Orestes Augustus Brownson was an American clergyman, transcendentalist, and social activist. He passed through the whole range of American religion, from nebulous Unitarianism to firmly disciplined Catholicism.
Background
Orestes A. Brownson was born in Stockbridge, Vermont, on September 16, 1803, to Sylvester Augustus and Relief Metcalf Brownson. 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 family raised him under the strict confines of Calvinist Congregationalism on a small farm in Royalton, Vermont.
Education
Brownson grew up on a small farm, educated only by his own reading; farm work toughened him and self-education trained his mind.
Career
From the start, his bent was toward the church. In 1822 he became a Presbyterian, but he was uncomfortable with the Presbyterian doctrines of election and reprobation. Universalism, on the other hand, preached that all men could be saved and that over the universe presided a loving rather than a just God. In 1826 he became a Universalist minister.
He preached in Vermont, New Hampshire, and upstate New York, seeking not only the ideal pulpit but the ideal theology. In 1829 he became the editor of a church paper, the Gospel Advocate. But he gradually developed doubts about Universalism too, questioning Christ's divinity, the Bible's authenticity, and the idea of eternal life. The one denomination more open than Universalism was Unitarianism, so from 1832 he served as a Unitarian minister. In 1836 he shook off this last affiliation and formed his own congregation in Boston.
Significantly, the new congregation was made up of poor people. Brownson had shown increasing interest in social action, particularly in bettering the condition of New England's urban poor. Before forming his Boston church, he had been a socialist and had helped set up the Workingmen's party. Now he found that he could make his best contribution not through political activity but through the church. He expressed his ideas in New Views of Christianity, Society and the Church (1836).
Brownson founded the Boston Quarterly Review in 1838. It outraged many New England conservatives by attacking inherited wealth, harsh criminal codes, and organized religion and espousing the cause of the poor and the Democratic party. In 1842 he merged his magazine with the Democratic Review; the merger proved unsuccessful, and 2 years later he reestablished his own journal as Brownson's Quarterly Review.
Meanwhile, though he remained an individualist, he found friends and allies among members of the transcendentalist movement. Their rather vague philosophy had little appeal for him, but he admired their unconventional stance and joined in their occasional efforts at social reform. Among his friends were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, George Ripley, and William Ellery Channing. Brownson sent his son Orestes to the transcendentalist commune Brook Farm.
In 1844 Brownson's supporters experienced a shock. The man they had systematically identified with individualism and dissent suddenly joined the Roman Catholic Church. He embraced his new denomination with more ardor than he had shown for any other, becoming that classic figure, the convert with more zeal than any cradle Catholic. The steps in his conversion are described in The Convert; or Leaves from My Experience (1857).
Brownson's conversion dealt a blow to the Review, which lost many Protestant and agnostic readers but failed to add many Catholic ones. It endured as an essentially Catholic journal until January 1865, and he revived it again in 1872 for 3 years.
Brownson was extraordinarily active throughout his life. His pen was seldom still. He contributed to other magazines besides his own and published several books. In old age, still driven by abundant energy, Brownson moved from place to place restlessly, as in his early days. He died in Detroit on April 17, 1876.
Achievements
Views
Quotations:
"If you would make a man happy, study not to augment his goods; but to diminish his wants. One of the greatest services Christianity has rendered the world has been its consecration of poverty, and its elevation of labor to the dignity of a moral duty. "
"Wages is a cunning device of the devil, for the benefit of tender consciences, who would retain all the advantages of the slave system, without the expense, trouble, and odium of being slave-holders. "
"If there must always be a laboring population distinct from proprietors and employers, we regard the slave system as decidedly preferable to the system at wages. "
"The United States, or the American Republic, has a mission, and is chosen of God for the realization of a great idea. It has been chosen not only to continue the work assigned to Greece and Rome, but to accomplish a greater work than was assigned to either. In art, it will prove false to its mission if it do not rival Greece; and in science and philosophy, if it do not surpass it. In the State, in law, in jurisprudence, it must continue and surpass Rome. "
"I love the Irish for their attachment to the faith and for many amiable and noble qualities, but they are deficient in good sense, sound judgement, and manly character. "
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Auguste Joseph Alphonse Gratry, called Brownson "the keenest critic of the 19th century, an indomitable logician, a disinterested lover of truth, a sage, as sharp as Aristotle, as lofty as Plato. "
Connections
Brownson married Sally Healy.
Orestes's brother Oran Brownson joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints about the same time Orestes became Catholic. One of Oran's main reasons for joining the LDS Church was its belief in authority.