A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Brill's commitment to publishing a series of reference books and handbooks on intellectual and religious life of Europe is to be praised, and this volume of heavily footnoted essays with extensive bibliographies will be particularly useful.The best aspect of this volume is its open struggle with its title term: Enlightenment. Ulrich Lehner in his excellent introduction is first to point out that term is slippery. This volume of essays, he notes, is a companion not a manual . What essays make clear in their own ways is that distinctively Catholic thinkers were engaged in a multiplicity of negotiations with exuberant rationality, Baroque spirituality, political philosophies concerning centralization of power, and moral philosophies of varying degrees of laxity and rigor. The essays emphasize particular negotiations of individuals and religious orders. At physical center of book is Mario Rosa's depiction of mediation skills of Pope Benedict XIV who was able to open spaces for Christian tradition and apologetics to be enriched by the powerful flow of new culture of (227). However, most of book is not about popes and papal pronouncements. Writing about Benito Jeronimo Feijoo in Spain, Andrea Smidt notes pervasive issue for enlightened Catholics was to avoid extremes of blind belief and obstinate unbelief (418). Tensions between tendencies of Jansenists and Jesuits play a variety of roles in most of essays. In France, Jeffrey Burson describes psychological and cultural tensions between optimism about moral progress and more pessimistic social reformism of Jansenist form of an Catholic (65). Harm Klueting describes inability of Austrian Jansenism to remain viable within moderate Catholic Enlightenment as it was co-opted by politics and Protestantism after Jesuits were repressed. In most of these essays and Jansenist relationship to centralized politics of different countries affects way each promoted regional versions of enlightened Catholicism.Evident in all essays is a Catholic eclecticism that undermines old reference-book traditions of hard categories and simple definitions. Jeffrey Burson, for example, writes of a Jesuit Synthesis that was sculpted and refined in various forms by Claude Buffier and Rene-Joseph Tournemine (79). This synthesis responded to radical statements in Spinoza and Descartes while adapting Malebranche and Descartes to Aquinas by way of Locke (79-80). This kind cut-and-paste thinking was usually regional and ephemeral. It responded to specific needs at specific times, usually supporting specific political and ecclesiastical situations. Andrea Smidt describes predominance in Spain of a particular Spanish Jansenism, rooted in humanist, Erasmian, episcopalist, and Augustinian traditions peculiar to Spain. Michael Printy writes about rival Catholic enlightenments in Holy Roman Empire that were not simply manifestations of anti-clerical or anti-religious ideas, but rather, the culmination of several generations of pious renewal and revival (173). …