The crystallization of counter-enlightenment and philosophe identities: theological controversy and catholic enlightenment in pre-revolutionary France

Church History, Dec, 2008 by Jeffrey D. Burson

No less reductionist is the redefinition of Enlightenment as a variety of eighteenth-century courtly styles and institutions, (9) whose revolutionary impact is linked solely with changes to reading taste, histories of the book, and broadening networks of sociocultural exchange. (10) The Enlightenment may have been all of these things, but a holistic historiography of Enlightenment demands greater attention to the generation of new content in the fault lines created by the collision of culture, appropriation, and religio-political contingencies.

This "controversialist approach," (11) as Jonathan Israel productively defines it, is adapted as the methodological fulcrum of this article, which focuses anew on the factional politics afflicting France from 1751-1764, and especially on the condemnations of De l'Esprit by Claude Adrien Helvetius, and of Denis Diderot's Encyclopedie. In using Israel's controversialist approach to intellectual history, I argue two related points that differ somewhat from his own conclusions: first, that the fundamentally secular, self-conscious Enlightenment identity was calcified (if not precisely created) by its opposition within the Catholic Church in France; second, that this more coherent, equally self-conscious religious opposition to Enlightenment was relatively new (a creation of the 1750s predominately). When these self-conscious anti-Enlightenment tendencies arose, they were generated by the mutual antagonism of contending factions within the Church itself (Jansenist versus Jesuit), with all sides eager to blame one another for the radicalization of the Enlightenment. The factions within the Gallican Church of the eighteenth century defined themselves by philosophical differences as well as by the more frequently studied differences of ecclesiology and moral theology, with Jansenists favoring Cartesian epistemology, and Jesuits often favoring a kind of epistemological sensationalism deriving from both John Locke and Nicolas Malebranche. As such, at least among many Jesuits, bishops, and Sorbonne professors, there was little inherently clerical opposition to Locke, Newton, or other lesser Enlightenment figures, as Israel notes as well. However, unlike Israel, this article demonstrates that the manner in which Locke's sensationalism, and Malebranche's occasionalism (defined subsequently), was employed by many professors, Jesuits, and apologists of the eighteenth century was fluid, adaptive, and not doomed to philosophical contradiction when confronted with the increasingly vitalistic, often Spinozan, discourses of the Radical Enlightenment. Contingent factors, instead, indirectly contributed to the mainstreaming of the Radical Enlightenment in France during the 1750s, for philosophical confrontations with the more assertively Cartesian Jansenists, whose popularity grew precipitously in the 1750s, and jurisdictional contests of secular versus sacral power of censorship, education, and sacrament administration all conspired to set the stage for the more polarizing identities of late eighteenth-century Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment France. Dale Van Kley has previously and extensively argued for the religious origins of the French Revolution; yet, it is no less essential to historicize the French Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment as twin movements arising from common origins, with the increasingly secular, increasingly radical French Enlightenment growing into a kind of religious movement of its own. Its defining moments and controversies, its persecutors and martyrs, and the historical genesis of its own evangelical sense of mission are the subject of this present article and my forthcoming book on the Jesuits, the Sorbonne, theology, and Enlightenment in France throughout the eighteenth century. (12)