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12181

The Papal Bull Unigenitus and the Forging of Enlightened

Catholicism, 1713–17641
Jeffrey D. Burson*
Georgia Southern University

Abstract
This article discusses the relationship between the papal Bull Unigenitus (1713) and the Catholic Enlight-
enment. The circumstances under which this controversial bull was received in the 18th century in
Europe, and particularly in France, partially occasioned the construction of factions in many dynastic
states—factions either pro-Unigenitus or pro-Augustinian (including but not limited to Jansenists). These
factions, in turn, tailored their particular varieties of Catholic Enlightenment in the process of elaborating
their respective positions concerning Unigenitus. This article synthesizes general trends in the present
scholarship in order to underscore the importance of Unigenitus to the response of the Catholic Church
to the Enlightenment. Because the fractures introduced into Catholic Europe by the bull were most acute
during the early 18th century in France and the most formative and contentious factionalism is
often presumed to have occurred before the suppression of the bull’s most stalwart defenders—the
Jesuits—between 1759 and 1773, this article focuses chiefly on the formative years of Catholic
Enlightenment factionalism in the middle third of the 18th century before the suppression of the Jesuits.

What does the papal bull Unigenitus have to do with the Catholic Enlightenment? The most ob-
vious answer is very little, at least not directly. Nevertheless, the circumstances under which this
controversial bull was received in the 18th-century Europe, and particularly in France, contrib-
uted to disagreement and discord that occasioned the construction of factions in many dynastic
states – factions either pro-Unigenitus or pro-Augustinian (including but not limited to Jansenists).
These factions, in turn, tailored their particular varieties of Catholic Enlightenment in the process
of elaborating their respective positions concerning Unigenitus. Much of what follows synthesizes
some of the general trends of present scholarship in order to highlight the utility of studying the
importance of bull Unigenitus and its relationship to the response of the Catholic Church to the
Enlightenment. Because the 18th century remains the core of Enlightenment era, and because
the Papal curia of Clement XI did not promulgate Unigenitus until 1713, this article will concern
itself with the effect of Unigenitus on the Catholic Enlightenment during the 18th century.
Moreover, because the religious and philosophical fractures introduced into Catholic Europe
by the bull were most acute during the early 18th century in France, and the most formative
and contentious factionalism is thus far presumed to have occurred before the suppression of
the bull’s most stalwart defenders – the Jesuits – between 1759 and 1773, this short article will
focus on the formative years of Catholic Enlightenment factionalism in the middle third of the
18th century.2 I thereby refrain from anything more than passing allusion to Enlightenment
Catholicism after the Suppression of the Jesuits. On these matters, readers are referred to the
groundbreaking research of Dale Van Kley in recent articles concerning the impact of the Jesuit
expulsion on Enlightenment Catholicism, alongside important works by Enrique Giménez-
López, Andrea J. Smidt, Charles C. Noël, and Jonathan Wright, and Jeffrey D. Burson.3
Before proceeding, it also seems prudent to clarify what I mean by Catholic Enlightenment,
or preferably “Enlightenment Catholicism.” The persistent quest for a univocal Catholic

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 Unigenitus and Enlightenment Catholicism 673

Enlightenment has left scholars with an excessively sharp, often rather hypostatic dichotomy
between the Catholic Enlightenment and the secular Enlightenment more generally. To avoid
such a dichotomy, this article defines “Enlightenment Catholicism” in a less restrictive and more
dynamic sense that permits scholars to resituate the extreme diversity and diachronic change
characteristic of Enlightenment Catholicism within the similarly polyvalent, diverse, and
dynamic notion of the Enlightenment now accepted by scholarship. Consequently, Enlighten-
ment Catholicism is here understood to encompass the work of authors, statesmen, monks,
secular clergy, philosophers, or apologists who participated in networks of publication and
18th-century sociability with a view toward integrating Enlightenment science, philosophy,
historical criticism, or political thought into their understanding of Catholic teaching and social
reform.4 Nevertheless, this capacious definition of Enlightenment Catholicism is not inattentive
to the often very sharp distinctions between “Anti-Jansenist” or “pro-Unigenitus” strains of
Enlightenment Catholicism on the one hand and Augustinian Enlightenment Catholicism on
the other. Indeed, the importance of Unigenitus in forging this very real rift between styles of
Enlightenment Catholicism distinction is the subject of this article. These distinct shades of
Enlightenment Catholicism owe their origins to support for (or criticism of ) Unigenitus. The
bull thus became a kind of fulcrum around which the pluralistic history of Enlightenment
Catholicism unfolded.5
The crisis over Unigenitus originally derived from lingering divisions over Augustine’s theology
of grace. Cornelius Jansen, Bishop of Ypres and founder of Jansenism in the last years of the 16th
century, wrote, in his Augustinus, that human free will was powerless to accept grace – that is,
divine grace was an irresistible gift. Jansen’s critics feared that his Augustinianism had led him
too far in the direction of an almost Calvinist pessimism about the depravity of humanity after
the fall. Already by 1643, Jansen’s work was posthumously censured by the papacy, but the con-
demnation of Jansenism followed a distinct trajectory in France relative to the rest of Europe.6
Many French Catholics had come to believe that the clergy of the French realm should have a
consultative role, alongside the papacy, governing the church in France. The French crown
had claimed the privilege of registering papal pronouncements in the Parlement of Paris (the
leading royal court of France). Such views were widely shared by jurists of the Parlement of Paris,
the bishops, French university theologians, and the crown itself. Ultimately, many of these so-
called “Gallican” customs heralded from the conciliarist jurists of the 14th and 15th centuries
(for example, Marsiglio of Padua, Bartolo of Saxoferrato, Jean Gerson, and Pierre Bailly). The
monastery of Port-Royal, a prominent 14th-century bastion of Catholic Reformation, literature,
and philosophy, disseminated this uniquely Gallican version of conciliarism, but the leadership of
Port-Royal (especially Antoine Arnauld and his daughter, Angélique Arnauld) was also perilously
close to the Jansenist Abbé Saint-Cyran, who had been an associate of Cornelius Jansen himself.
Port-Royal’s influence therefore associated, in the minds of many French educated men and
women, Jansen’s views on grace and the depravity of humankind after the fall and Gallicanism.7
In 1653, the papacy issued the bull Cum occasione against five propositions (attributed rather
generically and dubiously to Jansen). This earlier bull prompted Gallican bishops to appeal to
the papacy for clarification. The attempt to appeal Cum occasione turned around “matters of fact.”
That is, the censure of Jansenism as heresy was not the principal issue for many French appellants.
Instead, the issue turned on whether the propositions the papacy had censured properly speaking
came from Jansen at all or were instead condemnations of Jansenism and significant portions of
Augustinian theology that even non-Jansenist partisans of the 17th-century Catholic Reforma-
tion considered orthodox. The monarchy attempted to sidestep the debate in the hopes of secur-
ing a swift condemnation of Jansenism for political reasons: Chief Minister Cardinal Mazarin, like
his predecessor, Cardinal Richelieu, believed that followers of Jansen were politically dangerous
because some Jansenist-influenced clerics had been associated with the Fronde against ministerial

