CHAPTER 4
UNPARDONABLE
SINS:
ORESTES
BROWNSON'S CONVERSION TO ANTI-FOURIERISM
I.
In the early 1840s, Orestes Brownson used the pages of
his Boston Quarterly Review to voice
friendly criticism of the American Fourierist movement. While Brownson never endorsed the
Associationist platform, he openly sympathized with many of its goals. Well before 1840, the year
Brownson's most famous essay, "The Laboring
Classes" (1840), elaborated the New
Views platform through an economic critique of society that bore striking
similarities to Fourier's (Schlesinger, A
Pilgrim's Progress 96-99). Four
years later, in an account of the evolution of his radical thought, Brownson
explained that he had once hoped that communitarian reforms would make class
warfare completely unnecessary. In this
new society, laborers would also be capitalists; therefore, they would be
assured of a fair share of the profits, and would have an interest in making
their work "pleasant and attractive."
As Brownson notes, his solution was remarkably similar to Fourier's plan
for "Association and Attractive Industry," and he
claimed "to have seized all the great principles of the practical part of
Fourierism, long before Fourier's name was heard of in this country"
("No Church, No Reform" 177).
While Fourierism had no apparent effect upon the development of
Brownson's social thought prior to 1840, he was favorably inclined towards
In 1842, however, at about the same time that Brownson
began to lose faith in the New Views
program, his criticism of the Fourierists grew less friendly and more
strident. By 1844, the year of his
conversion to Catholicism, he had become Fourierism's fiercest opponent in
How
are we to account for Brownson's relatively rapid change in attitude towards
Fourierism? Strangely, this question has
never received much attention before, even though Brownson wrote eight essays
on Fourierism in the four years between the publication of "The Laboring
Classes" and his conversion, the period of his life that has received the
most critical attention.[2] But the relative neglect of Brownson's feud
with the Fourierists is not wholly without cause. In the 1850's, Brownson downplayed
Fourierism's influence on his thought, and after The Spirit-Rapper, he had little more to say about the
movement. His 1857 autobiography The Convert, for example, discussed at
length the influence of Owen and Saint-Simon on the evolution of his thought,
but did not mention Fourier by name.[3] Finally, because Brownson's critique of
Fourierism—which predated his conversion by two years—insisted upon the
inseparability of his theological and sociopolitical thought, it has largely
resisted ideological pigeonholing.[4]
The fact that Brownson continued to write about
Fourierism for years after his conversion suggests another, less forgivable,
reason to ignore these articles. In her
valuable dissertation, Patricia O'Connell Killen has noted the "bifurcation"
of approach typical of Brownson scholarship.
Some overly partisan Catholic scholars (joined, one might add, by some
overly zealous conservatives) have devalued Brownson's pre-conversion writings,
while some secular scholars have discounted Brownson's post-conversion writings
for similar reasons. Killen astutely
notes that each camp's prejudices "reduc[e] Brownson's significance as a
thinker even before the discussion begins" (2-3). As Brownson's own critique of
Fourierism—before and after his conversion—insisted upon the inseparability of
his theological and sociopolitical thought, reductionists in either camp might
have difficulty explaining why Browson's animus predated his conversion by two
years.[5]
But I would not argue that every scholar who ignored
Brownson's feud with the Fourierists was motivated by blind partisanship; such
a paranoid claim would be worthy of Fourier himself. Reasonable hypotheses can easily be
constructed: for example, critics may have dismissed Brownson's change of heart
as yet another of the about-faces for which he was famous. Even in the Transcendentalist circle, where
the hobgoblin of consistency was generally scorned, no one had made as many
stops as Brownson the "ecclesiastical recidivist" had in his Wanderjahre
(Swift 246). Similarly, Brownson
continually shifted his philosophical worldview. In the BosQR
and later in John O'Sullivan's Democratic
Review, he had advocated several of the latest French intellectual
fashions, only to turn against them later: from Benjamin Constant to
Saint-Simon to Victor Cousin to Cousin's most adamant critic, Pierre
Leroux. If Brownson had briefly flirted
with Fourierism, then perhaps he had simply grown tired of it. And once the feud began, the Fourierists gave
Brownson sufficient reason to take it personally. Brownson was frequently rebuked for his
alleged misinterpretations of Associationist doctrine; in 1844, one of The Phalanx's editors (probably Parke
Godwin) called Brownson "ignorant" and "malignant."[6] Such sniping, combined with Brownson's
consititutional propensity to repudiate his former positions, may well have
made his counterattacks more vitriolic.
