BROWNSON'S QUEST FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE
by EDWARD DAY, C.SS.R.
When Orestes Brownson entered the Catholic Church, he said he felt
like a man who had finally reached shore after a jumping-journey
across crumbling ice-floes. The ice-floes of his simile were the
radical schools of social thought that he had gingerly tested as
possible ways of changing the social injustices of his world. For
Brownson found Catholicism not only as a pilgrim seeking religious
truth, but even more as a crusader in quest of social justice. In
that quest Brownson blazed a trail any modern liberal might
follow. Brownson found that there were only two forces that could
change the social order: atheistic socialism, that would destroy
it, or Roman Catholicism, that would transform it. The world, with
its injustices, still torments the consciences of upright men. The
liberal's battle to change the social order is basically
Brownson's fight. The choice of weapons has not really changed:
the destructive force of socialism (brought up-to-date in
atheistic communism) or the transforming power of the Catholic
Church.
Brownson had a religious bent from his earliest years. At eight he
had read through the Bible and by fourteen had memorized a great
part of it.[1] Like Newman, the things of the spirit were more
real to him than the pine and granite of his Vermont home. One
day, shortly before the War of 1812, Brownson and a friend walked
to town to watch a militia muster. Later, all he could tell about
the exciting scene was that he had overheard "two old men talking
on religion."[2] This from a lad of nine. Yet Brownson lived
without Baptism to the age of nineteen.
As he became a man his own religious speculations gave him little
comfort. To save himself from universal doubt, young Orestes
joined the Presbyterians in October, 1822 But the Presbyterians
failed to satisfy him. Spurning reason, Presbyterianism did not
even claim her teaching was based upon divine authority. Yet she
enforced it with the tyranny of a police state: ". . . while the
church refused to take the responsibility of telling me what
doctrines I must believe, while she sent me to the Bible and
private judgment, she yet claimed authority to condemn and
excommunicate me as a heretic, if I departed from the standard of
doctrine contained in her Confession."[3] The hardheaded Vermonter
could not tolerate such a state of affairs. He threw over
Presbyterianism and continued his search for truth.
In 1825 Brownson became a Universalist preacher. He found it not
without its difficulties. To Brownson's reason eternal punishment
for sin seemed to destroy God's infinite mercy. The Universalists
claimed the Bible taught salvation for <all.> Now, Brownson could
plainly see that the letter of revelation spelled eternal death
for sinners. Since neither Universalism, nor its adversary,
Presbyterianism, spoke with divine authority, the Bible's words
ought logically to face the court of reason. Devoid of any
infallible interpreter, they did not seem reasonable to Brownson
Yet, to claim, as his sect claimed, that really there was no
difference between virtue and vice, saint and sinner, was equally
unthinkable. Religion, without authority, placed Brownson in a
quandary. "I had made nothing of my religious speculations,
nothing of my inquiries as to the invisible and the heavenly, and
reason counselled me, obliged me to leave them, to drop from the
clouds, take my stand on the solid earth, and devote myself to the
material order, to the virtue and happiness of mankind in this
earthly life."[4]
Orestes Brownson drew up his new creed in 1829.
My creed shall consist of five points and shall embrace all the
essentials of true religion
Art. I. I believe that every individual of the human family should
be <honest.>
Art. II. I believe that every one should be benevolent and kind to
all.
Art. III. I believe that every one should use his best endeavors
to procure food, clothing, and shelter for himself, and labor to
enable all others to procure the same for themselves to the full
extent of his ability.
Art. IV. I believe every one should cultivate his mental powers,
that he may open to himself new sources of enjoyment, and also be
enabled to aid his brethren in their attempts to improve the
condition of the human race, and to increase the sum of human
happiness.
Art. V. I believe that, if all mankind act on these principles,
they serve God all they can serve him; that he who has this faith
and conforms the nearest unto what it enjoins, is the most
acceptable unto God.[5]
Flatly denying Christ's "Only one thing is necessary . . ."
Brownson shouted from the housetops that food and clothing were
all that mattered. The best way to secure heaven was to create
heaven on earth. The only God that mattered was the God of
humanity. To win this earthly paradise society and government must
be organized. Brownson clung to this view from 1828 until 1842.[6]
The end was clear. How best to attain it? Brownson toyed with two
ideas. There was the homespun communism of Robert Owen and the
bizarre individualism of William Godwin.
Robert Owen, the manager of Dale's Cotton Mills, of New Lanark,
Scotland, married the owner's daughter and inherited the plant. A
spinner himself, Owen was anxious to ease the lives of his
workers. He improved working conditions in the plant, encouraged
thrift and good housekeeping. Production increased with the
contentment of his men. Owen felt he had hit upon a plan that
would change the face of the earth.
According to Owen, a man is passive, not active, in his education.
Only the proper arrangement of circumstances is needed to give him
the courage of Hector and the wisdom of Socrates. But property,
marriage, and religion have betrayed him into bondage. Free him
from these chains, put him on a plane of perfect equality with his
fellows, and poverty, inequality, envy and crime will be no
more.[7]
Putting his theory to the test, Owen came to the New World. He
bought a tract of land in Indiana and called it New Harmony. It
took only a few months of unbridled communism to disenchant poor
Owen and turn New Harmony into bedlam.
