesiastical temporalities increasingly ascribed criticism to the spirit of the so-called “enlightened age”. In part, this was a rhetorical strategy, which forced critics of the clergy to profess their Catholicism before making a distinction between spiritualia and temporalia. Yet it also reflected the “enlightened” tinge that proposals inimical to ecclesiastical interests were taking on in these decades. The most far-reaching of these “enlightened” plans was also the first. In 1767, Russia insisted that Gabriel Podoski (1719–1777), the notoriously hedonistic provost of Cracow Cathedral, succeed to the primacy. No one in Poland dared oppose the nomination and Pope Clement XIII reluctantly gave his consent. Podoski came up with a project for a national Church. The Warsaw nunciature would be abolished, and with it all appeals to Rome, even on lesser dogmatic questions. The pope might still confirm candidates for sainthood. The Church would be governed by a national synod with a mixed lay and episcopal membership, chaired by the primate. It would take over all ecclesiastical property, reduce the number of regulars, and pay the remaining clergy salaries. The “spiritual” half of the synod would exercise doctrinal and judicial authority over the Church in Poland. Had the might of Russia been deployed in support of Podoski’s proposals, they would have 134 Stanisław Litak, “Kilka uwag w sprawie szkolnictwa parafialnego w dobie Komisji Edukacji Narodowej”, in W kręgu wielkiej reformy, 284–289. Dariusz Łukasiewicz, “Statystyka szkolna Prus Południowych z 1799 roku”, Zapiski Historyczne, 56 (2001): 57–80. In Galicia, state expenditure on elementary schools rose from 3969 Austrian florins in 1781 to 65,046 florins (equivalent to 260,184 Polish złotys) in 1789. James Van Horn Melton, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Austria and Prussia (Cambridge: 1988), 232–234. 135 Mariusz Markiewicz, “Problem antyklerykalizmu w czasach saskich”, in Adam Kaźmierczyk et al. (eds.), Rzeczpospolita wielu wyznań (Cracow: 2004), 341–347.

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been passed. The Russian Ambassador, Nikolai Repnin, was instructed that if any attempt was made to excommunicate supporters of the legislation in favour of non-Catholics, the nuncio should be arrested, and Poland would have to choose between Russia’s friendship and the Roman Church. Rome drew back from the brink. Because no vital Russian interest was at stake in Podoski’s time-consuming plan, Repnin overruled his client at the end of February 1768.136 The next major alarm for Rome was the “Zamoyski Code”. In 1776 the Sejm entrusted the former Grand Chancellor of the Crown, Andrzej Zamoyski (1716–1792) with drafting a codification of the Commonwealth’s laws. Zamoyski’s team worked at breakneck speed and the Code was ready in two years. The codifiers sought to achieve wideranging judicial, social, and ecclesiastical reform. In face of vehement opposition, consideration of the Code was postponed in 1778, only for it to be rejected definitively by the Sejm in 1780. Some historians have exaggerated the part played by the nuncio, Archetti, while others have emphasized the role of the Russian Ambassador, Otto Magnus von Stackelberg. However, the essential reason for the Code’s rejection was the conviction among the szlachta that the codifiers had exceeded their brief and sought to interfere in the relationship between lord and peasant.137 Few of the concerns about the Code voiced by the sejmiks in 1778 and 1780 concerned religion: only a few instructions called for the removal or amendment of (unspecified) content prejudicial to the Catholic Faith.138 The speeches of those who opposed the Code in the Sejm testify to anti-clerical sentiments.139 In other circumstances, the provisions affecting the Church might have been passed.

136 Emanuel Rostworowski, “Podoski, Gabriel Jan”, PSB, vol. 27, (Wrocław: 1983), 149–161. Jerzy T. Lukowski, “The Papacy, Poland, Russia and Religious Reform, 1764–8”, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 39 (1988): 84–91. 137 Mieczysław Tarnawski, Kodeks Zamoyskiego na tle stosunków kościelno-państwowych za czasów Stanisława Augusta (Lwów: 1916). Kurdybacha, Dzieje Kodeksu. Wolff, The Vatican and Poland, 126–129. Jerzy Michalski, “‘Wolność’ i ‘własność’ chłopska w polskiej myśli reformatorskiej XVIII wieku”, in Idem, Studia historyczne z XVIII i XIX wieku, vol. 2, Ideologia—nauka—historiografia (Warsaw: 2007), 152–160. Ewa Borkowska-Bagieńska, “Zbiór Praw Sądowych” Andrzeja Zamoyskiego (Poznań: 1986) is the fullest general study. 138 Witold Filipczak, Sejm 1778 roku (Warsaw: 2000), 130–135. Cf. Kurdybacha, Dzieje Kodeksu, 116, who luridly depicts monks stirring up drunken nobles. 139 Tarnawski, Kodeks Zamoyskiego, 188–193. Filipczak, Sejm 1778 roku, 182–185, 282–285, 306–307.

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 337 On the one hand, Catholicism was maintained as the dominant religion, the terms of toleration for other confessions were grudging, and the penalties prescribed for apostasy, atheism, and sacrilege were gruesome. On the other hand, secular courts would adjudicate all civil matters involving clergymen, including disputes over tithes. A tribunal in Warsaw would become the supreme instance for all ecclesiastical cases in the Commonwealth, and the sole official channel of communication between Polish citizens and Rome. It would handle all dispensations, and examine all papal bulls, before sending them to the king for approval. Although the nuncio would be invited to preside over the tribunal, he could be outvoted by four Polish bishops (one of them a Uniate) elected by their colleagues. The bishops could not be expected to oppose this measure; nor would they object to the subordination of monks and nuns to themselves. Accompanying provisions such as the instruction to parish priests to teach the catechism after Sunday Mass, the obligation to reside in benefices in person, and the duty of consistory courts to collect records of marriages, baptisms, and burials, and send them to the state authorities in Warsaw, lend weight to comparisons with Josephinism.140 However, the Code should also be set in the context of traditional noble grievances. One of Zamoyski’s assistants, Józef Wybicki (1747–1822), sought to win over noble opinion to the Code in his Listy Patriotyczne (Patriotic Letters, 1777–1778). Among other things, Wybicki distinguished between the obedience he owed as a Catholic to the pope as the highest head of the Church, and his wish as a Polish citizen that “the Roman court” should treat the government of Poland with respect. Such views earned him a notorious reputation at the nunciature.141 The chief defence of the Church’s position at this time was made by Wojciech Skarszewski, in an anonymously published pamphlet, Uwagi polityczne imieniem stanu duchownego do zbioru praw polskich podane (Political Considerations in the Name of the Ecclesiastical Estate put to the Collection of Polish Laws, 1778). For all his hostile comments about “today’s economists”, “today’s wise men”, “today’s philosophers”,

140 Zbiór praw sądowych przez JW. Andrzeja Zamoyskiego, exkanclerza koronnego ułożony (Warsaw: 1778), pars I, art. iv, § 1–14, 27, 29, 33–35, pars II, art. iii § 1–4, art. xlvi § 1–3, art. xlvii, § 1, pars III, art. v, § 1–37. See Tarnawski, Kodeks Zamoyskiego, 71–123. Cf. Borkowska-Bagieńska, “Zbiór praw sądowych”, 324–326, and Emanuel Rostworowski, Historia powszechna. Wiek XVIII, 3rd ed. (Warsaw: 1984), 771. 141 Józef Wybicki, Listy patriotyczne, ed. Kazimierz Opałek (Wrocław: 1955), 314.

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“supposed philosophy”, and this “rotten century of ours”, Skarszewski saw the need to untangle and clarify the laws, which should be in harmony with reason and justice. However, starting from a demonstration of the need of every society for a dominant religion, he warned against extending religious toleration. Quoting old statutes, he also wanted to ban works contrary to religion and morality, and to expand the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts. Fearing the confirmation and enforcement of the 1768 law setting the age of profession at twentyfour for monks and sixteen for nuns, he justified the recruitment of younger candidates by stating that after being corrupted by the world, they would be unsuitable for a habit. He argued that the non-teaching orders served the public good, through religious ministry, charity, and their taxes. In a probably vain attempt to persuade lay readers, he cited Bolingbroke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and even Holbach to put the Church’s case.142 The Church faced no further serious challenge to its rights until 1788. Confessional tensions were defused in 1775 by the scaling back of the rights of the “dissidents”, compared to the law of 1768. Catherine II agreed to the restriction of the number of non-Catholic envoys to a maximum of three per Sejm. In fact not even a single ‘dissident’ was elected until 1784 (single Protestants were also elected in 1786 and 1788, and two in 1790). The constitutional settlement of 1775 effectively made the Commonwealth into a “proconsulate” of the Russian Empire, but within this context, Stanisław August gained the upper hand in political micro-management. He was seconded by his brother Michał. While it lasted, the alliance they symbolized—between “throne and altar”—helped to manage tensions between the servants of God and the servants of Caesar. One function of the eighteenth-century European “police state” was censorship. However, freedom of speech and of the press was a hallowed component of Polish liberty. A law of 1609 guaranteed citizens a “free voice” at public assemblies, and in succeeding decades the concept came to be extended to all verbal and written forms of expression. Contributing freely to public discussion was not only a civil right, it was also a civic responsibility. This was considered one of the most important distinctions between a republican form of government and

142 [Wojciech Skarszewski], Uwagi polityczne imieniem stanu duchownego do zbioru praw polskich podane (Kalisz: 1778), quotations at 6, 16, 22, 34, 83.

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 339 a monarchical one. But almost nobody conceded the right to mock religion. It was widely accepted that the Church should approve works on religion, and that authors, translators, printers, and vendors of books undermining religion and morality should be punished. On the other hand, very little was done to enforce ecclesiastical censorship of periodicals and other writings. The attempt was abandoned altogether in the charged political atmosphere, precipitating a downpour of pamphlets, that preceded the Sejm of 1788.143 9. Revolution, Counter-Revolution, and Insurrection, 1788–1794 Between 1788 and 1792, for the first time in many decades, the Sejm was able to exercise untrammelled sovereignty on behalf of the “nation”—a word that was omniscient in the discourses of the Four Years’ Sejm, or “Polish Revolution”.144 As in 1768–1772, Russia was preoccupied by war with the Ottoman Empire, and a challenge to Russian hegemony again ended in a partition of the Commonwealth. This time, however, after much initial unpleasantness, king and “nation” were reconciled. The same could be said about Church and “nation”. “Enlightened” discourse was prominent in these exchanges, but the outcomes owed much to traditional interests and high political intrigues. The sejmik instructions of 1788 and 1790 excoriated ecclesiastical wealth. Yet they also disclose that nobles esteemed hard-working parish priests and the “useful” teaching orders. Their ire was turned upon bishops, prelates, abbots, and the “useless” contemplative orders.145 Similar patterns emerge from the fierce exchanges between the pamphleteers and from the debates in the Sejm. Critics of the clergy pointed to gross inequalities among those labouring in Christ’s vineyard. Clerical apologists, foremost among them the tireless Skarszewski, highlighted the clergy’s contribution to the temporal welfare of the Commonwealth.

143 Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, “Dyskusje o wolności słowa w czasach stanisławowskich”, Kwartalnik Historyczny 102/1 (1995), 53–65. Irena Homola, “Walka o wolność druku w publicystyce polskiej drugiej połowy XVIII wieku”, Przegląd Historyczny 51 (1960), 74–94. 144 See Richard Butterwick, “Political Discourses of the Polish Revolution, 1788– 1792”, English Historical Review 120 (2005): 695–731. 145 Jerzy Michalski, “Sejmiki poselskie 1788 roku”, in Idem, Studia historyczne z XVIII i XIX wieku, vol. 1, Polityka i społeczeństwo (Warsaw: 2007), 276–277.

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References to prayer were answered by mockery—evidently God had disdained the clergy’s prayers for the Commonwealth; only a larger army could keep Polish territory intact. Clergymen and their allies also appealed to a sense of justice: let clergy and laity contribute an equal proportion of their income to the common cause. The answer came that a layman with a family to raise and an obligation to defend the Fatherland in person enjoyed less disposable income than a clergyman with the same revenue. If the clergy were expected to give charity to the poor, then in the present emergency no one was more needy than the Fatherland.146 The irrefutability of the case for a much larger army, and the conviction that the clergy should pay disproportionately for it, was demonstrated in March and April 1789. First, the bishops had to “offer” that the clergy would pay 20 per cent of their income to the treasury, in addition to the existing subsidium charitativum. The alternative would have been the imposition of a greater tax, without the figleaf of papal consent. However, reductions were granted to poorer parish priests and monasteries that ran schools. The bishops also had to reallocate the subsidium charitativum in order to spare the poorer clergy. The Sejm then acclaimed a noble “offering” of 10 per cent.147 The most dangerous argument faced by the clergy was that its lands were the “patrimonium Reipublicæ”, bestowed in return for services, and liable to be forfeited if those services were badly performed. According to one writer, “what dark centuries, inclined by fanaticism and superstition, carelessly gave to the clergy, the eighteenth century, enlightened by the light of true philosophy, should take back from them”.148 But this particular kind of “enlightened” discourse was unusual, and it exposed the author to stinging counter-attacks. Most

146 See Roman Pilat, O literaturze politycznej Sejmu Czteroletniego (1788–1792) (Cracow: 1872), 80–109; Władysław Konopczyński, “Polscy pisarze polityczni”, vol. 2, “Sejm Czteroletni”, unpublished typescript in Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Cracow, Akc. 52/61, ch. 22; Jan Kracik, “Klerykalizm i antyklerykalizm doby Sejmu Czteroletniego. Spór kasztelana Jacka Jezierskiego z kanonikiem Wojciechem Skarszewskim”, Biuletyn Biblioteki Jagiellońskiej 49 (1999), 187–196. 147 Walerian Kalinka, Sejm Czteroletni [1880–1887], 4th ed. (Warsaw: 1991), vol. 1, 386–393. Richard Butterwick, “O ratunek Ojczyzny. Sprawa opodatkowania duchowieństwa katolickiego w początkach Sejmu Czteroletniego”, in Zbigniew Anusik (ed.), Spory o państwo w dobie nowożytnej. Między racją stanu a partykularyzmem (Łódź: 2007), 229–241. 148 [Jan Baudouin de Courtenay], Poparcie uwag nad życiem Jana Zamoyskiego z roztrząsaniem pism, które się z ich powodu ziawiły (s.l.: 1788), 98.

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 341 anti-clerical authors stressed their Catholic credentials. The Church’s defenders sought to prove that the clergy held their property on the same basis as lay nobles. Therefore any arbitrary seizure of ecclesiastical land would also threaten noble property. This was a more persuasive argument, yet some demagogues, such as Wojciech Suchodolski (1749–1826), envoy for Chełm, claimed that the Commonwealth, embodied in the Sejm, was a “sovereign mistress” who did not need to explain her actions.149 Matters came to a head over the bishopric of Cracow. After Kajetan Sołtyk died on 30/31 July 1788, Michał Poniatowski hoped to retain the administration of the bishopric, and possibly to hold Cracow in tandem with Gniezno. Rome was not inclined to refuse him. However, the opposition, which in the autumn of 1788 was politically triumphant, desired the bishopric for one of their own and wished to humiliate the primate. What Saluzzo called “intrighi, e simonie” surrounding episcopal promotions and revenues reached their denouement when Ignacy Krasicki turned up in Warsaw at the beginning of July 1789. Frederick William II of Prussia wanted Krasicki to make way for a cadet Hohenzollern in Warmia, but his special envoy, Girolamo Lucchesini, decided to sabotage the deal. If Krasicki became bishop of Cracow on the terms offered by the king and primate, it would damage Prussian credit with the opposition.150 When the Sejm reconvened after a brief recess, the opposition, prompted by Lucchesini, unleashed its chief demagogue, Suchodolski. On 17 July 1789 he reintroduced his proposal to apply the revenues of the still vacant bishopric to the army, leaving the future bishop with 100,000 złotys per annum. A poorly attended session passed the proposal by 56 to 23 in a secret ballot. The next step was to extend the measure to other bishoprics. The law Fundusz dla woyska (Fund for the Army), passed on 24 July 1789, specified that as bishoprics fell vacant, their property would go to the Commonwealth. The treasuries would pay annual salaries of 200,000 złotys to the primate, 100,000 złotys to the bishops of the Latin rite, 100,000 złotys to the Uniate metropolitan archbishop of Kiev, and 50,000 złotys to the Uniate bishops. The surplus would go to the army. When the increases in income for

149

Wojciech Suchodolski, 21 July 1789, AGAD ASC 2, fols. 643–645. Richard Butterwick, “Intrighi e simonie wokół biskupstwa krakowskiego w 1789 roku”, Kwartalnik Historyczny 111/3 (2004), 103–126. 150

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about half the bishops were taken into account, the net annual gain for the treasury would be only a few hundred thousand złotys. As equal duties should accompany equal revenues, a deputation was appointed to discuss a redivision of the dioceses and sundry ecclesiastical matters with the episcopate and the nuncio.151 In despair, Michał Poniatowski left the country. To some, the way now seemed open to a wider reform of the clergy, involving the reduction of abbacies and prelatures, the rationalization of religious houses, and better provision for the parish clergy of both rites. Proposals were sent to the deputation. One added details to the plan for a “national synod” to reorder the clergy outlined by Kołłątaj in his Prawo polityczne narodu polskiego (Political Law of the Polish Nation, 1789).152 Kołłątaj’s vision was of a nation in which all were personally free, and in which political rights were a consequence of property rather than birth. In addition to the landed/noble and urban estates, he envisaged “service estates”—the military, the clergy, and the “teaching estate”. All confessions and their schools would be obliged to teach a common enlightened civic morality. Kołłątaj treated the Catholic Church as a means to this end: this marks him out as an adherent of “Catholic Enlightenment” rather than “enlightened Catholicism”. But he insisted that whatever the scale of the internal redistribution, the secular power should never seize ecclesiastical property. That property consecrated to God should not be seized for profane ends was also the key principle for the Holy See.153 Nuncial tact and papal procrastinations could postpone a rupture, but not forever. The Crown Treasury Commission began to survey the Cracow estates, and an auction was planned for the spring of 1790. First the nuncio, and then Pius VI himself, hinted that the Poles might go as far as Joseph II, but no further: “other European courts, having taken the property of monastic congregations and secular priests, never applied that fund to the maintenance of the army, but established a religious fund for

151

Kalinka, Sejm Czteroletni, vol. 1, 410–413. VL, vol. 9, 103–105. “Kongres Duchowieństwa do generalnego urządzenia Funduszów”, Biblioteka Czartoryskich, Cracow, 1178, pp. 155–159. Hugo Kołłątaj, Listy anonima i Prawo polityczne narodu polskiego, ed. Bogusław Leśnodorski and Helena Wereszycka, vol. 2 (Warsaw: 1954), 312–313. 153 This and the following two paragraphs are based on Richard Butterwick, “Jak nie doszło do schizmy. Rzeczpospolita a Stolica Apostolska w dobie Sejmu Czteroletniego”, Kwartalnik Historyczny 116/3 (2009): 73–90. 152

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 343 the support of churches, parishes, and the poor”.154 This solution was acceptable to some leaders of the opposition, such as the Sejm’s marshal, Stanisław Małachowski (1736–1809) and the brothers Ignacy and Stanisław Kostka Potocki. They professed horror at the arbitrary seizure of property. It tended to be enlightened aristocrats (often leading Freemasons) who publicly defended ecclesiastical temporalities, and raucous provincial squires, ostentatiously affirming their Catholicism and occasionally baiting “heretics”, who led the raids on pious ancestral bequests. During the winter of 1789/90 the sejm deputation met several times with the episcopate and the nuncio. The deputation failed to gain the bishops’ agreement to a fully-fledged Orthodox hierarchy in the Commonwealth, independent of the Holy Synod in St Petersburg. The bishops failed to persuade the deputation to recommend active measures against irreligious and immoral books. The two sides were however able to resolve questions such as episcopal tariffs for surplice fees, the requirement of residence, the means for resolving disputes over interest payments and tithes, the sums expedited to Rome, the proposed reduction of feasts in the Ruthenian rite and the Uniates’ adoption of the Gregorian calendar, and the age of monastic profession. In almost every respect, the deputation listened to the episcopal and nuncial arguments and left matters in the bishops’ hands for the present. A limited redrawing of diocesan boundaries was also agreed. Most importantly of all, shortly before the project was due to be presented to the Sejm, the deputation conceded that bishops could draw their allotted revenues from landed estates and other funds, rather than as salaries. It was also agreed that any surplus funds could be used for “pious” purposes such as military hospitals, pensions for invalid soldiers, the king’s cadet school, and seminaries. The negotiated agreement did not bind the Sejm. Convention forbade even a confederated Sejm to amend one of its own laws, except unanimously. Suchodolski insisted that he would consent to no change. The impasse was resolved when Suchodolski left Warsaw, enabling Małachowski to introduce the bill on 25 May 1790. The essential point, that bishops could draw their income from landed estates, was 154

Pius VI’s words during an audience with Cardinal Tommaso Antici, reported by Antici to the Sejm’s Deputation for Foreign Affairs, in a (lost) despatch dated Rome, 5 Sept. 1789, and read out to the Sejm in Polish translation on 19 Oct. 1789. AGAD ASC 18, fols. 123–134, at 133.

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agreed unanimously. Suchodolski then returned. Unable to reverse this decision, he was able to prevent surplus revenue being applied to non-military purposes. It transpires from a hitherto overlooked letter that Suchodolski’s patron, the grand hetman of the Crown, Franciszek Ksawery Branicki (c. 1730–1819), had sent him away from Warsaw on business, and tipped off one of the bishops that it would be a good time to settle the ecclesiastical business. Branicki’s clique had sprung the trap on the bishopric of Cracow, but Suchodolski’s obstinacy no longer served a political purpose. Schism was averted. The Sejm interrupted consideration of the deputation’s project on 1 June 1790 and resumed it on 22 July 1790, with the focus on the Uniates. The Uniate metropolitan archbishop was admitted to the senate. But the debates were broken off again on 29 July, this time for good. Despite the name of the law, Duchowieństwo oboyga obrządków (The Clergy of Both Rites), the provisions were effectively restricted to the two episcopates.155 An attempt was made on 27 July 1790 to deprive abbots of most of their income, and redistribute it among “active clergymen”, but it was deflected by Stanisław August and Małachowski.156 One final effort to establish a national synod for the comprehensive reform of the secular and religious clergy, backed by Kołłątaj, was made on 21 and 22 May 1792. But without a swell of support, it was left to further “deliberation”. By this stage the king and other leaders of the Polish Revolution were warning against following the French example and changing too much, too soon.157 Given that the temper of the times was less sympathetic to monks and nuns than to the secular clergy, the Sejm’s failure to pass a reform of the religious clergy may seem surprising. In the Habsburg lands, it was the orders that felt the brunt of Joseph II’s reforms—reforms that were extensively reported in Polish periodicals. In the Commonwealth, decisions were taken not by an absolute monarch, but in public by an elected assembly of nobles. Most envoys and senators were neither passionate reformers, nor diehard defenders of monasticism.

155 VL, vol. 9, 175–176. Kamil Paździor, “Dopuszczenie metropolity unickiego do senatu w 1790 r. Studium z polityki wyznaniowej Sejmu Czteroletniego”, Nasza Przeszłość, 91 (1999): 241–267. 156 AGAD ASC 8, fols. 278–279. Stanisław August to Michał Poniatowski, 28 July 1790, AGAD AGhig. 801b, vol. 1, fol. 32. Saluzzo to Zelada, 28 July 1790, 4 Aug. 1790, ASV ANV 67, fols. 38–39, 41. 157 Ignacy Wyssogota Zakrzewski, Stan Duchowny Panuiącey Wiary Świętey Katolickiey (Warsaw: 1792).

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 345 Such men might be persuaded by an overwhelming need for funds, or when the target of a measure was personally unpopular. In the case of the bishopric of Cracow, intrigue set the trap, and oratory shut it. Otherwise, ecclesiastical business did not much absorb the Sejm. For this indifference the nuncio was almost grateful.158 The place of the Catholic Church in the polity aroused no great controversy, either before or after the Constitution of 3 May 1791. It was widely accepted that Catholicism in both rites would remain the dominant religion, and that apostasy would not be permitted. At the same time there was little appetite to spell out the consequences of apostasy, as banishment was regarded as impolitic and the death penalty (the punishment prior to 1768) as draconian. Few contested the Church’s claim to censor irreligious and immoral publications, but the political will to implement such censorship was lacking. There was question of whether all people would be free to settle and worship in the Commonwealth, or only those belonging to specified “tolerated” confessions. The Constitution of 3 May resolved the matter in favour of all creeds.159 Finally, on 21 May 1792 the Catholic bishops, led by Skarszewski, lost their battle to prevent the creation of an autonomous Orthodox hierarchy by 123 to 13.160 The work of legal codification was renewed in the summer of 1791, but the “Code of Stanisław August” remained unfinished when the Sejm ended.161 This time, however, the monarch was happy to drop elements such as a royal exequatur for papal bulls, as he desired papal blessing for the Constitution of 3 May. Much of the clergy, secular and regular, was drafted into the campaign to persuade provincial nobles of the merits of the Constitution. In pastoral letters and sermons they portrayed it as a miracle of Divine Providence, to be celebrated with the panoply of Catholic ritual. They also hailed it as a masterpiece of “enlightened” legislation, justly admired by the luminaries of Europe and America. And the propaganda worked. In February 1792, no

158

E.g. Saluzzo to Zelada, 9 June 1790, ASV ANV 67, fols. 26–27. See Emanuel Rostworowski, “Religijność i polityka wyznaniowa Stanisława August”, in Jerzy Kowecki (ed.), Życie kulturalne i religijność, 11–24. Konstytucja 3 Maja. Statut Zgromadzenia Przyjaciół Konstytucji, (Warsaw: 1981), art. 1. 160 Eugeniusz Sakowicz, Kościół prawosławny w Polsce w epoce Sejmu Wielkiego 1788–1792 (Warsaw: 1935), 182–225. Kamil Paździor, “Polityka Sejmu Czteroletniego wobec kościołów wschodnich”, Ph.D. dissertation, Silesian University (Katowice: 2000), 354–380. Butterwick, “Deconfessionalization?”, 115–118. 161 See Wojciech Szafrański, Kodeks Stanisława Augusta (Poznań: 2007). 159

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sejmik instruction criticized the Constitution, and at the vast majority of sejmiks the szlachta either voted effusive thanks or swore an oath to defend it.162 The clergy continued to be an integral part of the state. In the Polish Crown at least, priests were among the thousands of local worthies elected to the Civil-Military Commissions of Good Order, established in the autumn of 1789, and which soon proved to be an effective form of local government.163 Canons and prelates continued to serve as judges of the Crown and Lithuanian tribunals, and bishops were elected to the central government commissions formed or reformed in 1791. Michał Poniatowski returned from England to take up his post in the custodial council of ministers (Straż Praw) as chairman of the Commission for National Education, and “head of the Polish clergy”. (It was soon clarified that this ambiguous phrase in the Constitution implied no jurisdiction prejudicial to other bishops, the orders, or the nuncio.)164 Kołłątaj, raised to the vice-chancellorship of the Crown despite nuncial and episcopal protests, spoke of “economic” and “moral” constitutions to follow the political one acclaimed on 3 May 1791. The king urged him to mend his fences with Rome.165 The counter-revolutionary regime installed by Catherine the Great in the summer of 1792, embodied in the confederacies of Targowica (in the Crown) and Wilno (in Lithuania), attempted to win over provincial nobles by employing republican and Catholic discourse against the “revolutionary Warsaw sejm”. Bishop Kossakowski was the effective head of the Lithuanian confederacy. Some bishops took the opportunity to crack down on irreligious and anti-clerical publishers and writers.166 Skarszewski, charged with investigating the Police Com162 Wojciech Szczygielski, Referendum trzeciomajowe. Sejmiki lutowe 1792 roku (Łódź: 1994). Magdalena Ślusarska, “Konstytucja 3 Maja w kaznodziejstwie okolicznościowym lat 1791–1792”, in Teresa Kostkiewiczowa (ed.), “Rok Monarchii Konstytucyjnej”. Piśmiennictwo polskie lat 1791–1792 wobec Konstytucji 3 Maja (Warsaw: 1992), 153–175. Butterwick, “Between Anti-Enlightenment and Enlightened Catholicism”, 219–227. 163 See Łukasz Kądziela, “Local Government Reform during the Four-Year Diet”, in Samuel Fiszman (ed.), Constitution and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Poland: The Constitution of 3 May 1791 (Bloomington, IN: 1997), 379–396. 164 Wojakowski, Straż Praw, 73–74. 165 Maria Pasztor, Hugo Kołłątaj na Sejmie Wielkim w latach 1791–1792 (Warsaw: 1991). 166 See Władysław Smoleński, Konfederacya targowicka (Cracow: 1903), and Ramunė Šmigelskytė-Stukienė, Lietuvos Didžiosios Kunigaikštystes konfederacijos susidarymas ir veikla 1792–1793 (Vilnius: 2003).

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 347 mission founded in 1791, could find no malefactions, but did detect an intention “to rule the altar under the appearance of counsel and enlightenment, and to prescribe to citizens, what they are to eat and drink”.167 Despite their traditional slogans, the confederates failed to achieve anything more than acquiescence among the szlachta. Michał Poniatowski kept his distance, only entering the fray to criticize an illconsidered plan to redraw the bishoprics within the truncated boundaries left by the Second Partition, agreed between Russia and Prussia in 1793.168 At first sight the insurrection of 1794 seems closer to the more violent stages of the French Revolution than to the Polish Revolution of 1788–1792. In Warsaw and Wilno, leading confederates were summarily tried and hanged for treason. Bishops Kossakowski and Massalski were among those who swung in front of baying crowds. Skarszewski was also condemned to death, and only escaped the scaffold after a personal plea by the nuncio, Lorenzo Litta, to Tadeusz Kościuszko. When Michał Poniatowski died suddenly, it was falsely rumoured that the king had told him to commit suicide. Undoubtedly, the king and the primate feared the mob that summer.169 Yet essentially the relationship between Church and “nation” followed the pattern of the Four Years’ Sejm. Episcopal property was appropriated for the war effort, and the clergy, including Poniatowski, acted as cheerleaders and masters of ceremonies. No altars were desecrated, no churches vandalized, no national memory stained. By and large, the rule of law was maintained.170 After the rising was crushed, Catherine parcelled out the remnants of the Commonwealth.

167 Andrzej Zahorski, Centralne instytucje policyjne w Polsce w dobie rozbiorów (Warsaw: 1959), 219. 168 Łukasz Kądziela, “Prymas Michał Poniatowski wobec Targowicy”, Przegląd Historyczny 85 (1994), 433–442. 169 Andrzej Woltanowski, “Czarna legenda o śmierci prymasa Poniatowskiego. Źródła i historiografia”, Kwartalnik Historyczny 94/4 (1987), 25–62. Zbigniew Góralski, Stanisław August w insurekcji kościuszkowskiej (Warsaw: 1988). 170 Andrzej Woltanowski (ed.), Kościół katolicki a powstanie kościuszkowskie. Zapomniana karta z dziejów insurekcji 1794 r. Wybór źródeł (Warsaw: 1995). Magdalena Ślusarska, “Między sacrum a profanum. O obrzędowości powstania kościuszkowskiego”, Wiek Oświecenia 12 (1996), 107–133.

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Many of the luminaries of the Stanislavian “high Enlightenment” and its critics remained active public figures into the 1810s and 1820s. The discourse of their old age differed little from that of their youth. Wybicki was still denouncing the interference of Rome in Poland’s affairs, Skarszewski was still citing Montesquieu against the “enlightened age”, and Surowiecki was still raging against the Antichrist’s Masonic acolytes. But the middle ground fell away. While the polemics of Anti-Enlightenment still occasionally sounded “enlightened”, and while the agents of Caesar still sought to propagate Enlightenment via the Churches, the conciliatory outlook of “enlightened Catholicism” belonged to the past. In the lands of the partitioned Commonwealth, the parting of ways between the “Late Enlightenment” and Catholicism was complete by about 1820.171 The initial period of statelessness led some Poles, including Kołłątaj, locked up in an Austrian prison, to doubt in a Providential God. Divine favour seemed more in evidence when first Napoleon, and then Alexander I, established Polish statelets: the Duchy of Warsaw (1807–1813) and the Kingdom of Poland (1815–1830). In the areas directly annexed to the Russian Empire, Alexander not only permitted, but even encouraged, a flowering of Polish learning and culture, centred on the University of Wilno.172 Some of Poland’s leading statesmen took advantage of the opportunity to devise and implement social, economic, educational, and confessional policies that showed much continuity with the “enlightened” reforms of the later eighteenth century.173

171 See, in general, Tomasz Kizwalter, Ludzie i idee Oświecenia w Polsce porozbiorowej (Warsaw: 1987). Most work on the “late Enlightenment” is by literary historians, including Piotr Żbikowski, W pierwszych latach narodowej niewoli. Schyłek polskiego Oświecenia i zwiastuny Romantyzmu (Wrocław: 2007), and Ryszard Przybylski, Klasycyzm, czyli prawdziwy koniec Królestwa Polskiego, 2nd ed. (Gdańsk: 1996). Martyna Deszczyńska, “Historia sacra” i dzieje narodowe. Refleksja historyczna lat 1795–1830 nad rolą religii i Kościoła w przeszłości polskiej (Warsaw: 2003), is interdisciplinary. 172 See Daniel Beauvois, Lumières et société en l’Europe de l’Est, 2 vols. (Lille: 1977), and W. H. Zawadzki, A Man of Honour: Adam Czartoryski as a Statesman of Russia and Poland 1795–1831 (Oxford: 1993). 173 See Jarosław Czubaty, “The Attitudes of the Polish Political Elite towards the State in the Period of the Duchy of Warsaw, 1807–1815”, in Michael Rowe (ed.), Collaboration and Resistance in Napoleonic Europe: State Formation in an Age of Upheaval, c. 1800–1815 (Basingstoke: 2003), 169–185.

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 349 It was Alexander, however, who effectively brought down the curtain on the Enlightenment in Poland and Lithuania. His increasingly pronounced leaning towards an ecumenical strain of Christian mysticism encouraged the Catholic episcopate to see him as their ally in reversing the more unwelcome developments during the Duchy of Warsaw and the first few years of the Kingdom of Poland. Napoleon’s insistence that the Poles adopt the Code Napoléon led to ructions, especially over civil marriage and divorce. Parish priests were pressed into service as civil registrars. Theoretically, they might even be obliged to marry an “apostate” (an ex-priest) to a divorced woman. Clergymen were also irritated by the stream of government edicts that they were obliged to read out from their pulpits. In their content, many instructions, such as those dealing with matters of public health, differed little from those of Michał Poniatowski. Now, however, they were being distributed by professional bureaucrats unpleasantly titled “sub-prefects”, some of whom were openly irreligious, and issued by anti-clerical ministers.174 Foremost among these ministers was Stanisław Kostka Potocki, Poland’s leading Freemason. He headed the “Chamber of Education” (Izba Edukacyjna). Potocki’s role became still greater in 1815–1820, when he headed the Kingdom of Poland’s “Government Commission of Religious Confessions and Public Enlightenment”. The Commission sought to prescribe the curriculum in seminaries, and fought a running battle with the episcopate and the Holy See over marital annulments. It even directed bishops to suspend priests who used the pulpit or confessional to persecute Freemasons. Potocki need not have worried much about Surowiecki, but Skarszewski proved a more formidable foe. Potocki’s plans to reduce the regular clergy fortified the lobbying campaign against him. So did his fiercely anti-clerical novel, Podróż do Ciemnogrodu (Journey to Darkborough, 1820). The eponymous “citadel of unenlightenment” (twierdza nieoświecenia) was an amalgam of jesuitical Polotsk and papal Rome. Alexander I dismissed Potocki at the bishops’ behest that same year. Potocki’s successor, Stanisław Grabowski (1780–1845), was soon known as the minister of “darkening” (ociemnienie).175

174 Barbara Grochulska, Małe państwo wielkich nadziei (Warsaw: 1987), 30–31. See also Tadeusz Walachowicz, Kościół katolicki w prawodawstwie Księstwa Warszawskiego (Lublin: 1984). 175 Waldemar Gliński, Komisja Rządowa Wyznań Religijnych i Oświecenia Publicznego wobec wspólnot religijnych w Królestwie Polskim 1815–1820 (Warsaw: 2002).