But while this explanation is plausible, it does not account for his
sustaining the anti-Fourierist offensive for a full decade, several years after
virtually every American phalanx had failed.
Another reasonable hypothesis, that Brownson's
repudiation of Fourierism was the natural result of his conversion, is not
supported by the chronology. This is not
to say that his repudiation and his conversion were wholly independent events,
for Catholics of the 1840s had sufficient cause to reject the utopian
theory. Like Saint-Simon, Fourier had
been a harsh critic of organized religion in general, and of the Roman Church
in particular. While he had made no
systematic ideological critique of institutional Christianity, he had
frequently noted Catholicism's crucial role in perpetuating social
injustices. These attacks did not escape
notice: the Church placed Fourier's Nouveau
Monde Industriel on the Index
Librorum Prohibitorum in January 1835.[7] Had Fourier's parodies of Catholic doctrine
in the suppressed manuscript of Le
Nouveau Monde Amoreux been known, Catholic opposition to Fourierism would
undoubtedly have been even stronger.[8] Many of Fourier's disciples shared his dislike
of institutional religion. For example,
Victor Considerant made no effort to conceal his anti-clericalism in Destinée sociale.[9] In September 1836, this popular and
influential treatise—an important source, as the title suggests, for
Nevertheless, the mutual hostilities between French
Catholics and French Fourierists were counterbalanced by mutual
attractions. Jean-Baptiste Duroselle and
Henri Desroche have shown that in the years before 1848, many individuals
declared simultaneous passions for Fourierism and Catholicism. Some Fourierists converted to Catholicism
without renouncing Fourier, while some Catholics became Fourierists without
leaving the Church.[11] In the years after Brownson's conversion, the
journals of the American Associationists reported the transatlantic efforts to
reconcile Catholicism and Fourierism.[12] Doctrinal differences notwithstanding, the
existence of Catholic Fourierists in Catholic France is not surprising. It is bizarre, however, that the
Transcendentalists of post-Calvinist New England were also subject to this dual
attraction, especially since neither the Church nor the social movement had
played a major role in New England intellectual life prior to the 1840s.
Brownson's writings suggest that his conversion to
Catholicism was not simply the cause, but also in part the consequence, of his
rejection of Fourierism. The attempt to
understand Brownson's response to Fourierism is important not only because it
sheds light on the relationship between his theological and his sociopolitical
writings, but also because it helps to explain the Transcendentalist interest
in "catholicity."
II.
Like many other Americans of the 1840s, Brownson's BosQR insisted upon the
interconnectedness of reform efforts in the spiritual and material realms. But his earliest published discussions of
Fourierism examined the visionary plan almost exclusively from a pragmatic
materialist perspective. Brownson's
first mention of Fourier is found in a January 1840 editorial, published six
months before "The Laboring Classes."
In setting forth his vision of an
I have no plan of
a world-reform for you to adopt, for I have not yet found one that I could
adopt for myself. I have paid some
attention to the schemes of world-reformers, from Plato down to Robert Owen and
M. Fourier, but none of them seem to me of any great value. ("Introductory Statement" 16-17)
Brownson knew of Fourier
almost a year before
Given this shared goal, it is understandable that
Brownson responded favorably to
The state is the
mere agent of society, and will always be what the will of society
ordains. If society be right, if its
institutions be founded in justice, the state will be just and beneficent; if
society be wrong, founded on false principles, and sustained by unequal, and
therefore unjust, institutions, it is in vain, that you seek to reform your government,
or perfect its administration. (rev. of SDM, 127-28)
In the same review,
Brownson argued that Fourierist communitarianism, because it affirmed the right
to individual property, was more realistic (!) than Owenite communism. As investors in the Phalanx were to receive
a handsome return, capitalists need not feel threatened. Therefore, Fourierism might be able to
reconcile class interests peacefully, solving the dilemma outlined in "The
Laboring Classes." Brownson closed
by blessing
Six months later, however, this praise was abruptly
withdrawn. Brownson's "Social
Evils, and their Remedy" (BosQR,
July 1841) marked the beginning of a long and eventually acrimonious
debate. While the perspective of
"Social Evils" was essentially secular, its thesis anticipated
Brownson's later theological critiques.
