Читать книгу Restless Souls - Leigh Eric Schmidt - Страница 11

CHAPTER ONE

MYSTIC CLUB

A ONE-TIME SPY FOR THE DANISH military, Carl H. A. Bjerregaard (1845–1922) hastily left Denmark in 1873, a twenty-eight-year-old lieutenant absent without leave, and headed for New York. In the United States Bjerregaard started a new life, first as a factory worker in New Jersey, and then through employment at the Astor Library (soon to form the core of the New York Public Library). In Denmark he had briefly helped curate a natural history museum, so his joining the library staff in 1879 to classify books and recatalog them was not wholly out of character. Soon his military service faded into the past; he spent the rest of his career with the New York Public, eventually heading up the main reading room. That was only his day job, though. In his spare time, with all the library's resources at his fingertips, Bjerregaard fashioned himself into a philosopher, artist, and mystic.

By the 1890s, he was lecturing widely on mysticism, nature worship, and kindred topics. “I address you as Pilgrims of the Infinite,” Bjerregaard told an audience in Chicago in 1896, “for you are pilgrims; I can see that on your faces. You are not pilgrims either from or to the Infinite, but you are of the Infinite. From and to indicate space and time relations, but in the Infinite we recognize neither time nor space; there is no to-day and to-morrow; no here and no there. Eternity is no farther off from the Mystic, than the moment in which he speaks. You are Pilgrims OF the Infinite.” Bjerregaard's summons to explore the “Mystic Life” was heady stuff. It was, among other things, an affirmation of the supreme freedom of spiritual aspirants to seek the truth for themselves and within themselves. The call seemed to resound everywhere: Bible passages, Taoist sayings, pine trees and cones, Jewish Kabbalah, Zoroastrian fire imagery, yoga, Sufi poetry, American Transcendentalism, and the Christian mythology of the Holy Grail.¹

Bjerregaard's spirituality, like the faith of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), was especially in synchrony with the American lecture circuit. Bjerregaard's favorite place to speak was Greenacre, the summer community that the visionary Sarah Farmer (1847–1916) founded in Eliot, Maine, in 1894. He saw Farmer's experiment as a realization of his ideas about a universal mysticism and was lavish in his praise of its design. When he gave personal examples of his own exalted experiences, they almost always circled back to Greenacre, whether to a sunrise worship service led by the Zoroastrian Jehanghier Cola or to barefoot walks on the dew-drenched grass. “Greenacre is a revelation,” Bjerregaard remarked. “When you rise from the cool waves of the Piscataqua [River], you rise out of the quiet place of your own soul.” As a lecturer, Bjerregaard believed in presentations that were personal and experiential; like Emerson, he did not want to offer secondhand news or disinterested scholarship. Make lecturers, he said, “give their own experiences and not something they have read in books and only poorly digested…. In soul life no abstract teachings are worth much.”²

Sarah Farmer's Greenacre community in Maine, with its tent village surrounding a large inn on the shore of the Piscataqua River, provided the setting for C. H. A. Bjerregaard's lectures on mysticism and spirituality in the 1890s. (Eliot Bahá'í Archives, Eliot, Maine.)

His time at Greenacre in the 1890s provided him with that firsthand material. Of one glistening experience there in 1896, Bjerregaard was especially jubilant:

The first evening I spent at Greenacre, I watched the sunset from “Sunrise Camp,” and it happened to me as it did to Wm. Blake, I did not see with my eyes, but through my eyes came to my soul the essence of that Golden Ball, and I heard it as “Glory to God on High”—“Peace on Earth”—“Good-will among Men.” It was July 5th, 1896, never to be forgotten. It was a gorgeous sunset. All the heavens and the earth were still; the fleeting colors of roseate hues and ashen gray played in incalculable series of mutations. Behind the passing scenes, the glorious orb, incomparable emblem of Being, sank majestically down behind the distant White Hills, and before the scenes, as if in midair, I felt the Becoming. My reason could not arrest the movement, my understanding could not declare what it perceived. The glorious tints, the melting into one another, the lack of fixedness or duration, the deep, yet eloquent and sonorous silence spoke from Heaven and whispered Eternal Harmony.

His lone epiphanies at sunset converged with the corporate prayers of the gathered seekers as they all softly chanted together a newly minted mantra, “the now famous Greenacre Uplift”: “Omnipresence manifest Thyself in me.” There on the banks of the Piscataqua River in a tent village, surrounded by fellow Pilgrims of the Infinite, Bjerregaard found his spiritual element.³

Mysticism mattered in the 1890s, as Bjerregaard's eager audiences in Chicago and at Greenacre made plain. Across a wide swath of religious liberalism, mystical experience had become a hallmark of religion at its most awesome, profound, and desirable. The new universal mysticism (to which Bjerregaard gave representative expression) served, in turn, as the foundation upon which the contemporary love of spirituality would be constructed. “The mother sea and fountain head of all religions,” the psychologist William James (1842–1910) wrote in a letter in June 1901, “lies in the mystical experiences of the individual, taking the word mystical in a very wide sense.” Understanding how mysticism took on such a wide significance over the course of the nineteenth century is an important step in fathoming how spirituality became such an expansive part of America's religious vernacular in the twentieth century. As Bjerregaard concluded in another series of lectures on mysticism in 1896, “A study of the mystics will prove a key by which you can open the doors that lead to Universal Consciousness and Cosmic Emotion, to everything of the New Spirituality, revealed in our day.” Bjerregaard's very nomenclature makes plain that the “new spirituality,” talked up so much as a recent development, is more venerable than novel. He himself stood right in the middle of this transformation, a bridge figure who joined nineteenth-century “mysticism” to twentieth-century “spirituality.”⁴

As a matter of course, Bjerregaard saw the mysticism he was preaching as timelessly true. By the 1890s, it had become common intellectual fare to imagine the mystical writers as part of an everlasting coterie, essentially unaffected by “clime or creed.” Their writings sparkled with eternal verities and ineffable insights into the Absolute; ageless classics, they had “neither birthday nor native land.” “Mysticism has no genealogy,” Robert Alfred Vaughan (1823–1857) commented in his influential Hours with the Mystics in 1856. “It is no tradition conveyed…down the course of generations as a readymade commodity. It is a state of thinking and feeling, to which minds of a certain temperament are liable at any time or place, in occident and orient, whether Romanist or Protestant, Jew, Turk, or Infidel.”⁵

Such claims only got bolder with time. “A history of Mysticism is an impossibility,” one writer remarked in 1918 with startling assurance. “It has no history.” Mysticism as monotony — it was so universally the same that it was almost boring: “When you see [mysticism] here or there, early or late, you feel perfectly at home with it. You say, ‘Here is the same old thing.’ It suffers a little, perhaps, from sameness.” It would come closer to the truth simply to stand such antihistorical suppositions on their head. The kind of timeless mysticism that Bjerregaard was trumpeting, one could say with a playful contrariness, actually had a very precise American birthday. In May 1896, when Bjerregaard published his first series of lectures on the subject, mysticism would have celebrated its fifty-eighth birthday, its nativity seven years (almost to the day) before Bjerregaard's own birth.⁶

