Page - 18 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Introduction18 field of education, combined with its reluctance to modernize the curri culum enshrined in the Ratio studiorum (in full: Ratio atque institutio studiorum Soci- etatis Jesu [Method and system of the studies of the Society of Jesus [1599]), with Scholastic theology as its centerpiece.44 This, scholars suggested, set the Jesuits apart in an era when Benedictines, for instance, were integrating in their own work the ideas of Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) and John Locke (1632–1704), Christian Wolff (1679–1754), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646– 1716), and the methods of empirical science and critical scholarship, while en- lightened monarchs sought to reform universities by upgrading or introducing subjects more closely related to the goals of efficient governance and the public good: law, state sciences, finance and economics, and medicine. It is only relatively recently that scholars have begun to diversify this pic- ture.45 They have pointed out that Jesuit scientists, in particular, were met with a great deal of appreciation and support among the enlightened, while in turn not a few Jesuits themselves were sympathetic to certain Enlightenment ideas and contributed significantly to crucial debates about them.46 The notion of a “Jesuit Enlightenment” has even been proposed, on the basis of the centrality of a synthesis of Locke, Malebranche, and Newton to Sorbonne apologetics in the first half of the eighteenth century, and to the defense of Catholic theology against the radical Enlightenment.47 These developments in the assessment of 44 For the text itself, see the excellent bilingual edition by Claude Pavur, trans., The Ratio studiorum: The Official Plan for Jesuit Education (St. Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2005). 45 As an exception, see Robert Palmer, “The French Jesuits in the Age of Enlightenment,” American Historical Review 45 (1939): 44–58. 46 Thanks to their “cultural modernity,” and despite their theological conservatism, “the Je- suits were participants in, rather than enemies of, the Enlightenment.” Joan-Pau Rubiés, “The Jesuits and the Enlightenment,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits, ed. Ines G. Županov (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 855–90. Cf., for the French context, Jeffrey D. Burson, “Between Power and Enlightenment: The Cultural and Intellectual Con- text of the Jesuit Suppression in France,” in The Jesuit Suppression in Global Context: Causes, Events, and Consequences, ed. Jeffrey D. Burson and Jonathan Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 40–63. 47 Antonio Trampus, I gesuiti e l’Illuminismo: Politica e religione in Austria e nell’Europa cen- trale (1773–1798) (Florence: Olschki, 2000); Jeffrey D. Burson, The Rise and Fall of the Theo- logical Enlightenment: Jean-Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth- Century France (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010). Cf. Lehner, “In tro duction,” 31–32; Burson, “Introduction,” 10, 17; Burson, “The Catholic Enlightenment in France from the Fin de siècle Crisis of Consciousness to the Revolution,” in Lehner and Printy, Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment, 63–125, passim; and Burson, “Refracting the Century of Light: Alternative Genealogies of the Enlightenment in Eighteenth- Century Culture,” in Let There Be Enlightenment: The Religious and Mystical Sources of