Page - 373 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

373Coping with Enlightenments by his inclusion in a bio-bibliographical encyclopedia of “Hungari and people from the provinces that have made themselves known through published writ- ings,” published in the same year as de Luca’s first volume.104 In any case, with the help of the Ephemerides, Hell was offering a map of “learned Austria” that recorded the changes explained to his esteemed colleague, another influential voice in the respublica astronomica: a shift of the center of gravity to the east. This representation of the situation was, of course, much too sanguine.105 While the observatory of Eger indeed performed well, with Madarassy as its astronomer after he had finished his training with Hell in 1778, a full-scale in- frastructure of higher learning that a university would have been, proved to be wishful thinking. The medical academy in Eger, opened in 1769, was forced to close in 1775 because of the royal withdrawal of the right of the institution to confer doctoral degrees. By the time the construction of the would-be univer- sity building was completed in 1785, clause 14 of the Ratio educationis or gen- eral law of education for the Kingdom of Hungary (1777) had stipulated that there was to be a single university in the whole of the kingdom: “The one splen- didly located in the very midst of the country [in Buda], endowed with rich funds and teaching personnel well trained in all manner of sciences.”106 A sec- ond layer of tertiary education was also created, with five academiae or Hoch­ schulen, in Győr, Oradea (Nagyvárad, Grosswardein), Košice (losing its university status), Zagreb, and Trnava. The school at Eger remained a lycée, not even allowed (as Eszterházy requested in 1784) to be a temporary host to the university evacuated from Trnava but not yet possible to accommodate conve- niently in the capital of the Hungarian province. Hell nevertheless remained in close contact with Bishop Eszterházy. Besides matters of science, after the debacle of the university plans the religious and ecclesiastical issues of the day acquired greater prominence in their corre- spondence. One subject that Hell discussed in two letters in quick succession in 1779 was the forced retraction of the tenets put forward in the famous 1763 treatise De statu ecclesiae (On the state of the church; better known as Febro­ nius, promoting a return to the conciliar tradition of government in the Catho- lic Church) by its author, Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim (1701–91), auxiliary 104 Elek Horányi, Memoria Hungarorum et provincialium scriptis editis notorum (Vienna: Loew, 1776), 2:81–90. 105 There is no scope here to examine either Hell’s judgment of the policies of Vienna with those it actually pursued in the matter, nor the amount of wishful thinking at the bottom of the proposed “shift.” 106 Aladár Friml, trans. and ed., Az 1777­ iki Ratio educationis (Budapest: Katholikus Középis- kolai Tanáregyesület, 1913), 50.