More than a century ago, the German Catholic historian Sebastian Merkle made the case for a specifically Catholic engagement with the Enlightenment.Footnote ¹ His audience was largely Protestant academics, who assumed that Protestantism and modernity went hand in hand. But Merkle also refuted wholesale condemnations of the Enlightenment by conservative Catholics, who blamed the movement for the ills that had beset the Church since the French Revolution and which were at the root of the liberal attack on Catholicism up through the Kulturkampf. Merkle insisted that a moderate and constructive Catholic Enlightenment had embraced some aspects of modernity, and that it was important to acknowledge this historical reality in order to fully bring the Church into the modern age.

Two world wars and the Second Vatican Council have utterly transformed both the German and the Catholic contexts in which Merkle first made his case. And in practical terms, we now know so much more about eighteenth-century Catholicism, as well as about the social and religious contexts of the Enlightenment, than Merkle could have anticipated. Meanwhile, the “Catholic Enlightenment” itself has become a bona fide area of historical research with many important studies having been conducted under its aegis. The Catholic Enlightenment was not just a German affair, but even late into the twentieth century, scholars in France and Italy employed the terms Aufklärung catholique and Aufklärung cattolica, respectively, in deference to the German context out of which the term originated.Footnote ²

A spate of recent works on the Catholic Enlightenment provides the opportunity to consider how far we, as scholars, have come, but also to reconsider and possibly to redraw the boundaries of the Catholic Enlightenment. The term has been used to challenge prevailing assumptions, serving as a useful heuristic for reassessing the place of Catholicism in the eighteenth century. Yet as fruitful as the concept has been for fostering research, some of the same issues Merkle faced about determining the boundaries between confessional allegiance and critical historical research remain. Historians writing about the Catholic Enlightenment continue to find themselves between the poles of Church history and profane history, between theological and secular commitments. Questions of modernization have always been at the root of conceptions of Catholic Enlightenment historiography, and historians writing today would do well to explicitly acknowledge whether they are writing a Church history that serves as an apology for Catholic modernity, or a more distanced, historically grounded account of the contexts surrounding and the factors motivating the actions of Catholics in the Age of Enlightenment.

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Perhaps no one writing in English knows more about eighteenth-century Catholicism than Ulrich Lehner. His Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement offers a comprehensive account of Catholic reform movements across Europe and its overseas territories in the eighteenth century. Lehner addresses Catholicism's geographic and linguistic diversity, as well as such topics as Catholic women and the Enlightenment; new views of the devil, demons, saints, and sainthood; and the problem of slavery. Lehner is at his best when he covers issues of liturgical reform and eighteenth-century theology, as he does in his discussion of the historian and priest Ludovico Muratori (1672–1750), or in his detailed discussion of the process of determining sainthood. The principal theme of this book is that “Catholic Enlighteners had a sincere wish for a reform of the church,” even if the precise mission of the Church was debated, including whether its focus should be on worldly improvement or the faith itself. Lehner writes, “All of the Enlighteners maintained some continuity with the Catholic tradition; none of them completely rejected past doctors of the church, doctrines, or councils” (45). But, he notes, the desire for reform and intellectual borrowing from the contemporary culture was not specific to the Catholic Enlightenment and can instead be found in almost all Catholic reform movements across time.

Although this book is certainly a welcome attempt at a synthetic treatment of the “Catholic Enlightenment,” it unwittingly shows just how unstable that concept is. At a little over two hundred pages, the book does not pretend to offer a thorough rendering of every major aspect of global Catholicism in the eighteenth century, and it would be unreasonable to expect such a vision. However, as an attempt to provide conceptual clarity, the book falls short. While there is much interesting detail in the book, it also presents three major stumbling blocks to a coherent vision of the Catholic Enlightenment. These are worth considering at some length because they can inform further discussion about the topic.

