By Glenn Stehle
[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4]
Once rationalism raised the intellectual stakes, Catholics could not go on playing by older, more relaxed rules: if formal rigor were the order of the day in physics and ethics, theology must follow suit….
In the Library of the Convent of Ste. Geneviève, near the Pantheon in Paris, is a manuscript entitled Traité de l’autôrité et de la réception du concile de Trente en France. It describes the struggle, after the Council of Trent, to uproot the “pernicious heresies and errors” of Protestantism, and paints a revealing picture of the intellectual position of the Catholic Church in early 18th-century France…. [I]ts final pages show how far the demand for “undeniable foundations” had made its way into Catholic theology by 1725. Looking back, the author credits the Council with anachronistic motives, which are intelligible only if already, in the 1570s, it could invoke the principles of a philosophical rationalism that was invented in the 1630s. The ambition of the Counter-Reformation, it tells us, was “to prove invincibly our most fundamental belief.”
–STEPHEN TOULMIN, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity
