H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-SHEAR@h-net.msu.edu (February 2006)

Patrick W. Carey. _Orestes A. Brownson: American Religious Weathervane_.
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004. xx + 428 pp. Note on sources, index. $28.00
(paper), ISBN 0-80-284300-X.

Reviewed for H-SHEAR by David J. Voelker, Departments of Humanistic Studies
and History, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay

The subtitle of Patrick Carey's much-needed modern biography of Orestes
Brownson (1803-1876) refers to the fact that, prior to his 1844 conversion
to Roman Catholicism, Brownson sequentially identified himself as a
Presbyterian, Universalist, skeptic, Unitarian, and, at least unofficially,
Transcendentalist. Brownson's frequent transformations made him an easy
target for criticism, of which he reaped his fair share during his lifetime
as he made the journey from religious liberal to Roman Catholic and from
fervent democrat to constitutional conservative. Fortunately, Carey does not
take the "weathervane" analogy too far. He charts Brownson's changing
positions (religious, philosophical, and political), but he also manages to
identify a unifying theme of Brownson's life: "his attempts to create an
intellectual as well as a personal synthesis between the drive for freedom
and the need for communion" (p. xvii) and his vision of the "dialectical
harmony of all things" (p. xiii). Applying a dialectical model to Brownson's
life and thought, Carey persuasively explains Brownson's many changes of
mind. Indeed, dialectical harmony emerges here as the interpretive key to
understanding Orestes Brownson.

Carey has produced what is by far the best available biography of a public
intellectual whom Ralph Waldo Emerson once privately labeled as a "hero
[who] wields a sturdy pen" (p. 93). Earlier biographical efforts were often
marred by insufficiently critical approaches to both Brownson and the
available historical sources. The main exception to this shortcoming was _A
Pilgrim's Progress_ (1939) by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was interested
primarily in Brownson's democratic politics. Schlesinger rightly claimed
that Brownson "belongs to all Americans, not simply to Catholics," but he
slighted the significance of Brownson's career as a Catholic. Theodore
Maynard's _Orestes Brownson: Yankee, Radical, Catholic_ (1943) provided a
more comprehensive and contextualized account of Brownson's life; Maynard,
however, leaned too heavily on Brownson's 1857 autobiography, _The Convert_,
and he presented a "portrait" rather than an argument. Thomas Ryan's
_Orestes A. Brownson: A Definitive Biography_ (1976) was highly detailed,
but its strength derived more from its lengthy quotations from Brownson's
published works and private letters than from its interpretative insights.
In short, no biography prior to Carey's can be considered both critical and
comprehensive.[1]

Unlike many Brownson biographers, Carey recognizes that the _Convert_ was
first and foremost a Catholic apologetic that cannot always be relied upon
as a source of biographical detail. He uses the _Convert_ sparingly and even
points out its probable errors. Carey also avoids the problem of
over-sympathizing with his subject. He attempts to understand Brownson's
shifts and reversals without defending him, and he does not avoid unsavory
aspects of Brownson's personality, including his anti-Protestant bigotry (p.
170) and his "virulent racism" (p. 350). Despite his willingness to
criticize Brownson when appropriate, Carey goes a long way to uncover
consistency in the shifts that Brownson's contemporaries saw as signs of
mental instability.

Throughout the book, Carey develops the thesis that we can best understand
Brownson's intellectual and religious trajectory if we recognize the
dialectic process at the heart of his vision of the organic harmony of the
universe. Brownson found various ways of making the argument for organic
harmony at different points in his career, and ultimately his search for
this harmony led him to Roman Catholicism. Brownson perhaps best explained
this concept in his 1863 essay "Orthodoxy and Unitarianism": "By the divine
creative act, all the parts of the universe are made one dialectic whole, in
which all the parts are really connected with the whole, and with one
another" (p. 239). As early as his 1836 _New Views of Christianity, Society,
and the Church_, Brownson called for "a new synthesis of spirit and matter"
(p. 64). Four years later, in his infamous essay on "The Laboring Classes,"
he called for a synthesis of religion and politics: "Our views, if carried
out, would realize not a union, but the unity, the identity of Church and
State. They would indeed destroy the Church as a _separate_ body, as a
distinct organization; but they would do it by transferring to the State the
moral ideas on which the Church was professedly founded, and which it has
failed to realize."[2] In 1842, he pushed his dialectical philosophy to a
new level through his adaptation of Pierre Leroux's "doctrine of communion."
In _The Mediatorial Life of Jesus_, he used Leroux's doctrine to argue that
Jesus, acting as "a mediator between God and Men.... saves the world by
communicating to it his life."[3] Eventually, for Brownson, the Roman
Catholic Church became the crucial mediator and channel of God's grace to
humanity; he believed that the Catholic tradition allowed him to discover
the dialectic harmony between freedom and authority, reason and faith,
religion and politics, and natural and supernatural. Carey makes the
insightful point that Brownson often seemed inconsistent in part because he
drew on a "dialectical storehouse" that could provide him with conservative
or liberal ideas as the situation required (p. 241). Brownson's faith in
"dialectic harmony," Carey shows, also drove his post-1844 battles against
the modern "movement to separate religion from revelation, philosophy from
theology, science from its ultimate spiritual foundation, and politics from
religious principle"--a movement that Brownson identified as atheistic (p.
288). Brownson thus rejected "the fundamental dualism of modern culture" (p.
xvii).

