Catholic Enlightenment

The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement by Ulrich L Lehner, 218 pages

"Ecrasez l'infame," Voltaire famously declared, over and over again, "Crush the infamy!" - "the infamy" being the Catholic Church.  In the decades following his death, Voltaire's "enlightened" admirers attempted to do just that, to wash away the Church with the blood of hundreds of thousands of her faithful.  These facts have dominated the understanding of the relationship between Church and Enlightenment ever since, "enlighteners" denouncing the Church as the chief enemy of human progress, traditional Catholics seeing in the Enlightenment little but persecution and genocide.  It is Lehner's argument that it need not be so, and was not always so.  In The Catholic Enlightenment he attempts to trace an "enlightened" movement within the Catholic Church itself which emerged organically out of the Tridentine reform. 

The central problem presents itself at the outset, when Lehner reminds the reader that the Enlightenment was not a single, unitary phenomenon, but that there existed "multiple Enlightenments."  This difficulty in definition produces considerable confusion - the Jesuits were enemies of the Enlightenment insofar as they supported the Papacy against the State, but the Jesuits were supporters of the Enlightenment insofar as they pushed for the adaptation of Catholic practices to Asian cultures against the will of the Papacy, and the Papacy supported the Enlightenment insofar as it pushed for the ordination of native priests against the will of the State.  Likewise, without clearly explicating the nature of the dispute between the Jesuits and the Jansenists ("Jansenists taught that... one must be truly sorry to receive absolution" while the Jesuits "argued that the minimum requirement for receiving absolution was sorrow for one's sins"), Lehner claims both sides for the Enlightenment.  Nor is "Enlightenment" the only vague term Lehner treats cavalierly - while he acknowledges that "superstition" could refer to anything from the evil eye to the Incarnation, he still frequently attributes "opposition to superstition" to his subjects as a sign of their Enlightenment without further definition.

For the most part, Lehner attempts to weave a distinctly Catholic Enlightenment out of two separate threads - the continuators of the Tridentine reforms, whose goals sometimes harmonized with and sometimes opposed those of the Enlightenment, and the "enlighteners" who sought to make the Church conform to the world and their "enlightened" ideas.  Unfortunately, these threads clash - while the former were invariably orthodox, the latter often spiraled into heresy and schism.  Then, too, Lehner's claims to objectivity are undermined by his consistent use of morally loaded terms such as "progress" and "reform" - even excusing the inevitable "Enlightenment" and its offspring "enlightened" and "enlighteners".  This works in both directions - it is difficult to describe St Alphonsus Ligouri as an Enlightenment figure, as Lehner does, unless "enlightened" is being used as a bare synonym for "good".  Finally, Lehner sometimes stretches too far to align Enlightenment figures with twentieth century concerns - he uses the beggar saint Benedict Labre to illustrate differences between the enlightened and Catholic attitudes towards poverty, but then attempts to connect this to a "preferential option for the poor" which resembles the former more than the latter.

There is a great deal of excellent detail in The Catholic Enlightenment, with its retrieval of the work of a host of neglected intellectuals.  Lehner's stated goal, demonstrating that Catholicism and Enlightenment should not be imagined as entirely irreconcilable, is laudable.  His attempted demonstration, however, is fundamentally misguided, absurdly suggesting that the quisling French state church was somehow superior to the "dark age" Church of Vianney and Therese, Newman and Chesterton, Seton and Brownson, Damien and Lwanga, Bosco and Leo XIII.  He seems not to have grasped the difference between engagement and surrender.