Orestes Augustus Brownson (September 16, 1803 – April 17, 1876) was an American intellectual, activist, preacher, labor organizer, and writer. Brownson was also a noted Catholic convert. Brownson was a publicist, a career which spanned his affiliation with the New England Transcendentalists through his subsequent conversion to Roman Catholicism.
Early life and education Orestes Augustus Brownson was born on September 16, 1803, to Sylvester Augustus Brownson and Relief Metcalf, who were farmers in Stockbridge, Vermont. Sylvester Brownson died when Orestes was young and Relief decided to give her son up to a nearby adoptive family when he was six years old.
The adopting family raised Brownson under the strict confines of Calvinist Congregationalism on a small farm in Royalton, Vermont. He did not receive much schooling but enjoyed reading books. Among these were volumes by Homer and Locke and the Bible.Maynard, Theodore (1943). Orestes Brownson: Yankee, Radical, Catholic. New York: Macmillan, pp. 2–9. In 1817, when he was fourteen, Brownson attended an academy briefly in New York. This was the extent of his formal education.Hoeveler, David (2000). "Brownson, Orestes Augustus", American National Biography Online.
Religious unease In 1822, Brownson was baptized in the Presbyterian Church in Ballston, New York, but he quickly complained that Presbyterians associated only with themselves, and that the Reformed doctrines of predestination and eternal sin were too harsh.
After withdrawing from Presbyterianism in 1824 and teaching at various schools in upstate New York and Detroit, Brownson applied to be a Universalist preacher. Universalism, for Brownson, represented the only liberal variety of Christianity he knew of. He became the editor of a Universalist journal, Gospel Advocate and Impartial Investigator, in which he wrote about his own religious doubt and criticized organized faiths and mysticism in religion.Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur M. (1963). Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim's Progress. New York: Octagon Books, pp. 6–10.
Later, rejecting Universalism, Brownson became associated with Robert Dale Owen and Fanny Wright in New York City and supported the Working Men's Party of New York.Hecker, I.T. (1887). "Dr. Brownson and the Workingman's Party Fifty Years Ago," The Catholic World, Vol. 45, No. 266, pp. 200–08. In 1830, for a few months, Brownson was editor of the Genesee Republican in Batavia, New York.History of the Press of Western New York, by Frederick Follett, page 74 (1847)
In 1831, Brownson moved to Ithaca, New York, where he became the pastor of a Unitarian community. There, he began publishing the magazine The Philanthropist.
Transcendentalism
After the demise of the Philanthropist in 1832, Brownson moved to Walpole, New Hampshire, where he became a part of the Transcendentalist movement.Caponigri, A. Robert (1945). "Brownson and Emerson: Nature and History", The New England Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 368–90. He read in English Romanticism and English and French reports on German Idealist philosophy, and was passionate about the work of Victor Cousin and Pierre Leroux. In 1836, Brownson participated in the founding of the Transcendental Club.
Also in 1836, Brownson moved to Chelsea, Massachusetts, to set up his own church, calling it "The Society for Christian Union and Progress", he also published his first book, New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church. This work combined Transcendentalist religious views with radical social egalitarianism, sharply criticizing the unequal social distribution of wealth as un-Christian and unprincipled. After President Martin Van Buren appointed George Bancroft as Collector of Customs at Boston in 1837, Bancroft in turn gave a job to Brownson.
In 1838, Brownson founded the Boston Quarterly Review, and served as its editor and main contributor for four years. Other contributors included George Bancroft, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, and Elizabeth Peabody.Lewis, R. W. B. (1955). The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, p. 185. Brownson originally offered use of the Boston Quarterly Review as a literary vehicle for the Transcendentalists; they declined and instead created The Dial.Von Mehren, Joan (1994). Minerva and the Muse: A Life of Margaret Fuller. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, p. 120.
Brownson's essays were political, intellectual, and religious. Among these was a favourable review of Thomas Carlyle’s Chartism, separately published as The Laboring Classes (1840). The article critiques Carlyle for putting the onus of reform on individual poor people themselves, rather than on the system that impoverishes them. It also objects to the inheritability of private property and the effects of factory labor on workers. The article and Brownson's review of it are sometimes blamed for causing Van Buren, whom Brownson avidly supported, to lose the 1840 election to William Henry Harrison.Schlesinger (1963), pp. 44–90. In fact, Van Buren himself is said to have "blamed [Brownson] as the main cause of his defeat" because the Boston Quarterly Review had recently promoted socialist ideas.Brownson, Henry (1908). Orestes Augustus Brownson. The Catholic Encyclopedia
In 1840 Brownson published his semi-autobiographical work, Charles Elwood; Or, The Infidel Converted. Through the protagonist Elwood, Brownson railed against organized religion and questioned the Bible's infallibility, or truthfulness. In 1842, Brownson ceased separate publication of the Boston Quarterly Review, and it was merged into The United States Magazine and Democratic Review. He found it necessary to break with the Review after a series of his essays created new scandal.
