The Strange Ride of Orestes Brownson

...If the transcendentalist "conscience" does not represent an authoritative path to pure morality, then it is little more than the projection of the individual will...

...To consider the case of Orestes Brownson is thus not simply to think about a curious nineteenth-century New England weathercock who swung over the course of his idiosyncratic and enormously productive writing career through Protestantism, Unitarianism, transcendentalism, Saint-Simonian socialism, and Catholicism...

...We still need a biography able to tell us why Brownson was finally convinced by Catholicism and why he abandoned every position incompatible with that belief...

...Brownson's journey began in the early 1820s...

...Brownson's desire for a separation of church and state is not at all the contemporary liberal's demand that the church have no say in the progress of secular society...

...and whatever is not catholic it leaves, as outside of its province, to live or die, according to its own inherent vitality or want of vitality...

...the object is that which is thought, the not-me...

...In line with thinkers such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Chan-ning, and under the direct influence of Victor Cousin, Brownson held that emotion and intuition are more reliable paths to truth than reason and reflection, and that those who follow the dictates of the individual conscience and the promptings of pure human sentiment will discover within their souls a spark of the divine nature itself...

...Brownson never advocated total separation in this sense, even in those writings in which he took various "conservative" Catholic dictators to task or severely criticized traditional monarchical arrangements...

...I had seized the principle which authorizes faith in the supernatural...

...Such dark convictions about religious belief meant that the material world began to take center stage in his thought...

...In a manner vaguely reminiscent of Hegel, Leroux maintained that consciousness consists of three elements: the subject, the object, and their interrelation...

...Central to his conversion was the recognition that the sentimentalist morality behind his ideological convictions rested upon shaky ground...

...In his own unique twist on Puritan symbols, Brownson viewed the American mission as one of "developing and applying to practical life one and the same divine idea...

...That Brownson was always a liberal is indubitable, though there is some confusion, in both Herrera and other interpreters, about the meaning of "liberal...

...For Brownson the attempt to uphold rights and liberties cannot survive in an atmosphere of moral, ethical, and spiritual relativism...

...What he seemed to desire above all was some sort of spiritual experience that would illuminate the mysteries of human existence...

...This was a view that Brownson claims he held "steadily and without wavering" from 1828 until 1842...

...The state and church are not in conflict, since through its political mechanisms the community is necessarily moved in a Catholic direction: "The state conforms to what each holds that is catholic, that is always and everywhere religion...

...As Brownson put it in The Convert, "man lives, and can live only by communion with that which is not himself"—which seems, in turn, to imply as a logical necessity the reality of a creator God as ultimately the only source for moral authority in human affairs...

...baffling all our powers to answer...

...One strength of R.A...

...God is free, I said, then I can love him, trust him, hope in him, and commune with him, and he can hear me, love me, and raise me to communion with himself...

...Her-rera focuses in particular on the philosophical and religious journeys that led Brownson from Protestantism to Unitarian-Universalism, transcendentalism, Saint-Simonian socialism, and finally Catholicism...

...Brownson claimed to have been motivated in his religious and intellectual peregrinations solely by an intense and passionate search for truth, rather than mere dilettantism...

...Under the inspiration of this "doctrine of communion," Brownson became convinced that human consciousness presupposes the existence of an external reality in which human beings participate and which ultimately forms the ground for all human action...

...Despite the presence of ideas on economic determinism in "An Essay on the Laboring Classes," there is no evidence that the early Marx had any direct influence, but all Brownson's works of the period bear the unmistakable stamp of French socialist thought, Comte's and Saint-Simon's in particular...

...He argued that the First Amendment is really more to the advantage of Catholicity than any Protestant denomination...

...As one might expect, his interest in this sort of Renaissance esoterica led him to the more recent European ideologies that preached the newer pro-gressivist gospel...

...The one thing he never wavered in was his philosophical search for truth, and he arrived at a fundamentally non-secularist conception of human nature...

...As he writes in his autobiography The Convert, his early years were marked by an unsettling sense of spiritual disorientation and confusion, largely due to the varied claims to religious truth he encountered in his hometown of Stockbridge, Vermont...

...Echoing Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man, he expounded a quasi-Promethean myth in which the godlike creature man is called by his creator to secure his own salvation within time...

