Culture of Enlightening

Jeffrey D. Burson

Description

Recent scholarly and popular attempts to define the Enlightenment, account for its diversity, and evaluate its historical significance suffer from a surprising lack of consensus at a time when the social and political challenges of today cry out for a more comprehensive and serviceable understanding of its importance. This book argues that regnant notions of the Enlightenment, the Radical Enlightenment, and the multitude of regional and religious enlightenments proposed by scholars all share an entangled intellectual genealogy rooted in a broader revolutionary "culture of enlightening" that took shape over the long-arc of intellectual history from the waning of the sixteenth-century Reformations to the dawn of the Atlantic Revolutionary era. Generated in competition for a changing readership and forged in dialog and conflict, dynamic and diverse notions of what it meant to be enlightened constituted a broader culture of enlightening from which the more familiar strains of the Enlightenment emerged, often ironically and accidentally, from originally religious impulses and theological questioning.

By adapting, for the first time, methodological insights from the scholarship of historical entanglement (l'histoire croisée) to the study of the Enlightenment, this book provides a new interpretation of the European republic of letters from the late 1600s through the 1700s by focusing on the lived experience of the long-neglected Catholic theologian, historian, and contributor to Diderot's Encyclopédie, Abbé Claude Yvon. The ambivalent historical memory of Yvon, as well as the eclectic and global array of his sources and endeavors, Burson argues, can serve as a gauge for evaluating historical transformations in the surprisingly diverse ways in which eighteenth-century individuals spoke about enlightening human reason, religion, and society. Ultimately, Burson provocatively claims that even the most radical fruits of the Enlightenment can be understood as the unintended offspring of a revolution in theology and the cultural history of religious experience.

