Bearded Profile: Orestes Brownson

For your reading pleasure, a Guest Post from Leauger Tobin Rachford;

  

     If you enjoy spending time  inside the mind of a true warrior, then you would almost certainly enjoy making the acquaintance of Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803-76), a bearded eminence of the nineteenth century (which was a century of really great beards) who deserves to be much better known, and a worthy precursor of Catholic controversialists like Chesterton and Belloc.  Unlike the “flagship four” of TLBC (Tolkien, Lewis, Belloc & Chesterton), however, Orestes Brownson is distinctly and proudly American, a defender of the Catholic church in American public life whose final resting place is the crypt church beneath the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on the campus of the University of Notre Dame. 

  

     Brownson was a true spiritual pilgrim who never gave up on the trail of truth until it brought him home happily and inexorably to eternal Rome.  [[Born in Stockbridge, Vermont, his upbringing was Congregationalist, and he joined the Presbyterian church in 1822 with the idea of becoming a missionary.  He soon found the generally dour tone of Calvinism, as well as the doctrines of unconditional election and double predestination, to be objectionable, and by 1824 he was calling himself just a “christian,” or a Universalist.  He was an ordained Universalist minster from 1826 to 1829, but he soon abandoned belief in divine revelation, the divinity of Christ, and the future judgment.  He never abandoned his natural sympathy for the working classes, however, and  he pursued a path of “Free Enquiry” while working on various projects for the betterment of society.  He was ardently anti-slavery.  During this time in his life he followed simply “The Religion of Humanity” and set himself up as an independent minister in 1831.  In 1832 he allied himself with the Unitarians, where he stayed put for about 12 years, serving as a pastor and contributing to various literary Reviews.  A fervent Democrat (pre-Martin van Buren, of course), he enthusiastically embraced the philosophies of Locke and Jefferson, adding in some ideas from the European Socialists and the Saint Simonians as part of a broadside attack on the incipient industrial and wage-labor system.  In 1840 he reached the point of calling for the complete abolition of Christianity, as he then understood it.  His vigorous mind could not be content with any doctrinaire materialism, however, and “The Mediatorial Life of Jesus,” which he wrote in 1842, already marks a step on the road to Catholicism.

  

     In October, 1844, Orestes Brownson came home to the Catholic Church and was received by Bishop Fitzpatrick of Boston.  American Catholicism of the 1840’s was still largely a working man’s religion, peopled by immigrants from the Old Country, honest and generous, but largely uneducated and lacking the intellectual formation to defend their faith in public.   Brownson was immediately at home with his new co-religionists, and, like a true Crusader vowed to defend the weak and the helpless, he plunged into the fray with his facile pen. **

  

     A running argument throughout all of Brownson’s mature years is the idea that nothing is more necessary for the preservation of constitutional democracy and popular government than Catholicity.  Catholicity is wholly averse to the revolutionary mindset, and is disinclined to tear down the existing order of things.   It is unlikely, therefore, to initiate democratic government where it does not already exist.  The Church, however, is able to pursue its task of saving souls under any form of civil society, and Catholicity is without parallel in forming those qualities of intellect and virtue which are necessary to sustain a free citizenry.   A robust, no-holds-barred and no-prisoners-taken presentation of Catholic doctrine and the Church’s social teaching was the missionary labor which Brownson undertook out of love for his fellow countrymen.  He wrote:

 

...the times, if I read them aright, demand Catholicity in its strength, not in its weakness; in its supernatural authority and power, not as reduced to pure rationalism or mere human sentimentality.  What is needed in these times – perhaps in all times – is the truth that condemns, point-blank, the spirit of the age, and gives no quarter to its dominant errors; and nothing can be more fatal than to seek to effect a compromise with them, or to form an alliance with what is called liberalism, – a polite name for sedition, rebellion, and revolutionism.  Let the American people become truly Catholic and submissive children of the Holy Father, and their republic is safe; let them refuse and seek safety for the secular order in sectarianism or secularism, and nothing can save it from destruction.

 

 

     For those interested in learning more about Orestes Brownson (“The Greatest Writer of the 19^th Century”), a good place to start is the website for the  Orestes Brownson Society: 

 

http://www.orestesbrownson.com/

 

The website includes information about Brownson’s biography, an on-line version of his writings, a bookstore, and contact information for the Society.

  

"The world does not ignore the lion who has roared."

 

**  The main venue for Brownson’s literary output was Brownson’s Quarterly Review, first published in 1844, and running (with a gap from 1865 until 1872) until 1875.  There is an accessible edition of Brownson’s collected works, in 20 volumes and totaling nearly 12,000 pages (!), by AMS Press (1966).  A quick summary of those volumes suggests the range and scope of Brownson’s vast oeuvre:  philosophy (3 volumes), some heterodox writings from his pre-Catholic years (1 volume), controversial works (4 volumes), scientific theories (1 volume), civilization (4 volumes), the development of doctrine and Christian morality (1 volume), politics (4 volumes), popular literature (1 volume), and some miscellaneous writings (1 volume). 

The above recommendation was written by Tobin Thomas Rachford, currently of Georgia, a former soldier who enjoys nineteenth-century Catholic authors, Thomistic philosophy, and good pipe tobacco.

Comments

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=36104594]

great write up... I'd love to see one about another bearded fellow, George MacDonald :)

[Barbara]

Orestes Brownson was influential in the conversion of Isaac Hecker. Both Brownson and the future founder of the Paulists, frequented Brook Farm, the commune founded by George and Sophia Ripley. The commune was famously satirized by Nathaniel Hawthorne, a former resident, in The Blithedale Romance.
The bearded Fr. Hecker received Sophia Ripley into the Church and later, Nathaniel Hawthorne's daughter, Rose, and her husband, George Lathrop. Rose, who founded the Dominican Sisters of St. Rose of Lima, now the Sisters of Relief for Incurable Cancer, is as is Fr. Isaac Hecker, up for canonization.
Wiki has a bio of Fr. Isaac has an accurate account of the seeds of the problems with modernism that have born ugly fruit at Notre Dame, in America Magazine, and in the NCReporter. The Paulists themselves have gone distressinly far afield.