Page - 387 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

387Coping with Enlightenments of the largely bogus character of those liberties. Hell’s old-new Hungarus pa- triotism, expressed by his adulation of the recent achievements of scientific progress in the country and his immersion in the labyrinthine paths of ancient Magyar history, sounded insincere to many in his potential audience. Kinship with the “fish-smelly Lappians,” as proposed, with Hell’s increasing sponsor- ship, in Sajnovics’s Demonstratio, was from their perspective not merely methodologically problematic, but undignified and unwholesome, even treacherous and hostile. Many believed that such a denigration of the Magyar stock received intellectual ammunition from German academic circles, where ideas of enlightened bureaucratic centralization were also promoted, and en- couragement from the Habsburg government, where such ideas were on the way of being implemented to the detriment of the ancient privileges of Hungary. After support for him in the imperial center had become lukewarm, what- ever hopes Hell entertained of re-constituting himself as a moving spirit of a scientifically thriving, Hungarus counterweight to Vienna, the alienation of this group of the nobility limited his scope of action to seeking the favors of conservative Catholic lords like Eszterházy. While the latter possessed the means of lavishly investing into the development of the infrastructure of learn- ing, this was still insufficient leverage to negotiate the recognition of the Eger lycée as a university, which was a political matter. However, this would have been an indispensable step, in Hell’s eyes, of his own repositioning on the map of learning in the Habsburg monarchy as well as the redrawing of that map by the resuscitation of Catholic knowledge in its old Jesuit style. On April 14, 1792, Hell passed away as a result of a deteriorating lung fever he had caught a few weeks earlier, without ever really coming close to attaining the ingeniously contrived end.