Dating to the thirteenth-century, the Sorbonne originally enjoyed a privileged role within the medieval church as a corporation of theologians who provided doctrinal advice and clarification on matters of doctrine. Much of this role, at least within France, derived from medieval France’s greatest “constitutional crisis” in which Phillip IV asserted what he considered his royal prerogative to tax clergy and try them for criminal offenses in royal courts. The showdown is well known to students of European history as the provocation for Boniface VIII’s Bull, Unam Sanctam, and for the fateful flurry of fourteenth-century opposition to such a sweeping pronouncement of papal supremacy in all matters spiritual and temporal. In France, the clergy of the day largely supported Phillip IV’s defense of their liberties concerning such temporal matters as consent to royal taxation, for example. Ultimately, the Faculty of Theology then fashioned its own institutional significance when, in the early years of the fifteenth century, the monarchy, the French clergy, and University of Paris all collaborated to internally reform the French Catholic, or Gallican Church, while providing further theoretical justification for ending the Great Schism of the papacy that had developed after 1379. Jean de Paris, Jacques Almain, John Major, Edmond Richter, Pierre d’Ailly and Jean Gerson developed kind of “School of Paris” that utilized extant canon law jurisprudence to forge a distinctively French variant of the conciliarist argument that the spiritual authority of the Catholic Church was vested in the whole church as assembled in councils, and that these councils were, and of right ought to be, advisory to papal authority.
Although the Great Schism ended at Constance in 1415, friction between conciliar and papal authority continued, such that by 1438, rather than await the unlikely ruling of a divided and fractious Council of Basle, King Charles VII and his clergy successfully negotiated a Concordat with the papacy known as the Pragrmatic Sanction of Bourges. The Pragmatic Sanction of 1438 was the result of the Sorbonne, alongside the rest of the Gallican Bishops, leaning on the monarchy against papal interference in temporal matters. Henceforth, the Pragmatic Sanction reasserted the primarcy of Councils and allowed for cathedral chapters to appoint members of the clergy to major benefices without the direct appointment of the papacy. Some years later, however, the Concordat of Bologna (1515) relinquished royal support for conciliar supremacy in exchange for the papacy’s grudging acceptance of the royal prerogative to appoint clergy to most of the major ecclesiastical benefices of the realm. Even after Bologna, however, many clergy including the doctors of the Sorbonne, as well as the leading royal law court, the Parlement of Paris, would periodically revive the memory of the Gallican Liberties promulgated in 1438 as a way of tacitly resisting both royal and papal authority, but the sixteenth-century religious wars and their aftermath only enlarged the scope and sacrality of royal temporal powers over the Gallican Chuch, even as they similarly strengthed papal authority. In fact, after the Estates General of 1614 promulgated the directly divine, sacred inviolability of the royal authority over all temporal matters, the Parlement of Paris emerged for a season triumphant in defending such regalian rights concerning the temporal administration of the church—a claim that often put it at loggerheads with the Gallican clergy that henceforth began to fear that the Parlement of Paris—the supreme royal law court—could limit their own spiritual authority.
By the seventeenth century, then, the Sorbonne had adapted to these changed circumstances and many of its theologians began to speak of the Sorbonne as the Ordinary Council of the Gallican Church. But this corporate self-fashioning was never fully accepted; indeed it was increasingly and successfully challenged by a more hierarchical Post-Tridentine Church and a Bourbon monarchy in France that, as often as not, favored the Jesuits and other regular orders to the exclusion of secular clergy and such medieval corporate institutions as the Sorbonne. Instead, King Louis XIV and his successor, Louis XV, most often promoted the foundation of Jesuit colleges and seminaries between the 1660s and 1762, and they tended to see the Sorbonne as merely advisory to the Archbishop of Paris and the Parlement of Paris. Nevertheless, in the latter half of the seventeenth-century, the Faculty of Theology began to weigh in on extremely important controversies affecting Catholic Europe and its empires. Many of these issues (as for example the methods of Jesuit missionary work in China which ignited a controversy over whether it was licit to selectively accommodate Chinese ancestral rites in order to better facilitate conversation to Christianity), also became the subject of examination by the papal curia in Rome. By the early years of the eighteenth century the Sorbonne was also in effect emerging as a site of theological and political controversy. Issues such as Jansenism, sacramental and moral rigorism, the reputedly lax moral relativism of Jesuits and Molinists, or the authority of bishops over regular clergy (in particular, the Jesuits) were all taken up by the faculty as it attempted to defend its corporate autonomy and interpretive doctrinal authority. The Sorbonne officially accepted the 1653 papal censure of the Five Propositions of Jansenism, and expelled one hundred partisans of Antoine Arnaud from the faculty in 1656. In general, therefore, the Paris Faculty was anti-Jansenist by the dawn of the eighteenth century, but it remained a fierce partisan of the customary liberties of Gallican Church at least in temporal and juridical matters. For this reason, the censure of the Five Propositions divided the faculty, for the papacy was believed to have rightly condemned Jansenism, but erred in matters of fact by associating with Jansenism matters that had had nothing to do with Jansen or his partisans. These divisions had not fully healed by the early years of the eighteenth century when by the papacy of Clement XI issued its most uncompromising and overly ambitious censure of Jansenism yet, Papal Bull Unigenitus (1713). (excerpted from chapter 1)

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I.

1. The Culture of Enlightening en Sorbonne and the Formation of Claude Yvon
2. Into the Mid-Century Maelstrom: Claude Yvon between Sorbonne and the Encyclopédistes
3. The Encyclopédie and the Polarization of Enlightening Culture in France Part 2.
4. Yvon the Encyclopédiste I: Metphysics, Logic, and the History of Philosophy
5. Yvon the Encyclopédiste II: Immortality, Immateriality, and an Abbé’s Dalliance with Vitalistic Materialism
6. Yvon the Encyclopédiste III: Moral Philosophy, Practical Theology, and the Problem of Evil Part 3.
7. Yvon in Exile, 1752-1762
8. The Return from Exile, c. 1762-1768
9. The Quest to Harmonize Philosophy and Religion: The First Attempt, 1762-1768
10. Out of the Ashes?: Yvon at Château d’Ormes, c. 1771-1774
11. From Yvon’s Last Stand before the General Assembly of the Clergy to His Last Days, c. 1770-1789
12. Yvon Post-Mortem: Concluding Reflections on the Cultural and Theological Revolution of Enlightening

