At first glance, many clerics influenced by the Enlightenment seem contradictory in their writings. An example of such apparently blatant contradiction is the perspective afforded by Sorbonne bachelor and contributor to Diderot, s Encyclopédie, abbé Jean-Martin de Prades, who wrote that individuals are born with ideas that are ‘as yet in a natural and formless state,, while asserting, in the same sentence, that all ideas ‘produce themselves via sensations,. 1 Often enigmatically in retrospect, Prades and many other clergy and apologists seem simultaneously to be both Cartesian and Lockean–both occasionalist and sensationalist. Many writers of the middle eighteenth century, including the illustrious Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, speak of ideas as merely occasioned by human senses, while directly caused only by God alone. 2 Historians of religion and Enlightenment in Pre-Revolutionary France remain puzzled by such apparent contradiction. Were eighteenth-century theologians or writers with theological training primarily influenced by Malebranche, Descartes, or Locke, or should they still be considered principally as Thomistic-Aristotelians? To re-contextualize this question in light of the intellectual history of Jesuit epistemology during the Enlightenment would be a significant step toward yielding a clearer answer to such a quandary. A re-examination of under-studied but significant Jesuit authors like the surprisingly influential Claude G. Buffier proves helpful to that end, while along the way suggesting a wholesale re-evaluation of the ways in which theologians actually used Malebranche and Locke throughout the first half of the eighteenth century. Accordingly, this article underscores Jesuit contributions to the Enlightenment by focusing upon the synthetic epistemological discourses that