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674 Unigenitus and Enlightenment Catholicism

despotism during the minority of Louis XIV (1649–1651, 1652–53). Thus, the monarchy issued
the Formulary of 1655 mandating sincere acceptance of Cum occasione. Under royal pressure, most
of the Gallican opposition signed the Formulary just in time for the young King Louis XIV to
reconcile his realm to the new pontificate of Clement IX and facilitate greater papal support in
its war against Spain. From 1669, this so-called “Peace of the Church” remained in place, only
to be reawakened in a more virulent form with the coming of papal bull Unigenitus.8
The storm over the Formulary between 1655 and 1669 fueled concern by the
Parlement of Paris that royal as well as ultramontane absolutism appeared to be escalating,
but it took Unigenitus to galvanize such fears. The popularity of Pasquier Quesnel’s
Nouveau Testament en français (chiefly in its 1693 edition) provided the catalyst for Unigenitus,
further inflaming Anti-Jansenists and even a wave of more pervasive “anti-Augustinian”
sentiment in both Rome and Versailles. Quesnel’s was a translation of the New Testament
into French with accompanying moral commentary written from the perspective of the
Neo-Augustinianism that had become popular among highly literate clergy and laymen in
France nourished by Port-Royal in the latter half of the 17th century. In response, Clement
XI issued Vineam Domini (1705) and Unigenitus (1713), the latter of which reaffirmed prior
condemnations of Jansenism, associating these with Port-Royal, Quesnel, and Gallicanism.
In so doing, to quote Grès-Gayer, “the desire to destroy the root itself of Jansenism and at
the same time prove the ultimate authority of the pope, … challenged the entire theological
methodology of the Gallicans as well as their ecclesiology.”9
Most damagingly, as Dale Van Kley has persuasively argued, Louis XIV’s activist
support for a bull that had ham-fistedly censured Gallicanism alongside Quesnel’s
Jansenism divided the monarchy against itself, for Louis XIV had also staunchly reaffirmed
and exalted the independence of the Gallican Church by formally supporting the Decla-
ration of the Gallican Clergy concerning Ecclesiastical Power (1682). Thus, Louis XIV set
the tone for his 18th-century successors as the Bourbons nominally supported Gallican
juridical autonomy from the curia, even as the dynasty persecuted Gallicans who came
to oppose Unigenitus regardless of their doctrinal support of Jansenists. Royal persecution
of Jansenism occurred in close alliance with the papacy and the Jesuits – whose command
of so many colleges, seminaries, convents, and powerful church patronage rattled the
University of Paris Faculty of Theology (Sorbonne) greatly, thereby throwing the faculty
into the arms of the staunchest Gallicans and their Jansenist supporters until the 1730s.10
After a brief thaw over doctrinal issues that ensued during the regency of the Duc de Bourbon
and the Duc d’Orléans following the death of Louis XIV (1715), many Gallican bishops and
doctors of the Sorbonne reacted to Unigenitus by 1717, when the University of Paris Faculty
of Theology appealed the bull to the papacy in order to request that doctrinal clarifications
be worked out in consort with a General Council of the Church. The papacy and the French
monarch opposed these “Appellants”. In particular, the monarchy attempted to undermine
them by silencing debate and insisting on acceptance of Unigenitus as a law of state and church
(but without the formal registration by the Parlement of Paris considered customary for papal
bulls according to Gallican Liberties). Many moderate Appellants were bought off through
crafty patronage and by attacks that painted them as self-interested obstructionists bent on
destroying the peace of the church and the state. But many of the most sincerely convinced
Jansenists continued to remain intransigent until opposition. Ultimately under Louis XV’s chief
minister, Cardinal de Fleury, the crown sanctioned the purging of suspected Jansenist and appel-
lant parishes, bishoprics, convents, and universities of clergy opposed to the bull.11 Wholesale
persecution of the bull’s detractors remained ongoing throughout the 1720s into the early
1750s, and with it, the bitter partisan warfare in press and pulpit between pro-bull and pro-
Jansenist opinion escalated.

