To kill the Enlightenment or the christian reading canon in the eighteenth century

Abstract

This work studies the theory of reading and the proposal of literary interpretation put forward, as a complement to institutional censorship, by part of the clergy in the last quarter of the 18^th century. Based on the analysis of a paradigmatic French text by Nicolas Jamin, the Treatise on Christian Reading (1774) and its translation into Spanish (1784), we analyse the will to establish a reading methodology with a counter-enlightened approach among the faithful and, by extension, in the society of believers. This methodology is based on theorizing about the text from the acceptance and spreading of a set of dogmatic and religious principles which will be used to assess the utilitarian meaning of reading, to ascribe civil and social responsibility to readers, and to establish criteria of bibliographic selection which would, in practice, make it impossible to gain access to the thinking of French enlightened philosophers. This work advances the thesis of the creation of a hermeneutic circle promoted by the official authorities on censorship that reaches its climax when the Christian reader is trained to accept that the only universal critical judgment is the revealed truth.