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Jan Paweł Woronicz, venerated almost as a national prophet, pointed the way to the Catholic future. He proclaimed Poland to be a chosen nation, who had brought her downfall on herself by her sins. Only by renewing her covenant with God would she redeem herself and win back her independence.176 Libertine lifestyles were already provoking more social opprobrium by the 1820s. In many respects, however, the Church’s position remained parlous. In 1829, the same year as Woronicz was buried, the Sejm of the Kingdom of Poland rejected a government bill to abolish civil marriage. Most of the Church’s former property had been appropriated by the new rulers, making the clergy financially dependent on the state. Right across the former Commonwealth, vocations were at a low ebb. The Jesuits were dissolved in the Russian Empire in 1818, just four years after their general restoration by Pius VII. All three of the partitioning regimes continued to close down monasteries and convents, although the major offensive against them in the Russian Empire began only after the Polish rising of 1830–1831 had been crushed.177 The Catholic revival of the nineteenth century would be led not by the religious orders but by a parish clergy that was increasingly close to the peasantry. On the other side of the fence, the title of Potocki’s ponderous novel has had an unexpected afterlife. Poland’s metropolitan anti-clericals are still associating the Catholic Church with ciemnogród in the early twenty-first century. Abbreviations AGAD AGhig. ASC ASV ANV BN PSB VL

Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych, Warsaw Archiwum ks. Kajetana Ghigiotiego Archiwum Sejmu Czteroletniego Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Archivio della Nunziatura a Varsavia Biblioteka Narodowa, Warsaw Polski Słownik Biograficzny Volumina Legum

Ewa Jabłońska-Deptuła, Przystosowanie i opór. Zakony męskie w Królestwie Kongresowym (Warsaw: 1983), passim. Martyna Deszczyńska, “Biskup Wojciech Skarszewski a dymisja Stanisława Kostki Potockiego”, Kwartalnik Historyczny 106/1 (1999): 45–56. Barbara Grochulska, “Dramat liberała”, in Barbara Grochulska and Jerzy Skowronek (eds.), Losy Polaków w XIX–XX w. Studia poświęcone Profesorowi Stefanowi Kieniewiczowi (Warsaw: 1987), 137–149. 176 Rejman, “Tematyka religijna”. 177 Jabłońska-Deptuła, Przystosowanie i opór, statistics at 502–503, and passim; Anna Barańska, Między Warszawą, Petersburgiem i Rzymem: Kościół a państwo w dobie Królestwa Polskiego (1815–1830) (Lublin: 2008).

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Melton, James Van Horn, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Austria and Prussia (Cambridge: 1988). Meissner, Andrzej, “Szkoły zakonne wobec Komisji Edukacji Narodowej”, in Mrozowska Kamilla and Dutkowa, Renata (eds.), W kręgu wielkiej reformy (Warsaw and Cracow: 1977), 241–254. Michalski, Jerzy, “Sejmiki poselskie 1788 roku”, in id., Studia historyczne z XVIII i XIX wieku, vol. 1, Polityka i społeczeństwo (Warsaw: 2007), 217–284. ——, “‘Wolność’ i ‘własność’ chłopska w polskiej myśli reformatorskiej XVIII wieku”, in Idem, Studia historyczne z XVIII i XIX wieku, vol. 2, Ideologia—nauka—historiografia (Warsaw: 2007), 130–205. Misiurek, Jerzy, Historia i teologia polskiej duchowości katolickiej, vol. 2 (Lublin: 1998). Mrozowska, Kamilla, Walka o nauczycieli świeckich w dobie Komisji Edukacji Narodowej na terenie Korony (Wrocław: 1956). ——, Funkcjonowanie systemu szkolnego Komisji Edukacji Narodowej na terenie Korony w latach 1783–1793 (Wrocław: 1985). O’Connor, Mark, “Oświecenie katolickie i Marcin Poczobut SJ”, in Grzebień, Ludwik and Stanisław Obirek (eds.), Jezuici a kultura polska (Cracow: 1993), 41–49. O’Keefe, Cyril B., Contemporary Reactions to the Enlightenment (1728–1762) (Paris: 1974). Pasierb, Janusz S., ‘Religijność polska w okresie Oświecenia’, in Drozdowski, Marian Marek (ed.), Życie kulturalne i religijność w czasach Stanisława Augusta Poniatowskiego, (Warsaw: 1991), 49–58. Paszenda, Jerzy (ed.), Z dziejów szkolnictwa jezuickiego w Polsce. Wybór artykułów (Cracow: 1994). Pasztor, Maria, Hugo Kołłątaj na Sejmie Wielkim w latach 1791–1792 (Warsaw: 1991). Pawlik, Wojciech, “Religia w projektach urządzenia szkół średnich”, Roczniki Humanistyczne 42 (1994): 123–154. Paździor, Kamil, “Dopuszczenie metropolity unickiego do senatu w 1790 r. Studium z polityki wyznaniowej Sejmu Czteroletniego”, Nasza Przeszłość 91 (1999), 241–167. ——, “Polityka Sejmu Czteroletniego wobec kościołów wschodnich”, Ph.D. dissertation, Silesian University (Katowice: 2000). Pęckowski, Michał, Józef Olechowski, archidiakon i suffragan krakowski 1735–1806 (Cracow: 1926). Pelczar, Józef, Zarys dziejów kaznodziejstwa w Kościele katolickim, vol. 2, Kaznodzieje polscy (Cracow: 1896). Piechnik, Ludwik, Dzieje Akademii Wileńskiej, 4 vols. (Rome: 1983–1990). Pilaszek, Małgorzata, Procesy o czary w Polsce w wiekach XV–XVIII (Cracow: 2008). Pilat, Roman, O literaturze politycznej Sejmu Czteroletniego (1788–1792) (Cracow: 1872). Przybylski, Ryszard, Klasycyzm, czyli prawdziwy koniec Królestwa Polskiego, 2nd ed. (Gdańsk: 1996). Raila, Eligijus, “Vilniaus vyskupas Ignotas Masalskis ir katališka apšvieta: edukacijos ir pastoracijos simbiozė”, in Kultūros istorijos tyrenėjimai, vol. 3 (Vilnius: 1997), 92–146. Reinhard, Wolfgang, “Was ist katholische Konfessionalisierung?”, in Reinhard, Wolfgang and Schilling, Heinz (eds.), Die katholische Konfessionalisierung (Münster: 1995), 419–452. Rejman, Zofia, “Tematyka religijna w twórczości Jana Pawła Woronicza”, in Kostkiewiczowa Teresa (ed.), Motywy religijne w twórczości pisarzy polskiego Oświecenia (Lublin: 1995), 215–240. Rostworowski, Emanuel, Sprawa aukcji wojska na tle sytuacji politycznej przed Sejmem Czteroletnim (Warsaw: 1957).

catholicism and enlightenment in poland-lithuania 357 ——, “Ksiądz pleban Kołłątaj”, in Grochulska, Barbara et al. (eds.), Wiek XIX. Prace ofiarowane Stefanowi Kieniewiczowi w 60 rocznicę urodzin (Warsaw: 1967), 49–63. ——, “Podoski, Gabriel Jan”, Polski Słownik Biograficzny, vol. 27, (Wrocław: 1983), 149–161. ——, Historia powszechna. Wiek XVIII, 3rd ed. (Warsaw: 1984). ——, “Ilu było w Rzeczypospolitej obywateli szlachty?”, Kwartalnik Historyczny 94/3 (1987): 3–40. ——, “Religijność i polityka wyznaniowa Stanisława August”, in Drozdowski, Marian Marek (ed.), Życie kulturalne i religijność w czasach Stanisława Augusta Poniatowskiego (Warsaw: 1991), 11–24. Sakowicz, Eugeniusz, Kościół prawosławny w Polsce w epoce Sejmu Wielkiego 1788– 1792 (Warsaw: 1935). Schmidt, Christoph, “Von der Schaukel aufs Schafott: Die polnische Aufklärung” in Kraus, Alexander and Renner, Andreas (eds.), Orte eigener Vernunft. Europäische Aufklärung jenseits der Zentren (Frankfurt am Main: 2008), 143–157. Schwaiger, Georg “Oświecenie a katolicyzm”, Concilium (1966/67): 373–382. Ślusarska, Magdalena, “Konstytucja 3 Maja w kaznodziejstwie okolicznościowym lat 1791–1792”, in Kostkiewiczowa, Teresa (ed.), “Rok Monarchii Konstytucyjnej”. Piśmiennictwo polskie lat 1791–1792 wobec Konstytucji 3 Maja (Warsaw: 1992), 153–175. ——, “Michał Franciszek Karpowicz”, in Kostkiewiczowa, Teresa and Zbigniew Goliński (eds.), Pisarze polskiego oświecenia, vol. 2 (Warsaw: 1994), 74–98. ——, “Między sacrum a profanum. O obrzędowości powstania kościuszkowskiego”, Wiek Oświecenia 12 (1996), 107–133. ——, “Oświeceniowe modele biskupa, plebana i parafii. Kontynuacja czy zmiana tradycji?”, in Ślusarska, Magdalena (ed.), Dwór, plebania, rodzina chłopska. Szkice z dziejów wsi polskiej XVII i XVIII wieku (Warsaw: 1998), 37–53. Šmigelskytė-Stukienė, Ramunė, Lietuvos Didžiosios Kunigaikštystes konfederacijos susidarymas ir veikla 1792–1793 (Vilnius: 2003). Smoleński, Władysław, “Żywioły zachowawcze i Komisya Edukacyjna”, in idem, Pisma Historyczne, vol. 2, (Cracow: 1901), 95–206. ——, Konfederacya targowicka (Cracow: 1903). ——, Kuźnica kołłątajowska. Studium historyczne, 2nd ed. (Warsaw: 1949). ——, Przewrót umysłowy w Polsce wieku XVIII. Studia historyczne [1891], 4th ed. (Warsaw: 1979). Snopek, Jerzy, Objawienie i oświecenie. Z dziejów libertynizmu w Polsce (Wrocław: 1986). Stasiewicz-Jasiukowa, Irena, “Der aufgeklärte Katholizismus im Polen der Frühaufklärung”, in Donnert, Erich (ed.), Europa in der Frühen Neuzeit. Festschrift für Günter Mühlpfordt, vol. 3 (Weimar, Cologne, and Vienna: 1997), 555–564. ——, (ed.), Wkład jezuitów do nauki i kultury w Rzeczyspospolitej Obojga Narodów i pod zaborami (Cracow and Warsaw: 2004). Stolarski, Piotr, “Dominican-Jesuit Rivalry and the Politics of Catholic Renewal in Poland, 1564–1648”, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, forthcoming. Stone, Daniel, Polish Politics and National Reform, 1775–1788 (Boulder, CO: 1976). Szafrański, Wojciech, Kodeks Stanisława Augusta (Poznań: 2007). Szczygielski, Wojciech, Referendum trzeciomajowe. Sejmiki lutowe 1792 roku (Łódź: 1994). Szybiak, Irena, Szkolnictwo Komisji Edukacji Narodowej w Wielkim Księstwie Litewskim (Wrocław: 1973). Tarnawski, Mieczysław, Kodeks Zamoyskiego na tle stosunków kościelno-państwowych za czasów Stanisława Augusta (Lwów: 1916). Tazbir, Janusz, “Staropolski antyklerykalizm”, Kwartalnik Historyczny, 109/3 (2002): 13–22.

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THE CATHOLIC ENLIGHTENMENT IN PORTUGAL* Evergton Sales Souza(**) The Catholic enlightenment in Portugal is commonly thought of as a phenomenon that gained momentum in the second half of the 18th century. Indeed, the reform policy implemented by King José I and his minister Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, more commonly known as the Marquis of Pombal, a title which he only received in 1770, privileged and opened the way for the dissemination of enlightenment thought in several fields, including the church. However, prior to the reign of King José I enlightenment ideas already circulated throughout Portugal. Moreover, as highlighted by José Pedro Paiva, the 18th century was characterized by “constant tension between cycles or forces open to reform in terms of the Catholic enlightenment and, simultaneously, movements of an apologetic nature which defended Christianity, the church, and religion against the secular enlightenment offensive”.1 The academic movement, stimulated during the reign of King João V (1705–1750), notably through the foundation of the Academia Real de História (Royal Academy of History), was one of the gateways to the new way of thinking.2 Portuguese intellectuals living in Portugal or abroad, namely in cities like Rome, Paris, London and Amsterdam, where they could maintain closer contact with the new ideas without running any major risk of persecution by the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, also contributed in many ways toward spreading

( )

* Translated by Ben Kohn, São Francisco – Niterói, Brazil **) I would like to express my gratitude to José Pedro Paiva, who kindly read a draft version of this text, pointing out problems and suggesting corrections; and to my colleague and friend Lígia Bellini, who has revised with me its English translation. I would also like to thank my colleagues Bruno Feitler and Íris Kantor for their suggestions and help. 1 Cf. José Pedro Paiva, Os bispos de Portugal e do Império, 1495–1777 (Coimbra: 2006), 156–157 2 See Isabel F. da Mota, A Academia Real da História: Os intelectuais, o poder cultural e o poder monárquico no século XVIII (Coimbra: 2003) and Íris Kantor, Esquecidos e renascidos: historiografia acadêmica luso-americana (1724–1759) (São Paulo, Salvador: 2004). (

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enlightenment ideas. However, here we are less concerned with the origins and more with the dynamics by which the lights penetrated the Portuguese Catholic realm. Thus, our focus naturally turns towards an examination of certain events which occurred beginning in the 1740s. There is no doubt that the clandestine publication of Luiz Antonio Verney’s O Verdadeiro Método de estudar (The True Method of Study) in 1746 was an event of utmost importance. But there was another event, not always associated with the penetration and development of Catholic enlightenment in Portugal that deserves our attention: the sigilismo (seal of confession) dispute, which reached its peak when Verney’s book appeared. Before addressing this matter, however, it is necessary first to discuss the milestone in the history of Portuguese enlightened Catholicism represented by the publication of O Verdadeiro Método de Estudar. 1. Verney and the Proposal to Reform Theological Studies 1746 was a year marked by the publication of numerous clandestine texts. A considerable portion of those texts were related to the sigilismo dispute.3 Yet none of these works, however much controversy and debate they may have triggered in Portuguese society, had the impact of the book which Verney (1713–1792) published under the pseudonym of Friar Barbadinho.4 In a work characterized by the spirit of the lights, the state of education in Portugal was harshly criticized and a proposal put forward for an entirely reformed program in line with the enlightenment rationale predominant in various European centres. From grammar to physics, from medicine to theology, the study plan proposed by Verney covered all disciplines. The general lines of his reformist thinking are manifested in passages of his canonical and theological studies. The suggested reading of works by Van Espen, Fleury and Noel Alexandre for canonical studies can be interpreted as a demonstration of his distance from the ultramontanist positions

3 See the list of publications dated that year presented by Antonio Pereira da Silva, A questão do sigilismo em Portugal no século XVIII. História, religião e política nos reinados de D. João V e D. José I (Braga: 1964), xxiii–xxxiv. 4 The studies by António Alberto Banha de Andrade regarding Verney and his work remain indispensible: Vernei e a cultura do seu tempo (Coimbra: 1965) and Vernei e a projecção da sua obra (Lisbon: 1980).

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prevalent among the Portuguese at the time, although not enough to render Verney a champion of Gallican ecclesiology. Indeed, his concern is bound less to principles and more to study methods.5 Furthermore, his theological and ecclesiological view, following the example of Muratori, demonstrated the intention to remain independent in relation to the Jansenists and the Zelanti. This way, to use a formulation that is somewhat in disuse, he was closer to the positions of a third Catholic party.6 Indeed, without necessarily adopting some of the principles defended by Gallicans and Jansenists, Verney approaches these in relation to the method used for theological and canonical studies. The historical grounding required in both areas leads him to share the critique of scholastic theology prevalent in Portugal among the adherents of positive theology, who based their theological understanding on returning to the sources and on history.7 Therefore, like other scholars before him, Verney uses erudite critique and history as the two fundamental pillars of theology. In one particular passage which was certainly somewhat provocative in the eyes of many Portuguese theologians of the time, he acknowledged, in the 14th letter, that Catholics owed much of the progress in criticism to Protestants, who by wanting to free themselves from numerous arguments drawn from the ancient priests, declared many works as apocryphal and meticulously studied the dead languages to argue against the Originals. This forced the Catholics to do likewise; and, restoring the said works to their original purity, they determined which were true and which were false and supposed.8

5 We share the view of Ana Cristina Araújo, “As ciências sagradas na cidadela da razão”, in Ana Cristina Araújo (ed.), O marquês de Pombal e a universidade (Coimbra: 2000), 83, who, when analysing the problem of the theological positions defended by Verney, states that the novelty of his rational theology resides “more in the method and in the acuteness of the examination of the holy texts than in fundamental matters of the doctrine.” 6 We are inspired, of course, by the important study by Émile Appolis, Entre jansénistes et zélanti. Le tiers parti catholique au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris: 1960). 7 Regarding the relation between positive theology and history see, especially, JeanLouis Quantin, Le catholicisme classique et les Pères de l’Église: un retour aux sources (1669–1713) (Paris: 1999), 103–111 and passim; Bruno Neveu, Érudition et Religion aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: 1994), esp. 333–363. 8 Cf. Luis A. Verney, Verdadeiro método de estudar (ed. Antonio Salgado Júnior), 4 (Lisbon: 1952), 267. The position that the author adopts here in relation to the Protestants is not an isolated example within the work. In fact, it is in perfect keeping with what he writes in the first pages of the same 14th letter, 231: “If everything that the Heretics say were contrary to our dogmas, they would be Idolaters or Atheists, and

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From here is born what Verney calls Modern Theology (Teologia Moderna), which through criticism and history aims to discover and prove the theological truth, “which depends on historical fact and scriptural doctrine” that cannot be proven without first being discovered and qualified.9 Many of the authors and works recommended by Verney were not entirely unknown in Portugal, although several of them were looked upon with suspicion. He was aware of this, which is without a doubt one of the reasons why he preferred to publish the book anonymously and clandestinely. In a passage in that same 14th letter, he makes a veiled criticism of the Holy Office consultors called qualifiers who, as can be inferred from the arguments he advanced, did not have the required knowledge to exercise such an important function.10 The overriding contribution of Barbadinho’s book was, without a doubt, to stimulate a debate which had yet to flourish in Portuguese society.11 While the matters raised therein were aimed mainly at the methodological field, that is, at renewing study methods in Portugal, it is no less certain that the increased interest in the authors it recommended would end up giving rise to questions which before long would transcend that field and penetrate that of the doctrinal principles themselves. Works by Noel Alexandre, Louis Ellies Du Pin, Claude Fleury and Van Espen would not make an impression on people’s minds for their methodological value or notable erudition alone. Contesting ultramontanist ecclesiology in the name of the truth revealed by history was a clear message in these authors’ books, and the force of their arguments was

not Heretics, I mean Christians. It is not the method which is condemned in Heretics, it is the bad interpretation.” 9 Ibid., 268. 10 Ibid., 256–257. 11 The viewpoint outlined here is in line with that of J. S. da Silva Dias, for whom the renovation of Portuguese culture happened before Verdadeiro Método de Estudar. Indeed, prior to the publication of Verney’s book, enlightenment ideas were already gaining ground in Portugal, being spread especially in the Casa Ericeira, through Oratorians, Theatines, Franciscans, foreigners and those with foreign customs or ideas. We are also in keeping with the vision that the novelty of this book by Verney consisted in showing the Portuguese the contrast between the baroque and the enlightenment and stimulating a debate about ideas which were already circulating, even if with a limited manner, in Portugal. In this regard, for Silva Dias, the controversy around Verdadeiro Método de Estudar should be seen firstly as a postscript to the baroque rather than a starting point for enlightenment thinking. Cf. J. S. da Silva Dias, “Portugal e a cultura europeia, séculos XVI–XVIII”, Biblos 28 (1952), 203–498, reedited in book format Portugal e a cultura europeia (séculos XVI–XVIII) (Porto: 2006).


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sure to end up conquering hearts and minds. Therefore, the reform of theological and canonical studies proposed by Verney, although centred on methodology, would seem to lead inexorably to the questioning of the prevailing ecclesiological and theological concepts. It would still take some years before modernising reforms like those which Verney proposed were put into practice. But the debate regarding his proposals penetrated the 1750s, throughout which decade an increasingly favourable context developed for the application of his ideas. However, before they became reality, other important clashes occurred in Portugal, the modernising purposes of which are not always presented as clearly in the historical examination of the period. One such clash worthy of our particular attention is the case of the Jacobeus,12 who, in the 1740s, took considerable steps towards a reform in the spirit of enlightenment, such as was produced in Rome during the pontificate of Benedict XIV. 2. The Jacobeia Movement, the Seal of Confession and Catholic Enlightenment A few years ago, associating the Jacobeia movement and Catholic enlightenment would have seemed to some as a mix-up or crass mistake. Authors such as Luis Cabral de Moncada tended to see Jacobeia as a mystical movement, contrary to the progress of enlightenment reason and of a reactionary nature.13 Thus two important errors of interpretation were committed. The first was the failure to perceive the plural and changing nature of the movement, which was originally

12 Jacobeus are adepts of the movement called Jacobeia. This, in its beginnings, in the first decades of the eighteenth century, characterized itself by being a mystical and rigorist movement confined to some religious orders in Portugal. From 1720 onwards, it gained momentum and adepts outside the cloisters, having as its main objective promoting changes in Portuguese religious life. The changes proposed recall the strict Christianism of Port-Royal. As it has been noted by Samuel Miller, in Portugal and Rome c. 1748–1830. An aspect of the Catholic Enlightenment (Rome: 1978), 227: “In many ways the Jacobeus’ rigorism, unusual discipline, especially in connection with penance, and moral searching are reminiscent of the Messieurs de Port-Royal”. 13 Cf. Luis Cabral de Moncada, “Mística e racionalismo em Portugal no século XVIII”, in Estudos filosóficos e históricos. Artigos, discursos, conferências e recensões críticas, vol. 2 (Coimbra: 1959), 341 and passim. A similar view is upheld by Zília O. de Castro, “Jacobeia”, in C. M. de Azevedo (ed.), Dicionário de história religiosa de Portugal, vol. 3 (Lisbon: 2001), 5–7.

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more restricted to mystical concerns of the clergymen who lived within the monasteries, but which, over time, broke through this barrier to become concerned with a more general reform of the church and religious life. Jacobeu missionaries and bishops were largely responsible for this reformist impulse which, beginning in the 1720s, became increasingly more palpable. The second mistake has to do with the understanding of the reformist will itself of the Jacobeus who, in the 1740s, for example, far from manifesting anti-rationalist or “conservative” tendencies, represented the incentive to renew theological knowledge in Portugal in such a way as to arouse reaction among the different segments of the Portuguese church. However, before dealing with the relations between the Jacobeia movement and Catholic enlightenment, it is necessary to outline briefly this religious reform movement, which was created in the early 18th century in the Augustinian Eremites order and spread throughout several other religious orders in Portugal.14 It was characterized by indignation at the mediocrity and laziness of the clergy which it aimed to reform. From early on, the Jacobeus were the target of criticism by a large portion of the Portuguese clergy. At first the criticisms were related to the suspicion which usually led to the formation of factions within a religious order. The first Jacobeus, Augustinian Eremites of the Colégio da Graça de Coimbra, were accused by some confreres of adopting schismatic behaviour opposed to community feelings. Discredited by the support for the Jacobeus shown by the order’s superiors, the adversaries of the movement began to focus their criticisms on the reformist action and behaviour of those they considered hypocrites and afflicted bigots. They accused them of being lazy, greedy, tyrannical when in power, ambitious and even simoniacal. Although it is difficult to verify such affirmations, one must recognize that the accusation of intransigence is rather plausible: the Jacobeia program itself indicates this reality. Some of the movement’s maxims indicate that its austere spirituality and demanding practice were not to be hidden: “to serve 14 For a more detailed look at the Jacobeia movement see the fundamental study of Antonio Pereira da Silva, A questão do sigilismo em Portugal no século XVIII, as well as Evergton Sales Souza, Jansénisme et réforme de l’Église dans l’Empire portugais (1640–1790) (Paris: 2004), 187–234 and Evergton Sales Souza, “Mística e moral no Portugal do século XVIII. Achegas para a história dos jacobeus”, in L. Bellini, E. Sales Souza e G. dos R. Sampaio (eds.), Formas de crer. Ensaios de história religiosa do mundo luso-afro-brasileiro, séculos XIV–XXI (Salvador: 2006), 107–128.


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God the dear discovery”15—stated the first of the thirty Jacobeia maxims. Against the backdrop of a Christian world profoundly marked by the need to externalize its practices and religious feelings, like that of Portugal in the first half of the 18th century, even a movement which aimed to touch the depths of minds and which struggled against an exclusively external religion was incapable of freeing itself of this concern with appearances. The Jacobeus, who intended to reform the customs and development of a faith which was not satisfied with external manifestations in order to attain a perfect Christian life, sought, from the outset, to establish a clear distinction between themselves and others, by means of visible signs of austerity and piety. This was not just a question of displaying in everyday life the difference between themselves, who were of the spirit, and the others, who were of the mundane. They believed that through their own example the reform of individuals and institutions could be accelerated. However, despite these declared intentions, the majority of their antagonists considered their attitude as driven less by charity and more by affectation. As time went by, especially from the 1720s, the Jacobeia movement grew in strength, giving rise to oppositions of theological, ecclesiological and political natures. The political opposition was due to one of the Jacobeia leaders, Fr. Gaspar da Encarnação, having become one of the most heeded advisors to King João V regarding the election of bishops in Portugal and its Empire.16 The theological and ecclesiastical opposition was in virtue of the reformist desire, which represented a threat to the positions of the hitherto dominant group, led by the Inquisitor General Nuno da Cunha, and by the Patriarch of Lisbon Thomás de Almeida. As regards the connections between Jacobeia and Catholic enlightenment, it is best to focus our attention on the events related to the seal of confession dispute, which emerged in the 1740s. Two documents were published in Lisbon on 6 May 1745 giving rise to the disputes: a pastoral letter from the Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon, Tomás de Almeida, reporting the existence of unorthodox practices relative to the seal of confession; and a Holy Office edict, ordered to be published by the Cardinal Inquisitor General Nuno da Cunha, in which for the 15

Lisbon, Arquivos Nacionais da Torre do Tombo (ANTT)/Conselho Geral do Santo Ofício (CGSO), book 132. 16 Cf. Paiva, Os bispos de Portugal e do Império, 491 and ff.

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first time breaking the seal of confession was cited as a crime under the inquisition’s jurisdiction. And so the sigilismo dispute was ignited. It would soon become known that accusations would fall on confessors linked in some way to the Jacobeia movement, forming a kind of attack on the Jacobeus. It did not take long for the Jacobeu bishops to react. The bishop of Coimbra Miguel da Anunciação, the archbishop of Évora Miguel de Távora, and the bishop of Algarve Inácio de Santa Tereza published pastoral letters manifesting their disagreement with the Holy Office’s edict. They all agreed on the seriousness of the offence of threatening the sacramental seal, however, in addition to denying that such abuse was being practiced in their respective dioceses, they were not willing to accept that such a crime was under the jurisdiction of the Holy Office Tribunal.17 In their opinion this was a clear attempt to usurp episcopal jurisdiction in favour of the inquisition’s jurisdiction. Nonetheless, numerous “anti-sigilista” works still tried to confound the arguments, making the Jacobeus out to be defenders of the violation of the seal. The dispute, which would still last some years, reached Rome, where Pope Benedict XIV tried to resolve it through the constitutions of Ubi primum (1745), Ad eradicandum (1746) and finally Apostolici ministerii (1749). The relations between the Jacobeus and Catholic enlightenment become more apparent following the circulation, in 1749, of a work entitled Lusitaniae ecclesiae religio in administrando poenitentiae sacramento, written by the renowned librarian of the Duke of Modena, Ludovico Antonio Muratori.18 Muratori’s entry into the sigilismo dispute, at the request of the Portuguese bishops, is a clear demonstration of the rift that existed in the Portuguese church. On the one side were the defenders of reform policies for the church, theology and teaching in general. On the other were those who wanted nothing to change, to whom the reform tendencies were, on the whole, suspected to be deviations from the faith. At the time, this second group gathered around the Grand Inquisitor and the Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon. The insinuations against Muratori leave no margin of doubt as to the profound aversion felt by these conservative players for Catholic authors who

17 Regarding the reaction of the bishops in the sigilista dispute see Silva, A questão do sigilismo em Portugal no século XVIII, 257–298. 18 Ludovico A. Muratori, Lusitaniae ecclesiae religio in administrando poenitentiae sacramento et Decretalis ea de re Sanctissimi Patris Benedicti XIV Pontificis propugnata (s.l.: 1749).


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proposed or followed different trains of thought. Manuel Pereira Sampaio, the Portuguese minister in the Roman Catholic Church, a figure who was very close to the Grand Inquisitor, Nuno da Cunha, wrote a letter to Father Carbone—council minister for King João V—about the news that Muratori was writing a book under the authority of the Portuguese bishops. “The author’s name is enough for the book to be odious.”19 Dionísio Bernardes de Morais, in his Coruscationes dogmaticae,20 in addition to attempting to disqualify Muratori, even accused him of being a Jansenist. The reaction of the conservative group is enough to show that the bishops who turned to the Duke of Modena’s librarian were perfectly aware of the effect they wished to cause in Portugal. In a way, the connections established between the group of Jacobeu bishops and ecclesiastical intellectuals like Muratori and Verney made the direction of their reformist intention quite clear. It is relevant to wonder to what extent the dispute between bishops and the Inquisition might have contributed to the advance of an episcopalist conscience in Portugal. The efforts of the bishop of Coimbra, Miguel da Anunciação, to found a Pontifical Academy in his diocese support the idea that this group was trying to implement an ambitious and extensive reform project of religious life in Portugal, aimed not only at pastoral, but also intellectual aspects. The Academia Litúrgica Pontifícia dos Sagrados Ritos e História Eclesiástica, created in 1747 by the papal bull Gloria Domini, issued by Benedict XIV, would only effectively open in 1758. This institution had a clear aim to promote changes in the direction of studies in Portugal.21 In the field of ecclesiastical history there was a distinct effort to produce studies in line with modern criticism. Francisco de Lemos de F. P. Coutinho—who would later, in 1770, become the dean of the University of Coimbra—in his Oração gratulatória (1760), saw the Academy as an important centre for educational reform in 19

Cf. Silva, A questão do sigilismo em Portugal no século XVIII, 330. Dionísio B. de Moraes, Coruscationes dogmaticae universo orbi terrae pro recta Sacramenti Poenitentiae administratione refulgentes in varios distributae radios quibus noxia praxis detegendi complices destruitur atque variae propositiones tum Morini tum Muratorii tum aliorum dissipantur (Lisbon: 1748). 21 Ana Cristina Araújo, “As ciências sagradas na cidadela da razão”, in Ana Cristina Araújo (ed.), O marquês de Pombal e a universidade (Coimbra: 2000), 85–86, confirms our perception regarding the reformist character of the studies undertaken by the Academia Litúrgica, indicating that the Cônegos Regrantes de Santo Agostinho de Coimbra, members of the said Academy, “display a demanding and updated theological education.” 20

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the kingdom. He made reference, for example, to contributions made by the academics for the reform of natural sciences and philosophy in Portugal, enriched by the “valuable discoveries” of Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Gassendi and Newton. By citing the school’s academics who contributed to the advance of theology in Portugal, he recalls, in his encomiastic rhetoric, that they would be responsible for retrieving theology from its previous state, when it was abstracted and concerned with mere speculation. Useless matters, sophisms subtly thought-out and fabricated in the arsenal of peripatetic philosophy, only to feed the literary trade . . . How hurtful it is to see neglected those solid foundations upon which the church had erected your great and majestic building, now in disuse and with rust covering those invincible weapons that always made you formidable and fearless of the most powerful enemies.22

Indeed, there are elements here of an anti-Jesuit discourse, which spread through the kingdom during and after the expulsion of the Jesuits (1759). But was it not, in part, in opposition to the Jesuits’ near monopoly on studies that some currents of enlightened Catholic thought would occupy an increasingly prominent space? A typical case would be that of the Oratorian Antonio Pereira de Figueiredo, who between 1748 and 1749 wrote a defence of Muratori against his Portuguese detractors. His first display of “disinclination” toward the Jesuits came with his Novo Methodo da Gramática Latina, printed in 1752, in which he intended to follow the most modern European trends in teaching grammar,23 drawing on authors like Kaspar Schoppe and the Port-Royalist Claude Lancelot. By criticizing the most commonly used compendium at the time, Arte by the Jesuit Manuel Álvares, Pereira de Figueiredo exposed himself to the fierce criticism of some Jesuit authors, who leapt to the defence of the grammar and method used in their schools. In fact, the controversy generated by the new grammar of the Oratorians provoked a kind of battle between the two religious bodies, opening wounds that “would never

22 Francisco de Lemos de F. P. Coutinho, Oração gratulatória recitada pelo Senhor Francisco de Lemos de Faria Pereira Coutinho, Freire Conventual da Ordem Militar de S. Bento de Aviz, Collegial, e Reytor do Real Collegio das Ordens Militares na Academia Liturgica A 4 de Novembro de 1760 (Coimbra: 1762). 23 [Antonio Pereira de Figueiredo], Novo Methodo da grammatica latina. Para o uso das Escolas da Congregação do Oratório na Real Casa de N. Senhora das Necessidades, ordenado e composto pela mesma Congregação (Lisbon: 1752).


