LITMIR.BIZ

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and now sounds downright laughable as a prediction (in a nation of about 150 million church members, Unitarian Universalists account for just over 150,000 of them). Looked at another way—say, from the far reaches of Emerson's influence—disaffected Unitarians and their liberal kin did have a sweeping effect on American religious life and the spiritual aspirations of vast numbers of Americans.

      The spiritual life, as religious romantics imagined it, was nothing if not personal, and any adequate history of these developments has to emerge out of the inner lives of distinct figures. Many of those who people these pages are familiar (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, W. E. B. Du Bois, and William James), others somewhat less so (Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Lydia Maria Child, Felix Adler, Rufus Jones, Ralph Waldo Trine, Swami Vivekananda, Howard Thurman, and Thomas Kelly), and some all but forgotten (William Rounseville Alger, Anagarika Dharmapala, Sarah Farmer, Protap Mozoomdar, and Max Ehrmann). Attributable to this diverse group of thinkers, writers, and organizers were most of the fundamental innovations: the transformation of “mysticism” and “spirituality” from obscurity to prominence, the revamping of the seventeenth-century notion of “seekers,” the locating of religion's essence in the solitary individual, as well as the sympathetic capacity to appreciate and appropriate other religious traditions as spiritual resources. The following chapters pursue four generations of liberals who helped create an expansive, unsettled culture of spiritual seeking: the Transcendentalists of the 1830s and 1840s, their radical heirs of the 1850s to 1880s, the realizing agents of liberalism's universal vision between 1890 and 1910, and the seekers who brought to fruition the emergent spirituality after 1910.¹⁶

      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

      One of the most important Transcendentalist innovations, charted in the second chapter, was the remaking of the hermit's solitude into a much more expansive spiritual trope. Before Emerson celebrated lonely strolls through nature in the 1830s and before Thoreau took to the woods at Walden Pond in the 1840s, the hermit had suffered a fall from grace, with Enlightenment philosophers and Protestant critics alike attacking the “monkery” of Catholic anchorites. In the early American republic the hermit, as a social type, also stood as an outcast who sought solitude as a refuge for lonely suffering, and the tales that circulated had a tragic cast of violence, lost love, and ominous mystery. Hermits were no longer enviable or heroic embodiments of religious dedication, austerity, or vision; they more often evoked bemused curiosity than pious awe; and sometimes that curiosity turned into outright contempt, especially when the self-mortifying practices of the ancient desert saints were in view. In the half-century or so after the 1840s, however, solitude reemerged as a defining feature of the spiritual life in American culture, an oasis of redemptive isolation amid the myriad alienations of modernity. It became such an entrenched habit of mind, if not body, that such grand theorists as William James and Alfred North Whitehead made solitary experience the core of religion itself. Aptly enough, James even noted one quirky seeker he had come across in his combing of spiritual narratives for whom the very mention of “the word hermit was enough to transport him.”¹⁸

      The third chapter explores the growing conviction that all the religions of the world were cut from the same cloth, that at bottom they shared a common spirituality. The Transcendentalists, eclectics to the core, were the first Americans to dabble with Asian religions as a source of personal inspiration and spiritual aspiration. From Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman on down, they distanced themselves from orthodox Christianity (and unorthodox Christianity for that matter) through appeal to the religions of the East. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a second-generation Transcendentalist, was especially prominent in crafting an absorbent, inclusive religion out of the various religions of the world. Higginson, a radical abolitionist who led an African-American regiment during the Civil War, made a signal religious contribution through a frequently republished essay called “The Sympathy of Religions.” Higginson and his numerous colleagues—among them the fellow radical Lydia Maria Child—happily offered up the gems of sacred wisdom to all liberal souls for their enrichment and through such offerings imagined themselves immersed in nothing less than “the piety of the world.” The creation of that cosmopolitan, sympathetic disposition fueled one innovation after another in American spirituality. It was a sine qua non of a seeker culture.

      One of the results of the growing American encounter with Asian religions was a heightened emphasis on the practice of meditation and the value of the concentrated mind, and that distinct history is chronicled in the fourth chapter, “Meditation for Americans.” The importation of yoga as a serious practice began in the 1890s, and much of its popularity centered on the disciplines of mental focus and composure in a swirling, rushed, anxiety-ridden culture. Significantly, Americans took up yoga in the context of an increasing interest in the implications of positive thinking for health, harmony, and well-being. In 1902 William James surmised that it was not evangelical Protestants but “mind-curers” who were responsible for the growing presence of “methodical meditation” in American religious life.¹⁹ He was right about that: meditation came to more and more Americans not through a retrieval of venerable Christian practices, but through the rise of “New Thought,” as the optimistic gospel of mental healing and positive thinking was then dubbed. The burst of interest in meditation involved a peculiarly American conversation among Transcendentalists, liberal Protestants, Reform Jews, Vedantists, Buddhists, and mind-cure metaphysicians. A significant swath of New Thought was simply liberal propositions put into practical dress. Ralph Waldo Trine, one of the most popular American guides to a contemplative mind and a harmonious body, shared much more than his first and middle names with Emerson.

      In the fifth chapter the saga of Sarah Farmer and her grand experiment unfolds. Inspired by the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, a much-watched international gathering of religious representatives of different faiths, Farmer set out to create an ongoing center of learning at which leading spiritual teachers from diverse traditions would congregate in pursuit of a global spirituality. To that end, she created a summer community called Greenacre in Eliot, Maine, in 1894, a gathering that would throb from one year to the next with religious variety and innovation. Under pines and in tents, mental healers communed happily with Hindu swamis, Buddhist practitioners, university professors, accomplished artists, and Concord sages. Though a stunning success—the Greenacre gatherings thrived for more than two decades; the World's Parliament lasted all of seventeen days—the community nonetheless fell into division. A fault line cracked open between those who remained loyal to the original design of eclectic seeking and those who came to favor submission to one claimant to universal spirituality. Farmer's pilgrimage into the Bahá'í faith—“the Persian Revelation,” as she called it—capped a life of religious inquiry in which elements of everything from Buddhism to Spiritualism commingled. Her new allegiance sorely tested liberal notions

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