Page - 15 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

15Introduction methods of historical and philological criticism,37 one of the outcomes being the assertion that the ever greater scarcity of miraculous events recorded in that tradition is proof that while in the remote past God resorted to such de- vices in order to convince a primitive folk about the truth of the Gospel, in a more progressive era these give way to rational demonstration. The other outcome of historical criticism was the reinforcement of existing initiatives that challenged the tradition of authority and hierarchy in the Ro- man Catholic Church. Even apart from the Protestant Reformation and the secession of national Lutheran, Calvinist, or other churches from Rome, these important precedents included the late medieval conciliarist movement that urged a collegiate form of ecclesiastical government, the humanist critiques that unveiled the impostures on which old claims for papal supremacy were founded, and the rise of a Gallican church that remained Catholic in matters of doctrine and worship, but over which the pope had to cede a substantial part of his jurisdictional control to the king of France. The 1648 compromise peace settlement of Münster and Osnabrück, which put an end to the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) and made the demise of the vision of a unitary Christendom under papal sovereignty irrevocable, gave further encouragement to the voices within Catholicism itself that expressed dissatisfaction with the interference of the curia in diocesan affairs. Jansenism and later especially Febronianism— the former insisting on the legal autonomy of parishes, the latter explicitly call- ing for the emancipation of national churches, both formally condemned by the curia on several occasions, but retaining their influence throughout Catho- lic Europe—supplied solid intellectual and theological ammunition to the re- pudiation of monarchical government in the church.38 Such efforts within the church, aiming to make parishes the centers of religious activity and bishops the genuine pastoral and administrative supervisors of that activity, found powerful political support among the enlightened rulers of the age, who also regarded any degree of extraneous intervention, including papal intervention, 37 This was especially prominent among the Benedictines of St. Maur and their followers elsewhere. See Ulrich L. Lehner, Enlightened Monks: The German Benedictines 1740–1803 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 38 Bernard Plongeron, “Recherches sur l’Aufklärung catholique en Europe occidental, 1770– 1830,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 16 (1969): 555–605; Plongeron, Théologie et politique au siècle des Lumières (Geneva: Droz, 1973); Ulrich L. Lehner, “Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim and His Febronius: A Censored Bishop and His Ecclesiology,” Church His- tory and Religious Culture 88 (2008): 93–121; Dale K. van Kley, “Jansenism and the Interna- tional Suppression of the Jesuits,” in Enlightenment, Reawakening, and Revolution, 1660– 1815, ed. Stewart J. Brown and Timothy Tackett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 302–28.