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heal”,24 while also promoting in the imagination of some intellectuals the simplistic idea that this was just a Portuguese reproduction of the conflict between Jansenists and Jesuits in other parts of Europe. A similar error would be to believe, due to the predominant anti-Jesuit character assumed by the Portuguese enlightenment thinkers of the latter half the 18th century, that none of the Portuguese Jesuits had embraced certain enlightenment ideas in different fields of knowledge. Former Jesuits like Father José Monteiro da Rocha, who even cooperated in writing the new statutes of the University of Coimbra regarding natural sciences and mathematics, are good examples of dissidents within the Society of Jesus. 3. Catholic Enlightenment and Anti-Jesuitism From the late 1750s onwards, the Portuguese government, which upheld a relentless campaign against the Society of Jesus, lent its strong support to some ecclesiastical groups and individuals with reformist tendencies who manifested their agreement with the anti-Jesuit policy25 and the regalist ecclesiological tendencies supported by the government. Both elements, in fact, were connected, to the extent that the Jesuits always figured among the main defenders of the ultramontanist positions refuted by the government. Beginning with the reign of Dom José, anti-Jesuitism became one of the common characteristics among a large part of those who were aligned with and promoted Catholic enlightenment in Portugal. The advance of this trend can be followed through the series of violent publications against the Jesuits which were developed and distributed by the Pombaline government. Without listing a complete timeline of these publications made, distributed and/or supported by the crown, it is appropriate to cite at least a few of the most important ones here. The first of these writings was the Relação Abreviada (1757), which denounced a republic that the Society of Jesus had established in Paraguay, on land under the domain of the

24 Cândido dos Santos, Padre António Pereira de Figueiredo. Erudição e polémica na segunda metade do século XVIII (Lisbon: 2005), 31. 25 Regarding anti-Jesuitism in Portugal see the recent study by José Eduardo Franco, O Mito dos Jesuítas. Em Portugal, no Brasil e no Oriente (Séculos XVI a XX), 2 vols. (Lisbon: 2006–2007).

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kings of Spain and Portugal.26 In 1759, the book Erros ímpios e sediciosos was published, in which the Jesuits were presented as defenders of regicide and promoters of the attack on King José in late 1758.27 In 1767 and 1768 a 4-volume book was published which summarized the government’s stance on the matter, Deducção chronologica e analítica,28 considered to have been written by Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo himself. The book was to serve as a kind of directive of anti-Jesuit thought which should be embraced by all those who did not want to go against the government’s will. It attempted to show how the Society of Jesus contributed decisively to the decline of the Portuguese kingdom. Not a single bastion of the Society was spared, and not even Father Antônio Vieira, who had furnished so many services to the first monarch of the Bragança dynasty, King João IV, escaped. Provas da parte primeira da Deducção chronologica contains the sentence declared by the Inquisition of Coimbra against the “impostor” Antônio Vieira. To

26 Relação Abreviada da República que os religiosos das províncias de Portugal e Hespanha, estabelecerão nos Dominios Ultramarinos das duas monarchias. E da guerra, que neles tem movido, e sustentado contra os Exercitos Hespanholes, e portuguezes; e por outros documentos authenticos (s.l.: s.d. (1757)). 27 Erros ímpios, e sediciosos que os Religiosos da Companhia de Jesus ensinarão aos Reos, que forão justiçados, e pretenderão Espalhar nos Póvos destes Reynos (Lisbon: 1759). 28 José de Seabra da Silva, Deducção chronologica e analytica. Parte primeira. Na qual se manifestão pela sucessiva série de cada hum dos reynados da Monarquia Portuguesa, que decorrerão desde o governo do Senhor Rey D. João III até o presente, os horrorosos estragos que a companhia denominada de Jesus fez em Portugal e todos seus dominios por hum plano e systema por Ella inalteravelmente seguido desde que entrou neste Reyno, ate que foy delle proscripta, e expulsa pela justa, sabia e providente ley de 3 de Setembro de 1759—Dada à luz pelo Doutor Joseph de Seabra da Sylva, para servir de instrucção e fazer parte do recurso que o mesmo ministro interpoz e se acha dependente na Real presença do dito Senhor sobre a indispensavel necessidade que sente pela urgente Reparação de algumas das mais atendiveis entre as Ruinas cuja existencia se acha deturpando a Autoridade Regia e opprimindo o Publico.—Parte segunda na qual se manifesta o que successivamente passou nas differentes epocas da igreja sobre a censura, prohibição e impressão dos livros: demonstrando-se os intoleraveis prejuizos que com o abuso delas se tem feito à mesma Igreja de Deus: a todas as Monarquias: a todos os Estados soberanos; e ao socego publico de todo o Universo—Dada à luz pelo Doutor Joseph de Seabra da Sylva.—Collecção das provas que forão citadas na parte primeira, e segunda da Deducção chronologica e analytica e nas duas Petições de recurso do doutor Joseph de Seabra da Sylva . . ., 2 vols. (Lisbon: 1767–1768). This is a work marked by violent anti-Jesuitism and which had significant repercussions in the Portuguese world and in the major European courts. Regarding this work see Jorge Borges de Macedo, “Dedução cronológica e analítica”, in Joel Serrão (ed.), Dicionário de História de Portugal, vol. 1 (Porto: 1980), 791–792 and José Eduardo Franco, “Os catecismos antijesuíticos pombalinos. As obras fundadoras do antijesuitismo do Marquês de Pombal”, Revista Lusófona de Ciência Das Religiões, 7/8 (2005), 255–260.


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complete the work of the Deducção chronologica, in 1771 the Compêndio histórico da Universidade de Coimbra was published, placing the blame on the Jesuits for the decline in education in Portugal.29 However, it should be noted that this compendium was not restricted to dealing with the damage caused by the Jesuits to university studies, for in many passages it talks about the trends to be followed in different areas of knowledge—an issue which would be addressed in more minute detail in the Estatutos da Universidade de Coimbra, published the following year. From a practical point of view, the replacement of the study methods used by the Jesuits effectively began upon the promulgation of the Instruções para os professores de gramática latina, grega, hebraica e de retórica and of the Order of 28 June 1759—published with the Instruções—which abolished Jesuit schools. The Order began with a declaration very much in accord with the flavour of the age of enlightenment, considering that the happiness of the monarchs depended on the development of the sciences. The justification for reforming the study of arts was grounded on the supposed decline provoked by the use of a “dark and fastidious” method introduced in Portuguese schools by the Jesuits; hence the banning, for example, of Gramática by the Jesuit Manuel Álvares and his commentators. In the selection of the new compendiums and guidelines which were to be be followed thereafter, there is an evident methodological renovation and the adoption of modern authors and works that made the Catholic enlightenment content of that reform clear.30 The aforementioned texts forcefully expressed the anti-Jesuit character of Pombaline policy. In some cases, as in that of the Compêndio histórico da Universidade de Coimbra, there is no doubt regarding the participation of Catholic enlightenment authors. But what matters most is to indicate the extent of the influence of such policy on the spirit of many churchmen who adhered to the reformist ideas of the enlightenment. Even in a group persecuted by Pombal, like the Jacobeus in the late 1760s, one can observe the concern on the part of some of its members with showing their distance from the Jesuits. This

29 Compendio histórico do estado da Universidade de Coimbra no tempo da invasão dos denominados Jesuítas e dos estragos feitos nas sciencias e nos professores, e Directores que a regiam pelas maquinações e publicações dos novos estatutos por elles fabricados (Lisbon: 1771). 30 It cites authors such as Rolin, Lami, Fleury, Lancelot, and Heineccius.

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is the case of the anonymous author of Resposta ao memorial sobre o scisma do sigilismo,31 who, upon analysing the relations between the Jacobeus and the Society of Jesus at the time that the sigilismo dispute emerged, refuted the accusations made by Seabra that the two groups were associated, saying that “if someone affirmed that it was the Jesuits of Portugal who gave substance to this chimera of sigilismo, then one would give that more credence (at least that is what people said at the time), and it is undeniable that they presented themselves as the most zealous and enthusiastic ones in this respect, and that the opposition that they always manifested against the Jacobeus was notorious and scandalous”.32 This example is symbolic of the force held by the aforementioned Pombaline political guideline. However, although anti-Jesuitism should be highlighted as an element present in the thinking and actions of many exponents of Portuguese Catholic enlightenment—as shall be observed at other points in this text—one must avoid exaggerating its influence and transforming it into a defining feature of Catholic enlightenment thinkers. 4. The Royal Censors Office: The Propagational Vector of Enlightened Catholicism As a tribunal created in 1768 by King José, the Royal Censors Office centralized, under the auspices of the state, literary censorship in Portugal, which until then had operated in a tripartite manner, requiring permits from the Holy Office, from the diocesan authority and from the Desembargo do Paço (the high court of justice). Therefore the institution began to control the literary production for circulation throughout the whole Portuguese empire, authenticating a new official mindset. The documental grounding consisting of reports that members of the Royal Censors Office issued regarding various works is particularly important for understanding the theological and ecclesiological tendencies favoured and prohibited in Portugal in the late 1760s and the following decades. 31 A manuscript kept at the Coimbra University General Library, ms. 1604, the full title of which is Resposta ao memorial sobre o scisma do sigilismo imputado aos jacobeus e beatos do Reyno de Portugal que em nome de José Seabra da Sylva Procurador da Coroa se apresentou à Real Mesa Censória. 32 Cf. Resposta ao memorial sobre o scisma do sigilismo, in Silva, A questão do sigilismo em Portugal no século XVIII, 435.


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Nine years had already passed since the Jesuit expulsion when the Royal Censors Office was installed. The government’s animosity against that congregation, however, had not ceased. Besides conducting a campaign to extinguish the Society of Jesus, the government did not fail to reaffirm its anti-Jesuitism through the action of this new tribunal. Through the publication of edicts, the tribunal expressly prohibited the reading of works by Jesuit authors such as Leonardo Lessius, Tomás Tamburino, Francisco Soares Granatense, Escobar, Jacob Keller, Luis de Molina, Fernando de Castro Palau and several others. The greatest care was taken with regard to works which sustained ultramontanist ideas and to those dealing with moral theology. It was necessary to banish all trace of ultramontanism from Portuguese clerical thought, as well as to proscribe the “relaxed and corrupted morality taught and written by the Jesuits for everyone”.33 It is not hard to notice, however, that the criticisms of such tendencies would necessarily drive censorship beyond the limited field of antiJesuitism, not least because such tendencies broadly transcended the scope of one religious order. As an example, one can cite the cases of works like Promptuario de Theologia Moral, by the Spanish Dominican Francisco de Larraga, the 1729 Madrid publication of which was suppressed by the Royal Censors Office in 1768 on the grounds of “Moral relaxada”34—in other words, for its probabilism. Indeed, the censorship policy was marked by anti-Jesuitism, anti-ultramontanism and by anti-probabilism. But is it therefore the case that the Portuguese enlightened Catholic reform was limited to characteristics which denoted opposition? Evidently, a reform cannot be restricted to the anti, but it may, at some point, be characterized—and this is what occurred in the case in question—as an opposition to certain positions without, however, strictly and exclusively establishing the presuppositions which should positively guide it. When it began its activities, the Royal Censors Office was already able to benefit from some directives consolidated by government policy relating to certain ecclesiological matters, notably regarding the relations between state and church. The royalist religious profession, embraced by the government, had in Antônio Pereira de Figueiredo’s 33

Edital da Real Mesa Censória de 12 de dezembro de 1771. Lisbon, Régia Oficina Tipográfica, 1771. 34 Cf. Maria T. E. P. Martins, A censura literária em Portugal nos séculos XVII e XVIII (Lisbon: 2005), 139.

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thesis, Doctrina veteris ecclesiae de suprema regum etiam in clericos potestate, published in 1765, one of these moments of affirmation.35 The principles defended therein can be gathered in four groups regarding the definition of the nature of royal power and its extent, the comparison and explanation of the relations between the royal power and the pontifical power, the right to protection of the church by the royal power and the submission that the clergy owes the royal power in the secular world, and lastly, the prince’s right over the clergy’s property and his right to impose taxes on people of the church. In addition to these four groups, one proposition referred to the condemnation, under all circumstances, of tyrannicide. The regalist model adopted by Pereira de Figueiredo was, without a doubt, inspired by the Gallican principles which, in fact, exerted a very strong influence in Portugal from the reign of Dom José onwards, and especially after the break in diplomatic relations with the Vatican beginning in 1760 and lasting until 1769. However, the relative consensus concerning regalism should not obscure the existence of dissensions when the tribunal deputies had to deal with problems of a different nature. The case of Antoine Godeau’s compendium of Moral Theology is emblematic. The session on 8 November 1770 included the reading of the report by Deputy Joaquim de Sant’Anna e Silva, hermit of Saint Paul, regarding the third book of Godeau’s Theologia Moral, translated into Portuguese, which talked about sins. At the very beginning of the report, a proposition in chapter 9 was called into question: “From which it may be gathered that one is never free to do good works if one is not free of sin and otherwise is the slave of justice”.36 According to the censor, the passage revealed the dangers of literal translations of biblical texts or quotes of the Holy Fathers, without taking their spirit into consideration. The poor translation, in this case, changed what was originally a hard truth into a serious mistake, for the proposition as it had been translated was “a formal heresy, opposed to the sacred scripture, the ecclesiastical councils, the priests and to the pious belief of the true faithful.”37 In his opinion, the proposition resembled that which was 35 About Antônio Pereira de Figueiredo and royalism in Portugal see Zília Osório de Castro, “O regalismo em Portugal: António Pereira de Figueiredo”, Cultura. História e Filosofia 4 (1987): 357–411. For a more detailed analysis of the De suprema regum thesis, see Sales Souza, Jansénisme et reforme de l’Église dans l’Empire portugais, 267–279. 36 Lisbon, ANTT/Real Mesa Censória (RMC), cx. 6, doc. 145 (1770). 37 Ibid.


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condemned by Pius V and Gregory XIII: “Omnia opera infidelium sunt peccata, et virtutes philosophorum sunt vitia”.38 It was also similar to “necesse est, infidelem in omni opere peccare”, condemned by Alexander VIII.39 Although he admitted that the text was based on a passage from Saint Augustine’s Enchiridion (unde ad juste faciendum líber non erit, nisi a peccato liberatus, esse justitiæ cœperit servus), the hermit of Saint Paul argued that the true meaning of this was: “Man cannot do a good supernatural work, worthy of eternal life, without being free of the privation of grace, which is one of the punishments of sin, and in place of being a servant to the same sin, he begins to be a servant to justice.”40 Such a translation was also justified by the need to prevent parish priests and confessors who were less educated in moral theology, and hence unprepared to understand the true meaning of the words of Saint Augustine, from teaching an inadmissible error. By admitting that the Portuguese translation was in accordance with Godeau’s text in French which, in turn did not contain any discrepancies in relation to Saint Augustine’s text in Latin, did the censor tacitly fail to acknowledge that the problem was not the translation, but the text in itself ? This was precisely the point on which Antônio Pereira de Figueiredo focused when presenting his report on the same work: How could I fail to marvel at seeing now censored of formal heresy another proposition which the highly learned colleague confesses to be faithfully translated from St. Augustine? From St. Augustine who, in matters of grace, is the Text? [. . .] If the said proposition is formal heresy in the translation of Godeau, then so too is it in Godeau’s text itself. If it is formal heresy in Godeau, so too is it in St. Augustine. Because the translator, as the learned colleague confesses, did no more than translate Godeau to the letter: and Godeau did no more than expound in French that which St. Augustine had written in Latin, meaning that if there is formal heresy in the translation, it falls back entirely on Godeau, or on St. Augustine, or on both.41

Pereira de Figueiredo’s irreproachable rationale expounded the contradiction in his colleague censor’s argument, for the problem resides in

38 Referring to the 25th proposition condemned in the Bull Ex omnibus afflictionibus (1567), which condemned sixty-nine propositions of the Louvain professor Michel Baius (1513–1589). 39 This corresponds to the 8th proposition of the Holy Office decree of 7 December 1690. 40 Lisbon, ANTT/RMC, cx. 6, doc. 145 (1770). 41 Ibid.

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Saint Augustine’s text itself which, judging by the censorship applied by Joaquim de Sant’Anna e Silva, was not in itself so clear, thus the need to be patched up. Now, by proposing an interpolation of this kind, was the censor not going against the erudite review held in such high esteem at that time? Perhaps this matter would bother some of the more critical spirit, but that is not where the main problem resides. In his report, Pereira de Figueiredo, seemingly not giving much relevance to the issue, touched on the true problem raised by the censor: I do not wish to dwell on showing (as it is not necessary here) that the papal bulls of Pius V, Gregory XIII and Urbanus VIII against Baius, are not rules of faith, because as yet the Universal Church or the Body of Pastors have not accepted them as such. [. . .] Everyone knows that one of the underlying causes which drove so many bishops and theologians against the Bull Unigenitus of Clement XI was seeing in that same papal bull the in globo censorship of many of Quesnel’s propositions as heretical, erroneous, scandalous and false, which by formal words were found just so in St. Prosperus, in St. Leo and in other ancient Priests.42

The references to the papal bulls which condemned Baius’ propositions, as well as the Bull Unigenitus, showed that Pereira de Figueiredo had understood perfectly where his hermit of Saint Paul colleague’s scruple lay. It was the problem of Jansenism which was at the crux of the debate. And the third censor, the Cistercian Francisco de Sá, did not fail to notice this, for in his report he concentrated his efforts against Pereira de Figueiredo, deeming it “very risky to suggest that the said papal bulls (of Pius V, Gregory XIII and Urban VIII) are not dogmatic.” However, in relation to the passage in Godeau’s text, he proposed a less radical solution than Joaquim Sant’Anna da Silva, suggesting only a note declaring the sense in which it should be understood. The solution adopted by the members of the Royal Censors Office was to leave the translation of the passage in question as it was, without alterations or amendments. Therefore, Pereira de Figueiredo’s opinion prevailed. This episode, which is significant to understanding the history of Jansenism in Portugal, also catches our attention for revealing that Pombaline reforms were guided by more than a single line of thought. Despite the view propagated by certain anti-

42

Ibid.


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pombaline history books, Catholic enlightenment thinkers in Portugal should not be seen as a homogenus group, even among those who actively participated in the government project. There was consensus, as already stated, regarding some guidelines for the reformist policies. But apart from those guidelines, there was a constant diversity of stances. The above example is a clear illustration of the internal dissensions in the Royal Censors Office in relation to important theological issues. Therefore, one can see that in the field of moral theology there was genuine unison in the condemnation of the probabilism and laxism engendered therein, while the same unanimity cannot be found in relation to the choice of authors and works which could be considered as references on the subject. Such dissensions do not correspond to a conflict between partisans and adversaries of the Catholic enlightenment; they are disputes which, more often than not, took place within the bosom of the enlightened Catholic group. The case of Dissertação crítica sobre o antigo e moderno calendário bracarense is significant to our understanding of this diversity of standpoints. This work by Antonio Pereira de Figueiredo was written between 1769 and 1771 at the request of the archbishop of Braga, Gaspar de Bragança. After subjecting the Breviary of Braga to a thorough erudite review—following the guidelines proposed around two decades earlier by Muratori—Pereira de Figueiredo proposed the elimination of over forty saints referred to therein, including St. Peter de Rates, the legendary first archbishop of Braga. The first opposition to the hand-written work, to the displeasure of the archbishop, was felt in the chapter of the see of Braga. Then the resistance to its publication was strong enough to render the work suppressed by the Royal Censors Office.43 Fr. Inácio de São Caetano, the bishop of Penafiel and member of the Royal Censors Office, was among those who manifested their disagreement with Pereira de Figueiredo’s work and even wrote a dissertation “on the truth and legitimacy of the First Ecclesiastical Council of Braga.” This dissertation was presented to the Royal Censors Office in May 1773 and also provoked unfavourable reactions concerning the timing of its publication.44 On top of the

43

Cf. Cândido dos Santos, Padre António Pereira de Figueiredo, 169–171. Lisbon, ANTT/RMC, book 10, pgs. 24–25vº. The bishop of Penafiel’s dissertation ended up being published in the same year using the pseudonym Lusitano Philopatrio and with the title Dissertação critica e apologetica de autenticidade do primeiro Concilio Bracarense celebrado em 411, vendicada contra os vãos esforços que para provar a 44

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methodological differences, the debates regarding this problem, without a doubt, became more heated for reasons of political state security. Modifying the liturgical calendar of Braga, with the suppression of several saints, could cause some controversy among the faithful. The cathedral chapter’s reaction to Pereira de Figueiredo’s dissertation, in a way, warned of such risks. The tribunal always adopted a careful stance in relation to matters which could provoke any unrest. That is probably the best explanation as to why it preferred to refrain from publishing this work, not least because, as regards the erudite method for establishing a “regulated devotion” there are no major disagreements apparent between the members of the tribunal, as can be seen in a 1782 report about a translation of Muratori’s Regolata divozione, which states that the work “circulates throughout the Catholic world with universal approval from men of letters and solid piety, and it should have been translated into Portuguese long ago.”45 In the same record of faith purification and combat against ignorance and superstition, the Royal Censors Office assumes a highly categorical stance in line with Catholic enlightenment as regards witchcraft. Here, once again, the Italian enlightenment model seemed to prevail, not least because it was after the demand for the publication of Defesa de Cecília Faragó—a work which reported on a case that occurred in Naples, written by Giuseppe Raffaelli and translated by José Dias Pereira, vice-dean of the Colégio dos Nobres46—that the Royal Censors Office would investigate the matter. As José Pedro Paiva indicated, Portugal never experienced the “witch hunt” phenomenon. However, until the mid-18th century, there was a predominant view among the clergy that agreed with the existence and effectiveness of sorcery and, in particular, with the reality of the diabolical pact—not least because there was a common belief manifested by Gabriel Pereira de Castro that omnes enim magicae operationes initiuntur pacto cum daemone celebrato.47 The position presented by the author of the preface to the translation of Defesa de Cecília Faragó reveals a change in stance of the Portuguese elite regarding the problem of witchcraft. In sua suposição fizeram Gaspar Estaço, o P. M. Macedo, o Dr. Manoel Pereira da Silva Leal e ultimamente hum sabio moderno (Lisbon: 1773). 45 Lisbon, ANTT/RMC, Cx. 12, doc. 32. 46 Lisbon, ANTT/RMC, Cx. 8, doc. 43. 47 Cf. Gabriel Pereira de Castro, Tractatus de Manu Regia (Lisbon: 1742 (1st ed., 1622–1625, 2 vols.)), 329, § 23, in José Pedro Paiva, Bruxaria e superstição num país sem “caça às bruxas”—1600–1774 (Lisbon: 1997), 38.


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close keeping with the style of the times, the author indicated that with the enlightenment of the current age one could get a better view of the previously manifested beliefs and the persistence of superstition among the less educated. Gone were the days “when one blindly yielded profound idolatry to the extravagant Disquisições Mágicas of Martinho Del Rio.”48 However, this optimistic and enlightened argument should not hide the reality of a far from united intellectual elite in which the most conservative sectors manifested their attachment to less rationalistic and enlightened ways of thinking. It is obvious that such sectors would have no voice in the Royal Censors Office, but, nonetheless, Giuseppe Raffaelli’s book gave rise to some degree of concern. Published in 1775, upon the tribunal’s first censorship review, the book was granted permission to be published. However, the theory sustained in the work that there had “never existed the Magic Art, and that the marvels attributed to wizards and witches are tricks caused by either nature, myth or the imagination”, according to some members of the Royal Censors Office, could startle some readers and cause scandal among those who believed in the reality of magic, for which reason the tribunal deemed it convenient to conduct another, more detailed examination of the work. This was performed by Fr. José da Rocha, in a long and studious report read at the tribunal in December 1774, signed by himself and the office members Fr. José Mayne and Fr. Luis de Santa Clara Povoa. The censor clearly defended the idea of magic being of a false and ineffective nature, sharing many of the viewpoints presented by Giuseppe Raffaelli. He went even further than the author by addressing matters not considered in the book, like the problem of the diabolical pact, presenting it as an “invention by scholarly theologians which was unknown in ancient times.” Moreover, such invention would be “entirely without foundation: as one cannot find a true and authentic witness to state that some demon comes, when called upon, to make a pact with some creature, and thereby satisfies the desires of that creature.”49 Fr. José da Rocha’s scepticism regarding the pact with the devil in a way reiterated the line of thought already manifested in Regimento do Santo Ofício, published in that 48

Cf. Traducção da defeza de Cecília Faragó, accusada do crime de feitiçaria: obra útil para desabusar as pessoas preoccupadas da arte mágica e seus pertendidos effeitos (Lisbon: 1775), “Prefação”, page not numbered. 49 Lisbon, ANTT/RMC, Cx. 8, doc. 43.

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same year, which demonstrated that the clergy of the Pombaline ruling elite participated in an enlightened Catholic project which intended to banish ignorance and superstition—the latter, in the case of magical crafts, was not restricted to the common people, as the criticism also extended to the Holy Office’s practices in the not so distant past.50 The aforementioned examples represent a sample of the way in which the Royal Censors Office contributed to hindering the penetration or continuity of certain ideas and to disseminating so many others, thus becoming an important agent in the construction of a new train of theological and ecclesiological thought, the characteristics of which became to a great extent consistent with what could be called enlightened Catholicism. However, the plurality of views within the Catholic enlightenment itself demands an extra degree of attention as regards the different religious feelings of those elements of the ruling elite who, due to occupying prominent positions or offering important reflections, contributed to this construction. Therefore, it is worth looking more closely at the problem of the presence of Jansenism in the Portuguese Catholic enlightenment. 5. Jansenism and the Catholic Enlightenment Beginning in 1758, when the news came to the fore of regarding the Jesuit missions in Paraguay, the editors of the French Jansenist periodical Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques displayed a growing interest in Portugal. The expulsion of the Society of Jesus and the reform program announced by the Portuguese government would attract even more attention among the French Jansenists. The front page in 1760 was devoted entirely to the description and analysis of recent events involving the Jesuits and the educational reform implemented by the Portuguese crown. The editors were interested in the case of Portugal— especially in relation to the Jesuit expulsion—due, above all, to the way in which they could use it as a genuine trump card in their political and ecclesiastical disputes in France. But that was not all. What was happening in Portugal also represented an opportunity to witness the prevalence in a European kingdom of an anti-Jesuit thinking in line

50

See Paiva, Bruxaria e superstição num país sem “caça às bruxas”, 88–89.


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with their own points of view. This explains the praise aimed at the study reform project outlined in the order of 28 June 1759. Taking the exact opposite approach as that followed by the Jesuits, he [the king] bans the authors these fathers were using in order to poison the mind and corrupt the heart of an impressionable age. With an exquisite zeal he orders the use of the best books, ancient and modern, in whatever language they may be written, and especially those which are the objects of the hate, envy, and unjust contradiction of the Jesuits.51

The “enlightened zeal” manifested by King José in his reformist action, praised by the editors of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, who perhaps fed the desire to exert some influence through their publication on the bearings of the reform underway in Portugal, led some Jansenist leaders to seek direct contact with the politicians and churchmen close to the government. It is well known that in the 1760s Abbot Dupac de Bellegard, of the Church of Utrecht, kept correspondence with the Benedictine monk João Batista de São Caetano and with Antonio Pereira de Figueiredo.52 In 1763, members of that church wrote a Mémoire sur la reforme des études ecclésiastiques au Portugal, directed at the Portuguese court ministers, in which they called attention to the significance of the matter and how important it would be not to allow Jesuit and ultramontanist ideas to continue to be freely circulated after the expulsion of the order and the announced educational reform.53 The great coincidence of the numerous proposals of the Mémoire and the paths subsequently followed by Pombal’s reform policy does not represent a governmental adherence to the Jansenist party (which should be understood here in the sense it was given in the Old Regime) or to a direct influence of that group on the stances adopted by the government. It is, instead, the result of a convergence between the attack on

51 Cf. Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques ou Mémoire pour servir à l’histoire de la constitution Unigenitus, du 2 janvier 1760, 7. 52 See Evergton Sales Souza, “L’incontournable jansénisme: l’Église d’Utrecht et la réforme ecclésiastique portugaise”, Histoire, Economie et Société, 4 (2005), 555–572; Samuel Miller, “Portugal and Utrecht: A Phase of the Catholic Enlightenment”, The Catholic Historical Review 63 (1977): 225–248. 53 Concerning Mémoire see Cândido dos Santos, “Os jansenistas franceses e os estudos eclesiásticos na época de Pombal”, Máthesis 13 (2004): 67–104 and Sales Souza, “L’incontournable jansénisme,” 555–572.

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Jesuit and ultramontanist positions and certain aspects of that which came to be called Jansenism. In other words, it would be very difficult to reform ecclesiastical studies and the Portuguese church itself, freeing it of the formerly prevalent positions, without approaching some ideas sustained by Jansenist authors. It would be no less difficult to defend regalist and anti-ultramontanist ideas accepting, without any reservation, the text of some papal bulls which opposed such positions, and the editor of the Mémoire was aware of this, pointing out in particular the case of the Bull Unigenitus. Without explicitly defending the Jansenist party, the Royal Censors Office, around seven years after the writing of the Mémoire, made a decision regarding Jansenism that seems to reveal the thinking of most of its members in relation to the issue. On 19 October 1770, the Office resolved that, “for now” it would permit the free circulation of all books which had been written in favor and against the Bull Unigenitus, as well as those written about the Church of Utrecht. This measure reveals the caution to avoid taking sides in relation to the problem; however, a second decision made in the same meeting demonstrates that the majority of the office members tended to protect some authors connected to the Jansenism disputes: “It should not be allowed that the conclusions and books tarnish Jansenius, Quesnel and Baius, comparing them to Calvin, Luther and others.”54 The rule of conduct defined by the Office aimed to avoid problems and dissensions in the future, but in some way ratified positions which had already been followed throughout the 1760s—especially after 1765—in Portugal. One should bear in mind that the Bull Unigenitus, promulgated in 1713 by Clement XI, condemning one hundred and one propositions extracted from Reflexions morales sur le Nouveau Testament by Father Quesnel, did not arouse the opposition of just the Jansenists. The condemnation of some of those propositions provoked the rejection of the Gallicans—who saw in them a clear attack on their positions by the Roman Curia—generating a union between themselves and the Jansenists in the fight against the Bull.55 Now, the aforemen-

54

Lisbon, ANTT/RMC, Book 362, pg. 91 vº. See Lucien Ceyssens and J. A. G. Tans, Autour de l’Unigenitus: recherches sur la gênese de la constitution (Louvain: 1987), 737–788; René Taveneaux, Jansénisme et politique (Paris: 1965), 134–144 and passim; and Catherine Maire, De la cause de Dieu à la cause de la nation: le jansénisme au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: 1998). 55


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tioned thesis De suprema regum etiam in clericos potestate, published in 1765, is based on clearly Gallican principles and, alongside passages taken from the Scriptures, tradition, Popes and doctors of the church, it draws on Gallican writers such as Bossuet, Noel Alexandre and even a Jansenist like the Flemish Van Espen, to sustain its positions. The government support for such theses defended by Antonio Pereira de Figueiredo made evident the shift which had occurred in the predominant ecclesiological tendencies in Portugal. Without having to flaunt the fact, it was clear that many of the previously observed pontifical decisions were not necessarily valid in the new times. Without making any public act which declared the Bull Unigenitus invalid in Portuguese lands, the government demonstrated through its actions and by defending certain principles its disaffection regarding the condemnations established therein. Curiously, in the same year of 1765, the translation of Catecismo de Montpellier 56 was published in Portugal. This work was written by the Oratorian François-Aimé Pouget at the request of Joachim Colbert, bishop of the diocese of Montpellier, one of the four members of the French episcopate which refused to receive the Bull Unigenitus, appealing to the future ecclesiastical council to settle doubts in this regard.57 The Catecismo de Montpellier had been included in the Roman Index since 1721 and had weighing against it the accusation of being a Jansenist work, which required the Archbishop of Évora, João Cosme da Cunha, responsible for its publication in Portugal, to provide some explanations in the warning inserted at the front of the Portuguese edition. For João Cosme da Cunha, the accusations against the work were the fruit of machinations by Jesuits who labelled any authors “who followed doctrines contrary to their school” as heretics. Therefore, unable to “argue with so many wise men and men enlightened in sanctity, without giving signs of a slanderous manifestation,

56 (François-Aimé Pouget ), Instrucções geraes em fórma de catecismo, nas quaes se explicão em compendio pela Sagrada Escritura, e Tradição a Historia, e os Dogmas da Religião, a Moral Christã, os Sacramentos, as Orações, as Ceremonias, e os Usos da Igreja. Impressas por ordem do Senhor Carlos Joaquim Colbert, Bispo de Montpellier, Para uso dos antigos, e novos Catholicos da sua Diecese, e de todos aquelles, que estão encarregados da sua instrucção, Com dous catecismos abbreviados para o exercicio dos meninos. Traduzidas na lingua Portugueza por mandado do Senhor Arcebispo de Evora Dom João, para uso dos Fieis do seu Arcebispado 4 vols. (Lisbon: 1765). 57 See Sales Souza, Jansénisme et reforme de l’Église dans l’Empire portugais, 241–267.

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they gave a title to their dictionary—referred to as Dictionnaire des livres Jansénistes, ou qui favorisent le Jansénisme—in such terms that those whom they were unable to make Jansenists, were at least left as suspected Jansenists.”58 For the archbishop the Jesuit’s dissatisfaction was evident in relation to the work insofar as it adopted “the purest moral rules”, without “any room for Jesuit probabilism.” It was no less important to verify that the catechism supported the regalist principles upheld by the government. In Part one, Section one, Chapter IV, Paragraph 21 of this admirable work the same Catechism highly recommends the faith that the vassals should have for their Sovereigns, proving with solid grounds that there is no case in which rebelling against the legitimate authority of the Kings is permitted, not even with the pretext of persecution, or of Religion, etc. Everyone knows that this doctrine is entirely opposite to the maxims of society.59

One could question whether it was a somewhat exaggerated attitude to make the introduction of the Catecismo de Montpellier in Portugal a relevant event to the comprehension of the Jansenist influence there. In this regard, it is worth pointing out that the government itself was aware of the significance of this event, and thus published at the front of each volume of the Portuguese edition a royal provision about the work and its importance for disseminating “the purest lights of the true doctrine.”60 It also should be recalled that this same catechism was subsequently adopted by various other Portuguese dioceses. One witness from 1770 gives an account that in Évora there had been four thousand copies printed and a further two sets of reprints; in Braga, the Archbishop ordered at that time the printing of six thousand copies for his diocesans; the bishop of Porto and the governor of the diocese of Coimbra had ordered the distribution of two thousand copies and the bishop of Algarve was doing likewise.61 In an encomiastic text, Antônio Pereira de Figueiredo praised João Cosme da Cunha for having

58 Cf. “Ao Leitor”, a warning note inserted at the start of the Portuguese edition of Catecismo de Montpellier. 59 Ibid. 60 Cf. Provisão of 26 October 1765, published at the start of each volume of the first Portuguese edition of Catecismo de Montpellier. 61 Cf. “Carta de João Baptista de São Caetano a Dupac de Bellegarde, de 9 de março de 1770”, Utrecht, Fundo de Arquivo Port-Royal, Rijksarchief da província de Utrecht, 2502. Samuel J. Miller, Portugal and Rome, 286, mentions this information based on the same document.