Conversion to Catholicism In the spring of 1843, rumors spread that Brownson was considering converting to Catholicism, especially when he met with the Roman Catholic Bishop of Boston.Packer, Barbara L. (2007) The Transcendentalists. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, pg. 171; Brownson finally converted on October 20, 1844.Lewis, R.W.B. (1955). The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, p. 184. He began to believe, in contrast to his Transcendentalist colleagues, in the inherent sinfulness of humanity.Grocholoski, Krystyna (1999) Orestes Brownson. American Transcendentalism Web. Further, he began to associate Protestantism with capitalist notions he despised.Hoeveler David. (2000) "Brownson, Orestes Augustus", in American National Biography Online."Anticipating Max Weber's argument about the symbiotic relationship between Protestantism and the spirit of capitalism, Brownson dismisses Protestantism as being too concerned with material goods and as engendering an ethic of unfettered individualism that results in social fragmentation and even, in the end, a 'spirit of lawlessness.'" Paul Giles, American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 67. Giles refers to Brownson's "Protestantism in a Nutshell."
Brownson soon renounced what he now considered the errors of his past, including Transcendentalism and liberalism, and devoted himself to writing articles dedicated to converting America to Catholicism.See for example his debunking of a Presbyterian sermon entitled "The Dangers of Jesuit Instruction." He used his articles to strike out against his former friends in the Transcendental movement, who, he wrote, would be damned unless they converted as well. He succeeded in persuading Sophia Ripley, wife of George Ripley, to convert, but few others.
According to one scholar, after his conversion, Brownson's writing changed, and the work he published in Brownson's Quarterly Review expressed "liberal views [that] frequently got Brownson into trouble, sometimes with the Catholic hierarchy." His conversion prompted him to be overzealous in defense of the Catholic Church. His unruly enthusiasm resulted in letters from local Catholic journalists and even the bishop of his diocese requesting that he cease leveling such harsh criticisms.Schlesinger (1963), pp. 200–10. Brownson's stance had much in common with the liberal Catholicism of Charles de Montalembert, with whom he corresponded, and he published articles in French liberal Catholic publications such as Le Correspondant, taking the side of the liberals against the conservative Catholics such as Louis Veuillot.
Brownson had also been writing many articles for the Paulist Fathers' Catholic World publication. Brownson now saw Catholicism as the only religion that could restrain the undisciplined American citizens and thus ensure the success of democracy.See Carl F. Krummel, "Catholicism, Americanism, Democracy, and Orestes Brownson," American Quarterly 6, no. 1 (Spring, 1954): 19–31, here 24. To him, the United States was to be a model to the world, and the ideal model was a Catholic America. He repudiated his earlier Fourierist and Owenite ideas, now criticizing socialism and utopianism as vigorously as he had once promoted them.
A staunch Douglas Democrat, Brownson, like Douglas, supported the Union in the Civil War and polemicized against the Confederacy and against Catholic clergy who endorsed secession. He avidly supported emancipation and even made several trips to Washington to discuss the importance and urgency of emancipation with President Lincoln. He encouraged all Americans, especially Catholics, to be patriots in the country’s time of turmoil."Notre Dame Archives Index BRO002", archives.nd.edu; accessed April 23, 2018.
After Brownson's conversion, he revived his former publication, now renamed Brownson's Quarterly Review, in 1844. From 1844 to 1864, Brownson maintained the Review as a Catholic journal of opinion, including many reviews of "inspirational novels" meant to encourage Catholic belief.Thorp, Willard (1978). Catholic Novelists in Defense of Their Faith, 1829-1865. New York: Arno Press, A New York Times Company. A single volume in the complete set The American Catholic Tradition;
In 1853, Brownson wrote a series of articles that claimed that the Church was supreme over the State. These writings caused a controversy among Catholic immigrants and the entire Catholic community in general. This controversy caused bishops all over New England to begin condemning his writings. He became increasingly lonely as a result of his being shunned from Boston communities, so he moved the Review and his family to New York in 1855, where he revived his interest in Catholic political philosophy.