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 Unigenitus and Enlightenment Catholicism 675

To a great extent, how one felt about Constitution Unigenitus – especially concerning grace,
free will, and church government – led to significantly divergent breeds of Enlightenment
Catholicism – pro-Unigenitus and pro-Augustinian.12 The rest of this essay will concern itself
first with the characteristics of the pro-Unigenitus discourses of Enlightenment Catholicism
and secondly with the pro-Augustinian discourses of Enlightenment Catholicism. For partisans
of Unigenitus, including and especially the Jesuits, Enlightenment Catholicism was relatively
more favorable to advances in physiology, chemistry, and Newtonian physics (at least when
suitably synthesized with their already eclectic approach to Aristotelianism). Epistemologically,
many of the French Jesuits remained Aristotelian in little more than name, favoring an eclectic
mélange of Cartesian occasionalism and Lockean sensationism at least until the 1750s.13 Jesuit
scientific and epistemological innovations were nourished by their moral philosophy that, in
its most extreme form, verged on what many Jansenists considered to be sheer heresy.
As Robert Palmer noted some 70 years ago, many Jesuits shared with the philosophes a
generally pervasive 18th-century optimism concerning the ability of humanity to ratio-
nally reform and improve itself.14 This more extreme style of Jesuit moral theology de-
rived from Luis Molina, whose De Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis (Concerning the
Concord of the Free Will with the Gifts of Grace, 1588) asserted that the essential ability of
human nature to exercise free will and choose good and evil was not destroyed after
the Biblical fall of humankind into sin. Thus, God’s supernatural grace that made good
will and good actions efficacious for eternal life alone was lost. As such, the church (its
sacraments and moral instruction) became, for many Molinists, the means by which the
divine gift of sufficient grace was reinfused into the natural ability to know and do
good.15 Because of this general optimism about the human condition, the
pro-Unigenitus style of Enlightenment Catholicism is not only broadly congruent with
the “moderate” strain of Enlightenment identified controversially by Jonathan Israel; re-
cent work by Dale Van Kley and Mircea Platon additionally suggests it is also broadly
consonant with John Robertson’s Enlightenment favoring progress and human improve-
ment by commercial and political economy.16
The persistent defense of the bull’s critique of Augustinianism therefore animated many
accusations that Jesuits were morally lax supporters of Molinism with excessive confidence
in the powers of human natural reason over against divine providence. Even if Jansenist
accusations are exaggerated, many Jesuits still rooted their optimistic appraisal of human
natural reason even after the fall in the Council of Trent – that Adam was originally
created with a pure and perfectible nature because a perfect God logically would not have
created an essentially defective human nature to begin with. Supernatural grace was
therefore understood to have fortified Adam’s nature until the fall, at which point this
efficacious, supernatural grace was revoked, and human nature slowly drifted into corrup-
tion. This Jesuit view was a significant departure from the opinion of many French clergy
influenced by Pasquier Quesnal’s interpretation of the fall. To defenders of the bull, and
especially Jesuits, the Jansenist interpretation implied that the choice of the first man to
sin had had the power to make or unmake the essence of the human spirit – a power
which God alone possessed, the power to create or destroy.17 Jesuit moral philosophy
thus presupposed at least the limited possibility of a “rehabilitation of human nature”
through reason, instruction, natural philosophy, and the sacramental rites and teachings
of the church.18
Because Jesuits believed that human nature was not essentially corrupted ( only the super-
natural grace of God was removed), some Jesuits even conceived of an early and even partially
postlapsarian state of nature that had degenerated through history as the human soul, whence
no longer ignited by supernatural grace, became prey to fears, passions, and the lust for

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676 Unigenitus and Enlightenment Catholicism

