Orestes Brownson

GPA Healy : Orestes Brownson , oil painting, 1863 (detail)

Orestes Augustus Brownson (born September 16, 1803 in Stockbridge , Vermont , † April 17, 1876 in Detroit ) was an American intellectual , preacher , magazine editor and political and religious publicist . His theological and state theoretical views changed in the course of his life, whereby he tended to radical positions and dialectical contradictions. In 1844 he converted to the Roman Catholic Church . In approval and opposition, he exerted a strong influence on the American intellectual life of his time.

Life

Orestes and his twin sister were born as the youngest of the five children of Sylvester Brownson and Relief. Metcalf was born in a rural village near the then settlement border . His father died when he was two years old. From the age of 6 to 14 he lived with an elderly couple in Royalton (Vermont) . They were congregationalists and taught him the basics of Christian doctrine without forcing him into a denomination .

When he was 14 years old, his mother moved to Ballston Spa and took back her younger children. Orestes became an apprentice in a newspaper publisher. At the same time he developed his feeling for social differences and his disgust for the “idolatry” of wealth in the fashionable seaside resort. At the urging of an aunt, he read religious scriptures, but according to later self-testimony he was an atheist at the age of 17 without getting any peace. For a short time he stuck to the Presbyterian Church , where he was baptized at the age of 19 .

After graduating from school and studying for a short period of time, he became a village school teacher in various locations, including in Springwell near Detroit in 1824, where he got to know the community life of Catholics of French origin.

In 1825 he decided on universalism , a denomination organized by the church in the USA, and began preparing for the ministry. He was ordained in 1826 . He then worked for three and a half years as a preacher in small universalist churches in New York State .

In 1827 he married Sally Healy. Eight children were born to the couple.

In 1828 he was given the task of publishing the church gazette Gospel Advocate . As a result, he got into internal universalist disputes, in the course of which he was accused of apostasy and which in 1830 led to his formal expulsion from the community.

After that, Brownson initially remained non-denominational, but, after a mystical experience, sympathized with Unitarianism . As a journalist he turned to the social question and criticism of capitalism . At the same time he worked as a freelance preacher, from 1834 in the salaried service of Unitarian congregations. At the same time, his political criticism of what he saw as the unstoppable impoverishment of the masses became more radical and brought him back into conflict within the church. In 1836 he was given a Unitarian office for the poor and workers in Chelsea, Massachusetts . He founded the Society for Christian Union and Progress . His weekly sermons were very popular and his newspaper articles were very popular. In the economic crisis of 1837 he radicalized himself further and thus turned more conservative Unitarians against himself.

In the following years he came into close contact and exchange with the transcendentalists around George Ripley and Ralph Waldo Emerson . He now rejected any religious practice that did not directly serve social reform and the abolition of capital-based inequality, advocated the abolition of inheritance law and a fund for the training and employment of all. He also lost previous comrades and had to see the election victory of the United States Whig Party in 1840 .

The disappointment led to a new turn to explicitly religious beliefs and to the resumption of preaching. In place of his previous philanthropic optimism, he came closer to the church doctrine of original sin and of redemption through connection with the divine humanity of Jesus. This communion needs an ecclesiastical form. Faith is not a prerequisite, but a consequence of this communion , as is the correct understanding of the Bible . With this, Brownson had separated from Unitarianism and was no longer allowed to publish in Unitarian papers. In July 1844, in his own journal, Brownson's Quarterly, he wrote : "Either the Church in communion with the See of Rome is one holy, catholic, apostolic church, or there is no one holy apostolic church."

Together with his wife and children, he entered the Catholic Church. For the next decade he spoke and wrote sharply apologetically and anti- Protestant . It was only after the mid-1850s that his tone became more conciliatory, and the effort to give Catholic immigrants a simultaneously Catholic and American-democratic identity came to the fore. He wrote his autobiography The Convert (1857) with the intention of understanding and dialogue.

Despite his now more conservative political stance - in 1862 he applied unsuccessfully for a Republican congressional mandate - criticism of the power of capital remained a basic feature of his thinking. In his Conversations on Liberalism and the Church (1870), the old Catholic priest put forward all the arguments of the criticism of capitalism in a dispute with the young journalist who believes in progress. Brownson expected little from the abolition of slavery because wage slavery for workers did not seem more humane to him. In the Civil War , two of his sons fell on the side of the northern states .

Until his death in 1876 he remained a fruitful and inwardly independent thinker and writer.

Orestes Brownson was first buried in the Mt. Elliott Cemetery in Detroit. In 1886 he was reburied in the crypt of the Sacred Heart Basilica of the University of Notre Dame, as requested.

Publications (selection)

• New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church . 1836
• The Laboring Classes . 1840
• Charles Elwood, or, The infidel converted . 1840
• The Mediatorial Life of Jesus . 1842
• Essays and reviews, chiefly on theology, politics, and socialism . 1852
• The Spirit-Rapper: an autobiography . 1854
• The convert; or, Leaves from my experience . 1857
• The American Republic constitution, tendencies, and destiny . 1865
• Conversations on Liberalism and the Church . 1870 ( digitized version )

literature

• Patrick W. Carey: Orestes A. Brownson: American Religious Weathervane. Grand Rapids 2005. ISBN 978-0-8028-4300-5
  (detailed review by David Voelker online )

Web links

Commons : Orestes Brownson  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Lynn Gordon Hughes, David Voelker: Orestes Brownson (Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography, 2009)
• Henry Brownson: Orestes Augustus Brownson ( Catholic Encyclopedia , 1908, English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Voelker, review
2. ^ "Either the church in communion with the See of Rome is the one holy catholic apostolic church or the one holy apostolic church does not exist" (quoted from Hughes / Voelker, see web link).
3. ↑ Hughes / Voelker, s. Web link
4. ↑ todayinndhistory.com