An Eighteenth-Century Catholic Enlightenment in Ireland?*

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
MARC HIGHT
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Enlightenment

ALEXANDER GEDDES AT THE LIMITS OF THE CATHOLIC ENLIGHTENMENT

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK GOLDIE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Catholic Priest ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Catholic Enlightenment ◽  
French Republicanism ◽  
The Revolution ◽  
Episcopal Authority

ABSTRACTIn the closing decades of the eighteenth century, Alexander Geddes (1737–1802) pressed Catholicism and the Enlightenment to the limits of their tolerance. A Catholic priest, he fled the censure of his Scottish superiors and settled in England, where he became a spokesman for the Catholic laity in their controversies with the hierarchy, and mingled in radical Protestant circles among the ‘Rational Dissenters’. In three domains, he appalled his contemporaries. First, Geddes prepared a new version of the Bible, which threatened to undermine the integrity of revelation, and offered mythopoeic accounts of the Old Testament that influenced Blake and Coleridge. Second, he embraced ‘ecclesiastical democracy’, denouncing papal and episcopal authority and proclaiming British Catholics to be ‘Protesting Catholic Dissenters’. Third, he applauded French republicanism, and adhered to the Revolution long after Edmund Burke had rendered such enthusiasm hazardous. Geddes was an extreme exponent of the Catholic Enlightenment, yet equally he was representative of several characteristic strands of eighteenth-century Catholicism, which would be obliterated in the ultramontane revanche of the following century.

Re-Evaluating John Lingard's History of England

2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 529-546
Author(s):  
Peter Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English History ◽  
Catholic Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

It has become customary to regard John Lingard as the last, and perhaps finest, of the cisalpine historians, a case powerfully developed in the pages of Joseph Chinnici's The English Catholic Enlightenment, and elsewhere. One of the last generation of students to be trained at the English College, Douai, Lingard would here have been introduced to the Gallican writings of Claude Fleury and his contemporaries which gave shape to English cisalpinism. The first edition of his History of England (1819–1830) was written at least partially with the intention of paving the way for Catholic emancipation which the cisalpine Catholics had so long struggled to achieve. At the same time, this work succeeded in offering a far more forthright challenge to the Protestant reading of English history, fashioned so cogently in the early decades of the eighteenth century, than Lingard's cisalpine forebears would have been prepared to make: Lingard was moving on and is better understood as belonging to a period of transition for the Catholic community in England. Revisions in later editions bring Lingard's intentions even more to the fore. Never quite at ease with figures such as John Milner and Nicholas Wiseman, his onetime pupil and future Cardinal, and certainly not accepting their strident ultramontanism, Lingard is closer to them in his historical studies than sometimes he, or they, realised.

The Catholic Enlightenment and Popular Education in the Prince-Bishopric of Würzburg, 1765–95

1988 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-30
Author(s):  
John Christopher Doney
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Popular Education ◽  
Distinctive Character ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Catholic Enlightenment ◽  
Parish Schools

In the last decades of the eighteenth century the Enlightenment (Aufklärung) flourished in Catholic Germany, developing a distinctive character there. Nothing lay more at the heart of enlightened interests than the reform of pedagogy, and in particular the education of children in parish schools and catechetical classes. This article focuses on the reform of popular education in the Prince-Bishopric (Hochstift) of Würzburg between 1765 and 1795 both to help in defining the goals and policies of the Catholic Enlightenment and to evaluate the extent of its success.

Ressourcement and Aggiornamento in the Eighteenth Century

2019 ◽  
pp. 43-82
Author(s):  
Shaun Blanchard
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Vatican Ii ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Catholic Enlightenment ◽  
Bible Reading

This chapter argues that the roots of Vatican II must be pushed back into the eighteenth century in order to fully understand the council. It profiles the existence and achievements of the “Catholic Enlightenment,” a now well-established phenomenon that spanned the entire European Catholic world, and argues that it was an attempt at aggiornamento. A variety of eighteenth-century movements, many of them later condemned or marginalized by the Church’s official magisterium, are then profiled, including Gallicanism, Richerism, Febronianism, and Josephinism. The chapter then examines a complex and misunderstood reform movement, Jansenism, which especially shaped Scipione de’ Ricci and the Pistoian circle. Finally, it examines a loose “Third Party” of moderate Catholic reformers (who were neither Jansenists nor traditionalist zelanti), focusing on Lodovico Muratori. The chapter shows that both radical Jansenists and moderate “Third Party” Catholics attempted ressourcement, especially in advocating liturgical and devotional reform and encouraging Bible reading.

