Page - 9 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

9Introduction philosophy of emancipation (and its literary manifestations) into a set of intel- lectual, cultural, and social practices. The goal of such practices was the accu- mulation and systematization of knowledge about man’s natural, moral, and social environment, for the sake of improving this environment and thereby achieving happiness for humans—in this world, irrespective of beliefs held about the next one.16 Besides allowing a more directly meaningful engage- ment, from the vantage point of Enlightenment studies, of areas from legisla- tion, government, and policymaking through manners and sociability to the arts and sciences (pursuits governed by agendas deriving from beyond their narrowly conceived boundaries), this has also led to the rise of a new notion of the Enlightenment’s much-vaunted “secularism,” one less militant and dog- matic and more compatible with cultivating Christian belief and worship. To some, this seemed to be a dilution of the concept of Enlightenment, while to others it was an opportunity to understand the phenomenon in a dynamic, elastic, and perhaps historically more authentic manner. The emerging “plural- ity of Enlightenments” has been understood and analyzed from several per- spectives, including “national,”17 ideological (“radical” versus “conservative”),18 and religious19 contexts. It has been suggested that while the questions that exercised the minds of “the enlightened” were the same or at least very similar across the European continent and its colonial extensions, the an- swers depended on a broad variety of local or regional considerations and 16 See the overviews in John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–51; László Kontler, “Introduc- tion: What Is the (Historians’) Enlightenment Today?,” European Review of History/Revue d’histoire européenne, special issue, “Enlightenment and Communication: Regional Expe- riences and Global Consequences,” ed. László Kontler, 13, no. 3 (2006): 337–55. 17 Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, eds., The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) 18 J.G.A. [John Greville Agard] Pocock, “Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlighten- ment in England,” in L’etá dei lumi: Studi storici in onore di Franco Venturi, ed. R. [Raffaello] Ajello, E. Cortese and Vincenzo Piano Mortari (Naples: Iovene Editore, 1985), 1:523–62; Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 5 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999– 2011); Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2011). 19 David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).