“GERMANIAE EPISCOPI PRINCIPES SUNT”

“The bishops of Germany are princes,” the Jesuit Adam Contzen laconically declared in 1621. “Italian bishops,” he continued, “are not.” With the exception of the papal states, in which even Hobbes recognized the pope as sovereign, that temporal power was invested in the bishop was indeed the distinguishing characteristic of the German episcopate. This peculiarity meant as well that any realignment of the church in Germany would also touch the fundamental structure of the Empire. Issues of Catholic reform were of general interest because the fate of the Reichskirche was inseparable from the fate of the Empire itself.

The bishops were endowed with ecclesiastical foundations (Stifte) over which they ruled – in conjunction with the cathedral chapter – as lay lords. Ideally, territorial independence assured that a bishop would not be hindered in the exercise of his sacred office. In reality, wealth and power in the hands of these bishops was often a source of criticism and rebuke ever since the later Middle Ages, and complaints had sharpened considerably at the time of the Reformation. Moreover, a bishop's spiritual and secular jurisdictions did not necessarily coincide. This meant, for example, that a bishop would at times have to rely on the goodwill of a neighboring lay prince – or possibly even another bishop – to enforce his religious authority, whereas he may have subjects under his territorial jurisdiction who belonged to a different diocese.

The ecclesiastical principalities were the Empire's oldest institutions.

ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE CREATION OF GERMAN CATHOLICISM

In the end, there was Napoleon. The destruction of the Reichskirche removed the conditions that had allowed German Catholics to rethink the church. But this does not mean that the effort was all for naught. In rethinking the church in the eighteenth century, German Catholics entered a new century of revolution and upheaval with a greater sense of identity and cohesion than they had at the close of the seventeenth century. A lasting legacy of the katholische Aufklärung, therefore, was the articulation of an entity that could survive the collapse of its own legal underpinnings. Moreover, in recognizing that the church could be rethought in the eighteenth century, German Catholics were well-prepared for the intellectual task of rebuilding. As the tensions and contradictions of the katholische Aufklärung themselves reveal, the idea of a cohesive German Catholic church did not preclude radical differences of visions about the nature of that church.

The first task at hand, however, was reconstruction. While many were happy to see the old aristocratic German church brought to an end, the Secularization of 1803 (as drawn up in the Peace of Lunéville and formalized with the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss) did not in any way solve the long-standing problems facing the German church. These included such issues as large ungovernable dioceses, inadequate training of clergy, deficiency of proper episcopal authority in areas of Catholic diaspora in Protestant territories, and the fact that territorial and ecclesiastical boundaries often did not coincide.

As discussed in an earlier chapter, the intense interest in pre-Reformation canon law and the idealization of the fifteenth century as failed moment for a German national church played a central role in the arguments of the German canon lawyers intent on establishing jurisdictional autonomy from Rome. This Gallican idea, as it evolved into the eighteenth century, assumed that the church played a central role in politics and society. The Catholic reform program assumed a sense of responsibility and leadership for the German church. Formed as it was by the church, the German Catholic bourgeoisie felt an obligation to tie the Catholic past with a Catholic future. Because the German church had not succeeded in securing the rights and liberties that its French counterpart had (as early as the fifteenth century), German Catholics could pin their hopes for moral and intellectual leadership of the church on an imagined future legal autonomy in ways that French Catholics did not.

This process of rethinking took place within a larger debate about the German nation that intensified with the Seven Years’ War and its aftermath. This debate was pushed further along by the Carl Friedrich von Moser's pamphlet on the “German National Spirit,” published in 1765, which argued that Germans needed to cultivate a sense of nationhood to overcome their weaknesses and divisions.

In the wake of the Seven Years' War, German states, Catholic and Protestant alike, needed to come to terms with the new fiscal and economic pressures brought about by modern war-fighting and modern bureaucracy. For Catholic states, this process required a wholesale rethinking of political theology. This rethinking occurred within the larger European intellectual context of the mutual redefinition of the church and the state. The development of legal, fiscal, and administrative tools and infrastructures in the eighteenth century represented an intensification of a process that had begun in the sixteenth century. The conceptual elaboration of the state, as Quentin Skinner has argued, marked something new in the history of early modern political thought. This new view of political life held that “our duties are owed exclusively to the state, rather than to a multiplicity of jurisdictional authorities, local as well as national, ecclesiastical as well as civil.” The emergence of this new idea of the state also required a new ideological justification, and conditions in Catholic Germany meant that the process of rethinking would occur somewhat differently than in other parts of Europe.

CATHOLIC ENLIGHTENMENT AND REFORM CATHOLICISM

The reform program of educated German Catholics represented the culmination of several generations of pious renewal and religious reform. As such, it was part of a broader Catholic Enlightenment throughout Europe. But reform Catholicism in Germany had its own dynamic and set of problems that distinguished it from other such programs in the Catholic world. The most important of these were the political fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire, the strength of Baroque Catholicism, and the biconfessional nature of German society. What the German reformers had in common with the Enlightened Catholic brethren was an animosity to the Jesuits that persisted even after the suppression of the Society in 1773.

This revolt against the Jesuit fathers, however, was only the tip of the iceberg.