Too many of the nation's would-be reformers, he argued, had made the
error of "contemplat[ing] a perfection, to which neither human nature nor
human society can attain."
Fourier's "scheme of passional harmonies," as presented
by
The harmony of the
passions, so far as attainable, is to be obtained not by gratifying the desires
of each, but by denying to each its special gratification, whenever its special
gratification would lead to disorder, either in the bosom of the individual or
that of society; that is, by following the Christian rule, deny thyself, which
we shall find but poorly substituted by Mr. Fourier's rule,—please
thyself. . . . But in all self-denial there is antagonism. ("SE&TR" 269-270)
Such philosophical objections
to Fourierism led Brownson closer to the traditional Christian doctrine of
Original Sin and the concomitant assertion of "self-denial" as
duty. (This potent argument can be
restated in psychoanalytic terms, if allowances are made for the incongruity of
the Freudian and Christian worldviews: the submission of every individual to
the pleasure principle would lead to chaos; therefore, a certain degree of
repression is necessary to maintain social order.) Yet in denying the trustworthiness of the
passions, Brownson was not retreating into seventeenth-century Calvinist
orthodoxy. In New Views, he had already rejected the doctrine of "hereditary
total depravity" and, waxing Transcendental, had found "divinity in
humanity, and humanity in divinity" (WOAB
In
retrospect,
It would be an exaggeration to call the Brownson of
1841 a Fourierist fellow-traveler, but he was a friendly critic of the
movement. He took pains to express his
sympathy for Associationists and noted the beliefs he shared with them. Brownson even "wish[ed] all
success" to prospective phalansterians and promised to do "all in our
power" to aid them ("Letter from Mr. Brisbane" [Brownson's note]
512). Accordingly, he ran another
article by Brisbane in the April 1842 BosQR,
an exposition of some of the less-controversial economic elements of
Associationism that covered much the same ground as Brisbane's New York Tribune columns.
But the cordial entente was short-lived. By the time he published Brisbane's article,
Brownson had already fallen under the influence of another French socialist,
the former Saint-Simonian Pierre Leroux, author of De l'Humanité (1840). From
Leroux's doctrine of "solidarity"—summarized by Guarneri as "a
mystical bond of divine life link[ing] persons throughout time and space,
demonstrating both the interdependence of humanity and the reality of racial progress"
(55)—Brownson would develop an idiosyncratic philosophical system that he would
later use to justify his conversion.
This worldview would take several years to ripen, however. In fact, his article for the July 1842 BosQR, "Leroux on Humanity,"
expressed anti-Catholic sentiments.
Brownson argued that the confusion of Christianity with Roman
Catholicism had been among the "follies" of the Saint-Simonians and
approvingly cited a Saint-Simonian leader's claim that the nouveau
christianisme would "rule the future more completely . . . even than
Catholicism ruled the middle ages" ("Leroux" 259; qtd., 260).
Leroux's book had a more direct effect upon Brownson:
it made him increasingly critical of Fourierism. According to Brownson, Leroux held that no man
could exist outside of his context, no "me" without a
"not-me." Furthermore, the
Whitmanesque "communion" of the "me" and the
"not-me" was necessary for human happiness. Leroux believed that this communion was
facilitated by existing social institutions.
Brownson seconded Leroux's statement that the institutions of family and
country allowed the individual to commune with the rest of the race, as well as
Leroux's more problematic claim that the institution of private property
facilitated the individual's communion with nature ("Leroux"
283-285). Having accepted Leroux's
trinity of institutions—family, country, property—Brownson immediately shifted
into an attack upon "zealous world-reformers" who sought to destroy
one of these institutions. Among those
he attacked were the Owenite opponents of private property, the anarchical
"New England non-resistants," and the Associationist enemies of
family values. Brownson argued that the
Fourierists unjustly criticized the institution of marriage, proposed to liberalize
the divorce laws, and advocated replacing individual households with the
phalanx. Interestingly, Brownson
included the communitarianism of his former ally Fanny Wright in the same
anti-family charge ("Leroux" 285-286). For the first time, Brownson's critique of
Fourier was bound up with a overt critique of his own former positions. A similar self-critique can be found later in
the essay: Brownson, one of the earliest members of the Transcendentalist circle,
argued that the "self-culture" of the Transcendentalists promoted a
selfish individualism opposed to all forms of "communion"
("Leroux" 292-293). Such
claims suggest that Leroux's primary effect upon Brownson was to restore his
faith in traditional social institutions.
