Seite - 61 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

61The Making of a Jesuit Astronomer in the Habsburg Provinces capital, preparing the ground for the order’s suppression two and a half de- cades later.65 Indeed, in 1749, Van Swieten, in his capacity as director of studies at the Faculty of Medicine, implemented reforms that, thanks to their greater emphasis on bedside work and other features, not only led to the rise of the international renown of the first great Viennese medical school but with its strict application of the principle that higher education was an affair of state in every aspect from appointments through remuneration to teaching materials and so forth also provided a model of centralization during the next few years for the other faculties, too. Another important development was set in motion by the Viennese archbishop Christoph Anton Migazzi (1714–1803), who in 1758 established a Priesterseminar that exclusively employed professors who sup- ported Jansenism.66 We have recently been cautioned that the apparent breakthrough associat- ed with Van Swieten was neither abrupt nor smooth, and that the ascription of a quasi-heroic status to him is an aspect of the twentieth-century master nar- rative on “Josephism,” not fully supported by, and to some extent even contra- vening, the sources and the earlier literature.67 As a result of these processes, the dominance of the Jesuits was to some extent reduced. However, interpret- ing them, with the hindsight gained from the dénouement of 1773, as the be- ginning of an irreversible path to suppression, or a period of transition toward such an end, is probably less instructive than regarding them as what they most probably were for those affected on all sides: a program of coordination and cooperation, with a reforming and calculating government determined to optimize the allocation of resources at its disposal for the sake of greater inter- national competitiveness (the attainment of which required efforts apparently 65 Van Swieten is the key figure in Erna Lesky, Österreichisches Gesundheitswesen im Zeitalter des aufgeklärten Absolutismus (Vienna: Rohrer, 1959); Lesky, “Gerard van Swieten: Auftrag und Erfüllung,” in Gerhard van Swieten und seine Zeit, ed. Erna Lesky and Adam Wan- druszka (Vienna: Böhlau, 1973), 11–62; more generally, Notker Hammerstein, “Besonderhei- ten der österreichischen Universitäts- und Wissenschaftsreform zur Zeit Maria Theresias und Josephs ii,” in Österreich im Europa der Aufklärung: Kontinuität und Zäsur in Europa zur Zeit Maria Theresias und Josephs ii, ed. Richard Georg Plaschka (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1985), 787–812; Winfried Müller, “Der Je- suitenordnung und die Aufklärung im süddeutsch-österreichischen Raum,” in Klueting, Katholische Aufklärung, 225–45, here 229–33. 66 For an account of the early proponents of Jansenism in Austria and the role of Migazzi in particular, see Peter Hersche, Der Spätjansenismus in Österreich (Vienna: Verlag der Öster- reichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1978), 50–70. 67 Sonia Horn, “Auftrag und Erfüllung: Erna Lesky and medizinhistorische Narrative im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Josephinismus zwischen den Regimen. Eduard Winter, Fritz Valjavec und die zentraleuropäischen Historiographien im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Franz Leander Fillafer and Thomas Wallnig (Vienna: Böhlau, 2016), 181–212.