The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment

by Burson, Jeffrey D.

• ISBN13: 9780268022204
• ISBN10: 0268022208
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780268075798
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-04-30
• Publisher: Univ of Notre Dame Pr

Summary

In The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment, Jeffrey D. Burson analyzes the history of the French Enlightenment and its relationship to the French Revolution by casting it as a diverse constellation of Theological Enlightenment discourses, compromised between about 1730 and 1762 by high-stakes cultural and political controversies involving the royal court, the government, and the Catholic Church. Burson places the Abbe Jean-Martin de Prades at the center of the storm. In 1749, Prades was working on his doctorate in theology at the University of Paris. An ambitious young theologian, Prades, like his teachers at the Sorbonne and like many lay and clerical apologists in mid-eighteenth-century France, had been deeply inspired by the spirit of the Enlightenment. Burson reinterprets the Jesuit Enlightenment and its influence on French society, arguing that Jesuits had pioneered ways of synthesizing Locke, Malebranche, and Newton in light of the expansion of the public sphere. Hoping to defend Catholic theology against the Radical Enlightenment by adapting these Jesuit Enlightenment discourses with natural history and Enlightenment theological debates, Prades inadvertently sparked a public scandal that galvanized members of the royal court and the Parlement of Paris, Jansenists, Jesuits, and philosophes, alike--all of whom refashioned the person and work of Prades to suit their own ends. Ultimately, the controversy polarized the cultural politics of pre-Revolutionary France into two camps, that of a self-consciously secular Enlightenment and that of a staunchly opposed Counter-Enlightenment. Prades''s history provides Burson with a lens through which to reevaluate the intersections of theology and Enlightenment philosophy, of French politics and the French Catholic church, and of conservatives, moderates, and radicals on all sides in order to provide us with a newly-capacious Enlightenment historiography. "This is a rich and detailed analysis, based on impressive archival research, that represents the first close study of a key episode in the evolution of the French Enlightenment, one that has not been granted attention for almost fifty years. Through close reading of Prades'' doctoral thesis in light of patterns in Catholic apologetics of the first part of the eighteenth century, Burson is able to show that Prades'' work represented a synthesis of Locke and Malebranche that was characteristic of Sorbonne apologetics and not a departure from it. His is an exemplary work that provides a newly nuanced perspective on eighteenth-century France and beyond." -- Susan Rosa, Northeastern Illinois University "Jeffrey Burson''s The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenmenthelps to restore, with erudition and meticulous scholarship, the mid-eighteenth century to its rightful place as a pivotal moment in the history of the French Enlightenment. Revisiting the often-invoked but imperfectly understood affaireof the abbe de Prades, Burson provides the most thorough analysis of the controversy to date, using it as a lens to explore much wider developments: the contingencies of the opposition between religion and Enlightenment, the origins of the Counter-Enlightenment, and the reasons for the polarization of French intellectual life in the second half of the eighteenth century. Thoroughly conversant in recent historiography and contemporary scholarly debates, Burson makes an important contribution to our understanding of this vital period." -- Darrin M. McMahon, Florida State University "Imagine what might have happened to Roman Catholicism if, in the course of the eighteenth century, the pro-Enlightenment clerics at the Sorbonne had escaped censure and come to dominate the church''s thinking. Burson does a superb job in reminding us about contingency, about the path that might have been taken, and might thereby have avoided the church''s ongoing quarrel with modernity." -- Margaret C. Jacob, University of California, Los Angeles

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xix
Introduction: Perspectives on Enlightenment, Religion, and the Abbé de Prades: Toward a New Historiography of Theological Enlightenment	p. 1
The Creation of the Jesuit Synthesis: Locke, Malebranche, and the Flowering of Theological Enlightenment	p. 33
The Radicalizing Enlightenment and the Maturation of Theological Enlightenment to 1750	p. 55
Bringing up the Theological Enlightenment: Life, Leisure, Philosophy, and Culture at the University of Paris and the Seminaries, ca. 1730-1755	p. 79
Theological Enlightenment at the Sorbonne, 1729-1752	p. 102
The Center Falters: Turmoil and the Burgeoning Fracture of Theological and Radical Enlightenments	p. 136
Prades and the Crucible of Religious Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France	p. 165
The Abortive Theological Enlightenment Synthesis of Prades I	p. 178
The Abortive Theological Enlightenment Synthesis of Prades II: From Natural Religion to the Necessity and Historicity of Catholicism	p. 199
The Scandal at the Sorbonne and the Condemnation	p. 239
The Nadir of Theological Enlightenment: Religious Polarization of the Eighteenth-Century Public Sphere in the Aftermath of the Prades Affair	p. 275
Epilogue: Prades and the Long Denouement in Prussia, 1752-1782	p. 310
Appendix: Authenticity of the Prades Thesis and Apologie	p. 325
Notes	p. 330
Bibliography	p. 435
Index	p. 471
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