Page - 319 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

319Disruption of Old Structures to be submitted to the emperor weekly by every provincial police chief) and other means.22 In many ways, a similar trajectory can be outlined in the case of one of the quintessential venues of enlightened sociability: freemasonry. The first lodge was created in Vienna in 1742, and by the 1780s there were altogether seventeen of them in the whole of Austria (besides a good number in the other provinces).23 Despite the sympathy of Emperor Francis I (who had famously joined a lodge in the Netherlands as early as the 1730s), they faced many difficulties under the devout empress, both on account of their secrecy and obscure ritual, and their real or suspected religious heterodoxy. The accession of Joseph ii brought about a change in this regard, although he also warned against the “supersti- tious” aspects (as he was later to express: the “mumbo-jumbo”) of masonic practices, and made it clear that his toleration of them is pragmatic: an ac- knowledgment of their potential good works, as well as the common sense that prohibition only makes a secret society more attractive.24 Nevertheless, also in light of the fact that freemasonry was generally allied with the emperor in his anti-clerical projects, in the early 1780s there was a wind of opportunity in Vienna for the unrestrained expression and assertion of the masonic com- mitment to the enlightened values of improvement through the pursuit of vir- tue, fraternity, and science.25 22 Paul B. Bernard, From the Enlightenment to the Police State: The Public Life of Johann Anton Pergen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 115–69. 23 The classic treatment is Ludwig (Lajos) Abafi, Geschichte der Freimaurerei in Österreich- Ungarn, 5 vols. (Budapest: L. Aigner, 1890–99). In more recent literature, see Helmut Rein- alter, ed., Freimaurer und Geheimbünde im 18. Jahrhundert in Mitteleuropa (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983); Reinalter, Joseph ii und die Freimaurer im Lichte zeitgenössischer Bro- schüren (Vienna: Böhlau, 1987). 24 Karl Gutkas, Kaiser Joseph ii: Eine Biographie (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1989), 326; Beales, Joseph ii, 1:486. 25 For a portrayal of European freemasonry in terms of this combination of values, see Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freema- sonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). It must be added that more recent research has shown this commitment to have been far from universal. Cf., e.g., Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A His- torical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 131–53; Cécil Révauger, “Eng- lish Freemasonry during the Enlightenment: How Radical, How Conservative?,” Lumières (Lumières radicales et Franc-maçonnerie) 22, no. 2 (2013): 33–48. For a concise overview of the state of the art in research on freemasonry and its relationship to strands of the En- lightenment, see Róbert Péter, “General Introduction,” in British Freemasonry 1717–1783, ed. Róbert Péter, 5 vols. (London: Routledge, 2016), 1. xi–xlvi.