Long story short: Orestes Brownson was an intense and prolific nonfiction writer from the 1800’s who tried out a decent handful of religions before he came home to the Catholic Church.
In this article, I don’t summarize his life; see the links at the bottom if you want to read biographical details on him.
Orestes Brownson, as far as I’d been able to recall in the years since I’d read of him in high school, was a vastly underrated Catholic writer from the 1900’s. However, I remembered little other than that he converted to many Christian denominations and was a fiery, opinionated, and prolific writer.
I’d mostly forgotten about him, but in a recent conversation I had with other Catholic writers, I recalled he is a great example of a prolific and well known writer who eventually converted to Catholicism. I promised I’d share a bit about him on my blog, as he’s rather obscure these days.
Up until this morning, I was unaware that he still has many followers and proponents who called him the greatest writer of the 19th century. The 19th century, mind you, is not the 1900’s, so I definitely did not remember correctly.
I found that he’s actually written an astonishing amount of works; there is a list on this website:
http://www.orestesbrownson.org/writings.html
(A note: his website does not have a valid SSL encryption certificate currently, so your device or browser may prevent you from opening the page.)
Many of his works are actually reviews of other books, which he seems to mostly have printed in his publication, the Brownston’s Quarterly Review.
I skimmed some of the works on the orestesbrownson.org website, and I can conclude that I am sure his works have much merit, but are not quite “light reading,” to put it gently.
Take, for example, his essay, Essay in Refutation of Atheism, Pt. III (Brownson’s Quarterly Review, April, 1874).
This essay demonstrates much of what was described in his autobiography – that he is very educated and well read, and weaves many references to historical facts and literature into thoughtful and long works. However, if you are not comfortable reading works written in the version of English common to well educated men of the late 1800’s, his works may be a bit cumbersome for you to read.
For example, from that article:
… Three centuries ago Christian theism was held universally by all ranks and conditions of civilized society, and atheism was regarded with horror, and hardly dared show its head; now, the most esteemed, the most distinguished philosophers and scientists, like Emerson, Herbert Spencer, Professor Huxley, Emile Littre, Claude Bernard, Voigt, Buchmann, Sir John Lubbock, and Professor Tyndall, to mention no others, are decided pantheists, and undisguised atheists. They are not merely tolerated, but are held to be the great men and shining lights of the age. Pantheism – atheism – in our times originates with philosophers and scientists and descends to the people, and, in the absence of all proof to the contrary, it is fair to presume that it was the same in ancient times. The corruption, alike of language and of doctrine, is always the work of philosophers and of the learned or the half-learned, never of the people.
The various heathen mythologies never originated, and never could have originated, with the ignorant multitude, or with savage and barbarous tribes. …
And further down, it gets a little more philosophical and theological:
… The analysis of the ideal element of the object in thought, we have seen, shows that it is resolvable into being, existences, and their relation, and the analysis of the relation, real only in the related, brings us, so to speak, face to face with the Divine creative act. Real and necessary being can exist without creating, for it is, as say the theologians, actus purissimus, therefore in itself ens perfectissimum, and is not obliged to go out of itself, in order either to be or to perfect or complete itself, in which respect it is the contrary of the reine Seyn of Hegel. It is in itself infinite Fulness, Pleroma, Plenum, while the reine Seyn is the Byssos of the old Gnostics, or the Void of the Buddhists, and even Hegel makes it not being, but a Becoming – das Werden. The being given in ideal intuition is real and necessary being, self-existent, self-sufficing, complete in itself, wanting nothing, and incapable of receiving anything in addition to what it is, and is eternally.
Hence the ontologist, starting with being as his principium, can never arrive at existences, for being can be under no extrinsic or intrinsic necessity of creating. But, may not the psychologist conclude being from the intuition of existences? Not at all, because existences, not existing in and of themselves, are neither cognizable nor conceivable without the intuition of being. …
Curious to know more, I jumped into his other works. My interest was piqued by a title on slavery, The Slavery Question Once More, from Brownson’s Quarterly Review for April, 1857. In this work, he very firmly spoke against slavery and detailed how it doesn’t have a right to exist under common or natural law, and that no state can have a right to introduce it into any territory. He spoke of which institutions technically have the legal power to introduce or interfere with the practice, regardless of whether it’s moral. He seems to break it down to a state issue vs. a federal issue, and I’m going to be honest, it does remind me of the recent overturn of Roe v. Wade which put the abortion question into the hands of the states.