In "Leroux on Humanity" and subsequent essays, Brownson would
simultaneously criticize the anti-institutional tendencies of the Fourierists
and the Transcendentalists.
In
September 1842, having negotiated an agreement to write for John O'Sullivan's Democratic Review, Brownson discontinued
the BosQR. November saw the publication of his first Democratic Review article, "Brook
Farm."[15] Despite the growing influence of Leroux on
his thought, Brownson continued to champion much of the Fourierists'
agenda. For example, he still identified
social inequality as the era's most serious problem, he still believed that the
clergy's advice to seek happiness in the hereafter did not excuse humanity from
its responsibility to strive for justice in this world, and he still argued
that ethical, political, and economic reforms were only limited solutions
("Brook Farm" 481-486). He
praised Brook Farm as a paradigm for a new type of social institution. The anomie brought on by industrial
capitalism could not be cured, he argued, by eliminating the social
institutions deemed useful by Leroux (Brownson had added a fourth institution,
the church, to Leroux's list). Instead,
communities like Brook Farm should supplement the work of traditional
institutions by bridging the chasm between public, private, and spiritual
lives. Brownson's rhetoric waxed
mystical: "the community [is] more than an aggregation of families, it is
a one body [sic], has life and unity of its own; but is, after all, like
the family, a member of the larger whole" ("Brook Farm"
489). Brownson believed that Brook Farm
could evolve into a fifth type of institution, one that would promote the
solidarity of the race without threatening the family.
Even as he celebrated the West Roxbury community's
potential to effect social reform, Brownson dismissed Associationism as
"mechanical." He argued that
while Brook Farm was a "living organism," Fourier's phalanx was
nothing but a "huge machine" ("Brook Farm" 488), a
formulation that echoed "Fourierism and the Socialists," Emerson's Dial essay published four months
earlier. In drawing theological
conclusions from assumptions that closely paralleled Emerson's, Brownson became
one of the first Americans to attack socialism for its godlessness[16]:
Of Fourier I must
speak with some diffidence, not having as yet been able to submit to the
drudgery of fully mastering his system. . . .
[H]is metaphysics, though broad and comprehensive, are often unsound;
and his theodicea, or theodicy, is, if we understand it, nothing but material
pantheism, a polite name for atheism. He
denies, at least according to his able and indefatigable American interpreter,
Mr. Brisbane, the progress of humanity, and proceeds on the assumption of that
greatest of all absurdities, the perfection of nature. (487)
Given Brownson's prose
style, any book that drove him to complain about "drudgery" certainly
must have deserved the charge. Atheism
was a more serious accusation, however, one that could not be ignored.
Upon the publication of "Brook Farm," Brownson's
heretofore friendly debate with the Fourierists began to turn bitter. O'Sullivan, who apparently wanted to retain
amicable relations with the social movement,[17] printed
letters from two Fourierists in rebuttal of the new contributor's charge. Both correspondents were less interested in
the "mechanical" aspects of Fourierism. The first, Charles Julius Hempel, argued that
Brownson's professed ignorance should discredit all his complaints, and announced
that his forthcoming book on Swedenborg and Fourier would prove that Fourierism
was not "practical atheism" but "living Christianity"[18]. Yet Hempel did not want to alienate Brownson
completely, and invited him to assist the Associationists in searching for the
best way to put Fourier's theories into practice ("Protest"
648). A second letter, from the Irish
Fourierist Hugh Doherty, editor of The
London Phalanx, also rejected Brownson's specific charges as
"absolutely erroneous." Like
Hempel, Doherty offered back-handed praise to Brownson for his independent
discovery of Fourierism's most important elements, despite his complete failure
to comprehend Fourierist theory.[19] In noting the probable cause of Brownson's
misreading, Doherty obliquely criticized the leader of the American
Fourierists: "[Brisbane] confine[d] himself almost exclusively to the
exposition of the practical parts of Fourier's views, not being conversant with
all the various doctrines of Divinity in Christendom" (321).
Like Hempel, Doherty had studied the writings of both Fourier and
Swedenborg;[20]
both disciples were undoubtedly annoyed with "the thoroughly secular
version of Fourier" set forth in Brisbane's publications (Guarneri 116).
