Page - 391 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

391Borders and Crossings guise it arrived in the Habsburg realm during the later years of Maria Theresa and especially under Joseph ii. Hell is a significant figure of science in the Age of Enlightenment, and the European Enlightenment is crucial to understand- ing Hell, while he remained peripheral to the Enlightenment—not geographi- cally, as “periphery” is most often understood in Enlightenment studies, but in the sense of Enlightenment as a “system,” a notion sketched in the introduc- tion. In this “Wallersteinian” perspective, Hell accessed the Enlightenment and both benefited from it and enriched it as a highly proficient user and improver of the mechanisms, institutions, networks, and practices that its ideas fostered and sustained, without meaningfully participating in its intellectual and moral universe. In fact, he cultivated a principled hostility to some core values of the Enlightenment—for instance, religious toleration. The Enlightenment of the late 1740s to the 1760s was still congenial to an ambitious Jesuit man of science with its emphasis on the improvement of the infrastructures of (especially higher) learning, besides a beginning of the overhaul of the economic founda- tions and administrative organization of the state. Hell does not even seem to have been bothered much by the step that underlined the unity of these three aspects of the incipient transformations: the establishment of Viennese Po- lizeywissenschaft, whose logic and the governmental modus operandi that it promoted were pointing toward a program of eroding estate distinctions, in- cluding the ecclesiastical estate, of the kind implemented—gradually, with varying intensity and consistency—from about the time of Hell’s northern adventure. Despite the shock of Dominus ac redemptor noster, neither was the change abrupt, nor did it represent an existential threat to Hell and his personal status. Though he complained about the practical implications of the suppression of his order to the work routine of the observatory, his resentment was also based on hardly explicit, nevertheless unmistakable grounds of principle. Happiness in this world, even pursued by the means of modern knowledge practices, re- mained to him inseparable from happiness in the next one—indeed, he re- garded the achievement of scientific goals, while in the strict sense subject to its own procedural rules, still ultimately dependent on the perpetual manifes- tations of divine benevolence. If “happiness” was to be attained, it therefore seemed to him indispensable to preserve the constitution of God’s servants exactly as it existed in the Catholic Church, including its scientifically most distinguished arm, the Society of Jesus. The lukewarm, non-committal disposi- tion of the Habsburg leadership vis-à-vis the matter of the suppression and its reconciliation with the papal verdict signaled to Hell a lack of commitment on the part of the government to the principle on which the services he was per- forming to it were founded.