The book briefly covers Brownson's early years, from his birth through his
excommunication by the Universalists in 1830. Born in Stockbridge, Vermont,
in 1803, Brownson lost his father when he was about two years old; several
years later, he was separated from his family when his mother sent him to
live with an elderly couple in a neighboring town. The young Orestes was
exposed to various Christian denominations as a boy, but he had no regular
religious education. When he was about fourteen, he rejoined his family,
which moved to Ballston Spa in upstate New York. By that time, he had
attended revivals and experienced a conversion, but he had also dabbled in
Universalism and adolescent skepticism. Only when he was nineteen was he
baptized, as a Presbyterian, but he did not cleave to Calvinism for long. He
soon returned to the Universalist beliefs that he had imbibed from his
mother, aunt, and various books. In 1825, at the age of 22, Brownson
undertook a relatively brief apprenticeship in Vermont to become a
Universalist minister. Ordained in the summer of 1826, Brownson moved around
frequently, following the preaching work; just as importantly, he served as
an editor of the Universalist newspaper, _The Gospel Advocate_. In that
capacity, Brownson wrote a variety of articles that attacked both Calvinist
theology and the unruly emotionalism of evangelical revivals. Over the next
few years, Brownson became an increasingly critical reader of the Bible, and
he began associating with the radical free thinkers Robert Dale Owen and
Fanny Wright. Neither of these trajectories endeared Brownson to his
Universalist readers and followers. After being dismissed from his
editorship, Brownson renounced Universalism and briefly struck up a closer
relationship with the free thinkers. He would soon revive his preaching
career, however, this time under the rubric of Unitarianism, and by 1836 he
had gravitated to Boston, the de facto capital of Unitarianism.

It was as a Unitarian, under the influence of William Ellery Channing and a
variety of French post-Kantian thinkers, that Brownson came into his own as
a religious and political thinker. Carey very skillfully sorts out the most
important influences on Brownson during the late 1830s. In short: "From
Channing he learned the importance of the divinity of humanity and the human
capacity to discover the depths of the divine within one's soul. From [Henri
Benjamin] Constant he learned that the religious sentiment was a natural and
therefore universal and permanent element of humanity that manifested itself
historically in a variety of variable and transitory human forms and
institutions. From [Victor] Cousin he learned that philosophy itself was
ultimately based on a spiritual reality that transcended but informed human
reason in its quest for truth" (pp. 38-39). Drawing on these materials, but
always reworking them for his own purposes, Brownson found himself aligning
with Boston Transcendentalism, a movement that began as a romantic rebellion
against Unitarian "supernatural rationalism." But his interests as a writer
went well beyond theology. In 1838 Brownson founded the _Boston Quarterly
Review_, a journal of politics, religion, and literature that he wrote
almost single-handedly (a subsequent version was more honestly titled
_Brownson's Quarterly Review_). The circulation of the _Review_ easily
surpassed that of the Transcendentalist _Dial_, and it became Brownson's
foremost means of self-expression.