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introduced in his diocese the Catecismo de Montpellier—“among us hitherto not only little known, but so ill reputed, due to reasons that I ignore”—being then followed by “so many and such distinguished prelates of the Portuguese church.”62 The catechism was widely used in Portuguese territory, and for decades it occupied an important place in the formation of the diocesan clergy. In the 19th century there were still bishops such as José Caetano da Silva Coutinho, of Rio de Janeiro, who recommended its reading to the diocesan clergy and required that candidates of the four minor orders display knowledge of the work in the synodal examinations.63 The introduction into the kingdom of books considered to be Jansenist should be understood as a repercussion of the positions which prevailed under the reign of King José. Works by authors such as Arnauld, Pascal, Nicole, Duguet, Van Espen and many others circulated with the approval of the Royal Censors Office and were held in great esteem in certain circles of churchmen. The very action of the censorship tribunal shows how close the Portuguese Catholic enlightenment ideas were to some of the tendencies held by Jansenists. Even without ever declaring any partiality in the Jansenist dispute, the fact is that, by allowing the circulation and, in some cases, the translation of works associated with that group, the tribunal stimulated the diffusion of those ideas, while at the same time limiting as greatly as possible the circulation of books which expressed ultramontanist and anti-Jansenist points of view. 6. The Episcopate and Enlightened Catholicism One can distinguish a group of prelates in the 1740s who, through some of their actions, demonstrated a degree of identification with certain ideas of enlightened Catholicism. Prelates who took part in the sigilismo polemic, like the Jacobeus Miguel da Anunciação and Inácio de Santa Tereza, are good examples. The latter, when Archbishop of Goa (1721–1740), faced serious questions concerning his orthodoxy, and was even reported to the Holy Office Tribunal for a proposition

62

Évora, Biblioteca Pública de Évora, cod. 2/11, nº 3. Cf. Maurílio César de Lima, Lourenço Caleppi. Primeiro núncio no Brasil (1808– 1816). Segundo documentos do Arquivo Secreto Apostólico do Vaticano (Rio de Janeiro: 1977), 158, 161–162. 63

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he professed during a sermon at his cathedral.64 His detractors accused him of Jansenism, and the Cardinal and Master Inquisitor Nuno da Cunha recommended that the Archbishop make a retraction in virtue of having made a statement which had been qualified by the Holy Office as heretical. As the Archbishop refused to do so, the case went to Rome, where he was found entirely innocent of any heresy. The problems faced by Inácio de Santa Tereza in Goa were related to his attempt to reform religious life in his archdiocese, imposing a more austere practice. Soon after assuming the episcopacy of Algarve, in 1741, the same reformist drive would lead him into conflict with the cathedral chapter of his diocese.65 The severity of this prelate was, without a doubt, linked to his status as a Jacobeu. But, as with other Jacobeu churchmen, his reformist action neared the field of enlightened Catholics. That is how one can interpret, for example, his concern with children’s education, stating in a pastoral letter of 25 March 1743 that there should be more “public schools as close as possible to the churches, and that in those schools the parish priests should teach boys and girls the Christian doctrine and catechism, purely and flawlessly.”66 Likewise, it may be revealing of his fondness of Catholic enlightenment ideas that he made Verney his representative in the Roman Curia as from 1749. Miguel da Anunciação, twenty years younger than Inácio de Santa Tereza, shared the reformist ideas of enlightened Catholicism more intensely, and sought to apply them during his episcopate. It is worth recalling that, as indicated previously, he was a founder of the Academia Litúrgica Pontifícia, which became, for a short time, a centre of propagation for Catholic enlightenment tendencies. His pastoral action also clearly demonstrated his adherence to forms of austere piety— which, obviously, is directly related to his status as a Jacobeu—as well

64 See Sales Souza, Jansénisme et reforme de l’Église dans l’Empire portugais, 141– 186, whose data were taken up again in “D. Ignácio de Santa Tereza, arcebispo de Goa, um prelado às voltas com a Inquisição portuguesa”, in Ronaldo Vainfas, Bruno Feitler and Lana Lage da Gama (eds.), A Inquisição em xeque. Temas, controvérsias, estudos de caso (Rio de Janeiro: 2006), 61–74. 65 Concerning his pastoral work in the Algarve see Bruno Leal, La crosse et le bâton. Visites pastorales et recherche dês pécheurs publics dans le diocèse d’Algarve (1630– 1750) (Paris: 2004), 208–218. 66 Cf. the pastoral letter printed on 25 March 1743, in Paiva, Os bispos de Portugal e do Império, 163.


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as displaying a great concern with the formation of the clergy.67 In a pastoral letter from 10 February 1756 regarding the upholding of Sundays and holy days, for example, he manifested his concern with the way in which some of the faithful of his diocese rendered devotion to the saints, performing bull races, staging comedies, organizing balls and other profane acts, as if the saints would be pleased with them for violating the respect due to God and desecrating the days dedicated to their cult. As well noted by José Pedro Paiva, the proscription of these profane manifestations reveals the Bishop of Coimbra’s adherence to a program which intended to reform worship towards “regulated devotion.”68 It is also worth remembering that the same bishop encouraged the publication of theological writings in line with enlightened Catholic reform. One very interesting case of this action is the auspices given to the publication, in 1766, of a work about the problem of attrition and contrition in the sacrament of penance, written by the Oratorian Antônio Pereira de Figueiredo.69 Like Cabral Moncada, other historians failed to notice the reformist content of the Jacobeia movement and allowed themselves to be led by the official line of the Pombaline government, which carried out a relentless persecution of the Jacobeus and imprisoned the bishop himself, after he published in 1768 a pastoral instruction condemning the reading of certain books in his diocese, and ended up seeing in the bishop and in the Jacobeia a movement resistant to the enlightenment. It is hard to evaluate to what extent the Jacobeu movement kept its vigor and homogeneity in the 1760s. But what is of interest here, above all, is the fact that there is no doubt regarding the adherence of the bishop—one of the main leaders of the Jacobeu movement since the 1740s—to certain Catholic enlightenment ideas. Indeed, this serves as an excellent example of the diversity among the enlightened Catholics, demonstrating that they

67 Regarding the thinking of Miguel da Anunciação, see João E. Pimentel Lavrador, Pensamento teológico de D. Miguel da Anunciação. Bispo de Coimbra (1741–1779) e renovador da diocese (Coimbra: 1995). 68 Cf. Paiva, Os bispos de Portugal e do Império, 162. 69 Antônio Pereira de Figueiredo, De non definita in concilio Tridentino, nec ab Ecclesia adhuc probata sufficientia attritionis ad gratiam in sacramento poenitentiae impetrandam, dissertatio historico-theologica Adversus Recentiores Scholasticos. Ante annos octo elaborata, novissime paucis quibusdam accessionibus aucta, nunc tandem in lucem prodit sub auspiciis Excellentissimi ac Reverendissimi Domini Episcopi Conimbricensis (Lisbon: 1766).

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were not restricted to the field of those who defended a Gallican ecclesiology. Although the Gallican model had prevailed among the church reformers of Pombaline Portugal, it would be a mistake to see in the ultramontanism of Miguel da Anunciação an unsurpassable contradiction of the Catholic enlightenment reformist tendencies. In other words, from a more general point of view, one can affirm that anticurialism and regalism are not absolutely defining characteristics of what should be understood as Catholic enlightenment, despite the fact that they frequently appear in the thinking of many of its exponents. It should be admitted that, in the context of 1760s Portugal, the ultramontanist position of Miguel da Anunciação—which would seem to be in line with the change in orientation which occurred in Rome under the pontificate of Clement XIII70—constituted an exception among the enlightened prelates. The adoption of regalist, and sometimes episcopalist, ideas and practices, aligned with the positions defended by King José’s court, prevailed. This was, no doubt, related to the fact that by that time the majority of the episcopate was composed of bishops named by that monarch. A good example of this can be seen in the aftermath of the publication of Tentativa Teológica71 (1766) in Portugal, a work of clear episcopalist inclination in which father Antônio Pereira de Figueiredo, in virtue of the break in relation between Portugal and Rome—beginning in 1760—defended the right of bishops to grant exemptions from matrimonial restrictions in the degrees reserved for the Holy See. Whether by adhering to the principles maintained by Pereira de Figueiredo, or by trying to offer a solution which was agreeable in the eyes of the government to a problem which had dragged on for years, what is certain is that numerous bishops began to grant such exemptions.72 According to the Benedictine João Batista de São Caetano, in a letter dated 1770, all the prelates of the kingdom had granted matrimonial exemptions; he even mentions that the Patriarch of Lisbon, some months earlier, had dis-

70

See Paiva, Os bispos de Portugal e do Império, 168–169. Antônio Pereira de Figueiredo, Tentativa Theologica, em que se pretende mostrar, que impedido o Recurso á Sé Apostolica se devolve aos senhores Bispos a faculdade de dispensar nos Impedimentos Publicos do Matrimonio, e de prover espiritualmente em todos os mais Cazos Reservados ao Papa, todas as vezes que assim o pedir a publica e urgente necessidade dos subditos (Lisbon: 1766). 72 Concerning Tentativa Teológica and its repercussions in Portugal see Sales Souza, Jansénisme et reforme de l’Église dans l’Empire portugais, 279–300. 71


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pensed some 690 cases.73 There are reliable sources confirming that the prelates of Évora, Miranda, Braga, Elvas, Coimbra—with Francisco de Lemos F. P. Coutinho in charge of the diocese—and Leiria practiced such exemptions.74 The adherence of these bishops to the government’s reform project should not be read as a kind of political opportunism. It is instead the result of a genuine convergence of thinking, rendering a large portion of the Portuguese bishops co-authors of the reforms implemented in the Portuguese church during the Pombaline era. There were numerous bishops committed to the Catholic enlightenment doctrine who provided important services to the construction of a new model for the church in Portugal. Witness the case of Francisco de Lemos F. P. Coutinho, the dean and reformer of the University of Coimbra, governor and later bishop of Coimbra. In 1760, in a congratulatory oration recited at the Academia Litúrgica Pontifícia, he demonstrated his optimism regarding the renovation of studies in Portugal and praised the enlightened thinkers of his time. In 1777, already under the reign of Queen Maria I, in the Relação geral do Estado da Universidade, he showed his concern for the proper formation of the regular and, in particular, secular clergy, for in many places being people “directed in religion by parish priests and secular clergymen”, it becomes evident that: If the secular clergymen are not educated in the science of their state, they shall not know how to govern the churches; and consequently the people shall fall into a mass religious ignorance; and the Discipline of the church into mass relaxation, as is generally seen; with the cause of this malady being the ignorance of the priests and clergymen.75

In his pastoral action, the archbishop of Braga, Gaspar de Bragança, also demonstrated his alignment with Catholic enlightenment doctrine.

73 Cf. “Carta de João Baptista de São Caetano a Dupac de Bellegarde, de 9 de março de 1770”, Utrecht, Fundo de Arquivo Port-Royal, Rijksarchief da província de Utrecht, 2502. 74 See Lisbon, Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, cx. 245, n. 166; Miller, Portugal and Rome, 182–183; Cândido dos Santos, “António Pereira de Figueiredo, Pombal e a aufklärung: ensaio sobre o regalismo e o jansenismo em Portugal na 2a metade do século XVIII”, Revista de História das Idéias, 4:1 (1982–1983), 182; and José Pedro Paiva, “Os novos prelados diocesanos nomeados no consulado pombalino”, Penélope 25 (2001): 84. 75 Cf. Francisco de Lemos F. P. Coutinho, Relação Geral do Estado da Universidade (1777) (Coimbra: 1980), 28.

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The reform of the Breviary of Braga, which he ordered from Antônio Pereira de Figueiredo, indicates the bishop’s attachment to a model of worship typical of the enlightenment, that is to say, the model of “regulated devotion” which aimed to purify the practice of worship, identifying as foolish belief and superstition everything that in the light of erudite criticism and of history could not be proven. On numerous occasions, Gaspar de Bragança also displayed his agreement with the regalist and episcopalist theories supported by the Pombal government. It is not superfluous to recall that the Demonstração teológica76 was dedicated to him, in which Pereira de Figueiredo expands on the episcopalist arguments defended in Tentativa Theologica. The case of Dom João Cosme da Cunha, bishop of Leiria, then archbishop of Évora and Master Inquisitor, is slightly different, as is would seem undeniable that at certain points in his life he showed some degree of political opportunism.77 How should one understand his sudden change in attitude in relation to Pombal the day after the death of King José? Would the closing (1773) and subsequent reopening (1778) of the Goa Inquisition not also be classified as political subservience? However, the trajectory of this observant Augustinian canon features well-known similarities to other prelates of his time. One aspect worth remembering is that he was a Jacobeu belonging to the same congregation as Miguel da Anunciação, as well as being a member of the Academia Litúrgica Pontifícia. The publication of Catecismo de Montpellier, in 1765, should be analysed as a political act, but at the same time was related to his desire to see the dissemination and practice of a more austere piety based on a better understanding of the religion itself. As the archbishop himself wrote, this publication aimed to compensate for “the lack of ecclesiastical studies, and of the means required for such studies.” According to him, in the respective catechism the parish priests would find the subject which they ought to teach their parishioners “to uphold the duties of their state.”78

76

Antônio Pereira de Figueiredo, Demonstração theologica, canonica, e historica do direito dos Metropolitanos de Portugal para confirmarem os bispos suffraganeos nomeados por sua Magestade; e do direito dos bispos de cada província para confirmarem, e sagrarem os seus respectivos metropolitanos, tambem nomeados por sua Magestade, ainda fóra do caso de rotura com a corte de Roma (Lisbon: 1769). 77 About João Cosme da Cunha, see Ricardo Jorge Carvalho Pessa de Oliveira, Uma vida no Santo Ofício: o inquisidor geral D. João Cosme da Cunha (M.A. thesis, University of Lisbon, 2007). 78 Cf. “Ao Leitor”, a warning note inserted at the start of the Portuguese edition of Catecismo de Montpellier.


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The list of “enlightened” prelates is far too long to be presented in this study, so much so that it could not be restricted to the Pombaline period; after all, bishops like Fr. Caetano Brandão79 (bishop of Pará, 1782–1789, and later archbishop of Braga, 1790–1805), José Joaquim da C. de Azeredo Coutinho80 (bishop of Olinda, 1794–1806) and Fr. Joaquim de Santa Clara Brandão81 (archbishop of Évora, 1814–1818), bear witness to the continued influence of enlightened Catholics in the Portuguese episcopate. It will suffice to look more closely at one case which seems to represent the most perfect model of the enlightened Catholic prelate in Portuguese lands: Fr. Manuel do Cenáculo.82 Coming from a modest family, Manuel Martins was born in Lisbon in 1724. He entered the Third Order Regular of St. Francis in 1739 and, the following year, professed in the convent of Nossa Senhora de Jesus, in Lisbon. In the same year he moved to Coimbra and continued his studies at the Colégio de São Pedro, run by his religious order. During his stay in Coimbra, Cenáculo enrolled at the University, where he received the degree of Doctor of Theology in 1749. From early on, he manifested positions signalling his interest in modern studies and its critique of the dominant Aristotelianism and scholasticism in the teaching of Portuguese. There is no doubt that he had become familiar with Verney’s Verdadeiro método de estudar early in his life, and shared much of the author’s modernising vision.83 Cenáculo’s trajectory, to a large extent, corroborates an interpretation which came to prevail in contemporary Portuguese history books: the church

79 See António Caetano de Amaral, Memórias para a história da vida do venerável D. Frei Caetano Brandão (Lisbon: 1818), 2 vols. and José Paulo Leite de Abreu, D. Frei Caetano Brandão: o reformador contestado (Braga: 1997). 80 Severino Leite Nogueira, O seminário de Olinda e seu fundador o bispo Azeredo Coutinho (Recife: 1985). 81 Samuel J. Miller, “Dom Frei Joaquim de Santa Clara (1740–1818) and later Portuguese Jansenism”, The Catholic Historical Review 69 (1983): 20–40. 82 About Manuel do Cenáculo, his biography, thinking and pastoral work, see the fundamental study by Jacques Marcadé, Frei Manuel do Cenáculo Villas Boas, évêque de Beja, archevêque d’Évora (1770–1814) (Paris: 1978). 83 The fact that in 1752 a work was written defending Raymond Lull, opposing Verney’s criticisms of this author, in essence changes nothing: the fact that both share similar points of view as regards the need to reform/modernise studies in Portugal. The aforementioned work is Advertências Críticas e apologéticas sobre o juizo, que nas materias do B. Raymundo Lullo formou o D. Apolonio Philomuso, e communicou ao publico em a resposta ao retrato de Morte-Cor, que contra o Autor do Verdadeiro Metodo de Estudar escreve o Reverendo Doutor Alethophilo Candido de Lacerda: satisfaz-se de passagem aos Autores, em cujo testemunho se fundou o D. Apolônio (Coimbra: 1752).

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reform implemented under King José’s reign could not have occurred if there had not been members in the core of the ecclesiastical institution itself willing to instil the reformist ideas. Even if one or two of them may have shown some signs of opportunism, it is undeniable that many of the churchmen who cooperated in the so-called Pombaline reforms did so without any personal interest and because they shared a vision that the reforms constituted the best path for the good of the church and the state. When, in 1768, Cenáculo was invited to work more directly with the court, as confessor for the Prince of Beira and deputy of the Royal Censors Office, the churchman was already renowned for his extensive learning and irreproachable conduct. Two years later he earned even greater duties, being appointed as tutor for the Prince of Beira, chairman of the Royal Censors Office and bishop of the recently created diocese of Beja. Without ambition and opportunism, Cenáculo willingly contributed to the advance of the Pombaline project because he truly shared many of its objectives. The need to make reference to the course leading up to Manuel do Cénaculo’s episcopate should not divert our attention from that which is really our point of interest right now: the kind of episcopal action that made him a model of an enlightened prelate in Portugal of the last third of the 18th and early 19th centuries. It should be highlighted that during the first seven years of his government, Cenáculo, due to high demand from the court, could not live in Beja, and so appointed a provisor to administer the diocese. In 1777, with the end of King José’s reign, many of his activities in Lisbon ceased, including his chairmanship of the Royal Censors Office, and so he could finally reside in his diocese and begin his pastoral work. Cenáculo would live in his diocese for 25 years, only leaving to assume the archbishopric of Évora in 1802. The first years of his episcopacy were characterized by intense pastoral activity. By 1782 the prelate had already personally visited practically all the parishes in his diocese. From the moment of his arrival in Beja, he never neglected the education of the clergy and, although without a building to house the diocesan seminar, he organized courses seeking to offer the clerical candidates an education which was compatible with the activities that they should perform and with his desire to endow his diocese with a learned clergy. As a matter of fact, it was his desire to provide more extensive and better knowledge to churchmen and laymen alike in his diocese which displays one of the strongest characteristics of this model of an enlightened prelate.


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In a diocese marked by intense poverty, there was still a large number of people who frequently resorted to the use of witchcraft, amulets and magic formulas.84 Hence the bishop concerned himself with this problem in some of his writings. In Cuidados literários do prelado de Beja, he clearly displays his concern for putting an end to superstitious beliefs among the simpler members of his diocesan faithful, but at the same time alerted his clergy to the importance of studies to achieve such an objective. So when speaking of the exorcist’s utility and way of acting, Cenáculo warns that this person should be highly educated so as not to be exposed to the derision of nonbelievers or prudent men. The education and prudence of the exorcist were even more necessary in those times when, in certain irreligious circles, magic had been discredited together with the powers of the devil and of the truth of religion itself. For Cenáculo, Catholics could not fight magic imbued with the same spirit of disbelief of the irreligious: But if the resolution´s spirit is to treat falsity by its name, is to unmask the vicious ones that feed on shams, is to divert commoners to the truth, and remove them from the custom which they have heard and to which they are attached; if it is to fight miserable fripperies, facilities [. . .] in parts of education where it has not being successful; if it is to show the health of men altered not by extraordinary causes, but by natural motives; if such is the spirit of censorship, well and prudently done it shall be.85

Thus one can see the importance of the good education of the clergymen in tackling ignorance and superstition, driven by a rationalism which protects them from credulity, yet without ever removing them from Catholic belief. In a passage of pastoral instruction aimed at the clergy and the ordained of his diocese, published in 1784, Cenáculo already indicated that the clergy should not “be a fugitive light, but instead a light of good consistency; emptied and clean: it should be like live coals, on which to roast and melt away all the dark matter, smoke, and shadows of ignorance and of error.” For “science and virtue shall

84 See Jacques Marcadé, “Les hommes et la vie dans l’Alentejo du XVIIIe siècle”, Arquivos do Centro Cultural Português, 10 (1976), 207 and Francisco A. Lourenço Vaz, “O catecismo no discurso da ilustração portuguesa do século XVIII”, Cultura. Revista de História e Teoria das Ideias, 10 (1998): 217–240. 85 Manuel do Cenáculo, Cuidados Literários do prelado de Beja em graça do seu bispado (Lisbon: 1791), 354.

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conspire so that the people in the clergy find the legitimate passage for their sanctification, which should not be jeopardized due to ignorance and bad example.”86 The practice seems to be in line with the theory, for the study program proposed by the learned prelate for the seminarians was very demanding, including courses in dogma, Holy Scripture, ethics, the history of the church, liturgy, canon law, as well as philosophy, rhetoric, French, Greek, Hebrew and mathematics. One can note that Cenáculo was concerned not only with ensuring a solid religious education, but also with endowing his clergy with a good general culture. Through his pastoral work, Manuel do Cenáculo proved to be a zealous bishop who saw in the clergy’s education the best weapon to defeat ignorance, superstition and disbelief. In this regard the model of the enlightened prelate seemed to take up paths previously followed by examples of pre-Reformation bishops of the Fifth Lateran Council, Tridentine prelates like St. Carlos Borromeo and Bartolomeu dos Mártires or even, later on, by Jacobeu bishops. Jacques Marcadé, in the conclusion of his masterful study, states that Cenáculo had been “a Jacobeu who fought against the Jacobeia movement.”87 In a way, his conclusion corroborates our interpretation of the Jacobeia as a reformist movement of particular importance for the educational renewal and the reform of the Portuguese church. What distances us from Marcadé, however, is understanding the Jacobeia movement in another context distinct from that of the late 1760s, in which, after the publication of Miguel da Anunciação’s pastoral letter, in which he condemned some royalist and Gallican books held in high regard by the government, Pombal issued an attack against his followers. In fact, by that time the Jacobeia movement no longer had the importance and élan that it had had two decades earlier. Many of its erstwhile members and/or supporters had gone on to defend regalist and episcopalist stances in the field of ecclesiology which, one could say, was never a domain of great Jacobeu thought—with the exception of their disputes with the Portuguese Holy Office at the time of the sigilista row. Others, although having continued to defend the educational renewal and encourage the moral reform of the clergy, did not 86 Manuel do Cenáculo, Instrucção pastoral do Excelentíssimo e Reverendíssimo Senhor Bispo de Béja ao clero, e ordenandos da sua diocese (Lisbon: 1784), 26–28. 87 Cf. Marcadé, Frei Manuel do Cenáculo Villas Boas, 480.


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follow that same course in relation to ecclesiological matters. A good parameter for comparison with Cenáculo is his contemporary Antônio Pereira de Figueiredo who, although never having been raised to the episcopate, followed a path which was similar, in some aspects, to his. For example, it is worth recalling that two years before signing the sentence of the Royal Censors Office against Miguel da Anunciação— also signed by Cenáculo—Pereira de Figueiredo had published a work about the sacrament of penance under the auspices of the same bishop of Coimbra. Both men shared a certain moral stringency which, as in the case of the Jacobeus, brought them closer to the positions maintained by Port Royalists like Arnauld, Nicole, Pascal and so many others. Neither he nor Cenáculo had been Jacobeus in the proper sense of the term, but it does not seem possible to deny that both men could benefit from the action of those who, especially in the 1740s, contributed to breaking the prevalent conservative atmosphere, encouraging church reform and the renewal of studies in Portugal. Cenáculo, without a shadow of a doubt, shared with Pereira de Figueiredo and other churchmen the defence of the an anti-ultramontanist and regalist ecclesiology, but, as Francisco A. L. Vaz rightly noted, although he showed himself to be an admirer of some Jansenist authors, this did not lead him to be a Jansenist.88 What is certain is that he and several other churchmen who, following or during the Pombaline period, had manifested in various ways their desire for reform, had one thing in common: a will to learn which was typical of those intellectuals of the time who, by means of their Republic of Letters, broke through barriers in the search for enlightenment. In this regard, Cenáculo provides an extremely interesting self-portrait when writing: He who decides to court wisdom in a worthy manner shall also seek its lights where he finds it; shall leave the homeland, and make permutations of the same kind, by the same steps, and arbitrations. Or, we may say, that the Litteratos are all Citizens of the same Country: They live in common there: a country of happiness and virtue.89

88 Francisco A. L. Vaz, Jansenismo e Regalismo no pensamento e na obra de D. Frei Manuel do Cenáculo, in http://home.uevora.pt/~fvaz/2005-%20Jansenismo%20e%20 Regalismo%20no%20pensamento%20e%20na%20obra%20de%20D.pdf. 89 Cf. Manuel do Cenáculo, Instrucção pastoral do Excelentíssimo e Reverendíssimo Senhor Bispo de Béja ao clero, e ordenandos da sua diocese, 115.

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evergton sales souza 7. Conclusion

What then can be taken from this picture, the imprecision of which the author readily acknowledges, outlining the Catholic enlightenment in Portugal? It is not possible to answer this question without first raising the problem which was intentionally avoided at the start of this text and which can be summarized in the question: what should be understood as Catholic enlightenment? Long gone are the days when this was believed to be a contradiction in terms. No less remote are the days of a partial view which intended to see in the Catholic Aufklärung a phenomenon restricted to the Germanic nations. Works such as those of Bernard Plongeron,90 Samuel Miller, Franco Venturi,91 Mario Rosa92 and others have helped us further our reflection on the notion and characters which we call Catholic enlightenment, without, however, enabling us to reach a precise concept regarding this movement. Without a doubt, this has to do with the dimensions and the diffused character of the Catholic enlightenment itself. Several different trends are encompassed under the same notion and, more often than not, the idea of an underlying unity is lost. However, as it covers such different realities, would that mean that the notion of Catholic enlightenment is destined to be imprecise and, therefore, abandoned by historians? However diverse the tendencies involved in this movement may be, it does not seem reasonable to abdicate from the attempt to understand them as a whole and propose specific explanations for a myriad of more restricted movements as if there were no possibility of seeing some unity between them. The understanding that there is a plurality within the Catholic enlightenment should not serve as an impediment to consider it as a flexible whole which can shelter distinct theological and ecclesiological tendencies, according to the circumstances of the time and space under observation. The Portuguese case study seems to confirm the idea that Catholic enlightenment should be regarded as a plural movement or even as a

90 We think especially of Bernard Plongeron, “Recherches sur l’aufklärung catholique en Europe Occidentale (1770–1830)”, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 16 (1969), 555–605 and Théologie et politique au siècle des lumières (1770–1820) (Geneva: 1973). 91 Among other works, Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore 5 vols. (Turin: 1969– 1987). 92 See among others Mario Rosa, Riformatori e ribelli nel’700 italiano (Bari: 1969) and Mario Rosa (ed.), Cattolicesimo e lumi nel settecento italiano (Rome: 1981).


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whole which can contain within it diverse and contradictory doctrinal tendencies. No sensible historian will disagree that in the Catholic enlightenment of the second half of the 18th century a regalist and anti-ultramontanist ecclesiology prevailed with Antonio Pereira de Figueiredo as one of its most prominent idealizers.93 However, as is clear in the case of Miguel da Anunciação, bishop of Coimbra, persecuted by the government for opposing such ecclesiological currents, it was possible to be in line with the enlightenment and still remain faithful to the Roman Curia. In other words, any search for a revelatory trait of total unity applicable to the idea of Catholic enlightenment would be in vain. In fact, the relative unity of the movement should be observed in a more rational and critical attitude in relation to the world and religion derived, to a large extent, from the advances obtained in different fields of knowledge and, in particular, from the methodological reform introduced by erudition. The will to purify faith, whether by the expurgation of devotions without solid historical foundations, or by the desire to restrain superstition, the representation of which expanded to the extent that numerous former beliefs would be relegated to this status, are traits of this enlightened Catholic attitude. Even though there are isolated differences among the enlightened Catholics, it is certain that in this regard they are all imbued with the same reformist spirit and, it may be said, united in their preconception of everything that represented a popular belief lacking in historical grounding. Going beyond the general traits of Catholic enlightenment—bound to a certain rationality and to the renewal of study methods—we move on to the specific characteristics related to the region and the period of the phenomenon. In this regard, it is fair to say that anti-Jesuitism, anti-ultramontanism, anti-scholasticism and anti-probabilism are predominant characteristics of the Portuguese Catholic enlightenment from the late 1750s onward. Indeed, considering that enlightened Catholicism reached its peak during the reigns of King José and Queen Maria, it can be affirmed that it was regalist from the ecclesiological point of view, historical-critical in theological and canonical terms,

93 Of course there are other authors who could be mentioned due to the importance of their works, namely the case of António Ribeiro dos Santos, author of a significant thesis entitled De sacerdotio et império. Concerning this author see José Esteves Pereira, O pensamento político em Portugal no século XVIII: António Ribeiro dos Santos (Lisbon: 1983).

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tending to defend a rigorist and moderate morality in its reform/ expurgation of popular beliefs and devotions and acceptance of new devotions—controlled to the extent that it knew how to respect directives of a political nature, as in the case of maintaining the devotion to St. Peter de Rates; it was also moderate when accepting without any great opposition modern devotions like that to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which diffused in Portugal especially starting in the 1730s.94 The same kind of moderation, dictated by political imperatives, can be verified in relation to Jansenism. If, as we have tried to show, the presence and influence of Jansenist thought are evident as from the late 1760s, the care shown by the Pombaline ruling elite not to allow the exacerbation of such tendencies is equally genuine, to the point of it giving rise to disputes regarding the theme. This plurality of approaches is seen in the position of the Royal Censors Office toward Jansenism discussed above. Government action, which had the valuable support of a group of clergymen firmly convinced of the need to reform the church and religious life in their country, ended up transforming the face of the Portuguese church in the second half of the 18th century. The transformation of the religious life of the common faithful, however, was definitely less successful. In this respect it is still very difficult to have a more accurate measure of the legacy of the Catholic enlightenment in Portugal. What is certain is that, by following the trends in enlightenment thinking, disseminated throughout Europe, the government and the clergy contributed towards building a new model for the church more in line with the new times and more open than it had previously been in relation to influences from beyond the Pyrenees.

94 See Zulmira C. Santos, “Luzes e espiritualidades. Itinerários do século XVIII”, in Carlos Moreira Azevedo (ed.), História religiosa de Portugal, vol. 2 (Lisbon: 2000), 42.


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[Pouget, François-Aimé], Instrucções geraes em fórma de catecismo, nas quaes se explicão em compendio pela Sagrada Escritura, e Tradição a Historia, e os Dogmas da Religião, a Moral Christã, os Sacramentos, as Orações, as Ceremonias, e os Usos da Igreja. Impressas por ordem do Senhor Carlos Joaquim Colbert, Bispo de Montpellier, Para uso dos antigos, e novos Catholicos da sua Diecese, e de todos aquelles, que estão encarregados da sua instrucção, Com dous catecismos abbreviados para o exercicio dos meninos. Traduzidas na lingua Portugueza por mandado do Senhor Arcebispo de Evora Dom João, para uso dos Fieis do seu Arcebispado (Lisbon: 1765). Relação Abreviada da República que os religiosos das províncias de Portugal e Hespanha, estabelecerão nos Dominios Ultramarinos das duas monarchias. E da guerra, que neles tem movido, e sustentado contra os Exercitos Hespanholes, e portuguezes; e por outros documentos authenticos (s.l., s.d. (1757)). Silva, José de Seabra da, Deducção chronologica e analytica. Parte primeira. Na qual se manifestão pela sucessiva série de cada hum dos reynados da Monarquia Portuguesa, que decorrerão desde o governo do Senhor Rey D. João III até o presente, os horrorosos estragos que a companhia denominada de Jesus fez em Portugal e todos seus dominios por hum plano e systema por Ella inalteravelmente seguido desde que entrou neste Reyno, ate que foy delle proscripta, e expulsa pela justa, sabia e providente ley de 3 de Setembro de 1759—Dada à luz pelo Doutor Joseph de Seabra da Sylva, para servir de instrucção e fazer parte do recurso que o mesmo ministro interpoz e se acha dependente na Real presença do dito Senhor sobre a indispensavel necessidade que sente pela urgente Reparação de algumas das mais atendiveis entre as Ruinas cuja existencia se acha deturpando a Autoridade Regia e opprimindo o Publico.—Parte segunda na qual se manifesta o que successivamente passou nas differentes epocas da igreja sobre a censura, prohibição e impressão dos livros: demonstrando-se os intoleraveis prejuizos que com o abuso delas se tem feito à mesma Igreja de Deus: a todas as Monarquias: a todos os Estados soberanos; e ao socego publico de todo o Universo—Dada à luz pelo Doutor Joseph de Seabra da Sylva.—Collecção das provas que forão citadas na parte primeira, e segunda da Deducção chronologica e analytica e nas duas Petições de recurso do doutor Joseph de Seabra da Sylva . . . 2 vols. (Lisbon: 1767–1768). Traducção da defeza de Cecília Faragó, accusada do crime de feitiçaria: obra útil para desabusar as pessoas preoccupadas da arte mágica e seus pertendidos effeitos (Lisbon: 1775). Verney, Luis A, Verdadeiro método de estudar, António Salgado Júnior (ed.) (1746; Lisbon: 1952). Secondary Works Abreu, José Paulo Leite de, D. Frei Caetano Brandão: o reformador contestado (Braga: 1997). Andrade, Alberto Banha de, Vernei e a cultura do seu tempo (Coimbra: 1965). ——, Vernei e a projecção da sua obra (Lisbon: 1980). Appolis, Émile, Entre jansénistes et zélanti. Le tiers parti catholique au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris: 1960). Araújo, Ana Cristina, “As ciências sagradas na cidadela da razão”, in Araújo, Ana Cristina (ed.), O marquês de Pombal e a universidade (Coimbra: 2000). Azevedo, Carlos Moreira (ed.), História religiosa de Portugal, 3 vols. (Lisbon: 2000– 2002). ——, (ed.), Dicionário de história religiosa de Portugal, 4 vols. (Lisbon: 2000–2001). Castro, Zília Osório de, “O regalismo em Portugal: António Pereira de Figueiredo”, Cultura. História e Filosofia 4 (1987): 357–411. ——, “Jacobeia”, in Azevedo, Carlos Moreira (ed.), Dicionário de história religiosa de Portugal, vol. 3 (J–P) (Lisbon: 2001).


