Maximilianus Hell (1720-1792) - Munin

activity until the suppression of the Society in 1773. According to the Ratio studiorum,
mathematical topics were to be taught at all Jesuit schools, a requirement that was quite
radical at the outset of the scientific revolution. 30 One may assume that this, in its time
controversial, emphasis on mathematicae (‘mathematics’) took on greater importance as
interest in the study of natural sciences increased among Europe’s intellectual elites. In order
to succeed in their “ministries among the learned”, 31 the Jesuits needed to produce professors
who could teach these subjects with authority. Our biographee was to become one of them.
After his two years in the novitiate of Trenchinium, Maximilianus Höll – or, as he later in life
preferred to name himself, Hell 32 – enrolled at the University of Vienna in 1740. Academic
life in Vienna had by then been steeped in Jesuit erudition for more than a century. A Jesuit
Collegium (“Hochschule”) was opened in Vienna as early as 1550. After many political
intrigues, it was finally incorporated in the University in 1622/23. This move gave the Jesuits
a majority among the staff and virtually carte blanche to control academic life. Protestants
were expelled and Jesuit professors gradually took over most chairs. As for astronomy,
physics and other branches of ‘mathematics’, Jesuits soon became the undisputed professors
of these subjects. 33 Beginning in 1746, the Jesuits also ran a “Hochschule” for young
noblemen in Vienna, the so-called Seminarium Nobilium or Collegium Theresianum
Vindobonense or simply the Theresianum, but this institution remained a separate entity.
Another separate institution was the “Orientalische Akademie”, a language school for future
diplomats in the East, founded in 1754 and under Jesuit leadership from the start. As for the
university, Gerhard Van Swieten (1700-1772) was to implement a sweeping set of reforms in
1749-52 at the request of Empress Maria Theresa (1717-1780, ruler from 1740). The reforms
of Van Swieten aimed to modernise the education system according to utilitarian principles,
and in this process, the dominance of the Jesuits was to some extent reduced. However, the
faculties of Theology and Philosophy (under which mathematics, astronomy and experimental
physics sorted) were still run by Jesuits until 1773. 34 In a way, the early career of
30
See for example Smolarski 2002.
31
The phrase used by Harris 1996. See also Bireley 2003 for a broad analysis of the counter-reforming strategies
of the Jesuit order in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
32
Höll should, according to traditional transliteration, be Latinized Hœll. However, as Pinzger conjectures
(Pinzger 1920, p. 9) the pious Jesuit probably wanted to avoid association with the German word for Hell – “die
Hölle” – by changing his name to Hell. This spelling should instead allude to the German word for bright, “hell”.
When writing this text in English, it is hard not to see the irony of the story.
33
For a detailed account on the Jesuits and the Vienna University in the period from the 1540s to the 1620s, see
Perkmann 1866.
34
On the impact of the university reforms imposed by the personal physician of Maria Theresa, Gerhard Van
Swieten, see for example Müller 1993, pp. 229-233.
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