Abstract
Michael Printy, Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2009; viii + 246 pp.; 9780521478397, £48.00 (hbk)
Michael Printy’s Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism casts light on a neglected theme in the intellectual history of Germany – the rise of a Catholic Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Printy’s work criticizes the dominant historiography, which has concentrated on two themes, the German nation’s emergence and the role of Prussia, a Protestant power, in fostering that rise. Since German Catholicism did not obviously contribute to the rise of a German national state (Prussia won that battle), the literature has overlooked its vitality, when not condemning it as backward and imitative. Printy argues, in contrast, that the Catholic Enlightenment was not an etiolated version of its Protestant cousin, but emerged from its own resources and grappled with serious issues.
The most powerful aspect of this book is the author’s contextualization of the Catholic intellectual world. Printy correctly notes that much of the debate in eighteenth-century Germany is an outgrowth of the Peace of Westphalia (1648). This treaty produced a multi-confessional empire that hosted powerful states intent on challenging the status quo. Protestant states tried to expand their power via political reform and usually included their religious establishments in the process. Catholic powers, however, took another path. They wanted to reform their state apparatuses, but their church hierarchies, which were controlled from Rome, opposed key reforms. In this environment enlightened Catholics had to balance the needs of political reform against their own religious affiliation. The result was an intellectual high-wire act that yielded new ways of being Catholic and German.
Printy’s prime example is Nicholas von Hontheim, suffragan to the Archbishop of Trier and author of the most important enlightened Catholic critique of the church, On the State of the Church and Legitimate Power of the Roman Pontiff (1763). Writing under the pseudonym of Febronius, von Hontheim argued for greater Episcopal freedom. He justified this position on historical grounds, holding that the Papacy repeatedly usurped local authority. Printy explains that Hontheim’s position resulted from the increasing application of historical analysis to discussions of church authority. Here, the richness of Printy’s argument is most apparent. According to Printy, Hontheim learned to see the church in historical terms while at the University of Bologna, which was under papal control. More significant, however, is that other Catholics applied this approach to their own states. In the eighteenth century both Austria and Bavaria tried to found a state church (Staatskirche) along Protestant lines. Enlightened Catholics saw these schemes, however, as mere usurpations and foiled them. Printy’s book thus addresses a neglected theme: the historical approach to religion restrained both church and state.
Printy then grounds his point by showing how the growth of a bourgeois contingent within Catholic Germany offered fertile soil for Hontheim’s arguments. Although this was a small group, enlightened Catholics in cities such as Mainz, Munich, and Vienna attacked a church that they believed to be out of touch with the times. The rhetorical environment was extremely complex, as Catholics asserted their loyalty to a universal church, while undermining its authority over local practices. Printy’s evidence comes from the pamphlet literature that German Catholics produced in the second half of the eighteenth century. An excellent example is Friedrich Anton Blau’s Critical History of Ecclesiastical Infallibility (1791), in which Blau argues church ministers as a whole had led the church astray. Blau’s critique harboured radical implications. As Printy notes, ‘Blau does not attack papal infallibility, but ecclesiastical infallibility, a far more radical step’ (163). Blau was a professor of theology in Mainz and, like the protestant Georg Forster, supported the French revolutionary occupation of that city. Political radicalism could, thus, emerge from a Catholic context.
For all the book’s strengths, it has one major weakness. Printy’s assertion that the Catholic Enlightenment emerged from its own resources is difficult to support. In the first half of the eighteenth century Protestant Germany produced a vigorous literature on the limits of state authority, as Timothy Hochstrasser’s Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment (2000) and Ian Hunter’s Rival Enlightenments (2001) demonstrate. Given that print crossed political boundaries, it is not clear how one can argue that the Catholic Enlightenment developed independently, when Catholics had access to a Protestant literature from cities such as Berlin, Göttingen, Halle, Hamburg and Leipzig. Moreover, Printy’s chronology lends support to this critique, in so far as Hontheim’s work appeared well after Protestant enlightened debates were in full swing. It is, therefore, unlikely that Catholics did not also make use of Protestant resources.
It may, therefore, have been better to emphasize the unity of enlightened German debates. This approach would recognize the Catholic Enlightenment’s late start, while also offering room to explore its uniqueness within the German context. Enlightened Catholics confronted different problems than did their Protestant brethren and responded to them just as creatively. But they did neither of these things in a vacuum, and a greater sensitivity to borrowings and the circulation of ideas would have expanded the book’s implications for the literature on the German Enlightenment.