So, when and where was “mysticism” born in the United States? On May 20, 1838, in Medford, Massachusetts, in the old parsonage of Caleb Stetson (1793–1870), a seasoned pastor of high ambitions and modest achievements. On that day the Transcendental Club, a symposium of liberal Christian ministers and New England intellectuals in its third year of existence, met specifically to take up, in Ralph Waldo Emerson's phrase, “the question of Mysticism.” In addition to Emerson, on hand for this late-into-the-night discussion were such illuminati in the making as Theodore Parker (1810–1860), Jones Very (1813–1880), and George Ripley (1802–1880). Within months of the gathering, Very, as poet and oracle, would take off on his own distinct mystical flight, roaming from Cambridge to Concord, offering to baptize people with the Holy Ghost and with fire, much to the dismay of his friends and colleagues. Three years later Ripley would leave his pastorate over the Purchase Street Church in Boston and found one of Transcendentalism's most visionary enterprises, the community experiment known as Brook Farm. Parker, just out of Harvard Divinity School in 1836 and with a congregation in West Roxbury, had already been drawn in his voracious studies to “the writings of the Mystics,” “the voluptuaries of the soul.” As Parker noted of the precious flora he had gathered from this literature during his student days, “I was much attracted to this class of men, who developed the element of piety, regardless of the theologic ritualism of the church.” Emerson, Very, Ripley, and Parker were all well primed to take up the question of mysticism as they gathered at Stetson's home on High Street in Medford.

Amos Bronson Alcott, an enthusiastic member of the Transcendental Club, went on to found his own Mystic Club as a successor. (Concord Free Public Library.)

Perhaps the most expectant of all, though, was Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), another key member present for this spirited meeting of the Transcendental Club. By turns vilified and celebrated–Emerson saw him as an almost unrivaled genius; many others thought he was insane–Alcott has had some of his quirks sanded down over the years through the culture's enduring fondness for his daughter, Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women. Even if many of his projects sputtered, including his vegetarian commune Fruitlands (which lasted all of six months in 1843), Alcott was a creative and compelling force, a down-on-his-luck Yankee peddler turned self-taught Transcendentalist with a mission to educate and inspire. He was, not surprisingly, effusive about the conversation the assembled intellectuals enjoyed that evening: “On the main topic of conversation, much was said,” Alcott noted in his journal. “Was Jesus a mystic? Most deemed him such, in the widest sense. He was spiritual…. He used the universal tongue, and was intelligible to all men of simple soul.” Here was one good measure of Alcott's excited and enduring preoccupation with the evening's topic: years later he would organize his own Mystic Club as the aptly named successor to this famed group of Transcendental associates.

Alcott was not one to curb impulsive utterances. He had already become a lightning rod for controversy because of his educational experiments at the Temple School in Boston in which he treated the spontaneity of children as a likely conduit of divine revelation. Rather than catechizing his young pupils, he led them in free-form conversations on the Gospels, confident that spiritual wisdom would well up naturally from their own unspoiled intuitions. Predictably, then, on the topic of mysticism Alcott proved voluble, even inspired. That night at Stetson's parsonage he even feared that he had “overstepped the bounds of true courtesy” by talking too much (certainly a danger to the well-being of any salon). Still, he was unbridled: “A vision was vouchsafed, and I could but declare it.” Emerson, by contrast, was fearful that he had been “a bad associate” at the gathering, “since for all the wit & talent that was there, I had not one thought nor one aspiration.” Trying to quiet this pang of intellectual insecurity, Emerson offered an excuse: “It is true I had not slept the night before.” Alcott's ardor on that spring evening, rather than Emerson's sluggishness, was a better measure of the impact that this Transcendentalist turn to mysticism would have on American religious life.⁷

Ralph Waldo Emerson appears in this portrait in a pose for the lecture circuit, a main medium for him after he left the ministry. (Concord Free Public Library.)

Two months later, on July 15, 1838, Emerson proved much more inspired when he addressed the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School. Having left the full-time ministry in 1832 over his inability to perform the sacrament of the Lord's Supper with sincere conviction, he had grown only more restive under the sleepy preaching of the New England pulpit over the next six years. Unitarian liberals were mired in doctrinal debates with traditional Calvinists–and often with each other as well–about everything from Original Sin to Christ's divinity to biblical miracles, and Emerson found the whole scene dispiriting. The address to the senior class of the divinity school provided him with the opportunity to declare the emancipation of human curiosity in the realm of religion, the freedom from dogmatic and canonical constrictions, and the awakening of spiritual intuition and individuality. “Truly speaking,” Emerson exhorted, “it is not instruction, but provocation that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject.” Refuse the old path of imitative piety; throw off “secondary knowledge”; eschew “hollow, dry, creaking formality.” “Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost,” Emerson cajoled, “cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.”⁸

Though his address ended on a cautious note in self-contradictory praise of breathing new life into the old institutions of the Sabbath and regular preaching, the oration nonetheless created a considerable stir. More controversy followed upon its publication the next month, and, since nothing vended quite so well in antebellum America as a religious hullabaloo, Emerson's goading of his alma mater quickly sold out. The rise of religious liberalism had many milestones and monuments in the first half of the nineteenth century: The election of Henry Ware, a theological liberal, as Hollis Professor at Harvard in 1805 pointed ahead to the movement's dominance over religious education there. William Ellery Channing's ringing defense in 1819 of a Unitarian conception of God against Trinitarian orthodoxy was another important sign of the times, as was his affirmation of the powers of self-cultivation against Calvinist notions of human depravity. Then there was the duo of September 1836—the organization of the Transcendental Club and the publication of Emerson's Nature. The latter included Emerson's famed moment of spiritual exhilaration, the experience of becoming a transparent eyeball at one with its surroundings, subsumed into God, all egotism gone. That episode helped earn him his enduring reputation as the movement's greatest mystic. The year 1838 represented another critical passage, and not only because of Emerson's divinity school address, so deeply inspiring to other “heretics” of the period like the young Theodore Parker. The all but forgotten meeting of the Transcendental Club two months earlier to discuss mysticism was perhaps the most telling signal of change: Religious liberals intended nothing less than a redefinition of the spiritual life.

Christopher Pearse Cranch, an artist within the Transcendentalist movement, was also its best in-house caricaturist. Here Emerson, the mystic, appears as transparent eyeball. (MS Am 1506 [3]. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.)

Cranch also pegged Emerson as among those Transcendentalists who relished all too much their spiritual absorption with nature. (MS Am 1506 [4]. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.)

To see how innovative Transcendentalist discussions of mysticism were, to see why the birthday analogy is not too far-fetched, it is necessary to step back for a moment into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That mysticism should come to stand, in the second third of the nineteenth century, as the pinnacle of a universal and timeless religious experience was anything but an obvious development. Through the early decades of the eighteenth century, the English category of “mysticism” did not exist. The prevailing notion instead was “mystical theology,” and it signified a specific devotional branch within Christian divinity. In 1656, the lexicographer Thomas Blount, working off a Roman Catholic description of mystical theology from 1647, arrived at the following definition for his formative dictionary of “hard words”: “Mystical Theology, is nothing else in general but certain Rules, by the practise whereof, a vertuous Christian may attain to a nearer, a more familiar, and beyond all expression comfortable conversation with God.” Mystical theology, in other words, was a way of life that involved the Christian in a “constant exercise” of prayer, contemplation, and self-denial. And that was the heart of it: Blount's work contained no parallel entries for the nouns mystic and mysticism.9