Though Owen's teaching never fully convinced Brownson, it did
awaken him to the crying need of social reform.[8]
William Godwin's teaching was another story. Godwin, the author of
<Caleb Williams>, was a successful English novelist. His daughter
Mary, the creator of <Frankenstein> and the mistress of Shelley,
was probably the fruit of his philosophy. For Godwin, life was a
matter of justice. His intrinsic goodness determines each man's
due. The better a man is, the more he has a claim on my love. "If
his father, mother, or sister are more worthy than mine, then am I
to love them more than mine."[9] On this basis of right, such
institutions as marriage, property, and government are impossible.
How pledge unwavering allegiance to one nation when the land
across the border may be better? No undying fidelity to this
woman, when the next may surpass her in virtue! Godwin did not
abolish private property. Social justice, however, decreed that
property belongs to him who needs it most. "If my neighbor needs
what is in my possession, or some portion of it, more than I do,
he has the right to take it without asking my leave. This doctrine
rather pleased me, for I had less than my share, and therefore
more to gain than to lose by it."[10]
Anarchy was Godwin's aim. He taught that the tyranny of civil
government is the cause of evil in man. It must go and a reign of
justice will arise. Man is eminently reasonable, with no horizon
curtaining the vista of his mind's perfection. When this noble
creature finds his rights respected and his freedom untrammelled,
he will wholeheartedly observe the dictates of justice and
Godwin's paradise on earth will begin.
For all his absurdity, Godwin profoundly influenced Brownson. He
admits that, until he became a Catholic, he never tried to coerce
his children's intellectual freedom by raising them in any
religion. Why were his ideas better than theirs or another's?[11]
Despite his enthusiasm, Brownson found the chink in Godwin's armor
of justice.
Man is social by nature, and he has wants which can be met only by
the provisions of society. Grant that the depravities of
individual character originate in government, kingcraft and
priestcraft; but in what have these originated? If they are
unjust, as you maintain, there must be a source of injustice prior
to them, and independent of them.[12]
Governments were no better than the men who made them. The problem
then was to reform the individuals. But merely appealing to reason
is so much beating of air when addressed to a man who knows good
and yet wills evil. The individual intelligence, no matter how
enlightened, is not enough. Only an efficient organization,
teaching authoritatively, could sweep away the cobwebs of
prejudice and superstition that stranded men's minds and bound
their wills.
The inspiration of such an organization entered his life with the
charming Fanny Wright.
In 1824 Frances Wright, a young Scotswoman, visited America in the
suite of General Lafayette. The land was to her liking; but
slavery, not at all. With the help of Thomas Jefferson she founded
a utopia for slaves in Nashoba, Tennessee. Within two years her
dream went the way of Owen's New Harmony. But the land was brave
and Fanny was young And there were other than black men to free
from their shackles. "The three great enemies to worldly happiness
were held to be religion, marriage or family, and private
property.... For religion we were to substitute science, that is,
science of the world of the five senses only; for private
property, a community of goods; and for private families, a
community of wives."[13]
Religious superstition lived on the bogey of hell. Love was
nothing but passion. The institution of marriage turned an instant
of weakness into a lifetime of bondage. As Henry Brownson
delicately phrased it: Fanny hoped the day would dawn "when, if a
woman were a mother, the question would not be asked whether she
were a wife."[14]
Only education could smash the manacles of convention. Fanny's
state would take the child from his parents at the age of two.
This would serve two purposes. First of all, it would render the
permanence of marriage totally unnecessary. Without a family to
support, the acquisition of private property could not be
justified. A new era of freedom would begin. Secondly, the
children, groomed to live in a communist state from their earliest
years, would be the ideal citizens of tomorrow.[15]
The plan was radical, but it proposed to establish a system of
free education that Brownson felt was essential to human progress.
After listening to her lecture in Auburn, New York, "Mr. O. A.
Brownson held out the hand of fellowship," as Miss Wright trimly
put it. He agreed to become corresponding editor of her <Free
Enquirer.>
The success of their venture depended upon control of the schools.
To capture the schools in the state of New York, Fanny Wright, and
her associates, formed an underground movement very much like the
Carbonari of Europe.
The members of this secret society were to avail themselves of all
the means in their power, each in his own locality, to form public
opinion in favor of education by the state at the public expense,
and to get such men elected to the legislature as would be likely
to favor our purposes. How far the secret organization extended, I
do not know; but I do know that a considerable portion of the
State of New York was organized, for I was myself one of the
agents for organizing it.[16]
In 1828 Fanny's fellow conspirator, Robert Dale Owen, New Harmony
Owen's son, helped to found <The Workingman's Party> in
Philadelphia. The age of Jackson was dawning, and democracy was
riding the crest of the political wave.
We hoped, by linking our cause with the ultra-democratic sentiment
of the country, which had had, from the time of Jefferson and Tom
Paine, something of an anti-Christian character, by professing
ourselves . . . champions of equality, by expressing a great love
. . . a deep sympathy for the laborer . . . by denouncing all
proprietors as aristocrats, and by keeping the more unpopular
features of our plan as far in the background as possible, to
enlist the majority of the American people under the banner of the
Working-Men's Party.[17]
For a year Brownson gave the Party loyal support. The movement
very nearly grew to the proportions of a dominant political
organization. Several leading journals of the National Republican
Party sustained it.[18]
But a year of conspiracy convinced Brownson that the Workingman's
Party was not what he was looking for. The Party could only stir
up futile class warfare without hope of righting labor's wrongs.
For the working-men were neither numerous enough nor strong enough
to wield the power of the state.
