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Restless Souls. Leigh Eric Schmidt
Читать онлайн.Название Restless Souls
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isbn 9780520954113
Автор произведения Leigh Eric Schmidt
Издательство Ingram
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