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Praise for
RESTLESS SOULS
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10. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin, 1985), 211; Tony Hoagland, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2010), 14.
Restless Souls opens with a chapter that dives into the heart of the Transcendentalist love of “mysticism.” The English term came into being only in the mid-eighteenth century as part of the polemics over the place of ecstatic experience in the Christian life, and its associations were initially more negative than positive. A century later, it was an important and colorful fragment in the spiritual kaleidoscope. The eighteenth-century Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, whose accounts of his extensive conversations with angels were more popular in death than in life, was one important contributor to this transformation; he reached the height of his American influence in the 1840s and 1850s. Homegrown mystics became increasingly prevalent, and many of them emerged at the intersections of the Transcendental Club and the Harvard Divinity School, a place, as one of its own deans admitted, “made up of mystics, skeptics, and dyspeptics.” By the time the pioneering American psychologist William James embraced “mysticism” as a prominent part of his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), he had a sustained lineage upon which to build. James's exploration of mystical consciousness represented a culmination in the ascent of the new mysticism from Emerson forward—a climb that had been swift and momentous in its effects. The United States was a country, a critic sighed in 1906, where “mysticism” and “a craving for spiritual experiences” had “run mad.”17
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