Capital and credit, in its various forms and ramifications, is too
strong for them. The movement we commenced could only excite a war
of man against money; and all history and all reasoning in the
case prove that in such a war money carries it over man. Money
commands the supplies, and can hold out longer than they who have
nothing but their manhood. It can starve them into submission.[19]
Moreover, Brownson had never fully approved of Fanny's "free-love"
theories-at least "not in the present state of society."[20] Nor,
as the father of a family, was he now so convinced that the state
was necessarily the best teacher of his children. Education devoid
of spiritual principles suddenly seemed gross. Even the religion
of humanity grows cold if its God is nothing but a cultured
animal. Would this "sort of learned pig," Frances Wright's citizen
of tomorrow, be worth the sweat of a social savior?
In 1830 Brownson abandoned the Workingman's Party by supporting
the Jackson candidate in New York's gubernatorial race.[21]
Though the young reformer had hit upon socialism's fundamental
weakness, its crass materialism, he never underestimated the
socialist's devotion to his cause. In words that have the modern
ring of Whittaker Chambers about them, Brownson says:
I am convinced by my own experience that our philanthropists and
world-reformers may become so engrossed in their plans that they
do not experience that aching void within, that emptiness of all
created things, which we sometimes imagine.... Even failures do
not at once discourage them, for they find their relief in their
doctrine of progress. ... We have failed today, but we shall
succeed tomorrow.... Individuals die, but the race survives, is
immortal.
We cannot reach the socialist, who has made a religion of his
socialism, by appeals to his love of happiness, or to the failures
of his undertakings.... He has certain aspects even of Christian
truth.... In those aspects of truth which he has, and to which he
is devoted, we must take our point of departure in leading him to
renounce his errors.[22]
His time in the Workingman's Party convinced Brownson that not
class warfare, but only co-operation among all levels of men could
bring about a paradise on earth.[23] That co-operation could only
take its stand upon heroic self-sacrifice. If socialist devotion
must be denied, then only the heroism of religious conviction
could fashion the strong fiber of such a co-operative effort. "I
had fixed it in my mind that the creation of an earthly paradise .
. . was the end for which I should labor; and I saw that I could
not gain that end without the agency of religion. Therefore I . .
. resumed my old profession of a preacher, though of what
particular Gospel it would be difficult to say."[24]
The religion Orestes Brownson preached was nothing more than
naturalism. In Jesus Christ burned the spark of divinity that
glowed in the hearts of all men. "I took him as my model man, and
regarded him as a moral and social reformer, who sought, by
teaching the truth under a religious envelope, and practicing the
highest and purest morality, to meliorate the earthly condition of
mankind."[25]
Using the Bible as any good Protestant might, Brownson followed
the example of the carnal Jews and gave an earth-bound sense to
all the prophecies of the Messias. The words of the great
Unitarian, William E. Channing, did not fall upon rocky ground
when Brownson read his eulogy to the <Dignity of Human Nature.> In
his revolt against grim Calvinism, Dr. Channing had turned to
Pelagius. As one of his fellow ministers impishly put it: "Dr.
Channing makes man a great God and God a little man." Pelagian or
not, Unitarianism gave Brownson new hope. In 1832 he became the
pastor of a Unitarian flock in the rustic village of Walpole, New
Hampshire.[26] Here Brownson sat down to a methodical study of
philosophy and theology.[27]
Benjamin Constant's <Religion Considered in its Origin, its Forms,
and its Development> was just the kind of thought Brownson needed
to formulate his own religious ideas as a springboard to social
progress. Constant, a Liberal politician and philosopher out of
tune with the reactionary France of Charles X, believed,
nonetheless, that religion was an instinct deeply ingrained in
human nature. The <expression> of this instinct, however, must
develop with the race's intellectual progress. Each generation
will necessarily embody this instinct in fixed forms and
institutions.
But as men move forward these institutions must become antiquated,
and have to be replaced.
The point of the theory which struck my attention, and influenced
my studies and action, was the fact alleged, that man naturally
seeks to embody his religious ideas and sentiments in
institutions, and that these institutions serve as instruments of
progress. What we now want, I said, is a new religious institution
or church, one that will . . . respond to all the new wants which
time and events have developed.[28]
In its day, Brownson believed, Catholicism had done its work.
Protestantism, no religion at all, was the revolt of modern man
against an antiquated institution. A new church must now rise upon
the ruins of Rome to meet the needs of a new race of men and carry
them on to progress. This new church was the Church of the Future,
and Brownson became its prophet.[29]
Of Boston's seventy thousand souls, between twenty and thirty
thousand did not regularly attend any religious meeting.[30] Most
of them belonged to that working class that a socially conscious
Protestantism successfully kept consigned to "its place." On the
fringe were intellectuals, too closely hemmed in by Protestant
orthodoxy. Lastly there were those who felt that the evangelical
churches had failed to make men holy.[31] When Brownson vainly
tried to unify the teaching of his Unitarian brother ministers,
they suggested that the irksome preacher take his method to
Boston's "infidels."[32] On the last Sunday of May, 1836, in
Boston's Lyceum Hall, Brownson addressed his new congregation on
the <Wants of the Times.>[33] With this sermon the <Society for
Christian Union and Progress> was born. And every week, for seven
years thereafter, Brownson preached Christ, the social reformer
and democrat, to about five hundred devoted followers.[34]
Henry Brownson wryly points out:
The citizens of Boston generally were much pleased with the idea
of having these disorganizers, agrarians, infidels, as they called
them, gathered into a religious society and brought under
religious influence. . . . They were far from being willing to
allow him [Brownson] to animadvert freely on what was faulty in
existing institutions, whether of church or state, and to
entertain his hearers with any projects of reform beyond those of
individual reform.[35]
The <Society for Christian Union and Progress> rested upon
Benjamin Constant's premise that the expression of man's religious
instinct is progressive. Doctrinally, Brownson Christianized the
pantheistic basis of the St. Simonians' corporative state.[36] As
a result of the social action of the Society, he hoped that the
Church of the Future would arise, and with it, a paradise on
earth.