Added to these theological dimensions were exegetical ones. From the first centuries of Christian history forward into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, among the most common associations for mystical were its connections to allegorical forms of biblical commentary. Scriptural texts, in this view, were not transparent, but contained hidden or spiritual senses behind the surface of the literal. To take a commonplace example from the eighteenth century: the passage in the book of Genesis saying “let there be light, and there was light” literally referred to the light of the sun but in its mystical senses pointed to the Messiah, grace, and the glory of God. These ancient forms of biblical commentary remained evident in as basic a compendium as Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopœdia (1738), which still foregrounded “the mystical sense of Scripture” as central to understanding the term's religious significance. Like Blount, Chambers also stressed “MYSTIC theology” and did not employ “mysticism” per se as a category. Through the early eighteenth century, the meanings attached to mystic and mystical were inextricably woven into a larger system of Christian theology, linked at the level of practice to a recognizable set of devotional and exegetical habits.¹⁰

When “mysticism” emerged as an object of discussion in the middle of the eighteenth century, it was usually seen pejoratively. The concept initially crystallized within the eighteenth-century critique of Protestant enthusiasm–an attack aimed especially at taming the ecstatic extravagance that accompanied the rise of such high-flying movements as the Quakers, the French Prophets, and the Methodists. It was Henry Coventry (c. 1710–1752), a Cambridge wit and a relatively minor player in the larger world of the English Enlightenment, who first employed mysticism as part of a sustained critique of sectarian Protestant excitement. In a series of dialogues entitled Philemon to Hydaspes; or, The History of False Religion, the initial installment of which appeared in 1736, Coventry explicitly contrasted “the seraphic entertainments of mysticism and extasy” with the “true spirit of acceptable religion.” By the latter, he meant a wholly reasonable commitment to civic virtue, cosmopolitan learning, public decorum, and aesthetic proportion. Religion, rightly practiced, was a “manly, rational, and social institution,” and the “deluded votaries” of mystical Christianity had no place in that world of erudite conversations, moderated passions, and refined tastes. Coventry's understanding of mysticism was thus socially situated within debates about the fundamental comportment of religious people: were they to carry themselves with the genteel gravity of Cambridge divines and dons or the bumptious assurance of Quakers and Methodists?¹¹

Coventry shared wider Enlightenment suspicions of false religion as a product of credulity, fraud, fear, and the ignorance of natural causes (for example, mistaking thunder for the angry voice of God or an earthquake for divine punishment). His dialogues tapped into all of those explanations at one point or another, and, in that sense, he was a secondary colleague of more famous and cutting philosophes such as Voltaire and David Hume. Still, his account of mysticism, though now completely forgotten, possessed its own edginess and originality. Probing for its erotic psychology, Coventry went further than the usual sexualizing of religious upstarts. That tack was epitomized in the prurience and wit of Jonathan Swift, who, in his Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit (1704), had richly satirized the “ogling” and “orgasmus” of Quaker spiritual exercises. Whereas Swift dwelled on the ease with which spiritual zeal fused with earthly lust, Coventry developed a more explicit theory of sublimation and projection to explain the amorous qualities of “mystical dissoluteness.” For Coventry, it was not the human emotions of fear and hope that explained the natural origins of religion—an explanation preferred especially by Hume. Instead, Coventry riveted attention on the unruly passion of love and the wildly illusory distortions that it produced.¹²

Coventry was nothing if not direct on this point: The great source of all mystical experience is “disappointed love.” The frustrated passion is “transferred from mere mortals to a spiritual and divine object, and love…is sublimated into devotion.” That divine object is necessarily “an imaginary and artificial” contrivance, a mistaken substitute, a projection of the “wantonest appetites and wishes.” In working from the perspective of the passions, which were understood to be stronger and more predominant in women, Coventry marked mysticism as primarily female, with a spirituality of sublimated sexuality making up “the far greatest part of female religion.” He found such displacement of the sensual doubly sad; it was both a religious illusion and a loss of the genuine tactile pleasures of “connubial love.” What devout women really suffered from, one of his male interlocutors winked to another, was “the want of timely application from our sex.” Coventry's analysis fully anticipated the intellectual “fashion” that William James would later complain about in The Varieties of Religious Experience: namely, “criticising the religious emotions by showing a connection between them and the sexual life.”¹³

Coventry helped bring mysticism into being in the Anglo-American world as a term laced with reproach. Misplaced sexuality, unintelligibility, pretension, and reason-be-damned piety were now among its chief associations. The Anglican bishop William Warburton (1698–1779), a contemporary of Coventry's, made those connections clear in his contemptuous conclusions about the ardent devotional writer William Law (1675–1752). Law's exposition of the rigors of piety, especially his Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728), had profoundly influenced such early evangelical luminaries as John Wesley and George Whitefield, and these dubious alliances already made him a marked man in Warburton's book. The perverse love that Law showed for mystical writers, particularly the German visionary Jacob Böhme (1575–1624), served to sharpen Warburton's suspicions to a knife's edge: “When I reflect on the wonderful infatuation of this ingenious man, who has spent a long life in hunting after, and, with an incredible appetite, devouring, the trash dropt from every species of Mysticism,” Warburton declared, “it puts me in mind of what Travellers tell us of a horrid Fanaticism in the East, where the Devotee makes a solemn vow never to taste of other food than what has passed through the entrails of some impure or Savage Animal.” Hard to put it more graphically than that: mysticism was seen as an excremental waste in the making of a learned, reasonable Christianity amenable to the forward march of the Enlightenment.¹⁴

Another noteworthy aspect of the understanding of mysticism before its Transcendentalist embrace was the way that the learned worked to narrow its signification rather than enlarge it. The mystics, though sometimes seen as part of a stream that flowed back to the ancient church, were commonly presented as a small camp with a few exemplary members. They were bearers, in this view, of a sectarian spirit, not a perennial philosophy. At the head of the sect was a controversial band of seventeenth-century French devotional writers–Jeanne Marie Guyon, Antoinette Bourignon, and François Fénelon–known for their supreme dedication to an inward life of prayer and utter abandonment of the self to God. In William Hurd's New Universal History of the Religious Rites, Ceremonies, and Customs of the Whole World: or, A Complete and Impartial View of All Religions, published in 1782, the “Account of the Mystics” was placed toward the end of his massive volume, tucked into accounts of other “smaller sects” such as the already defunct Muggletonians and French Prophets. Guilty of various excesses of piety, the mystics were, in Hurd's mind, clearly identifiable with a small group of French devotional writers and their misbegotten English successors like the unfortunate William Law.¹⁵

That factional understanding was encapsulated in the 1797 entry “Mystics” in the Encyclopædia Britannica, a multivolume project that epitomized the vast expansion and reorganization of knowledge in this century of light. “MYSTICS,” the entry read, “a kind of religious sect, distinguished by their professing pure, sublime, and perfect devotion, with an entire disinterested love of God, free from all selfish considerations…. The principles of this sect were adopted by those called Quietists in the seventeenth century, and under different modifications, by the Quakers and Methodists.” (The intensity of their withdrawal from the social world into the interior reaches of silent prayer had earned these “mystics” the disparaging sectarian label of “Quietists.”) Enlightenment compilers and historians rarely followed Coventry's lead in universalizing “mystic” and “mysticism” as part of a sweeping critique of false religion. Instead, they preferred to keep the purview of the terms much more contained–and, in some sense, containable–by making them party labels for a singular brand of overwrought Christians.¹⁶