When Brownson flirted with Transcendental idealism in the late 1830s, he did
so in order to combat what he saw as the conservative Unitarian
over-reliance on the allegedly objective evidences of Christianity--namely,
the miracles of Jesus that proved the truth of his message. But unlike the
more radical Transcendentalists (including Emerson, Theodore Parker, and
Bronson Alcott), Brownson did not verge on reducing religion to a completely
subjective phenomenon. In fact, Carey helpfully argues, Brownson's brand of
idealism tended toward the objective rather than the subjective: "Brownson
had emphasized the divinity within humanity and asserted that one could know
that divinity intuitively or by an immediate grasp. But, following Cousin's
philosophy, Brownson believed that the divine light within was impersonal
and spontaneous, not personal (that is, under the control of the human will)
and subjective. It came to all human beings, but as an objective revelation,
not as an inherent part of the human condition" (p. 71). Brownson's
objective idealism eventually caused him to separate himself from his
Transcendentalist friends and colleagues; the process of doing so gradually
led him to the Roman Catholic Church over the course of the early 1840s.

Carey provides an especially insightful analysis of Brownson's thought as he
stood on the cusp of conversion to Catholicism. He identifies three
experiences as being crucial to setting the stage for Brownson's final
conversion: his realization of his own spiritual trajectory, which occurred
as he listened to Theodore Parker's lectures on "absolute religion" during
the winter of 1841-42; a conversion experience that convinced him of what he
eventually labeled the "freedom of God"; and his study of Pierre Leroux's
doctrine of "life by communion" (pp. 100-101). Listening to Parker awoke
Brownson to what he later called the "invincible repugnance" of the
"religion of humanity," of the naturalistic, humanistic philosophy that he
had recently confused with true religion (p. 100). At about the same time as
Parker's lectures, Brownson became impressed with God's absolute freedom and
sovereignty. Carey, who draws more attention to this "conversion experience"
than have other biographers, makes a convincing argument that this new
conception of God provided a foundation for Brownson's renewed belief in
divine providence--clearly a critical prerequisite for his forthcoming
conversion to Rome. Carey also emphasizes that Brownson's new openness to
providence developed independently of his reading of Leroux. In fact, Carey
refers to the conversion as "an immediate insight or revelation" rather than
as a scholarly discovery (p. 103).

Continuing his analysis of Brownson's transitional period of the early
1840s, Carey shows how Brownson "creatively appropriated" (p. 105) from the
ideas of the French, ex-Saint-Simonian socialist Leroux. Leroux fashioned a
"religious socialism" that was rooted in his "doctrine of communion" (p.
107). Carey summarizes the basic idea that Brownson borrowed from Leroux as
follows: "Human beings could not grow or progress without receiving some
higher life from outside the self and outside the human race.... Human
beings had life because of their communion with God, with nature, and with
other human beings" (pp. 114-115). According to Leroux, much of human
progress could be explained through the influence of "providential men," who
had special gifts that they shared with humanity (p. 115). Although Brownson
rejected Leroux's post-church ethos, he seized upon the idea that human
progress occurred through communion. Indeed, because of his newfound
conviction of the reality of original sin, Brownson denied that humanity
could lift itself up by its own bootstraps. The doctrine of communion, Carey
elegantly shows, allowed Brownson to leave behind the "subjective idealism"
of Emerson and Parker and to pursue instead "his own incarnational
supernaturalism" (p. 116). Brownson's acceptance of communion, resting upon
his new providentialism, paved the way for his insistence that humanity
needed the church in order to be saved.

Carey's argument regarding the importance of Brownson's 1842 conversion
experience is persuasive, but his analysis of Brownson's thought in the
early 1840s neglects to provide a compelling answer to a crucial question:
what happened to Brownson's earlier optimism about human nature and the
potential for human progress? Carey is right to emphasize the positive shift
in Brownson's conception of God, but something must have destroyed
Brownson's optimism and thus paved the way for his shift toward reliance on
providence. After all, as late as 1836 Brownson was a bright-eyed reformer
with utopian ambitions. Brownson himself often cited his utter
disillusionment with electoral democracy as the material factor in his
declining confidence about human potential. Carey correctly argues that
Brownson had long denied the notion that the voice of the people was the
voice of God in favor of Bancroft's definition of democracy as "eternal
justice ruling through the people" (p. 81). But this discussion of
Brownson's views on popular sovereignty does not quite capture the
apparently affective shift in his views on human nature. In his 1842
_Mediatorial Life of Jesus_, Brownson argued for the reality of "human
depravity" and "original sin." This shift needs explaining. The best
explanation is that Brownson's political experiences (especially the defeat
of the Democrats in the presidential election of 1840) led him to change his
assessment of human nature. Brownson struggled throughout his life to "unite
religion and politics on the level of principles," although not
institutionally (p. 123). Furthermore, he was more directly involved in
politics than most public intellectuals of the time. (Prior to his Catholic
conversion, Brownson took an active role in both workingmen and Democratic
politics. In 1862, he campaigned actively in New Jersey in a failed bid for
a seat as a Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives. And in 1865 he
published the _American Republic_, which Carey aptly labels a "Catholic
dissertation on government," p. 338.) Carey rightly argues that Brownson was
"first of all a religious thinker." In explaining Brownson's shift regarding
human nature, however, Carey might have had more interpretative success if
he had briefly privileged politics over religion.