The mission of Jesus Christ, Brownson taught, was one of
atonement. Not atonement for sin, but rather at-one-ment between
two forces fighting for power in His age: the spiritualism of Asia
and the materialism of Greece and Rome. From spirit came God, the
soul, the priesthood, faith, heaven, eternity. Out of matter came
man, the state, reason, earth, and time Their striving for power
pitted God against man, state against priesthood, faith against
reason, earth against time.
Now, if we conceive Jesus as standing between spirit and matter,
the representative of both-God Man-the point where both meet and
lose their antithesis, laying a hand on each and saying, "Be one,
as I and my Father are one," thus sanctifying both and marrying
them in a mystic and holy union, we shall have his secret thought
and the true idea of Christianity.[37]
The old Catholic Church, according to Brownson, had never fully
understood Jesus' message. The apostles preached a spiritual
kingdom and condemned matter as intrinsically evil. Protestantism
was the revolt of matter against spirit, the claims of this earth
against the dreams of mystics. Obviously neither church had
grasped Jesus' full teaching. The Church of the Future would be
the true church of Christ, calling a truce to this war of matter
and spirit.
. . . the new doctrine of the atonement reconciles these two
warring systems . . . spirit is real and holy, matter is real and
holy . . . God is holy and man is holy.... One is not required to
be sacrificed to the other; both may and should coexist as
separate elements of the same grand and harmonious whole.[38]
Brownson's concept of the atonement of Jesus would divinize
humanity by uniting it with God. As a consequence, inhumanity
would become as rare as sacrilege.
Man will shudder at the bare idea of enslaving so noble a being as
man.... Wars will fail.... Man will not dare to mar and mangle the
shrine of the Divinity.... Education will destroy the empire of
ignorance.... Civil freedom will become universal.... All will be
seen to be brothers and equals in the sight of their common
Father. The church will be on the side of progress.... Industry
will be holy. The cultivation of the earth will be the worship of
God. Workingmen will be priests.... He that ministers at the altar
must be pure, will be said of the mechanic, the agriculturist, the
common laborer....[39]
"The Christian thought, as it existed in the mind of Jesus of
Nazareth, I maintained, was coincident with democracy."[40] His
kingdom was not merely interested in a man's soul. It was a
kingdom of peace and justice for the poor. "The Spirit of the Lord
is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach glad tidings to
the poor to heal them that are bruised, to bind up the broken
hearted, to set the captives free." The poor were the heirs of his
kingdom and the wealthy were dispossessed. Publicans and harlots
would be honored sons and daughters when the scribes and the
Pharisees were begging at the gates. Pomp and human pride would be
stripped away. Simple naked humanity became divine in Christ the
Atoner. The kingdom of Christ would be the kingdom of the common
man.
Here was that Christian democracy, as I called it, which
constituted the substance of my preaching for ten or eleven years.
It was substantially the doctrine of Dr. Channing.... It had a
powerful champion in the unhappy Abbe de La Mennais.... Even the
pious and philosophical Rosmini seemed, in his work on the <Five
Wounds of the Church>, to look towards it.... It can be detected,
in some of its phases, in Padre Ventura's famous Funeral Oration
on Daniel O'Connell. It is, as the Cardinal Archbishop of Rheims
has well remarked, "the great heresy of the nineteenth
century."[41]
It is Christ, the great democrat, who brings the truth that makes
men free. His government would rule for the common good of all
men, irrespective of the accidents of birth, rank or condition.
But before Christian democracy could become a practical reality,
Brownson saw it had to have the patronage of some influential
organization. Its very ideal of justice and equality pointed out
the path to be followed.
I saw or thought I saw in the American political constitution the
germ of the very organization I was in pursuit of.... It was
thought that, by uniting with the Democratic party, at once the
conservative and the movement party of the country, and
indoctrinating it with our philosophical, theological, and
humanitarian views, we could make it the instrument of realizing
our ideas of men and society.[42]
In 1838 Brownson founded the <Boston Quarterly Review>, and every
issue, after the first, was devoted to this plan of indoctrinating
the Democratic Party with the ideals of Christian democracy.[43]
Among its contributors could be found some of New England's
flowering <literati>: the historian, George Bancroft; the
philosopher, Theodore Parker; the social thinker of Brook Farm,
George Ripley; and the blue-stocking defender of female rights,
Sarah Margaret Fuller.[44]
Bancroft, especially, seemed anxious to enlist Brownson's fine
mind in the cause of Democracy and candidate Martin Van Buren. In
a letter to Brownson he said:
With your newspaper which I often see, I am much charmed. On the
principle of the advance of humanity Mr. Van Buren is sincerely
with us. That and that only is the cause of the intense bitterness
of the Whigs.... The country is Democratic; the people need a
higher conviction, a clearer consciousness of its democracy. It is
during Mr. V. B.'s administration, that the work will go on. The
government cannot be improved except by the advance and
improvement of the people.[45]
Shortly after Van Buren was inaugurated, Bancroft, now collector
of the port of Boston, offered Brownson the stewardship of the
Marine Hospital in Chelsea. To the victor belongs the spoils!
