Page - 12 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Introduction12 conservative-ultramontanist charge of complicity in bringing about the revo- lutionary tide. Already at that time, the Roman Catholic Church of the eigh- teenth century was claimed to have included significant forces that relied on enlightened tools in their endeavor to implement reforms aiming at adapta- tion to the requirements of modern times.26 However, while the subject as- sumed a special significance in the post-Kulturkampf intellectual and political milieu of Germany and gained some currency in German scholarship,27 from the point of view of international Enlightenment research it has remained an undercurrent—and “Catholic Enlightenment” as a compound looked to most mainstream specialists a contradiction in terms—until the past generation. This more recent thrust of scholarship—initially also dominated by Ger- manophone historians, with the incrementally more intense involvement of other scholars—has been marked by significant debates, even fissures, but one can eventually discern a rough consensus in the treatment of some major themes. Still acknowledging Enlightenment and Catholicism to be strange bedfellows, some have preferred the term Reform Catholicism, but others ob- jected that this obliterates the palpable enlightened influences on the reform processes.28 Somewhat inversely, “enlightened Catholicism,” which has also been proposed, met resistance, especially on the part of French historians be- cause in their view it drew emphasis on the secularizing momentum gaining ground in the church at the expense of the aspect of religious renewal.29 An- other fault line concerned the question of the reconcilability of the Enlighten- ment with Catholicism (and religion more generally). A negative answer to this question implied, first, a wedge between the mainstream Enlightenment and 26 Sebastian Merkle, Die katholische Beurteilung des Aufklärungszeitalters (Berlin: Curtius, 1909). 27 Burson, “Introduction,” 3–5. 28 Bernhard Schneider, “Katholische Aufklärung: Zum Werden und Wert eines Forschungs- begriffs,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 93 (1998): 354–97; Rudolf Schlögl, “Secularization: German Catholicism at the Eve of Modernity,” German Historical Bulletin 25, no. 1 (2003): 5–21. 29 Louis G. Rogier, “L’Aufklärung catholique,” in Louis G. Rogier, Guillaume de Bertier de Sauvigny and Joseph Hajjar, Nouvelle histoire de l’église, vol. 4, Siècle des Lumières, révolu- tion, restauration (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 137–61; Bernard Plongeron, “Wahre Gottesverehrung und das Problem des Unglaubens: Debatten um Inhalte und Wege von Religiosität und Seelsorge,” in Die Geschichte des Christentums, vol. 10, Aufklärung, Revolution, Restauration (1750–1830), ed. Bernard Plongeron (Freiburg: Herder, 2000), 233–93. See, however, albeit on a different context, Richard Butterwick, “Between Anti-Enlightenment and Enlight- ened Catholicism: Provincial Preachers in Late-Eighteenth-Century Poland–Lithuania,” in Peripheries of the Enlightenment, ed. Richard Butterwick, Simon Davies, and Gabriel Sánchez-Espinosa (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2008), 201–28.