the valuing of silence, solitude, and serene meditation;
• the immanence of the transcendent—in each person and in nature;
• the cosmopolitan appreciation of religious variety as well as unity in diversity;
• ethical earnestness in pursuit of justice-producing reforms or “social salvation”;
• an emphasis on creative self-expression and adventuresome seeking.
An interlocking group of precepts and practices, these could pass under various names—from the Transcendentalist Newness to the Universal Religion to the New Spirituality. Religious liberalism remains particularly serviceable as shorthand for this conglomeration.13
Imbued to varying degrees with these principles, emancipated souls set out less on a pilgrimage toward otherworldly salvation and more on an individualized search to imbue this life with spiritual meaning and depth. Liberal pilgrims still made progress, but they did so not through the perilous landscape of damnation in John Bunyan's seventeenth-century representation of the journey to the Celestial City. Instead, they traversed an increasingly disenchanted and divided terrain that they sought to reanimate and make whole through a universalized religion of the spirit. That new topography had its own hazards, of course—mires of alienation, lost identity, and nihilism—that sometimes made hell seem more real than the spewing of any fire-and- brimstone evangelist. As Whitman observed in Leaves of Grass,
Down-hearted doubters dull and excluded,
Frivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affected, dishearten'd, atheistical,
I know every one of you, I know the sea of torment, doubt, despair and unbelief.
In opening up new roads for traveling souls, religious liberals regularly confronted those psychic risks and sometimes even overcame them.14
In a moment of irrational exuberance all his own, Thomas Jefferson once predicted that Unitarianism, as a newly minted denomination of “liberal Christians” in New England, would come to dominate American religious life as a great force of reason. With its emphasis on Jesus as moral exemplar more than divine being, its optimism about human nature, and its refined educative vision, Unitarianism would, Jefferson believed, set the tone for the new republic's unfolding improvement and advancing knowledge, its freedom from superstition and intolerance. “I confidently expect,” he wrote from Monticello in 1822, “that the present generation will see Unitarianism become the general religion of the United States.”15 That ascent did not come close to happening and now sounds downright laughable as a prediction (in a nation of about 150 million church members, Unitarian Universalists account for just over 150,000 of them). Looked at another way—say, from the far reaches of Emerson's influence—disaffected Unitarians and their liberal kin did have a sweeping effect on American religious life and the spiritual aspirations of vast numbers of Americans.
The spiritual life, as religious romantics imagined it, was nothing if not personal, and any adequate history of these developments has to emerge out of the inner lives of distinct figures. Many of those who people these pages are familiar (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, W. E. B. Du Bois, and William James), others somewhat less so (Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Lydia Maria Child, Felix Adler, Rufus Jones, Ralph Waldo Trine, Swami Vivekananda, Howard Thurman, and Thomas Kelly), and some all but forgotten (William Rounseville Alger, Anagarika Dharmapala, Sarah Farmer, Protap Mozoomdar, and Max Ehrmann). Attributable to this diverse group of thinkers, writers, and organizers were most of the fundamental innovations: the transformation of “mysticism” and “spirituality” from obscurity to prominence, the revamping of the seventeenth-century notion of “seekers,” the locating of religion's essence in the solitary individual, as well as the sympathetic capacity to appreciate and appropriate other religious traditions as spiritual resources. The following chapters pursue four generations of liberals who helped create an expansive, unsettled culture of spiritual seeking: the Transcendentalists of the 1830s and 1840s, their radical heirs of the 1850s to 1880s, the realizing agents of liberalism's universal vision between 1890 and 1910, and the seekers who brought to fruition the emergent spirituality after 1910.16
Restless Souls opens with a chapter that dives into the heart of the Transcendentalist love of “mysticism.” The English term came into being only in the mid-eighteenth century as part of the polemics over the place of ecstatic experience in the Christian life, and its associations were initially more negative than positive. A century later, it was an important and colorful fragment in the spiritual kaleidoscope. The eighteenth-century Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, whose accounts of his extensive conversations with angels were more popular in death than in life, was one important contributor to this transformation; he reached the height of his American influence in the 1840s and 1850s. Homegrown mystics became increasingly prevalent, and many of them emerged at the intersections of the Transcendental Club and the Harvard Divinity School, a place, as one of its own deans admitted, “made up of mystics, skeptics, and dyspeptics.” By the time the pioneering American psychologist William James embraced “mysticism” as a prominent part of his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), he had a sustained lineage upon which to build. James's exploration of mystical consciousness represented a culmination in the ascent of the new mysticism from Emerson forward—a climb that had been swift and momentous in its effects. The United States was a country, a critic sighed in 1906, where “mysticism” and “a craving for spiritual experiences” had “run mad.”17
One of the most important Transcendentalist innovations, charted in the second chapter, was the remaking of the hermit's solitude into a much more expansive spiritual trope. Before Emerson celebrated lonely strolls through nature in the 1830s and before Thoreau took to the woods at Walden Pond in the 1840s, the hermit had suffered a fall from grace, with Enlightenment philosophers and Protestant critics alike attacking the “monkery” of Catholic anchorites. In the early American republic the hermit, as a social type, also stood as an outcast who sought solitude as a refuge for lonely suffering, and the tales that circulated had a tragic cast of violence, lost love, and ominous mystery. Hermits were no longer enviable or heroic embodiments of religious dedication, austerity, or vision; they more often evoked bemused curiosity than pious awe; and sometimes that curiosity turned into outright contempt, especially when the self-mortifying practices of the ancient desert saints were in view. In the half-century or so after the 1840s, however, solitude reemerged as a defining feature of the spiritual life in American culture, an oasis of redemptive isolation amid the myriad alienations of modernity. It became such an entrenched habit of mind, if not body, that such grand theorists as William James and Alfred North Whitehead made solitary experience the core of religion itself. Aptly enough, James even noted one quirky seeker he had come across in his combing of spiritual narratives for whom the very mention of “the word hermit was enough to transport him.”18
The third chapter explores the growing conviction that all the religions of the world were cut from the same cloth, that at bottom they shared a common spirituality. The Transcendentalists, eclectics to the core, were the first Americans to dabble with Asian religions as a source of personal inspiration and spiritual aspiration. From Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman on down, they distanced themselves from orthodox Christianity (and unorthodox Christianity for that matter) through appeal to the religions of the East. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a second-generation Transcendentalist, was especially prominent in crafting an absorbent, inclusive religion out of the various religions of the world. Higginson, a radical abolitionist who led an African-American regiment during the Civil War, made a signal religious contribution through a frequently republished essay called “The Sympathy of Religions.” Higginson and his numerous colleagues—among
