The Enlightenment is not what it used to be. Hackneyed images of a few anti-clerical Frenchmen dominating the era’s intellectual life have been replaced by more nuanced historical portrayals. Central to this sea change is the realisation that Catholic thinkers made vital contributions to philosophy, science and countless other disciplines. They admired Newton, they saw potential in Locke and, later on, some of them even found time for Kant. Far from rejecting the era’s obsessions, some Catholics used them to bolster their beliefs, seeking a “balanced relationship between reason and faith”.
Lest we forget, the first dedicated experimental physics department was established by Benedictines at the University of Salzburg in the 1740s. One of the most provocative and passionate defences of women’s rights was published by the Spanish monk Benito Feijoo in 1726.
And where did the era’s fascination with all things Chinese originate? Largely from the reports of Jesuit missionaries.
Ulrich Lehner has done as much as anyone to explore the contours of this Catholic variant of Enlightenment. His analysis does have some drawbacks, however. One could easily gain the impression that the only worthwhile 18th-century Catholics were those who embraced Enlightenment ideals and that all the others were hopeless obscurantists.
Lehner demonstrates, with great skill, how some Catholics advocated undeniably positive causes – toleration, the condemnation of slavery, the rejection of an outmoded Aristotelian scientific paradigm – but not everything about the Enlightenment or its legacy was quite so rosy. Other Catholics recognised this.
Lehner is a firm believer in modernity and something called “progress”, so he mourns the premature demise of the Catholic Enlightenment in the late 18th century. He seems, at times, to suggest that nothing much of value emerged within the Catholic intellectual tradition between 1789 and Vatican II – rather a harsh judgment. Sometimes it was acceptable to be counter-cultural and query the Enlightenment’s less appealing nostrums. It still is.
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