Page - 390 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Conclusion 390 mathematics and mechanics (as against new-fangled approaches informed by the humanities and vitalism), is capable of bringing the study of all these fields to a shared platform. Fashioning himself in this role, Hell was self-assured, even self-conceited and occasionally arrogant, resorting to steps of dubious honesty like attributing to himself scientific achievements that at the very best originated from collaborative effort. As regards dishonesty, the allegations that he manipulated his Venus transit observation data were patently false. But it is small wonder that the cross-disciplinary pretensions of Hell were met with some perplexity and evoked a mixed response among fellow scholars. The lat- ter continued to recognize his outstanding merits as a practical and theoretical astronomer, but also the limits of his larger claims as well as the eccentricity and unpleasantness of some of his reactions. In this situation, Hell, more than any time before, was in need of support from other centers of knowledge, such as the Royal Danish Society of Sciences, of which he had become a member during the Arctic expedition, or the Pari- sian Académie des Sciences, whose membre correspondant he had become far earlier. However, the ideological underpinnings of such support had either vanished altogether or became corroded. In Denmark, the coup by Struensee in late 1770, which wiped away the mighty ministers who had facilitated Hell’s recruitment as a savant in service of their monarch, was less than a year and a half later followed by a nationally oriented, “anti-German” government reluc- tant to lend support to cosmopolitan and multinational scientific endeavors of the kind represented by Hell and his expedition. From the French side, the reasons for the lack of support and ultimately indifference from former allies such as Lalande were apparently more complex. The continuing support for Boscovich and the lack thereof vis-à-vis Hell at least goes to show that anti- Jesuit sentiments around the climax of the suppression of the order did not trump prestige based on scientific merits and good conduct according to the long-established informal rules of the Republic of Letters. Hell’s late publica- tion and over-aggressive support of his Venus transit observations from Vardø in the ensuing controversy over the solar parallax were an infringement of the latter. The uneasiness, anxiety, impatience, and frustration that filters through not a few of Hell’s utterances in his later life, however, arose not only from the ap- parent futility of some of his scholarly endeavors but from changing tides on the Central European public scene. Hell’s personal trajectory as a Jesuit man of science and state servant under successive Habsburg reform administrations in the mid- to late eighteenth century puts the chronology of the Enlighten- ment in Central Europe into relief. If there was one border that Hell was con- sistently unwilling to cross, it was the boundary of the Enlightenment in the