These British usages readily crossed the Atlantic to the new republic. Hannah Adams's compendious Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations, which went through four editions in New England between 1784 and 1817, offered a more far-ranging account of mystics and mysticism than Hurd's parallel volume, but it nonetheless trotted out the same select club of “modern mystics.” In the first edition of Noah Webster's American Dictionary in 1828, the narrow sectarian meaning was front and center: “MYSTICS, n. A religious sect who profess to have direct intercourse with the Spirit of God,” and “mysticism” itself was still joined to seventeenth-century Quietist practices of prayer and submission. Through the 1820s and 1830s, sectarian and enthusiast understandings remained commonplace (indeed, through the sixth and seventh editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which ran from 1823 to 1842, the entries on “mystics” closely followed the narrow eighteenth-century pedigree). These entrenched associations made mysticism an unlikely candidate for liberal absorption into their imagining of the universal religion. “The liberal mind is of no sect,” Bronson Alcott proudly proclaimed. To give mysticism a sympathetic hearing, the Transcendental Club and its sundry successors would have to work against the grain of prevailing restrictions of the mystics to a minuscule sect of prayer-immersed, self-denying devotees.¹⁷

For a viable counterhistory to the received meanings from Catholic theology and Enlightenment critique, there were various waters for Transcendentalists, Unitarians, and fellow liberals to troll. Perhaps closest at hand were their own eighteenth-century forebears: above all, Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), a Unitarian apologist who, though often stammering in the pulpit, proved extremely fluent as a historian and natural philosopher. Like Benjamin Franklin's reputation, Priestley's fame was secured through experiments with electricity, but, unlike Franklin, Priestley was more than happy to lead a double life as a theologian. Abandoning England in 1794, which he had come to see as a wretched place of persecution, Priestley moved to postrevolutionary Pennsylvania, which he imagined as a blessed state of republican liberty. His History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782) provided one common strategy for the rehabilitation of mysticism. Not that Priestley was particularly fond of the mystics; he said that he was “ashamed” as a Christian to see what kind of bodily “austerities” and scriptural “perversions” some of them had practiced in Christ's name. These horrid “bodily exercises” in which the flesh was tormented for the good of the soul were dismissed as Catholic vices.

Still, mysticism mattered for Priestley's Protestant Enlightenment as a flawed vessel of true interiority; it was the source of a Christian underground that managed to preserve at least the traces of true spirituality in the face of all the vulgar superstitions of pagans and Catholics. “For though the ideas of the Mystics were very confused,” Priestley concluded, “they had a notion of the necessity of aiming at something of inward purity, distinct from all ritual observances.” That proved a distinction that liberal reclaimers of the spiritual life could get their minds around, if not their bodies. The mystics contained within them the “sparks of real piety” and served, in effect, as clandestine prognosticators of pure religious interiority amid the dark ages of superstition. Nothing ascetic, nothing sacramental, nothing ritualistic, nothing bleeding or oozing—just unadulterated spiritual experience–that was a mysticism Priestley and his heirs could stomach, perhaps even savor.¹⁸

A little further afield, at least for most liberal Christians of the 1830s, were evangelical Protestant defenses of mysticism. Many in the evangelical movement were tired of getting beat up with the charge of enthusiasm and largely stayed clear of anything that would further associate them with such scorned sects as the Quakers and the French Prophets. But not all did. John Fletcher (1729–1785), one of John Wesley's ablest partners in Methodism's insurgency against England's Anglican establishment, wrote an explicit defense of “evangelical mysticism,” by which he especially meant the unfolding of the spiritual senses of biblical passages. More than that, Fletcher had in mind a transformed mode of perception; “gospel mysticism” was a way of seeing the “invisible and spiritual” within things “gross and material.” The natural world, like Scripture itself, was filled with hidden spiritual correspondences, and the reborn Christian lived in a world alive with poetic subtlety, symbolism, and grace.¹⁹

In a similar vein, Thomas Hartley (1708–1784), another Anglican with sympathies for the evangelical revival, was more than ready to defend mysticism, including William Law's perfectionist piety of ceaseless prayer. In 1764 he explicitly challenged the captious pigeonholing of the mystics in his Short Defense of the Mystical Writers: “Let it here be remarked, and constantly remembered, that the true Mystics are not to be taken for a sect or party in the church, or to be considered as separatists from it, for they renounce all such distinctions both in name and deed, being the only people that never formed a sect.” By Hartley's account, mystical meant “nothing more nor less than spiritual,” and the mystics were the “guardians” in all ages of “the spirituality of true religion.” Fletcher, Hartley, and other defenders were part of wider counter-Enlightenment currents that were available for nineteenth-century projects of reclaiming mysticism as the essence of genuine spirituality. Evangelicals and Transcendentalists could both agree, for example, that devotional writers like Jeanne Marie Guyon and William Law led spiritual lives that were profoundly serious and could not be easily dismissed. They could agree, too, that the natural world was filled with divine encryptions awaiting those with the spiritual senses to decipher them.²⁰

Births require parents, and, if the genealogy of the Transcendental Club meeting on mysticism in May 1838 is starting to sound complicated, it was. That lineage presented not so much a family tree, with stately branches, as a family thicket, dense with tangles. That complexity, not to say impenetrability, was clearly on display in Bronson Alcott's lifelong fascination with the subject, especially in his habits of book collecting. Emerson may have wanted active souls with fresh experiences rather than bookworms with blighted sight, but, in point of fact, reinventing mysticism required a lot of reading. Alcott's journey exemplified this. After his earnest contributions at that spring symposium on mysticism in 1838, he went on to amass a library of hundreds of volumes on “mystic and theosophic lore.” If he could still talk your ear off about mysticism (he and Emerson had another long discussion of “this sublime school” on a December afternoon in 1839), that was in large part because he was an unabashed bibliophile.²¹

Alcott's collection ended up being immense. It included numerous seventeenth- and eighteenth-century editions of paragons Jacob Böhme, Antoinette Bourignon, and Jeanne Marie Guyon; several copies of William Law's works (including The Spirit of Prayer; or, The Soul Rising Out of the Vanity of Time into the Riches of Eternity); and a full selection of Neoplatonists from Plotinus to Thomas Taylor. There was a collection of revelations of divine love from the medieval visionary Julian of Norwich; and the venerable Thomas à Kempis, a perennial Catholic guide even for Protestants, was predictably still in the mix. These Catholic bearers of medieval mystical theology now shared shelf space, though, with such romantic works as Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Aids to Reflection (1825), a series of inward-looking meditations designed to help modern doubters move beyond the “uprightness” of the moral life to the “godlikeness” of the spiritual life. As such reading possibilities suggest, Transcendentalists and liberal Christians had many elements at their disposal to perform their alchemy of transforming mysticism from a sectarian affectation into a universal piety. Just as today's inquirers can do much of their seeking at Barnes and Noble or through Amazon.com, the nineteenth century's “New Spirituality” had a distinctly bookish feel, a communion of restless souls shaped as much through eclectic reading as through regular churchgoing.²²

