Religion at its finest had become all about flashes of intensified feeling and transformed vision, about moments of direct experience, however ephemeral. “I had a revelation last Friday evening,” the poet James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) wrote of one such moment. “The air seemed to waver to and fro with the presence of Something I knew not what.” Likewise, in a poem he titled “The Mystic” David Atwood Wasson (1823–1887), another Transcendental preacher of the second generation and a brief successor to Theodore Parker as minister of Boston's Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society, imagined himself becoming “a leaf that quivers in God's joy,” an experience of “pure participation” in the “Mystery of Being.” At one of the early meetings of the Transcendental Club, in May 1837, the group had taken up the question of “what is the essence of religion as distinct from morality,” and Emerson had responded by defining religion as “the emotion of shuddering delight and awe from perception of the infinite.” The definition struck a resonant chord with his associates: Harvard's Convers Francis duly recorded Emerson's phrasing in his journal as representing the pith of the group's conversation.
A couple of years earlier, Orestes Brownson (1803–1876)–who eventually converted to Roman Catholicism, but who was then still in a liberal Protestant phase–had written a review essay titled “Spirituality of Religion” in which he portended much of the ensuing ferment. Feeling the chill of technological practicality all around him, Brownson lamented that “all our mysterious emotions, our interior cravings, [and] vague longings” are “allowed to count for nothing.” He still used spirituality as a metaphysical term in opposition to philosophical materialism, but he also lamented “the want of spirituality” in the quietude of individual souls, the lack of the felt inspirations of the divine spirit. As weary as Emerson of religious formality, Brownson turned for warmth to “the poetry of the soul.” But what, pray tell, were the rhythms and rhymes of that poetry? The awakening of spirituality was experienced, he claimed, as an intuition, an impulse, an energy, an enthusiasm, an inward breathing of God's spirit in the heart, a contemplative stillness, a waiting in silence, “a freedom of soul.” It is hardly surprising that William James, a culminating figure in this New England lineage, imagined mysticism as “original and unborrowed experience” and fleeting “states of insight.”43
If the Transcendentalists often seemed longer on excited prose than extended practice, their aspirations nonetheless carried the day. “Mysticism is an experience,” C. H. A. Bjerregaard said assuredly in one of his lectures in 1896. “Learn to say with Thoreau: ‘I hear beyond the range of sound, / I see beyond the range of sight.’” It would be almost impossible now to think of mysticism as only a wing of Christian theology and practice or as the domain of one small set of Catholic devotees and their few Protestant defenders. The efforts of Coventry and company to treat mysticism in terms of sexual pathology and psychological illusion still resonate, no doubt, with some diehard skeptics. In the early twentieth century, the notion of religion's “erotogenesis”–its origin in “sex mysticism”–gained a genuine intellectual vogue, but the appeal of that position, along with its ability to shock, has now long since dwindled. That kind of explanation hardly enjoys a fraction of the popularity of mysticism considered as a perennial philosophy, an ageless dimension of religious experience, or “a journey of ultimate discovery.” The “mystic heart” beats vibrantly on as part of a “universal spirituality” gleaned from the religions of the world, a pulsing of interconnections still established through the timelessness of mystical states of consciousness.
Even a seemingly quintessential embodiment of the current New Age, the Zen-practicing basketball coach Phil Jackson, partakes as much of mysticism's nineteenth-century exaltation as more recent fads. In his spiritual memoir Sacred Hoops (1995), Jackson tells of his journey from a Pentecostal boyhood in North Dakota to a life of Buddhist meditation in the glamorous world of the National Basketball Association. The major catalyst for the shift in his spiritual sensibilities had actually occurred while he was on the road with the New York Knicks through a close reading of William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, “a book filled with firsthand accounts by Quakers, Shakers, and other Christian mystics.” As Jackson related, “I couldn't put it down.” The book led him to his own form of low-key “mystical experience,” “a quiet feeling of inner peace” for which he had longed as a Pentecostal teenager, but which had always eluded him. Moving into the open air of Jamesian curiosity, Jackson read evermore widely on yoga, Sufism, and Buddhist meditation, even as he saw his quest as part of a fuller and more honest engagement with his Christian upbringing and its principles of “selflessness and compassion.” Having been exposed to James's club of mystics, Jackson could now “explore other traditions more fully without feeling as if I was committing a major sacrilege against God and family.” The mystics, considered as an exalted fellowship of great souls free of history and bound together through firsthand experiences of the infinite, are clearly just as dear today with contemporary seekers as they were in the nineteenth century with religious liberals.44
CHAPTER TWO
SOLITUDE
I SAT IN MY SUNNY DOORWAY from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery,” Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) wrote of an experience at Walden Pond in the mid–1840s, “amidst the pine and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness.” Though “naturally no hermit” and happily entertaining various visitors in his makeshift home in the woods, Thoreau pronounced a distinct and enduring blessing upon isolation through his two-year experiment twenty miles outside Boston and a mile or so from the village of Concord. “I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time,” he confessed. “To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” His commitment to simplicity and seclusion hardly made for loneliness or melancholy. He said that only once during his sojourn, and only “for an hour” as a result of “a slight insanity in my mood,” had he felt “the least oppressed by a sense of solitude.” His was not a misanthropic withdrawal from friendship and society, but a spiritual retreat into a natural world of revelatory sounds and seasons. The question about solitude that Thoreau put to himself and to his age was ultimately one of contemplative discernment: “What do we want most to dwell near to?”1
Beginning his sojourn in the woods on Independence Day in 1845, Thoreau gave practical embodiment to Transcendentalist self-reliance and religious aspiration, to “the solitude of soul” that his friend Emerson, fourteen years his senior, had already praised as a desideratum in his private journal and in his manifesto Nature (1836). “I got up early and bathed in the pond,” Thoreau wrote of his morning ablutions. “That was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did.” He reenacted in the glow of the sunrise his desire for casting off slumber and for awakening into “a poetic or divine life.” “To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?” His devout habits at Walden were anything but ethereal, enveloping his body, dress, food, and furnishings, which Thoreau imagined–loosely, to be sure–as a “Hindoo” discipline: “Nothing was too trivial for the Hindoo lawgiver, however offensive it may be to modern taste. He teaches how to eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and urine, and the like, elevating what is mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling these things trifles…. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.” The angular hermit imagined an ascetic path of awakening; his exploration of the solitary life was a quest for a purity of soul and body.2
Thoreau devoted a distinct chapter to “Solitude” in Walden and at another point imagined a dialogue between a Hermit and a Poet, which allowed him to bring his spiritual and artistic sensibilities into a direct, if ironic, exchange. The Poet, rustling through the woods, interrupts the Hermit