Carey might also have gone further to explain why Brownson's post-1840
wandering led him to Catholicism rather than to yet another Protestant
alternative. Brownson wrote his way through his conversion, and an 1843
series of articles in the Unitarian _Christian World_ most clearly revealed
his trajectory toward Rome. Carey very nicely details the responses of
Brownson's contemporaries to these articles, but he does not delve as deeply
as he might have into the articles' content. Carey shows how the concept of
a universal church became increasingly central to Brownson's thinking and
points out that Brownson was becoming quite concerned about the matter of
his own salvation by 1844, but he falls short of explaining why Brownson
took the radical step of embracing Catholicism. This matter needs more
attention--within the nuanced context laid out by Carey--especially because
Brownson had virtually no contact with actual Roman Catholics prior to his
conversion. Perhaps it makes the most sense to label Brownson's 1842
perception of God's freedom as his most significant conversion, with his
joining the Catholic Church as a logical outcome. Even so, that logic could
use a more sustained analysis.

Following his move to the Catholic Church, Brownson fell under the influence
of Bishop John Fitzpatrick (who took responsibility for instructing the
convert in Catholic doctrine), and he temporarily relinquished the doctrine
of communion that had led him to the church. Carey shows how Brownson
shifted to an apologetic that he called the "method of authority" and that
Carey labels as a "post-Cartesian neo-scholastic apologetic," targeted at
demonstrating "the visible, authoritative, infallible and indefectible
church as the condition of faith" (p. 165). To state the matter somewhat
less abstractly, Brownson argued that neither reason nor the Bible alone
could provide an adequate public support for Christian faith. Although he
did not deny the personal relevance of "private illumination" (p. 166), he
maintained that "the only infallible public witness and authentic
interpreter of the revelation in Christ was the apostolic ministry" (p.
167). The legitimacy of the apostolic church, in turn, was supported
historically by the Bible and Christ's miracles. As Carey points out, this
apologetic based on historical evidence and miracles marked a turning away
from Brownson's Transcendentalist approach of the late 1830s. Although
Brownson returned to and refurbished his objective idealism during the 1850s
under the influence of the writings of Vincenzo Gioberti, for most of his
career as a Catholic he took an uncompromising stand against Protestantism,
rather than attempting to gain converts for Catholicism.

Despite his failing health, Brownson wrote through his final years, the
decade after the Civil War. Carey makes it clear that Brownson continued to
play an important journalistic role for American Catholics, publishing
pieces in the _Catholic World_, the _Tablet_, _Brownson's Quarterly Review_,
and elsewhere. During this period, Brownson chafed under the supervision of
his editors at the _Catholic World_, Augustine Hewit and Brownson's old
friend Isaac Hecker. He fundamentally disagreed with what he saw as their
tendency to overemphasize the compatibility of Catholicism and modern
American culture. Rejecting latitudinarianism, Brownson held to a hard line.
He continued to assert an uncompromising version of the doctrine of "extra
ecclesiam nulla salus"--no salvation outside of the church--an unpopular
view among many American Catholics. Brownson also participated in the
controversy over the First Vatican Council (1869-70). Carey's extensive
treatment of the reactions to the Council's promulgation of papal
infallibility shows how controversial the decision was among American
Catholic leaders and that it played into the hands of American critics of
the church. Not surprisingly, Brownson supported the doctrine of
infallibility while painstakingly explaining just how it should be
understood. Additionally, the central project that Brownson took up at the
end of his life was that of combating naturalism and certain forms of
liberalism. Carey deftly points out, however, that Brownson did not
completely reject liberty; as Carey's thesis suggests, Brownson sought a
harmony between liberty and authority, supporting "liberty of conscience,
religious liberty in the state, and the freedom of theology, philosophy, and
science" while rejecting radical individualism and atheism in politics,
education, and science (p. 334).