dominion. As long-time Jesuit editor of the Mémoires de Trévoux, Claude G. Buffier had main-
tained, the natural sentiment of humanity – human common sense – was warped after the fall
in so far as natural reason was inexorably dependent upon sense perceptions governed by the
needs of the body.19 In short, defense of the more anti-Augustinian aspects of Unigenitus had
legitimized a Jesuit conception of original sin that derived it from the natural corruptibility of
human perception and therefore rational and moral understanding. In this latter sense, Jesuit
moral philosophy is not so far from the views of many other Enlightenment thinkers. Pierre
Bayle conceived of primitive humanity as beset by the fear of inexplicable natural forces that
led to superstition and idolatry.20 Similarly, for John Locke, whose views were among those
that directly informed many French Jesuits between 1710s and 1750s, early mankind tended
to ascribe fearful and inexplicable natural catastrophes to the vengeance of angry anthropo-
morphic beings in nature – beings that required propitiation and worship. By the natural im-
petus of carnal lust and fear, human understanding, increasingly dependent after the fall on
senses, led naturally to all forms of idolatry and superstition. This opinion was common to
Locke and Buffier, and it remained very much akin to that of many early Enlightenment
writers (sacred and secular), including the Oratorian Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche,
the Maurist Benedictine François Lamy, and even such celebrated apologists of the
1760s–1780s as Nicolas Sylvestre Bergier.21
Because human understanding was thought to be liable to corruption due to the very
nature of sense perception, many Catholic writers agreed on the insufficiency of natural
theology. Individual reason, even once properly enlightened, remained powerless to
maintain or rediscover the pristine natural revelation of God. Jesuits and other apologists
of the 18th century considered only the revealed religion of the Catholic Church to be
an effective rampart against the inherently corruptive tendencies of natural reason. How-
ever, for such a claim to be palatable to 18th-century readers, Jesuits and other apologists
had to demonstrate that the teachings and traditions of the Church were historically ver-
ifiable as a block because they were carried through time in as an unbroken succession
dating to within living memory of Jesus himself.22 In order to do so, many Catholic
apologists of the time turned toward demonstrations of the veracity of Catholic revelation
from historical evidence. If the Catholic revelation were shown to be at least reasonably
verifiable by a chain of historical evidence, then it could be assumed to be the only truly
divine revelation capable of arresting the vulnerability of postlapsarian human understand-
ing to fears and passions. Buffier in particular utilized Locke’s rules for historical probabil-
ity to this end, thereby adapting them for use in assessing the historical certitude of the
gospels and the authenticity of the Church’s revealed teachings.23 Methods such as this
were widely popular and re-emerged almost wholesale even in the article on historical
certitude by Abbé de Prades in Diderot’s Encyclopédie.24
In moving apologetics away from speculative reason and on to more historicist-
empiricist grounds, Buffier’s efforts were in good company. Buffier’s Traité des prémiers
vérités (1724) and his Exposition des preuves les plus sensibles de la veritable religion (1732)
joined a cacophony of historical-empirical apologetics published largely between 1690
and 1760, including the Benedictine François Lamy’s L’Incrédule amené à la religion par
le raison (1710), the Oratorian abbé d’Houtteville’s La Religion Chrétienne prouvée par
les faits (1722), and Doctor of the Sorbonne, Luke Joseph Hooke’s Religionis naturalis
et revelatae principia (composed in the 1740s but not formally published until 1774).25
Thanks at least in part to the philosophical speculations on moral theology and the
nature of grace unleashed by Unigenitus, the theology of Enlightenment Catholicism
among supporters of the papal bull evolved into a science focused upon uncovering
historical evidence for the veracity of Scriptural texts and church traditions.26

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This new historico-empirical mode of enlightened apologetics similarly implied a quest for
concrete demonstrations of the process by which the original, natural religion/revelation from
God (often identified with the religion of the Biblical patriarchs) had been corrupted among the
peoples of the globe.27 Jesuits thereby proved instrumental as participants in what Guy Stroumsa
has recently dubbed the “new science” of comparative religion in the Enlightenment.28 Jesuit
participation in what amounts to the earliest Enlightenment debates on comparative religion
followed from their moral philosophy, which left room for the descent of man from a more
pristine state of nature. The participation of apologists and defenders of Unigenitus in the study
of comparative religions led some like Jesuit Father René-Joseph Tournemine to conclude that
philosophical atheism does not actually exist – its origins are the same as that of idolatry and
superstition. In a series of reflections on atheism posthumously published in a 1776 revised
edition of Fenelon’s philosophical works, he went so far as to claim that “there are no true
atheists”, because atheism is the willful attachment to metaphysical confusions that obscure
the natural sentiment within human beings that attests to the existence of God.29
The furor over Unigenitus additionally ignited a distinctively Augustinian style of Enlighten-
ment Catholicism. Augustinian Enlightenment Catholicism is characterized by significantly
different emphases and concerns from that of the Jesuits (in France, at least, until after the
1760s when these strains begin to converge once the storm over Unigenitus had subsided and
the Jesuits were suppressed). I have previously used the term, “Augustinian Enlightenment
Catholicism” rather self-consciously because it provides a way to more precisely describe the
style of Enlightenment Catholicism that emerged among a variety of different clerical reformers
including but not limited to the Jansenists. In fact, numerous critics of Unigenitus and the
presumed Molinism and Ultramontanism at its root existed among Benedictine Maurists,
Jansenists, Gallican bishops, and Doctors of the Sorbonne. Not all of these reformist critics were
Jansenists, but most were more self-consciously influenced by Augustinianism than were the
Jesuits whose soteriology and moral theology still owed much to Thomistic and Salamancan
influences. Similarly, the distinctive history of the French Catholic Church in particular drew
many French bishops toward Augustinian notions of grace and farther in the direction of
conciliarism – that is, the belief that national churches and not the papacy should take a more
active and direct role in the financial, juridical, and moral oversight of the church.30
Although many of these French Gallicans were not Jansenist, many Gallicans shared with
Jansenists fear of the French monarchy’s high-handed support for Unigenitus thereby allowing
fears of encroaching Bourbon absolutism to converge with concerns over the encroaching
juridical autocracy of the pope. In self-conscious opposition to Unigenitus, Jansenists gravitated
to late medieval conciliarist political thought, which had been among the medieval origins of
Renaissance republicanism. Similarly, conciliarism in the guise of Gallicanism cloaked “civic
humanism in clerical garb”, as Dale Van Kley has suggested.31 That is, later Jansenists and French
Gallicans considered the progress of Enlightenment Catholicism to mean returning the church
to an earlier state when congregations (or regional and national churches) functioned as a
“confederal republic” (Grès-Gayer) that provided advice and consent to Rome in the elabora-
tion of doctrine.32 Unigenitus seemed to them the greatest obstacle to the fulfillment of Catholic
Reform and Enlightenment.
When the Jansenists acquired an institutional ally in the Parlement of Paris in its own stand
against Louis XV’s encroaching fiscal absolutism and support for refusing the sacraments to
suspected critics of Unigenitus (1732–1760), Jansenists found themselves behaving as though
the Parlement of Paris were the last bastion of support for the primitive Church and the chief
guarantor of the fundamental laws of the French nation against royal despotism. At least, in
France, therefore, it seems that many Augustinian critics of Unigenitus believed in a style of
Enlightenment Catholicism that was most receptive to contractar and consensual theories of