The first issue has to do with the relationship between the Church and Catholicism. Lehner has identified an essential question of any historical work about Catholicism, namely who speaks for it and how to address who is in or out of the fold. Any work on the history of Catholicism and the Catholic Church in a time of upheaval must face the question whether “Catholicism” was identical with the Church, and, if so, whether the Church should be understood in a narrow sense as limited to the Pope and the hierarchy, or in its broadest sense as encompassing all the “people of God.” Lehner writes that, while neglect of the Catholic Enlightenment is mainly rooted in the assumed antagonism of religion and Enlightenment, a “great deal of the blame falls on the church” itself. Until the Second Vatican Council, the Church hierarchy vigorously rejected any positive engagement with the Enlightenment and its legacy, but Catholicism was much broader than its institutional apparatus. Lehner acknowledges historians such as R. R. Palmer and Bernard Plongeron, who insisted in the middle of the twentieth century that Catholicism was not limited to the papacy and the Church hierarchy. However, he observes, those earlier insistences did not take root.Footnote ³ But while Lehner nods to the question of who constitutes the Church, he does not thematize it in any consistent or methodical way (3).

The book also leaves unanswered the question whether the Catholic Enlightenment represents a historical epoch bounded in time to the eighteenth century, or a set of ideals and aspirations that stretch temporally forward and backward alike. Lehner characterizes the main agenda of “Catholic Enlighteners” as twofold: “to use the newest achievements of philosophy and science to defend the essential dogmas of Catholic Christianity and … to reconcile Catholicism with modern culture” (7). However, his definition of Catholic Enlightenment poses some methodological problems. He characterizes “Catholic Enlighteners” as committed to certain fundamental beliefs about the Church and its doctrines. However, whether those doctrines are historically bounded or transhistorical ideals remains unclear. In essence, his work confuses history and philosophy or, more to the point, history and theology. To avoid the admixture of metahistorical categories to history, one must be clear which story one is telling: an apologetic story for later twentieth-century Catholicism or a historically grounded explanation of how people in the past sought to effect change within the realm of the practice of Catholicism. Lehner's book claims to offer the latter, but his efforts at apology overwhelm this goal.

A second, related, problem stems from Lehner's desire to present the Catholic Enlightenment as a unified global movement, which leads him to downplay differences between antagonistic groups within the Church. He touches on a wide variety of reforming movements and ideas, including state-sponsored suppression of the Jesuits, biblical studies, and Jansenist-inspired devotional reforms, which he acknowledges could often be quite antagonistic. For Lehner, both Jesuits and Jansenists can be put on the Enlightenment ledger, the Jesuits for supporting a positive theological anthropology that left an opening for natural law and human reason, and French Jansenism for inspiring a revival of Gallicanism and a simplified style of worship. Lehner resolves these contradictions by insisting that many eighteenth-century reforming programs and ideas were rooted deep in Catholic tradition, which he traces back to late medieval movements and the Council of Trent (46). This emphasis on the reform movements as a “reprise” of Trent has been made elsewhere, notably by Peter Hersche, who links it to the “Innocentian Turn” of the late seventeenth century under the papacies of Innocent XI (r. 1676–89) and Innocent XII (r. 1691–1700), which resulted in a renewed push for pastoral reform and the abolition of papal nepotism.Footnote ⁴ However, while linking eighteenth-century reforms back to Trent enables all Catholic groups to find a common heritage, such a comprehensive characterization dilutes the concept of Catholic Enlightenment and obscures any distinctive eighteenth-century contribution to Catholicism's development.

A final difficulty with Lehner's account is the way in which it flattens the complexities of the Enlightenment writ large, creating historiographical straw men against which Catholic apologies are offered, and at the same time obscuring interactions between Catholic reform and the larger culture. For example, a long chapter on women and the Catholic Enlightenment ends by noting how the paucity of secondary literature on the topic hinders a comprehensive view. Yet Lehner still tries to provide one, and the result is not very coherent. While he justifiably wants to redeem early modern Catholicism from some of the worst one-sided condemnations of its attitude toward women, his reliance on caricature seriously undermines his argument. Against the “repeated accusations”—he does not cite particulars—that Catholicism “turns women into birthing machines and expects couples to have as many children as possible,” Lehner writes that in fact “it is the Enlightenment that can be charged with having turned women into ‘breeders’” (92). Lehner wants to offer a positive account of Catholic teachings on marriage and the family, reaching back to the Council of Trent and St Francis de Sales's 1609 Introduction to the Devout Life. Yet he reductively polarizes Catholic and secular Enlightenments, mischaracterizing the secular Enlightenment as focused exclusively on population growth and ignoring the range of views about women and the family that both the moderate and the radical Enlightenment encompassed. Likewise, Lehner points to such figures as the moral theologian and founder of the Redemptorist order Alphonse of Liguori (1696–1787) as leading the way to the Catholic engagement with poverty. Yet in condemning “secular Enlighteners [who] argued for workhouses” and harsh punishments, he willfully ignores key figures such as Cesare Beccaria, the most significant writer on penal reform in the eighteenth century (179).