The book's final full chapter concludes on a negative note, criticizing
Brownson for his failure to see that he might have worked with American
Protestants "in demonstrating a fundamental need for religion and
Christianity." Instead of seeing Protestants as fellow Christians and
potential allies, Brownson targeted them with a "harsh and unjustifiable
rhetoric" (p. 379). While Carey accurately depicts Brownson's
anti-Protestant tirades, he might have devoted more space to analyzing their
content. It is true that all but the least ecumenical of today's Christians
would reject Brownson-styled bigotry, and it is also true that Brownson
offended and alienated potential allies with his uncompromising advocacy of
Catholicism. Nevertheless, it is important to realize that Brownson's lack
of ecumenical spirit did not flow from mere bullheadedness or from an
impulse to be "more Catholic than the pope." Brownson's emphatic rejection
of Protestantism derived from his understanding of the naturalist threat to
religion in America. He had observed and experienced Protestant
individualism in many of its forms, and he developed an extensive argument
that explained how Protestantism was tantamount to infidelity.[4] His friend
Isaac Hecker tried to lure Protestants into the Church by revealing the
alleged weaknesses of Protestantism, but Brownson could hardly unite with
what he perceived to be infidelity in order to combat it. This subject bears
further excavation.

Patrick Carey has done more to advance the study of Orestes Brownson than
anyone since Henry Brownson, a dutiful son who published a twenty-volume
collection of his father's writings, along with a three-volume biography.
Carey's biography provides us with an unparalleled consideration of
Brownson's thought, carefully situated within the relevant American, French,
and Catholic contexts. Americanists should be especially grateful for
Carey's expert discussions of the writings of the French intellectuals who
influenced Brownson. Furthermore, Carey's dialectical model gives us the
best available explanation of Brownson's many intellectual shifts. Carey
concludes by identifying what he sees as Brownson's main contribution to
American thought: "He did not completely abandon the Transcendentalist
tradition when he became a Catholic; in fact, he revived it and reshaped it
in conjunction with Catholic ontologism and traditionalism" (p. 388). But
Brownson's historical significance goes beyond his distinctive theology.
Carey's book, by so excellently evoking Brownson's intellectual context,
will help other scholars address some outstanding issues: how was Brownson
able to survive as one of the nation's early public intellectuals? How and
why did this seemingly fickle man appeal to enough of his contemporaries to
support himself and his family off of voluntary contributions? How should
Brownson's organic vision be understood within the larger context of
American religion, politics, and culture? The fact that Carey himself has so
assiduously worked to publish _The Early Works of Orestes A. Brownson_ in
six volumes to date (with one more volume forthcoming) suggests that he
believes there are additional questions to be answered about Brownson and
his significance.[5] Carey's publications will greatly advance this project.

Notes

The author would like to thank Ruth E. Homrighaus and Brian D. Steele for
their assistance in preparing this review.

[1]. Other notable book-length treatments of Brownson include Doran Whalen
[Sister Mary Rose Gertrude Whalen], _Granite for God's House: The Life of
Orestes Augustus Brownson_ (New York, 1941) and Per Sveino, _Orestes A.
Brownson's Road to Catholicism_ (New York: Humanities Press, 1970).

[2]. Brownson, _The Laboring Classes (1840) with Brownson's Defence of the
Article on the Laboring Classes_, introduction by Martin K. Doudna (Delmar:
Scholar's Facsimiles & Reprints, 1978), p. 19.

[3]. Brownson, "The Mediatorial Life of Jesus," in _The Works of Orestes A.
Brownson_, vol. 4, ed. Henry F. Brownson (Detroit, 1882-1906), p. 161.

[4]. For examples of Brownson's anti-Protestant polemic, see "The Church
Against No Church" (1845) in _Works_, vol. 5; and _The Spirit Rapper_ (1854)
in _Works_ vol. 9. See also David J. Voelker, "Orestes Brownson and the
Search for Authority in Democratic America" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of North
Carolina, 2003), pp. 217 ff.

[5]. Patrick W. Carey, ed., _The Early Works of Orestes A. Brownson, 6 vols.
(Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2000-2005).



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