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678 Unigenitus and Enlightenment Catholicism

government.33 Well before the Jacobin clubs in the Revolutionary Era, moreover, the Jansenist
party, as it was often referred to by contemporary sources, also functioned as one of the first
organized pressure groups in Old Regime politics, mobilizing against religious persecution
resulting from enforcement of Unigenitus.34 Crises make curious allies, and despite the vehe-
mence with which the Jansenists would often attack more radical writers, Jansenists and
philosophes shared a common disdain for religious persecution and a common concern with
what they each perceived as papal and regal despotism.35
Because of their support for Gallicanism against high-handed papal and royal support
for Unigenitus, the pro-Augustinian avatar of Enlightenment Catholicism combed ecclesi-
astical history and canon law in support of their Gallican assumption that the church was
rightfully and historically akin to a confederation of national churches with whom the
papacy consulted in elaborating doctrine. Moreover, the tendency of jurists in the Parlement
of Paris to oppose Louis XV’s often pro-Jesuit, pro-Unigenitus upper clergy in persecuting Jan-
senists stimulated pro-Jansenist clergy and jurists to dabble in Atlantic republican and Civic
Humanist political theory. As such, the legal and political thought of many Enlightenment
Catholic writers who opposed the bull frequently depicted modernity as a source of author-
itarianism, moral corruption, and theological innovation, juxtaposed to the ancient virtue of
the primitive church as a source of theological, humanistic, and moral virtue. One is tempted
therefore to see analogies between Augustinian Enlightenment Catholicism, especially among
the most radical opponents of Unigenitus and the Civic Humanist Enlightenment of Pocock’s
Atlantic Republicans.36
In addition, the Augustinian style of Enlightenment Catholicism led to some intriguing
contributions to broader Enlightenment currents. The very fact that many Jansenists believed
human reason to be powerless to understand the motives and actions of God meant, conversely,
that they were confident that natural reason was most properly concerned with natural
phenomena37 As such, Jansenist pessimism about human reason in no way precluded their
participation in Enlightenment scientific inquiry nor did it deter Jansenists from studying
political economy and social reform based on rational self-interest, as Dale Van Kley argued.
Thus, when Jansenists supported physiocratic political economic theory, or any other system
of 18th-century moral reform based on individual self-interest, they did so for different reasons
than the philosophes: Jansenists believed social reform must presuppose the tragic but inevitable
fact that individuals act out of self-interest and self-preservation.38 Jansenists associated with the
Nouvelles ecclésiastiques also framed their crusade against “Jesuits”, “Molinists”, and the “Consti-
tution Unigenitus” as a struggle of the forces of light against darkness. To morally reform society
and root out superstition from the supposed purity of the church’s so-called primitive teachings
was to enlighten society.39 This view of a properly reformed Catholic Church as quintessential
to human progress become a commonplace of Enlightenment apologetics in France even into
the early revolutionary era; the works of Anne-Robert Turgot, Abbé Gregoire, and even
apologists for the Constitutional church before 1793 (like Adrien Lamourette) would emphasize
the essential consonance of Catholic reform, social progress, and felicity.40
Indeed, many Catholic Reform movements in the rest of Europe after the Suppression of
the Jesuits in France (1764) were deeply imbued with the character of Augustinian Catholic
Enlightenment. The recent work of Dale Van Kley especially has shown how personal
connections between French Jansenists and those of the Austrian Netherlands may have
redounded upon critiques of Baroque Catholicism in Austria under Maria Theresa and
Joseph II.41 “[E]ven in enlightened Catholic absolutisms like Habsburg Austria or Tuscany”,
Van Kley writes, many such pragmatic Catholic Reforms inspired by Jansenist or
Augustinian reformers allowed for “de jure toleration much sooner than in France” as
Dale Van Kley reminds us.42 Though space precludes doing justice to such topics in this

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essay properly concerned with the period of 1713–1765, a thorough treatment of such
complex issues, Augustinian-inspired Catholic reform in Habsburg Austria, Tuscany, Naples,
and the “Ibero-Atlantic” world (Spain, Portugal, and their respective empires) redounded
negatively upon the Jesuits, resulting in an international wave of expulsions that have been
the subject of recent work by Van Kley and others.43 In fact, it is the subject of a forthcoming
edited volume with Cambridge University Press, edited by Jonathan Wright.44
In conclusion, although the storm over Unigenitus drew the bulk of its inspiration from
lingering tensions over grace and ecclesiology within Post-Tridentine Catholic Europe, its
aftershocks proved to be a vital catalyst for Enlightenment Catholicism in the years prior to
the international suppression of the Jesuits (1759–1773). The fiery polemics afflicting the
18th-century Catholic church after Unigenitus, especially in France, served as a blast furnace that
forged the superstructure of Enlightenment Catholicism in the 18th century.

