Page - 21 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

21Introduction pedagogical humanists. Jesuit education, which has been described as highly competitive, aimed to prepare students for leadership roles in the church, state, and society to the benefit of all, so that some have found it justified to style its conceptual foundation as “Jesuit civic humanism.”55 Having said this, it must be admitted that while mathematics (also with a view to its applica- tions) had a strong foothold in schools and universities controlled by the Jesu- its, they were slow in adjusting the dominant Aristotelianism of the philoso- phy curriculum to new currents in natural philosophy, and staunchly resistant to any temptation to introduce the teaching of law or medicine. As a matter of fact, utility was a prime and hardly concealed consideration from another point of view, too: by providing good education and more gener- ally sound learning as a social good to the rising elite, Jesuits could ingratiate themselves with the culturally powerful—including not only the virtuosi (i.e., the mostly aristocratic patrons of the arts and sciences) but also the cogno- scenti (the citizens of the Republic of Letters)—and thus promote the goal of confessionalization.56 In this way, the matter of Jesuit education leads us to consider the topic that, even amid the general efflorescence of Jesuit studies, has received a disproportionate amount of attention: the intriguing field of Jesuit science.57 As the thrust of a great deal of recent work on the Enlighten- ment has been to assert the centrality of the “new science” to its gestation,58 this topic is of crucial importance to this section; and similarly to this thrust, the more contextualized approach to Jesuit science owes its existence to the larger revisionism in the history of science, particularly with regard to the “sci- entific revolution.” Even in the traditional narrative, the sixteenth- and seven- teenth-century revolution in science, with its discoveries in physics and astronomy that reaffirmed the idea of a heliocentric cosmos and with its inau- guration of an altogether mathematized nature, figured as the twin brother of the Enlightenment drive to emancipation and toleration in bringing about the modern world.59 This account of early modern science was largely conceived 55 Grendler, “Culture of the Jesuit Teacher,” 31–36; cf. John W. O’Malley, “Jesuit Schools and the Humanities Yesterday and Today,” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 47, no. 1 (2015). 56 Harris, “Confession-Building,” 292. 57 For a concise overview, see Sheila J. Rabin, “Early Modern Jesuit Science: A Historiograph- ical Overview,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 1, no. 1 (2014): 88–104. For a comprehensive ac- count, see Agustín Udías, The Jesuit Contribution to Science: A History (Cham: Springer, 2015). 58 Cf. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, eds., The Sciences in Enlightened Eu- rope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), especially the editors’ “Introduction,” 3–31. 59 For classic examples of this interpretation, see Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800 (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1950); Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed