Restless Souls - Leigh Eric Schmidt

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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

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