Page - 187 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

187The North Beckons like the best timing of the trip), permission from both Superior General Ricci and from the Austrian authorities had been secured.46 The official letter of commission by the Viennese court was issued on February 24, 1768. At this point, it is also worth making an attempt to reconstruct Hell’s own perspective on the matter. The few autograph sources that are extant all origi- nate from a later date, and contain a few puzzles. From one angle, as Hell commented in one of the relevant accounts pub- lished later on, the invitation was certainly “worthy of [his] soul born for the obtaining of merit in the realm of the sciences.”47 However, as he confessed in the same retrospect, “in the year 1767 nothing was further from my thoughts, than to leave—even for a moment—my post at the observatory in order to observe the transit of Venus in front of the Sun that was going to take place in 1769, invisible to me in Vienna.” He would have been content to confine himself this time to the role of a theoretical astronomer, relying on the results of others in doing his own calculations.48 He had good reason for this resignation. He must have thought that his belonging to the Society of Jesus apparently made his chances of traveling to the (Protestant) realm of the midnight Sun, where the transit was visible, as meagre as seeing anything of it in the Austrian capi- tal, especially “at a time when the Society endured the severest of persecutions in Catholic kingdoms.”49 The invitation from the Danish ambassador also came as a surprise because, as Hell alleged, he “had so far never cultivated any scientific correspondence [commercium litterarium] with anyone in Denmark.” This is a point that receives special emphasis in Hell’s rendering: as he further explains, he was convinced that no one had even heard of his name “in that country, especially not in Copenhagen, and even less so among the highest ministers at the king’s court.”50 Hell was here ignoring—hardly innocently—a letter in his own hand, dated Vienna, October 5, 1766 and addressed to Bugge, already mentioned as a par- ticipant in the failed Danish Venus transit efforts of 1761.51 Hell thanked Bugge 46 Bachoff to Bernstorff (RA), dated Vienna, December 10, 1767. 47 Maximilian Hell, Observatio transitus Veneris ante discum Solis die 3 junii anno 1769 […] (Copenhagen: Gerhard Giese Salicath, 1770), 1. 48 Hell, Observatio transitus Veneris […] 1769, 1. 49 At the time when Hell received the invitation, the general suppression of the Society (and thus its demise in the Habsburg realms) in 1773 was still a matter of the future, but it had already been accomplished in Portugal (1759), France (1764), and the countries of the Spanish crown (1767). The quotation is from the unfinished “Introductio ad Expeditionem litterariam ad Polum Arcticum,” published with an English translation in Aspaas, “Maxi- milianus Hell,” 383–417 (here 409). 50 Aspaas, “Maximilianus Hell,” 408–9. 51 See Pinzger, Hell Miksa, 1:3–5.