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la religion
• Religion
• Christianisme
• Individual Philosophers
• Religious
• HISTORY
• PHILOSOPHY
• Histoire
• Catholic
• Christianity
• France
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 01 août 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268105440
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Culture of Enlightening
THE CULTURE of ENLIGHTENING
———————————————
Abbé Claude Yvon and the Entangled Emergence of the Enlightenment
JEFFREY D. BURSON
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu
Copyright © 2019 by the University of Notre Dame
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Burson, Jeffrey D., author. Title: The culture of enlightening : Abbé Claude Yvon and the entangled emergence of the Enlightenment / Jeffrey D. Burson. Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019017147 (print) | LCCN 2019019088 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268105433 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268105440 (epub) | ISBN 9780268105419 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268105413 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Yvon, Claude, 1714–1791. | Theologians—France—Biography. | Historians—France—Biography. | Encyclopedists—France—Biography. | Enlightenment—France. | Encyclopédie. | France—Intellectual life—18th century. Classification: LCC BX4705.Y838 (ebook) | LCC BX4705.Y838 B87 2019 (print) | DDC 282.092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017147
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I
1 The Culture of Enlightening en Sorbonne and the Formation of Claude Yvon
2 Into the Midcentury Maelstrom: Claude Yvon between Sorbonne and the Encyclopédistes
3 The Encyclopédie and the Polarization of Enlightening Culture in France
Part II
4 Yvon the Encyclopédiste I: Metaphysics, Logic, and the History of Philosophy
5 Yvon the Encyclopédiste II: Immortality, Immateriality, and an Abbé’s Dalliance with Vitalistic Materialism
6 Yvon the Encyclopédiste III: Moral Philosophy, Practical Theology, and the Problem of Evil