scholarly journals Skepticism, Criticism, and the Making of the Catholic Enlightenment: Rethinking the Career of Jean Hardouin

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 486-504
Author(s):  
Daniel J. Watkins
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Historical Criticism ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Catholic Enlightenment ◽  
The Impact

This article evaluates the early career of the French Jesuit Jean Hardouin (1646–1729) and the impact that it had on other Jesuit scholars of the first decades of the eighteenth century. It argues that Hardouin’s historical criticism—a response to skeptical critiques of the certainty of knowledge—pushed other Jesuit writers to consider new epistemological arguments and use new philosophical tools. In this way, Hardouin’s career helped motivate French Jesuit engagement with the ideas and sensibilities of the Enlightenment.

scholarly journals Introduction: The Culture of Jesuit Erudition in an Age of Enlightenment

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-415
Author(s):  
Jeffrey D. Burson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
French Enlightenment ◽  
Catholic Enlightenment ◽  
Age Of Enlightenment ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Individual

Although works on religious, specifically Catholic, and more specifically Jansenist, contributions to the Enlightenment abound, the contributions of the Jesuits to the Enlightenment have remained relatively unexplored since Robert R. Palmer initially identified affinities between Jesuit thought and the emergence of the French Enlightenment as long ago as 1939. Accordingly, this introduction and the essays contained within the pages of this special issue revisit and further explore ways in which the individual Jesuits contributed to broader patterns of European intellectual and cultural history during the age of Enlightenment. Taken together, the contributions to this special issue investigate different aspects of an important question: to what extent were some Jesuits (at time, despite themselves, and at times, even against the grain of the order’s official positions) unlikely contributors to the Enlightenment? This question of whether one might speak of a specifically Jesuit Enlightenment is complicated by the still unsatisfactory scholarly consensus regarding the definition of the Enlightenment. But, growing scholarly attention to the nature of Catholic Enlightenment, and to the continuities linking eighteenth-century preoccupations to the controversies of the seventeenth century have further underscored the need for greater attention to Jesuit contributions to the Enlightenment itself. In this introduction, rather than considering the Enlightenment as a series of transformative and largely eighteenth-century debates rooted in the middle or late seventeenth century, I suggest that Jesuit engagement with the Enlightenment is best understood if the Enlightenment is more firmly anchored somewhat earlier in the culture of late Humanism—a culture that was first weaponized then chastened within the crucible of the European Reformations.

scholarly journals Porcelain and Catholic Enlightenment: The Zwettler Tafelaufsatz

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 116-134
Author(s):  
Matthew Martin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
World Order ◽  
Human Learning ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Catholic Enlightenment ◽  
The One ◽  
Representative Function ◽  
The Church

The mastery of a hard-paste porcelain technology in Dresden in 1708 was a major natural philosophical achievement for the European Enlightenment. From the outset, the material possessed a representative function at the Saxon court, where it served to promote the power and cultural prestige of the Wettin dynasty. As porcelain factories were established at courts across Europe, however, the material's signifying role became complex. On the one hand, its alchemical associations aligned it with unfettered princely power in the realm of the absolutist court. On the other, its origins in laboratory investigation could indicate a princely engagement with the Enlightenment pursuit of scientific knowledge. These contradictory associations reached an apogee in the so-called “Catholic Enlightenment,” producing artworks that sought to consolidate the church. This paper analyzes the Zwettler Tafelaufsatz—the great porcelain table centerpiece that was created in 1768 as part of a multimodal baroque celebration of Abbot Rayner Kollmann's jubilee at the Cistercian monastery of Zwettl in Lower Austria. Here the porcelain medium enabled the Cistercian brethren to argue for the continuing role of monasteries and monastic scholarship in eighteenth-century Enlightenment learning, while simultaneously declaring the limits of human learning and the ultimate supremacy of divine revelation in the context of an absolutist world order.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document