The Brill Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe omits to define either Catholicism or the Enlightenment. This is understandable as to do either would be fatal to the enterprise itself. The main problems with this useful compilation are its oxymoronic title and this refusal to define terms. However, the failure of so many people both in the eighteenth century and now to see that a ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ is a contradiction in terms is an historical phenomenon in itself of great significance and in need of investigation. Nevertheless, one cannot help but feel that this investigation would be better conducted by scholars who appreciated its paradoxical nature from the outset or at least understood why it might be seen in this light.
The problem of paradox and definition is admitted if not precisely met head on in Ulrich Lehner's introduction, which is clearly sympathetic to the idea of ‘Catholic Enlightenment’. Its study was, Lehner explains, impeded from the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth century by ‘intransigent Neo-Scholasticism’. He cites with approval those who include under the term ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ all who do not reject revelation and refuse to restrict it to those who were ‘obedient to the magisterial teachings’ and ‘embraced the singularity of the Catholic Church and of Christian revelation’. This definition of Catholicism would, we are told, ‘be insufficient because it denies the Catholicity of a number of important thinkers of the time who understood themselves as ardent Catholics despite their papal censoring or even excommunication’. While such a narrow definition of the faithful might have served in the glory days of intransigent Neo-Scholasticism; in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council it has been manifested that a very, very much wider understanding of the term must be countenanced. It is one that almost by definition defies definition. When Lehner tells us that the ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ was an anticipation of Vatican II and cites the dissolution of monasteries and the collapse in religious vocations in late eighteenth-century France and the Hapsburg Lands as signs of ‘renewal’, we know where we are. But Lehner's perspective is not uniformly adopted across the Companion. The unevenness of preconceptions behind the different sections is admitted by Lehner as a necessary side effect of the subject matter. He makes the interesting observation that it was the ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ which first created the phenomenon of laity privately suspecting their clergy of heresy and looking to Rome for reassurance over the heads of their priests and bishops. Certainly this has been a flourishing phenomenon in more recent times.
Of all the contributors to the Companion, only Richard Butterwick, the author of the chapter on Poland-Lithuania, comes near to a clear understanding of what does and does not constitute Catholicism, perhaps reflecting the more robust republican spirit of Polish Catholicism. It is refreshing to hear him frankly assert that the ‘chief sources of the Enlightenment derive from the anthropocentric and neo-Pagan aspects of the Renaissance and the anti-Trinitarian elements of the Protestant Reformation’, and it is notable that he is almost the only contributor to define his terms.
But the concept of Catholic Enlightenment is not wholly empty nor merely a term for fools or knaves. Catholicism is properly a reasonable faith. Other accounts of Christianity always rest upon some sort of fideism but the Catholic Church has never countenanced any true conflict between faith and reason. Doubtless the Enlightenment in general arose from, among other things, a huge loss of confidence in the Socratic philosophical tradition. The abandonment of a perennial philosophy precludes any stable meaning for the articles of faith. It therefore necessarily entails the abandonment of any role for the faith as a universal social norm and for the papacy as the guarantor of that norm.
Jeffrey D. Burson's chapter on France traces the way in which the need of Catholicism (even in this diluted form) for reasons in order to remain a visible and public body led post-Socratic Catholic thinkers to the eclectic adoption of philosophical novelties of increasingly Protestant provenance, as Descartes and Malebranche gave way to Newton and Locke. This enlightened Catholic approach (particularly associated with the Jesuits) pre-dated the more radical and logical move characteristic of the Enlightenment proper to eliminate divine positive law altogether as a source of civil law. When the two came into conflict the former lost. As the intransigent Neo-Scholastics would have told them they inevitably would. As Burson observes,’ Implicit in the late eighteenth century apologetics of the French Catholic Enlightenment … is a perilous concession to the governing paradigm of the Radical Enlightenment: that if the Church cannot be validated as morally progressive and necessary, it cannot be true’. As the end of man is a revealed truth and its hypothetical natural counterpart is not going to be identified correctly by a post-Socratic thinker, the Enlightenment is unlikely to agree with the Church about what is and is not morally progressive and necessary.
The Companion naturally ends with the Revolutionary epoch in which the impossibility of compromise between transient philosophies and Catholicism became too obvious for a ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ to survive. It is difficult to draw the line between those who maintained a merely external allegiance to Catholicism while adhering in private to some species of unbelief and those who on some level genuinely sought to reconcile the two. This difficulty is not confined to the eighteenth century and does not abolish the value of the study of both groups. It was not only in their eclecticism that the Jesuits prepared the way for catastrophe. The failure of the Holy See to condemn Molinism left an open wound in Tridentine Catholicism soon infected by Jansenism, which provided the Enlightenment proper with an effective means to divide and conquer the body of Christendom. This manoeuvre is traced across each section by all the contributors.
The organisation of the Companion on the basis of ‘nations’ is appropriate, as an invariable effect of the ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ was to weaken the adherence of particular churches to Rome and subject them to the temporal power. The one truly international element in the phenomenon (other than the abandonment of scholastic reason) was Jansenism. As the contributors often observe, there was nothing per se in the doctrine of limited atonement to appeal to the devotees of the Enlightenment other than that it had been condemned by Rome and therefore accidentally went hand in hand with a weakening of magisterial authority and papal jurisdiction.
The one element of the Enlightenment which need not have entailed conflict with Catholicism is the rigorous application of scholarly methods of research to historical matters such as patrology or hagiography, as well as the critical examination of potentially excessive popular piety. Evergton Sales Souza, in his section on Portugal, tries to make this the essence of Catholic Enlightenment. Defined in this way the concept is acceptable from a Catholic perspective, but the degree to which it can really be assimilated to the Enlightenment becomes questionable. The attempt of Lehner to make a desire to implement Trent the property of Enlightened Catholics is also unconvincing. Even with historical rigour there are perils, for the core of theology is not inductive but deductive and blanket application of empirical reasoning to the Queen of Sciences is clearly inappropriate and liable to reduce her to reflection on religious experience or textual criticism. Furthermore, which practices might be defined as ‘superstition’ varies according to what the observer defines as ‘reason’. Theism will accept vastly more than deism and will tolerate infinitely more than atheism. The concept of superstition is therefore more often than not a proxy for more general metaphysical commitments.
The eighteenth century was a bad century. So bad was the eighteenth century that when they dissolved the Jesuits it was a bad thing. If you would seek to understand this peculiarity, the Brill Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe will provide you with only limited illumination, but it may show you where to start looking. With this caution in mind the Companion is a helpful entry point to a dismal but important topic and epoch. The bibliographies and notes are extensive and its organisation into national chapters (it deals only with officially Catholic countries) makes it an excellent place to begin further reading in this area.
