The influence of the new intellectual currents that swept the Austrian clergy through Vienna, Italy, the Rhineland and the Netherlands did not bypass the Bishop of Ljubljana, Johannes Karl Herberstein (1772–1787), who became acquainted with various new initiatives during his studies in Salzburg and Rome, as well as as a canon in South Tyrol, where he had excellent connections with the Viennese philo-Jansenist circle. In doing so, his auction catalogue (1788) testifies that Bishop Herberstein, as a representative of the Catholic Enlightenment, could not limit himself exclusively to an Enlightenment understanding of human nature. In doing so, he seems to have found an adequate answer both to Augustinian voluntarism, which denied the power of fallen reason, and to the extremely naïve optimism of the Enlightenment, which attributed all knowledge to reason alone. The Catholic Enlightenment successfully embraced both divergent tendencies, preserving the elements of Jansenism with its emphasized, albeit pessimistic, individualism on the one hand, and allowing the reception of Wolff's optimistic Enlightenment thought on the other. It seems that the key to understanding this synthesis actually lies in Thomistic philosophy, which, after the failure of the so-called Jesuit synthesis, that pushed Catholic thought in the direction of empiricism, offered as a solution Aristotle's notion of analogy, which was successfully introduced into Christian thought by St. Thomas Aquinas. Thus, the Catholic intellectuals found an adequate answer to the contradictions of human nature. This enabled them to understand in a different way the nature of the human reason, which in this way remained receptive to the different meanings of language and was able to perceive reality in its entirety, both immanent and transcendent, thus remaining open to Christian revelation without in any way denying the role of reason.
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