A similar reliance on false dichotomies is apparent in a chapter on Catholicism in European overseas territories. Here and throughout this book, Lehner conflates Catholic Enlightenment with any moderately progressive or modern author who happens to be a cleric or simply Catholic. In his discussion of missionaries in the Americas, China, and India, Lehner addresses the ways in which Catholic missionary activity intersected with the Enlightenment. He rightly underscores how the international nature of the Church meant that pushes for reform in education and science—especially those that circulated among religious orders—necessarily introduced a cosmopolitan character to the movement. He contrasts the cultural sensitivity of the South American Jesuits to the attitudes of secular “Enlighteners,” for whom “cultural and ethnic diversity were without value,” a comment which reflects outmoded and reductionist views of the Enlightenment (117).Footnote ⁵ In Latin America, Lehner casts the Jesuits in a positive light because of their appreciation and even protection of indigenous peoples and cultures. Similarly, in the case of the Malabar and Chinese rites, he praises them for their openness to non-Christian ritual.Footnote ⁶ His one-sided account of Jesuit progressivism in Latin America oversimplifies the society's complex relationship with the Catholic Enlightenment. In Europe, after all, the Jesuits were the main opponents of most ecclesiastical reforms, resulting in a wave of attacks, starting with expulsions in 1759 and culminating with the suppression of the society in 1773. Nowhere in the book does Lehner consistently acknowledge how the Jesuits could display both progressive and conservative tendencies at the same time.

If the monographic attempt to delineate a stable concept of the Catholic Enlightenment instead reveals its weaknesses, does a volume offering twenty-one biographical sketches move us any closer to a resolution? Jeffrey Burson and Ulrich Lehner's Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History contains a set of discrete studies of individual Catholic figures from the Iberian Peninsula to Poland. Each of the twenty-one authors examines a different aspect of Catholicism in the eighteenth century, some even avoiding the label “Catholic Enlightenment” completely. In his introduction to the volume, Burson outlines a concise history of the term, noting (as do most others) how the debate originating in Merkle's 1908 address to the Protestant-dominated German historical congress was long captive to confessional politics. The story is then carried forward to show the ways in which the spirit of Vatican II (1962–5) propelled a reconsideration of the Catholic past, notably in the work of Bernard Plongeron.Footnote ⁷ Burson notes that despite a growing body of scholarship on the topic, “a single taxonomy for a monolithic ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ movement is, at least on the surface of things, more elusive than ever” (9). Nonetheless he proposes the usefulness of the specific term “Catholic Enlightenment” beyond those of “Enlightenment Christianity,” “Reform Catholicism,” and “Religious Enlightenment,” for three major reasons.

The first is apologetic: to counteract the assumption that Catholicism is anti-Enlightenment in all cases and at all times. The second reason is that, while recent research has rightfully shown the influence of Jansenism and Gallicanism on reform Catholicism, we continue to overlook the fact that other groups, such as Sorbonne theologians, Jesuits, Benedictines, and Lazarists, “all participated in their own networks and regional variations of Catholic Enlightenment.” Burson does not want to restrict the “impetus for Catholic Reform” to one “brand of Catholic Enlightenment” in order to allow for a fuller description of the world of eighteenth-century Catholic discourse. A persistent question, however, is whether this approach allows the term to have any distinctive coherence or whether it is similarly shorthand for the more generalized engagement of Catholic intellectuals with the debates and issues of their own time. Third, then, Burson argues that if we were to limit ourselves to David Sorkin's preferred term, “Religious Enlightenment,” we would risk losing what is specific about Catholic discourse. What we would gain in the comparative view, we would lose in understanding the “evolution of Catholicism throughout the eighteenth century” (10–11).Footnote ⁸

