Catholicism and Enlightenment: Professor Richard BUTTERWICK-PAWLIKOWSKI delivered a lecture in Halle

On 9 November 2015, the Chairholder of the European Civilization Chair at the Natolin (Warsaw) campus of the College of Europe, Professor Richard BUTTERWICK-PAWLIKOWSKI, delivered the inaugural lecture in the series "Beyond 'Centres' and 'Peripheries' of the Enlightenment" organized by the Interdisciplinary Research Centre on the European Enlightenment at the Martin-Luther-Universität in Halle, Germany.

 

Professor BUTTERWICK-PAWLIKOWSKI's subject was "Catholicism and Enlightenment in Poland-Lithuania: On Enlightened Catholicism and Catholic Enlightenment". After critically reviewing recent discussions of the 'Catholic Enlightenment' and the 'religious Enlightenment', he argued that setting out a spectrum of overlapping positions between radical Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment, centred between 'enlightened Catholicism' and 'Catholic Enlightenment' could aid the analysis of the varied interactions between Catholicism (and by analogy, other confessions of faith) and Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe and the Americas. He illustrated his argument with examples drawn mainly from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

 

The following day, Professor BUTTERWICK-PAWLIKOWSKI participated in a discussion organized by the Aleksander Brückner Centre for Polish Studies at the Martin-Luther-Universität with Dr Dorota KELLER-ZALEWSKA, Deputy Director of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw; Professor Yvonne KLEINMANN, Director of the Brückner Centre; and Dr Dorothea WARNECK, the centre’s Coordinator.