God Alone Is Truth: Catholic Epistemologies and the Reception of the New Sciences in a Transatlantic Debate of the Spanish Enlightenment

Throughout the eighteenth century, drastic changes were occurring in the intellectual climate of the Spanish Empire.  Commonly referred to collectively as the “new philosophy” or the “new science,” these new methods of thought impacted the sphere of the religious and intellectual thinkers of the Spanish.  To many, these changes were not only direct challenges to established certainties, but represented calls for radical methodologies that would lead to materialism, atheism, and the ultimate ruin of Catholic society.  This presentation assesses the debate between the progressive and reactionary positions of Spanish intellectuals to the notion “enlightenment epistemology” by highlighting a transatlantic, epistolary debate of the 1750s.

By the middle of the eighteenth-century, the Spanish Benedictine priest Benito Jerónimo Feijóo had established himself as one of the leading voices of the Spanish Enlightenment, advocating, among other notions, the adoption of new philosophies of science.  In response, a Mexican Jesuit, Francisco Ignacio Cigala, authored a series of open letters in which he disputed Feijóo’s modernist school of thought and suggested alternative, traditional Catholic epistemologies for the practice of natural philosophy.  Using these resources, including a hitherto unpublished and unstudied letter of Cigala’s, this presentation provides a detailed analysis at the way rival epistemologies combated for the notion of “the truth” during the influx of enlightenment thought across the Spanish Atlantic.  In so doing, it also examines the usefulness of understanding the Spanish Enlightenment as a series of convergent, and at times contradictory, ideas.