CHAPTER III
THE EUROPEAN ORDER OF THE ILLUMINATI
I. THE RISE AND THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE ORDER
That great European movement in the direction of the secularization of thought to which the expressive term, the Aufklärung or Enlightenment, has been applied, and which reached its apogee in the latter half of the eighteenth century, encountered a stubborn opposition in southern Germany in the electorate of Bavaria. The pivot of Bavarian politics, particularly from the beginning of the sixteenth century, had been the alliance which had been effected between the clerical party and the civil power. The counter reformation which followed in the wake of the Lutheran movement was able to claim the field in Bavaria without the necessity of a combat.
In the third quarter of the eighteenth century Bavaria was a land where sacerdotalism reigned supreme. Religious houses flourished in abundance; the number of priests and nuns was incredibly large.[1] So easy were the ways of life in that fertile country that a lack of seriousness and intensity of feeling among the masses flung open the door for
- ↑ Forestier, Les Illuminés de Bavière et la Franc-Maçonnerie allemande, p. 103. This author, upon whose recent painstaking researches much reliance is placed in this chapter, relates that one traveler who was in Bavaria at this time, found 28,000 churches and chapels, with pious foundations representing a total value of 60,000,000 florins. Munich, a city of 40,000 inhabitants, had no less than 17 convents. When a papal bull, issued in 1798, authorized the elector to dispose of the seventh part of the goods of the clergy, the Bavarian government, in executing the pope’s directions, deducted 25,000,000 florins, and it was remarked that this amount did not equal the sum which had been agreed upon. Cf. ibid., pp. 103 et seq.
