Catholic Enlightenment

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The term Catholic Enlightenment refers to a heterogeneous phenomenon in Ancien Régime Europe and Latin America. It stands for the church policy pursued by a Catholic enlightened monarch and/or his ministers as well as for a reform movement within the Roman Catholic clergy to find answers to the ever-growing secularism of that period: In contrast to the zeitgeisty rationalism, which in its pure form rejects revelation as contrary to reason, Catholic Enlightenment is characterised by the attempt of reform-oriented parts of the church to counter the onrush of mainstream Enlightenment. They endeavoured to reconcile the conflicting concepts of reason, which is seen as the sole source of truth by rationalists, and revelation as a disclosure of information to man by a divine or supernatural agency. It is by definition beyond the ordinary course of nature and was ipso facto a prime target for enlightened intellectuals and statesmen. In doing so, they challenged the very foundations of Catholicism, and that consequently culminated in the complete suppression of Christianity in favour of a Cult of Reason during the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution.

Mainstream Enlightenment was, however, by no means atheistic, but it denounced certain tenets crucial to the Catholic Church as merely historic and man-made and therefore fictitious. Many of the most influential philosophers of that time, like the Encyclopédistes, Voltaire or Reimarus, were secularists or promoted a deist view: In a nutshell, they proclaimed that nature was the only revelation God has ever made and thus the preoccupation with any other alleged revelation was superfluous. Additionally the Bible (and the Old Testament in particular) was considered contradictory in itself, to pure reason and to the perfection of God. Others, like Lessing, agreed with respect to biblicism and revelation, but he was more lenient toward "emotional (i.e. unenlightened) Christs" who were in need of the gospels to do good. Still, he detested ecclesiastical obscurantism and intolerance: He postulated a "Chistianity of Reason" without the obsolete traditions and dogmata of the church. For Lessing it was all about the Education of Humankind and this very attitude was actually an autostereotype of the enlightened elite: They saw themselves as guardians of reason and considered Christ principally a useful educator of virtue who was - in their opion - just to be freed from all the fake and superstitious church-masquerade of the Dark Ages.

While basically under the same rationalistic pressure, the Protestant churches of Northern Europe could react a bit more flexibly to the rational challenge of the Enlightenment, because they already had got rid of their ultramontane superstructure, monasticism and the worship of the saints. Moreover, being anti-Catholic is the raison d'être of any Protestant church, so Protestant thinkers naturally joined forces with the enlightened critics of their Catholic rival and that way Protestantism could evade harsh criticism of their own doctrine of sola scriptura to a certain degree.

The self-conception of Roman Catholicism on the other hand was (and is) not only the opposite of the Protestants' dry plainness and austerity, but also of their deliberate provinciality of independent national churches. The Catholic Church was supranational and especially since the Counter-Reformation flamboyant and splendidly baroque in appearance. With respect to its colourful feasts, processions and iconodule venereration it was in charge of everything extraordinary in community life. But this kind of devoutness was in the eyes of its critics rather anxious for effect and created some collective identity through a joint experience, which made a Catholic eo ipso a Catholic, but it wasn't so much aimed at the inner persuasion of the faithful based on reason and virtue. Instead it was an utterly visual world, and that was in the conceptual and iconophobic context of philosophy an illusionary world. Furthermore, abbeys started to look like pompous baroque castles which were anything but humble. The clergy was enormous and the hierarchy byzantine and incomprehensible with almost all senior jobs being reserved for the aristocracy as secundogeniture, which undoubtedly was of no theological significance at all. It was merely tradition. Combined with its firm supranationality all that made the church extremely inflexible, because with any reformatory change influence and privileges were at stake. But for most enlightened thinkers the point at issue was the freedom of thought: In spite of all progress made in science and in the arts, theology was still in the very centre of academic life, with the Jesuits controlling the universities almost everywhere. In the eyes of their critics - and much to the chagrin of enlightened monarchs who competed with their Protestant peers for prestige - the Jesuits failed to embrace modernity the way Protestant universities and academies did.

Apart from ignoring the problem, there were two possible ways to confront the criticism: To treat it as potentially dangerous and fight it off in order to conserve the church's traditional position of power or to acknowledge that the church was in need of reform and disengange it from outdated ballast, either to appease the critics or out ouf real persuasion.

The group of apologists abode by Rome, because any reformatory change of the status quo would have weakened the Papacy and its claim to primacy consequentially. The ultramontane camp was spearheaded by the omnipresent Society of Jesus which first came into being as the Catholic fortress against the Reformation and rose to the occasion impressively. Since that time the Jesuits played key roles in the administrative mashinery of state, university and church in every Catholic nation and they were often most influential confessors at court. They were answerable to the pope only and had a reputation of being elitist, unscrupulous and obesessed with power. They were clouded in secrecy and thus people were fascinated about their alleged intrigues and plots to defend the Papacy. Given the crucial influence of the Society of Jesus and their obstructionism against any kind of reform, be it modest or radical, they attracted most of the critics' attention: It was necessary to break their firm resistance to change Catholicism. The reform willing camp on the other hand had no visual spearhead and was very heterogeneous, and they found themselves in the company of Protestant and enlightened critics in their effort to overcome the Jesuit blockage, and in doing so they all can be described as anti-Jesuits. So it's not wrong to state that the alleged antagonism between Enlightenment and Catholicism was in fact overshadowed by a severe conflict about the Jesuit influence. The list of their enemies who ultimately succeeded in the suppression of the Jesuits is impressive:

The Portuguese prime minister Marquês de Pombal suppressed the Jesuits as early as 1759 in Portugal and its colonial empire. He broke off the diplomatic relations with the Papacy until 1770 and reorganized the ecducational system and modernised the teachings by spending more tax money: He added faculties of natural science to the University of Coimbra, introduced general vocational education and rose the number of teachers. To rival the Jesuits' alleged obscurantism the Order of the Oratorians presented themselves markedly progressive with a huge modern library and a prominent experimental laboratory to entertain and impress the nobility.

The Austrian chancellor Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz and Kaiser Joseph II claimed that a sovereign state's authority also covers ecclesiastical affairs. With their reforms, generally referred to as Josephinism, the borders of the dioceses were adjusted to the Archduchy of Austria, the Jesuits's influence was reduced and a Patent of Tolerance of 1781 allowed some freedom of worship.

The French prime minister Étienne-François, duc de Choiseul allowed the Encyclopédie to be published and was on good terms with the philosophes. With the backing of the royal maîtresse Madame de Pompadour, who was denied absolution by the Jesuits for being an adulteress, Choiseul was a declared opponent of the Society of Jesus and the obsolete baroque catholicism he thought they represented.

As prime minister in the kingdom of Naples Bernardo Tanucci successfully reduced the ecclesiastical influence and played a crucial role in the suppression of the Jesuits in all Bourbon states (France, Spain, Parma and all their colonies) in 1767.