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Ceyssens, Lucien and J. A. G. Tans, Autour de l’Unigenitus: recherches sur la gênese de la constitution (Louvain: 1987). Franco, José Eduardo, O Mito dos Jesuítas. Em Portugal, no Brasil e no Oriente (Séculos XVI a XX) (Lisbon: 2006–2007). ——, “Os catecismos antijesuíticos pombalinos. As obras fundadoras do antijesuitismo do Marquês de Pombal”, Revista Lusófona de Ciência Das Religiões 4 (2005): 247–268. Kantor, Íris, Esquecidos e renascidos: historiografia acadêmica luso-americana (1724– 1759) (São Paulo, Salvador: 2004). Lavrador, João E. Pimentel, Pensamento teológico de D. Miguel da Anunciação. Bispo de Coimbra (1741–1779) e renovador da diocese (Coimbra: 1995). Leal, Bruno, La crosse et le bâton. Visites pastorales et recherche dês pécheurs publics dans le diocèse d’Algarve (1630–1750) (Paris: 2004). Lima, Maurílio César de, Primeiro núncio no Brasil (1808–1816). Segundo documentos do Arquivo Secreto Apostólico do Vaticano (Rio de Janeiro: 1977). Macedo, Jorge Borges de, “Dedução cronológica e analítica”, in Serrão, Joel (ed.), Dicionário de História de Portugal, vol. 1 (Porto: 1980), 791–792. Maire, Catherine, De la cause de Dieu à la cause de la nation: le jansénisme au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: 1998). Marcadé, Jacques, Frei Manuel do Cenáculo Villas Boas, évêque de Beja, archevêque d’Évora (1770–1814) (Paris: 1978). ——, “Les hommes et la vie dans l’Alentejo du XVIII e siècle”, Arquivos do Centro Cultural Português 10 (1976): 185–211. Martins, Maria T. E. P., A censura literária em Portugal nos séculos XVII e XVIII (Lisbon: 2005). Miller, Samuel J., Portugal and Rome c. 1748–1830. An Aspect of the Catholic Enlightenment (Rome: 1978). ——, “Portugal and Utrecht: a Phase of the Catholic Enlightenment”, The Catholic Historical Review 63:2 (1977), 225–248. ——, “Dom Frei Joaquim de Santa Clara (1740–1818) and later Portuguese Jansenism”, The Catholic Historical Review 69:1 (1983): 20–40. Moncada, Luis Cabral de, “Mística e racionalismo em Portugal no século XVIII”, in Moncada, Luis Cabral de, Estudos filosóficos e históricos. Artigos, discursos, conferências e recensões críticas (Coimbra: 1959). Mota, Isabel F. da, A Academia Real da História: Os intelectuais, o poder cultural e o poder monárquico no século XVIII (Coimbra: 2003). Neveu, Bruno, Érudition et Religion aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: 1994). Nogueira, Severino Leite, O seminário de Olinda e seu fundador o bispo Azeredo Coutinho (Recife: 1985). Oliveira, Ricardo Jorge Carvalho Pessa de, Uma vida no Santo Ofício: o inquisidor geral D. João Cosme da Cunha, M.A. thesis, University of Lisbon, 2007. Paiva, José Pedro, Os bispos de Portugal e do Império, 1495–1777 (Coimbra: 2006). ——, Bruxaria e superstição num país sem “caça às bruxas”—1600–1774 (Lisbon: 1997). ——, “Os novos prelados diocesanos nomeados no consulado pombalino”, Penélope 25 (2001): 41–63. Pereira, José Esteves, O pensamento político em Portugal no século XVIII: António Ribeiro dos Santos (Lisbon: 1983). Plongeron, Bernard, “Recherches sur l’aufklärung catholique en Europe Occidentale (1770–1830)”, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 16 (1969), 555–605. ——, Théologie et politique au siècle des lumières (1770–1820) (Geneva: 1973). Quantin, Jean-Louis, Le catholicisme classique et les Pères de l’Église: un retour aux sources (1669–1713) (Paris: 1999). Rosa, Mario, Riformatori e ribelli nel’700 italiano (Bari: 1969).

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——, (ed.), Cattolicesimo e lumi nel settecento italiano (Rome: 1981). ——, Sales Souza, Evergton Jansénisme et réforme de l’Église dans l’Empire portugais (1640–1790) (Paris: 2004). Sales Souza, Evergton, “Mística e moral no Portugal do século XVIII. Achegas para a história dos jacobeus”, in Bellini, Lígia, Evergton Sales Souza and Gabriela dos Reis Sampaio (eds.), Formas de crer. Ensaios de história religiosa do mundo luso-afrobrasileiro, séculos XIV–XXI (Salvador: 2006). ——, “D. Ignácio de Santa Tereza, arcebispo de Goa, um prelado às voltas com a Inquisição portuguesa”, in Vainfas, Ronaldo, Bruno Feitler and Lana Lage da Gama (eds.), A Inquisição em xeque. Temas, controvérsias, estudos de caso (Rio de Janeiro: 2006). ——, “L’incontournable jansénisme: l’Église d’Utrecht et la réforme ecclésiastique portugaise”, Histoire, Economie et Société 4 (2005) : 555–572. Santos, Cândido dos, Padre António Pereira de Figueiredo. Erudição e polémica na segunda metade do século XVIII (Lisbon: 2005). ——, “Os jansenistas franceses e os estudos eclesiásticos na época de Pombal”, Máthesis 13 (2004): 67–104. ——, “António Pereira de Figueiredo, Pombal e a aufklärung: ensaio sobre o regalismo e o jansenismo em Portugal na 2a metade do século XVIII”, Revista de História das Idéias 4:1 (1982–1983), 167–203. Santos, Zulmira C., “Luzes e espiritualidades. Itinerários do século XVIII”, in Azevedo, Carlos Moreira (ed.), História religiosa de Portugal, vol. 2 (Lisbon: 2000). Silva, António Pereira da, A questão do sigilismo em Portugal no século XVIII. História, religião e política nos reinados de D. João V e D. José I (Braga: 1964). Silva Dias José Sebastião da, “Portugal e a cultura europeia, séculos XVI–XVIII”, Biblos 28 (1952): 203–498. Taveneaux, René, Jansénisme et politique (Paris: 1965). Vaz, Francisco A. Lourenço, “O catecismo no discurso da ilustração portuguesa do século XVIII”, Cultura. Revista de História e Teoria das Ideias 10 (1998): 217–240. ——, Jansenismo e Regalismo no pensamento e na obra de D. Frei Manuel do Cenáculo, in http://home.uevora.pt/~fvaz/2005-%20Jansenismo%20e%20Regalismo%20 no%20pensamento%20e%20na%20obra%20de%20D.pdf. Venturi, Franco, Settecento riformatore, 5 vols. (Turin: 1969–1987).

LUCES POR LA FE: THE CAUSE OF CATHOLIC ENLIGHTENMENT IN 18TH-CENTURY SPAIN Andrea J. Smidt The cause of luces (lights) in Spain meant a purification, or “enlightening,” of the Catholic faith rather than its abolition. Thus, the Spanish Enlightenment is more Catholic than the standard image associated with France. While a number of Catholic (or at least non antiCatholic) Enlightenments existed, the Spanish monarchy sponsored the predominant mode. Associated with “progress”, it focused on the educated elite of Spanish society. The Spanish monarchy found it in its interests to promote such progress in “science,” associated with the Benedictine monk Benito Jerónimo Feijoo (1676–1764), and in the growth of civility and economic productivity, particularly through the regalist program of increased political centralization advanced by the court lawyers in Madrid, especially under the monarchy of Charles III (1716–1788). Furthermore, this Enlightenment under Charles III coincided with many of the objectives of the Catholic movement known as Jansenism. While in the 17th century Jansenism was a movement originating in the southern Netherlands and extending to France, which theologically affirmed the Catholic Church’s Augustinian tenets regarding the role of grace over that of good works in salvation, by the 18th century it had extended its reach to Spain and other parts of Catholic Europe and became more focused on political and legalistic matters involving the support of episcopal jurisdiction and authority at the expense of papal supremacy. As it became less linked to theological concerns it was condemned as pseudo-Calvinist and was declared heterodox in the bull Unigenitus (1713). The late or “second” Jansenism of the 18th century attracted the attention of Catholic princes such as the Bourbons of Spain who sought to extend their monarchical authority over church affairs (regalism).1 Starting in the early 18th century with the victory of the Bourbon dynasty in the War of Spanish 1 The term “second Jansenism” is borrowed from the synthesis of William Doyle, Jansenism: Catholic Resistance to Authority from the Reformation to the French

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Succession, regalism in the Spanish context became associated with a turn towards a more French or “Gallican” style of royal control over the church, a tendency that, over the course of the century, led to the confirmation of royal authority over the Spanish church in every possible political opportunity.2 Especially during the reign of Charles III (1759–1788), the efforts of regalism took on more Jansenist, or at least philo-Jansenist, traits in matters of religion, as seen in the revival of patristic theology over that of Jesuit moral theology, a drive to purify the Catholic faith from all that was considered “superstition,” and a push for greater independence of national churches, episcopacies, and secular, parish clergy at the expense of the Roman hierarchy.3 Oftentimes, then, the causes of Jansenism and regalism in Spain supported each other in a mutually beneficial relationship.4 Overall, however, the exact relationship is hard to pinpoint since the relationship developed gradually over the 18th century, constantly varied depending on the particular balance of interests at stake at any given moment, and led to unique coalitions of political and religious partners for each measure or act emanating from Madrid. To date, most comprehensive studies of Enlightenment in Spain (and by extension its Catholic nature) have focused primarily, if not exclusively, on the predominant mode sponsored by the Spanish monarchy as “the Enlightenment” in Spain—an Enlightenment whose Catholicity proceeded indirectly from the fact that most agents

Revolution (New York: 2000). See the annotated bibliography of the study for a great list of the secondary literature available on the subject. 2 For a brief summary of regalist trends in Spain as part of the larger context of continental Catholic Europe see the chapter of Nigel Aston in Stewart J. Brown and Timothy Tackett (eds.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, Volume VII: Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution, 1660–1815 (Cambridge: 2006), 24–25. 3 William J. Callahan finds that the “Caroline Church” considered popular religious practices outside those of the church proper as something to suppress, or at best a necessary evil. William J. Callahan, Church, Politics, and Society in Spain, 1750–1874 (Cambridge, MA: 1984). 4 Charles Noel details this relationship (discussed below) in “Clerics and Crown in Bourbon Spain 1700–1808: Jesuits, Jansenists, and Enlightened Reformers”, in James E. Bradley and Dale K. Van Kley (eds.), Religion and Politics in Enlightenment Europe (Notre Dame: 2001), 119–153. This relationship is discussed specifically in the context of Barcelona during the episcopacy of Josep Climent i Avinent in Andrea J. Smidt, “Piedad e ilustración en relación armónica. Josep Climent i Avinent, obispo de Barcelona, 1766–1775,” Manuscrits. Revista d’Història Moderna 20 (2002): 91–109.

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of Enlightenment were also Catholic, did not propose any reforms that contested orthodoxy, and sometimes proposed reforms that happened to coincide with, or even actively embrace, uniquely Catholic ideas of renewal, albeit for different motives. These studies have shown how the Spanish political elite were able to successfully import and adapt French encyclopedic and physiocratic ideas regarding science and economic progress in a way that accepted, or at least worked around, the strong Catholic features of the Spanish landscape. At the same time, the extensive scope of such studies and their universal acceptance as definitive works in the field have promoted a premise for many historians that uncovering Enlightenment in Spain entails making 18thcentury developments cohere to the French model of Enlightenment in order to produce a national history that somehow stands on its own as “the Enlightenment in Spain.” The result, then, tends to limit the parameters of Enlightenment studies to Spanish knockoff applications of French original ideas, leading more than a few to conclude that little room now exists for further studies of the phenomenon of Spanish Enlightenment.5 While such a conclusion might indicate that the following pages of this chapter will be few in number, what follows instead is a treatment of Enlightenment in Spain that builds from the previous comprehensive studies of the official, state-sponsored Enlightenment and extends out to examine other grass-roots and uniquely Spanish modes of Enlightenment. In the process, what is and what is not Catholic Enlightenment in Spain will be articulated. From there, this chapter will illustrate exactly how Enlightened Catholicism developed in Spain as a unique movement or mode of Enlightenment that existed and even conflicted with the other variations, paying attention to the important figures, intellectual discussions, works of renewal, and Enlightened Catholicism’s overall impact on society.

5 In the 2006 meeting of the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, Richard L. Kagan discussed the current state of research in the field of Early Modern Spain in the meeting’s final plenary session, concluding that the 18th century remained ripe for studies of the transatlantic Spanish world but that those of Enlightenment in Spain did not share the same broad horizons. The Annual Meeting of the Society of Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies was held in Lexington, KY, April 2006.

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1. Towards a Vision of Catholic Enlightenment in Spain Seminal works by renowned historians of Spain have established both the existence of Enlightenment in Spain and its Catholic nature. The ability of the Spanish state and society to absorb the ideas of the philosophes of the French Enlightenment, the zenith of Enlightenment under Charles III,6 the growth in power of the state over the church, embodied as “Enlightened Despotism,”7 the work of a small minority, politically pro-monarchical and anti-revolutionary who were primarily concerned with economic reform8—these are the predominant characterizations of the Spanish Enlightenment. What these studies do show is that Spain under the Bourbons became again an active participant in the general life of Western Europe, in its economic, political as well as intellectual affairs. Enlightenment in Spain is well documented, and it did not contest Catholicism nor did it lead to the pursuit of deism or atheism as a (non-)belief system. In the end, the figures, events, and institutions associated with the Spanish Enlightenment in these studies all maintain a Catholic identity in some regard, even if at times there is no discernable connection between the aspects considered “enlightened” and the underlying Catholic identity. What these studies do not relate is that, at the same time, Spain also became an active participant in the religious scene of Catholic Europe and witnessed the development of a unique and authentic Catholic Enlightenment that had an impact on European affairs and sometimes served as an obstacle to competing programs of Enlightenment. Some historians have preferred to study Spanish Catholicism in the 18th century simply in terms of participation in the religious scene of Catholic Europe, and others have followed the lead of Bernard Plon-

6 Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Sociedad y estado en el siglo XVIII español (Barcelona and Madrid: 1976); Carlos III y la España de la Ilustración (Madrid: 1988). 7 Richard Herr, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton: 1958). 8 Jean Sarrailh, L’Espagne éclairée de la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: 1954). Sarrailh, however, gives a more dynamic account of the Catholic Church’s relation to Enlightenment as religious orders and many of the secular clergy are revealed as conscientious champions of reform. He also takes issue with the militantly Catholic historian Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo who helped form the classical picture of Enlightenment Spain as “encyclopedists” and their cohort weakening the religious foundations of the Spanish nation, which were the first cause of all Spain’s later troubles. Menéndez y Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxos españoles, 7 vols (Madrid: 1911–1932).


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geron and researched the Catholic Aufklärung9 in Spain. Overall, these studies have helped to clarify the relationship between Spanish Catholicism and Enlightenment, focusing particularly on that relationship in the political arena between Jansenists and agents of enlightened reform.10 Furthermore, since the causes of Enlightened Catholicism and Enlightened Absolutism were always closely connected, more uniquely so than in other Catholic countries given the Spanish monarch’s historical legacy as a protector of the Catholic faith, the discussion of what exactly is Catholic Enlightenment in Spain seems especially prudent at this juncture. Only loosely associated with the better-known phenomenon of French Jansenism, Spanish Jansenism did not share the same theological heritage as its French counterpart and was based instead on the humanist and Erasmian traditions of 16th century Spain which promoted individual spirituality and reading of Scripture.11 The Jansenist movement in Spain grew as a critical reaction to baroque Catholicism which, arising in the post-Tridentine Catholic Church, had focused on emotion and the senses in religiosity. For Jansenists, extravagance in art and sacred objects had externalized religion to the point of excess.12 Spanish Jansenism was therefore centered on the renovation

9 Bernard Plongeron, “Recherches sur l’‘Aufklärung’ catholique en Europe occidentale, 1770–1830”, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 16 (1969): 555–605. 10 Emile Appolis coined the phrase tiers parti, or “third party”, to describe those in Spain associated with Jansenism who did not wholly subscribe to the political program of Enlightened Despotism or affiliate themselves with the Catholic “zealots” connected with the Society of Jesus. Not necessarily deserving of the name of “Jansenist” since, more often than not, individuals were labeled “Jansenist” only by their adversaries, instead, it was the resulting correspondence between the third party’s temporal (as opposed to spiritual) goals and those of Jansenism which earned the group its Jansenist label. Emile Appolis, Entre Jansénistes et Zélanti. Le “tiers parti” catholique au XVIII siecle (Paris: 1960). See also his book Les Jansénistes espagnols (Bordeaux: 1966). 11 Joël Saugnieux, Le Jansénisme Espagnol du XVIIIe Siècle: ses composantes et ses sources (Oviedo: 1975). For more analysis on how the Enlightenment took form in Spain and its relationship to Catholicism, see particularly Idem, Les jansénistes et le renouveau de la prédication dans l’espagne de la seconde moitié du XVIII e siècle (Lyon: 1976) and the first chapter of Idem (ed.), Foi et Lumières dans l’Espagne du XVIII e siècle (Lyon: 1985). 12 French Jansenist Abbé Clément of Auxerre most vividly illustrates this Jansenist reaction to baroque Catholicism in his observations as a visitor to Madrid in 1768— even using the word “baroque” himself to describe a song sung in a procession! He writes that the women of Madrid “marchent dans les rues avec un air grave et serieux, marmottant continuellement les priers du Chapelet, garni de belles Croix et medailles d’or ou d’argent qu’elles ont toujours à la main. Dans les eglises leur devotion paroit aussi singuliere que peu eclairée. . . . Le people est de la dernière ignorance touchant la

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of Spanish religiosity through a reform of pastoral work and conceptions of spirituality. Joël Saugnieux finds that, by the middle of the 18th century, Spanish Jansenists had developed into diverse “spiritual families” that, despite sometimes conflicting goals, were all united by an attachment to a “national tradition,” or appeal to history—be it of the early Church or Spanish humanism of the 16th century13—and increasingly advocated different kinds of reforms depending on the type of authority they associated with Jansenism: political, theological, moral, or ecclesiastical. The period of 1753 to 1767 was one in which the crown and Jansenists, as well as other clerics, were generally aligned in a campaign which questioned the jurisdictional authority of the pope and his nuncio in Madrid as well as the patronage of many Spanish clerical offices held at the time in the hands of the pope.14 Since the results of these years were the transfer of patronage of thousands of Spanish benefices to the hands of the king in the Concordat of 1753 and the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain in 1767, the particular events themselves transpiring over the course of this period not only gathered an increasingly diverse group of collaborators into the campaign fold but also attracted those aligned together in this campaign to a greater diversity of causes: episcopalism, regalism, conciliarism, and “enlightened ideas.”15 Thus, the resulting picture of the relationship between Jansenism and the enlightened reformers of Spain takes on a rather amorphous shape, making it increasingly difficult to separate the two groups from

Religion, il n’y a aucune traduction en langue vulgaire, l’Écriture sainte, de la tradition et des SS.PP. il n’est pas permis aux Laïcs de lire la Bible ni aucun autre livre pour s’instruire des verités saints de la Religion. . . . Le chant si baroque don’t ils se servent est si ridicule qu’on ne peut s’empecher d’en rire, et dans le fonds de gemir d’une pareille ignorance.” Clément concludes that this is a shame since the Spanish indeed demonstrate a natural desire to be pious. See the Abbé‘s words in “Voyage de Paris à Madrid, et Retour; au mois de Juillet mil sept sent soixant huit,” Fols. 74–76 of Augustin Jean Charles Clément, Journal de correspondances et voyages d’Italie et d’Espagne, pour la paix de l’Eglise, en 1758, 1768 et 1769 (Paris: 1802). 13 Saugnieux, Le Jansénisme Espagnol, 93. 14 Charles C. Noel has studied the interplay of Jansenism and regalism in late 18th century Spanish politics. See Idem, “Clerics and Crown in Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808: Jesuits, Jansenists, and Enlightened Reformers,” 120. Also, Idem, “Missionary Preachers in Spain: Teaching Social Virtue in the Eighteenth Century,” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 866–892; and Idem, “Opposition to Enlightened Reform in Spain: Campomanes and the Clergy, 1765–1775,” Societas. A Review of Social History 3 (1973): 21–43. 15 Idem, “Clerics and Crown,” 126.


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each other, especially after 1767. It is only the cases of individual men (often clerics) who ran afoul of the Bourbon ministers and their regalist plans that provide any clear examples of the differences between the two groups. While those cases are instructive and will be discussed below, the first task at hand involves clarifying our understanding of a uniquely Catholic Enlightenment in Spain and its relationship to the brand of Jansenism that has just been described. 2. The Resulting Picture of Catholic Enlightenment in Spain Over the past forty years, the concept of a Catholic Enlightenment has emerged as a distinct phenomenon as scholars have brought to light increasing evidence of movements in Catholic lands, in most cases from the bottom up, striving to restore the structure of the Church towards a less hierarchical, more egalitarian version of ecclesiastical relations that harkened back to the spirit of the early Church. In rekindling this spirit of early Christianity, Catholic Enlightenment was also associated with attempts to make the Church more of service to the faithful, especially by making its liturgy and doctrine more intelligible for all classes of people, and Christianity as a faith more reasonable and useful to society (although the proposed means of doing that varied by theological bent). Given the religious landscape of its day, this naturally translated into an opposition to or suppression of the excesses of baroque Catholicism; a push for the use of the vernacular in the Mass and in Scripture; education of the laity and clergy, and with it, an openness to the newer sciences; and finally, a strengthening of regional or national churches that was often accompanied by a call for open, deliberative procedures in matters of church governance. In sum, Catholic Enlightenment “bears everywhere the marks of a revival of Christian humanism.”16 Because of its many similar characteristics, late or second Jansenism of the 18th century is oftentimes discussed synonymously with Catholic Enlightenment.17 Yet the two are not always one and the same. In

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Bradley and Van Kley, “Introduction,” in Religion and Politics in Enlightenment Europe, 15. 17 Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal 1540–1770 (Cambridge: 2005), 230–232. Hsia identifies Enlightened Catholicism with three intellectuals—Van

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general, Jansenism is correctly associated with Enlightenment because of its tendency to appeal directly to the critical common sense of the individual in his own internal spiritual devotion rather than give primacy to the larger external expressions of group or social religiosity. In similar fashion, Jansenists resisted the established authority of the Church (i.e., the papacy) and refused to allow the Church hierarchy “to dictate everything they should believe,” making them in some scholars’ eyes “authentic harbingers of the modern world.”18 Yet there are other aspects of Enlightenment within 18th-century Catholicism that fell outside and at times stood in opposition to Jansenism. In fact, it was the Society of Jesus and Jesuit moral theology that adopted a more optimistic view of human nature and moral capability which best accommodated the philosophes’ faith in empirical or Lockean “reason” to achieve civility, progress, and happiness in contemporary society.19 The result was a Jesuit theology of moral laxism that made Christianity reasonable and useful to society by allowing room for all types of religious expressions and an easier road to penance within both the spiritual and physical walls of the Church. Since this same Society originated in Spain and held enormous influence there (and throughout the Spanish Empire), a discussion of Catholic Enlightenment in Spain must include the Jesuit aspects as well.20 Furthermore, the other efforts, by laymen and clerics alike, to harmonize enlightened views of science (from the physical sciences to economics) with distinctly Catholic ideas represent authentic integrations of Enlightenment and

Espen, Febronius, and Muratori—who all had Jansenist affiliations (The former two were infamous Jansenists, while the latter was not a Jansenist per se, but an advocate of a simplified liturgy). Interestingly, Hsia maintains that this Enlightened Catholicism and its Jansenist advocacy of episcopal authority against ultramontanism challenged “the worldview of the Tridentine Church” and ushered in the end a “Catholic Renewal,” which in this study was identified as the expulsion, suppression, and dissolution of the Society of Jesus by 1773. 18 Doyle, Jansenism, 89–90. 19 For a helpful illustration of how Jesuit moral theology “embraced a generally more optimistic view of human moral capability” and how this developed in the 18th century as a “revolution in moral theology” that led to the institutional Catholic Church’s embrace of popular piety as genuine piety—see Michael Printy, “The Intellectual Origins of Popular Catholicism: Catholic Moral Theology in the Age of Enlightenment,” The Catholic Historical Review 91 (2005): 438–461. 20 For example Herr, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution, 411–424 discusses the ex-Jesuit Hervas y Panduro’s “Historia de la vida del hombre.” This piece seems a great example of Enlightenment literature that posits a distinctly Catholic (specifically Jesuit) view of “progress,” even in matters of religion.


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Catholicism. In sum, Catholic Enlightenment in Spain encompasses all of the distinctly religiously-motivated and uniquely Spanish attempts at bringing science, reason, progress, and greater social utility to Catholicism. As in other areas of Europe, Catholic Enlightenment in Spain entailed a version of Catholicism that was more useful and civilizing to society, but more importantly, this version was arrived at through a critical awareness of history that found inspiration in the spiritual and ecclesiastical roots of the early Church.21 As a unified phenomenon at least in the early 18th-century, one may study the Catholic Enlightenment in Spain. About mid-century, tension and fracture began to erupt within and between secular and regular clergy and their various supporters, creating at least two versions of authentically Catholic Enlightenment by the 1760s and 1770s. Thus, the story of Spanish Catholic Enlightenment is one of initial unity and important inroads of learning, interrupted by the 1750s by politically

21 Most traditional studies of the Enlightenment tend not to refract it into a study of various lights but instead focus on the most radical mode or “brand” of Enlightenment that seems to have predominated only in France—the encyclopedic Enlightenment that later historical interpretations would position as the meta-narrative of Enlightenment: Lockean or empirical reason winning its assault on superstition or religion. More recent studies, however, have found the historical record to reflect a much more complex relationship between Christianity and the Enlightenment with regional and national variations across Europe and America that lead us to see a plurality of enlightenments. Some have attempted to find commonalities among the “family of discourses” in order to restore some sort of unity to the 18th century phenomenon across national boundaries. One suggestion has been to focus not on common ideas but on common structures, practices, or institutions (e.g., print culture, salons, academies) that communicate ideas and allow for the introduction of religion as an active part and protagonist of the Enlightenment. Others have looked at common ideas and deciphered separate modes or brands of Enlightenment, such as the encyclopedic; the physiocratic, focused on economic progress in the form of commerce; the civic humanistic and proto-republican, opposed to the “luxury” of the physiocratic and related to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; as well as uniquely Protestant and Catholic variations of Enlightenment. Just as much as the rest of Europe, if not more so, Spain witnessed the emergence of multiple strands of Enlightenment that competed for influence to achieve the different visions for progress each represented. See Helena Rosenblatt, “The Christian Enlightenment,” in Brown and Tackett (eds.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 7: Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution, 1660–1815, 283–301; John G.A. Pocock, “Enthusiasm: The antiself of Enlightenment,” in Lawrence E. Klein and Anthony J. La Vopa (eds.), Enthusiasm and Enlightenment Europe, 1650–1850 (San Marino, CA: 1998), 7; Jonathan Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization: A Review Essay,” American Historical Review 108 (2003): 1061–1080; Bradley and Van Kley, “Introduction,” in Religion and Politics in Enlightenment Europe, 14–17. The introduction offers six distinct strands by separating out “Rousseauism” as its own strand from proto-Republicanism since the “quasi-religious phenomenon acquired enough mass at least in France.”

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charged events that fragmented different Catholic groups towards the poles of the monarchy or the papacy, or the rejection of either one, creating in the process a mosaic of different Catholic Enlightenments. From the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 on into the later decades of the 18th century and the early years the 19th, the gradual importation of the Gallican Catholic Enlightenment by Spanish Jansenists worked toward an independent national church. The increasing political dominance of this Gallican variety over all other forms of Catholic Enlightenment in Spain (and elsewhere in Catholic Europe) escalated tensions between proponents of Catholic Enlightenment, made their contrasts more stark, and polarized the cause of lights to the extent that all other brands of Catholic Enlightenment became progressively alienated in Spain from the Enlightenment and less visible as they became less tolerated. The overall result is that, by the end of the century, Catholics and even philo-Jansenists who had earlier advocated one form or another were now condemning this radical Gallican Enlightenment, associated with the 1786 Synod of Pistoia in Tuscany and even the 1790 Civil Constitution of the Clergy in Revolutionary France, as contributing to anticlericalism and de-Christianization. While even in the last years of Charles IV’s monarchy, before the Napoleonic invasion, reforming bishops and government ministers were appointed who identified with what remained of the Enlightenment—Catholic or otherwise—in Spain, reform at the state level slowed, and regalism became destabilized because of events after 1800, preparing the way for the clerical and royalist reaction in the Bourbon restoration under Ferdinand VII. In that same year of 1814, the pope would reinstate the Jesuit order, a return that would receive a royal celebration in Spain.22 When studying the development of Catholic Enlightenment in the Spanish 18th century, Enlightened Absolutism must be considered as a competing political force that was sometimes conciliatory and other times antagonistic. The reasons for this variance stem from the unique obstacles that proponents of Enlightened Absolutism, mainly the king

22 Teófanes Egido López and Isidoro Pinedo, Las Causas “Gravísimas” y Secretas de la Expulsión de los Jesuitas por Carlos III (Madrid: 1994). While the first half of the book covers the 18th-century campaign against the Jesuits after the Madrid Hat and Cloak Riot of 1766, the authors point out that much of the archival documentation accessible on the justification of the expulsion comes instead from documents of 1814 that were compiled by royal initiative in order for Ferdinand VII to officially celebrate the Jesuit return without seeming to contradict royal policy as expressed under his grandfather Charles III in 1767.


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and his ministers, faced in negotiating their own terrain towards success. For example, Catholic identity and “patriotism” were intertwined in 18th-century Spain. The economic revival of the Spanish Empire grew a new merchant and productive class who supported the Bourbon government for their own profit as well as out of patriotism. As one’s Catholic identity was interwoven with allegiance to the king of Spain, embracing the enlightened economic ideas of the king’s government and enjoying the rewards it reaped was implicitly considered Catholic as much as it was patriotic.23 While, at least earlier in the century, the debate about whether the economic policies of Madrid promoting trade in fashion and luxury encouraged vice or virtue had leaned towards vice, by the 1780s the expansion of the Spanish calico industry and other state-sponsored economic measures had given those arguing the virtues of fashion and luxury the upper hand. Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (1744–1811), minister of Charles III and Charles IV, “believed that if luxury could be of benefit to the Spanish nation and increase its population, then it could be tolerated. Moreover, the production and purchase of national products, even if fashionable and luxurious, could represent a patriotic act.”24 Given such perspectives, those who argued against fashion and luxury based on wholly Catholic principles openly conflicted with the economic and political elite who represented Enlightened Absolutism and could be seen as un-patriotic and, from that perspective, advocates of anti-Enlightenment. The account that follows demonstrates how, over the course of the century, Enlightened Catholicism was only as successful as its ability to accommodate the growing success of the state’s Enlightened Absolutism as power was continually being contested and no one institution or group—monarchy included—had an established monopoly

23 While a middle class did emerge that focused on industry and commerce, historical research has found that they did not identify themselves as bourgeois or as a separate class. David Ringrose, among other historians, has found that in urban areas these wealthy non-nobles sought to appropriate the lifestyle of nobility and even joined the Royal Academies and other circles of noble sociability in order to intermingle with the nobility. David Ringrose, “Madrid and Spain, 1560–1860: Patterns of Social and Economic Change,” in Paul Fritz and David Williams (eds.), City and Society in the Eighteenth Century (Toronto: 1973), 59–75. 24 Marta V. Vicente, Clothing the Spanish Empire: Families and the Calico Trade in the Early Modern Atlantic World (New York: 2006), 72. See pages 69–74 of the fourth chapter for the debate on vice and virtue in fashion and luxury.

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on it.25 All strands of Enlightenment in Spain were responses to a general sense of crisis coming out of the late 17th and early 18th centuries and thus centered on the concept of reform.26 As the century unfolded, however, it was the reform directed by regalist state ministers that would gradually launch itself the most powerfully and dominate all other movements of reform precisely because those ministers had worked for decades to improve the institutional apparatus of the Bourbon state in order to effectively orchestrate and implement reform. Such an institutional mechanism was a resource no other Spanish reform movement had at its disposal. 3. The Unity of the Catholic Enlightenment in Spain The Catholic Enlightenment that emerged in the first half of the 18th century was inherently unified in nature because of the conditions in Spain around 1700. The latter years of the 17th century, under the weak monarchy of the sickly, inbred Charles II (1665–1700), had witnessed a closing off from European culture at the same time that the rest of Europe was opening up to new worlds—both geographically and intellectually. While Spain maintained its grip (albeit a looser one) on the American colonies, for Spaniards who dared to entertain the validity of new scientific theories and share such ideas in university settings or in print form, the Spanish Inquisition or university estab-

25 The bulk of the historical records illuminate most brightly the mode of Enlightenment promoted by the state associated with science and political economy. To a lesser extent, the Enlightenment of Catholic reform associated with “Jansenism” is illuminated when it worked with the state to promote forms of civility and economic progress by diminishing baroque excesses of religiosity that were seen as external to Catholicism and inhibiting the productivity of the Spanish citizenry. When their desired reforms were the same, the state-sponsored Enlightenment and that of Catholic Enlightenment were hard to distinguish as separate forces. Yet the advocates of each brand always had different motives. When the relationship between the two brands in practice is studied, one can see the complexity of the situation. Those that sought to bring science, reason, or literacy to Spain as a whole out of distinctly religious motivations negotiated a very complicated terrain, especially when dealing with the regalist ministers of the state. 26 Manuel Camarero, La prosa de la Ilustración: Feijoo y Jovellanos (Madrid: 1996), 30. The author introduces the writings of these two ilustrados by discussing the general historical context of Enlightenment as one of reformismo that emerged with a consciousness of political and cultural crisis. In this light, one cannot equate Enlightenment in Spain with Enlightened Despotism or the Bourbon dynasty since it was not until the reign of Charles III in which the links between them were strongest.


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lishment would find a way to silence them, given the greater influence and “orthodoxy” of Aristotelian-Ptolemaic science which had been accepted as quasi-canon in Spain for centuries. While the twilight years of the Habsburg dynasty were generally known as a period of cultural, as well as economic and political, decline, the same cannot be said for Spanish Catholic fervor. From the peasantry to the nobility, ever more emotional and dramatic expressions of Catholic piety were popularly engaged in and reinforced by the “baroque” artwork produced and placed within churches and homes of elite. From ornate rosaries and bleeding statues to the veneration of relics and the proliferation of images of Christ and the saints, Spanish Catholicism had responded to the Council of Trent’s official encouragement of such piety. In league with this baroque piety was Trent’s effort at making the church (ideally the parish church) the center of society. In daily affairs this translated into the promotion of lay religious associations, such as confraternities and brotherhoods, and manifestations of lay devotion, such as processions and romeries (romerías), that became central forums for social activity. Thus, religious devotion in Spain was ever more a social affair organized and led by community members, all of this contributing towards a blurred distinction between the sacred and the profane. The result was that by the early 18th century, a growing minority of Spaniards found the current state of religiosity and education out of harmony with what constituted good Catholic piety or education: Baroque piety was commonly found in all sectors of society, from the illiterate to the highly educated, and scholasticism dominated Spanish universities to the extent that the study of new works of “heretics” such as Galileo and Descartes was prohibited and scientific inquiry was neglected in favor of theology. Furthermore, by 1714, more opportunity for expressing critique existed (although most remained wary of being outspoken critics) given the new political environment created by the victory of the Bourbon claimant Philip V (1683–1746) in the War of Spanish Succession. Since the papacy had sided with the Austrian Habsburg claimant for strategic reasons in 1709, Philip V had cut off communications with Rome, leading to many episcopal vacancies, broken economic links between the two courts, and the unresolved matter of many marriage dispensations. Some Spaniards likened their contemporary situation to that of England under Henry VIII, fearing a complete break that would witness the state sale of monastic lands or, worse yet, the end of Roman Catholicism in the land of “the Catholic

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kings”.27 In such an environment, the call for Catholic Enlightenment emerged, although not without responses of scorn and criticism that warned of further damage to the Catholic fabric of Spain. Thus, that which has been traditionally considered Enlightenment in the first half of the Spanish 18th century emerged with great debate on and consideration for its “catholicity.” Perhaps no better example of this debate and call for Catholic Enlightenment exists than the case of Benito Jerónimo Feijoo. Joining the Benedictine order at the age of fourteen despite being the first born son of a noble family, Feijoo’s insatiable pursuit of knowledge led him down a career path as a man of letters—one who was all too painfully aware of his own country’s intellectual backwardness and would work diligently to reverse this trend. As a monk who held a special reading license from the Inquisition, Feijoo had access to foreign works that were inaccessible to lay Spaniards through his many international friends, and his intellectual curiosity led him to an acquaintance of the works of Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, and Newton, among others, which he found to present the best scientific explanations yet available, even if on theological grounds their theories were not entirely acceptable. It was the utter neglect of such works in Spanish universities that grieved Feijoo and led to his outspoken criticism of Spain’s intellectual climate. While Feijoo is not significant for his scientific expertise or for being the lone voice in the intellectual wilderness that was Spain, he was important for being the most aggressive voice and winning a popular reception as a writer, unmatched in Spain since the days of Cervantes. With the nine-volume Teatro crítico universal (Universal Theater of Criticism) published between 1726 and 1740 and essay series Cartas eruditas y curiosas (Inquiring and Erudite Letters) from 1742 to 1760, Feijoo introduced the ideas of many foreign writers into thousands of Spanish homes, broadening cultural horizons in Spain to include other European developments. In the process, he successfully defended the work of skeptics and other Spaniards who entertained new methods of scientific inquiry, particularly in the field of medicine, which went against the deeply entrenched Aristotelian view of science.