REFORMING THE CLERGY

The secular clergy was at the nexus of the rethinking of the church. Ideas and plans for the reformation of the clergy touched the heart of relations between the church and state. They were inseparable from questions of the structure of church hierarchy and were the canvas onto which reformers projected their visions of social reform.

Competing visions of the clergy and the type of religious practices, they should be supporting lurked behind the contest over the institutional apparatus of the church.

THE CHURCH AND THE PUBLIC

In rethinking the church, educated German Catholics “scrutinize[ed] the signs of the times” and imagined a Catholicism that, they felt, would do away with outworn accretion and would be suited to the world in which they lived. While the diversity of visions prevents a monolithic account, a sample of the pamphlet literature can at least lend insight into the shape of the religious world of German Catholic Enlightenment thinkers. This pamphlet literature constituted a Catholic subculture of the public sphere, and reflected the conditions of the literary world of Publizistik, the typically German discourse on public affairs. The educated German Catholics who participated in this forum considered the church in some form to be subject to public discussion and debate. This was a specifically German Catholic public sphere, but it was not hermetically sealed from the influence of Protestant German vernacular works. Benedikt Werkmeister, for one, contended that the Enlightenment was spread in Catholic parts of Germany through contact with Protestants. This contact was made possible by the spread of Freemasonry among the Catholic laity and the reading of Protestant literature, particularly the works of C. F. Gellert (1715–1769) and J. G. H. Feder (1740–1821). Furthermore, Werkmeister noted, the alliance of the houses of Saxony and Bavaria during the Seven Years' War, and especially the Saxon presence in Munich during the war, introduced Catholics to new ideas:

PUBLIC LAW AND THE CHURCH

As Hobbes realized, rethinking the state required rethinking the church. The elaboration of a sphere of secular power in opposition to the church was an act of mutual redefinition. The rise of the state was as much an intellectual phenomenon as it was an institutional one. Earlier, we have seen how Catholic princes and their supporters altered ideas about the common good. Given the tradition of Catholic political thought, with its strong commitment to the alliance of church and state, how did absolutist princes legitimate their exertions of financial and legal pressure on the church? One of the ways in which they did this was by subsuming parts of church law under the category of public law (öffentliches Recht, ius publicum). Because of the prominence of public law literature in early modern Germany, conceptualizations of the church were shaped by legal discourse.

The discussion and teaching of public law affected the church's law in two ways. First, the legal reasoning employed in distinguishing public from private law migrated into canon-law literature. Initially, the application of new terms like “public church law” was a neutral development and reflected more a shift of language than any radical new theory of the church. In other words, scholars of church law could organize their subject into private and public church laws without necessarily favoring curialist, conciliar, or Erastian positions. The expression ius publicum ecclesiasticum could be employed to refer to concordat law or particular state–church law.

THE ANCIENT CONSTITUTION OF THE GERMAN CHURCH

“Scholars,” the Trier Auxiliary Bishop Nikolaus von Hontheim proclaimed in his 1763 legal broadside against the papacy, “ought to be considered the natural defenders of both the church and state.” This sentiment underpinned the German Catholic rethinking of the church and was in many ways its leitmotif. From the outset, the Catholic reform program of the eighteenth century combined pious concern for religious renewal with intellectual engagement. Educated German Catholics did not see religion and reason as opposed – instead they sought to strengthen the bonds between them by rethinking and adapting the church to new times. In this, we can see how a relatively small group of German Catholics laid claim to the mantle of Christian humanism (a claim made explicit by Michael Ignaz Schmidt toward the end of the century) to express their sense of responsibility for the church. Given the ways in which the Church was embedded in the Old Regime culture of rights, privileges, and liberties – of law, in short – the initial phase of the German Catholic rethinking occurred largely through jurisprudence.

The political universe of German Catholics in the eighteenth century was shaped by the consequences of the Peace of Westphalia. Indeed, the German commitment – Protestant and Catholic alike – to the “constitution” (Verfassung) of the Empire may to a large degree be traced the success of the Westphalian treaties in preserving, more or less, confessional peace.

NATION AND RELIGION IN THE GERMAN ENLIGHTENMENT: A NEW PERSPECTIVE

Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism tells the story of how eighteenth-century German Catholics rethought the church. They imagined a church independent of, though still in communion with, Rome. Led by educated, “Enlightened” German Catholics in partnership with the state, the church they envisioned would solidify the link between religion, civilization, and morality. The reform program of this cohort of educated bourgeois Catholics represented the culmination of several generations of pious renewal and religious reform. As such, it was part of a broader Catholic Enlightenment throughout Europe. But reform Catholicism in Germany had its own dynamic and set of problems that distinguished it from other such programs in the Catholic world. The most important of these were the political fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire, the vitality of popular Baroque Catholicism, and the biconfessional nature of German society. Educated German Catholics sensed that the church needed to be strengthened against a series of interrelated threats. Religion's “cultured despisers” (in Schleiermacher's terms) were increasingly vocal in their attacks on revealed religion. The political structure of the Holy Roman Empire – which provided the institutional guarantee for the Catholic church in Germany – was menaced by the rise of Prussia. Protestants were constructing a powerful narrative that emplotted German nationalism as a rejection of Roman Catholicism.