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

Thanks to Jesuit epistemological innovation, church doctrine could be empirically granted the status of a special revelation because the historical authenticity of its sacred texts and their corroboration by other ancient sources and a living tradition manifested by the church itself could be validated based on essentially Lockean proofs of historical certitude (so Buffier and later Enlightenment apologists would argue). Following the first generation of Jesuit editors of the Journal de Trevoux, then--a generation that included both Tournemine and Buffier--Jesuits continued to invoke Locke just as regularly as many other early eighteenth-century writers had done. (32) Contrary to existing work on the Jesuits, however, this was not mere fideism. Buffier had developed experiential a posteriori proofs of his seemingly trans-rational linkage of Malebranche and Locke. For, in an effort to refute Spinoza, Buffier and other Jesuits had argued that perceptions are always holistic, and ideas of matter (basic perceptions) reveal that matter is divisible. How then, they asked, could divisible matter be perceived by equally divisible matter? The essence of though--as the many bishops, theological writers, and apologists schooled in the Jesuit epistemological synthesis argued--had to be therefore something other than matter. (33)

In the above manifold ways, Jesuits of the early eighteenth century had managed to create an extremely influential apologetical tool--a discourse of theological Enlightenment that I have elsewhere described as the "Jesuit Synthesis." (34) This Jesuit Synthesis was, in effect, a theological discourse comprising the rudiments of occasionalism and sensationalism. In large measure because of Buffier, the emphasis of theological argumentation in general shifted toward the following questions: to what extent was the New Testament a reliable historical account? To what extent had the New Testament been faithfully transmitted by the Church? This notion of "Theological Enlightenment" was not the only variety of clerical response to the Enlightenment, nor is it the sum total of Catholic Enlightenment in France. Moreover, that the pioneers of this Jesuit synthesis were Jesuits should not be taken to imply that all Jesuits used it; nor does it imply that only Jesuits used this synthesis of occasionalism and sensationalism. For the Jesuits and other eighteenth-century French writers who fashioned and refashioned these discourses through debate did not always identify themselves as Lockean or Malebranchian (although the pioneers of the Jesuit synthesis, Buffier and Tournemine, frequently attributed aspects of their work to Locke and Malebranche by name). Later Jesuits adopted Malebranchian or Lockean arguments as the rhetorical occasion demanded. Self-consciously or not, they frequently did so in order to update Aristotle who, as Kors, Northeast, and many other scholars have long noted, had been dealt a damaging blow by Cartesianism. The Jesuit Synthesis, as originally conceived by the Jesuits themselves, can then be considered an update of their prevailing Aristotelianism in order to meet the demands of Cartesian, Gassendo-Lockian, and Spinozistic extremes--another point I develop at great length in Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment. Even if Buffier was somewhat atypical among Jesuits in his day, and even if the official position of the Jesuits would remain Neo-Scholastic Aristotelianism throughout the eighteenth century, the Jesuit Synthesis itself was widely disseminated and came to have scientific and apologetical uses that transcended the confines of early eighteenth-century Jesuit theology--indeed, the Jesuit Synthesis transcended the Jesuit order itself by mid-century.