Acknowledging the difficulties of a unitary definition, Burson proposes a few core elements drawn from the various contributors to the volume: the Catholic Enlightenment is defined “both as a style and discursive field … and as part of a broader Enlightenment process.” What unites it “is the very same quality that remains definitive of the unitary Enlightenment itself … a unity of style and tone … referred to as the taste for ‘sensibility,’ and a quest for moral improvements and happiness.” The Catholic strand also partakes of the Enlightenment's new sociability, and an ethos that “valorized practical improvement of humanity, education, and social reform,” anchored “in the bedrock of a more historicized, philosophical, and spiritual quest for the fundamental nature of humankind insofar as knowable in global perspective.” But the Catholic Enlightenment is also portrayed as part of the larger “transnational process characterized by secular and religious motives and implications, and by which a constantly evolving series of movements dynamically intersect and dialectically constitute one another,” leaving the reader to wonder if anything that happened in eighteenth-century intellectual history is possibly left out. Burson does, however, point to one distinguishing feature: “We additionally understand Catholic Enlightenment as appertaining to any eighteenth-century writer whose work considered the moral vitality of a reformed Catholic Church to be fundamental to the Enlightenment pursuit of happiness and social justice” (12–14). This definition seems to be the most useful of those he suggests because it focuses on the intentions and language of the historical actors themselves. Yet it still raises the question whether it makes “Catholic” a functional historiographical concept.

Burson and Lehner's volume may be profitably employed by those looking for an overview of Catholics’ engagement with the larger culture in the eighteenth century. Still, Burson's admission that the focus on biography may be the volume's “Achilles’ heel” rings true. Organizing around biography enables the volume to hold together without any strict thematic or systematic definition of Catholic Enlightenment. But it may well have proved the point that such a concept is not very productive other than to serve as an organizing principle for a set of discrete studies. Most of those individual studies are quite good, even if there are a few questionable inclusions (such as Joseph de Maistre, who, if anything, was a key figure of the Counter-Enlightenment) and exclusions. If a case for Hugues-Félicité de Lamennais, a progenitor of liberal Catholicism in the nineteenth century, can be made an “heir” of the Catholic Enlightenment, why not also include Johann Michael Sailer or Ignaz Heinrich von Wessenberg, two German churchmen who harvested the fruits of reform Catholicism in the nineteenth century?

Several contributors, such as Ritchie Robertson, explicitly address the question of the boundaries of Catholicism. He notes that the Austrian satirist Johann Pezzl, while remaining in the Catholic Church, “undoubtedly belongs on the outside left” in his religious politics (243). Likewise, Mario Rosa's account of Pope Benedict XIV (r. 1740–58) tackles the problems with the mythology of the “Enlightenment Pope” that began soon after his death and continues to this day. While Benedict did indeed engage a significant number of reforms and assimilate mainstream Enlightenment thought, his papacy began a retrenchment after 1750. While in some areas Benedict XIV demonstrated more tolerance to Jews, in others he reconfirmed intolerant Church policies (56–7). Rosa's observations about the formation of Benedict's legacy touch on the central historiographical problem of Catholic modernization and value judgments. “Progressive reforms” in the eighteenth century were often pushed by those seeking a morally rigorist agenda that would seem quite alien to those today otherwise cheering eighteenth-century “reformers.” Furthermore, defenders of the conservative order often embraced a more positive anthropology that would be at home in the late twentieth-century Church. Lehner's monograph and Burson and Lehner's biographical compendium represent two different ways of presenting a synthetic account of the Catholic Enlightenment. However, both demonstrate the limitations of the concept more than the authors intended.