After some hesitation Brownson accepted, on condition that his
position would in no way hinder his freedom to think and write as
he pleased.[46]
Eighteen thirty-six was not a happy year for radicals. For the
past half-decade the country had been living on a dangerously
expanded economy. Public lands offered a field-day for speculators
buying on easy credit and gambling on the future. The bottom
shifted and rumbled when the Jackson Administration demanded
specie payments for public lands. It sagged and crumbled when
grain failed in America and Europe; English creditors called in
American loans, and the out-of-work shuffled aimlessly amid the
shambles of 1837.[47]
Unemployment and depression were enough to cool Brownson's
enthusiasm for the Democratic Party, but there was something else
that made him strike out at Van Buren's administration in the
crucial election of 1840. He saw what the Party was doing to
himself:
I found myself acquiring a prominent position in the Democratic
Party, and in a fair way of becoming one of its trusted leaders;
but in proportions as I acquired the confidence of the party, I
found myself less disposed to insist on my doctrines of social
reform.... I might aspire to the highest posts in the state and
nation, and even gain them . . . but in gaining them, I must give
up my personal freedom and independence, and follow as well as
lead my party.... Let me go on as I am going . . . and I shall
forget all my early purposes, abandon the work to which I have
consecrated my life....[48]
Disgusted with what he considered to be the political hypocrisy of
the Democrats, the only straight-forward thing to do was to make
use of Bancroft's guarantee and publish his views on democracy,
cost what it might. In July, 1840, four months before Van Buren
had to battle "Tippecanoe and Tyler too" at the polls, Brownson's
essay on <The Working Classes> appeared in <The Boston Quarterly.>
St. Simonian in content, and not differing from anything he had
said or previously published, this <summa> of his social thought
raised a furor by the very impact of its systematic thoroughness.
The Democrats, he chided, proudly called themselves the "party of
equality against privilege." And yet, they did nothing to strike
at the roots of inequality. Under the wage system those who
produce the wealth of the land with their hands grow poorer while
"the highest salaries are attached to the offices which demand of
their incumbents the least amount of actual labor, either mental
or manual...."[49] Comparing the two systems of labor for wages
and slave labor, the latter seems less oppressive. The wage-slave
bears all the burdens of freedom and none of its blessings. Why
does the average worker take so little interest in the negro
slave? Simply because he feels that if anyone is to be free, he
has first call.
Political freedom is mockery to a man chained with poverty. The
very administration of justice is usually too expensive really to
defend his rights. Nor are all men truly equal before the law. In
the state of New York, workers are imprisoned because they dared
to strike for a just wage. "Yet manufacturers, flour dealers,
physicians, and lawyers may band together on the same principle,
for a similar end, form their trade unions, and no law is
violated."[50] By letter of the law, the penalties for crimes are
visited upon rich and poor alike with blind impartiality, but
little equity. The sentence may mean a fine, or, failing that,
imprisonment. Twenty dollars means nothing to a rich man, but a
poor man may have to put half a year's labor upon the block to
keep himself out of jail.
If the Democrats would sincerely restore equality, said Brownson,
they must first of all destroy the priesthood. "The priest is
universally a tyrant, universally the enslaver of his brethren
and, therefore, it is Christianity that condemns him."[51] The
priesthood is a class set apart. Every social messias has set upon
it as an enemy of progress. It was so with the prophets, it was so
with Jesus Christ.[52] The priesthood, Catholic and Protestant
alike, is based upon authority-yet it denies the authority of
reason and wages war against freedom of thought. Commissioned to
battle sin, it condemns only sins no one commits. Its pulpits are
silent when, before them, wealthy parishioners grind their workers
into dust. What are these hireling priests doing to set up the
kingdom of God on earth?
Once the priesthood is finished, pure Christianity will establish
Christ's kingdom of peace. Justice will reign and the laws of the
land will defend the workers. "The first legislation wanted was
such as would free the state and federal governments from the
control of the banks and secure the destruction of the latter.
Then all privilege and monopoly should be abolished, hereditary
descent of property with the rest."[53]
Secondly, the danger that Hilaire Belloc was to call "The Servile
State" was real. Large corporations were rising from the death of
competition.
The multiplication of large corporations is bringing the laborers
under the control of corporate bodies, which check individual
enterprise, lessen competition between individual capitalists,
bind the capitalists together in close affinity of interest, and
enable them to exert sovereign control over the prices of labor.
In a few years more they will be able to reduce wages to the
minimum . . . and there will grow up around them a population
enfeebled in mind and body, without either the mental or physical
energy to shift its employment or make a firm stand for the
amelioration of its condition.[54]
Brownson did not demand a strong central government. But to stave
off the day when a single corporation might be strong enough to
dictate to a state, he did demand that the governments of the
individual states control, within limits, business' rising power.
So long as the central government did not positively legislate
against labor, let it "leave all the great interests of the
country to the natural and immutable laws of trade."[55]
While condemning the concentration of wealth, Brownson did not
question the natural right to private property. But he did not
think this natural right extended to inheritance.[56] By
inheritance the reign of the wealthy was perpetuated without toil.
God gave the earth so that each might have his fair share. In a
democracy all men ought to be equal. Inheritance denied an equal
distribution of land to all.[57] Inheritance must go.
