This article, presentating Caraccioli' s life, looks at the influences on him in order to understand how a certain type of Christian thinking could move towards Enlightenment. Caraccioli can be seen as typical inasmuch as he was an honest, sometimes elegant and surprising thinker, sensitive to contemporary developments. His early education led him to oppose most enlightened principles ; but he changed under the influence of 17th-century Christian social thought, the model of the primitive Church, Jansenist political analysis and a reading of Malebranche. Finally, we see how his position changed radically in the early 1780s, following figures like Rousseau or the Physiocrats, who reinjected religious feeling into enlightened discourse. His priorities changed, and the presentation of theological principles was replaced by a more reforming pragmatism ; however, this finally led to a series of difficulties which the Revolution often revealed and which remain at the heart of questions concerning the link between religion and Western modernity.
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