By contrast, yet another study, this one by an art historian and limited to eighteenth-century Rome, shows how “Catholic Enlightenment” can be useful when carefully delimited or when employed as an opening gambit in a historiographical discussion. In his Visual Culture of the Catholic Enlightenment, Christopher Johns largely equates the Catholic Enlightenment with Benedict XIV's papacy, as well as the reforms that preceded it, notably the Tridentine “reprise” and the official abolition of nepotism under Innocent XII in 1692. Johns's main aim is to explore the “visual culture” of eighteenth-century Rome, including painting, architecture, public institutions, and the patronage behind them. According to Johns, the Catholic Enlightenment is the larger context that helps explain this body of visual culture, but he also shows how various reforming impulses shaped cultural production. Reforms of the canonization process and calls for a simplified devotion lay behind the imagery of much eighteenth-century Roman artistic production. For example, he shows how the changed emphasis on the nature of sainthood meant that depictions of saints in general moved away from the miraculous and instead pointed to the saint's “heroic virtue.” “Catholic Enlightenment popes,” Johns writes, “worked hard to promote exemplars demonstrably useful to the modern world” (125), and thus downplayed or even ignored the visions and miraculous activities that had been the hallmark of baroque sainthood in the visual art they sponsored. Two chapters on patrimony focus largely on the Capitoline Museum (opened to the public by Clement XII in 1734), and its expansion under two subsequent popes, Benedict XIV and Clement XIII. In these chapters, Johns focuses on the popes as rulers partaking in the larger European interest in classical art in the eighteenth century.

The book demonstrates a tendency to identify Catholic Enlightenment with a set of practical reforms and practices. A chapter on “administration and polite conversation,” for example, looks at papal use of the Quirinal Palace, with a detailed discussion of Benedict XIV's Caffeaus—a pavilion in the Quirinal gardens that served as a space for social interaction but also for receptions of foreign leaders. Johns links the gardens to European coffee-house culture and sociability, noting that the space was “a site where a pope could appear more human and relate humanely to visitors” and thus stood as a “monument to Benedict XIV's moderation and affability” and enhanced his reputation in “progressive European circles” as well as among Protestants. Johns concludes that the Caffeaus served as a “metaphor for the middle ground occupied by enlightened Catholic thinking” (237). He also clearly delineates an end to the Catholic Enlightenment with the papacy's “loss of control over reform” due to outside political events that overtook the process of change by mid-century (319). But Johns's view also implies a top-down idea of the Catholic Enlightenment as driven by the papacy and the hierarchy. Focusing on Rome and the Papal State—where the Church and the state were essentially identical—elides the central problematic of every other Catholic reform movement, namely the tug-of-war over issues of ecclesiastical finance and taxation, the limits of canon law, struggles over education, the status of monastic foundations, mortmain, and the determination of the public good.

It may be wondered whether Johns buys too much into the “myth”—to use Mario Rosa's aforementioned term—of Benedict XIV. But while his approach is not conceptually rigorous, it is not fatal to the book, given that these ideas are not the main focus. Because Johns seeks to elaborate the context of a visual culture, and also to show how that visual culture was employed to further reforms, his temporally limited application of concept of “Catholic Enlightenment” effectively signals a set of issues without attempting an overarching definition.

A very different use of Catholic Enlightenment as a conceptual tool is to be found in Thomas Wallnig's Critical Monks: The German Benedictines, 1680–1740. A deliberate response to Lehner's Enlightened Monks of 2011,Footnote ⁹ Wallnig deconstructs the myth that has emerged in the scholarly literature that a cohort of critical German Benedictine monks in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries paved the way for the subsequent flowering of the Catholic Enlightenment. Wallnig also weaves an institutional history of the German Benedictines with methodological reflection throughout his book. For example, the first chapter discusses the “layers” of periodization, geography, cultures of knowledge, and demography that comprise the interpretational matrix in which one could place Benedictine monks. The next chapter explores the competing interpretational contexts in which Benedictine histories have been told in twentieth-century scholarship. The third chapter offers a detailed account of the institutional nature of Benedictine scholarship. He discusses the circulation of knowledge in Benedictine congregations and academies, the conditions of state and ecclesiastical patronage and censorship, and Benedictine interactions with Protestants scholars and the public sphere. The remainder of the book covers “tropes and metaphors of monastic knowledge” such as reform, criticism and scholasticism (159). He concludes by analyzing four major intellectual fields in which German Benedictine monks were active: philosophy, history and criticism, canon law, and theology.