...He turned, instead, to the Unitarian-Universalists, a group of "freethinking" rationalists who offered a Christ cleansed of supernaturalism and portrayed as simply a reasonable, loving, and merciful man...

...So what is the Brownsonian legacy...

...Even after his conversion to Catholicism, Brownson held a belief in progress...

...Brownson's resting point shifted often and dramatically...

...This too, however, quickly palled, as Brownson became disillusioned with the incapacity of "natural" religion to satisfy the inner spiritual longing to establish contact with the divine ground of being...

...These constitute the real man...

...The man lies beneath his deeds, and is but slightly revealed by the outward events of his life," as Brownson himself once wrote...

...As recounted in "Religious Orders," his conversion experience had an Augustinian completeness: It struck me as a flash of light in the midst of my darkness, opened to me a new world, and changed almost instantaneously not only the tone and temper of my mind, but the direction of my whole order of thought...

...and the relation between them is the synthesis that produces knowledge and progress...

...These conclusions led Brownson toward the French thinker Pierre Leroux...

...The most important change in Brownson's life was his conversion to Catholicism in 1844, a remarkable development given the progress of his thought over the two decades before...

...Brownson argued that the unfolding of this new spirituality would awaken humanity to the moral imperative of social transformation...

...The subject is the individual thinker, the me...

...For the first time he sensed an element of moral nihilism in the philosophical views that both men shared...

...The change occurred in a three-year period, as Brownson grew disenchantBrownson's embrace of Catholicism was a logical—even predictable—outcome of the nihilist tendencies in transcendentalism...

...Since the Constitution does not include any explicit philosophical or theological discussion of the ultimate ends or purposes of the state, such purposes are left to the community to establish, following a lengthy process of deliberation in which public reason roots out the elements that cannot command widespread acceptance...

...Transcendentalism's claim of private interpretation of morality according to the dictates of the individual conscience developed in a straight line from the Protestant claim of private interpretation of Scripture according to the dictates of the individual conscience...

...Herrera's account leaves the impression that Brownson's conversion marked simply one more port of call in his long career...

...For Brownson, the constitutional recognition of the Church's right to participate in the affairs of the community represents an implicit acknowledgment not only of the primacy of the spiritual order over the temporal, but also of catholicity over sectarianism...

...But there may be, in fact, a way to see the spiritual unity that runs just beneath the surface...

...But where to find it...

...Brownson knew nothing of the preoccupations of mystics, but he was aware that the world seemed full of inexplicable suffering, and his quest for some sense of human purpose moved him into the arena of socialist political ideology...

...Would you become acquainted with the man you must read the history of his soul— make yourself familiar with his spiritual experience, his inward struggles, defeats, victories, doubts, convictions, ends, and aims...

...On the surface, of course, this is correct...

...God had not touched his soul in any special way...

...Of course, the baggage of oppression that must be cast off invariably includes the preoccupation with human freedom and dignity—which is how progressive dictators can arise...

...This insight proved to be the "greatest step" in Brownson's long spiritual journey...

...But that post-conversion pro-gressivism had little to do with his old socialism...

...The experience of listening to the humanitarian author and lecturer Theodore Parker was particularly important, for Parker seemed to present the humanitarian-socialist faith in what Brownson termed a "naked, unbelieving spirit...

...Though years elapsed before I found myself knocking at the door of the church for admission, my conversion began from that moment...

...Leroux's experiential philosophy of consciousness has now faded away from intellectual history, but it seemed to Brownson at the time an advance upon the antinomian tendencies of the transcendentalists...

...He joined a Presbyterian congregation, but he soon found himself led away from all varieties of Calvinism...

...But Brownson himself perceived it as rather a grasping of the final truth underlying human aspiration...

...Only the Catholic Church seemed to have "the slightest historical claim to be regarded as the body of Christ...

...If the end of man is an earthly end, then we should be focusing our attention on the best means of securing an earthly paradise...

...The question of authority was the key...

...As such, it is not a reliable source for human progress...

...He was compelled by it to reject humanitarian religion and politics, and he found that through it he could "reasonably accept the ideas of providence . . . supernatural inspiration, supernatural revelation, and Christianity as an authoritative religion...

...His essays for the Gospel Advocate and his sympathies with the utopian schemes of Robert Owen, Francis Wright, and William Godwin show his engagement in the modern ideological project of inverting traditional Christian symbols of salvation to re-divinize the things of this world...

