Junior Faculty Fellow 1999-2000
Susan Rosa (History)
Northeastern Illinois University
Catholic Polemic and the Origins
of Enlightenment Rationalism
While in residence at the Erasmus Institute, I will be completing
a two-volume manuscript entitled Catholic Polemic and the Origins
of Enlightenment Rationalism (Vol. I: Britain; Vol. II: The
Continent). Through analysis of the seventeenth-century Catholic
polemical literature directed at educated Protestants throughout
Europe (i.e., aristocrats, gentry, scholars, theologians, and clergymen),
this project aims to overturn the entrenched but mistaken view that
the seventeenth-century Church repudiated rational defenses of the
faith. It will show, on the contrary, that the literature in question
placed an exclusive emphasis on the role of individual judgment
and rational choice in the determination of a religion, and in so
doing effectively made reason the judge of revelation. Thus, it
may in the long run have been as effective in encouraging the development
of “enlightened” forms of religious dissent as was religious
dissent itself. In demonstrating that rationalizing tendencies were
characteristic of both Catholic and mainstream Protestant
polemic during the seventeenth century, the project will also show
that the focus of inter-denominational controversy had lost its
religious specificity, and had come to reflect a generalized concern
with the credentials any authority must possess in order to enforce
its claims on the individual. Such commonalities, the argument concludes,
suggest that scholars should turn their attention to the ways in
which religious controversy itself both reflected and promoted the
secularization of thought in the early modern period.
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