soul that exceeded doctrinal statements, moral precepts, and worship forms. Without mysticism, Ware insisted, there is nothing to “fill my soul's longing.” “Without it there is, and there can be no religion.”30
Robert Alfred Vaughan's two-volume compendium, Hours with the Mystics, first published in London in 1856 and often thereafter on both sides of the Atlantic, pushed nineteenth-century discussions of mysticism to the next level. An English Dissenter of a literary, meditative, and melancholy cast, Vaughan (1823–1857) had come around to the ministry by way of his father's example and “the lone dark room of the artist.” He spent long hours wooing poetry as a youth, but he soon turned to writing theological essays, including one on Friedrich Schleiermacher, a German architect of religious liberalism, especially in his emphasis on experience as the essence of religion. Poetry and German theology were but preparation for Vaughan's work on his favored subject. “Mysticism is the romance of religion,” he bubbled at one point. And, like Bjerregaard after him, Vaughan was able to carry on that tryst throughout Christian history and just about anywhere else as well.
Amid his sweeping romantic vision, Vaughan still had moments of focus, and the Transcendental turn in the United States was one of them. None of his immediate contemporaries stood out more for him than “Mr. Emerson, the American essayist,” whose writings possessed “in perfection the fantastic incoherence of the ‘God-intoxicated’ man.” “Whether in prose or verse,” Vaughan wrote, “he is chief singer of his time at the high court of Mysticism.” Vaughan, who made comparing mysticisms an art, labeled Emerson a modern Sufi–a comparison that was not entirely an Orientalist chimera, since Emerson's eclecticism explicitly extended to the warm embrace of Persian religious poetry. Not all was similarity on this point, since Vaughan also drew a sharp contrast between what he saw as Emerson's realization of divinity through self-reliance and the Sufi's through self-conquest.31
Setting up his magnum opus as a series of genteel conversations among friends, Vaughan had his refined interlocutors leisurely pursue mysticism as it had found expression “among different nations and at different periods.” Having produced a book with a mix of critical, appreciative, and diverting voices, Vaughan himself was hard to pin down. Sometimes he was sorting out the chaff; other times he was happily harvesting the wheat; always he was wary of appearing to endorse enthusiasm or fanaticism; quite often he simply lost his way in chatty nonchalance. That last quality especially raised the ire of Roman Catholic and High Church Anglican critics who found Vaughan's “mysticism” to be a terrible trivialization of “mystical theology.” It was little more, in this view, than a shallow series of conversations “over port wine and walnuts,” with the occasional “flirtation” thrown in. Those readers, of course, were hardly Vaughan's chosen audience, since he was exploring mysticism in intentionally expansive, woolly terms. Because of the very breadth and popularity of his compendia, Vaughan, more than anyone else, threw open the door for “mysticism” as a great conduit into “the highest form of spirituality.”32
The availability of Vaughan's breezy collection made the expansion of interest in mysticism all that much easier. His volumes served as the basis for the next substantial exposition of Transcendental spirituality in the United States, a lengthy review essay by Octavius Frothingham (1822–1895), published in the Christian Examiner in 1861. An architect after the Civil War of the Free Religious Association, an organization that pursued (among other liberal projects) the distillation of a universal spirituality through the wide-ranging study of world religions, Frothingham helped tend the mystic flame in its transit from the first glimmering in the 1830s to the glare of fascination at the end of the century. The leading early chronicler of Transcendentalism's history, Frothingham imagined the future religion of the United States as a liberal, universal one of the spirit, not dogmatic, ecclesiastical, sacramental, or sectarian, post-Protestant as much as post-Catholic. “The mystic is only by rare exception,” he insisted, “a ritualist or a sacramentalist.” Above all, the mystic stands up for “the soul's light, right, and freedom against ecclesiastical authority.” Offering a clearer endorsement of the mystics than Vaughan, Frothingham desired, above all, the rich interiority of their immediate insights: “We love the mystics for their inward, not for their outward life; because they lift us up above the world, not because they make us faithful in it,” Frothingham avowed. “There are others, and enough of them, who will keep us up to that. We crave more mist and moonlight in America; and that the mystics give to us.”33
The full development of “mysticism” as the basis of Bjerregaard's “New Spirituality” was all but complete when one last New England liberal, James Freeman Clarke (1810–1888), weighed in. A founding figure in the field of comparative religions at Harvard Divinity School and the author of a much heralded two-volume text called Ten Great Religions, Clarke delivered a lecture titled “The Mystics in All Religions” in 1880 and then published it a year later as part of his Events and Epochs in Religious History. Building on the tradition from Emerson and Alcott through Vaughan and Frothingham, Clarke grandly presented the mystic as one who “sees through the shows of things to their centre, becomes independent of time and space, master of his body and mind, ruler of nature by the sight of her inmost laws, and elevated above all partial religions into the Universal Religion. This is the essence of mysticism.” Emerson and Jones Very took the lead as Clarke's “American Mystics”–in effect, a canonization of the first generation of Transcendentalists in which they were placed in the same company with everyone from Sufis to Swedenborg, from Buddhists to Böhme. With that lecture and essay, Clarke laid one last plank in the extensive platform that was in place for William James's exploration of mysticism in The Varieties of Religious Experience. “The everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition,” James averred, is “hardly altered by differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note.”34
By 1902, when James published his great work on religious experience, the liberal reinvention of mysticism had reached its meridian. Between 1830 and 1900, American Transcendentalists and their like-minded heirs had created an ahistorical, poetic, essential, intuitive, universal, wildly rhapsodic mysticism. As Franklin Sanborn observed in 1900, “New England in its early days was no[t] very good soil for mysticism…. But for the past 70 years, mysticism has gained ground in New England.” Sanborn, one of Transcendentalism's most devoted chroniclers, traced that development straight through from Emerson, Alcott, and Fuller to the “authors of the Greenacre school,” lecturers like Carl H. A. Bjerregaard. The reinvention of mysticism that these religious liberals, radicals, and progressives effected between 1830 and 1900 would serve them well on many fronts.35
Harvard's James Freeman Clarke was one in a long line of nineteenthcentury New England liberals who, in advance of William James, helped lift up the mystics as the bearers of a universal spirituality. (Firestone Library, Princeton University.)
Of first importance was the deployment of the new mysticism in the intensifying conflicts between religion and science, which in some minds amounted to a warfare. On this minefield, the revamping of mysticism was intended as a shield against untrammeled naturalism, “the fierce onward current of purely scientific thought.” “Never was there an age,” one anonymous essayist insisted in 1878, “when what is true in Mysticism needed emphatic assertion more than it does today. The general drift of thought is antagonistic to the spiritual and the eternal. Science, and by this word is generally understood the material and economic province, absorbs in itself all thought and investigation.” The very reality of the spiritual world was increasingly up for grabs in the second half of the nineteenth century, and mystics offered their own kind of empirical evidence for its existence. Not surprisingly, many of America's native-born mystics emulated Swedenborg in his ability to claim to occupy both religious and scientific domains. As the Concord seer Henry David Thoreau quipped in 1853, “The fact is I am a mystic–a transcendentalist–& a natural philosopher to boot.”36
The