Brownson's response was prompt. In "The Community System,"
published in the February 1843 Democratic
Review (two months after Hempel's letter and one month before Doherty's),
he used Leroux's metaphysics to develop a more rounded critique of
Fourierism. His first assertion was that
any communitarian system should be judged by comparing it "to the first
principles of human nature," "the essential, permanent, and
indestructible nature of man" ("Community System" 129). Following Leroux, Brownson postulated that
man exists not only as an individual, but also as part of the genus
"humanity," the transcendental idea of man: "Man's existence is
then to be contemplated as Ideal
and Actual, and Ideal and Actual
answer precisely to his existence as the kind, and as an individual"
(129). Because "[h]umanity is in
some sort itself an individual," each person has a "two-fold being" and a "two-fold life" (130, 131).
Unlike
the Transcendentalist version of this tale, the "One Man" fable of
"The American Scholar," Brownson stressed that the fable was more
than a fable, that the "transcendental" unity of humanity had
"real" consequences: "It
is on [the unity of humanity] that society rests for its basis; and it is from
this unity that society derives its power and its right to found the State, to
institute civil government, and to demand and even enforce the obedience of its
members" ("Community System" 131). Brownson eloquently argued that the ideal
society must allow both human natures to flourish concurrently, rather than
cultivating one at the other's expense:
Community without
Individuality is tyranny, the
fruits of which are oppression, degradation, and immobility, the synonym of
death. Individuality without community,
is Individualism, the fruits of
which are dissolution, isolation, selfishness, war; which again attains to
death on the opposite side. . . . What
we need, then, is not Communism, nor Individualism, the two forms in which the
principle manifests itself, but Community and Individuality harmonized, or as
we may say, atoned.
("Community System" 134)
Unfortunately, Brownson
continued, all communities to date were flawed, "if the establishment at
Brook Farm be excepted," because "the ruling thought is Community for
the sake of Community, not Community for the sake of Individuality" (135). Brownson's argument took an even more mystical
turn as he argued that for a community to nurture individuality, it must
provide its members with the social institutions that provide opportunities for
Leroux's "communion" with other people, with God, and with nature. From
this defense of existing social institutions, Brownson repeated his earlier
attack upon the communitarian theories that proposed their eradication. Once again he singled out communitarian
theories that would modify or eradicate the institution of marriage. Brownson argued that love, while undoubtedly
the most desirable foundation for a marriage, was not necessarily exclusive;
therefore, it could not replace marriage as the basis of the family. If society were to implement this misguided
reform, he predicted disastrous results: "[W]e should render the family
indefinite, which would be seeking to realize the indefinite in the
indefinite,—a mistake no less fatal than that of seeking to realize the
definite in the definite" ("Community System" 139). To recast this abstract argument in blunter
terms, Brownson was arguing that if Love were to become the basis of the
family, then the resultant communal orgy would dilute, if not destroy, family
identity. Any modification of existing
divorce laws, he concluded, would "dissipate the domestic life and
affections, the household virtues, and therefore defeat the very end for which
the family exists" (140).
While this argument was not directed specifically
against the Fourierists, Brownson levelled another charge against them later in
the essay. Even as he again conceded the
need for an communitarian institution modelled upon Brook Farm to bridge the
"too great" distance "between the Family and the Nation,"
he simultaneously warned against utopian attempts to replace the
institution of the state. If Fourier's
plan were adopted, the abolition of the state would lead to disruption of trade
between communities, thus decreasing both material wealth and the feeling of
universal unity (143-144). By
implication, the Fourierist movement was a potential threat to the government
of the United States.[21]
The charge was unwarranted: in fact, Fourier had made
considerable (albeit fanciful) plans for regional, national, and world
government. But whatever deficiencies
there were in Brownson's knowledge of socialist literature, he now knew enough
to argue that Fourierism was wildly irrational:
"Do these disciples anticipate that . . . they can grow rice
and cotton on our granite cliffs of New England, and enable the polar bear to
luxuriate under the equator?" ("Community System" 144)
For some time, "The Community System"
appeared to be Brownson's last word on Fourierism, if not on communitarianism
in general. Indeed, he did not return to
either subject in his published writings between February 1843 and April 1844.[22] On the other hand, despite his total
rejection of Fourierism, he continued to read the literature of the movement,
and even continued to correspond with Brisbane.[23] At least one advocate of social reform was
dismayed. In the
15 October 1843 issue of his new journal, The
Present, William Henry Channing called the late BosQR "the best journal this country ever produced" and
praised the further evolution of Brownson's thought in his Democratic Review articles.