27 Teófanes Egido, “El Regalismo y las relaciones iglesia-estado en el siglo XVIII” in Antonio Mestre Sanchis (ed.), Historia de la Iglesia en España, vol. 4: La Iglesia en la España de los Siglos XVII & XVIII (Madrid: 1979), 225–232.


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Of all critics, Feijoo was one that intimately knew the Spanish intellectual universe. As a student, he had studied in Pontevedra, Salamanca, León, and Oviedo, later spending most of his academic career as a Doctor of Theology and dean of writing at the University of Oviedo. As a student in the later 17th century, he had observed how the attempts of certain Spanish novatores (innovators) to introduce new ideas on philosophy or natural science had met with resistance from lettered clergy and Spanish Inquisition leaders who considered such ideas as dangerous to Church doctrine that came out of the scholastic tradition and to the hierarchical nature of ecclesiastical authority that Aristotelian cosmology and biology reinforced. But instead of debating such ideas or refuting them on a scientific basis, the Spanish university and intellectual establishment disregarded or scorned them as pretentious and even heretical. The work of heretical foreigners or men of doubtful orthodoxy could offer nothing worth imitating. So it was that whilst elsewhere Galileo, Gassendi, Descartes, and Newton were revealing to their fellow men secrets of the natural world, the Spaniard concentrated on theology, Roman law, and Aristotle, while his teachers argued over what language the angels spoke, or which might have been greater, the blood which sprang from the body of Xavier after the lapse of many years, or the milk which flowed from the severed head of Paul. Should the Spaniard have wondered about the heavens, Ptolemy provided him with answers. If he wished to take up medicine, Hippocrates and Galen were the authorities he turned to.28

Within this intellectual context Feijoo emerged as a spokesperson for Enlightenment. But rather than advocating any one philosophy as the only acceptable intellectual path, his main message was that Catholics could learn something from “heretics” and that their studies should at least be tolerated even if some of their theories had elements that contradicted Scripture. Feijoo’s incredible popularity—he was even made a member of the Council of Castile in 1748—and his association with the general call for an opening of the Spanish Catholic mind helped to forge a unity in the cause for Catholic Enlightenment in the first half of the 18th century. Change was needed in Spain in order for individuals

28 John Browning, “Fray Benito Jerónimo de Feijóo and the Sciences in 18th century Spain,” in Peter Hughes and David Williams (eds.), The Varied Pattern: Studies in the 18th century (Toronto: 1971), 353–354. For more information on Spanish universities, see also George M. Addy, The Enlightenment in the University of Salamanca (Durham, NC: 1966).

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and society to function effectively with a genuinely Catholic perspective. And by the end of the reign of Philip V, a diversity of clergy and laity became unified in their support for Spain’s engagement with the outside world for distinctly religious reasons. Scientific inquiries were divinely inspired quests for truth rather than what some scholastics were branding as useless curiosities. “There is no truth whose perception is not useful to understanding because all truths lend themselves to satisfying man’s natural thirst for knowledge. This appetite came to man’s understanding from the Author of Nature. Is it not a grave insult to God to think that he inspired the soul with an appetite for something useless?”29 For those in authority to keep the public in scientific obscurity was just as pernicious to society as the potential threat scientific curiosity supposedly presented. As his subtitle relates, Teatro Crítico Universal: Discursos varios en todo género de materias para desengaño de errores comunes, Feijoo wrote in Castilian on all matter of topics to reveal to the public their common errors in having such prejudices towards science and even their misunderstandings that led to superstitious beliefs, with the goal that the universal value of the natural sciences to transform Spanish society would be made evident to his readers.30 The foundational belief for Feijoo and other Spaniards advocating Enlightenment at the time was that two dangerous extremes must be avoided: blind belief and obstinate unbelief. Likewise, the key was to promote the right balance between superstition and skepticism.31 29 Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, Cartas eruditas y curiosas, vol. 2 (Madrid: 1773 [1745]), 219, Carta XVI. As translated in the work of John Browning, “Fray Benito Jerónimo de Feijóo and the Sciences in 18th century Spain,” 357. 30 For example in the third volume of Teatro crítico, one essay is entitled Milagros supuestos or “supposed miracles,” devoted to explaining the rational scientific explanations for many Spanish accounts of modern-day miracles. 31 Feijoo was most concerned for Spain’s backwardness in the realm of AristotelianPtolemaic science as it related to medicine, and here he found empiricism (especially Bacon’s doctrine of experiment-based observation) particularly helpful in exposing the complexity of the natural sciences that could not be explained by the four elements, the four humors, and abstract ideas. Since the natural scientist would instead study the human body as composed of a delicate system of organs, vessels, and tubes, he had more ability than a scholastic philosopher to gain an appreciation for the divine maker as studies of anatomy exposed the greatness of God. See John Browning, “Fray Benito Jerónimo de Feijóo and the Sciences in 18th century Spain,” 358. Translation of Feijoo, Teatro crítico y universal vol. 7 (Madrid: 1746 [1736]), 330. While Feijoo himself had no more medical knowledge than a layperson, he wrote publicly and in Castilian to defend the works of skeptics and other surgeons who published studies on anatomy (albeit seldom through studies of cadavers, commonly


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While Feijoo was an aggressive critic who provoked much debate and promoted new ideas, he was not the first or the only one of his time to demand Spanish modernization. Historians have given Feijoo credit for almost single-handedly opening up Spain to European culture and empiricist science, yet there are many others whose contributions in medicine and other lettered pursuits played an integral role in Spain’s intellectual reawakening. In the 17th century, Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz (1606–1682) and the Marano Isaac (Fernando) Cardoso (1615–1680?) were known for their anti-scholastic attitudes and work that reflected the influences of Descartes and Gassendi. Names like Zapata (1644–1745) and Tosca (1651–1723) were also associated with intellectual innovation in the small circles of Spanish intellectual elite by the early 18th century. The 1727 publication Medicina scéptica y cirugía moderna (Skeptical Medicine and Modern Surgery) of Martín Martínez (1684–1734) strongly advocated the method of observation and experiment in medicine and challenged scholastic medical concepts. All helped to advance three foundational concepts for Spanish Catholics who wished to diverge from the scholastic tradition and entertain new philosophies and scientific studies: 1) One could renounce Aristotelian tradition and continue to be a Catholic. 2) The Fathers of Old and New Testament did not have as much authority in matters concerning the natural world as they did matters of spirituality and faith. 3) Laymen could study theology and separate philosophy from the domain of ecclesiastical authority.32 Of all Catholics, the Jesuits showed the most acceptance of math and accommodation for modern science both in their individual studies and as an order instructing in their colegios mayores, even promoting the instruction of other modern languages to provide access to untranslated scientific works. Thus, in many aspects they led the way of Catholic Enlightenment in these new areas of research.

prohibited by the Inquisition) that questioned the concepts of humors and elements and received many replies from outraged Scholastic physicians. “The observation of dissections undertaken for teaching purposes was not mandated as part of training for doctors until a royal decree of 1777.” Rebecca Haidt, Embodying Enlightenment: Knowing the Body in Eighteenth-Century Spanish Literature and Culture (New York: 1998), 24–25. 32 Antonio Mestre Sanchis, “Religión y cultura en el siglo XVIII” in Idem (ed.), Historia de la Iglesia en España vol. 4: La Iglesia en la España de los Siglos XVII & XVIII, 688.

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Yet, in the first half of the 18th century, Spanish universities were slow to accommodate these ideas in their programs. The major exception was the University of Valencia, which as early as the 1680s had professors of medicine and anatomy who welcomed the new scientific studies and by the early 18th century deans of medicine such as Andrés Piquer (1711–1772) later court doctor for Ferdinand VI (1713–1759) and associated with a larger circle of Valencian ilustrados.33 Yet, the majority of enlightened ideas spread instead through the tertulias, gatherings for the discussion of ideas typically held in the salons of the nobility and intellectual and political elite. Here one could share ideas in a setting that did not carry with it as much threat of attack from the reactionary sectors of Spanish society. In addition, the men and women who gathered in such salons typically had access to administrative and political posts, thus offering networking opportunities for ilustrados and government officials desiring innovative thinkers to help conceive of and implement Bourbon reforms to revitalize Spain and its monarchy.34 Some Spaniards were inspired by European scientists and philosophers, others the classical models of the Greek and Roman world, yet many Spanish ilustrados took their cue from authentically Spanish sources of Christian humanism that came out of the Erasmian tradition of 16th-century Spain and the alumbrado trait of the individual’s study of Scripture as well as co-ed group discussion of it. Gregorio Mayans y Siscar (1699–1781) was one nobleman whose writings championed Christian humanism and internal religiosity in the spirit of Erasmus. While Feijoo directed his work towards a popular audience, Mayans wrote to a more selective, although not exclusively erudite, audience and helped to establish a vigorous intellectual culture in provincial Valencia (with strong ties to the city’s university). Known in the 18th century for his veneration of Erasmus and other great humanists of the Renaissance tradition, Mayans focused on a variety of themes, including ecclesiastical history, religious superstition, intelligible preaching, and ecclesiastical relations in society, doing so with a methodological

33 Charles C. Noel, “Charles III of Spain,” in Hamish M. Scott (ed.), Enlightened Absolutism: Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe (Ann Arbor: 1990), 122. 34 Even a cleric, the Benedictine monk Martín Sarmiento, a close friend and book dealer to Feijoo, was well known for his gatherings of artistic and intellectual friends in Madrid and his access to different sources of information.


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rigor that he and other Valencian humanists falted Feijoo for lacking.35 Mayans’ passion for treating history as a science, promoting historical criticism and the use of the best original sources available, inspired those of all Catholic stripes, from Jesuits to Augustinians, to write religious histories of Spain.36 The result was that, in the field of religious history, Spain was making evident progress in the quality of its scholarship defined by a critical use of sources.37 Concerning religious practices that were “traditional”, Mayans criticized baroque excesses that could not be supported by any known doctrinal mandate, using the same methodology he employed towards ecclesiastical history. Contributing towards the sense of one unified Catholic Enlightenment in the first half of the 18th century, Mayans and other Erasmian humanists were not alone in their critique of Spanish religiosity. Regular clergy, secular clerics, and lay scholars reacted to external religious behavior with common displeasure.38 In

35 See the works of Antonio Mestre Sanchis, “Religión y cultura en el siglo XVIII” in Historia de la Iglesia en España Vol. 4: La Iglesia en la España de los Siglos XVII & XVIII, 583–743; Idem, Don Gregorio Mayans y Siscar: entre la erudición y la política (Valencia: 1999); Idem, Historia, fueros y actitudes políticas: Mayans y la historiografía del XVIII (Valencia: 2000); Idem, Ilustración y Reforma de la Iglesia. Pensamiento Político-Religioso de Don Gregorio Mayans (1699–1781) (Valencia: 1968). See also the published correspondence of Gregorio Mayans y Siscar, pistolario, 17 vols. (Valencia: 1972–2000). 36 Mayans would not publicly pronounce his views on the tradition surrounding the patron saint of Spain, but his analysis of the arrival of Santiago (Saint James, son of Zebedee) to the Iberian Peninsula in the 1st century A.D. as a historical fact led him to conclude that insufficient evidence (primary sources) existed to support its truth or the authenticity of the remains venerated in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. One’s “faith” in history should be guided by the acts of councils, letters of church fathers, papal bulls, and of course the accounts of the Old and New Testaments. Mestre, “Religión y cultura en el siglo XVIII” in Idem (ed.), Historia de la Iglesia en España Vol. 4: La Iglesia en la España de los Siglos XVII & XVIII, 606–31, 695–702. 37 Some prominent works include Lamberto de Zaragoza, Teatro histórico de las iglesias de Aragón; Juan Loperráez Corvalán, Descripción histórica del obispado de Osma con el catálogo de sus prelados; Juan Gómez Bravo, Catálogo de los obispos de Córdoba y breve noticia histórica de su iglesia; Joaquín Traggia, Aparato de la historia eclesiástica de Aragón; and Juan Francisco Masdeu, Historia crítica de España y de la cultura española. 38 The 18th century witnessed a new wave of missionaries in Spanish cities, and even in the villages and countryside, engaged in avid campaigning for a more internal religiosity that focused on a difficult and sincere penitence that would change behavior and instill virtue from the marketplace to the law court. The Jesuit novelist José Francisco de Isla (1703–1781) used the main character of his work so-entitled Fray Gerundio de Campazas to demonstrate how the Spanish preacher must proceed in order to effectively convey his message of reform. “The preacher must teach in a clear, sharp style, intelligible to all, adapted to ordinary ideas so that it will be equally

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fact, the sermons of missionary preachers from the first two thirds of the century indicate that missionaries focused on a common theme, Christian social virtue, in a way that represents an enlightened strand of civic humanism. Often they condemned luxury as leading to heresy, indifference, and, worst of all, cruelty of the rich against the poor. Overall, these professional preachers spoke strong words against the rich that exposed the reality of socio-economic relations,39 at the same time demonstrating their relative clerical independence by denouncing nobility, even craftsmen, and most of all merchants for their economic misconduct. By the middle of the century, litigation normally proceeded and resulted in the monarchy (vis-à-vis its reforming ministers) placing prohibitions on such preachers of anti-commercialism. The result was that, by the later 18th century, missionary preachers had less freedom of speech and spoke less directly against luxury and more directly about the virtues of agriculture or the impending doom of modernity. By gaining the support of the poor, missionaries were able to bring religious renewal to lower levels of society. Yet, the excesses of baroque piety were especially prevalent amongst those of wealth and privilege. As this latter group was typically affiliated with the ruling order and perceived an implicit threat in the preachers’ ability to attract crowds, by the second half of the 18th century such grass-roots attempts at religious renewal in Spanish society were impeded by government concerns for political stability. As the century unfolded, attempts at religious renewal would increasingly have to accommodate or be sponsored by the goals of the state. Similarly, those who advocated an enlightened strand of civic humanism and condemned the ruling order’s enlightened program of commerce and luxury would

understood by the plebian and the aristocrat, the man of culture and the rustic, . . . the wise and the ignorant, . . . and, in a word, he must persuade and move all.” Isla, as quoted in Charles C. Noel, “Missionary Preachers in Spain: Teaching Social Virtue in the Eighteenth Century,” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 874. 39 Pedro de Calatayud from his sentencias pronounced during processions: “Haughty and proud men! You have raised yourselves up and become conceited; you seek to dominate all and subject all to your lordship; you solicit nobilities and exemptions, you avoid charges and taxes in which you are meant to be included like all others; now you count yourselves mighty because you command or have a protector, but you will not endure; you will be confounded and humiliated; God will break your pride like a grain stalk that reaches above its neighbors.” Calatayud, as quoted in Noel, “Missionary Preachers in Spain,” 881.


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have to speak even more softly or with more political skill as they faced a bolder and less tolerant state. Thus, by the 1750s, a variety of individuals as well as their audiences helped to promote a genuine intellectual reawakening in Spain (although generally limited to the educated urban elite) that also inspired religious renewal—one that remained genuine in its Catholic fervor and undivided by theology and ecclesiology. While the coming years would enlarge the Spanish body representative of Catholic Enlightenment, its Catholic identity would become a source of division rather than unity due to larger European trends and events. Catholic Europe witnessed exertions of ultramontane authority that exacerbated any pre-existing theological and ecclesiological tensions between those of Augustinian and Jesuit leanings. Political moves against the Jesuits elsewhere in Europe inspired Spain to move in a similar direction, leading to the divisive international expulsion of the Society in 1773. European efforts, especially in France, towards a more centralized control of religious affairs in the home country also led many Spanish Catholics to want the same. In the end, the relative success of Enlightenment to open up Spain to European culture contributed to the splintering of the Catholic Enlightenment in the second half of the 18th century, as Spain imported the intra-Catholic divisions of other countries and created its own splits in the process. 4. The Widening Rift From about 1747 to 1767, Spain witnessed a series of both contingent and wholly unrelated political developments that contributed to a widening rift in the Spanish Catholic Enlightenment as friction increased between representatives of opposite ends of the Catholic theological and ecclesiological spectrum. While events gradually pulled the proJesuit and pro-Augustinian sides apart to the point of collapse, it was not until the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 (and their international suppression six years later) that a complete fissure had occurred into at least two distinguishable Catholic Enlightenments—one centered on optimism in human nature and embracing ultramontanism and the other centered on individual internal piety through the reading of Scripture in the vernacular and embracing episcopalism. Even though the political stance of the Spanish monarchy was decidedly set against the Jesuits in 1767, just twenty years earlier the case was quite the opposite as regalism had entailed the use of monarchical

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authority to protect the Jesuits and even show them favor. While both Philip V until 1746 and his son Ferdinand VI (reigned 1746–59) had aggressively pursued greater power over the Spanish church by appointing benefice holders and limiting the powers of the papal nuncio in Spain (initially attempted in the “useless” Concordat of 1737), most of the work towards those ends was accomplished by ministers who were either Jesuits themselves or those favorably disposed to them. In fact, even the Concordat of 1753 that had been thirteen years in the making and that effectively gave the Spanish monarch control over all but 52 remaining benefices was solidified by the actions of the king’s Jesuit confessor Francisco Rávago (1685–1763) and the pro-Jesuit Secretary of State José Carvajal y Lancáster (1698–1754) and secured by the young Manuel Ventura y Figueroa (1708–1783).40 Yet at the time such regalist action was not inconsistent with the usual pro-papal stance of the representatives of the Society of Jesus, since the rationale for the terms of the Concordat had targeted the ever-present abuses of the Roman Curia in carrying out their duties in Spain and the result of taking these duties away from the Curia would mean more power and influence for those who considered themselves the most loyal and obedient to the pope in all of Christendom—that is, as long as Jesuit influence carried weight with the Spanish monarchy. And in 1753 no reason existed to doubt continued Jesuit influence over the Spanish monarchy since the recent past had demonstrated great signs of royal favor. At that point only Jesuits had taken advantage of regalist rights in Spanish ecclesiastical matters. Thus, while the Concordat itself did not tear apart the unity of the Spanish Catholic Enlightenment in 1753, its Jesuit direction did not allow for many favors for those of Jansenist or Augustinian bents. In fact, compounded with regalist acts in favor of Jesuits, alienating many other orthodox Catholics as recently as 1747, a series of politically charged events had begun that would officially sanction the theological views of one extreme to the exclusion of the other, creating an ever-deepening divide between the Catholic lights of Enlightenment. The event that historians have pointed to as creating “Jansenists” in Spain, where there formerly were few or none, and as beginning

40 Teófanes Egido, “El regalismo y las relaciones iglesia-estado en el siglo XVIII” in Mestre (ed.), Historia de la Iglesia en España, vol. 4: La Iglesia en la España de los Siglos XVII & XVIII, 173–188.


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a heated public battle in the field of Catholic Enlightenment was the Spanish Inquisition’s 1747 publication of its index of prohibited books that dared to include even papally-approved books. The work of particular controversy was that of the Italian Cardinal Enrico Noris (1631–1705), an Augustinian, whose 17th-century Vindiciae augustinianae and Historia pelagiana had clarified the differences between Augustinian Catholicism and Jansenism and received a special declaration of orthodoxy from the pope. The act of the Spanish Inquisition to prohibit the works of Noris and of other writers revered by Spanish Dominicans and Augustinians, and to include it in a list with many papally prohibited works of Jansenists such as Pasquier Quesnel (1634–1718), was clearly the work of the Jesuits, since the Inquisitor General had charged two specific Jesuits with the work of compiling the index. While Benedict XIV (reign 1740–1758) responded directly to the inquisitor in a brief outlining the error that had been committed, sending a copy directly to the head of the Augustinian order as well as assuring the order of the papal efforts on their behalf, it was to no avail. The king’s confessor Rávago supported the acts of his Jesuit brothers and moved Ferdinand VI to use regalist means to sustain this attack on doctrine considered Jansenist. The king wrote to Rome defending his actions in support of the Inquisition, explaining that the prohibition was necessary for the peace of his towns, to avoid any danger such works would pose to the purity of Catholicism in Spain, and to maintain his regalías over the Inquisition. While in this case regalism had clearly won out to work against theological works that did not defend Jesuit theology, the harm had been done. Not only had papal relations been damaged (they would only be repaired somewhat when Rávago was relieved of his duties in 1754), but also the many Spaniards that disagreed with the Jesuit theological doctrine of probabilism observed that a campaign must be waged in order to vindicate the orthodoxy of their Catholic beliefs in Spain’s political environment.41 In 1754, the political tide began to turn. While the years of 1746–1754 of Ferdinand VI’s reign were known for continuing the reform program begun by Philip V and for using regalism to support the Society of Jesus, their doctrine of probabilism, and the social class

41 Doyle, Jansenism, 68; Mestre, “Religión y cultura en el siglo XVIII” in Mestre (ed.), Historia de la Iglesia en España, vol. 4: La Iglesia en la España de los Siglos XVII & XVIII, 652–654.

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of the aristocracy theologically and socially connected through education in the elite colegios mayores, in 1754–1755 a trifecta of events (in the midst of the Seven Years’ War) led to a change of guard in Madrid which slowly turned regalism towards the support of antiJesuits (and the doctrine of probabiliorism that opposed probabilism) and a new social class of manteístas—university-educated men of the lower nobility who had been excluded from the colegios mayores and resented their strong influence. In the space of about a year, the three men who virtually governed Spain for the king would leave Madrid. The talented secretary of state Carvajal, who had followed a path of cautious, armed neutrality in the Atlantic, would unexpectedly die; the pro-Jesuit minister of finance and navy the Marquis of Ensenada (Zenón de Somodevilla y Bengoechea, 1702–1781) would be taken out of power by plotting politicians, including the British ambassador who desired an end to his aggressive ship-building program; and finally in 1755, Ensenada’s ally Rávago, who had used his post to influence the Inquisition, royal ecclesiastical policy, and the king in a pro-Jesuit fashion, was removed as the king’s confessor.42 From 1754–1759, a virtual power vacuum existed in the monarchy. Ferdinand VI failed to push his new ministers to achieve needed economic reforms and became dominated by his extravagant queen María Bárbara of Braganza. After the queen’s death in 1758, a crisis of sovereignty emerged as the king remained depressed and isolated himself while those servants who managed to see him questioned his mental stability. Now it was clear that the king’s ministers acted without the king’s authority since all knew that the ministers could not consult the king nor a queen who represented the king’s interests. The situation was so grave that in the summer of 1759 a group of Spanish bishops petitioned Rome to fill the many clerical vacancies that existed—a clear violation of the Concordat of 1753. While the bishops would not see their request fulfilled due to the efforts from Naples of the soon-to-be Spanish king Charles III, by the time Charles arrived in October this “species of interregnum” had made the new king’s work cut out for him in order to re-establish political authority in Spain.43 In

42 Rafael Olaechea, “La política eclesiástica del Gobierno de Fernando VI,” in La Época de Fernando VI. Ponencias Leídas en el coloquio conmemorativo de los 25 años de la fundación de la Cátedra Feijoo (Oviedo: 1981), 139–225. 43 Noel lays out the political transactions and implications of 1758–1759, using the term of Archdeacon William Coxe for the time period, in “The Crisis of


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this context, Enlightened Despotism was not a given, and Charles III would specifically use Spanish Catholicism and the clergy as a muchneeded support in achieving the degree of power that would later be designated as Enlightened Despotism.44 It was at this time that the Bourbon monarchy made a key transition in its policy by embracing the side of Catholic Enlightenment which had been alienated by the Jesuits. A new alliance would now materialize between the crown and clerics sympathetic to Jansenist ideas, especially those of the Gallican variety.45 While the Concordat of 1753 at its inception was a financial operation centered on the control of church money connected to the thousands of benefices now under the authority of the king of Spain, during the reign of Charles III (1759–1788) the Concordat’s implications now opened the doors for the state’s reform initiatives in religious affairs. (Mayans himself had observed the potential it had, hoping it would result in the bestowal of benefices to the most virtuous and educated men.) And even though the Concordat did not allow for the power to expel the Jesuits in 1767, it certainly provided for the establishment of some necessary preconditions. For one, it reaffirmed the Spanish monarchy’s ability to create an upper clergy “addicted to the system of Enlightened Despotism.”46 Now, under the administration of Charles III, ministers argued that Thomism (or the doctrinal school aligned with Dominicans and Augustinians and opposed to the laxity of Molinism) better supported regalist rights, while the Jesuit school excused regicide and supported papal prerogatives over all others. In

1758–1759 in Spain: Sovereignty and Power during a ‘Species of Interregnum,’ ” in Robert Oresko, G.C. Gibbs, and Hamish M. Scott (eds.), Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Memory of Ragnhild Hatton (Cambridge: 1997), 580–607. 44 As part of a larger imperial policy designed to make Spain stronger in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic (most notably against the British), “Spaniards’ energies must be harnessed, their talents nourished and directed toward the monarchy’s needs, their knowledge and skills developed. . . . The body of the church and its hierarchy needed to be controlled, then mobilized to preach and support reform. . . .” Noel, “Charles III of Spain,” 124. 45 This is not unsurprising given Charles’ background as king of Naples where he had been influenced by his prime minister Bernardo Tanucci towards reducing the power of the Roman Curia and increasing that of the state in ecclesiastical affairs, in the process making contacts with Italian and French Jansenists. 46 Egido, “El regalismo y las relaciones iglesia-estado en el siglo XVIII” in Mestre (ed.), Historia de la Iglesia en España, vol. 4: La Iglesia en la España de los Siglos XVII & XVIII, 183.

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fact, it became commonplace to think that part of being a good patriot under the absolutist regime of Charles III was to be an advocate of Thomism and probabiliorism, or at least an enemy of probabilism or Molinism. Given that the king had come from Naples predisposed to favor manteístas for government ministers and seized opportunities whenever he could to replace grandees with them, and that in Spain these men equated Jesuit ideas with a defense of socio-political interests represented by the colegios mayores and aristocracy, it is not surprising that they would work to erode Jesuit power and argue that probabilism did not guarantee the dutiful submission of Spanish “vassals” to the absolute authority of their king. Another result of Charles III’s enforcement of the Concordat of 1753 was the realization that much of the jurisdiction over the Spanish benefices was still held by the Roman Curia. The Minister of Grace and Justice Manuel de Roda (1706–1782) and leading lawyer (fiscal) of the Council of Castile Pedro Rodríguez Campomanes (1723–1802) found that the Council of Castile and its chamber dealing with ecclesiastical appointments lacked both the manpower and the direction to effectively propose candidates for all vacancies. In such a situation, Roda, Campomanes, and other regalist ministers began to look for culprits and found them (conveniently) in the Society of Jesus. The anti-Jesuit campaign began to manifest itself as early as 1761 and gathered steam by 1766, so that a diverse and populous group of ministers, aristocrats, clergy, and lesser nobility all advocated the elimination of the Jesuits from Spain for being too privileged, powerful, ruthless, ambitious, and divisive in society. All of these generalities could then be used to argue that the continued presence of the Jesuits in Spain undermined the political stability of the Bourbon state, making the king’s eventual action against them understandable to many. The first sign of a change in theological direction at the political level occurred in 1761 when a Jesuit success in Rome led to one of their first defeats in Spain. A catechism of the French abbé Françios-Philippe Mesenguy (1677–1763), denying the infallibility of the pope, attacking the Jesuits, and praised by many Italian Jansenists, received papal condemnation as Jansenist and as thus containing false propositions dangerous for the life of the Church. While Clement XIII’s papal brief and letter of condemnation were sent to all bishops, Spain along with other Catholic regions prohibited its publication. When the Inquisitor General Manuel Quintano Bonifaz (years of office, 1755–1784) in league with the papal nuncio published the brief anyway, Charles III


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responded fiercely by banishing Bonifaz from court and accepting his return only after he had been publicly humiliated. Charles III used his royal privilege, the exequatur regium, to act against the papal documents, showing strong favor towards the Jansenist author. But why would Jansenism find favor in Madrid? The answer lies in the many interests shared by Jansenists and Spanish ilustrados of the humanist, Erasmian bent whose ideas coincided well with those of government reformers: a hatred of scholasticism, a desire to restrain the excesses of baroque religiosity and encourage more internal forms of piety, a promotion of episcopalism and conciliarism, a push for a reduction in privileges and exemptions of regular clergy. All of these were fundamental points of convergence between Jansenists, indigenous schools of enlightened thought, and the ilustrados of the Bourbon state under Charles III in the 1760s. Roda and Campomanes were two figures who embody this convergence. Roda was definably more Jansenist and kept the most conciliatory relations with Jansenists outside of Spain; however, he was still bound by the parameters of regalism. Campomanes was definably more regalist and less of an advocate of episcopalism. He embraced the cause of Jansenism only when it could be used to further the regalist agenda (e.g., the beatification of the Venerable Palafox, prohibiting the devotion of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Spain, and university reform based on the theology of Augustine and Aquinas to the exclusion of that of Suarez). Possibly the greatest convergence of interests centered on the expulsion of the Jesuits. Since the Society of Jesus comprised an international organization with headquarters outside of Spain and were bound by a special vow of loyalty to the pope, the monarchy saw the Jesuit order as a challenge to royal power. Spain was not unique in this stance; first, in 1759, Portugal expelled the Jesuits, and in 1764, France dissolved the order in its realm. Before the Catholic monarchies managed to persuade Pope Clement XIV to dissolve the Jesuits entirely in 1773, Charles III followed suit with his European neighbors, issuing a royal pragmatic on April 2, 1767 that because of serious or “grave causes” the Jesuits residing in Spain and its colonies would have to leave immediately.47

47 For the political process of the expulsion in Spain, see Teófanes Egido Lopez and Isidoro Pinedo, Las Causas “Gravísimas” y Secretas de la Expulsión de los Jesuitas por Carlos III (Madrid: 1994).

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From a purely political perspective, the ministers of Charles III had found that the Jesuit presence impeded an alliance with neighboring Portugal. While not a direct explanation for their expulsion but certainly a factor working against them, the extinction of the Jesuits as an order in Spain was a first and necessary step to loosening Portugal from their British allies and bringing them closer to their Iberian neighbors, an attractive proposition to fortify Spain in the Americas and Mediterranean during the Seven Years’ War and beyond. The Jesuits had been seen as a political nuisance due to their activity with the Guaraní peoples in the reductions of Paraguay along the Portuguese-Spanish border in South America. Since the Portuguese monarchy retaliated in 1759 by official suppression of the order in its realm, the order’s survival in Spanish lands remained an impediment for mending relations between the neighboring kingdoms. The third Family Pact of 1761 had begun a new set of diplomatic talks with Portuguese ministers who proposed two objectives: an ecclesiastical goal of the expulsion of the Jesuits and a political goal of a stronger Portuguese-Spanish alliance that would work to combat the English in the Atlantic and Mediterranean.48 With those developments in the background, along with pressures from a virtual army of Spaniards set against the Jesuits for various reasons, the monarchy had intentionally avoided spelling out what the “grave causes” were in the April proclamation in order to avoid their public refutation. Yet, in the 12 months preceding the pragmatic, it was quite clear to many that the Jesuits were under investigation as the prime suspects behind the riots that had occurred during Holy Week (Semana Santa)—March 23–26, 1766—in nearly 70 cities and towns of Spain, including Madrid, and had forced the king and his family to flee the capital for personal safety, bringing incredible embarrassment to Charles III and his ministers. In response, the government issued a royal decree on April 21, 1766, which set up mechanisms for investigating the riots, to be led by Campomanes, modeled after those of the Inquisition—they granted immunity and anonymity for witnesses. In this same royal decree, the government responded to the large amount of “clandestine literature ‘by another class’ around and capable of manipulating popular opinion and provoking riots,” prohibiting such

48 Enrique Giménez López, “La expulsión de los jesuitas como problema de estado,” Anales de la Real Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País (1997–1998): 249–264.


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literature as “verses and seditious and injurious papers to the public and particular person” of the king.49 But the literature continued to be circulated, and largely because of this, by September a Consejo Extraordinario (special council) was formed. At this moment “antiJesuitism went par for course with regalism.”50 Having filled clerical posts with various kinds of anti-Jesuits (men of Jansenist, Augustinian, Dominican leanings, or with other reasons to hate the Society), the regalist ministers sailed smoothly ahead with their plans. On January 29, 1767, the Consejo Extraordinario submitted its report to the king concluding that the Jesuits were anti-monarchical and their relaxed theology of probabilism was conducive to a moral and physical “tyrannicide” (tiranicidio), or regicide. The evidence collected placed the Jesuits in and around and before and after the riots so that they could no longer be explained by the spontaneity of the people of Madrid.51 An absolute monarch could not tolerate such a despotic body. And so, in April of 1767, Charles III used much of what was in the report to expel the Jesuits from Spain. The expulsion left a monarchy, as well as a clergy, seeking the territory which the Jesuits had occupied in education and pastoral work, and the way that territory was incorporated shaped the course of Catholic Enlightenment in Spain. The monarchy had achieved increased centralization over the Spanish church, assuming responsibility over Jesuit positions and wealth, and later determining how they would be delegated. To a certain extent then, “Enlightenment” within the Spanish church depended on the views of the state officials in Madrid, their desire for reform, and to what extent that reform would benefit the church and the state, respectively.52

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Egido, Las Causas “Gravísimas”, 29. Egido, Las Causas “Gravísimas”, 35. 51 While the testimonies do not clarify the supposed protagonism of the Jesuits in the riots, they do show, that since the fall of Rávago as the king’s confessor in the 1750s “the Society had radically changed its attitude in the short space of 10 years: from ultra-regalist Rávago, the posture becomes more genuinely and consistently ultramontanist. And on the other extreme, the rest of the clergy, because of the need to find anti-Jesuit testimony during the months of the investigation, appear as the closest ally to the reforming and ‘Jansenist’ team.” Egido, Las Causas “Gravísimas”, 91. 52 Antonio Domínguez Ortiz details Charles III’s policy of secularization for the ends of absolutism in Idem, Carlos III y la España de la Ilustración (Madrid: 1988). 50

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andrea j. smidt 5. Catholic Enlightenment and the Royal Church: The Influence of Gallicanism in Spain

The expulsion of the Jesuits and the resulting religious environment in Spain from 1767 onwards marked a key turn towards an even greater link between state policy and the directives of the Catholic Church in Spain. Whether they were truly “addicts” of Enlightened Despotism under Charles III or simply trying to succeed as best they could with the resources at their disposal, Spanish clergy increasingly accepted regalism as a tool in achieving Catholic reform in the later 18th century. Along with this trend came an importation of Gallicanism in the sense that Spanish government ministers and clerics borrowed the rhetoric and were encouraged by the progress of French Catholics who argued against direct Roman authority in the administrative affairs of the French church in the name of traditional liberties French kings and bishops had exercised in previous centuries. “A product in large measure of the French Jansenist controversy—and always adjacent to Jansenism,” this Gallican mode of Enlightenment spread into Catholic Europe, was celebrated in the Dutch Council of Utrecht in 1763, and as it spread it brought the same divisions it had created in France.53 Especially in matters of ecclesiology, it continued to fracture Catholic lights of reform, only to be halted by the French Revolution and the resulting work of Napoleon to produce a tidal wave of political and religious conservatism that would end religious reform in Spain. As the splintering of Catholic Enlightenment in the wake of Jesuit expulsion began, Spaniards soon realized that voicing too loudly any kind of anti-regalist sentiment regarding the state’s path for religious renewal would be met with both royal disfavor and public punishment. The first clear sign of this was the case of Isidro Carvajal y Lancáster (1713–1771), Bishop of Cuenca. Of the eight bishops of the Spanish hierarchy who voted against the expulsion of the Jesuits, all but Carvajal remained silent after the fact. Carvajal had written the king’s confessor Eleta to express his moral concerns shortly after the investigation directed at the Jesuits began in 1766. While he was careful to avoid blaming the king for any wrongdoing, he was harsher on

53 Dale K. Van Kley, “Civic Humanism in Clerical Garb: Gallican Memories of the Early Church and the Project of Primitivist Reform, 1719–1791,” Past and Present 200 (2008): 77–120.


