Page - 309 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

309Disruption of Old Structures nevertheless deeply infiltrated domains of the secular administration), espe- cially the existence of “idle” enclaves of religious orders, seemed to them a det- rimental anomaly. Besides increasing suspicion toward, and ultimately the abolition of these orders, steps toward limited religious tolerance—beginning with minor improvements in the condition of non-Catholics in the later 1770s and culminating in the toleration legislation of Joseph ii in the 1780s—also followed from these principles. So did the elimination of church control over education and censorship, and assuming it by the state. It is important to recognize that while the ensuing reforms did amount to an incremental elimination of the church from an expanding range of spheres of public life, it is more helpful to see them rather as the integration of the church in the management of secular affairs increasingly dominated by the state: as the expansion of the power of the state through its interference in ambiguous areas in the role of the regulator of social tensions.5 It was concern about education—famously defined as politicum, a political affair, by Maria Theresa and also central to raising patriotic citizens according to von Sonnenfels’s pamphlet Ueber die Liebe des Vaterlandes (On the love of the fatherland [1771])—that appears to have motivated the empress’s first attempts at ecclesi- astical reform back in the 1750s. To be precise, the motivation was exactly pi- ous. In the first, 1750 draft of her “Political Testament,” she was critical of the all too generous donations of her predecessors to ecclesiastical orders because “on the one hand they do not need it, and on the other they do not, unfortu- nately, utilize what they have in the way it should.”6 If we are to judge from the purposes to which the income of ecclesiastical property confiscated later on were turned, “the way it should” meant primarily parish work, in conjunction with popular education, in the expectation that this would improve genuine, personal Catholic devotion. Maria Theresa believed that the condition of her realm in this regard left much to be desired, and required a “great remedy.” The first attempt by her and her government to convert these ideas into practice by imposing a ten percent levy on the revenues of monasteries in the mid-1750s was thwarted by the refusal of papal approval. The effort was revived a decade later, at first in Lombardy, where in 1765 the Giunta Economale was created as a bureaucratic unit for exploring the incomes of the church and their uses. In 5 Cf. Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Re- sults,” in States in History, ed. John A. Hall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 109–36. 6 Josef Kallbrunner and Clemens Biener, eds., Kaiserin Maria Theresias Politisches Testament (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1952), 38, cited in Ernst Wangermann, The Austrian Achievement, 1700– 1800 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 75–76. The whole text is available in Alfred Ritter von Arneth, “Zwei Denkschriften der Kaiserin Maria Theresias,” Archiv für österreichische Ge- schichte 47 (1871): 267–354.