Orestes Brownson

Who was Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803 - 1876) and why should we care? *** In his Prologue to ORESTES BROWNSON: SIGN OF CONTRADICTION biographer Robert A. Herrera answers the question this way: "Orestes August Brownson is the Catholic thinker par excellence of the United States. There are no rivals. The decks have been cleared. No Catholic thinker has equaled him in national prominence, international presence, density of thought, variety of concerns or sheer volume." *** Herrera spends the next 235 pages unfolding and arguing for the truth of that assertion. The American Catholic thinker? Then why haven't we heard of Brownson -- as many surely have heard -- of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, John Courtney Murray, S.J. or Father Richard Neuhaus? Never mind, argues R.A. Herrera: we owe it to ourselves to know this man. As early as 1939 very young Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. thought highly enough of him to write ORESTES A. BROWNSON: A PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. And academic and ecclesiatical writers are today alive to Brownson's incisive criticisms of Blessed John Henry Newman and also his creation of several bold "American" ideas on liberty of conscience and religious toleration at the core of contemporary Catholicism since the 1960s and the Second Vatican Council. *** In the subtitle, SIGN OF CONTRADICTION, Herrera tries to capture Brownson's Socratic temperament, the eternal gadfly who irritates friend and foe alike, asks new questions, essays new answers and whose thought never settles into the kind of "settled truth" that makes Brownson easy to grasp, much less evaluate. *** In Herrera's view one abiding feature in the life and thinking of Orestes Augustus Brownson is a passion for religion and the search for God. This may have grown out of longing for his father Sylvester whom he barely knew as twin youngest children in Vermont -- a father who died young leaving a widow with five young children. Separated from his twin sister Daphne, Orestes was placed with a God-fearing old couple in Royalton, Vermont. He did not attend school. At age 14, the twins and the other three children went with their mother to nearby Ballston Spa, New York. By then he knew much of the Bible by heart. There at age 19 Orestes joined the local Presbyterian church. In 1826 he was ordained a Universalist minister, the year before he married Sally Healy of Elbridge, New York. In 1844 in Boston he converted to Roman Catholicism in which religion he died in Detroit in 1876 ***Over the decades Orestes Brownson did many notable things. He was a founder of the Transcendentalist Club. He knew all the other leading Transcendalists. He gave a teaching job to Henry Thoreau. He founded and edited more than one magazine and wrote prodigiously for other journals on politics, slavery, Negro emancipation, the Irish, Americanizing immigrants and especially what made America uniquely American. Biographer Herrera describes several of Brownson's works in moderate detail: notably, the three autobiographical works CHARLES ELWOOD, THE CONVERT and THE SPIRIT RAPPER, but also what some consider his political masterpiece, THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. *** Polymath, multi-lingual Orestes Brownson was almost entirely self-educated. He immersed himself in French, German and Italian writers and would stay with authors like John C. Calhoun, Juan Donoso Cortes, Victor Cousin and above all Pierre Leroux, digging for their core insights, wrestling with them, rejecting some, assimilating others into his current, temporary synthesis -- and then moving on. Brownson passed through various phases as a thinker: radical, creative ontologist, conservative, demanding a new Jesus and a Church of the Future -- and more. As a result he can be quoted on almost any side of any issue today: evolution of ideas, communion of the human race with one another and with God, democracy, republicanism, women, liberation theology and on and on. *** Herrera is a good, clear writer. His ORESTES BROWNSON is a useful introduction to and revival of an original American thinker. It will probably make you want to know more about its subject. -OOO-