Enlightenment, Catholicism, Conservatism: The Isaac-Joseph Berruyer Affair and the Culture of Orthodoxy in France, ca. 1700-1830

When the second-century Church Father Tertullian asked the provocative questions, “What is there in common between Athens and Jerusalem? What between the Academy and the Church?” he opened up a line of inquiry to which the Church has been responding for nearly two millennia. How has the Church negotiated its relationship with the constantly changing world of non-ecclesiastical cultures, and what are the ramifications of the Church’s decisions either to embrace or eschew cultural norms? The answers to these questions explain how the Church’s role in European society has transformed over time. This dissertation examines the complex relationship between the Catholic Church and the cultural and intellectual movement of the Enlightenment over the course of the long eighteenth century (ca. 1700-1830). More specifically, it focuses on the Enlightenment in France—where many historians have located the birthplace of modern secularism—to track the unlikely ways that members of the French Society of Jesus interacted with the sensibilities of the Enlightenment and employed them for the purposes of the Church. Providing the case study for this examination is the French Jesuit Isaac-Joseph Berruyer (1681-1758) whose magnum opus, the Histoire du peuple de Dieu, promoted a unique blend of traditionally Catholic and enlightened values. Berruyer’s Jesuit style of “Catholic Enlightenment” differed from the ways by which other groups in the Catholic Church sought to accommodate the new perspectives and cultural assumptions of the Age of Enlightenment. When his Histoire underwent fierce opposition and eventual censorship at both state and ecclesiastical levels, Berruyer’s negotiation of ecclesiastical and non-ecclesiastical cultures became intertwined in the political disputes of mid-century France, including most especially the long standing quarrel between Jansenists and the Society of Jesus that ended in the expulsion of the Jesuits from France and all of Catholic Europe. Berruyer’s legacy, however, persisted past the suppression of the Jesuits and the French Revolution into the nineteenth century where it laid the foundation for a new set of conservative political sensibilities. In this way, the unlikely figure of a French Jesuit helped connect the ideals of the Enlightenment to the mentalities of post-revolutionary conservatism and nineteenth-century Catholic culture.