a match made in heaven. In his essay enshrining Swedenborg as the representative mystic, Emerson often took away with one hand what he gave with the other. Swedenborg gained credit in Emerson's eyes for his versatility in prying into so many subjects, but there remained something strangely “scholastic” and “passionless” about him. The seer denoted whole “classes of souls as a botanist disposes of a carex,” Emerson acidly remarked. Swedenborg's vast writings were without poetry; they lacked tremulous emotions and lustrous landscapes. Insufficient in his self-reliance, not ultimately rising to the level of creative genius, Swedenborg remained all too subservient to the Bible and Christian symbolism. For Emerson, the great mystic remained at last the faithful son of a Lutheran bishop, while the Concord sage was charting (so he believed) a more independent course far freer of such baggage. Swedenborg's angels, Emerson sniffed at one point, were “all country-parsons” on “an evangelical picnic.” Differences aside, the larger Transcendentalist estimate of Swedenborg as mystical summit took the better measure of American fascinations with the seer. Whether for Walt Whitman, Julia Ward Howe, or Henry James Sr., no one surpassed Swedenborg as the archetype of mysticism's new possibilities in mid-nineteenth-century America. He exemplified the potential for spiritual perception in everyday life and the renewed accessibility of angels.26
What mattered more than influences, even when as large and contradictory as Swedenborg's, were the distinct spiritual journeys that the growing love of mysticism made possible. Alcott and Emerson had numerous fellow travelers. Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), though not at the natal meeting for the new mysticism, joined enthusiastically in this dimension of the Transcendental Club's vision. Close to both Emerson and Alcott (she actually taught for a time with Alcott at the Temple School), Fuller served as editor of the movement's celebrated periodical, The Dial. Best known as a foundational thinker for the women's rights movement, she was also a self-confessed mystic. In October 1838, for example, she wrote a friend about a “heavenliest day of communion” in which “free to be alone” in “the meditative woods…all the films seemed to drop from my existence.” That evening, standing by herself outside a church and looking up at the crescent moon beyond the pointed spire, “a vision came upon my soul.” In that moment Fuller made clear the extra-ecclesial character of her intensifying experience: “May my life be a church, full of devout thoughts.” The real church was the inward life of solitary spiritual illumination, not the building, a relic of the external, whose very steeple pointed beyond itself.
Margaret Fuller, a premier New England intellectual and a staunch advocate of women's rights, was also a self-avowed teacher of mysticism. (Firestone Library, Princeton University.)
Two years later Fuller was still immersed in these religious aspirations. She declared herself “more and more what they will call a mystic,” even announcing that she was ready now to preach “mysticism.” In her formidable work Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Fuller imagined such religious exaltation as an essential vehicle for the progress and elevation of women, a primal source of “spiritual dignity.” “Mysticism, which may be defined as the brooding soul of the world, cannot fail,” she insisted, “of its oracular promise as to Woman.” Fuller, like most of her compatriots, distanced mysticism from both its Catholic and its Enlightenment incarnations. It was neither an ancient form of Christian theology nor a predictable way of criticizing sectarian enthusiasm; instead, it was becoming part of an intuitive spiritual quest for originality, transcendence, and emancipation. For Fuller, laying claim to the democratic individuality at the heart of this romantic spirituality was especially important for women, so long defined in terms of their subordination to male relations. From Fuller's Transcendentalism through Annie Besant's Theosophy, “mysticism” and “spirituality,” twinned nineteenth-century constructs pitting individual autonomy against ecclesial hierarchy, were often construed in radical circles as resources for the advance of women's rights.27
Other exemplars of the mystical turn were not hard to come by. The Transcendentalist reveries of Samuel Johnson (1822–1882) in “the serene, spiritual moonlight” of the early 1840s carried him through Harvard Divinity School and launched him on a lifelong study of Asian religions–an area in which he eventually emerged as a leading American authority. His three-volume, 2,559-page Oriental Religions (1873–1885) still stands as a monument, even if now dust-gathering, to the kind of religious and historical inquiry that Transcendentalism authorized. Johnson's youthful meditations, by contrast, were more rapturous than erudite. As his friend Samuel Longfellow (1819–1882) remarked, Johnson “began soon to take on a mystical phase, which led him into some deep experiences.” “This phase lasted but a short time,” Johnson himself reported, “yet a very effervescent state it was while it lasted.” An intuitionist, Johnson “sought spiritual truths by direct vision” and “by immediate inward experience.” Caught up in “the rapture of devotion,” Johnson asked in one rhetorical flight after another, what are the deepest longings, feelings, and aspirations at the heart of human existence? “What are the dreams of a pure spirit?”28
More audacious was Jones Very, a Harvard tutor of Greek and a poet of mantic insight. In attendance at the Transcendental Club meeting in May 1838, he was often seen as the most eccentric (and hence genuine) mystic of the whole crowd. In September of that year, Very had first awed Samuel Johnson, then an undergraduate at Harvard, but soon that impression turned to fright. In a letter home, the young Johnson reassured his father that Very's astonishing “absence of reason” and his wild declarations about being “a man of heaven” had not (yet) derailed his own “proper understanding of religious truth.” With an increasing spiritual intensity, Very was evangelizing as much as he was teaching. He dumbfounded students and colleagues when he walked into the classroom one day and behaved like a rank enthusiast: “Flee to the mountains, for the end of all things is at hand!” he declared in a prophetic blaze that brought his days as a Harvard tutor to an abrupt end.
A nearly monthlong stay in the McLean Asylum followed, and Very gradually channeled more of his spiritual ardor and mental anguish into his identity as a poet. Eventually, he was even able to canalize his divine contemplations into brief Unitarian pastorates, but he remained far from that settled state in the fall of 1838 as he moved about the countryside as a latter-day John the Baptist. Emerson's support for Very stayed steadfast throughout this prophetic episode, even though many critics were more than willing to lay the blame for Very's “madness” on his intimacy with “Emerson & the other Spiritualists, or Supernaturalists, or whatever they are called.” The journeys of Johnson and Very, like those of Alcott and Fuller, suggest the extent of mysticism's reconstruction in these liberal New England circles as a domain of individual insight and spiritual exploration. For the first time, Americans had a definable club of self-proclaimed mystics all their own, a group ready at a moment's notice, as Margaret Fuller's memoirists reported of her ecstasies, to “plunge into the sea” of “mystical trances.”29
More sustained reflection soon emerged in this liberal religious world and even extended to those otherwise wary of the Transcendentalist ferment. Harvard's Henry Ware Jr. (1794–1843), writing for a wider liberal audience in the Christian Examiner in 1844, lifted up mysticism for the considered attention of all “rational Christians.” “There is, perhaps, no one element of religion to which Ecclesiastical history has done so little justice,” Ware suggested. Predictably cautious in his reclamation, he remained dismissive of “rude and unenlightened” forms of mysticism, including the “Fetichism” of devotions aimed at “outward objects” and the somatic tortures of “self-inflicted penance and scourgings.” Ware, like Priestley before him, wanted a rarefied mysticism–one stripped of rituals and material symbols. “Now,” he insisted, “as a higher stage in spiritual life has been reached, we find the mysticism of religious experience.” That was a turn of phrase worthy of William James's work more than a half-century later. “We have used the word mysticism in a wider than its usual signification,” Ware concluded, rightly highlighting the innovations of the era, “but what is mysticism but the striving of the soul after God, the longing of the finite for communion with
