Ulrich L. Lehner

Bio: Ulrich L. Lehner is an academic researcher from Marquette University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Catholic Enlightenment & Enlightenment. The author has an hindex of 7, co-authored 24 publications receiving 289 citations. Previous affiliations of Ulrich L. Lehner include Brill Publishers.

A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe

Abstract: (ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Brill's commitment to publishing a series of reference books and handbooks on the intellectual and religious life of Europe is to be praised, and this volume of heavily footnoted essays with extensive bibliographies will be particularly useful.The best aspect of this volume is its open struggle with its title term: "Catholic Enlightenment." Ulrich Lehner in his excellent introduction is the first to point out that the term is slippery. This volume of essays, he notes, is a companion not a manual . What the essays make clear in their own ways is that distinctively Catholic thinkers were engaged in a multiplicity of negotiations with exuberant rationality, Baroque spirituality, political philosophies concerning centralization of power, and moral philosophies of varying degrees of laxity and rigor. The essays emphasize the particular negotiations of individuals and religious orders. At the physical center of the book is Mario Rosa's depiction of the mediation skills of Pope Benedict XIV who was able to open spaces for Christian tradition and apologetics to be enriched by "the powerful flow of the new culture of Enlightenment" (227). However, most of the book is not about popes and papal pronouncements. Writing about Benito Jeronimo Feijoo in Spain, Andrea Smidt notes the pervasive issue for enlightened Catholics was to avoid the extremes of "blind belief and obstinate unbelief" (418). Tensions between the tendencies of Jansenists and Jesuits play a variety of roles in most of the essays. In France, Jeffrey Burson describes the psychological and cultural tensions between Jesuit optimism about moral progress and the more pessimistic social reformism of the Jansenist form of an "Augustinian Catholic Enlightenment" (65). Harm Klueting describes the inability of Austrian Jansenism to remain viable within the moderate Catholic Enlightenment as it was co-opted by politics and Protestantism after the Jesuits were repressed. In most of these essays the Jesuit and Jansenist relationship to centralized politics of different countries affects the way each promoted regional versions of enlightened Catholicism.Evident in all the essays is a Catholic eclecticism that undermines old reference-book traditions of hard categories and simple definitions. Jeffrey Burson, for example, writes of a "Jesuit Synthesis" that was "sculpted and refined in various forms by Claude Buffier and Rene-Joseph Tournemine" (79). This synthesis responded to radical statements in Spinoza and Descartes while adapting Malebranche and Descartes to Aquinas by way of Locke (79-80). This kind cut-and-paste thinking was usually regional and ephemeral. It responded to specific needs at specific times, usually supporting specific political and ecclesiastical situations. Andrea Smidt describes the predominance in Spain of a particular Spanish Jansenism, rooted in humanist, Erasmian, episcopalist, and Augustinian traditions peculiar to Spain. Michael Printy writes about rival Catholic enlightenments in the Holy Roman Empire that were not simply manifestations of anti-clerical or anti-religious ideas, but rather, "the culmination of several generations of pious renewal and revival" (173). …

The Catholic Enlightenment

Abstract: Recent research has demonstrated not only the existence of a variety of Enlightenments, but also the importance of the religious aspect to this worldwide process. In particular, special interest has been paid to the long-neglected Catholic Enlightenment, which entailed many strands of thought by Catholic intellectuals and political leaders who attempted to renew and reform Catholicism from the middle of the 18th to the early 19th century. This renewal was an apologetic endeavor designed to defend the essential dogmas of Catholic Christianity by explaining their rationality in modern terminology and by reconciling Catholicism with modern culture. The Catholic Enlightenment was in dialog with contemporary culture, not only by developing new hermeneutical approaches to the Council of Trent or to Jansenist ideas, but also by implementing some of the core values of the overall European Enlightenment process that tried to ‘renew’ and ‘reform’ the whole of society, and thus truly deserves the label Enlightenment.

What is ‘Catholic Enlightenment’?

Abstract: Recent research has demonstrated not only the existence of a variety of Enlightenments, but also the importance of the religious aspect to this worldwide process. In particular, special interest has been paid to the long-neglected Catholic Enlightenment, which entailed many strands of thought by Catholic intellectuals and political leaders who attempted to renew and reform Catholicism from the middle of the 18th to the early 19th century. This renewal was an apologetic endeavor designed to defend the essential dogmas of Catholic Christianity by explaining their rationality in modern terminology and by reconciling Catholicism with modern culture. The Catholic Enlightenment was in dialog with contemporary culture, not only by developing new hermeneutical approaches to the Council of Trent or to Jansenist ideas, but also by implementing some of the core values of the overall European Enlightenment process that tried to ‘renew’ and ‘reform’ the whole of society, and thus truly deserves the label Enlightenment.

F. C. Baur's Synthesis of Böhme and Hegel: Redefining Christian Theology as a Gnostic Philosophy of Religion

Abstract: In this book, Professor Simuț demonstrates how Baur came to understand Christian theology as a Gnostic philosophy of religion under the influence of Bohme's unorthodox esoteric theosophy and Hegel's modern religious philosophy.

Negotiating the Sacred: Spirituality and Reform in the Age of Enlightenment in the Republic of Venice

Abstract: Publication Date 2014-04-29 Availability Embargoed Embargo Period 2017-04-28 Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PHD) Department History (Arts and Sciences) Date of Defense 2014-04-03 First Committee Member Guido Ruggiero Second Committee Member Mary Lindemann Third Committee Member Hugh Thomas Fourth Committee Member Steve Stein Fifth Committee Member Laura Giannetti Abstract The continuing resilience, significance, and variety of religious culture in the age of the Enlightenment in the Republic of Venice are the overarching themes of this dissertation, which consists of a series of case-studies. Though the stories examined here are diverse and cover several aspects of devotions, practices, and beliefs, they all grew out of negotiations that took place at all levels. Each chapter showcases negotiations of the sacred among secular authorities, the clergy and their flocks, bishops and inquisitors, higher office holders in the Roman Church and in local branches of the Inquisition, and various members of ecclesiastic institutions. Together, these represent a more complicated religious Enlightenment than usually envisioned. Negotiations of the sacred unfold against the background of unapologetic quests for the miraculous and divine manifestations. Hence, the pursuit of modernity, which is still seen as the hallmark of the Age of Reason, actually never was very far removed from the sphere of religion and consciousness of the spiritual world. The examination of so many varied aspects of devotion, practices, beliefs, and the numerous uncertain attempts to constrain them within more rigorous boundaries (or to remove them from popular control) during the eighteenth century ultimately confirms that we – “moderns” – are the children of the Enlightenment in more complex ways than we might imagine.