Wallnig acknowledges that German Benedictines’ critical view of the past and their own history played a vital role in the religious Enlightenment. But he shifts the inquiry to the Benedictines’ self-understanding as part of a “case study [of] how modernist narratives are crafted and passed on” (ix). The myth of the modernizing Benedictines became especially powerful in the wake of the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773. Some Benedictines were able to parlay the new intellectual and institutional opening within the Catholic intellectual and educational world into a place in the narrative of Catholic engagement with the “modern” world. Wallnig successfully shows that the idea of a coherent “Benedictine” Enlightenment (or pre-Enlightenment) was very much a later historical construction. He writes of “the failed attempt of early modern ecclesiastical scholarship to maintain interpretational control over its own past, safeguarding its own legitimacy solely by dressing it in the tropes and epistemologies of what would later become modernity” (ix). The Benedictines were thus left “in a historiographical no man's land between intellectual history, political history, and ecclesiastical history” (ix).

One of the most useful and interesting aspects of this book is its clear delineation of the institutional contexts in which Benedictine monks worked and lived. Wallnig makes the important point that the organization of the Order of Saint Benedict was very different from that of the Jesuits and the mendicant orders, and that this institutional difference was of major importance for scholarly and monastic life. It was not an order in the canonical sense, a legal status that dates only to 1883. His account of the formation of congregations emphasizes how the various relationships among the French, German, and Austrian Benedictines shaped the possibilities and opportunities available to various scholar monks in his story. Similarly, Wallnig sheds new light on the role of scholarship within the Church and the various ecclesiastical configurations and rivalries that shaped it. He also discusses the monks’ engagement with German Protestant scholars and their role in the republic of letters. He convincingly argues that the ecclesiastical and geographic matrix within which the German Benedictines operated shaped the fields they studied, particularly with regard to philosophy, history, and law.

Above all, Wallnig shows how the subsequent placement of the Benedictines in the story of the Enlightenment hinged on their role in modernizing narratives. The Benedictines can be regarded as integral to the Enlightenment in the sense of “an academic historiography that … considers early modern Benedictine scholarship,” such as the source-critical method of Jean Mabillon (1632–1707) and the congregation of St Maur “among its origin myths of both source positivism and historicity” (xi). But this influence on secular Enlightenment historical research only touches on part of what the Benedictines thought they were doing. Forgotten in the modernizing narratives of the later eighteenth century was the fact that the Benedictines, who were engaged in source-critical scholarship at the end of the seventeenth century, were also deeply involved in an intense internal debate about the reform of monastic institutions and a return to asceticism, principles that do not align with the Enlightenment's valuation of progress and practical reform.

Like most other scholars, Wallnig points to Merkle's 1908 speech, and later book, on the Catholic “evaluation” of the Enlightenment as the origin not only of research on the Catholic Enlightenment but also of the very concept itself. Importantly, Wallnig notes that “Merkle's is a ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ that has a clearly defined Protestant counterpart, not an atheist or deist one” (58). This seems a vital point that is frequently lost in the usual nod to Merkle. It is not that “Catholic” Enlightenment is opposed to irreligion, but that it was, at least in German states, an answer to the pervasive conviction in late Wilhelmine culture that Protestantism had in one form or another given birth to modern culture, and that the Enlightenment, in Ernst Troeltsch's words, was the “origin and foundation of the actual modern period of European culture and history in opposition to the ecclesiastical and theological culture that had hitherto reigned.”Footnote ¹⁰ Troeltsch's Enlightenment left no room for miracles; the only question was how to fit modern Protestantism into that story. Wallnig insists that the German context of the katholische Aufklärung was key. In France, Mabillon's remains were moved next to those of Descartes in the church of St Germain-des-Prés in 1819. The Benedictine congregation of St Maur was thus integrated into a French story of the Enlightenment already in the early nineteenth century. Merkle, for his part, was struggling to bring the German Catholics into a modernity that was assumed, distinctively in Germany, to be Protestant (41).

