Page - 80 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 180 excommunication to Gál, and eventually it was the latter who felt forced to retreat.125 Though this affair and its outcome, which must have seemed unusual for a man with Hell’s stock of experience, might be taken as a confirmation of the familiar narrative of the decline of Jesuit influence in the mid-eighteenth cen- tury, the Society’s visibility and impact in Cluj was striking. As the town was small and had been architecturally rather static since the late Middle Ages, the building complex erected in its center under Jesuit auspices, dedicated to edu- cational, religious, and secular purposes, exerted a transformative effect be- yond its relatively modest scale. Its consistent use of the conventions of ba- roque emphasized the Jesuit commitment to a universalist vision whose geographically closest local idiom found expression in Vienna: a function of the “Jesuit district” in Cluj was to make it “look more Austrian, less individual, less ‘ethnic,’ and more rationally organized,” and thus to tip the precarious bal- ance between east and west that existed in the town toward the latter.126 This Jesuit vision also penetrated the daily lives of town-dwellers from the elite to the marginalized, thanks to the Society’s participation in the mechanisms of social ordering through ritual, example, and injunction. Practices of penance, drama performances, the inculcation of values of “propriety” in a range of in- stitutions like the orphanage or the religious sodalities set up by the Society offered a rich storehouse of devices, making it possible to correct and control irregular, socially harmful practices from dueling through sexual license and polygamy to outrageous conduct and “superstition.”127 As a matter of fact, the characteristic terrain where such Jesuit antidotes to social ills—easily aligned with the “enlightened” quest of subjecting the pas- sions to the governance of reason in the interest of harmony and happiness— worked, was urban, and the very thinness of the urban fabric in Transylvania set limits to their effectiveness. The domain where the eighteenth-century Jesuits of Cluj were probably most unequivocally successful is itself typically 125 The complaints are developed in letters by Sztojka addressed to the Cluj college (Cluj, January 16, 1754; Sibiu, February 22, 1754) and a report by Cluj chaplains Péter Ferendi and Ferenc Nagy (March 6, 1754). The intervention of the capellanus major is contained in Kampmiller to Sztojka, Vienna, February 5, 1754, while Gál’s defense was made in a re- sponsio dated March 20, 1754.The conclusion of the affair is documented in Sztojka’s let- ters of August 14, 1754 “to the beloved clergy and to the beloved, pious population of both sexes, in the free and royal city of Cluj,” as well as specifically to parish priest János Bíró, and the record of a meeting between Sztojka and Gál on August 24, 1754. Cluj, Archives of the Parish of St. Michael, 36, 99–107. 126 Shore, Jesuits and the Politics of Religious Pluralism, 111–17. 127 Shore, Jesuits and the Politics of Religious Pluralism, 147–62.