But Channing, who was rapidly growing closer to the Fourierist camp (as
evidenced by the translation from Destinée
sociale appearing in the same issue), said that "the present state of
the public mind" called for "a full exhibition of Mr. Brownson's
views of Communities."[24]
Brownson's silence on the subject of Fourierism can be
at least partially explained by the spiritual crisis he was undergoing. In "The Community System," he had
forsaken the critique of historical Christianity, the central thesis of New Views, and had begun to advocate the
necessity of the Church as a social institution. However, he was still uncertain which
Christian sect would be "the" Church to realize the transcendental
unity of Humanity. It would have been
understandable if this search had crowded further consideration of Fourierism
out of his life. Surprisingly, the
opposite occured. As Brownson became
increasingly preoccupied with his quest for the true Church, he returned to his
critique of Fourierism. In 1844, the
year of his conversion, he wrote three separate articles on the subject for Brownson's Quarterly Review.
As early as the fall of 1843, Brownson had come to see
communitarianism in general, and Fourierism in particular, as a false
alternative to the "true Church."
He was not alone: in the letters he exchanged with Isaac Hecker in late
1843 and early 1844, both correspondents fervently insisted upon this
fundamental opposition. For example,
Brownson expressed relief when his young friend had decided to forsake Brook
Farm and Fruitlands for his home:[25]
These Communities
after all are humbugs. We must
rehabilitate the Church, and work under its direction. Brisbane has been here lecturing, and has
produced no sensation. Fourierism will
not take with us, and Brisbane will not recommend it. (Brownson to Hecker, 2 Sept. 1843, B-H 66)
Brownson had not yet
determined which "Church" was to be rehabilitated; elsewhere in the
same letter, he denied his intention to "g[o] over to the Roman
Catholics." But by now, he was
disenchanted with Brook Farm, which he had associated with Brisbane and the
Fourierists several months before the community's official
"conversion." Hecker, who
continued to follow the communitarians' activities closely,[26] came to
agree that Fourierism was humbuggery. He
argued that the "Church movement" was "of infinite more
importance . . . than these personal, social, and political reforms, it being
the soul centre of all life, and reform" (Hecker to Brownson, 16 Oct.
1843; B-H 74). In his reply, Brownson voiced his objections
to Channing's attempts to found a universal church, the same institution young
Brownson had advocated in New Views:
[Channing's]
theory of Christian union is beautiful, nay true; but he will fail. For to succeed he must institute a New
Church, and to do that he must be a New Christ, and even greater than
Christ. . . . The
principle of union, he says, is love, nothing more true. Therefore, if you love, you will all be one,
nothing again more true. But, the
precise difficulty is men do not love, and it is because they do not
love that they are alienated, and divided. . . . So far from seeking Christian love as the
basis of the union of the Church, we must seek the unity of the Church as the
condition of creating Christian love.
These Unitarians are exceedingly suspicious. They worship the
means. . . . They do not
believe in the Mediator. (Brownson to Hecker, 8 Nov. 1843; B-H 76)
Channing's vision of the
unity of humanity—the nineteenth-century equivalent of a Saatchi & Saatchi
commercial for British Airways—was not deficient, Brownson argued. Rather, it was hopelessly utopian, for
"men do not love." In
Brownson's view, such a society could only be achieved through the mediation of
the Church, the institution founded by the ultimate "Mediator." Although Brownson's thought was still clearly
marked by Leroux's influence, such an argument represented a fundamental break
with the worldview of De l'Humanité. As A. Robert Caponigri has noted, the
pantheist Leroux found the divine beneficence in all the religions of humanity,
while Brownson insisted upon the uniqueness of the Providential God-Man and the
Church that he had founded (Caponigri 107-111).
Although Brownson's letter to Hecker also included a
lukewarm recommendation of the Episcopal Church—"If I was in it I would
not go out of it; but being as I am I cannot go in it" (B-H 76)—its theology was unmistakably
Catholic. His argument not only
foreshadows his conversion but also helps to explain its connection with his
rejection of Transcendentalism. Brownson
came to believe that Emersonian self-reliance, in its insistence upon a direct,
unmediated relationship between Man and God, was the ne plus ultra of
Protestantism.