The question of modernity and its historiography informs Wallnig's approach throughout. He simultaneously presents a secular historical account of the place of eighteenth-century Benedictine scholars in the emergence of the Enlightenment, all the while questioning the very basis for such a story. Who is the “we” that is interested in the history of the early modern Benedictines, Wallnig asks. “Is it the Church, or a part of it—an imagined community treating epistemic virtues as moral principle? Or is it the range of academic areas of secular society, careful not to transgress the fragile line between method and belief?” (242). This is a reflection, writ large, which applies to all aspects of scholarship on the Catholic Enlightenment. Should we be writing from the standpoint of the Church as it is (or should) be today, insofar as it embodies some projected eternal ideal? Or should we strive to write historically grounded and impartial accounts of what people in the past thought they were doing, and the contexts in which their actions and thoughts became possible? Both are valid approaches—Church history and profane history, in short—but it is essential that scholars make their methodology clear. Wallnig concludes his book by exhorting scholars to distinguish between the Enlightenment as a period and as a project; that is, between “a distinct historical period” and “the set of values and practices presumably ruling it” (247–8).

Historians’ confusion between values and historical period motivates the very structure of Vincenzo Ferrone's The Enlightenment: History of an Idea. Based on a set of lectures given at the Collège de France and originally published in Italian in 2010, Ferrone's The Enlightenment does not address the topic of the Catholic Enlightenment in the same way as do the other volumes reviewed here. Indeed, Ferrone expresses his doubts about the usefulness of Catholic Enlightenment as a historiographical category (182 n. 27). Nevertheless, the concept of the Catholic Enlightenment plays a pivotal role in his book as the unfortunate outcome of the distorted philosophical interpretation of the Enlightenment originating in German philosophy. The origin of this distortion, according to Ferrone, goes back to the famous eighteenth-century debate about the meaning of Aufklärung itself. Ferrone employs the metaphor of the Centaur (half-man, half-beast) to characterize “the way in which philosophers in thinking of the Enlightenment mix together history and philosophy” (xv). By removing the Enlightenment from its historical context, the philosopher's version subsequently blamed the Enlightenment for the dark sides of modernity, starting with the Terror and wars of the French Revolution and culminating in technological oppression and totalitarianism.

The first part of Ferrone's book addresses the “philosopher's Enlightenment,” outlining the evolution of this postmodern conception of the Enlightenment. His story is largely a march through German intellectual history—with chapters on Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Horkheimer, Adorno, and also Foucault. The final chapter in this narrative of how philosophers created this postmodern “Centaur” runs from the Cassier–Heidegger debate of 1929 to Romano Guardini (1885–1968, a German priest of Italian background) and Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI). These latter two Catholic thinkers connected the philosophical critique of the Enlightenment to a theological condemnation of humanity's excessive rationalism and alienation from God. The second half of the book advocates for a return to “the historians’” Enlightenment, making the case for the Enlightenment as a cultural revolution firmly grounded in the context of the Ancien Régime. Ferrone focuses on the role of intellectuals, who propagated a modern humanism and who made the Enlightenment a “complex laboratory for modernity” that was rooted in its historical context (77). Recovering that social-historical context is key toward moving beyond distorted philosophical and theological interpretations of the Enlightenment, Ferrone insists.