Short Biography

Jeffrey D. Burson is a member of the Jack N. Averitt Graduate Faculty of Georgia Southern
University, and Assistant Professor of French History in the Georgia Southern University
Department of History within College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. Dr Burson
received his PhD from George Washington University in 2006 and has taught at George Mason
University, Washington College, and tenure-track at Macon State College (now Middle
Georgia State College) before beginning his current tenure-track position at Georgia Southern
University in 2011. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment: Jean-Martin
de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France (University of Notre Dame Press,
2010) and co-editor with Ulrich L. Lehner of Enlightenment Catholicism: A Transnational History
(University of Notre Dame Press, 2014). In addition, Professor Burson is the author of 15
articles and chapters, including contributions to French History, Réflexions Historiques, Contributions
to the History of Concepts, Intellectual History Review, SVEC, Brill Companion to Catholic Enlighten-
ment, and Church History. His current projects include a book on religion and the enlightenment
in Pre-Revolutionary France tentatively entitled, The Crucible of Theological Enlightenment:
Abbé Claude Yvon and the Peripheries of Enlightenment Catholicism in a Revolutionary Era (under
advance contract with University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), a chapter on the French
Jesuits and the Enlightenment forthcoming in a volume about the suppression of the Jesuits
in 18th-century Europe (Cambridge, 2015). He is also working on another book manuscript
entitled, “Drawn and Quartered in Service to God and Mamon: French Jesuits between
Power and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-century France.” Professor Burson is Editor of
Eighteenth-Century Thought and a member of the Board of the Directors of the Consortium
on the Revolutionary Era.

Notes
* Correspondence: Georgia Southern University, Department of History P.O. Box 8054 Statesboro, GA 30460-8054, USA. Email:
jburson@georgiasouthern.edu.
1
This article is an expanded and revised edition of a guest lecture I delivered by invitation from the Rare Books and Special
Collections Department of Mullen Library, Catholic University of America, on the occasion of the tercentenary of Unigenitus
(18 November 2013). Special thanks is due to Lenore Rouse, Curator of the Rare Books and Special Collections Department,
and in particular, of the very useful Clementine Collection of the Albani Library housed therein. Special thanks is also due to the
Catholic University Department of History for their hospitality, to Gail Bossenga for suggesting I publish the address in
modified form in History Compass. This article is also dedicted to the late Jacques M. Grès-Gayer whose life-long devotion
to the history of Unigenitus and Catholic Reform at the Sorbonne will be greatly missed.

