Page - 11 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

11Introduction “ capitalist world system.” According to Wallerstein, while capitalism as a pecu- liar set of relations of production continued to be confined to portions of the Western world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, thanks to the spe- cial dynamism it assumed during this period, it was capable of drawing into its orbit and turning to its own purposes regions where those relations were not capitalist, to an extent that, complementing the West as the “core,” they all formed parts of the same global system as “semi-peripheries” and “peripheries.”24 One may not need to agree with the Wallersteinian analysis of the capitalist world system, nor even adopt the language of center and periphery, in order to conceive of the Enlightenment, by the same token, as a “system” of eighteenth- century culture and thought possessing its own intellectual and ethical priori- ties and agendas as well as more or less clear boundaries, while at the same time capable of involving, affecting, enlisting, or even swallowing entities whose own logic and mode of operation was not necessarily altogether or per- vasively “enlightened.” 2 Catholic Enlightenment—Enlightenment Catholicism One obvious candidate for the role of such an ambiguously located entity in the Enlightenment world is the Christian church and religion, especially its Catholic version, which according to classic accounts so thoroughly imbued the structures of tradition and authority that were the prime target of critique by the eighteenth-century’s “little flock of philosophers.”25 Renaissance hu- manism and the Protestant Reformation have long been credited with prepar- ing the ground for the enlightened assault on dogma, superstition, and fanati- cism, but Catholicism, with its continued attachment to devotional practices such as the adoration of saints and belief in miracles, its maintenance of armies of apparently idle monks, ostentatious baroque pomp, and universal monarchy as the appropriate form of ecclesiastical government, was deemed antithetical to the ideals of emancipation, utility, and progress associated with the Enlightenment. It is true that a Catholic Enlightenment was discovered in German scholarship as long ago as the beginning of the twentieth century, as part of a more comprehensive attempt to deliver the Enlightenment from the James van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2001). 24 Originally developed in Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agri- culture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1976). 25 For this famous epithet, see Gay, Enlightenment, 1:3–8.