Page - 389 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

389Borders and Crossings ambitious Jesuit from Banská Štiavnica, also holding out the possibility of more of the kind. Far from severing the ties binding him to the life worlds in which he was active until then, he made strenuous efforts to channel whatever worthy scientific work he saw being pursued there into the broader circulations that now opened to him. Nevertheless, at the same time he was thrown into one far grander in scale, especially as regards access to the various strands of the contemporary ferment in cultural sensibility, intellectual orientation, political program, and patterns of communication: the European Enlightenment. It is important to re-emphasize how unproblematic it was for the Viennese administration to enlist in the service of its reform agenda a member of the Society of Jesus in 1755, just a few years before the demise or “end” of the order began with its expurgation from the Catholic states of the West, and not a full two decades before its general suppression by the pope. The analysis of the circumstances and the extant documents of the appointment, as well as the new state servant’s subsequent manner of procedure, demonstrates that in this period the unity of purpose between him and the promoters of enlight- ened policies and institutions could hardly have been fuller. The pursuit of anti-superstitious and utilitarian ends via the production and dissemination of new knowledge, prescribed to Hell in the instructions given to him, was conso- nant with age-old Jesuit priorities and practices, and he proved to be highly ingenious and creative in exploiting the avenues and methods of knowledge circulation characteristic of the Republic of Letters at home and abroad in or- der to earn the much-desired recognition for his patrons as well as for himself, his faith, and his order. By the 1760s, his status as a truly cross-border character, constituting himself at the intersection of domestic and cosmopolitan scenes and shrinking the distances between them, had become sealed. The 1767 invi- tation of the Danish–Norwegian court to lead the Arctic Venus transit expedition was both an acknowledgment of this fact, and stretched it to its limits. Borders and distances are relevant notions to the interpretation of Hell’s figure in regard of the substance of his scientific contributions, too. Two of the most memorable among these were his calculation of the solar parallax (i.e., his preoccupation with inquiry into the fundamental unit of measurement of distance in the solar system), and determining the virtual proximity of human communities separated by physical distance in his studies of Sámi–Hungarian linguistic kinship. Together with his work in fields of knowledge as widely di- vergent as northern lights, electricity, meteorology, and magnetic healing, after the famed expedition of 1768–70 these were supposed to establish his creden- tials as a universal man of science with an encompassing vision who, thanks to his firm attachment to the solid methods and principles characteristic of