Seite - 62 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 162 coinciding with those needed to secure the common good).68 As with other (administrative, financial, military etc.) reforms initiated by von Haugwitz and Kaunitz during the 1740s and 1750s, largely in response to the Habsburg monar- chy’s mixed performance in the War of Austrian Succession (1740–48), the uni- versity reforms targeted privilege—more precisely, privilege that ran counter to the utilitarian calculus of efficiency—but not expertise. The meritocratic considerations that inspired these steps actually favored the Society of Jesus, which not only retained control over the faculties of theology and philosophy (under which mathematics, astronomy, and experimental physics were sorted) at the university but played a key role in providing such expertise in the two new Viennese institutions of higher learning, the Theresianum and the Orien- tal Academy. It would indeed have been a waste of resources to abandon Jesuit knowl- edge. The Jesuit professors of Vienna and other universities in the Habsburg monarchy were sufficiently competent to write textbooks (which they were required to do regularly by a 1753 decree), including one in physics that pre- sented the controversy of Cartesian and Newtonian positions in a cogent and accessible manner—similar, for instance, to the Dissertatio physica de motu corporum (Physical Dissertation on the Motion of Bodies, Trnava, 1753) by polymath Ferenc Kéri Borgia (1702–68). Kéri Borgia had previously been the first professor to systematically cultivate astronomy at the University of Trnava in the 1730s, to return there as rector in 1752, after serving a period of six years at the Jesuit college and thus the University of Vienna in various functions. These works obviously could not arise from rashly and newly gained knowl- edge, but from a confident use of discourses already available among Jesuits in the region, although difficult to bring into the public in a still ambivalent situ- ation. While there was an urge to publish up-to-date works by the state that was arising as the supervisory authority of universities, the papal prohibition of teaching Copernicanism issued to Galileo in 1616 formally remained in force until 1757, when it was lifted thanks to Boscovich’s efforts.69 Among many other 68 For the state as a coordinating mechanism of this kind, applied to Habsburg history (in an earlier period), see Karin J. MacHardy, War, Religion, and Court Language in Habsburg Austria (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 69 The manifestations of Jesuit reception of the new natural philosophy in Trnava are di- vided into two phases in Csaba Csapodi, “Newtonianizmus a nagyszombati jezsuita egye- temen,” Regnum 6 (1944–46): 59–68. The textbooks written by several Trnava professors up to around 1758 testify to extensive familiarity with Newton, but with a strong prefer- ence for Descartes, while by the 1760s Newton clearly prevailed. At that time, the fully Newtonian two-volume textbook of the Viennese Jesuit professor Karl Scherffer’s (1716– 83) Institutionum physicae […] (1752–53) was in use in Trnava, too. Cf. Csaba Csapodi, “Két