Beyond amassing an impressive library on the subject, Alcott long continued to be an arch-dreamer of mysticism. “Mysticism,” he sweepingly concluded in Concord Days in 1872, “is the sacred spark that has lighted the piety and illuminated the philosophy of all places and times.” In 1878, he enthused about the idea of starting a “Journal of Mysticism and Idealism,” proposed to him in a letter from a young partisan in Osceola, Missouri. Alcott thought it would be a perfect outlet for anthologizing an array of mystical writings for the American public. His short-lived Mystic Club, essentially a reading group for corporate study and reflection organized in 1882, was an appropriate capstone to his proclamation of mysticism's global significance. Fittingly enough, Franklin Sanborn (1831–1917), as dedicated as anyone to the Transcendentalist movement and its memorialization, was also a founding member of this latest club of rapidly aging New England radicals. A biographer of Alcott, Thoreau, and Emerson, Sanborn would weave the connecting threads from the first-generation Transcendentalists through the third-generation progressives. A disciple of Theodore Parker and an abolitionist supporter of John Brown in the 1850s, Sanborn played a leading role in the Concord School of Philosophy in the 1880s and became a primary chronicler of Sarah Farmer's Greenacre community to which Bjerregaard devoted himself. ²³

If Alcott's wide-ranging enthusiasm for the subject suggested the incorporation of a hodgepodge of materials into Transcendentalist aspirations, one source still stood above the rest: namely, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), mining expert turned mystic par excellence. In the mid-1740s, after long years of scientific inquiry, Swedenborg experienced a religious awakening that transformed him from natural philosopher to seer. Out of his newly opened spiritual sight came a vast array of writings: visionary commentaries opening up the spiritual sense of biblical texts as well as detailed reports on his grand tours of heaven and hell. Swedenborg took the Christian and occultist fascination with hidden correspondences to a new level of empirical exactness; everywhere Swedenborg turned he discovered mystical signs of the invisible world beyond the visible. The human ear, for example, corresponded to obedience to God; an odorous mouse to avarice; cats to inattentiveness to sermons. Even more mysterious was his self-reported ability to “converse with angels and spirits in the same manner as I speak with men,” and it was his memorable relations of things seen and heard in the celestial world that especially garnered him a significant readership. By the 1840s, his posthumous fame had made him the most influential “mystic” in the United States, both a popular best seller and an intellectual with literary cachet. When the Encyclopaedia Britannica finally got around in 1858 to updating its entry on the subject, shifting from mystics and mystical theology to the increasingly universal mysticism, the essay paid Swedenborg an impossibly large tribute: “Nothing really new in the way of mysticism has been produced since the days of the northern seer.”²⁴

Almost as a matter of course Emerson chose Swedenborg, the “largest of all modern souls,” to stand for his mystic of the ages in his Representative Men (1850). The appeal that Swedenborg held for Emerson and company was complex. As a symbolist of nature and Scripture, his elaborate view of spiritual correspondences had resonance for Transcendentalists who held similarly arcane views of reality. Swedenborg was also a thorough anti-Calvinist, critiquing a variety of doctrines from predestination to infant damnation to the Trinity. (His rejection of John Calvin went deep: in one vision, the seer discovered that the spiritual shade of the Genevan divine was fond of frequenting otherworldly brothels.) A cosmopolitan universalist, Swedenborg saw heaven as open to all those, inside or outside the church, who sustained their love of God and active benevolence toward their neighbors. His dismissal of external miracles, while preserving room for direct internal experiences of the divine, jibed with Transcendentalist intuitions. Such theological convictions meshed well with the propensities of New England liberalism.²⁵

For all those affinities, this was not a match made in heaven. In his essay enshrining Swedenborg as the representative mystic, Emerson often took away with one hand what he gave with the other. Swedenborg gained credit in Emerson's eyes for his versatility in prying into so many subjects, but there remained something strangely “scholastic” and “passionless” about him. The seer denoted whole “classes of souls as a botanist disposes of a carex,” Emerson acidly remarked. Swedenborg's vast writings were without poetry; they lacked tremulous emotions and lustrous landscapes. Insufficient in his self-reliance, not ultimately rising to the level of creative genius, Swedenborg remained all too subservient to the Bible and Christian symbolism. For Emerson, the great mystic remained at last the faithful son of a Lutheran bishop, while the Concord sage was charting (so he believed) a more independent course far freer of such baggage. Swedenborg's angels, Emerson sniffed at one point, were “all country-parsons” on “an evangelical picnic.” Differences aside, the larger Transcendentalist estimate of Swedenborg as mystical summit took the better measure of American fascinations with the seer. Whether for Walt Whitman, Julia Ward Howe, or Henry James Sr., no one surpassed Swedenborg as the archetype of mysticism's new possibilities in mid-nineteenth-century America. He exemplified the potential for spiritual perception in everyday life and the renewed accessibility of angels.²⁶

What mattered more than influences, even when as large and contradictory as Swedenborg's, were the distinct spiritual journeys that the growing love of mysticism made possible. Alcott and Emerson had numerous fellow travelers. Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), though not at the natal meeting for the new mysticism, joined enthusiastically in this dimension of the Transcendental Club's vision. Close to both Emerson and Alcott (she actually taught for a time with Alcott at the Temple School), Fuller served as editor of the movement's celebrated periodical, The Dial. Best known as a foundational thinker for the women's rights movement, she was also a self-confessed mystic. In October 1838, for example, she wrote a friend about a “heavenliest day of communion” in which “free to be alone” in “the meditative woods…all the films seemed to drop from my existence.” That evening, standing by herself outside a church and looking up at the crescent moon beyond the pointed spire, “a vision came upon my soul.” In that moment Fuller made clear the extra-ecclesial character of her intensifying experience: “May my life be a church, full of devout thoughts.” The real church was the inward life of solitary spiritual illumination, not the building, a relic of the external, whose very steeple pointed beyond itself.

Margaret Fuller, a premier New England intellectual and a staunch advocate of women's rights, was also a self-avowed teacher of mysticism. (Firestone Library, Princeton University.)

Two years later Fuller was still immersed in these religious aspirations. She declared herself “more and more what they will call a mystic,” even announcing that she was ready now to preach “mysticism.” In her formidable work Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Fuller imagined such religious exaltation as an essential vehicle for the progress and elevation of women, a primal source of “spiritual dignity.” “Mysticism, which may be defined as the brooding soul of the world, cannot fail,” she insisted, “of its oracular promise as to Woman.” Fuller, like most of her compatriots, distanced mysticism from both its Catholic and its Enlightenment incarnations. It was neither an ancient form of Christian theology nor a predictable way of criticizing sectarian enthusiasm; instead, it was becoming part of an intuitive spiritual quest for originality, transcendence, and emancipation. For Fuller, laying claim to the democratic individuality at the heart of this romantic spirituality was especially important for women, so long defined in terms of their subordination to male relations. From Fuller's Transcendentalism through Annie Besant's Theosophy, “mysticism” and “spirituality,” twinned nineteenth-century constructs pitting individual autonomy against ecclesial hierarchy, were often construed in radical circles as resources for the advance of women's rights.²⁷

Other exemplars of the mystical turn were not hard to come by. The Transcendentalist reveries of Samuel Johnson (1822–1882) in “the serene, spiritual moonlight” of the early 1840s carried him through Harvard Divinity School and launched him on a lifelong study of Asian religions–an area in which he eventually emerged as a leading American authority. His three-volume, 2,559-page Oriental Religions (1873–1885) still stands as a monument, even if now dust-gathering, to the kind of religious and historical inquiry that Transcendentalism authorized. Johnson's youthful meditations, by contrast, were more rapturous than erudite. As his friend Samuel Longfellow (1819–1882) remarked, Johnson “began soon to take on a mystical phase, which led him into some deep experiences.” “This phase lasted but a short time,” Johnson himself reported, “yet a very effervescent state it was while it lasted.” An intuitionist, Johnson “sought spiritual truths by direct vision” and “by immediate inward experience.” Caught up in “the rapture of devotion,” Johnson asked in one rhetorical flight after another, what are the deepest longings, feelings, and aspirations at the heart of human existence? “What are the dreams of a pure spirit?”²⁸

More audacious was Jones Very, a Harvard tutor of Greek and a poet of mantic insight. In attendance at the Transcendental Club meeting in May 1838, he was often seen as the most eccentric (and hence genuine) mystic of the whole crowd. In September of that year, Very had first awed Samuel Johnson, then an undergraduate at Harvard, but soon that impression turned to fright. In a letter home, the young Johnson reassured his father that Very's astonishing “absence of reason” and his wild declarations about being “a man of heaven” had not (yet) derailed his own “proper understanding of religious truth.” With an increasing spiritual intensity, Very was evangelizing as much as he was teaching. He dumbfounded students and colleagues when he walked into the classroom one day and behaved like a rank enthusiast: “Flee to the mountains, for the end of all things is at hand!” he declared in a prophetic blaze that brought his days as a Harvard tutor to an abrupt end.

