Before his
conversion to Catholicism in 1844, Orestes A. Brownson (1803-1876) was a
supporter of the socialist ideas of Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, the
Abbé Félicité de Lamennais, and many of their disciples. These included Pierre Leroux, whose work
Brownson during his socialist phase greatly admired. (Butler, In Search of the American Spirit, op. cit.,
88-89.) No one in the United States,
therefore, was more alert to the dangers of all forms of socialism, or their
seductive power over the minds of people, than he. (Ibid., 116-162.)
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| Orestes Brownson in his younger days. |
Brownson began
his investigations into philosophy by reading the massive, five-volume De la Réligion Considérée dan sa Source, ses
Formes et ses Développement (1824-1831) by political philosopher Henri-Benjamin
Constant de Rebecque (1767-1830). Constant’s thesis was an evolutionary,
historic approach that called both the meaning and role of Christianity, and
the future of religion itself, into question. (Strube, “Socialism and
Esotericism in July Monarchy France,” op.
cit., 11.)
After reading Constant,
Brownson made a more serious study of Saint-Simon with whose writings he
already had a brief acquaintance. (Patrick W. Carey, Orestes A. Brownson: American Religious Weathervane. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans
Publishing Company, 2004, 38.) Saint-Simon’s ideas had reached New England as
early as 1829; the Saint-Simonians viewed America as the perfect place to
realize their ideas. (Butler, In Search
of the American Spirit, op. cit., 68-69.)
Saint-Simonianism
was well known in the early 1830s among intellectual circles within which
Brownson moved. (Ibid., 47.) By 1832
Brownson thought he had discovered in Nouveau
Christianisme the answers he sought. (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim’s Progress. New York: Octagon Books, Inc., 1963, 32-33.)
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| Henri de Saint-Simon |
In the June 1834 issue
of The Unitarian, Brownson published
an essay summarizing Saint-Simon’s life and work, Orestes Brownson, “Memoir of
Saint-Simon.” 1834. Another essay, Christianity, Society, and the Church
(1836) is, to all intents and purposes, a Saint-Simonian tract. (Butler, In Search of the American Spirit, op. cit.,
68.)
Brownson,
however, thought Saint-Simon erred in describing his thought as “Christian.” As he believed Saint-Simon’s ideas went far
beyond traditional concepts of Christianity, Brownson considered
Saint-Simonianism a new religion, a gospel of social reform. (Theodore Maynard,
Orestes Brownson: Yankee, Radical,
Catholic. New York: Macmillan and Co.,
1943, Maynard, Orestes Brownson, op. cit.,
128.)
Brownson later
claimed that he imbibed no errors from the Saint-Simonians. (Ibid., 82.) That, however, could be the
result of his refusal to accept even as a socialist the principle that all
things, including the natural law, must be subject to the goal of social
betterment.
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| Charles Fourier |
Given a
commitment to truth that eventually led him into the Catholic Church, Brownson
does not appear to have been a socialist in the strictest sense of the
term. He may have been genuinely
incapable of accepting any system, especially “democratic religion,” that
subordinated the natural law — God — to anything.
Brownson’s
understanding of democracy precluded the freedom to choose falsehood that
characterizes socialism, modernism, and New Age thought. Thus, even while he identified himself as a
socialist, Brownson was adamant that private property is a natural right, and
must not be infringed. Interestingly, as a socialist, Brownson insisted that
private property is a natural right, but the right of inheritance is merely a
social convention. (Maynard, Orestes
Brownson, op. cit., 92-93.)
There appears to
be no evidence that Brownson came across the work of Taparelli or the natural
law revival, at least at this time. He
seems to have developed his ideas independently; most of Brownson’s reading was
in the German and French thinkers.
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| Pierre Leroux |
Fourierism had
little influence on Brownson, although at first, after reading Fourier’s book
that he borrowed from Brisbane, he admitted it might have a place in a reform
program. As Brownson wrote in an 1843
letter to Parke Godwin (1816-1904) of the New
York Evening Post, a leading Fourierist, “I require in my theory, four
terms, the Church, the State, the Phalanx or Community and the Family.” (Brownson
to Godwin, May 9, 1843, Greeley-Godwin Papers, cited in Schlesinger, Orestes A. Brownson, op. cit., 167; cf.
Orestes Brownson, “Social Evils and Their Remedy,” Brownson’s Quarterly Review, July 1841.) Nevertheless, Brownson rejected
Fourier’s rigid social planning (Leonard Gilhooley, Contradiction and Dilemma: Orestest Brownson and the American Idea.
New York: Fordham University Press, 1972, 67), and the belief that people had
to make a radical break with existing society. (Carey, Orestes A. Brownson, op. cit., 129.)
Brook Farm’s
conversion to a Fourierist community seems to have triggered Brownson’s
outright condemnation of Fourierism, coming as it did during the final phase of
his conversion to Catholicism. In “Fourierism
Repugnant to Christianity,” Brownson declared Fourierism, even Albert Brisbane’s
bowdlerized version, false and anti-Christian. (Orestes Brownson, “Church Unity
and Social Amelioration,” Brownson’s
Quarterly Review, July 1844.) This was in large measure due to Fourier’s assumption
of the natural perfection of the human person without God or the Church. (Gilhooley,
Contradiction and Dilemma: op. cit.,,
104-105.)
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| Albert Brisbane |
Brownson came
across de Lamennais’s writings soon after the latter’s break with the Catholic
Church. De Lamennais’s defense of
democracy, despite its unsound philosophical underpinnings, appealed strongly
to Brownson’s sense of truth and of justice.
In 1836, as editor of The Boston
Reformer, a socialist weekly, he translated some of the articles that de
Lamennais later published as De l’Esclavage
Moderne (1839).
After founding The Boston Quarterly in December 1837,
Brownson reviewed a number of de Lamennais’s works for its pages. These included Les Paroles d’un Croyant
and Les Affaires de Rome. Brownson’s interest was not de Lamennais’s
attacks on Church and State, but the rhetoric in support of democracy, however
poorly conceived.
Brownson
synthesized the concepts he derived from these and other New Christians and
Neo-Catholics into a “Church of the Future.”
This would abolish the priesthood and unite all religions in an
invisible church regulated by the government and bring about the Kingdom of God
on Earth. (Hugh Marshall, Orestes
Brownson and the American Republic, An Historical Perspective. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of
America Press, 1971, 15-26; also, Schlesinger, Orestes A. Brownson, op. cit., 130.)
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