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Eleta for not working to clarify the king’s perspective on the riots and on the Jesuits’ role in them.54 In the ensuing report the king required of him in response, Carvajal expressed support, or at least sympathy, for the Jesuits, and even petitioned for a greater use of censorship in existing periodicals and printed pamphlets that represented the Holy See of Rome and the Society of Jesus in a bad light. Campomanes and the Count of Floridablanca José Moñino (1728–1808), both energetic ministers of the Bourbon government, found that Carvajal’s report gave them a great occasion to publicly refute it as an example of fanaticism and superstition as well as to perpetuate the fear that such forces, although defeated in the expulsion, were not completely eliminated. Carvajal, an aged, devout, and reform-minded cleric, was publicly humiliated and removed from office, symbolically punished to set the tone for what was considered incorrect episcopal behavior under the Bourbon monarchy. Thus, it was clear that nothing but criticism of Jesuits would be tolerated in Spain.55 The forces of regalism were in full force against those of ultramontanism. Charles III would even proceed to put further pressure on Rome, seen in the conclave that elected Clement XIV as pope in 1769, and then over the next few years to secure the ultimate

54 Following earlier letters the bishop had written stating concern for the fallen, ruinous nature of Spain, this letter expressed the major arguments of the opposition at the time who felt that the Church was being persecuted and robbed of her wealth and traditional protection in Spain through some of the plans of regalists like Campomanes. While Carvajal’s report would not arrive in royal hands until after the expulsion of the Jesuits, he used the opportunity to put forward his own defense of Church organization and wealth that worked to disprove the arguments of regalist ministers such as Campomanes and directly reproached them for imposing obstacles in the field of episcopal liberty, most notably in the area of convening national and provincial councils. See Noel, “Opposition to Enlightened Reform in Spain: Campomanes and the Clergy, 1765–1775,” Societas. A Review of Social History 3 (1973): 21–43. Egido, “El regalismo y las relaciones iglesia-estado en el siglo XVIII” in Mestre (ed.), Historia de la Iglesia en España, vol. 4: La Iglesia en la España de los Siglos XVII & XVIII, 237–240. 55 Bishop Climent i Avinent of Barcelona wrote to the French Jansenist Clément of Auxerre that he would cease to write any more anti-Jesuit tracts since Spain was now overpopulated with them. Because expressing sympathy towards Jesuits was now known to be extremely dangerous (after the case of the Bishop of Cuenca), a multitude of clerics actively wrote and published against the Jesuits to prove their loyalty to “Spain.” Correspondence of the Abbé Clément, bishop of Versailles, (henceforth CC) and Josep Climent, bishop of Barcelona, manuscript 1289, Archives du Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice (henceforth, ASSP): Paris. Letter of Climent, 5 April 1768, fols. 11–12.

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dissolution of the entire Jesuit order in 1773.56 Establishing royal authority over the Spanish church was seen as instrumental in achieving the larger Bourbon initiatives of agricultural, industrial, and commercial development to improve Spain’s standing as a European power. The government of Charles III would not be satisfied with the successes against ultramontanism in the defeat of the Jesuits; instead it would continue to work towards a “royal church”57 through reforms in the later 1760s and 1770s. While embodying a Catholic Enlightenment of sorts, this importation of Gallican-style ecclesiology would work against all other notions of Catholic Enlightenment because of the relative lack of state toleration they would consequently receive. Even so, all of this worked towards a flourishing of Catholic reforms that promoted civic humanism within and through the Catholic Church. The demand for internal forms of religiosity, more Christocentric in nature, that would diminish the prevalence of external forms of piety and “superstition;” an emphasis on Christian morality mediated by increased pastoral visitations, teaching of the catechism, and missions; a personal knowledge of the Bible through increased use of Scripture in sermons and individual reading of Scripture; increased education of clergy and laity through the promotion of seminaries, libraries, and academies; de-emphasizing dogmatic Christianity while promoting more flexible applications of Church administration through episcopalism and conciliarism; oversight of diocesan clergy, especially benefice holders; and a smaller role for regular clergy within the ecclesiastical body and fewer exemptions within the diocese—all of these were common goals of candidates for the episcopacy and naturally also of enlightened bishops in the later 18th century.58 Regalist ministers in Madrid supported these goals to the extent that they allowed for greater royal control of church affairs, enacting reforms that promoted these ends. While such reforms might have been driven 56 Clement XIV would also be prevailed upon by Catholic states to abandon the practice of publishing the annual bull of In coena Domini in 1773—a practice that had been used to exert papal authority over temporal affairs by excommunicating princes and other political leaders. Rafael Olaechea, Las relaciones hispano-romanas en la segunda midtad del siglo XVIII. La Agencia de Preces, (Zaragoza, 1965), vol.1: 352ff. 57 The term has been used most notably by Callahan in Church, Politics, and Society in Spain 1750–1874 and by Noel in “Clerics and Crown.” Here, I use the term to emphasize the Gallican-nature by which it proceeded into the later 18th century. 58 Joan Bada Elias, “L’il·lustració a la Catalunya de la segona meitat del segle XVIII”, in Joaquim M. Puigvert (ed.), Bisbes, Il·lustració i jansenisme a la Catalunya del segle XVIII (Girona, Spain: 2000), 156–163.


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more by political and economic rather than religious motivations, overall they coincided with the aims of various Catholic reformers. In one area of coinciding visions of reform, the Spanish Inquisition’s power had effectively been checked by Charles III early in his reign, and by the 1770s the Holy Office was characterized by inconsistency and contradiction, especially when led by reform-minded clerics such as Felipe Bertrán (1703–1783), who was specifically appointed to create a kinder, gentler Inquisition.59 The “intimidated” Inquisition, although still able to pose a threat by its mere existence and then at times by acting against the enlightened ministers Pablo de Olavide (1776–1778) and Jovellanos (1796), was less zealous and consistent in its censorship of literature so that “after about 1770, Gallican, Jansenist, and radical regalist readings circulated readily.”60 Even in 1782, under Inquisitor General Bertrán, the Holy Office approved the reading of Scripture in the vernacular, fulfilling the century-long goal of students of Erasmus and others who believed in Catholic Enlightenment through the individual’s knowledge of Scripture. In such cases of coinciding objectives, our vision of what was Catholic Enlightenment in Spain is easily blurred. But the overarching objectives of enlightened ministers in Madrid were to grow a royal church. Only exalting bishops in relation to the usurpations of their authority from Rome, regalist ministers focused on the need for submission of church hierarchy. After accomplishing this goal, they did little to hide their ultimate objective of using the Spanish clergy as an instrument for Enlightened Despotism. And with royal power to select clergy under the Concordat of 1753 and the larger real patronato, the Spanish clergy under Charles III were effectively converted into spokesmen for the royal program of Enlightenment—not just within the church but also in larger cultural and political affairs promoted by the government. While in theory national and provincial councils as well as diocesan synods would have been a natural choice for bishops to work towards religious renovation under Charles III, “his reign constituted a desert” in the larger history of councils.61 In 1768, 59 Bertrán as bishop of Salamanca had been known for his efforts to purify the Catholic liturgy, his work against the devotion of the Sacred Heart, and even for founding a vocational school for goldsmiths. 60 Noel, “Clerics and Crown”, 143. 61 Egido, “El regalismo y las relaciones iglesia-estado en el siglo XVIII” in Mestre (ed.), Historia de la Iglesia en España, vol. 4: La Iglesia en la España de los Siglos XVII & XVIII, 202–203.

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Campomanes and the Council of Castile achieved effective control of such assemblies by publishing an edict which obligated all diocesan synods to submit their acts and proceedings first to the Council of Castile for approval. What occurred in practice was the elimination and modification of some acts before their publication to promote the government’s ends.62 Thus, piece by piece, all that existed outside of the strictly spiritual realm in the diocese was claimed under government jurisdiction by the forces of Enlightened Despotism. The reforms of regular clergy did much to further the goals of enlightened clerics and other promoters of Catholic Enlightenment since as a social group these clerics tended to be less educated and thus tolerated more religious superstition. But with the suppression of their exemptions under episcopal authority and the 1787 requirement that each religious order within Spain have their superior within the Spanish realm, the government developed regular clergy who were more subservient to state interests. In another area of religious reform, a royal cedula in 1768 ordered the erection and reform of diocesan seminaries. The end results were to bring such seminaries under direct episcopal control and exclusive leadership by secular clergy, the promotion of Augustinian and Thomistic doctrine, a prohibition of Jesuit theology, and the fulfilment of a Tridentine objective. Accordingly, eleven new seminaries were established under Charles III, the most noteworthy being that of Salamanca under Bishop Bertrán in 1779.63 The government of Charles III had effectively managed to significantly influence the means or forums of Enlightenment.64

62 A great example is found in the chapter of Jesús Menéndez Pelaez in Saugnieux (ed.), Foi et Lumières, 167–186, in which he contrasts the archival records of the synod of Pisador of 1769 in Oviedo with the royally approved acts of 1784, published in 1786. The author highlights one example of the clergy’s act to prohibit the use of holy days as market days in the manuscript. This is completely contradicted by the published acts which allow for the continued observance of markets on such holy days so as to prevent the vendors from losing a day’s work. 63 The curriculum he imposed there became the model for Spanish seminaries in the 19th century. Focusing on piety and promoting civic virtue, Bertrán’s seminary became the focus of Jovellanos’ praise and contributed towards the “splendid renovation” of the Spanish Church. See Francisco Martín Hernández, “La formación del clero en los siglos XVII y XVIII” in Mestre (ed.), Historia de la Iglesia en España, vol. 4: La Iglesia en la España de los Siglos XVII & XVIII, 523–582. 64 By taking initiative to direct the realm of teaching and seminary reform after 1767, the Bourbon government was able to shape the formation of the clergy and the laity with access to education, inclining them towards regalist ideology. Furthermore, the salon culture of the first half of the century was essentially transformed into the


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6. The Refracted Catholic Lights of Enlightenment So while a strong working relationship developed over the course of the 18th century between “clerics” and “crown” in the matters of reform, increasingly there was less room for reform motivated out of uniquely religious reasons that did not correspond directly with the aims of the state. The religious thought that inspired these marginal reforms corresponded with alternate strands of Catholic Enlightenment. The Catholic Enlightenment of the Bourbon state, although “Gallican” in inspiration and friendly to Jansenism, was ultimately separate from and subservient to an enlightened program of economic progress and luxury that better empowered Enlightened Despotism in the 18th century and that in theory would have been better accommodated by the Jesuitical side of Catholic Enlightenment with its optimism regarding human nature and disposition towards moral laxism. Yet, coherence in state policy was maintained between the enlightened strands of economic progress and Jansenist reform: the objectives of the former always trumped those of the latter. Overall, government policy regarding religious affairs, compounded with larger European developments, caused this particular state-sponsored strand of Catholic Enlightenment to alienate all others—such as proto-republican and ex-Jesuit ones—to the extent that it somehow was portrayed as embodying a more “Catholic” Enlightenment or a more “orthodox” vision for Catholic society. Yet this outcome was not immediately clear in the late 1760s and 1770s. Instead, it was during this period in which regalist reform initiatives were working towards a royal church and supporting a wide array of Catholic reformers, when those who previously had stood united with regalist ministers against the Jesuits became increasingly aware that, after the defeat of their common enemy, the state had less interest in supporting their other ideas of Catholic renewal that did not immediately satisfy political priorities. One particular example of a marginalized strand of Catholic Enlightenment is the case of Josep Climent i Avinent (1706–1781), Bishop of royal academies and economic societies that became popular venues for nobles and wealthy merchants by the 1760s and 1770s. In sum, the contradiction in our understanding of Enlightenment emerges here: In its actions to suppress all expressions of thought that conflicted with regalist ideology, whether they be doctoral dissertations at universities or books at diocesan seminaries, “Enlightened Despotism” under Charles III thus entailed a certain reduction in freedom of thought and intellectual discussion.

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Barcelona from 1766–1775. While in the end he was forced to resign his post, branded a “Catalan separatist” by the Council of Castile, this Jansenist-friendly bishop achieved relative success given Madrid’s impetus to create a royal church. His clashes with regalist ministers over reform objectives and episcopal jurisdiction demonstrate in a practical way the existence of and conflicts between refracted lights of Catholic Enlightenment in the later 18th century. His brand of Catholic Enlightenment opposed that sponsored by the Spanish monarchy, implicitly condemned the Catholic Church’s present hierarchy, and explicitly advocated popular Enlightenment and the creation of a more independent “public sphere” in Spain by means of increased literacy and education of the masses.65 The crux of the matter for Climent was that even though the representatives of Enlightened Despotism in Spain claimed to be the staunchest defenders of Catholicism and proponents of Catholic renewal, they could not exist on an equal playing field with advocates of the brand of Enlightened Catholicism who, like Climent and under the auspices of Tridentine reform, sought to return to the practices of the early Church and could not prioritize temporal political demands before the spiritual needs of the Church. Since the “Jansenism” of regalist ministers prioritized temporal political demands and mandated Catholic reform from the top down in the name of state, rather than ecclesiastical authority, Climent was too bold in his claims to episcopal authority, and his demission as bishop demonstrated the marginalization of this proto-Republican strand of Catholic Enlightenment in Spain.

65 See Francesc Tort i Mitjans, El Obispo de Barcelona Josep Climent I Avinent (1706–1781): Contribución a la Historia de la Teología Pastoral Tarraconense en el Siglo XVIII (Barcelona: 1978). See also Smidt, Fiestas and Fervor: Religious Life and Catholic Enlightenment in the Diocese of Barcelona, 1766–1775 (Ph.D. thesis, Ohio State University/Columbus, OH, 2005). In this dissertation, I examine how Climent’s case illustrates the effects that his particular brand of Catholic Enlightenment “unleashed” or unchecked had on the masses as well as the implications for the education of women and the publication of their ideas. (Climent published the Countess of Montijo’s Spanish translation of Nicolas de Tourneaux’s Las Instrucciones Christianas sobre el Sacramento del Matrimonio.) My primary claim is that a Catholic Enlightenment occurred in Barcelona, permeating to the lower levels of society, through Bishop Climent’s attempts at reforming popular religious practices by means of education, specifically through greater literacy and dissemination of literature. By means of an analysis that is both “top-down” and “bottom-up”, this study illustrates the phenomenon of Enlightenment as a societal and intellectual one while also providing a comparative perspective with which to contextualize other contemporary manifestations of enlightened or reform Catholicism.


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Similarly, the success of regalist reforms over religious affairs had made the kind of Catholic Enlightenment that had been promoted by Jesuits unable to recuperate in Spain by the 1770s. If the former allies of state ministers in the 1760s were now finding themselves effectively side-lined for initiating reform that did not sufficiently accommodate regalist demands, then how much more silent and alienated were those whose vision of Catholic renewal could still incorporate the work of the Jesuits in science and education (and who were all too familiar with the story of the Bishop of Cuenca). Through state-orchestrated seminary and university reform the state had successfully streamlined religious reform with its temporal needs. The adopted curricula was either Jansenist, Augustinian, or more open to both, shaping the minds of the next generation of clerics and ministers in a way that began to fuse Jansenism and regalism in a Gallican fashion. Thus, in the 1770s clerical and lay advocates of Catholic renewal in Spain were now aware that regalism had become the most powerful tool to employ in order to achieve desired reforms. 7. The Predominance of Spanish Jansenism and the Alienation of Other Catholic “Enlightenments” By the end of the 1780s, Spanish Jansenism—that unique conglomerate of Jansenist, Augustinian, episcopalist, and anti-Jesuit Spaniards—had become characterized by its fusion with regalist reform and likewise had become increasingly bolder in its initiatives, in the process estranging more of its sympathizers. A contributor to the “Gallicanization” of Catholic Enlightenment in Spain was the commonly held belief that the Jesuits and their proponents still posed a threat to the royal church and its Jansenist influence. After the dissolution of the order in 1773, a great falling out had occurred in Spain as it did in other parts of Catholic Europe between the once united Augustinian and Dominican camps, the latter aligning themselves with the ex-Jesuits and papal curia against the former in response to a growing dominance of Augustinian theology in Spanish curricula. This falling out, or as Appolis has called it “the fragmentation of the third party,” took away the middle ground that had once allowed firm footing for various strands of Catholic Enlightenment. But now that papal politics courted ex-Jesuits and their supporters under Pius VI, and Augustinians had responded by taking on a pro-Gallican ecclesiology and

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placing a stronger theological emphasis on grace, the political stakes had been raised and a theological and ecclesiological gulf had been introduced as pamphlets and periodicals began to employ stronger anti-Jesuit and ultramontanist overtones.66 Ex-Jesuits of Spain, now living mostly in Italy and still receiving state pensions, would remain silent for the time being just to maintain an income. Yet by the later 1790s, after the French Revolution had introduced further divisions in Europe and many French Jansenists had thrown in their lot with the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, these ex-Jesuits would retaliate by writing against the interests of the other side that they associated with theologically “heterodox” Jansenism. As ex-Jesuit writings were sometimes translated into Spanish and disseminated, they communicated that they were far from desisting in their cause and actually seemed to be gaining momentum. But before this happened, the fusion of Spanish Jansenism and regalist reform seemed to bring the project of Catholic renewal to new heights. In 1782 the reform-minded Felipe Bertrán as Inquisitor General approved the publication and reading of Scripture in the vernacular. While many in the political and ecclesiastical establishment had long desired this, the decision would still prove to be a controversial one. As the Augustinian camp came out in favor of the policy, others found that to advocate such a policy was to risk falling into Jansenism. Even though the full reaction to this religious turn in Spain would not come until the 1790s, the significance of it was to confirm the existence of two theological camps that remained resolutely divided from each other—one that advocated an “external, ceremonial, and formulaic religiosity preferring that the faithful not directly and personally know holy Scripture . . .” and the other that in contrast advocated an “internal and anti-ceremonial religiosity, desiring that the faithful enter into direct contact with the original sources of Christianity.”67 The 1786 Synod of Pistoia in Habsburg Tuscany would also have a profound impact in Spain. Convened by Bishop Scipione de Ricci, moderated by the theologian Pietro Tamburini, and facilitated by the

66 Appolis, Le “tiers parti” catholique, 369–512. This phenomenon occurs in other parts of Catholic Europe. Cf. Van Kley, “Catholic Conciliar Reform in an Age of AntiCatholic Revolution: France, Italy, and the Netherlands, 1758–1801,” in Idem (ed.), Religion and Politics, 74–80. 67 Mestre, “Religión y cultura en el siglo XVIII” in Idem (ed.), Historia de la Iglesia en España, vol. 4: La Iglesia en la España de los Siglos XVII & XVIII, 733.


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Grand Duke Leopold as the first in a series leading to a national council, this synod was decidedly Jansenist and “bore a frankly reformist and anti-curial stamp.”68 The first news of the synod reached Spain through the letters of ex-Jesuits living in Italy, but the fuller details of the proceedings were revealed in April of 1787 in the pro-Pistoia, proRicci accounts of the Mercurio Histórico y Político, the French-inspired gazette published in Madrid. With praises for Ricci’s efforts and pages containing large portions of his pastoral instructions, the Mercurio and its royal license to publish allowed for the ideas of Pistoia to spread throughout Spain and shape the development of Spanish Jansenism. While royal approval was never given to publish a Castilian translation of the Acts of Pistoia in Spain, its influence was so great—according to Appolis, it had more impact on Spanish Jansenism than the Civil Constitution of the Clergy—that by 1789 the Inquisition began prohibiting the work of Tamburini and opened up several delegations for cases surrounding the Jansenist Acts of Pistoia.69 After Pistoia, the fusion between Spanish Jansenism and regalist reform of the Church took on an even stronger Gallican flavor.70 While not all regalists were Jansenists, their goal was the establishment of a national church and the reduction of the Church to the spiritual arena so that it would look more like the early Church—poor with less emphasis on differences between clergy and laity. Possibly the best representative of this fusion between Spanish Jansenism and regalist reform would be Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos. Author of various plays and essays, most infamously the Informe sobre la Ley Agraria, Jovellanos backed Jansenist reform and supported a vision of the Church that was poorer in material possessions, especially farmland. His praise for the work of Felipe Bertrán in the new seminary of Salamanca was compounded with his later promotion of the ultraJansenist Antonio Tavira as bishop of Salamanca by the end of the century. In his brief tenure as Minister of Grace and Justice, Jovellanos entrusted the overhaul of the University of Salamanca to Tavira,

68 Van Kley, “Catholic Conciliar Reform in an Age of Anti-Catholic Revolution,” in Idem (ed.), Religion and Politics, 82. 69 Mestre, “Repercusión del sínodo de Pistoia en España,” In Claudio Lamioni (ed.), Il sinodo di Pistoia del 1786: Atti del Convegno internazionale per il secondo centenario, Pistoia-Prato, 25–27 settembre 1986 (Rome: 1991), 425–439. 70 “. . . Regalism combined with episcopalism and Jansenism. . . .” Emilio La Parra, “Regalisme i monarquia hispànica (1750–1808)” in Bisbes, Il·lustració i jansenisme a la Catalunya del segle XVIII, 145.

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“the herald of Spanish Jansenists” of his day and who as bishop of the Canary Islands in 1791 was accused of proclaiming the doctrines of Pistoia there. At one point Jovellanos would positively remark on the intellectual and theological environment in the historical center of Spanish learning, “[a]ll of the Salamancan youth is Port-Royalist, of the Pistoian variety.”71 Thus, by the time Charles IV became king in 1788, the forces of regalism and Spanish Jansenism appeared to have radically carried the Spanish Church to the threshold of true renovation, a luminous Catholic Enlightenment. Yet, as coming events would soon reveal, this “advancement” towards the past, a Spanish religiosity more reflective of the early Church, was underpinned by continued sponsorship from the system of Enlightened Despotism, a system in which the king had effectively supplanted Roman authority to become a quasi-pope in church administration. Since, by the early 1790s, that system had finally achieved a political strength similar to the Bourbon absolutism of Louis XIV, the Spanish church would soon see how the contingency of different European events would have an oscillating effect on its direction. With the tumultuous events of the French Revolution, response of certain European monarchies, and critical reaction of the papacy, the once silenced pro-Jesuit and ultramontanist contingent now found a new reactionary voice and gained supportors in fearful Catholic circles, leaving Spanish Jansenists in a precarious position, having to renew their fight to maintain dominance over their previously defeated rivals. Even though Charles IV maintained much of his father’s regalist stance, many of his ministers were newly installed, enough of a change of guard for some historians to note that Bourbon despotism ceased to be “enlightened” and remained simply despotic. But this trend was more related to government ministers receiving the news of Revolution from France and, seeking a way to keep it from spreading, taking pains to make censorship more rigid and publications more closely monitored—all in the name of regalism. (Some publications intentionally promoted regalism, such as the essay of Gregorio Mayans on the Concordat of 1753, published for the first time around 1789–90 since Manuel de Roda had earlier considered it too radical for publication.)

71 Words of Jovellanos as quoted in Mestre, “Religión y cultura en el siglo XVIII”, 718–723.


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Figures such as Jovellanos, who voiced disapproval of the revolutionary actions in France yet maintained firm belief in reformist ideals, would remain involved in politics for the time being, and publications such as the Mercurio histórico y político would continue to be critical of politics in other areas of Europe. Yet by 1793, government ministers were harnessing “regalism” instead to galvanize Spain in its opposition to the French in the name of king and religion rather than to pursue an organized program of reform—religious or otherwise. In this vacuity of reform, more voices began to criticize earlier Jansenist initiatives. A number of publications after 1790 contained harsh words on the reading of Scripture in the vernacular and the array of mistakes committed when doing so that bordered on heresy. A battle of words ensued, both in published works and unpublished letters, between those that favored the practice, namely those in the Augustinian theological camp, and those of the Jesuit camp that found such adamant defenders to be true Jansenists. Tensions rose as ex-Jesuits of Spain published accusations of an anti-Roman Jansenist conspiracy linked to reading Scripture in languages other than Latin and supplying the theological base that had sparked the French Revolution.72 Without the theological and ecclesiological middle ground of the mid-1700s, the fractured nature of Catholic Enlightenment in Spain became ever more sharply divided, and political events outside of Spain began to pull supporters away from the ruling camp of Spanish Jansenism in the 1790s. For the moment that dominant fabric of Spanish Jansenism would not be unraveled. It would indeed remain defiant in the face of the 1794 papal bull Auctorem Fidei. As the Terror raged in France, an emboldened Pius VI sought to exert his authority as the traditional defender of orthodoxy and issued a bull that condemned all that had been done at the Synod of Pistoia, including the publication of its acts, in an effort to essentially condemn all that was now perceived as Jansenism. “This bull was a new Unigenitus, condemning conciliarism, Erastianism (in the form of the Gallican articles of 1682), iconoclasm, vernacular worship, and all the writings commended by Ricci—including, of course, Quesnel’s Moral Reflexions. But unlike Unigenitus, it provoked 72

The exiled Spanish Jesuit Hervás y Panduro received government permission in 1789 to edit the multi-volume work Historia de la vida del hombre that came to public light by 1793 with an inflammatory prologue stating that Jansenists had adopted this anti-Latin maxim in their new anti-Catholic sect.

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no appeals. Almost all those who still believed in these things were now outside the Church.”73 Outside of France, if they were still within the Church fold, they were otherwise dedicating their efforts to the political and social priorities in their home country. Refusing to accept the renewed claims to papal authority, the government of Charles IV did not publish the bull in order to defend regalist claims to authority over the Spanish church. Thus, while falling short of appealing the bull, Spain and other Catholic countries of Europe refused to acknowledge it and thereby allowed the Augustinian-Jansenist camp to proceed unchecked in their own reform initiatives. On the other hand, many religious leaders in Spain had been enraged by the spread of Pistoia’s ideas in their own land and even the sight of some fellow clergy exhibiting tacit approval of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. According to leading Jansenists, it was the former regalist and reformminded Archbishop of Toledo Francisco Lorenzana who, along with the Spanish nuncio, had encouraged the pope to promulgate the bull.74 And even though the anti-Jansenist measure would not yet receive force of law in Spain, Lorenzana as the newly installed Inquisitor General would condemn the Acts of Pistoia. Now the ultramontanist camp, with the support of Lorenzana and the nuncio, would attempt to accept the bull as a doctrinal document from Rome in order to work against what they saw as a dangerous infection of anti-Catholicism in Spain. Showing the renewed strength of ultramontanism, the Inquisition began prohibiting works associated with Jansenism in order to send a clear message of Pistoian condemnation, including all manner of Spanish translations of the Bible. Perhaps the most audacious act directed against the poison that was Spanish Jansenism acted itself as an inflammatory venom. In 1798, the Castilian translation of ex-Jesuit Rocco Bonola’s La liga de la teología moderna con la filosofía en daño de la Iglesia de Jesucristo (The League of Modern Theology and Philosophy against the Church of Jesus Christ) directly branded Jansenists as making common cause with the Republic of Letters to undermine the Catholic Church, and one expression of this had been the Synod of Pistoia. The Jansenist camp quickly responded with the writing of an Augustinian friar who satirized La liga in book form, maintaining that 73

Doyle, Jansenism, 85. As Archbishop of Toledo, the ultra-orthodox Francisco Lorenzana was known for his reforms to purify preaching in the archdiocese of its difficult style and his social projects which included an attempted revival of the silk industry. 74


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“Jansenism” as a heresy was a ghost created by Jesuits to work against the very orthodox practice of advocating the Gospel’s moral rigor. While Spanish Jansenists still enjoyed state support, the Secretary of State Mariano Luis de Urquijo (1768–1817) promptly followed with a prohibition of both works that had enflamed the situation. Yet the matter, with the introduction of Roman curia meddling in Spanish affairs, had alerted Spanish Jansenists to the growing strength of the Jesuit camp. And government ministers, most notably Manuel de Godoy (1767–1851) and Urquijo, began to see episcopalism as a political necessity—that is, the restoration of power to bishops and the reduction of the bishop of Rome to a ceremonial leader or figurehead of the Church. As earlier solicited by Floridablanca, the Spanish government began to call for the return of the original rights of bishops diminished by the papacy through the Roman curia. Some ministers advocated direct action by the monarch against Rome that would gain him the confidence of Spanish bishops, while others pursued a more moderate course relying on diplomacy in Rome to work towards a bull that would accomplish such a goal. But before either of these paths were followed, the death of Pius VI introduced a precarious situation. With Spain’s exclusion from the Roman conclave and overall weakened relations with Rome, the matter of issuing marriage dispensations had loomed unresolved for some time. Thus, in September of 1799 during the papal vacancy, Charles IV, by way of Urquijo, made the bold move of decreeing that, until a new pope was announced, all bishops and archbishops could enjoy full faculty of authority, “conforming to the early discipline of the Church, for marriage dispensations and other matters that pertain to them.”75 While the actual effects of the decree at the diocesan and even parish level have received little attention from historians, most have noted the larger consequences it had for Spain. It allowed for greater royal access to Church wealth which would come in handy later to resolve the state’s financial problems. From a diplomatic perspective, it worked against the Spanish nuncio to convey that the jurisdictional powers of the episcopacy were considered ordained to bishops by virtue of their office, not delegated down from Rome via the nuncio. And finally, from the perspective of

75 Decree of Urquijo as quoted in Mestre, “La ripercusíon del sínodo de Pistoya en España”, 434–435.

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religious discipline, the decree was a clear statement in support of the discipline of the early Church, making it the “Magna Carta” of administrative Spanish Jansenism.76 It seemed the predominance of Spanish Jansenism in royal policy would continue indefinitely, having weathered the 1790s more or less unharmed. In the eyes of the ultramontanist, anti-Jansenist contingent in Spain, the decree of Urquijo had created Jansenists everywhere out of bishops, professors, lesser clergy, regulars and seculars. As this proliferation of Jansenists, virtually coming out of the woodwork from every which way, aroused the concern of many who had formerly been supportive of or at least sympathic to the regalist policies in the Church, at this point even the Council of Castile in league with an assembly of Madrid priests succeeded in prohibiting Urquijo from printing some translations of classic regalist works “because they diminished papal authority.”77 Thus, by the time of the election of Pope Pius VII in March of 1800, regalist policy in religious matters had made an abrupt turn, and many former proponents of this Gallicanized version of episcopalism now saw the need to soften their stances. Urquijo sought to revoke his earlier decree and was soon relieved of his duties after the pope had demonstrated his support for those who had dared to attack the Jansenists and voiced his lament to the Spanish king for the ministers who led their bishops down a path which had harmed the See of Rome. Charles IV, by means of his prime minister Godoy, finally accepted the bull Auctorem Fidei in Spain out of the same regalist motivations that had caused him to reject it some years earlier. While some Spanish Jansenists such as the exiled Jovellanos would hold out for a resurgence in political power of their cause to even the score against the ultramontanist, Jesuit camp, the subsequent concordat between the papacy and Napoleon in 1801 and the Frenchman’s ensuing military activity left Spanish Jansenism handicapped on its road to recovery. In the end, the events of the late 1790s and early 1800s show the problems inherent in depending so greatly on regalism to realize Catholic Enlightenment (i.e., a Catholic Enlightenment of either the Gallican or Jesuit variety). As political tides turned and temporal needs

76 Olaechea, Las relaciones hispano-romanas; Mestre, “La ripercusíon del sínodo de Pistoya en España”, 435. 77 Mestre, “Religión y cultura en el siglo XVIII,” 739–743.


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continued to receive priority over the spiritual needs of the Church, the theological and ecclesiological dividing lines widened to the point of collapse for Spain’s Catholic Enlightenment. The resulting legacy for Spain’s Catholic Enlightenment left the Jesuit proponents on the side of the rehabilitation of the will and self-interest and the Jansenist proponents on the other of the reformational rehabilitation of secular government and an anti-clerical campaign against the regular clergy and papal curia.78 By 1800 the pursuit of those two paths to Catholic Enlightenment had ceased to be followed by many and were officially halted at the state level; still, proponents of reform would strive to effect change where they could. Tavira, Jovellanos, the Countess of Montijo, and Felix Amat (1750–1824, another disciple of Bishop Climent and confessor to the king in 1803) all remained active and were somewhat supported by the state in trying to promote what they saw as the enlightened quest for religious renewal. 8. Conclusion So when did the various lights of Catholic Enlightenment fade away in Spain? Some argue that the cause of Enlightenment continued well into the 19th century in the deliberations and initiatives of the Cortes of Cadiz by 1812. Others maintain that the papal concordat of 1801, which granted the pope more concessions over the French church than he had ever possessed in Old Regime France, undid the work of the French Jansenists for Gallican liberties and was a death sentence for Jansenists everywhere. While in Spain the 1801 acceptance of Auctorem Fidei in the long run spelled out to the Spanish Jansenist camp that regalism would no longer be following the same path of innovation in religious matters—except for those strictly related to appropriating Church wealth and maintaining political control over clergy—the continued toleration that they received in and outside of the court of Charles IV until the Napoleonic invasion of 1808 gave the surviving Jansenist remnant some hope of realizing their ideals, even if by 1808 it was clear that regalism acted primarily in the defensive mode to protect the monarchy’s absolutism and traditional aristocratic privileges rather than work for innovation in the Church. 78 Van Kley provides a similar description for the collapse of Catholic Enlightenment in Italy. See Van Kley, “Catholic Conciliar Reform,” 79.