A nearly monthlong stay in the McLean Asylum followed, and Very gradually channeled more of his spiritual ardor and mental anguish into his identity as a poet. Eventually, he was even able to canalize his divine contemplations into brief Unitarian pastorates, but he remained far from that settled state in the fall of 1838 as he moved about the countryside as a latter-day John the Baptist. Emerson's support for Very stayed steadfast throughout this prophetic episode, even though many critics were more than willing to lay the blame for Very's “madness” on his intimacy with “Emerson & the other Spiritualists, or Supernaturalists, or whatever they are called.” The journeys of Johnson and Very, like those of Alcott and Fuller, suggest the extent of mysticism's reconstruction in these liberal New England circles as a domain of individual insight and spiritual exploration. For the first time, Americans had a definable club of self-proclaimed mystics all their own, a group ready at a moment's notice, as Margaret Fuller's memoirists reported of her ecstasies, to “plunge into the sea” of “mystical trances.”²⁹

More sustained reflection soon emerged in this liberal religious world and even extended to those otherwise wary of the Transcendentalist ferment. Harvard's Henry Ware Jr. (1794–1843), writing for a wider liberal audience in the Christian Examiner in 1844, lifted up mysticism for the considered attention of all “rational Christians.” “There is, perhaps, no one element of religion to which Ecclesiastical history has done so little justice,” Ware suggested. Predictably cautious in his reclamation, he remained dismissive of “rude and unenlightened” forms of mysticism, including the “Fetichism” of devotions aimed at “outward objects” and the somatic tortures of “self-inflicted penance and scourgings.” Ware, like Priestley before him, wanted a rarefied mysticism–one stripped of rituals and material symbols. “Now,” he insisted, “as a higher stage in spiritual life has been reached, we find the mysticism of religious experience.” That was a turn of phrase worthy of William James's work more than a half-century later. “We have used the word mysticism in a wider than its usual signification,” Ware concluded, rightly highlighting the innovations of the era, “but what is mysticism but the striving of the soul after God, the longing of the finite for communion with the Infinite.” For Ware, mysticism in the “good sense” was fundamentally about the reality of divine-human encounter, about the experiential realm of the soul that exceeded doctrinal statements, moral precepts, and worship forms. Without mysticism, Ware insisted, there is nothing to “fill my soul's longing.” “Without it there is, and there can be no religion.”³⁰

Robert Alfred Vaughan's two-volume compendium, Hours with the Mystics, first published in London in 1856 and often thereafter on both sides of the Atlantic, pushed nineteenth-century discussions of mysticism to the next level. An English Dissenter of a literary, meditative, and melancholy cast, Vaughan (1823–1857) had come around to the ministry by way of his father's example and “the lone dark room of the artist.” He spent long hours wooing poetry as a youth, but he soon turned to writing theological essays, including one on Friedrich Schleiermacher, a German architect of religious liberalism, especially in his emphasis on experience as the essence of religion. Poetry and German theology were but preparation for Vaughan's work on his favored subject. “Mysticism is the romance of religion,” he bubbled at one point. And, like Bjerregaard after him, Vaughan was able to carry on that tryst throughout Christian history and just about anywhere else as well.

Amid his sweeping romantic vision, Vaughan still had moments of focus, and the Transcendental turn in the United States was one of them. None of his immediate contemporaries stood out more for him than “Mr. Emerson, the American essayist,” whose writings possessed “in perfection the fantastic incoherence of the ‘God-intoxicated’ man.” “Whether in prose or verse,” Vaughan wrote, “he is chief singer of his time at the high court of Mysticism.” Vaughan, who made comparing mysticisms an art, labeled Emerson a modern Sufi–a comparison that was not entirely an Orientalist chimera, since Emerson's eclecticism explicitly extended to the warm embrace of Persian religious poetry. Not all was similarity on this point, since Vaughan also drew a sharp contrast between what he saw as Emerson's realization of divinity through self-reliance and the Sufi's through self-conquest.³¹

Setting up his magnum opus as a series of genteel conversations among friends, Vaughan had his refined interlocutors leisurely pursue mysticism as it had found expression “among different nations and at different periods.” Having produced a book with a mix of critical, appreciative, and diverting voices, Vaughan himself was hard to pin down. Sometimes he was sorting out the chaff; other times he was happily harvesting the wheat; always he was wary of appearing to endorse enthusiasm or fanaticism; quite often he simply lost his way in chatty nonchalance. That last quality especially raised the ire of Roman Catholic and High Church Anglican critics who found Vaughan's “mysticism” to be a terrible trivialization of “mystical theology.” It was little more, in this view, than a shallow series of conversations “over port wine and walnuts,” with the occasional “flirtation” thrown in. Those readers, of course, were hardly Vaughan's chosen audience, since he was exploring mysticism in intentionally expansive, woolly terms. Because of the very breadth and popularity of his compendia, Vaughan, more than anyone else, threw open the door for “mysticism” as a great conduit into “the highest form of spirituality.”³²

The availability of Vaughan's breezy collection made the expansion of interest in mysticism all that much easier. His volumes served as the basis for the next substantial exposition of Transcendental spirituality in the United States, a lengthy review essay by Octavius Frothingham (1822–1895), published in the Christian Examiner in 1861. An architect after the Civil War of the Free Religious Association, an organization that pursued (among other liberal projects) the distillation of a universal spirituality through the wide-ranging study of world religions, Frothingham helped tend the mystic flame in its transit from the first glimmering in the 1830s to the glare of fascination at the end of the century. The leading early chronicler of Transcendentalism's history, Frothingham imagined the future religion of the United States as a liberal, universal one of the spirit, not dogmatic, ecclesiastical, sacramental, or sectarian, post-Protestant as much as post-Catholic. “The mystic is only by rare exception,” he insisted, “a ritualist or a sacramentalist.” Above all, the mystic stands up for “the soul's light, right, and freedom against ecclesiastical authority.” Offering a clearer endorsement of the mystics than Vaughan, Frothingham desired, above all, the rich interiority of their immediate insights: “We love the mystics for their inward, not for their outward life; because they lift us up above the world, not because they make us faithful in it,” Frothingham avowed. “There are others, and enough of them, who will keep us up to that. We crave more mist and moonlight in America; and that the mystics give to us.”³³