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd History Compass 12/8 (2014): 672–684, 10.1111/hic3.12181
680 Unigenitus and Enlightenment Catholicism
2
The historical dynamic unleased by Unigenitus figures prominently in voluminous scholarship, most prominent in this
respect are the following: Mairie, De la cause de Dieu à la cause de la Nation: le Jansénisme au XVIIIe siècle; Van Kley, The
Damiens Affaire and the Unraveling of the Ancien Régime, 1750–1770; Van Kley, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits
from France, 1757–1765, 230–37; Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution; Bell, The Cult of the Nation:
Inventing French Nationalism, 1680–1800; Kreiser, Miracles, Convulsions, and Ecclesiastical Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century
Paris; Cottret, Jansénisme et Lumières: pour un autre XVIIIe siècle; Campbell, Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 1720–1745;
Ehrard, L’Idée de nature en France dans la prémière moitié du XVIIIe siècle; Burson, The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment;
Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France; Grès-Gayer, D’un jansénisme à l’autre: chroniques de Sorbonne,
1696–1713, 373–417; Grès-Gayer, ‘The Unigenitus of Clement XI: A Fresh Look at the Issues’, 259–82.
3
Van Kley, ‘From the Catholic Enlightenment to the Risorgimento: The Debate between Nicola Spedalieri and Pietro
Tamburini, 1791–1797, forthcoming; ; Van Kley, ‘Jansenism and the International Expulsion of the Jesuits’, 302–38;
Nöel, ‘Clerics and Crown in Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808: Jesuits, Jansenists, and Enlightened Reformers’, 119–53;
Giménez-López, (ed.), Expulsión y exilio de los Jésuitas españoles; also Burson, ‘Introduction’, 23–37; Smidt, ‘Bourbon
REgalism and the Importation of Gallicanism: The Political Path for a State Religion in Eighteenth-Century Spain’,
25–53; Jonathan Wright, (ed.), The Jesuit Expulsion, forthcoming.
4
For more extended discussion of my definition of Enlightenment Catholicism, see Burson, ‘Introduction to Enlightenment
and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History’, 1–49.
5
Burson, ‘French Catholic Enlightenment’, 63–125.
6
Doyle, Jansenism, 12–38.
7
Ibid., 5–25.
8
Ibid., 31–38.
9
Grès-Gayer, ‘The Unigenitus of Clement XI: A Fresh Look at the Issues’, 279; also Mairie, De la cause de Dieu à la cause de la
Nation, 36–44; Julia, L’Affaiblissement de l’église gallicane, 11–50.
10
A helpful summary of Van Kley’s near canonical arguments concerning the impact of Unigenitus on the notion of Sacral
Kingship in France is found in the chapter summary of his larger book, found in Peter R. Campbell’s edited volume on the
Origins of the French Revolution: see Van Kley, ‘The Religious Origins of the French Revolution, 1561-1791’, 160–190;
McManners, Church and Society, 1:213; Doyle, Jansenism, 45–55; Phillips, Church and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France,
105–8; Mairie, De la cause de Dieu à la cause de la Nation, 36–44;Grès-Gayer, Le Gallicanisme de Sorbonne, 435–42;
Grès-Gayer, D’un jansénisme à l’autre: chroniques de Sorbonne, 1696–1713, 373–417.
11
Grès-Gayer, Théologie et pouvoir en Sorbonne, 203–10; Hudson, ‘The Regent, Fleury, and the Sorbonne’, 138–48.
12
Burson, Theological Enlightenment, 112–3; Burson, ‘The Catholic Enlightenment in France from the fin de siècle Crisis of
Consciousness to the Revolution, 1650-1789’, 64–125.
13
Burson, Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment, 33–178, 239–75.
14
Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France, 28–52.
15
Van Kley, Religious Origins, 52.
16
Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 3–60; Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, 1–14,43–44; Van Kley, ‘Robert R.
Palmer’s Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France’, 13–36; Platon, ‘Physiocracy, Patriotism, and Reform
Catholicism’, 182–202; for additional recent work on the importance of physiocracy to the Enlightenment in general, or
Enlightenment Catholicism in particular, see Vardi, The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment); Shovlin, The Political
Economy of Virtue; Guasti, N., ‘Antonio Genovesi (1713–1769): Reform through Commerce and Renewed Natural
Law’, 269–289; Vanysacker, ‘Giacinto Sigismondo Cardinal Gerdil (1718–1802): Enlightenment as Cultural and
Religious Achievement’, 89–107; Sonenscher, ‘Physiocracy as Theodicy’, 326–39.
17
Ehrard, L’Idée de nature en France, 438–40.
18
Northeast, The Parisian Jesuits and the Enlightenment, 217–8; Mercier, La Réhabilitation de la nature humaine, 1700–1750.
19
Buffier, Traité des Prémières vérités et de la source de nos jugements, I.ix. 33–5, 72–6.
20
Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, 26–31; Hazard, La crise de la conscience européene, 90–109.
21
Malebranche, Éntretiens sur la métaphysique, sur la religion, et sur la mort ([1674] 1711), in Oeuvres complètes du Malebranche, IV.
xvii, XII.ix; Cottret, Le Christ des lumières: Jésus de Newton à Voltaire, 1680–1750, 57, 75–6; Manuel, Eighteenth Century
Confronts the Gods, 44–55, 62–3, 132; see Ehrard, L’Idée de nature, 423 n. 7.
22
Burson, The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment, 64–70.
23
Hammerton, ‘A Feminist Voice in the Enlightenment Salo’, 216–20; Hammerton, ‘Malebranche, Taste, and Sensibility’,
533–58; Burson, ‘Claude G. Buffier and the Maturation of the Jesuit Synthesis in the Age of Enlightenment’, 449–72;
Burson, Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment, 1–274; Wilkins, A Study of the Works of Claude Buffier; Ehrard, L’Idée de
la Nature en France dans la première moitié du XVIII siècle, 424–5; Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 1:588–9;

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 Unigenitus and Enlightenment Catholicism 681