The version of the Catholic Enlightenment that Ferrone disputes is essentially that of Joseph Ratzinger, which is notable, Ferrone says, for its “intellectual complexity and sophistication” (54) as much as for the way in which it “blithely manipulate[es] historical memory” (166). In Ferrone's account, Ratzinger's view of the Enlightenment had been in the air since Vatican II, but went back to interwar French Catholic circles and to Romano Guardini. The Catholic Church, in Ferrone's view, has “embraced the Centaur” in that it acknowledges the “historical merits of the Enlightenment,” such as the creation of lay culture and the separation of Church and state. But it also has condemned the Enlightenment as a “dangerous ‘dead dog’ in Western culture,” with direct responsibility for totalitarianism and other evils (53).Footnote ¹¹

Ferrone's view of the Catholic Enlightenment is unnecessarily harsh and also too tied to the Italian context, where the anticlerical edges are sharper, and where the prime opponent is Ratzinger's “neo-Bellarminian” notion of the Church's indirect power.Footnote ¹² Nonetheless, Ferrone's larger point holds true: that one must distinguish between history and philosophy, history and church history. So while Ferrone's book is not exclusively about the Catholic Enlightenment, his insights about the mingling of history and philosophy are useful in assessing totalizing narratives such as Lehner's. And in a long afterword to the English translation, Ferrone subjects Jonathan Israel's Spinozistic Enlightenment to the same critique. While Israel's Enlightenment could not be farther from that of Joseph Ratzinger's, Ferrone sees the same focus on core doctrines—in the latter case “atheistic materialism, Spinoza's rationalistic monism, and political radicalism”—as ignoring the complexity of the process and historical context of the Enlightenment (165).Footnote ¹³ No doubt sympathetic to Israel's preference for secular modernity, Ferrone nonetheless sees Israel's insistence on Spinozistic materialism as no less an embrace of a dogmatic Centaur.

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All this brings us back to the opening question of just how useful “Catholic Enlightenment” is as a framework for historical analysis. It helps to see the concept within the larger trends of Enlightenment studies in general over the last few decades. One major strain has been to emphasize a plurality of Enlightenments and to focus on national or regional contexts. This approach has resulted in discrete studies dedicated to specific contexts, local concerns, and reform movements, with a concentration on practices, communication strategies, and notions of “politeness.” J. G. A. Pocock's work offers the best example of studies in this realm, starting with his seminal article on “clergy and commerce” and crowned by his volumes on Edward Gibbon.Footnote ¹⁴ However, there has also been a revived insistence by some on a unitary view of a transnational Enlightenment, foremost among them John Robertson, with his focus on political economy, and Israel, with his emphasis on Spinozism and radical materialism.Footnote ¹⁵ The historiography of the Catholic Enlightenment, as with the literature on the religious Enlightenment in general, has largely benefited from the “plural” approach to the Enlightenment.

However, because the Catholic Church is a transnational institution par excellence, it also seems possible to make a claim for a unitary Catholic Enlightenment in ways that do not apply even to the Protestant or Jewish Enlightenments. Fragmentation and diversity were characteristic of Protestantism. Likewise, the geographical and linguistic diversity of Jewish culture does not lend itself to uniform accounts of a centralized Jewish Enlightenment. The Catholic Church presents a temptation to the historian to assume an outcome that was the result of a historical process—namely the rise of uniformity in the Catholic Church with the victory of ultramontanism over national and regional manifestations of Catholicism. These processes themselves were part of the story of eighteenth-century Catholicism, as Catholic monarchs throughout the period sought to increase their authority over clergy and education, and to tax, when not outright appropriate, land and property in the hands of religious orders and foundations, often with the support of Catholic reformers. After the French Revolution, those Catholic reformers were disparaged by the Church hierarchy, and with them much of the legacy of the Catholic Enlightenment. In the post-Revolutionary period, a far more uniform and centrally controlled Church emerged, which replaced the more dispersed sense of religious authority within eighteenth-century Catholicism.

In writing histories of this earlier period, one must avoid the temptation to project the purported unity of the modern Catholic Church back onto earlier developments, when the nature of Catholicism and the definition of the Church were shifting and actively contested. Until Lehner's Catholic Enlightenment, there has been no serious attempt at a global synthesis of the topic, and it remains to be seen whether the shortcomings of the book are a result of his choices and formulations or because such a conceptual synthesis is just not possible because of the diversity of Catholicism in the Old Regime. In making a definitive assertion about the nature of the Catholic Enlightenment, one must also make a claim about what is or is not truly Catholic—a question better left to a theologian than to a profane historian.