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With the absence of a Bourbon monarch during the French occupation of Spain, the old program of Spanish Jansenism continued on in the spirit of innovation found in the Cortes of Cadiz as early as 1810 and until 1814. While the same divisions existed between ultramontanists (now also affiliated with regalists) and their newly named opposition of “liberals,” most political groups at the Cortes found the convening of a national church council a necessity given the unique situation. Even though the council would never come to pass, the agenda proposed in the Cortes of Cadiz illuminated the lasting influence of Spanish Jansenism.79 Even so the innovative Cortes would stop far short of suggesting a separation of the Church from the state as it tried to negotiate a new role for priests and impose a reduction in Church privileges and wealth that subjected it to greater state control. By 1814, any dreams of religious renovation either by means of the state, Church, or populace that proponents of Catholic Enlightenment had had in the 18th century would fade by the time the Spanish monarchy was restored in the person of Ferdinand VII who used the position of the Throne to re-appropriate the Altar—this time for the purposes of political conservatism. In sum, the cause of “lights for the faith” in Spain had encompassed a wide range of initiatives over the century: the embrace of medicine and modern science; the promotion of internal and individual forms of piety, including the reading of Scripture in the vernacular; the promotion of various schools of education for laity and clergy; episcopal authority; the reform of seminaries and universities; civic virtue through charity; and church-sponsored programs of free elementary education and vocational training. Many of those initiatives became more controversial within Catholic circles as the political interplay with the state polarized Catholic Enlightenment. The incorporation of strands of authentic Catholic renewal at the state level brought both the greatest triumphs and the greatest failures of the cause of Catholic lights in Spain. As studies have exposed the intersection of regalist policy and Catholic Enlightenment, much room exists to uncover the enlightened efforts of Spaniards who, without the direct endorsement of the powers that be, campaigned out of genuinely religious motiva-

79 For an elaboration see both the work of Mestre, “La ripercusión del sínodo de Pistoya en España,” 435–439 and La Parra, El primer liberalismo y la Iglesia (Alicante: 1985).


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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Jeffrey D. Burson is assistant professor of history at Macon State College, and a Vice President of the Southwestern Historical Association. Professor Burson is the author of The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment: Jean-Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France (2010), and has published several articles for Church History, Intellectual History Review, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, and French History. Richard Butterwick is senior lecturer in Polish history at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His research focuses on the Enlightenment and its critics, Catholicism and the monarchy in the later 18th-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Among his publications are Poland’s Last King and English Culture: Stanisław August Poniatowski, 1732–1798 (1998), and (edited with Simon Davies and Gabriel Sanchez Espinosa), Peripheries of the Enlightenment (2008). He is now completing a monograph on the Polish Revolution and the Catholic Church, 1788–1792. Frans Ciappara is senior lecturer at the University of Malta. He specializes in the late 18th century, and his recent publications include Society and the Inquisition in Malta (2001) and Enlightenment and Reform in Malta 1740–1798 (2006). Harm Klueting is a Catholic theologian and historian and Professor of Modern History and of Historical Theology. He teaches history and Church history at the Universities of Cologne (Germany) and Fribourg (Switzerland). He was Visiting Professor in Britain (Leicester), the United States (Emory University, Atlanta) and Switzerland (Zurich) and he held a chair of Church History in Romania. He specializes in Early Modern European History and in 15th to 18th-century Historical Theology. His most recent work is a book on European history and Church history from the 15th to the 17th centuries, Das Konfessionelle Zeitalter. Europa zwischen Mittelalter und Moderne. Kirchengeschichte und Allgemeine Geschichte, 2 vols. (2007–2009).

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notes on contributors

Ulrich L. Lehner is assistant professor of historical theology and religious history at Marquette University. Lehner’s research focuses on the history of Christianity between the 17th and early 19th century. Among his numerous publications are several editions of early modern religious thinkers, including Beda Mayr-Vertheidigung der katholischen Religion (2009), and two monographs, Kants Vorsehungskonzept (2007) and Enlightened Monks. The Benedictines of Southern and Middle Germany 1740–1803 (2010). Michael Printy is a visiting scholar in history at Wesleyan University. He specializes in 18th-century European intellectual and religious history. He is the author of Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism (2009). His essays have appeared in German History and The Catholic Historical Review. He is currently working on a study of the Protestant Enlightenment in Germany. Mario Rosa has been professor of Modern History in the universities of Lecce, Bari, Pisa, Rome “La Sapienza,” and in the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, of which he was Assistant Director from 1994 to 1998. He has been a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei since 2006 and is editor of the Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa. Moreover, he is the author of many articles that have appeared in important Italian and international journals and has devoted most of his time to 18th-century Italian religious history. Among his published works are: Riformatori e ribelli nel ’700 religioso italiano (1969), Politica e religione nel ’700 europeo (1974), a collection of essays from various authors, Cattolicesimo e lumi nel Settecento italiano (1981), and Settecento religioso. Politica della Ragione e religione del cuore (1999). Evergton Sales Souza, associate professor in the History Department of the Federal University of Bahia, is the author of Jansénisme et reforme de l’Église dans l’Empire portugais (1640–1790) (2004) and, with Lígia Bellini and Gabriela R. Sampaio, compiled Formas de crer. Ensaios de história religiosa do mundo luso-afro-brasileiro (sécs. XIV–XXI) (2006). Andrea J. Smidt is an Assistant Professor of History at Geneva College. She specializes in early modern religious and social history, particularly that of 18th-century Spain, and is currently working on a book manuscript on the intersection of religion and Enlightenment in 18th century Barcelona.

INDEX Acton, John 288 Agius, Don Francesco 261 Agreda, Maria de 177, 225 Albertan-Coppola, Sylviane 12 Alberti, Andrea 281 Albertrandi, Jan 330 Albrecht, Wolfgang 12 n. 46 Alembert, Jean le Rond d’ 11, 95–96, 107, 229 Alexander I, emperor of Russia 310, 348–349 Alexandre, Noel 360, 362, 383 Almeida, Tomas de, Archbishop of Lisbon 365 Almici, Giambattista 233 Alpheran, de Bussan 255, 257 Alpruni, Francesco 245 Álvares, Manuel 332, 368, 371 Amaduzzi, Giovanni Cristofano 234, 238–240, 244 Amat, Felix 447 Amidei, Cosimo 261 Amort, Eusebius 151, 176–178, 184, 187 Anunciação, Miguel da, Bishop of Coimbra 366–367, 385–386, 388, 390, 394–395, 397 Antoine, Gabriel 267 Aquinas, Thomas 80, 267, 429 Archetti, Giovanni 329, 336 Aristotle 80, 417 Arnauld, Antoine 22, 68, 385, 395 Arnauld, Jacqueline 68 Aschenbrenner, Beda 172, 199 Augustine, St. 253, 267, 318, 375–376, 429 Augustus II, elector of Saxony and king of Poland 311 Augustus III, elector of Saxony and king of Poland 311 Azzopardi Castelletti 269 Azzopardi, Francesco 256 Barbeyrac, Jean 233 Bardou, Jean 112 Barocchi, Paola 231 n. 28 Barruel, Augustin 41 n. 182 Bartenstein, Johann Christoph

131

Barthel, Johann Kaspar 183–184 Baston, abbé Guillaume André René 82, 102 Batllori, Miquel 216 Bayle, Pierre 64, 78, 94, 114, 252–253 Bazzoli, Maurizio 233 n. 31 Beales, Derek 21, 251 Beaumont, Christophe de, Archbishop of Paris 74, 86, 93, 98–100, 103, 106, 108–109 Becagli, Vieri 241 n. 43 Beccaria, Cesare 232, 234, 239 Bellarmine, Robert 19 n. 81, 257 Bellegarde, Dupac de 384 n. 61, 389 n. 73 Bendel, Rainer 28 n. 119 Benedict XIII (Pietro Francesco Orsini), pope 19, 136, 226 Benedict XIV (Prospero Lambertini), pope 19, 23, 25, 36, 95, 132, 142, 172, 177–178, 183, 220–222, 224–229, 256, 261, 313, 363, 366–367, 425 Bergier, Nicholas Sylvestre 109–110 Berruyer, Isaac-Joseph 33 n. 150 Berti, Lorenzo 18 n. 77 Bertieri, Giuseppe 137–138, 151 Bertrán, Felipe 435–436, 440–441 Bérulle, Pierre de 20, 24 n. 105 Bianchi, Isidoro 15 n. 66, 234, 237–238, 244 Blarer, Melchior 135, 137–138 Blau, Felix Anton 151, 196, 198 Bohomolec, Jan 323 Bolgiani, Franco 216 n. 3 Bolingbroke, Henry St John, Viscount 338 Bolzano, Bernard 15 n. 61 Bonaparte, Napoleon 206, 251, 306, 348–349, 432, 446 Boncompagni, Ignazio 285 Borg, Don Felice, 272 Born, Ignaz von 156 Borromeo, Charles, saint 25, 394 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne 92, 383 Boulogne, abbé Étienne Antoine 213 Bragança, Gaspar de, Archbishop of Braga 370, 377, 389–391 Branicki, Franciszek Ksawery 344

456

index

Braubach, Max 5 Bretschneider, Gottfried Heinrich von 137 Brück, Heinrich 4 Buffier, Claude G. 65, 79–80, 84, 86, 109, 111 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de 82, 90, 96 Buonafede, Appiano 233 Burgio, Francesco 220 Burlini Calapaj, Anna 222 n. 13 Butterwick, Richard 350 Callahan, William J. 404 n. 3 Calvin, John 261, 382 Campomanes, Pedro Rodríguez de 428–430, 433, 436 Canisius, Petrus 134 Capecelatro, Giuseppe 236 Cappellari, Mauro (Pope Gregory XVI) 185–186 Caracciolo, Domenico 263 Caramuel y Lobkowitz, Juan 419 Carbone, Giovanni Battista 367 Cardoso, Isaac (a.k.a. Fernando) 419 Carvajal y Lancáster, Isidro 432–433 Carvajal y Lancáster, José 424, 426 Carvalho e Melo, Sebastião José de see Pombal, Marquis de Castel, Louis-Bertrand 89 Castro, Gabriel Pereira de 378 Caterina de’ Ricci, saint 225 Catherine II the Great, empress of Russia (1729–96) 299, 312, 328, 338, 346 Cazzaniga, Gian Mario 228 n. 24 Cerutti, Giacinto 236–237 Chadwick, Owen 21 Charles II, king of Spain 414 Charles III, king of Spain 403–404, 406, 412 n. 22, 413, 414 n. 26, 426– 431, 432–436, 437 n. 64 Charles IV, king of Spain 412–413, 442, 444–447 Charles V, emperor 251, 261 Charles VI, emperor 131, 140, 142 Charles-Gaspard Vintimille du Luc, Archbishop of Paris 86 Châtelet, Gabrielle Émilie, marquise du 88 Choiseul, Étienne François, duc de 106 Chróścikowski, Samuel 314 Clarke, Samuel 89

Clement XI, pope (Giovanni Francesco Albani) 69, 136, 226, 376, 382 Clement XII, pope (Lorenzo Corsini) 41, 132, 136, 228 Clement XIII, pope (Carlo Rezzonico) 142, 225, 229, 232, 238, 260, 279, 335, 388, 428 Clement XIV, pope (Lorenzo Ganganelli) 138, 144, 238, 261, 284, 314, 327, 429, 433, 434 n. 56 Climent i Avinent, Josep 404 n. 4, 433 n. 55, 437–438, 447 Coccejus, Samuel 263 Cochrane, Eric William 232 n. 29 Codignola, Ernesto 215 Colbert, Charles-Joachim, bishop of Montpellier 383 Colloredo, Hieronymus 145 Concina, Daniello 267 Condillac, abbé Étienne Bonnot de 82, 86, 105, 262 Consalvi, Ercole 206 Copernicus, Nicolaus 314, 324 Cottret, Bernard 74 n. 26, 79 n. 37, 237 n. 37 Cottret, Monique 21 n. 90, 111 n. 153 Cunha, D. Nuno da [de Ataíde e Melo] 365, 367, 386 Cunha, João Cosme da 383, 384, 390 Czartoryski, Adam Jerzy 348 n. 172 D’Alembert see Alembert Dalberg, Karl Theodor von 206 Danzer, Jakob 151 Darnton, Robert 107 De Haen, Anton 134, 137 De Luca see Luca De Terme, Johann Baptist 138 Debiel, Ludwig 135–136 Del Negro, Piero 241 n. 42 Del Rio, Martinho 379 Delpiano, Patrizia 224 n. 17 Dereser, Johann Anton 151 Descartes, René 29–30, 64–65, 76–80, 314, 368, 415–417, 419 Desgabets, Robert 29 Desing, Anselm 176, 179–180 Diderot, Denis 82, 89–90, 95–97, 104–105, 110, 112, 156, 229 Diodati, Ottaviano 229 Dohm, Christian Wilhelm 199 Döllinger, Ignaz von 207 Domfort, Michael 153 Dorsch, Anton 198

index Du Pin, Louis-Ellies 362 Duguet, Jean-Jacques 385 Dülmen, Richard van 32, 176 n. 23 Dupre, Louis 25 n. 106 Durini, Mgr. Angelo Maria 269 Encarnação, Fr. Gaspar da (Gaspar Moscoso e Silva) 365 Ensenada, Zenón de Somodevilla y Bengoechea 426 Erasmus of Rotterdam 219, 420, 435 Erthal, Friedrich Karl von 137, 169 Escobar y Mendoza, Antonio 373 Espen, Zeger Bernhard van 129, 154, 158, 159, 182–184, 260, 285, 360, 362, 383, 385, 409 n. 17 Ess, Leander van 34 n. 154 Eugène, prince of Savoy 131–132, 158 Euler, Leonhard 244 Everdell, William 111, 113–115 Eybel, Josef Valentin 156 Fabiani, Ignaz von 153 Fantappiè, Carlo 76 n. 29 Fast, Patricius 135 Febronius, Justinius (see Hontheim, Johann Nikolaus von) Feder, Johann Michael 35 n. 157 Feijoo y Montenegro, Benito Jerónimo 30, 403, 416–421 Felbiger, Johann Ignaz 141, 198 Ferdinand VI, king of Spain 420, 424–426 Ferrari, Stefano 233 n. 31 Ferrer Benimeli, José Antonio 41 n. 182 Ferrone, Vincenzo 215, 216 n. 3 Fessler, Ignaz Aurelius 156 Figueiredo, Antonio Pereira de 368, 373–378, 381, 383–384, 387–388, 390, 395, 397 Filangieri, Gaetano 234, 235–236 Filangieri, Serafino 255 Filippi, Paola Maria 233 n. 31 Firmian, Karl Joseph von 137, 142 Firmian, Leopold Anton Eleutherius 133 Firmian, Leopold Ernst 133 Firmian, Vigilius Maria 133, 137 Fleury, André-Hercule, Cardinal de 72, 74, 81, 85–86, 94 Fleury, Claude 362 Floridablanca, José Moñino y Redondo 433 Fontana, Gregorio 244–245

457

Formosa, Don Tommaso Cirillo 271 Francisco de Lemos Faria Pereira Coutinho 367, 389 Franckenberg, Johann Heinrich Ferdinand 159 Franklin, Benjamin 262, 319 Franz, Joseph 136 Frederick II, king of Prussia (Frederick the Great) 264, 327 Frederick William II, king of Prussia 341 Frimmel, Johannes 41 n. 182 Fubini, Mario 215 n. 3 Gaillande, Jean-Noël 85–86, 97 Galasso, Giuseppe 223 n. 17 Galiani, Celestino 29, 222–224, 229, 232–233, 245 Gallarati Scotti, Gio. Filippo 264, 267, 286–287 Gallo, Daniela 231 n. 28 Ganganelli, Lorenzo, see Clement XIV pope Garampi, Giuseppe 137, 300 Garms-Cornides, Elisabeth 216 n. 7 Gassendi, Pierre 29, 222, 368, 417, 419 Gazzaniga, Pietro Maria 137–138, 151 Gebler, Tobias Philipp von 137 Geissau, Anton Ferdinand von 156 Gengell, Jerzy 314 Genovesi, Antonio 223–224, 229, 232–233, 245, 264, 267 Gerbert, Martin 187, 201–202 Gervasio, Agostino 137, 151 Giftschütz, Franz 197 Giovanetti, Andrea 239 Giudici, Gaetano 245 Giuli, Egidio 136 Giuseppe da Copertino, saint 225 Gmeiner, Franz Xaver 156 Godeau, Antoine 375 Godoy, Manuel de 445–446 Goldenbaum, Ursula 13 n. 54 Gondola, Joseph 138 Gourcy, abbé François Antoine Étienne de 112 Grabowski, Stanisław 349 Granatense, Francisco Suarez 373 Gravina, Gianvicenzo 29, 233 Grech, Fabrizio 263 Grégoire, abbé Henri 75, 115, 206 Grell, Ole Peter 25 n. 108 Gres-Gayer, Jacques 63 n. 1, 71 Grima, Michel’Angelo 262

458

index

Griselini, Francesco 235 Groethuysen, Bernhard 24 n. 103 Grotius, Hugo 36–37, 86–87, 179 Guasti, Niccolò 224 n. 17 Haas, Hanns 217 n. 7 Habermas, Rebekka 17 n. 73 Haefs, Wilhelm 8 n. 28 Hahn, Roger 40 n. 179 Hallweil, Ferdinand 133, 134, 137 Hammermayer, Ludwig 5 n. 19 Hammerstein, Notker 9 n. 30 Hardouin, Jean 33 n. 150 Haugwitz, Friedrich Wilhelm 140, 142 Hay, Leopold 38 n. 170 Hazard, Paul 76 n. 31 Heinke, Franz Joseph von 156 Hellyer, Marcus 18 n. 78 Helvétius, Claude Adrien 102 Henry VIII, king of England 273, 415 Herberstein, Karl Johann 133 Hermes, Georg 207 n. 113 Hersche, Peter 6, 21, 132–133, 138, 157, 167, 171–172, 175, 194 n. 70 Hesse, Carla 48 n. 204 Heynes, Renée 227 n. 23 Higgs, David 43 n. 190 Hinske, Norbert 10 n. 36 Hobbes, Thomas 252, 263 Hofbauer, Clemens Maria 157 Hoffmann, Franz 153 Holbach, Baron d’ 11, 109–110, 112, 232 Holzem, Andreas 4 n. 12 Hontheim, Johann Nikolaus [see also Febronius] 36, 136, 181, 185, 260 Hooke, Luke Joseph 16 n. 67, 84 Houtteville, abbé Claude-François de 86, 262 Hunter, Ian 169–170 Incontri, Francesco Gaetano 230, 242 Innocent XI, pope (Benedetto Odescalchi) 19 n. 80, 128, 226 Ippoliti, Giuseppe 234–236 Isenbiehl, Johann Lorenz 150 Israel, Jonathan 1, 11, 76 Jansen, Cornelius, Bishop of Ypres 68–70, 129, 253, 382 Jaroszewicz, Florian 324 Jesus 17, 45, 87, 96, 143, 151, 197, 321, 324

Jezierski, Franciszek Salezy 332–333 João IV, king of Portugal 370 João V, king of Portugal 359, 365, 367 John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła), pope 305 José I, king of Portugal 359 Joseph I, emperor 131 Joseph II, emperor 28, 127, 138–141, 144–148, 150, 155, 157, 159, 166, 201, 215, 242, 244, 285, 320, 330, 342, 344 Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de 413, 435, 436 n. 63, 441–443, 446–447 Kamieński, Adolf 331 Kampmiller, Ignaz 138 Kant, Immanuel 9, 13–14, 153, 170, 195, 207 n. 113 Karpiński, Franciszek 323 Karpowicz, Michał 329 Kaunitz-Rietberg, Wenzel Anton 135, 141-146, 263, 273 Keller, Jacob 373 Kitowicz, Jędrzej 317 Klueting, Harm 6 Klüpfel, Engelbert 151–152 Kolakowski, Leszek 245 n. 46 Kołłątaj, Hugo 308, 314, 322, 329, 342, 344, 346, 348 Konarski, Stanisław 31 n. 141, 308, 313 Kopczyński, Onufry 332 Kościuszko, Tadeusz 310, 347 Koselleck, Reinhard 196 Kossakowski, Józef Kazimierz 319 Krasicki, Ignacy 312–313, 319, 324, 341 La Chalotais, Louis-René 262 La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de 232 Labini, Vincenzo 254 Lambert, Mme de 77 Lambertini, Prospero (see Benedict XIV, pope) Lami, Giovanni 230 Lamy, Bernard 34 Lancelot, Claude 368 Lanzi, Luigi 241 Larraga, Francisco de 373 Latrelle, André 111 Lauber, Joseph 153 Le Large de Lignac 114 Le Paige, Adrien 100 Le Rouge, Antoine 84–85, 96

index Le Taste, Bernard 96 Leclerc, Jean 219 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 23, 30, 170 Leopold I, emperor 128 Leopold II, emperor 157 Leopold Peter, Grand Duke of Tuscany 242–244, 441 Lessing, Gotthold Emanuel 15 n. 64, 169 Lessius, Leonard 373 Letourneux, Nicolas 131 Liguori, Alphonsus 178 Litta, Lorenzo 347 Locke, John 3, 11, 29, 30, 64–65, 71, 76, 79–80, 85–87, 90–92, 96, 97 n. 93, 99, 102, 104, 110, 112, 114, 222–223, 313, 410, 411 n. 21 Loménie de Brienne, Étienne Charles 92 Lorenzana, Francisco Antonio, Archbishop of Toledo 444 Loubens de Verdalle, Hugues 273 Louis XIV, king of France 67–70, 76, 158, 226, 442 Louis XV, king of France 23, 28, 67, 72, 77, 88, 93, 95, 100–101, 106–107, 259 Louis XVI, king of France 113 Luby, Anton 153 Luca, Luca Nicola de 235–236 Lucchesini, Girolamo 341 Łuskina, Stefan 330, 333 Luther, Martin 16 n. 71, 38, 168, 261, 382 Mabillon, Jean 32–34, 37 Macé, Laurence 95 n. 87, 228 n. 24 Machajewski, Franciszek 319 Mahomet [Mohammed] 228, 324 Maire, Catherine 131 n. 13, 228–229, 383 Mairie, Catherine 70, 75 n. 29 Małachowski, Stanisław 343–344 Malarbì, Domenico 266 Malebranche, Nicholas 29, 31 n. 141, 64–65, 79–80, 87, 90, 97 n. 93, 112, 114 Malesherbes 103 Malvin de Montazet, Bishop of Lyon 110 Mancinforte, Gio. Ottavio 262, 265, 276, 280–281

459

Mandeville, Bernard 95 Mansi, Giovanni Domenico 229 Manzoni, Alessandro 245 Maria d’Agreda see Agreda, Maria de Maria I, queen of Portugal 389 Maria Theresa, queen of Bohemia and Hungary, archduchess of Austria 127, 131–132, 134–135, 137–138, 140–141, 144, 147, 149, 194 n. 70, 215, 244, 260 Martínez, Martín 419 Massalski, Ignacy 316, 320, 328–329, 334, 347 Masseau, Didier 107–108, 111 Maupeou, Rene 112 Mayans y Siscar, Gregorio 420–421, 427, 442 Mayer, Georg 135 Mayne, Fr. José 379 Mazarin, Jules, Cardinal 68–69, 94 McMahon, Darrin 10 n. 39, 63 n. 1, 108 Merkle, Sebastian 3–5, 8, 178 n. 30, 208, 215–216 Mesenguy, abbé Françios-Philippe 428 Mestre, Antonio 216 Michelini Rotondò Miriam 231 n. 28 Mickiewicz, Adam 306 Mifsud, Don Ignazio Saverio 261 Migazzi, Christoph Anton 134–136, 138, 141, 150 Mignon, Etienne 111 Miller, Samuel J. 36, 216, 396 Mirabeau, Victor Riqueti de 234 Mirepoix, Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Bishop of 74, 93, 107 Molina, Luis de 18, 64, 70, 73, 84, 106, 134, 373, 427-428 Monsagrati, Giuseppe 239 n. 38 Montelatici, Ubaldo 232 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat Baron de 36, 75, 89, 91, 94–95, 228, 231, 273, 338, 348 Montijo, María Francisca de Salas Portocarrero, Countess of 438 n. 65, 447 Morais, Dionísio Bernardes de 367 Morellet, André 65, 92 Moser, Friedrich Carl von 203 Moser, Johann Jacob 193 Moses 87, 179, 324 Mozzarelli, Cesare 222 n. 13 Müller, Ignaz 134, 137–138

460

index

Muratori, Lodovico Antonio 23, 28, 129, 218, 255, 318, 366 Muscat, Giovanni Nicolò 263 Napoleon I, emperor see Bonaparte Naruszewicz, Adam 330 Neller, Georg Christoph 183–184 Neny, Corneille de 137 Neny, Patrice-François de 159 Neupauer, Franz Xaver 156 Neveu, Bruno 226 n. 22, 361 n. 7 Newton, Isaac 3, 18 n. 78, 29–30, 64–65, 71, 76, 88–90, 92, 96, 97 n. 93, 112, 114, 222–223, 239, 266, 368, 416–417 Nicolai, Friedrich 8, 200 Nicole, Pierre 385, 395 Nivernais, Louis-Jules Mancini Mazzarini duke of 228 Noailles, duc de 77 Noel, Charles 404 n. 4, 408 n. 14 Nollet, abbé Jean-Antoine 89 Noris, Cardinal Enrico 425 Oakley, Francis 76 n. 29 Oberhauser, Benedict 132, 136 Okęcki, Antoni Onufry 321 n. 77, 326 Olier, Jean-Jacques 83 Opstraet, Jan 28, 133, 152 Orlandi, Giuseppe 232 n. 30 Orléans, Phillippe d’ 77 Osterwald, Peter von 189 Paciaudi, Paolo Maria 241, 267 Palau, Fernando de Castro 373 Pannilini, Giuseppe 243 Pâris, François de 23, 74 Pascal, Blaise 22, 86 Passerin, Ettore 215 Passionei, Domenico, Cardinal 29 Pasta, Renato 241 n. 43 Pehem, Joseph Johann Nepomuk 156 Pellerano, Carmine Giovanni 269 Pereira, José Dias 378 Peter Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany see Leopold Peter Pezzl, Johann 156 Philip V, king of Spain 415, 418, 424, 425 Philip, duke of Parma 262 Pinto, Manuel, de Fonseca 259, 262–263, 265, 268, 270, 272–276, 278, 280–281, 283–284

Pisani, Gaetano 253 Pius VI (Giovann Angelo Braschi), pope 142, 146, 186, 190, 232, 237–239, 285–286, 288, 342, 343 n. 154, 439, 443, 445 Pius VII (Barnaba Chiaramonti), pope 185, 206, 350, 446 Plongeron, Bernard 5, 38, 41 n. 182, 111, 216, 396 Pocock, John G. A. 9, 171 Poczobut, Marcin 329, 333 Podoski, Gabriel, primate of Poland 335–336 Pombal, Marquis de (Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo) 269, 359, 370–371, 381, 390, 394 Pompadour, Mme. de 88, 106 Pompignan, Le Franc de 114 Poniatowski, Michał Jerzy 315–317, 320, 322–323, 328–329, 332, 341–342, 346–347, 349 Poniński, Adam 328 Popławski, Antoni 331 Porter, Catherine 12 n. 47 Postigliola, Alberto 216 n. 3 Poszakowski, Jan 314 Potocki, Ignacy 331 Potocki, Stanisław Kostka 309, 310, 343, 349–350 Pouget, François-Aimé 383 Prades, abbé Jean-Martin de 92, 96–97, 103–105, 109–111 Prüsener, Marlies 41 n. 180 Pufendorf, Samuel von 15 n. 66, 30, 170, 179–180, 233, 263 Pütter, Johann Stephan 193 Quesnel, Pasquier 22, 69, 376, 382, 425, 443 Quintano Bonifaz, Manuel 428 Quirini, Angelo Maria, Cardinal 30 Raab, Heribert 8 n. 28 Raffaelli, Giuseppe 378, 379 Ramaggini, Giovanni Giuseppe 134, 137 Rautenstrauch, Franz Stephan 31, 138–139, 150–153 Rautenstrauch, Johann 156 Rávago, Francisco 424–426 Reinkingk, Theodor 155 Repnin, Nikolai 336 Reyberger, Anton Karl 153

index Ricci, Scipione de’ 238, 242–243, 254–255, 271, 276, 440–441, 443 Richer, Edmund 28, 271 Richter, Joseph 156 Ricuperati, Giusepe 215 Riegger, Joseph Anton 155 Riegger, Paul Joseph 134, 136, 155 Rinaldo I d’Este, duke of Modena 218 Robertson, John 9 n. 33, 10 n. 35 Rocha, Fr. José Monteiro da 369, 379 Roda, Manuel de 428–429, 442 Rogier, Louis J. 5 Rohan, Cardinal de 77 Rohan, Emanuel, grand master of Malta 262, 268, 270–272, 274, 276–277, 281, 285, 289 Rosa, Mario 2, 396 Rose, abbé Jean-Baptiste 112 Rossignoli, Pier Francesco 280 n. 191 Rotondò, Antonio 231 n. 28 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 82, 108–109, 114–115, 232, 237, 239, 411 n. 21 Rucellai, Giulio 263 n. 70 Ruffo, Mgr. Antonio 266 Ruggieri, Giuseppe 240 n. 40 Rull, Bartholomew 269, 272 Sá, Francisco de 376 Sabbatini, Giuliano 230–231, 242 Sailer, Johann Michael 195, 207 Saint-Cyran 68 Salm, Karl Theodor Otto 131–132 Saluzzo, Ferdinando Maria 325, 341 Sampaio, Manuel Pereira 367 Sant’Anna e Silva, Joaquim de 374, 376 Santa Clara Povoa, Fr. Luis de 379 Santa Tereza, Inácio de, Bishop of Algarve 366, 385–386 São Caetano, Fr. Inácio de 377 São Caetano, João Batista de 30, 381, 388 Saporiti, Giuseppe Maria 230, 242 Sarmiento, Martín 420 n. 34 Sarpi, Paolo 260 Sartori, Joseph 204 Scaramelli, Giovanni 25 Schanza, Wenzel 153 Scharf, Anton von 156 Schelle, Augustin 153, 190–191 Schembri, Benedetto 289 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 153

461

Schlögl, Rudolf 42 Schmid, Erhard 153 Schmidt, Lorenz 13 n. 54 Schnabel, Franz 207 Schneider, Bernhard 7 Schneiders, Werner 60 Schnürer, Gustav 5 Schönborn, Friedrich Karl von 183 Schoppe, Kaspar 368 Schramm, Dominicus 151 Sciarelli, Niccolò 243 Selleri, Gregor 136 Semler, Johann Salomo 151 Serrao, Andrea 266 Sigorgne, Pierre 88 Silva Coutinho, José Caetano da 385 Simen, Johann Peter 136 Simon, Richard 34, 77 Skarga, Piotr 318 Skarszewski, Wojciech 310, 318, 320–321, 337–339, 345–347, 349 Śliwicki, Hiacynt 315 Smoleński, Władysław 304 Smuglewicz, Franciszek 322 Soderini, Gasparo 258 Sołtyk, Kajetan 317, 341 Sorkin, David 2 nn. 4–5 Sozzini, Fausto 219 Sozzini, Lelio 219 Spaur, Joseph Philipp 133 Spedalieri, Nicola 240 Sperges, Joseph von 137 Spinoza, Benedict (Baruch) 78, 119 Sporck, Franz Anton von 131 Sprenger, Placidius 200 Stackelberg, Otto Magnus von 336 Stanisław II August Poniatowski, king of Poland 311, 315, 334–335, 338, 344 Stattler, Benedikt 195 Stäudlin, Karl Friedrich 168 Stella, Pietro 254 Stock, Ambros Simon von 134, 136–138 Stöger, Ferdinand 135 Storchenau, Sigismund 151 Stroynowski, Hieronim 329 Suarez, Francisco 101, 429 Suchodolski, Wojciech 341 Surowiecki, Karol 326–327, 348–349 Swieten, Gerhard van 134, 136, 139, 141 Świtkowski, Piotr 330 Szaniawski, Konstanty 301, 316

462

index

Tamburini, Pietro 440–441 Tamburino, Tomás 373 Tanucci, Bernardo 279–280 Tavira y Almazán, Antonio 441, 447 Távora, Miguel de, Archbishop of Évora 366 Testa, Francesco 234 Thomas à Kempis, saint 318 Thomasius, Christian 13 n. 51, 16, 155, 170 Thun, Joseph Maria 132 Tilgner, Hilmar 41 n. 180 Toland, John 95, 223 Tonelli, Giorgio 10 n. 36 Tosca, Tomás Vicente 419 Tournemine, Réné-Joseph 65, 79 Trampus, Antonio 32 n. 145 Trautson, Johann Joseph 133, 135, 150, 154 Trevor-Roper, Hugh 9 Troeltsch, Ernst 9 Turgot, Anne-Robert Jacques 92 Urquijo, Mariano Luis de

445–446

Valjavec, Fritz 5 Van Espen, Zeger-Bernard see Espen Van Kley, Dale 71, 113 Van Swieten, Gerard see Swieten Vattel, Emmerich de 233 Vella, Don Giuseppe 270 Vella, Michel’Angelo 256 Ventura y Figueroa, Manuel 424 Venturi, Franco 215, 396 Venuti, Filippo 229, 231 Venuti, Marcello 231 Venuti, Ridolfino 231 Verney, Luiz Antonio 360 Vetri, Alessandro 234 Vetri, Pietro 234 Vico, Giambattista 253

Vieira, Antônio 370 Vincent de Paul, saint 25 Vogel, Christine 31 n. 142 Voltaire 9, 88, 91, 95–96, 108–109, 227–228, 231–232, 235, 261, 338 Wangen-Geroldseck, Friedrich von 139 Washington, George 319 Werkmeister, Benedikt 38 n. 170 Wessenberg, Heinrich Ignaz 206–207 Więckowski, Jacek 326 Wilcke, Anna 326 Winkopp, Peter Adolf 199, 205 Winter, Eduard 15 n. 61 Wittola, Marc Anton 137–138, 157, 176 n. 23 Wolf, Peter Philip 194 Wolff, Christian 3, 13–15, 30, 151, 153, 170, 179, 195, 314, 315 Woronicz, Jan Paweł 305–306, 350 Wybicki, Józef 337, 348 Wyszyński, Stefan 305, 311 Wzzino, Don Francesco 257 Ximenes, Leonardo 241 Xuereb, Don Francesco Maria

271

Zacchia, Paolo 225 Zallwein, Gregor 132, 183–184 Załuski, Andrzej Stanisław 311 Zambarbieri, Annibale 244 n. 45 Zambelli, Paola 223 n. 17 Zamoyski, Andrzej 336–337 Zapata, Diego 30, 419 Zbytkower, Szmul 325 Zeiller, Franz von 141 Zerafa, Benigno 256 Zingale, Anna 245 n. 46 Zondadari, Antonio Felice 266, 282

A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe

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Toleration in Enlightenment Europe

A Companion to Europe Since 1945

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A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Europe

A Companion to Europe 1900-1945

A Companion to Europe 1900-1945

Contemporary Theatres in Europe: A Critical Companion

A Companion to the City

A Companion to Hegel

A Companion to Byzantium

A Companion to Epistemology

A Companion to Milton

Church and Society in Catholic Europe of the Eighteenth Century

A Companion to Pragmatism

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A Companion to Byzantium

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