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

Ulrich L. Lehner’s recent work has forged a new field of historical scholarship on the significant but forgotten role Catholics played in advancing the goals of the Enlightenment. In the period from the Council of Trent (1545–1563) until the late nineteenth century, the “Catholic Enlighteners” comprised an immense range of religious and lay women and men. They were politicians, jurists, and sovereigns, educators and civil servants, philosophers, theologians, and prelates. The body of thought they represent is too complex and diverse to synthesize under a single formula, but several commitments and tendencies set them apart: Catholic Enlighteners engaged constructively with modern forms of thought, with other Christian communities, and with other religions; they were often on the leading edge of social and political debate over questions of tolerance, human rights, gender roles and expectations, scientific progress, and the relations of church and state. In many cases, even more than their secular counterparts, they were protagonists of intellectual and moral advancement, of human equality and freedom, and of democracy and cultural diversity.

Without attempting any unnatural fusion or summary, Lehner’s sensitive approach to this history allows the manifold of Catholic Enlightenment thought to speak for itself. His reading shows that a multiform historical engagement with Enlightenment ideas occurred even within predominantly Catholic European countries like Spain, Portugal, and Italy. In other cases, from Bohemia and Poland to China, India, and the Americas, Lehner gathers and interprets a wide array of local and national efforts at social, political, and ecclesial reform. To name just two examples of a far more expansive picture, one finds the prominent Spanish champions of women’s equality, Benito Feijoo (1676–1764) and Josefa Amar (1749–1833), or Pablo de la Olavide (1725–1803), a Catholic advocate of reforms in religious education and public welfare whom the Spanish Inquisition tried and convicted for heresy and impiety. Lehner demonstrates, among other significant historical claims, that a gradual refutation of prejudice and superstition owed less to an emerging secularism than to a prolonged effort of post-Tridentine reform. He also shows that the Catholic response to slavery was more mixed than is often assumed, taking as evidence the work of Lisbon-born abolitionist lawyer and priest Ribeiro Rocha (1687–1745), for example, or Theodore von Neuhoff (1694–1756), who abolished slavery during a brief period as king of Corsica.

Catholic Enlighteners are not always in the majority, but their presence is global, and Lehner catalogues their successes as well as their failures. The historically and geographically expansive range of sources Lerner marshals in support of his argument cannot be ignored, and yet if he is correct about the widespread historical harmony of Catholic thinking and the cause of human progress, then how has it happened that scholarly and public opinion have often taken the opposite view? Lehner’s answer is nuanced, yet straightforward. Through the decades leading up to 1789, the Jansenist controversy had changed the intellectual and public climate in France. One of its outcomes was to align the crown and the pope against Jansenists and others who increasingly made appeal to the realm of conscience rather than acquiesce to religious or secular authority. It was an appeal that united local clergy and lay believers who supported Jansenist piety, together with nobles, parliament, and secular enlighteners, who would ultimately take the mantle of tolerance as their own. Lehner argues that the controversy had a two-fold, reorienting effect in France that polarized the church and radicalized Enlightenment thought, which eventually “redefined itself as anti-clerical or even anti-Christian” (53). If in the early period after 1789 it was still possible for faithful Catholics to support Enlightenment principles and even the cause of Revolution, the wave of brutality that followed after 1792 marginalized enlightened moderates and cast a cloud of suspicion over Catholic reformers. The death of Catholic Enlightenment was all but completed as Napoleon overran Europe, undermining the authority of bishops...