post–Civil War periods. The new mysticism had a modest place in these politics as Northern intellectuals sought a religious vision to serve the national cause of Union. Frothingham, for one, made it plain that the issues of disunion were crucial to his reflections on the future religion of the United States. These divisions whetted his desires to discern a transcendent spirit that would override knotted sectional differences, admittedly on the North's terms. Charles C. Everett (1829–1900), a Harvard professor of theology who took up James Freeman Clarke's mantle in comparative religions, wrote of mysticism in 1874 as having “to do with wholes,” with the common and the unifying. “The word mysticism, whenever properly used,” he said, “refers to the fact that all lives, however distinct they may appear, however varied may be their conditions and their ends, are at heart one.” For Everett, no more sublime exemplar of this “mystical view of life” could be adduced than “our martyred president, Abraham Lincoln,” a truly “tender and heroic soul” who understood “alike the glory and the terror” of his “great work” and who held firm for “the unity of all being” against “modern atomism.” The growing liberal fascination with a globalized mysticism of universal brotherhood could serve a specific New England vision of capturing a holy union out of the rubble of rival nationalisms, North and South.37
Notwithstanding the interiority and solitude that these liberal Christians and post-Christians were championing, they were never far removed from the political and social realms. The suspicion that all this Transcendental talk of mysticism was isolating and self-absorbed is not borne out in these circles. Even Frothingham, who was as misty-eyed on mysticism as they came in his embrace of Vaughan's work, readily counseled that “genuine spirituality goes into the street” and does not seek the cloister. Indeed, much of the liberal writing on mysticism came to focus precisely on activism, on the “fusion of mystic communion with ethical passion.” “Mysticism is the form of religion most radical and progressive,” the Unitarian George W. Cooke wrote with complete confidence in 1894. William James himself was impatient with any equation of mysticism with a gospel of repose. His consistent measure of religious experience was its fruits, its production of saintliness and active habits–what he called “the moral fighting shape.” James imagined mystical experience as a way to unleash energy, to find the hot place of human initiative and endeavor, and to encourage the heroic, the strenuous, the vital, and the socially transformative. Likewise, the Quaker Rufus Jones, who followed in James's footsteps and became one of the most prolific American writers on mysticism, characterized mystics as “tremendous transmitters of energy.” He exemplified this through his own lifelong dedication to international relief work.38
Time and again, liberal religious leaders were adamant about the inseparability of mysticism and political activism, prayer and social progress. In his book Mysticism and Modern Life, published in 1915, the Methodist John Wright Buckham (1864–1945) made the connections between Christian spirituality and the tackling of the industrial crisis explicit with his category of “social mysticism.” Buckham, a professor for more than thirty years at the Pacific School of Religion, drew a sharp line on this point: active service to others was actually a requirement to be considered under his tendentious heading of “Normal Mysticism.” From the Unitarian Francis Greenwood Peabody (who developed social ethics as a distinct field at Harvard Divinity School in the 1880s) through the Quaker Howard H. Brinton (who was a guiding force in the Pendle Hill retreat center for contemplation and social action in the mid-twentieth century), the galvanizing concern for liberals was almost invariably “ethical mysticism.” Those deep concerns for a spirituality of social vision and transformation would make Albert Schweitzer, Mohandas Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and Howard Thurman patron saints for religious liberals. The convergence of political progressivism, socioeconomic justice, and mystical interiority was at the heart of the rise of a spiritual left in American culture.39
Finally, mysticism mattered existentially to all those wayfarers who invested so much in it. Spirituality in this new guise was embraced because of the distress it potentially assuaged, the questions of meaning it hoped to answer, the divided selves it tried to make whole, and the epiphanies it occasionally wrought. The dark question that James asked–“Is Life Worth Living?”–was hardly his alone, nor were his haunted feelings of meaninglessness, absurdity, and pointlessness. It was the sick soul in Leo Tolstoy's religious writings to which James was drawn as a worn and weary companion: “Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death which awaits me does not undo and destroy?” James turned to the exploration of mysticism not out of any great optimism, but out of a profound sense of having stood all too often on a precipice of despair. His own experiences of melancholia and “quivering fear,” he was convinced, “had a religious bearing.” “I have no living sense of commerce with a God,” James wrote. “I envy those who have, for I know that the addition of such a sense would help me greatly…. I have grown so out of Christianity that entanglement therewith on the part of a mystical utterance has to be abstracted from and overcome before I can listen. Call this, if you like, my mystical germ.” That experiential inkling was one James tried to safeguard from materialist suspicion, but he could never turn it for himself into more than a hedge or a hunch.40
Modern mysticism was always formed as much out of lacking and loss as it was out of epiphanic assurance. For many, it emerged out of an empty space of longing for “a heightened, intensified way of life” and represented a troubled quest for a unifying and integrative experience in an increasingly fragmented world of divided selves and lost souls. In his Recollections (1909) Washington Gladden (1836–1918), a titan among liberal Protestant thinkers and a bellwether activist as pastor of the First Congregational Church in Columbus, Ohio, tried to specify “the changes, which have taken place within the last sixty years in our conceptions of what is essential in religious experience.” He recalled “so many nights, when the house was still, looking out through the casement upon the unpitying stars,…a soul in great perplexity and trouble because it could not find God.” The loss of spiritual experience had become “my problem,” he reported, as he increasingly lived with an ethical Christianity without raptures, without “marked and easily recognizable emotional experience.” Likewise, Vida D. Scudder (1861–1954), an arch–Christian socialist and a much beloved professor of English literature at Wellesley, cultivated her mystical yearnings against a backdrop of religious loss, disorientation, and “inner misery.” Turning to Episcopalian monasticism, medieval Catholic saints, and the Bhagavad Gita as contemplative anchors in her quest for interior stillness amid her exterior struggles on behalf of labor, Scudder was hardly at ease on her journey. The prayer that “punctuated my life for many years”–indeed, she said in old age, “it recurs to this day”–evoked doubt as much as hope: “O God, if there be a God, make me a real person.”41
The turn to mysticism would have meant little if it had been primarily a species of nostalgia for lost faith, something people longed for, even as they got by without significant religious experiences. For many of these innovators, there clearly remained a living power to what they were describing as mysticism or spiritual consciousness. Take, for example, the manuscript account “My Creed So Far As I Have One,” penned by the second-generation Transcendentalist and radical Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911):
When the devout emotions come, says Emerson in substance–I have not the passage at hand–“yield to them; no matter what your theory, leave it as Joseph left his coat in the hands of the harlot, and flee.” In the life of every thoughtful man, no matter how sunny his temperament, there are moments of care, sorrow, depression, perplexity when neither study nor action nor friends will clear the horizon: the tenderest love, the most heroic self-devotion leave the cloud still resting, the perplexity still there. It is at such times that the thought of an Unseen Power comes to help him; by no tradition of the churches, with no apparatus of mythology; but simply in the form that the mystics call “the flight of the Alone, to the Alone.” It may be by the art of a prayerbook; it may equally well be in the depth of a personal experience to which all prayerbooks seem an intrusion. It may be in a church; it may equally well be in a solitary room or on a mountain's height.
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