In its broad line, this was Brownson's plan for reform. He was
realistic enough to admit that this plan would never be peacefully
legislated. Nor was the time yet ripe for the bloody revolution
that would raise Brownson's concept of Christian democracy to
power. But an opening might be made in men's minds by discussing
the problem; hence Brownson's essay.[58]
Discussion there was a-plenty. Had the Whigs hired Brownson to
betray their Democratic rivals, he could not have better served
them. His unfailing logic showed all just how far the Democratic
Party would have to go to win that equality for the masses of
which they boasted. And, of course, no good American could
tolerate such Jacobin nonsense! The Democrats tried to disavow
Brownson, but to no avail. Though the Panic of 1837 did more than
its share, Van Buren blamed his defeat in November upon Brownson's
stupid straight-forwardness.[59]
His experience with the Democrats had disillusioned Brownson. The
presidential race of 1840, with its ballyhoo and hysteria,
revealed the utter shallowness of the mass of men. How many social
saviors had risen to lead men to new heights? Yet, despite their
efforts, man had not added an inch to his social stature. Was
Brownson so much wiser than these reformers that he would succeed
where they had failed? No. It would take more than a political
party or a self-appointed prophet to bring Christian democracy
into existence. Neither a political party nor the school of a
prophet was stronger than the men who made it up. Christ's
democratic way of life seemed to demand more than poor human
nature had to offer.
Man is now below what I would have him, and behind the goal I
propose for him. I propose his progress; I propose to elevate him
in virtue and happiness. But if he is below what I would have him,
how, with him alone, am I to elevate him? Man is what he is, and,
with only man, how am I to make him, or is he to become, more than
he now is? . . . No man can rise above himself, or lift himself by
his own waistband.[60]
A study of Pierre Leroux, a St. Simonian associate of George Sand
and Abbe de Lamennais, gave Brownson an inkling of an answer.
All nature, taught Leroux, witnesses the truth that there can be
no growth save by assimilation from without. No acorn becomes an
ask without soil, no cub a bear without food. Nor can a man grow
in body or in soul without food for that body and reality for that
soul. For Leroux objectivity was essential, and he solved the
perennial difficulty of objective knowledge by pointing out that
thought is a synthesis of two facts: subject and object. For
Brownson, shut up in Hume's sensist world, this was lifting the
latch on intellectual reality.[61]
The subject cannot think without the concurrence of the object and
the object cannot be thought without the concurrence of the
subject, or thinker.... The object affirms itself in the fact of
consciousness as object, as distinct from, and independent of, the
subject; and the subject recognizes itself as subject, as thinker,
and therefore as distinct from and opposed to the object.[62]
Being finite, man does not know himself immediately. Only God can
be the object of His own intelligence. Man totally depends upon
the object outside of himself, not only for his knowledge, but as
a condition of his existence and his progress.
Man lives and can live only by communion with what is not
himself.... In himself alone, cut off from all not himself, he is
neither a progressive nor a living being. His body must have food
from without, and so must his heart and his soul. Hence his
elevation, his progress, as well as his very existence, depend on
the object. He cannot lift himself, but must be lifted by placing
him in communion with a higher and elevating object.[63]
According to Leroux, there are three types of communication
necessitated by human existence and progress: communication with
nature, with other men, and with God. A man communicates with
nature through property, with his fellowmen through the family and
the state, and with God through humanity. Brownson agreed that the
first two communications were indispensable for human living. And
a raising to some kind of union with God was needed if the human
race was to progress. But communing with God through humanity was
not essentially different or more noble than man's work-a-day
contacts with his neighbors. Such a communication would give a man
nothing he did not already naturally possess, and consequently
would not raise him above what he already was.[64]
God, as the divine object of our life, must present himself in a
higher order, or we are not elevated above or advanced beyond what
we already are. I was obliged, then, either to give up all my
hopes of progress, or abandon my doctrine of no God but the God in
man.... I must recognize God as superior to humanity, independent
of nature, and intervening as Providence in human affairs, and
giving us, so to speak, more of himself, than he gives in
nature.[65]
If men were to progress, Brownson concluded, God would have to
take a hand in human affairs and lift men to new heights by
somehow lifting them to Himself. Here was an approach to the
supernatural, an approach that led to a new sphere of religious
reality. The concept of a providential creator, lifting humanity
with careful hands, was a far cry from the remote Jehovah of
Calvin or the powerless mechanic Hume called God.
But had God ever found a way to raise men up to Himself and
progress? Scanning history Brownson pointed out that God had sent
out certain men to lead the race, or at least a part of it,
forward. Brownson ventured that, at different times in history,
God lifted certain "providential men to an extraordinary or
supernatural communion with himself; they would live a divine
life, and we by communion with them would also be elevated, and
live a higher and more advanced life."[66] Zoroaster, Confucius,
the prophets, all were men on a mission from God: to communicate
to humanity a fuller share of the divine life. But Jesus Christ
was the providential man for the ages. He came with the fullness
of divine life and truth. The man Jesus Christ, said Brownson,
might well have been taken up into immediate union with God. Since
life is such a union of subject and object, Christ could be said
to live a divine-human life. Was not the Incarnation the
actualization of the divine in the human?[67] By communing with
Christ in their turn, the apostles lived a life that made them one
with God and one with each other, for Christ, the divine-human
life, was their object. This communication raised them above their
natural life and put them forward on the path to progress. This
kind of communication, Brownson thought, was what the Church meant
when she talked of the mystery of Holy Communion.[68]
When the apostles became the objects of their disciples'
knowledge, they passed on Christ's divine life from one generation
to the next. This communication of life down through the ages,
according to Brownson, was what the Church means by apostolic
succession.