Part III
7 Yvon in Exile, 1752–1762
8 The Return from Exile, circa 1762–1768
9 The Quest to Harmonize Philosophy and Religion: The First Attempt, 1762–1768
10 Out of the Ashes? Yvon at Château d’Ormes, circa 1771–1774
11 From Yvon’s Last Stand before the General Assembly of the Clergy to His Last Days, circa 1770–1789
12 Yvon Postmortem: Concluding Reflections on the Cultural and Theological Revolution of Enlightening
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As is so often the case with any large project, this book emerged from careful planning and lengthy labors conducted largely in the space between, and at the instigation of, happy accidents, minor calamities, and unexpected delays. But in retrospect, this book could not have reached its own destination—one very different from that which I had initially planned for it—if I had not been compelled to tack a course into the rapidly changing, ever expanding ocean of scholarship on the Enlightenment while sailing against life’s often erratic and gusty winds at key moments throughout the process.
My first sustained encounter with Abbé Claude Yvon was as the shadowy figure who had befriended and assisted the seemingly minor eighteenth-century figure of Abbé Jean-Martin de Prades in the writing of a uniquely controversial theology thesis defended at the Sorbonne in December 1751. Yvon, furthermore, had accompanied Prades into exile following the scandal surrounding this thesis, and, as I quickly learned, he was in fact a prolific if minor contributor to eighteenth-century thought for many more years than the abbé de Prades himself. Throughout academic year 2003–4, therefore, and in the early months of researching a dissertation on the cause célèbre of the Prades thesis (a dissertation that later became the seed of my first book), I first became familiar with a small handful of Abbé Yvon’s extensive contributions to the Encyclopédie. But it was not until one particularly snowy Parisian morning in early December 2004 at the François-Mitterrand Library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France—within a week of returning to the United States after residing in Paris for research on what became The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment —that I encountered a very rare example of Yvon’s later apologetical church histories published after his return to France in the early 1760s. Only then did I realize the extent to which Yvon had somehow managed to contribute both to Diderot’s Enlightenment and to the genres of antiphilosophe literature that until quite recently had been considered a part of the Counter-Enlightenment. I realized that to fully investigate this intriguing mystery, it would be necessary to pursue it as a wholly separate inquiry. At best, I initially conceived this project on Yvon as most likely to afford me with just a few solitary scholarly journal articles or perhaps a very short book about a peculiarly idiosyncratic clergyman. But my own life, and the contours of eighteenth-century scholarship, charted a different course, and the shape of my initially biographical investigation into the life and work of Abbé Yvon accordingly transformed.
Nevertheless, my pursuit of Claude Yvon receded in priority for a few short years as I concentrated on producing The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment and several other projects while an assistant professor of history at what was still then known as Macon State College (now Middle Georgia State University). But throughout the period of 2007–10, I continued very slowly to read more deeply into Yvon’s life and his output. By 2009, I had become sufficiently convinced of the richness and mysterious fractures characteristic of Yvon’s several thousand pages of published material, spanning three vital decades of the Enlightenment and pre-Revolutionary era, that I decided a more extensive, much overdue book on this often underestimated and overlooked eighteenth-century figure was in order. Shortly after beginning a new position at Georgia Southern University in the fall of 2011, I began the research in earnest. All the while, the contours of scholarship on the eighteenth-century Enlightenment (particularly as it concerns questions of Enlightenment, Enlightenment radicalization, and religion) underwent a rapid and very exciting transformation. The rapid proliferation of often quite diverse and even contradictory perspectives has meant that, throughout the last six years in particular, the contextual backdrop of Yvon’s life often seemed like a disorienting attempt to strike at a moving target. But, what follows is, I hope, all the richer for it.
This project has immensely benefited from several transformative conferences and symposia that have assisted me in refining and reconceiving my original notion of theological Enlightenment in view of the many stunning developments in Enlightenment and Revolutionary-era historiography that have transformed our understanding of the period in recent years. First, I wish to thank my friend and colleague Dean Kostantaras, now at Northwest Louisiana State University, for calling me in the fall of 2011, in the midst of a frenetic year, to convince me to write a paper for a thematic panel on the influence of l’histoire croisée (historical entanglement) on various fields of European and global historiography. Reluctantly at first (if only because I was then largely unfamiliar with l’histoire croisée as an approach), I agreed to participate. I quickly discovered to my delight, in the process of researching my paper for what was to be the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, in Baton Rouge, that entangled history afforded me with a theoretical framework, and a more effective vocabulary, for articulating how the dialogical process of Theological Enlightenment I had defined in my first book was really more capaciously described as a process applicable to the Enlightenment as a whole. Second, I wish to thank Anton M. Matytsin and Dan Edelstein for inviting me to present at a symposium convened at Stanford University just two years later, in May 2014, on the religious and mystical origins of the Enlightenment. This conference proved to be my first vital foray into investigating the narratological constructions of the Enlightenment crafted by different groups of eighteenth-century actors and so often spoken of, retrospectively, as separate enlightenment tendencies. Third, I am immensely grateful to my friend and colleague, Daniel J. Watkins, now at Baylor University, for inviting me to speak at a conference in honor of Dale K. Van Kley in Chicago in October 2015. In what proved to be a very heartwarming and intellectually stimulating weekend, I first attempted to consider ways in which eighteenth-century learned culture—the Enlightenment and its various permutations (pious, radical, or otherwise)—might be considered as having emerged from a process of entanglement by which separate enlightenments mutually created one another through dialog and dispute. This conference proved to be a defining moment for this project, one that allowed me to reconceive the life of Claude Yvon as a window on to a new cultural and intellectual history of the entangled processes at work during the Enlightenment era. Finally, I wish to thank Margaret C. Jacob, John Christian Laursen, Gianni Paganini, and the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library for graciously inviting me to present at a weekend symposium, Clandestine and Heterodox Underground in Early Modern Europe, in March 2016. This gathering, and the many intriguing papers and conversations that ensued as a result, afforded me a thoroughly indispensable opportunity to enliven my understanding of the ways in which cla