The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement by Ulrich L. Lehner (review)

Of the making of "Enlightenments" there is no end, and it seems only fair that the Catholic Church should have its own niche patent, however much that association might have unsettled Voltaire and other leading philosophes. But, as Ulrich L. Lehner argues in his wide-ranging study, it is time to (re)state the exaggerated disconnection between infâme and lumières and show how, in many areas of its life, in its balance of faith and reason, in its work with state reformers, Catholicism partook of what most scholars would deem characteristics of the moderate Enlightenment. Professor Lehner is not the first historian to point this out. He treads in the steps of David Sorkin, Christopher M. S. Johns, Michael Printy, and others in making the case for a/the Catholic Enlightenment. What distinguishes his book is its global reach and its illumination of so many parts of the Church's life, witness, and worship.

In his first chapter, Lehner takes the reader on a worldwide tour of Catholic Enlighteners at work, specifying contexts as he proceeds and noting "national" variants such as the "Enlightenment in Tridentine mode," which he finds in Spain and Italy, and in such practitioners as Ludovico Antonio Muratori. Themes one might expect to be emphasized are here, including conciliarism, antipathy to the Jesuits, and the privileging of social utility and good works over mysticism, but less expected ones, too, such as the Church's interest in the latest healthcare trends (the endorsement of vaccination among them) and advocates of flexibility in marriage teaching and clerical celibacy. He considers the course of Catholic historical criticism of the Bible from Richard Simon to John Geddes, the alignment of so many clergy behind the temporal régimes that sponsored Febronianism in Germany and Regalism in Iberia, and the intellectual gifts of such defenders of enlightened Catholicism as Nicolas Bergier in France, the critic of Rousseau but the personal friend of Diderot. Lehner argues that religion was becoming "for many an intellectual exercise" (p. 25), but some of the evidence he himself presents in this chapter might count against him.

Having set the scene, he then looks at that very 'Enlightened' commitment to toleration in principle and practice evidenced by many Catholic intellectuals, clergy and lay. Jansenists in France would not be silenced though the Bourbon monarchy was slower to legalize toleration for non-Catholics than the Habsburgs. In a hyperbolic moment, Lehner hails Joseph II's 1781 Edicts as a "quantum leap into modernity" (p. 60), but it is Poland's short-lived Constitution of 1791 that contains the least restrictions on religious freedom. Then, in a compelling overview of Catholic women and the Enlightenment, he finds many talented women with progressive views and not afraid to articulate them, among them Josefa Amar, as well as the Benedictine Benito Feijóo, who were Spanish precursors of women's rights, and scientists like Laura Bassi and Maria Agnesi in Italy. Lehner makes a plausible case for seeing what he calls a second wave of Tridentine reforms in the first half of the eighteenth century as offering women more scope in the Church and more recognition by it, with clergy, for instance, being ready to make the case for wives having an equal share with their spouses in the moral education of the family.

Lehner next ranges on to the Catholic Enlightenment beyond Europe arguing that the Church was more appreciative of Amerindian culture than secular society. Among individuals featuring here are the Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavigero with pronounced anti-racist convictions on display in his four-volume history of ancient Mexico (he demonstrated that syphilis was a European import to the New World, not the other way round) and, in the post-Independence United States, John Carroll, its first Catholic prelate, one prepared to endorse even the democratic election of bishops. The fifth chapter, "Devils, Demons...