The full development of “mysticism” as the basis of Bjerregaard's “New Spirituality” was all but complete when one last New England liberal, James Freeman Clarke (1810–1888), weighed in. A founding figure in the field of comparative religions at Harvard Divinity School and the author of a much heralded two-volume text called Ten Great Religions, Clarke delivered a lecture titled “The Mystics in All Religions” in 1880 and then published it a year later as part of his Events and Epochs in Religious History. Building on the tradition from Emerson and Alcott through Vaughan and Frothingham, Clarke grandly presented the mystic as one who “sees through the shows of things to their centre, becomes independent of time and space, master of his body and mind, ruler of nature by the sight of her inmost laws, and elevated above all partial religions into the Universal Religion. This is the essence of mysticism.” Emerson and Jones Very took the lead as Clarke's “American Mystics”–in effect, a canonization of the first generation of Transcendentalists in which they were placed in the same company with everyone from Sufis to Swedenborg, from Buddhists to Böhme. With that lecture and essay, Clarke laid one last plank in the extensive platform that was in place for William James's exploration of mysticism in The Varieties of Religious Experience. “The everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition,” James averred, is “hardly altered by differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note.”³⁴

By 1902, when James published his great work on religious experience, the liberal reinvention of mysticism had reached its meridian. Between 1830 and 1900, American Transcendentalists and their like-minded heirs had created an ahistorical, poetic, essential, intuitive, universal, wildly rhapsodic mysticism. As Franklin Sanborn observed in 1900, “New England in its early days was no[t] very good soil for mysticism…. But for the past 70 years, mysticism has gained ground in New England.” Sanborn, one of Transcendentalism's most devoted chroniclers, traced that development straight through from Emerson, Alcott, and Fuller to the “authors of the Greenacre school,” lecturers like Carl H. A. Bjerregaard. The reinvention of mysticism that these religious liberals, radicals, and progressives effected between 1830 and 1900 would serve them well on many fronts.³⁵

Harvard's James Freeman Clarke was one in a long line of nineteenthcentury New England liberals who, in advance of William James, helped lift up the mystics as the bearers of a universal spirituality. (Firestone Library, Princeton University.)

Of first importance was the deployment of the new mysticism in the intensifying conflicts between religion and science, which in some minds amounted to a warfare. On this minefield, the revamping of mysticism was intended as a shield against untrammeled naturalism, “the fierce onward current of purely scientific thought.” “Never was there an age,” one anonymous essayist insisted in 1878, “when what is true in Mysticism needed emphatic assertion more than it does today. The general drift of thought is antagonistic to the spiritual and the eternal. Science, and by this word is generally understood the material and economic province, absorbs in itself all thought and investigation.” The very reality of the spiritual world was increasingly up for grabs in the second half of the nineteenth century, and mystics offered their own kind of empirical evidence for its existence. Not surprisingly, many of America's native-born mystics emulated Swedenborg in his ability to claim to occupy both religious and scientific domains. As the Concord seer Henry David Thoreau quipped in 1853, “The fact is I am a mystic–a transcendentalist–& a natural philosopher to boot.”³⁶

The cracks appearing in the once unified relationship between religion and science were bad enough, but more life-threatening were the ragged sectional divisions of the pre– and post–Civil War periods. The new mysticism had a modest place in these politics as Northern intellectuals sought a religious vision to serve the national cause of Union. Frothingham, for one, made it plain that the issues of disunion were crucial to his reflections on the future religion of the United States. These divisions whetted his desires to discern a transcendent spirit that would override knotted sectional differences, admittedly on the North's terms. Charles C. Everett (1829–1900), a Harvard professor of theology who took up James Freeman Clarke's mantle in comparative religions, wrote of mysticism in 1874 as having “to do with wholes,” with the common and the unifying. “The word mysticism, whenever properly used,” he said, “refers to the fact that all lives, however distinct they may appear, however varied may be their conditions and their ends, are at heart one.” For Everett, no more sublime exemplar of this “mystical view of life” could be adduced than “our martyred president, Abraham Lincoln,” a truly “tender and heroic soul” who understood “alike the glory and the terror” of his “great work” and who held firm for “the unity of all being” against “modern atomism.” The growing liberal fascination with a globalized mysticism of universal brotherhood could serve a specific New England vision of capturing a holy union out of the rubble of rival nationalisms, North and South.³⁷

Notwithstanding the interiority and solitude that these liberal Christians and post-Christians were championing, they were never far removed from the political and social realms. The suspicion that all this Transcendental talk of mysticism was isolating and self-absorbed is not borne out in these circles. Even Frothingham, who was as misty-eyed on mysticism as they came in his embrace of Vaughan's work, readily counseled that “genuine spirituality goes into the street” and does not seek the cloister. Indeed, much of the liberal writing on mysticism came to focus precisely on activism, on the “fusion of mystic communion with ethical passion.” “Mysticism is the form of religion most radical and progressive,” the Unitarian George W. Cooke wrote with complete confidence in 1894. William James himself was impatient with any equation of mysticism with a gospel of repose. His consistent measure of religious experience was its fruits, its production of saintliness and active habits–what he called “the moral fighting shape.” James imagined mystical experience as a way to unleash energy, to find the hot place of human initiative and endeavor, and to encourage the heroic, the strenuous, the vital, and the socially transformative. Likewise, the Quaker Rufus Jones, who followed in James's footsteps and became one of the most prolific American writers on mysticism, characterized mystics as “tremendous transmitters of energy.” He exemplified this through his own lifelong dedication to international relief work.³⁸

Time and again, liberal religious leaders were adamant about the inseparability of mysticism and political activism, prayer and social progress. In his book Mysticism and Modern Life, published in 1915, the Methodist John Wright Buckham (1864–1945) made the connections between Christian spirituality and the tackling of the industrial crisis explicit with his category of “social mysticism.” Buckham, a professor for more than thirty years at the Pacific School of Religion, drew a sharp line on this point: active service to others was actually a requirement to be considered under his tendentious heading of “Normal Mysticism.” From the Unitarian Francis Greenwood Peabody (who developed social ethics as a distinct field at Harvard Divinity School in the 1880s) through the Quaker Howard H. Brinton (who was a guiding force in the Pendle Hill retreat center for contemplation and social action in the mid-twentieth century), the galvanizing concern for liberals was almost invariably “ethical mysticism.” Those deep concerns for a spirituality of social vision and transformation would make Albert Schweitzer, Mohandas Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and Howard Thurman patron saints for religious liberals. The convergence of political progressivism, socioeconomic justice, and mystical interiority was at the heart of the rise of a spiritual left in American culture.³⁹

Finally, mysticism mattered existentially to all those wayfarers who invested so much in it. Spirituality in this new guise was embraced because of the distress it potentially assuaged, the questions of meaning it hoped to answer, the divided selves it tried to make whole, and the epiphanies it occasionally wrought. The dark question that James asked–“Is Life Worth Living?”–was hardly his alone, nor were his haunted feelings of meaninglessness, absurdity, and pointlessness. It was the sick soul in Leo Tolstoy's religious writings to which James was drawn as a worn and weary companion: “Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death which awaits me does not undo and destroy?” James turned to the exploration of mysticism not out of any great optimism, but out of a profound sense of having stood all too often on a precipice of despair. His own experiences of melancholia and “quivering fear,” he was convinced, “had a religious bearing.” “I have no living sense of commerce with a God,” James wrote. “I envy those who have, for I know that the addition of such a sense would help me greatly…. I have grown so out of Christianity that entanglement therewith on the part of a mystical utterance has to be abstracted from and overcome before I can listen. Call this, if you like, my mystical germ.” That experiential inkling was one James tried to safeguard from materialist suspicion, but he could never turn it for himself into more than a hedge or a hunch.⁴⁰

