The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment : Jean-Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France / Jeffrey D. Burson ; foreword by Dale Van Kley.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Burson, Jeffrey D.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Enlightenment--France.

Enlightenment.

Catholic Church and philosophy--France--History--18th century.

Catholic Church and philosophy.

France--Church history--18th century.

France.

Catholic Church--France--History--18th century.

Catholic Church.

Prades, Jean-Martin de.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xxiv, 494 p. )

Place of Publication:

Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2010]

Language Note:

English

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 Abbé 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.

Contents:

Perspectives on enlightenment, religion, and the Abbe de Prades : toward a new historiography of theological enlightenment

The creation of the Jesuit synthesis : Locke, Malebranche, and the flowering of theological enlightenment

The radicalizing enlightenment and the maturation of theological enlightenment to 1750

Bringing up the theological enlightenment : life, leisure, philosophy, and culture at the University of Paris and the seminaries, ca. 1730-1755

Theological enlightenment at the Sorbonne, 1729-1752

The center falters : turmoil and the burgeoning fracture of theological and radical enlightenments

Prades and the crucible of religious polarization in eighteenth-century France

The abortive theological enlightenment synthesis of Prades I

The abortive theological enlightenment synthesis of Prades II : from natural religion to the necessity and historicity of Catholicism

The scandal at the Sorbonne and the condemnation

The nadir of theological enlightenment : religious polarization of the eighteenth-century public sphere in the aftermath of the Prades affair

Prades and the long denouement in Prussia, 1752-1782

Appendix : authenticity of the Prades thesis and Apologie.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780268075798

0268075794

OCLC:

794700559