The only case in which it can be pretended that congress may interfere with the slave question is in the organization of territorial governments; but it cannot even in this case interfere with it, because under our system slavery is purely a state question, and has no existence where there is no state. The federal government is a government of express powers, and among its express powers there is none which gives it authority to introduce or abolish, to authorize or prohibit slavery. Its powers in regard to territories not yet erected into states are restricted to the necessities of the case, and must be exercised in accordance with the general principles of law. It may enforce the natural law, and is bound to protect all the rights which exist under the common law; but it can go no further, except by special constitutional provision. It has no authority to create new rights or to derogate from existing rights. But as slavery exists neither by the common law nor by the natural law, congress cannot introduce it in a territory; and as slavery exists only by virtue of municipal law, it cannot enter legally into any territory while a territory. So in no case has congress or the Union any power over the question of slavery, and hence both the Missouri compromise and the Wilmot proviso are unconstitutional, and ought never to have been adopted.
…
Slavery is, whether the supreme court has so decided or not, a local institution, rightfully existing only by virtue or municipal law. Under the law of nature, there are no slaves, for all men are created equal, and one man has no jus dominii over another. Hence all Americans maintain that power, in whose hands soever lodged, is a trust, and a trust to be exercised for the good of the governed, for whose benefit the trust is created. Neither the civil law nor the common law authorizes slavery, and every lawyer knows that all the presumptions of law are in the favor of freedom. There remains then no possible legal sanction of slavery but that of municipal law, which has no force out of the municipality. It exists with us, if it legally exists at all, by virtue of the local law of the state, and that law has and can have no extra-territorial jurisdiction. How then is it possible for slavery to have legal status in territory included within no state, and subject, aside from the law of congress, to no law but the law of nature?
Brownson occasionally has a rather confusing way of using the word “we” in his works, and I am still trying to piece out whether he refers to himself, his publication, or his nation in each place he uses that pronoun.
Anyways, if you want the whole of that piece, here it is: http://www.orestesbrownson.org/739.html
The last sample I will leave here, is an excerpt from his essay, Catholicity and Literature:
It has also been contended in more circles than one, that it is narrow-minded bigotry for a Catholic critic to make his religion a criterion in judging literary works. We have seen in a work of fiction an imaginary Catholic critic unmercifully ridiculed by an imaginary Catholic priest, for pronouncing judgment on literary works, according to Catholic faith and morals. The author can have little reason to pique himself on his proficiency as a moral theologian. He seems to proceed on the assumption, that religion has nothing to do with politics. The writer, most likely, has not reflected that between judging of a book, as one to be commended or not to be commended to the public, and judging its simply literary merits, there is a difference. If in the former case, the much-ridiculed imaginary critic used his Catholicity as his standard of judgment, he acted only as an honest man, and a consistent Christian; if he did so in the latter case, he deserved, no doubt, to be rebuked for taking up a trade he did not understand. For ourselves, we judge, and we cannot help judging, all literary and artistic productions, when determining their doctrinal or ethical character, by the standard furnished by our Catholic faith and morals; but in determining their purely literary or artistic merits, we judge according to our literary or artistic cultivation, tastes, and principles, as every man does, whether Catholic or non-Catholic. Books may be, as the Wahlverwandtschaften of Goethe, unexceptional, under the relation of mere literature, and yet not be commendeds literary works, because they may be false in doctrine, unsound in philosophy, and immoral in their spirit and tendency. Books, again, may be free from all blame as doctrinal and moral; and yet, like Father Jonathan, for instance, be wholly deficient in literary merit. In the latter case, as a Catholic, we recognize the author’s orthodoxy and applaud his good intentions; but, as a literary man, we have nothing to say to his favor, and must beg him to excuse us from commending or reading his productions. In the former case we may recognize the purely literary or artistic merit; but however great it may be, we must condemn the work, because no amount of purely literary merit can atone for the slightest offence to Catholic faith and virtue. We must condemn the book, though in doing so, we condemn not the genius, learning, ability, or skill of the author, for they, in themselves, are good; but his application, or rather, abuse of them.
Catholicity and Literature
The rest of it can be found here – I think this piece is actually pretty inspiring and thought-provoking for a Catholic author. (http://www.orestesbrownson.org/729.html)
Thank you for reading! Personally, I’d love to dig more into this man’s works more than the surface level of detail I have done here. If you have any thoughts or see any mistakes here, please let me know!
If you want more of his works, here is the link to the list of his works again:
http://www.orestesbrownson.org/writings.html
Since I completely overlooked writing much of what went on in his life, here are links to more information on him:
http://www.orestesbrownson.org/bio.html
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