A virtue evidently, according to the principle of life, must have
been communicated by the apostles to their successors. They who
have not received this virtue cannot be true ministers of Jesus.
For how can I communicate to others the divine life of Jesus, if I
have not myself received that life? The doctrine of apostolic
succession teaches us simply that the church has held that this
divine life is communicable from man to man by spiritual
generation. Hence with singular propriety has she called her
clergy, <spiritual fathers.>[69]
This participation in the divine life gave true meaning to the
divinity of humanity and the brotherhood of men under the
fatherhood of God.
The injury done to the life of one man is an injury done to the
life of all men; the least significant member, however incrusted
with filth or polluted with sin, cannot suffer but the whole body
must suffer with him. Regard for our own welfare and
distinterested regard for others may combine then to ameliorate
the moral, intellectual, and physical condition of mankind.[70]
In applying Leroux's philosophy of life to Christianity Brownson
discovered Christ. Christ is the very heart, the life of
Christianity. For the first time he realized that Christianity
without Christ was nothing but a club. True Christianity is
dynamic, a participation in the life of Jesus Christ. Those who
share in this Christ-life form one universal organism, the Church.
Hence I have the church, not as an association . . . of
individuals, but as an organism, one and catholic,-one because its
life is one, catholic because it includes all who live the
life.... The life of Christ is . . . the principle of life, and,
operating in the body, assimilates individuals as the human body
assimilates ... food.... It [the church] is no sham, no illusion,
but the real body of Christ, a real living organism, and in some
sense a continuation of the Incarnation.[71]
Since progress and salvation depended upon living this Christ-
life, no one could advance to the heights of Christ's kingdom
without it. Outside of Christ's church there was no salvation.[72]
Since it was the sole source of salvation, the only way to the
kingdom of God, this church obviously had ample authority to
teach. Its Bible, holding the doctrine of life, was, beyond
dispute, the word of God.[73]
Superficial as his concept of the Mystical Body may have been,
Brownson had come to see that God could somehow supernaturalize
human nature by quickening it with a supernatural principle that
would lift it to a goal above its capabilities. Here was the
answer to the mystery of progress.
But if God had found a way to lift men up, where was that way?
Which of the sects that cluttered Christendom was the living
church of Christ? The Protestant sects, with one possible
exception, could claim to be nothing but man-made associations of
pious people. Their pedigree stemmed from some year after the dawn
of the sixteenth century and they could trace no unbroken line of
ancestry back to Christ, the God-man. For the man who believed God
had established a church, there were only two choices, as Brownson
saw it: the Quakers or Roman Catholicism.
The Quakers made themselves equal to Christ by claiming that God
lifted each man of them to immediate union with Himself in this
life through the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. The Quaker Church,
they claimed, was a realm of truth, righteousness and love
stemming from immediate union with God. It was not the way of
progress, but rather its culmination and end, perfection. Brownson
denied this claim. The facts of the case belied it.
My mistakes concerning the church formerly arose from not making a
distinction between the church as a mediator, and the end to be
effected. I saw clearly the end, and stated, if we had that we
wanted nothing else. In this I was right. But it so happened, the
world had not attained the end, the mediatorial work was by no
means completed. Means are still wanted. This I saw, and then I
looked around to find what provision of means God had made for us,
and I found that these means were all embodied in the Church
Catholic.[74]
If the end had not been attained, then only Roman Catholicism
could claim to be the means to that end. For it alone embodied
Brownson's concept of the living church of Christ. It alone traced
its ancestry back to Jesus Christ, the divine-human object.
Christ's life was passed on by the Church. Because this life is a
communication of subject with object, this church has to be
visible. Necessarily the Church demands the adherence of its
members, for it alone is the channel of Christ's life. In passing
on this life it cannot fail, for "Thou art Peter, and upon this
rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not
prevail against it . . ." and again, "Lo, I am with you all days,
even to the consummation of the world."[75]
If Christ is God, and by the middle of 1844 Brownson understood
this in the Catholic sense,[76] then the Roman Catholic Church is
the way He chose to lift men up to progress.
In the church is ever present the Holy Ghost, who proceeds from
the Father and the Son, but who is one with the Father and the
Son. As in the days when Jesus, as son of Mary, tabernacled in the
flesh, we would have approached him bodily, and sat at his feet in
order to come to God and learn of him; so now we must approach the
church, the reproduction and continuation, so to speak, of his
body.... Such is our radical conception of the church. It is to
Christ what Christ was to the Father....[77]
On Oct. 20, 1844, Orestes A. Brownson abjured Protestantism and
became a Catholic. He faced and answered the problem confronting
many thoughtful men today. There are two ways to change the social
order: destroy it with socialism, or reform it with religious
truth. No one better than the man who sifted to nothingness the
dreams of Godwin, Owen, Fanny Wright, and the St. Simonians knew
the futility of socialism. Christ, with His "only one thing is
necessary," brings the answer.
St. Bernard, living on the water in which pulse had been boiled...
is more to be envied than Apicius at his feast; and far better was
it for Lazarus, who begged the crumbs that fell from the rich
man's table, than for the rich man who fared sumptuously
everyday.... You must once more make voluntary poverty honorable,
and canonize anew, not your rich old sinner, gorged with the
spoils of widow and orphan . . . but the man who voluntarily
submits to poverty, that he may lay up riches in heaven....
