Orestes Brownson

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Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803-1876) was a New England intellectual and activist, preacher and labor organizer. Brownson is best remembered as a publicist, a career which spanned his affiliation with the New England Transcendentalists, through his subsequent conversion to Catholicism.

Brownson was an adopted orphan, who was raised by impoverished Rural farmers in Stockbridge, Vermont, and educated himself. He had a series of religious conversions throughout his life. In 1822 Brownson became a Presbyterian and in 1824 he became a Universalist, becoming ordained in 1826 and preaching in New York and New England. Later, rejecting Universalism, he became associated with Robert Dale Owen and Fanny Wright in New York City and supported the New York Workingmen's Party. Then he became a Unitarian, preaching in Walpole, New Hampshire from 1832 and in Canton, Massachusetts from 1834.

For the next decade, Brownson was a part of the Transcendentalist movement which swept through the Boston Unitarian community. He read in English Romanticism and English and French reports on German Idealist philosophy, and was passionate about the work of Victor Cousin and Pierre Leroux. In 1836, the year of Emerson's Nature, Brownson participated in the founding of the Transcendental Club; he also published a pamphlet, New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church, which combined Transcendental religious views with radical social egalitarianism, angrily criticizing the unequal social distribution of wealth as un-Christian and unprincipled. He founded a magazine, The Boston Quarterly Review, in 1838, and wrote political, intellectual, and religious essays. Among these was a review of Carlyle's Chartism, separately published as The Laboring Classes (1840), which caused considerable controversy. In 1842, Brownson ceased separate publication of the The Boston Quarterly Review, and it was merged into The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, but his beliefs were once again evolving, and he found it necessary to break with the Review after a series of his essays created new scandal. He founded Brownson's Quarterly Review in 1844. This journal continued until 1864, and then was relaunched, late in Brownson's life and after a nearly ten-year hiatus, in 1873. It finally ceased publication in 1875. Brownson also wrote many articles for the Paulist Fathers' Catholic World publication.

In 1844 Brownson converted again, to Catholicism, his religion for the rest of his life; his reputation among the Transcendentalists fell, as did his opinion of them. As a Catholic, Brownson became politically conservative. He repudiated his earlier Fourierist and Owenite ideas, now criticizing socialism and utopianism as vigorously as he had once promoted them. A staunch Douglas Democrat, Brownson, like Douglas supported the Union in the Civil War, and polemicized against the Confederacy and against Catholic clergy who endorsed secession.

In his 1848 "Letter to Protestants", Orestes Brownson coined the term Odinism.^[1] In 1857 he wrote a memoir, The Convert; or, Leaves from My Experience.

His remains were subsequently transferred to the crypt of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at the University of Notre Dame, where his personal papers are also archived.

[edit] References

^ His use of "Odinism" can be found in The Works of Orestes Brownson vol. V (Detroit, 1885), pp 256-257.

[edit] Further reading

Patrick W. Carey. Orestes A. Brownson: American Religious Weathervane Eerdmans, 2004. ISBN 0-8028-4300-X.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., A Pilgrim's Progress (1939)