dissoluteness.” For Coventry, it was not the human emotions of fear and hope that explained the natural origins of religion—an explanation preferred especially by Hume. Instead, Coventry riveted attention on the unruly passion of love and the wildly illusory distortions that it produced.12
Coventry was nothing if not direct on this point: The great source of all mystical experience is “disappointed love.” The frustrated passion is “transferred from mere mortals to a spiritual and divine object, and love…is sublimated into devotion.” That divine object is necessarily “an imaginary and artificial” contrivance, a mistaken substitute, a projection of the “wantonest appetites and wishes.” In working from the perspective of the passions, which were understood to be stronger and more predominant in women, Coventry marked mysticism as primarily female, with a spirituality of sublimated sexuality making up “the far greatest part of female religion.” He found such displacement of the sensual doubly sad; it was both a religious illusion and a loss of the genuine tactile pleasures of “connubial love.” What devout women really suffered from, one of his male interlocutors winked to another, was “the want of timely application from our sex.” Coventry's analysis fully anticipated the intellectual “fashion” that William James would later complain about in The Varieties of Religious Experience: namely, “criticising the religious emotions by showing a connection between them and the sexual life.”13
Coventry helped bring mysticism into being in the Anglo-American world as a term laced with reproach. Misplaced sexuality, unintelligibility, pretension, and reason-be-damned piety were now among its chief associations. The Anglican bishop William Warburton (1698–1779), a contemporary of Coventry's, made those connections clear in his contemptuous conclusions about the ardent devotional writer William Law (1675–1752). Law's exposition of the rigors of piety, especially his Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728), had profoundly influenced such early evangelical luminaries as John Wesley and George Whitefield, and these dubious alliances already made him a marked man in Warburton's book. The perverse love that Law showed for mystical writers, particularly the German visionary Jacob Böhme (1575–1624), served to sharpen Warburton's suspicions to a knife's edge: “When I reflect on the wonderful infatuation of this ingenious man, who has spent a long life in hunting after, and, with an incredible appetite, devouring, the trash dropt from every species of Mysticism,” Warburton declared, “it puts me in mind of what Travellers tell us of a horrid Fanaticism in the East, where the Devotee makes a solemn vow never to taste of other food than what has passed through the entrails of some impure or Savage Animal.” Hard to put it more graphically than that: mysticism was seen as an excremental waste in the making of a learned, reasonable Christianity amenable to the forward march of the Enlightenment.14
Another noteworthy aspect of the understanding of mysticism before its Transcendentalist embrace was the way that the learned worked to narrow its signification rather than enlarge it. The mystics, though sometimes seen as part of a stream that flowed back to the ancient church, were commonly presented as a small camp with a few exemplary members. They were bearers, in this view, of a sectarian spirit, not a perennial philosophy. At the head of the sect was a controversial band of seventeenth-century French devotional writers–Jeanne Marie Guyon, Antoinette Bourignon, and François Fénelon–known for their supreme dedication to an inward life of prayer and utter abandonment of the self to God. In William Hurd's New Universal History of the Religious Rites, Ceremonies, and Customs of the Whole World: or, A Complete and Impartial View of All Religions, published in 1782, the “Account of the Mystics” was placed toward the end of his massive volume, tucked into accounts of other “smaller sects” such as the already defunct Muggletonians and French Prophets. Guilty of various excesses of piety, the mystics were, in Hurd's mind, clearly identifiable with a small group of French devotional writers and their misbegotten English successors like the unfortunate William Law.15
That factional understanding was encapsulated in the 1797 entry “Mystics” in the Encyclopædia Britannica, a multivolume project that epitomized the vast expansion and reorganization of knowledge in this century of light. “MYSTICS,” the entry read, “a kind of religious sect, distinguished by their professing pure, sublime, and perfect devotion, with an entire disinterested love of God, free from all selfish considerations…. The principles of this sect were adopted by those called Quietists in the seventeenth century, and under different modifications, by the Quakers and Methodists.” (The intensity of their withdrawal from the social world into the interior reaches of silent prayer had earned these “mystics” the disparaging sectarian label of “Quietists.”) Enlightenment compilers and historians rarely followed Coventry's lead in universalizing “mystic” and “mysticism” as part of a sweeping critique of false religion. Instead, they preferred to keep the purview of the terms much more contained–and, in some sense, containable–by making them party labels for a singular brand of overwrought Christians.16
These British usages readily crossed the Atlantic to the new republic. Hannah Adams's compendious Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations, which went through four editions in New England between 1784 and 1817, offered a more far-ranging account of mystics and mysticism than Hurd's parallel volume, but it nonetheless trotted out the same select club of “modern mystics.” In the first edition of Noah Webster's American Dictionary in 1828, the narrow sectarian meaning was front and center: “MYSTICS, n. A religious sect who profess to have direct intercourse with the Spirit of God,” and “mysticism” itself was still joined to seventeenth-century Quietist practices of prayer and submission. Through the 1820s and 1830s, sectarian and enthusiast understandings remained commonplace (indeed, through the sixth and seventh editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which ran from 1823 to 1842, the entries on “mystics” closely followed the narrow eighteenth-century pedigree). These entrenched associations made mysticism an unlikely candidate for liberal absorption into their imagining of the universal religion. “The liberal mind is of no sect,” Bronson Alcott proudly proclaimed. To give mysticism a sympathetic hearing, the Transcendental Club and its sundry successors would have to work against the grain of prevailing restrictions of the mystics to a minuscule sect of prayer-immersed, self-denying devotees.17
For a viable counterhistory to the received meanings from Catholic theology and Enlightenment critique, there were various waters for Transcendentalists, Unitarians, and fellow liberals to troll. Perhaps closest at hand were their own eighteenth-century forebears: above all, Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), a Unitarian apologist who, though often stammering in the pulpit, proved extremely fluent as a historian and natural philosopher. Like Benjamin Franklin's reputation, Priestley's fame was secured through experiments with electricity, but, unlike Franklin, Priestley was more than happy to lead a double life as a theologian. Abandoning England in 1794, which he had come to see as a wretched place of persecution, Priestley moved to postrevolutionary Pennsylvania, which he imagined as a blessed state of republican liberty. His History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782) provided one common strategy for the rehabilitation of mysticism. Not that Priestley was particularly fond of the mystics; he said that he was “ashamed” as a Christian to see what kind of bodily “austerities” and scriptural “perversions” some of them had practiced in Christ's name. These horrid “bodily exercises” in which the flesh was tormented for the good of the soul were dismissed as Catholic vices.
Still, mysticism mattered for Priestley's Protestant Enlightenment as a flawed vessel of true interiority; it was the source of a Christian underground that managed to preserve at least the traces of true spirituality in the face of all the vulgar superstitions of pagans and Catholics. “For though the ideas of the Mystics were very confused,” Priestley concluded, “they had a notion of the necessity of aiming at something of inward purity, distinct from all ritual observances.” That proved a distinction that liberal reclaimers of the spiritual life could get their minds around, if not their bodies. The mystics contained within them the “sparks of real piety” and served, in effect, as clandestine prognosticators of pure religious interiority amid the dark ages of superstition. Nothing ascetic, nothing sacramental, nothing ritualistic, nothing bleeding or oozing—just
