Page - 353 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

353Coping with Enlightenments language for the servants of God. As a representative of the Republic of Letters, he saw the benefits of Latin for communication across linguistic and political barriers. Thus, in his arguments for the preservation (or restoration) of Latin, his old loyalties ran together, and while his mother tongue was German, he saw little benefit of it within this matrix. For pragmatic purposes, back in the early 1760s he explained to Bishop Eszterházy that if there was any modern vernacu- lar Balajthi ought to master when the latter came to study with him in Vienna, it was French, “which is of utmost importance for a mathematician.”28 A good decade later, Hell reported that Madarassy was learning French with ease, but struggled to make progress with German. In the end, Madarassy asked the bishop for money to move out of Hell’s apartment and hire a room in a private home, so that he could speak the language on a daily basis.29 Hell did not op- pose this, which may be taken as an indication that he was beginning to under- stand the voice of the times, and the stakes of listening to it. Privately, he still continued to express his reservations about the use of modern vernaculars in learned communication. As Hviid reported in 1778, Hell told him: “Danes al- ways wrote in Danish; this was an impediment to our scientific image abroad […]. We [i.e., the Danes] should write more in Latin, he argued, or at least in French, which is also a universal language.”30 Hell did so despite the fact that his own knowledge of French, as we learn from Hviid, was passive: during din- ners at Garampi’s, he spoke “kitchen Latin” only, and that “in an unusual rapid- ity,” since “this erudite does not speak French.”31 Even as late as the early 1790s, in a particularly long and bitter letter to the bishop of Eger, Hell lamented over the dissolution of the Society of Jesus, and what he called the “seminars of Antichrist” (seminaria Antichristi) that had replaced the theology studies at the university since the Jesuit professors were removed from their posts. As a result of the implementation of compulsory teaching in German, knowledge of Latin had seen such a rapid decline among university students that even Mass at the university church was now held in the vernacular. As a result, young women attended, and flirted overtly with the students. The fair sex would not have been present, Hell argues, if only the Masses had been cele- brated in Latin as they used to be in the good old days before the suppression of the Society of Jesus: 28 Hell to Eszterházy in Eger, dated Vienna, October 24, 1762, fle, AV 2629. 29 Hell to Eszterházy in Eger, dated Vienna, August 22, 1775 and July 1, 1776; Madarassy to Eszterházy, dated Vienna, April 2, 1776, fle, AV 2629. 30 Hviid, Hviids Europa, 369 (entry on November 21, 1778). 31 Hviid, Hviids Europa, 401–2 (entry on December 6, 1778).