III.
But why would Brownson's rejection of Fourierism
follow from the same theological premises that led to his rejection of
Transcendentalism? This question may
best be answered by first posing another: what relationship did the
Transcendentalists of the 1840s perceive between Catholicism and
Fourierism?
Several of the Brook Farm Fourierists were fascinated
by Catholicism, including W. H. Channing, the Ripleys, Hecker, John Sullivan
Dwight, and Georgiana Bruce. The
Unitarian minister Channing was the first to express interest in Catholicism. According to O. B. Frothingham's biography,
Channing almost converted in 1835; his 1840 short story "Ernest the
Seeker," serialized in the first two issues of The Dial, drew a sympathetic portrait of a convert to Catholicism
who defended the Church from its Protestant critics.[27] For most of the Brook Farmers, however,
their interest in Catholicism peaked soon after their enthusiasm for Fourierism
waned. Sophia Ripley converted in 1847;
Hecker, an 1844 convert, would become the most famous American priest of the
nineteenth century.[28] And in her social history of
Transcendentalism, Anne C. Rose notes that at least two other Brook Farmers
also converted (196n).
What attracted some members of the Transcendentalist
community to Catholicism? Among other
factors, Guarneri points to the Church's "mystery" (137). Orthodox Unitarians believed that Jesus had
performed miracles to prove his divine office.
Even though many Transcendentalists shared Emerson's disdain for this
perceived trivialization of the miraculous, they had a thirst for sacred mysteries. Indeed, the cabalistically inclined might
interpret the Transcendentalist faith in "unity in variety" as a
Unitarian reworking of Catholicism's central mystery, the unity-in-diversity of
the Trinity. (Channing would later
borrow this famous phrase from Nature
in making his case for a universal Church to succeed Rome ["Unity in
Catholicity in the Church"].) Those
attracted to "unity in variety" were likely to be William James's
"decided monists," temperamentally inclined towards the One rather than
the Many. In their attempt to overcome
metaphysical dualism, they could draw inspiration from another of Nature's theses, "Every natural
fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact" (E&L 20). In this sense,
as F. O. Matthiessen suggested in American
Renaissance, the Brook Farmers' original mission was to turn the
Transcendental Ideal of "The Age of Swedenborg" into the
natural fact of "The Age of Fourier" (viii). The Brook Farmers may even be said to have
taken Emerson's dictum one step further, turning the doctrine of
correspondences into a moral imperative to leave no spiritual fact
unmaterialized. Per Sveino has usefully
compared the Brook Farm community to the institutional Church, arguing that the
former attempted the historical realization of the Transcendental Ideal, while
the latter strives to realize the Christian Ideal in secular time (279).
As we have already seen, Leroux's defense of social
institutions eventually inspired Brownson to attribute this latter function to the
institutional Church. But years earlier,
the Unitarian Brownson had attributed the same function to his New Church
(Sveino 278-279). He had reaffirmed this
position as late as 1842, in an essay written shortly before Leroux's influence
began to pervade his thought: "The
church is the organization of mankind for the peaceable, orderly, and
successful realization of the Christian Ideal, or the Ideal as beheld by the
early followers of Jesus" ("Church of the Future" 5). After declaring that no existing denomination
had set its sights high enough and that all of them had fulfilled their
historical mission, Brownson had repeated New
Views's call for a "New Church"
to realize the true Christian Ideal of Christ himself: "It shall become a
really Catholic Church, a Church truly universal, and finally gather the vast
family of man into one universal association" ("Church of the
Future" 6, 24).
Anticipating Channing, Brownson predicted that this
"really Catholic Church" would replace Rome. Furthermore, it had the same goal as
Fourierism, "universal association."
Understandably, many students of the self-proclaimed science of
"Universal Unity" would also be attracted to the literal
"catholicity" of a Universal Church like Brownson's. In "Unity in Catholicity in the
Church," Channing would call for such a Church as a refuge from the
"sectarian bondage" of the day.