...Herrera interprets Brownson's many changes as "bizarre," proof of "egotism," and an inexplicable "sign of contradiction...

...Brownson was convinced that America's success as a free people depended upon her willingness to seek out the transcendent divine as the source for all morality, including that morality which holds to a belief in the transcendent worth and dignity of individuals...

...Relativism tends to breed prophets of innerworld-ly salvation—those who appeal to the alienated and dislocated by flattering residual religious sentiment and claiming to be the true and enlightened carriers of good, in opposition to traditional forces of "oppression...

...Herrera's addition to this literature, Orestes Brownson: Sign of Contradiction, is its concise overGregory S. Butler teaches in the government department at New Mexico State University and is the author of In Search of the American Spirit: The Political Thought of Orestes Brownson...

...His own spiritual poverty soon became the standard by which he judged all matters, and he dismissed believers as trafficking in "unintelligible dogmas about unknown beings and invisible worlds...

...The idea, however, stems from Brownson's own experiences with freethinking and "enlightened" rationalism, as well as with radical humanitarian socialism: Personal freedom and social justice are possible only when the quest for freedom and justice is supplied with authoritative direction and guidance...

...Indeed, the political history of our own century can almost be defined by the progressive withering away of anachronistic "rights" in the face of mankind's quest for total control of the environment, both human and non-human...

...Herrera sees it mostly in the variety and liveliness of his intellectual career, with perhaps nothing beneath the “façade...

...What Herrera misses is the extent to which the possibility of embracing Catholicism was a logical—even predictable—outcome of certain nihilist tendencies within transcendentalism...

...The rigid dogmatism he encountered seemed—as it seemed to other intellectually inclined New Englanders at the time—unworthy of creatures endowed with free will and reason...

...And Brownson came to see that the entire principle of private interpretation must ultimately undermine all religion and morality, as it subjects such matters to the whims and passions of a sinful human nature...

...Brownson was particularly drawn to the romantic and sentimental dimensions of transcendentalism, because he believed these were the features that could inspire individuals to commit their lives to the humanitarian socialist project...

...questions concerning the transcendent had become shrouded in "impenetrable darkness...

...Of central importance to Brown-son's "religion of humanity" was his attraction to New England transcendentalism...

...Our thoughts, including the "conscience," are not simply our own but are the result of a continuous experiential dialectic...

...During the 1830s he developed the idea of Christ as a humanitarian savior and forerunner to the progressive religion of the future, an idea that culminated in two of his best-known works: "New Views of Religion, Society, and the Church" in 1836 and "An Essay on the Laboring Classes" in 1840...

...view of Brownson's literary career, which spanned almost half a century and produced twenty volumes of work, in addition to huge quantities of letters and other unpublished writings...

...ed with his political religion...

...The Strange Ride of Orestes Brownson BY GREGORY S. BUTLER Since the publication of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim's Progress in 1939, a number of informative biographies of Brownson have appeared, together with monographs, collections of essays, and doctoral dissertations about this controversial nineteenth-century writer—a New Englander who was perhaps the most significant Catholic apologist in American history, an opponent of the secularized socialist culture he felt had been building throughout modern times, and a genuine American original...

...But such changes are best understood as Brown-son himself understood them: as an integral part of a long process of seeking the truth about human beings and what is demanded of them...

...Rather, his new understanding of progress centered around the meaning and destiny of the American republic...

...In a highly controversial fashion, Brownson argued that there is an essential compatibility between Catholicism and the American constitutional order, including its provisions for church-state relations...

...Unfortunately, Herrera fails to do justice to the measure of truth in Brownson's claim, for there was an odd but persistent continuity in Brownson's career...

...Those propositions that survive must necessarily be universal and authorita-tive—insofar as reason itself assents to their truth—and thus, in a properly constituted liberal regime, the Catholic Church enjoys full liberty to bring her message to the community...

...Indeed, Brownson saw Parker's atheism as allowing the frightening possibility that human passion could produce the opposite of true humanitarian goodness...

...Brownson's call for the union of Catholic Christianity and the American state, for example, is likely to strike readers as hopelessly unrealistic (not to mention gravely offensive to both liberationist and socialist interpreters of the American political experiment...

...It is in the Catholic sacramental tradition, Brownson maintained, that one finds a divinely instituted medium through which the possibility of a non-private authority enters human affairs...