Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism (review)

Printy’s ambitious work, his University of California–Berkeley doctoral dissertation in history, is an interesting and very important contribution to the history of eighteenth-century Catholic Enlightenment in Germany. He distinguishes between “Catholic Enlightenment”—as a rejection of the moral pessimism and Augustinian rigorism in a more international context—and “Reform Catholicism”—as a concrete program in a more national context. However, these distinctions are troubling. Printy’s understanding of Catholic Enlightenment hides the apologetic side of Catholic Enlightenment against the anticlerical and antireligious tendencies of the Enlightenment. Such an understanding cannot make clear that Catholic Enlightenment was a struggle against superstition and baroque forms of Catholic piety to defend Catholicism against the enlightened who attacked religion. If Printy understands “educated bourgeois Catholics” as protagonists of Catholic Enlightenment, this is not only an anachronism of terms but also conceals that many important protagonists of Catholic Enlightenment were clerics or monks and exactly the opposite of “bourgeois Catholics.” His opinion that the reform program of those protagonists was the culmination of several generations of pious renewal and religious reform seems to be a little too simple because there was no direct continuity between fifteenth-or sixteenth-century Catholic Reform and the eighteenth century. Actually the reforms of eighteenth-century Catholic Enlightenment can be interpreted as a completion of the sixteenth-century Council of Trent, but it is also true that there were many influences from the outside on Catholic Enlightenment in the German-speaking countries, especially from Jansenism and the Protestant German Enlightenment.

The most important problem is Printy’s main thesis that the Enlightenment created German Catholicism. Actually, nineteenth-century German Catholicism and the German Catholicism of the first half of the twentieth century were much more ultramontane. The heritage of the Catholic Enlightenment was really not dead but only of secondary importance—partly important, for instance, with the Tübingen liberal wing of Catholic theology, but mostly not more than an accessory. In Printy’s view, German Catholicism was “recast by its Enlightenment in a manner similar to the creation of a national German literary culture by a relatively restricted circle of writers and the reading public in the age of Goethe and Schiller” (p. 2). He quotes Friedrich Carl von Moser—not a Catholic but a Protestant with a background in Pietism—for “German National Spirit” (Von dem deutschen Nationalgeist, 1766) and writes that eighteenth-century German “educated Catholics” were trying to reform the Church because they “questioned not only what it meant to be Catholic, but also what it meant to be German, and in the process they created German Catholicism” (p. 21). This is a key misunderstanding. Printy speaks about German Catholic Enlightenment and takes the view of German Protestant Enlightenment. His perspective is that of Lessing’s Wolfenbüttel, Goethe’s, Schiller’s, or Herder’s Weimar, Schlözer’s Göttingen, or Nicolai’s Berlin, but not that of the Catholic centers in the abbeys, universities, and bishops’ curias in the west and the south of Germany. His paradigm is that of a “German” Enlightenment that did not exist. He does not see enough Catholicism from its inner life and not enough the relationship between eighteenth-century German Catholics and French or Italian Catholicism. He asserts a nation where was no nation in the same way as for Protestants. It is true that Hontheim (Febronius, 1763) wanted a German national church, but he understood “nation” in another way than the Weimar classicism.