He felt that his fellow Unitarians, by practicing their motto, "Holiness, Liberty, Love," could
bring into being an institution in which all Christians would "be in
living communion with the Divine Spirit," "live in relations of love
with all men," and enjoy the freedom "to seek on all sides for
manifestations of the Divine Will" ("Unity" 366-367). Yet Channing's "catholicity," like
Brownson's in New Views, was not
bound by the past. The religious liberty
that Channing demanded from the universal Church would include each
individual's freedom to reject or accept the creeds of past generations. He specifically rejected the priesthood as an
unnecessary "medium," as well as claims to legitimacy based upon
"Ecclesiastical Organizations," "Bishops," and
"Forms" (367). Instead,
Channing's definition of true Christianity as the "spirit of
Humanity" combined the Transcendentalist and social reform platforms:
[This Spirit]
worships no past creeds, but announces that every human being, every society of
human beings, the Race at large is called to realize by experience the Mystery
of God incarnating himself in Man. It
asks no stately cathedrals, and magnificent rites, and splendor of worship; but
summons Christian nations to put away, once and forever, War, Slavery, Caste,
Oppression, Inequality, Injustice, and every form of human degradation . . .;
calls upon each Christian person to link hands with his neighbor in one grand
coöperative effort to introduce the reign of Heaven, which is the Liberty of
Love. (366-367)
In accordance with these
beliefs, Channing's "First Church of Humanity," founded the following
year, simply required prospective members to pledge their commitment to
"universal unity."[29]
Certainly the quest for "catholicity" was
not new to New England. Channing's and
Brownson's visions of a communal reform made possible by the faith of the
community both echoed the founding text of American theological
exceptionalism. John Winthrop had also
argued that an American society could only succeed if bonded by mutual love
within the mystical body of Christ, "knitt together in this worke as one
man" (198). Even as
mid-nineteenth-century New England Protestants followed the Puritans in
demonizing Rome,[30]
many of them regretted that the Reformation splintered of the Body of Christ
into various sects, all competing for the claim to
"catholicity." Like Henry
Adams at Chartres, American visitors to one of the great European cathedrals
often used the occasion to mourn this lost unity. Even Albert Brisbane said that the Strasbourg
cathedral made him feel that Protestantism was "meager, and starved"
(qtd., Guarneri 136-137). As Guarneri,
among others, has noted, such yearning for a paradise lost was reflected in
Fourier's theory of history: Harmony was to be the complex restoration of an
simple Edenic society that had lapsed into "Civilization." Just as many Associationists searched for the
return to Eden, they also sought to recapture the past unity of
Christianity. Most of them, including
Brisbane, Channing, and Godwin, felt that Rome could not be the
"true" Catholic Church, if only because the social conditions in
Catholic countries proved that the Church was not an effective agent for social
reform.[31] However arbitrary the resemblances between
Catholicism and Fourierism may seem in retrospect, it was a commonplace among
many members of the Transcendentalist circle.
At the same time, many of them denied the "catholicity" of the
Roman Catholic Church.
Just as the Associationists were generally opposed to
the Roman Church, yet interested in it, Hecker felt a similar ambivalence
towards Fourierism. In an April 1844 letter to Brownson, he contended that Fourierism could
play a useful role in spiritual reform, as its "doctrine of unity and
diversity" was essentially "Catholicity in the industrial world"
(B-H 91). Even though he had already followed Brownson
in rejecting Fourierism, he still found that the Brook Farm Phalanx had exerted
a positive spiritual effect upon its residents:
It has rid them of
their transcendentalism, of their protestantism and most of their pernicious
results. It seems to me I have greater
hopes of Mr Ripley than I ever had. He is
now laboring on the results which the Catholic Church of Christ is destined to
realize in time, not on the cause which only can do this. . . . I firmly believe it will be the means of
opening their eyes to those Catholic principles developed in the history of the
Church. . . . Ripley has spoken once or
twice with an earnestness and enthusiasm very great. This is his apprenticeship for the
priesthood.[32]
While Hecker praised
Fourier's other-reliant communitarianism for drawing the Brook Farmers away
from Emersonian Transcendentalism's self-reliant "protestantism," he
reassured Brownson that he did not "believe in the innumerable
speculations of Fourier or that these men in their present movement will effect
much by their plans" (B-H
91-92). Brownson came to the same
conclusion. He argued that Fourierism,
unlike the "True Church," was unable to transform its ideals into a
material reality. In effect, Brownson
had appropriated Emerson's memorable one-liner, "Fourier had skipped no
fact but one, namely, Life," and recast it in a Christian context: Fourier
had skipped no fact but the Holy Spirit.
Despite their hope