Orestes Brownson

 

Orestes Brownson (September 14, 1803 - April 17, 1876), who died 150 years ago today, was perhaps the most intellectually noteworthy lay American Catholic convert of the 19th century. His contemporary (and fellow convert), Paulist Fathers' founder, Servant of God Isaac Hecker (1819-1888) later recalled: “He [Brownson] was the master, I the disciple. God alone knows how much I am indebted to him.” [“Dr. Brownson and Catholicity,” Catholic World, 45 (1887), p. 235.] According to one of Brownson's more recent biographers, Patrick W. Carey, Hecker “was interested in ideas and enjoyed extended discussions with Brownson,” while the older, more intellectual Brownson, although somewhat wary of Hecker’s mystical tendencies, “was drawn to what he criticized in Hecker and knew, instinctively, that Hecker possessed something that he did not.” [Orestes A, Brownson: American Religious Weathervane (Eerdmans,2004), p. 138.] Importantly, Carey highlights how Brownson also “always had an emphasis on the social dimension of Christianity, an emphasis that evolved into his stress upon the church" [p.135].  

Brownson himself recounted his long journey to Catholicism in 1857 in The Convert, which acknowledged how difficult a move it was to become Catholic and how ineffective he considered the Catholic apologetics of the time - "dry, feeble, and unattractive."

Bronson was born and raised in the intense religious atmosphere of the Second Great Awakening. He learned his Bible as a child. He became a Presbyterian, then a Universalist, then a Unitarian, none of which he found fully satisfactory. He was attracted to the 19th-century movements we now remember as "utopian socialism." In the 1830s, he was active in the New York Workingmen's Party, motivated by his "deep sympathy with the poorer and more numerous classes."

When Isaac Hecker first heard him lecture in New York in early 1841, Brownson was a prominent Unitarian minister, journalist, and active social reformer. Later that year, thanks to the initiative of the Hecker brothers, Brownson was back in New York to give more lectures and stayed with them at their home. At the time, besides being an intellectual influence, Brownson also became a personal friend and a help to Isaac and his family as they struggled to come to terms with the increasing intensity of Isaac Hecker's spiritual experience. Although both men moved on to more explicitly religious preoccupations and Brownson's faith in American democracy diminished over time, his early political program never completely lost its salience for Hecker.“The ominous outlook of popular politics at the present moment,” Hecker wrote in 1887, “plainly shows that legislation such as we then proposed, and such as was then within the easy reach of State and national authority, would have forestalled difficulties whose settlement at this day threatens a dangerous disturbance of public order. [“Dr. Brownson and the Workingman’s Party Fifty Years Ago,” Catholic World 45 (1887), pp. 205-208.] 

In the 1840s, Brownson concluded that "progress depends on the objective element of life ... on living in communion with God." In 1844, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church by Boston's Archbishop Fitzpatrick. Brownson's Quarterly Review, which he had founded in 1838, added to his prominence as the best known Catholic convert and apologist of his era, who also enjoyed a large non-Catholic audience.

He remained friends with Hecker for the rest of his life, visiting and corresponding with him, and contributing to Hecker's Catholic World, although theological and editorial disagreements  would eventually cause him to cease writing for the Paulist publication.

Those disagreements were anticipated in Brownson's review of Hecker's second book, Aspirations of Nature. in Brownson's Quarterly Review (October 1857). While praising Hecker and his goal of converting Americans to Catholicism by appealing to "the earnest seeker after truth, who is revolted by the depreciation of reason and. nature by Calvinism," Brownson rejected Hecker's tendency to to treat New England Transcendentalism "as an index of the direction likely to be taken by the American mind." Brownson had a better appreciation of American Protestantism's prospect of renewing and revitalizing itself, producing "more conservative forms of Protestantism." Indeed, Brownson suggested, "the American people are more Evangelical to-day than they were fifteen or twenty years ago." Hecker, Brownson acknowledged, was writing "to the popular mind, in a popular style, and seldom aims at technical precision." He appreciated how Hecker's purpose "led him to dwell on the goods retained after the Fall rather than on those lost by it." That said, however, he faulted Hecker "for not taking sufficient pains to guard his readers against confounding what reason and nature have the power to do with what they actually accomplish." With remarkable prescience, Brownson worried whether, in appealing to "Rationalists or Transcendentalists, we are more likely to be regarded as converting the Church to them, than we are to convert them to the Church." Of particular relevance to the contemporary American situation, Brownson insisted on the empirical fact that there never has been an actual state of pure nature. Hecker's "Earnest Seeker," Brownson observed "has been born and trained in a Christian atmosphere, under direct or indirect Christian influences, for no man absolutely ignorant of revelation and grace could propose his problems in the form he proposes them."

Americans can be converted, Brownson argued, "by addressing that in them which is common to all men, their reason, their heart, and their conscience, not what is peculiar to them, or what is their local or temporary interest or passion." He feared subordinating "the Church to American nationality" and warned that mixing the Church "with a radical party or a conservative party would be to compromise her Catholicity." That last warning, in particular, seems an especially apt one for us all to ponder today.

Photo: Orestes Brownson, Portrait by G.P.A. Healy (1863).