Modern mysticism was always formed as much out of lacking and loss as it was out of epiphanic assurance. For many, it emerged out of an empty space of longing for “a heightened, intensified way of life” and represented a troubled quest for a unifying and integrative experience in an increasingly fragmented world of divided selves and lost souls. In his Recollections (1909) Washington Gladden (1836–1918), a titan among liberal Protestant thinkers and a bellwether activist as pastor of the First Congregational Church in Columbus, Ohio, tried to specify “the changes, which have taken place within the last sixty years in our conceptions of what is essential in religious experience.” He recalled “so many nights, when the house was still, looking out through the casement upon the unpitying stars,…a soul in great perplexity and trouble because it could not find God.” The loss of spiritual experience had become “my problem,” he reported, as he increasingly lived with an ethical Christianity without raptures, without “marked and easily recognizable emotional experience.” Likewise, Vida D. Scudder (1861–1954), an arch–Christian socialist and a much beloved professor of English literature at Wellesley, cultivated her mystical yearnings against a backdrop of religious loss, disorientation, and “inner misery.” Turning to Episcopalian monasticism, medieval Catholic saints, and the Bhagavad Gita as contemplative anchors in her quest for interior stillness amid her exterior struggles on behalf of labor, Scudder was hardly at ease on her journey. The prayer that “punctuated my life for many years”–indeed, she said in old age, “it recurs to this day”–evoked doubt as much as hope: “O God, if there be a God, make me a real person.”⁴¹

The turn to mysticism would have meant little if it had been primarily a species of nostalgia for lost faith, something people longed for, even as they got by without significant religious experiences. For many of these innovators, there clearly remained a living power to what they were describing as mysticism or spiritual consciousness. Take, for example, the manuscript account “My Creed So Far As I Have One,” penned by the second-generation Transcendentalist and radical Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911):

When the devout emotions come, says Emerson in substance–I have not the passage at hand–“yield to them; no matter what your theory, leave it as Joseph left his coat in the hands of the harlot, and flee.” In the life of every thoughtful man, no matter how sunny his temperament, there are moments of care, sorrow, depression, perplexity when neither study nor action nor friends will clear the horizon: the tenderest love, the most heroic self-devotion leave the cloud still resting, the perplexity still there. It is at such times that the thought of an Unseen Power comes to help him; by no tradition of the churches, with no apparatus of mythology; but simply in the form that the mystics call “the flight of the Alone, to the Alone.” It may be by the art of a prayerbook; it may equally well be in the depth of a personal experience to which all prayerbooks seem an intrusion. It may be in a church; it may equally well be in a solitary room or on a mountain's height.

Call these powerful experiences what you will, Higginson insisted–prayer, reverie, mystical flight, devout feeling–the critical point was “the genuineness and value of these occasional moments.”⁴²

Religion at its finest had become all about flashes of intensified feeling and transformed vision, about moments of direct experience, however ephemeral. “I had a revelation last Friday evening,” the poet James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) wrote of one such moment. “The air seemed to waver to and fro with the presence of Something I knew not what.” Likewise, in a poem he titled “The Mystic” David Atwood Wasson (1823–1887), another Transcendental preacher of the second generation and a brief successor to Theodore Parker as minister of Boston's Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society, imagined himself becoming “a leaf that quivers in God's joy,” an experience of “pure participation” in the “Mystery of Being.” At one of the early meetings of the Transcendental Club, in May 1837, the group had taken up the question of “what is the essence of religion as distinct from morality,” and Emerson had responded by defining religion as “the emotion of shuddering delight and awe from perception of the infinite.” The definition struck a resonant chord with his associates: Harvard's Convers Francis duly recorded Emerson's phrasing in his journal as representing the pith of the group's conversation.

A couple of years earlier, Orestes Brownson (1803–1876)–who eventually converted to Roman Catholicism, but who was then still in a liberal Protestant phase–had written a review essay titled “Spirituality of Religion” in which he portended much of the ensuing ferment. Feeling the chill of technological practicality all around him, Brownson lamented that “all our mysterious emotions, our interior cravings, [and] vague longings” are “allowed to count for nothing.” He still used spirituality as a metaphysical term in opposition to philosophical materialism, but he also lamented “the want of spirituality” in the quietude of individual souls, the lack of the felt inspirations of the divine spirit. As weary as Emerson of religious formality, Brownson turned for warmth to “the poetry of the soul.” But what, pray tell, were the rhythms and rhymes of that poetry? The awakening of spirituality was experienced, he claimed, as an intuition, an impulse, an energy, an enthusiasm, an inward breathing of God's spirit in the heart, a contemplative stillness, a waiting in silence, “a freedom of soul.” It is hardly surprising that William James, a culminating figure in this New England lineage, imagined mysticism as “original and unborrowed experience” and fleeting “states of insight.”⁴³

If the Transcendentalists often seemed longer on excited prose than extended practice, their aspirations nonetheless carried the day. “Mysticism is an experience,” C. H. A. Bjerregaard said assuredly in one of his lectures in 1896. “Learn to say with Thoreau: ‘I hear beyond the range of sound, / I see beyond the range of sight.’” It would be almost impossible now to think of mysticism as only a wing of Christian theology and practice or as the domain of one small set of Catholic devotees and their few Protestant defenders. The efforts of Coventry and company to treat mysticism in terms of sexual pathology and psychological illusion still resonate, no doubt, with some diehard skeptics. In the early twentieth century, the notion of religion's “erotogenesis”–its origin in “sex mysticism”–gained a genuine intellectual vogue, but the appeal of that position, along with its ability to shock, has now long since dwindled. That kind of explanation hardly enjoys a fraction of the popularity of mysticism considered as a perennial philosophy, an ageless dimension of religious experience, or “a journey of ultimate discovery.” The “mystic heart” beats vibrantly on as part of a “universal spirituality” gleaned from the religions of the world, a pulsing of interconnections still established through the timelessness of mystical states of consciousness.

Even a seemingly quintessential embodiment of the current New Age, the Zen-practicing basketball coach Phil Jackson, partakes as much of mysticism's nineteenth-century exaltation as more recent fads. In his spiritual memoir Sacred Hoops (1995), Jackson tells of his journey from a Pentecostal boyhood in North Dakota to a life of Buddhist meditation in the glamorous world of the National Basketball Association. The major catalyst for the shift in his spiritual sensibilities had actually occurred while he was on the road with the New York Knicks through a close reading of William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, “a book filled with firsthand accounts by Quakers, Shakers, and other Christian mystics.” As Jackson related, “I couldn't put it down.” The book led him to his own form of low-key “mystical experience,” “a quiet feeling of inner peace” for which he had longed as a Pentecostal teenager, but which had always eluded him. Moving into the open air of Jamesian curiosity, Jackson read evermore widely on yoga, Sufism, and Buddhist meditation, even as he saw his quest as part of a fuller and more honest engagement with his Christian upbringing and its principles of “selflessness and compassion.” Having been exposed to James's club of mystics, Jackson could now “explore other traditions more fully without feeling as if I was committing a major sacrilege against God and family.” The mystics, considered as an exalted fellowship of great souls free of history and bound together through firsthand experiences of the infinite, are clearly just as dear today with contemporary seekers as they were in the nineteenth century with religious liberals.⁴⁴