Charles, ‘L’immatérialisme allié naturel ou ennemi désigné des philosophes chrétiens?’, 161–72; Bergier, Origine des dieux du
paganisme, 1: 1:5–12, 15, 23–24, 29–33, 38–44.
24
Buffier, Traité des Premières vérités, I.xix.142–148, 62–5; I.xxviii.175–179, 73–5 Essay concerning Human Understanding, IV.
xv.1–6, 654–7; IV.xvi.10–11, 663–5; IV.xviii.4, 690–1; Ehrard, L’Idée de la nature, 425–7; Burson, Theological Enlightenment,
64–70, 207–13;Bouillier, ‘Introduction to Oeuvres philosophiques de Père Buffier’, 131;Hutchison, Locke in France, 35–9;
Palmer, ‘The French Jesuits in the Age of Enlightenment’, 44–58; Northeast, The Parisian Jesuits and the Enlightenment, 65.
25
Ehrard, L’Idée de la nature, 421–6; d’Houtteville, La Religion chrétienne prouvée par les faits, 1:182; Hooke, Religionis naturalis
et revelatae principia; on Hooke’s own debt to Houtteville, see ‘Jugement de censeur: Religionis naturalis et revelatae principia, 2
juillet 1751’, BnF, Annisson-Duperron 22138, f. 50; on Hooke, see O’Connor, An Irish Theologian in Eighteenth-Century
France: Luke Joseph Hooke, 1714–96; O’Connor, ‘Luke Joseph Hooke: Theological Tolerance in an Apologetic Mold’,
420–38; Bernard Lamy’s early work was generally reviewed favorably by the Jesuits, see ‘Article III: [R.P. Lamy
Bénédictin de la Congrégation de Saint Maur], Les prémiers élémens des sciences, ou entrée aux connoissances solides, en divers
entrétiens, proportionnés à la portée des commençans, & suivis à un Essai de Logique (Paris: Chez Frédéric Leonard, 1706)’, 37–51.
26
Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 56–63, 106–7.
27
For varieties of apologetics during the Enlightenment and divers interpretations of the Jesuit apologists, see Masseau, Les
énnemis des philosophes; Everdell, Christian Apologetics in France, 1730–1790: The Roots of Romantic Religion.
28
Guy Stroumsa, A New Science, 1–13, 145–57.
29
‘Réflexions du Père Tournemine, Jésuite, sur l’Athéïsme, sur la démonstration de Monseigneur de Cambray, & sur le
Systême de Spinosa qui ont servi de Préface aux deux Éditions précédents de la Démonstration’, 377–412.
30
Grès-Gayer, ‘The Magisterium of the Faculty of Theology of Paris in the Seventeenth Century’, 424–50; Parsons, The
Church in the Republic.
31
Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 1:3–22, 49–65; Van Kley, ‘Civic Humanism in Clerical Garb: Gallican
Memories of the Early Church and the Project of Primitivist Reform, 1719-91’, 77–120; Jacques M. Grès-Gayer, ‘The
Magisterium of the Faculty of Theology of Paris in the Seventeenth Century’, 424–50.
32
Grès-Gayer, ‘The Magisterium of the Faculty of Theology of Paris’, 424–50; Parsons, The Church in the Republic,
33
Mairie, De la Cause de Dieu à la cause de la Nation, 48; Burson, ‘The Catholic Enlightenment in France’, 70–2.
34
Campbell, Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 196–7.
35
Cottret, Jansénisme et lumières, 76; Van Kley, Religious Origins of the French Revolution, 135–321.
36
Pocock, ‘Clergy and Commerce’, 523–561; Van Kley, ‘Civic Humanism in Clerical Garb’, 77–120; Van Kley, Religious
Origins, 135–302; Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, 89; Cottret, Jansénisme et lumières, 76; Conttret contends that, while
Jansenist political thought may have been used by Diderot and others to defend republicanism or limited government,
Jansenists remained largely defenders of “Gallican Monarchy” or limited monarchy for reasons ultimately rooted in their
ecclesiology and their detestation of Unigenitus. See Cottret, ‘Aux origins du républicanism janséniste: le mythe de l’église
primitive et le primitivisme des lumières’, 99–115; recently, Dan Edelstein’s interesting and provocative work on the
reception of Locke’s Second Treatise in France has similarly implied that the Jansenists may have largely shared a common
French tendency to neglect social and political contract theory, focusing instead on law reform in order to make it
comport with natural law (as knowable by natural sentiment): see Edelstein, ‘Rights Talk’, 1–36; Van Kley is prescient,
and in this author’s judgment, convincing however, in as much as later Jansenist political thought, at least in its more
radical garb after the 1750s, later shaded sporadically and perceptibly toward republicanism, and this Gallican Civic
Humanism was exported well outside of France between the Jesuit Suppression in France (accomplished formally in
1764) and the Civic Constitution of the Clergy (1791). Van Kley, ‘Civic Humanism in Clerical Garb’, 77–120; also Van
Kley, D., ‘Catholic Conciliar Reform in an Age of Anti-Catholic Revolution’, 91–141.
37
Kennedy, Cultural History of the French Revolution, 57–76.
38
Dale Van Kley, ‘Pierre Nicole, Jansenism, and the Morality of Enlightened Self-Interest’, 69–85.
39
Froeschlé-Chopard, ‘Les Nouvelles ecclésiastiques et les lumières (année 1750)’, 77–89; Mairie, De la cause de Dieu à la cause
de la nation, 48; Bell, ‘Culture and Religion’, 89.
40
Turgot, ‘Discours de Turgot alors prieur de Sorbonne, pour l’ouvérture et la clôture des Sorbonniques de l’année’,
2:586–97; Plongeron, ‘Bonheur et ‘civilisation chrétienne’: une nouvelle apologétique au XVIIIe siècle’, 1637–55;
Sepinwall, Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution, 231; Masseau, Les énnemis des philosophes: l’antiphilosophie au temps des
Lumières; Chopelin-Blanc, Adrien Lamourette; Sorkin, Religious Enlightenment, 263–309.
41
Forster, Catholic Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, 187–98.
42
Van Kley, ‘Christianity as Causality and Chrysalis of Modernity: The Problem of Dechristanization in the French Revolution’, 13.
43
Van Kley, ‘Jansenism and the International Expulsion of the Jesuits’, 302–38; Van Kley, ‘Catholic Conciliar Reform in an
Age of Anti-Catholic Revolution’, 91–141; on Augustinian Enlightenment Reform, the suppression of the Jesuits, and

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682 Unigenitus and Enlightenment Catholicism

impacts on regalism and Enlightened Absolutism elsewhere in Europe, readers are referred to Smidt, ‘Luces por la Fe: The
Cause of Catholic Enlightenment in 18th-Century Spain’, 403–53; Nöel, ‘Clerics and Crown in Bourbon Spain,
1700–1808: Jesuits, Jansenists, and Enlightened Reformers’, 119–53; Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in
Spain and Its Empire, 1759–1808; also Forster, Catholic Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightement, 184–198; Beales,
‘Religion and Culture’, 131–77.
44
Burson, ‘Between Power and Enlightenment: The Cultural and Intellectual Context for the Jesuit Suppression in France’,
forthcoming.

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