God has told us what is the kingdom of heaven, in what it
consists, and how we may enter therein.... Raise man above the
world, if you would make him blessed while in the world.[78]
Immaculate Conception Seminary
Oconomowoc, Wisconsin
ENDNOTES
1 Orestes A. Brownson, "The Convert," <Brownson's Works>, ed. by
Henry F. Brownson (Detroit: Thorndike Nourse, 1884), V, 5.
2 <Ibid>.
3 <Ibid.>, p. 13.
4 <Ibid>., p. 40.
5 <Ibid>., p. 44.
6 <Ibid>., p. 48.
7 <Ibid>., pp. 41-42
8 <Ibid>., pp. 40-43.
9 <Ibid>., p. 52.
10 <Ibid>., p. 52.
11 <Ibid>., p. 53.
12 <Ibid>., p. 55
13 <Ibid>., p. 60.
14 Henry F. Brownson, <Orestes A. Brownson's Early Life: From 1803
to 1844> (Detroit: H. F. Brownson, 1898), p. 40.
15 Brownson, Orestes A., <op. cit.,> V, 60.
16 <Ibid>., p. 62.
17 <Ibid>., p. 63.
18 Brownson, Henry F., <op. cit.>, p. 47.
19 Brownson, Orestes A., <op. cit.>, V, 64.
20 <Ibid>., p. 61.
21 <Ibid>., p. 63.
22 <Ibid>., pp. 49-50.
23 <Ibid>., p. 64.
24 <Ibid>., p. 66.
25 <Ibid>., p. 69.
26 Brownson, Henry F., <op. cit.>, p. 85.
27 Brownson, Orestes A., <op. cit.>, V, 70.
28 <Ibid>., p. 73.
29 <Ibid>., p. 74.
30 Brownson, Henry F., <op. cit.>, p. 138.
31 <Ibid>., p. 143.
32 Sister Mary Rose Gertrude Whalen, C.S.C., <The Influence of
Orestes Augustus Brownson> (South Bend, Indiana: The Chimes Press,
1936) p. 93.
33 Brownson, Henry F., <op. cit.,> p. 138.
34 <Ibid>., p. 140.
35 <Ibid>., p. 148.
36 The disciples of St. Simon conceived the ideal state as a
smoothly operating organism, perfectly reconciling, in itself, the
demands of matter and spirit. This reconciliation was brought
about by dividing society into three classes: the artists, the
scientists, and the industrial workers. The two latter classes,
under the wise influence of the artists, humanists, <par
excellence>, would meet the demands of man's total nature by their
co-operative productivity. This perfectly balanced society would
manifest, in its turn, the perfection of God. "This ocean of
matter in which we swim is the body, or better yet, the heart of
the infinite being we call God." J. Tonneau, "Saint-Simon,"
<Dictionnaire de theologie Catholique,> XIV, colt 790-94.
37 Brownson, Orestes A., "New Views of Christianity, Society, and
the Church," <Brownson's Works,> IV, 8.
38 <Ibid>., p. 47.
39 <Ibid>., pp. 48-49.
40 Brownson, Orestes A., "The Convert," <Brownson's Works,> V, 99.
41 <Ibid>., p. 101.
42 <Ibid>., p. 110.
43 <Ibid>., p. 111.
44 Brownson, Henry F., <op. cit.>, p. 219.
45 <Ibid>., p. 180.
46 <Ibid>., p. 212.
47 Reginald C. McGrane, "The Panic of 1837," <Dictionary of
American History>, ed. James T. Adams, IV, 208.
48 Brownson, Orestes A., "The Convert," <op. cit.>, V, 119.
49 Brownson, Henry F., <op. cit.>, p. 241.
50 <Ibid>., p. 256.
51 <Ibid>., p. 245.
52 <Ibid>., p. 244.
53 <Ibid>., p. 248.
54 <Ibid>., p. 283.
55 <Ibid>., p. 285.
56 <Ibid.>, p. 261.
57 <Ibid>., p. 264.
58 <Ibid>., p. 248.
59 Henry F. Brownson, "Brownson," <The Catholic Encyclopedia>,
III, 1-2.
60 Brownson, Orestes A., "The Convert," <op. cit.>, V, 123.
61 <Ibid>., p. 124.
62 <Ibid>., p. 128.
63 <Ibid>., p. 129.
64 <Ibid>., p. 131
65 <Ibid>., p. 132.
66 <Ibid>., p. 133.
67 Brownson, Orestes A., "The Mediatorial Life of Jesus,"
<Brownson's Works>, IV, 149, 169.
68 <Ibid>., p. 165.
69 <Ibid>., pp. 162-63.
70 <Ibid>, p. 165.
71 Brownson, Orestes A., "The Convert," <Brownson's Works>, V,
147.
72 <Ibid>.
73 Brownson, Orestes A., "The Mediatorial Life of Jesus," <op.
cit.>, IV, 169.
74 Brownson, Henry F., <Orestes A. Brownson's Early Life>, pp.
465-66.
75 <Ibid>, pp. 456-57.
76 <Ibid>., p. 464.
77 Brownson, Orestes A., "Sparks On Episcopacy," <Brownson's
Works,> IV, 562.
78 Brownson, Orestes A., "Church Unity and Social Amelioration,"
<op. cit.,> IV, 525.
Taken from the August 1954 issue of "The American Ecclesiastical
Review."
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