perhaps even savor.18
A little further afield, at least for most liberal Christians of the 1830s, were evangelical Protestant defenses of mysticism. Many in the evangelical movement were tired of getting beat up with the charge of enthusiasm and largely stayed clear of anything that would further associate them with such scorned sects as the Quakers and the French Prophets. But not all did. John Fletcher (1729–1785), one of John Wesley's ablest partners in Methodism's insurgency against England's Anglican establishment, wrote an explicit defense of “evangelical mysticism,” by which he especially meant the unfolding of the spiritual senses of biblical passages. More than that, Fletcher had in mind a transformed mode of perception; “gospel mysticism” was a way of seeing the “invisible and spiritual” within things “gross and material.” The natural world, like Scripture itself, was filled with hidden spiritual correspondences, and the reborn Christian lived in a world alive with poetic subtlety, symbolism, and grace.19
In a similar vein, Thomas Hartley (1708–1784), another Anglican with sympathies for the evangelical revival, was more than ready to defend mysticism, including William Law's perfectionist piety of ceaseless prayer. In 1764 he explicitly challenged the captious pigeonholing of the mystics in his Short Defense of the Mystical Writers: “Let it here be remarked, and constantly remembered, that the true Mystics are not to be taken for a sect or party in the church, or to be considered as separatists from it, for they renounce all such distinctions both in name and deed, being the only people that never formed a sect.” By Hartley's account, mystical meant “nothing more nor less than spiritual,” and the mystics were the “guardians” in all ages of “the spirituality of true religion.” Fletcher, Hartley, and other defenders were part of wider counter-Enlightenment currents that were available for nineteenth-century projects of reclaiming mysticism as the essence of genuine spirituality. Evangelicals and Transcendentalists could both agree, for example, that devotional writers like Jeanne Marie Guyon and William Law led spiritual lives that were profoundly serious and could not be easily dismissed. They could agree, too, that the natural world was filled with divine encryptions awaiting those with the spiritual senses to decipher them.20
Births require parents, and, if the genealogy of the Transcendental Club meeting on mysticism in May 1838 is starting to sound complicated, it was. That lineage presented not so much a family tree, with stately branches, as a family thicket, dense with tangles. That complexity, not to say impenetrability, was clearly on display in Bronson Alcott's lifelong fascination with the subject, especially in his habits of book collecting. Emerson may have wanted active souls with fresh experiences rather than bookworms with blighted sight, but, in point of fact, reinventing mysticism required a lot of reading. Alcott's journey exemplified this. After his earnest contributions at that spring symposium on mysticism in 1838, he went on to amass a library of hundreds of volumes on “mystic and theosophic lore.” If he could still talk your ear off about mysticism (he and Emerson had another long discussion of “this sublime school” on a December afternoon in 1839), that was in large part because he was an unabashed bibliophile.21
Alcott's collection ended up being immense. It included numerous seventeenth- and eighteenth-century editions of paragons Jacob Böhme, Antoinette Bourignon, and Jeanne Marie Guyon; several copies of William Law's works (including The Spirit of Prayer; or, The Soul Rising Out of the Vanity of Time into the Riches of Eternity); and a full selection of Neoplatonists from Plotinus to Thomas Taylor. There was a collection of revelations of divine love from the medieval visionary Julian of Norwich; and the venerable Thomas à Kempis, a perennial Catholic guide even for Protestants, was predictably still in the mix. These Catholic bearers of medieval mystical theology now shared shelf space, though, with such romantic works as Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Aids to Reflection (1825), a series of inward-looking meditations designed to help modern doubters move beyond the “uprightness” of the moral life to the “godlikeness” of the spiritual life. As such reading possibilities suggest, Transcendentalists and liberal Christians had many elements at their disposal to perform their alchemy of transforming mysticism from a sectarian affectation into a universal piety. Just as today's inquirers can do much of their seeking at Barnes and Noble or through Amazon.com, the nineteenth century's “New Spirituality” had a distinctly bookish feel, a communion of restless souls shaped as much through eclectic reading as through regular churchgoing.22
Beyond amassing an impressive library on the subject, Alcott long continued to be an arch-dreamer of mysticism. “Mysticism,” he sweepingly concluded in Concord Days in 1872, “is the sacred spark that has lighted the piety and illuminated the philosophy of all places and times.” In 1878, he enthused about the idea of starting a “Journal of Mysticism and Idealism,” proposed to him in a letter from a young partisan in Osceola, Missouri. Alcott thought it would be a perfect outlet for anthologizing an array of mystical writings for the American public. His short-lived Mystic Club, essentially a reading group for corporate study and reflection organized in 1882, was an appropriate capstone to his proclamation of mysticism's global significance. Fittingly enough, Franklin Sanborn (1831–1917), as dedicated as anyone to the Transcendentalist movement and its memorialization, was also a founding member of this latest club of rapidly aging New England radicals. A biographer of Alcott, Thoreau, and Emerson, Sanborn would weave the connecting threads from the first-generation Transcendentalists through the third-generation progressives. A disciple of Theodore Parker and an abolitionist supporter of John Brown in the 1850s, Sanborn played a leading role in the Concord School of Philosophy in the 1880s and became a primary chronicler of Sarah Farmer's Greenacre community to which Bjerregaard devoted himself. 23
If Alcott's wide-ranging enthusiasm for the subject suggested the incorporation of a hodgepodge of materials into Transcendentalist aspirations, one source still stood above the rest: namely, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), mining expert turned mystic par excellence. In the mid-1740s, after long years of scientific inquiry, Swedenborg experienced a religious awakening that transformed him from natural philosopher to seer. Out of his newly opened spiritual sight came a vast array of writings: visionary commentaries opening up the spiritual sense of biblical texts as well as detailed reports on his grand tours of heaven and hell. Swedenborg took the Christian and occultist fascination with hidden correspondences to a new level of empirical exactness; everywhere Swedenborg turned he discovered mystical signs of the invisible world beyond the visible. The human ear, for example, corresponded to obedience to God; an odorous mouse to avarice; cats to inattentiveness to sermons. Even more mysterious was his self-reported ability to “converse with angels and spirits in the same manner as I speak with men,” and it was his memorable relations of things seen and heard in the celestial world that especially garnered him a significant readership. By the 1840s, his posthumous fame had made him the most influential “mystic” in the United States, both a popular best seller and an intellectual with literary cachet. When the Encyclopaedia Britannica finally got around in 1858 to updating its entry on the subject, shifting from mystics and mystical theology to the increasingly universal mysticism, the essay paid Swedenborg an impossibly large tribute: “Nothing really new in the way of mysticism has been produced since the days of the northern seer.”24
Almost as a matter of course Emerson chose Swedenborg, the “largest of all modern souls,” to stand for his mystic of the ages in his Representative Men (1850). The appeal that Swedenborg held for Emerson and company was complex. As a symbolist of nature and Scripture, his elaborate view of spiritual correspondences had resonance for Transcendentalists who held similarly arcane views of reality. Swedenborg was also a thorough anti-Calvinist, critiquing a variety of doctrines from predestination to infant damnation to the Trinity. (His rejection of John Calvin went deep: in one vision, the seer discovered that the spiritual shade of the Genevan divine was fond of frequenting otherworldly brothels.) A cosmopolitan universalist, Swedenborg saw heaven as open to all those, inside or outside the church, who sustained their love of God and active benevolence toward their neighbors. His dismissal of external miracles, while preserving room for direct internal experiences of the divine, jibed with Transcendentalist intuitions. Such theological convictions
