Brownson’s Approach to god: The Catholic Period

BROWNSON'S APPROACH TO GOD: THE CATHOLIC PERIOD ON BECOMING A Roman Catholic in October of 1844, Orestes A. Brownson * had already acquired, at least in germ, many of the leading ideas that would shape his approach to God as a Catholic. Victor Cousin's model of the infinite, the finite, and their relation; the Idea taken as objective in the sense of Plato; the "synthetic philosophy " comprising the subject, the object, and their relationthese and other ideas would shape Brownson's development of the Ideal Formula (Being creates existences), the focus of his search as a Catholic for an objective or ontological foundation for God's reality.1 Some of these pre-Catholic ideas, of course, would undergo transformation in his Catholic period. Cousin's Absolute or spontaneous Reason, for example, would be replaced by the objective Ideal understood as real and necessary Being.2 *Orestes A. Brownson (1803-1876), an editor and a prolific writer on many questions facing 19th century America, was born in Vermont in 1803. He imbibed the spirit of New England Puritanism and became a Presbyterian at nineteen. Then he successively became a Universalist preacher (1826-28), espoused social reform as a radical humanist (1829-31), became a Unitarian minister (1832), organized his own " Church of the Future " (1836), developed certain aspects of New England Transcendentalism, and finally converted to Roman Catholicism (1844) . After a stormy but productive career as a Catholic layman, he died in 1876. 1 On becoming a Catholic, Brownson's instructor, Bishop Fitzpatrick of Boston, asked him to relinquish his pre-conversion philosophy for a scholastic philosophy. This, plus Brownson's concern to form a philosophy compatible with Catholic teaching, were the underlying concerns of his God-Question after his conversion to Catholicism. These factors both limited and enhanced his rather distinctive approach to a philosophical theology of God. • In a letter to Cousin, Brownson told him that he discarded his distinction between the Absolute and subjective reason, but maintained a deep interest in de571 57~ RICHARD M. LELIAERT Brownson's approach to the God-question as a Catholic would be primarily philosophical, not biblical, in character. Against fl.deists and traditionalists, he believed human reason capable of yielding genuine knowledge of God to supplement, not supplant, knowledge of God gained through faith.3 Though Brownson in fact both granted and pre-supposed God's reality as known through faith in a theological sense, his prime concern was how certain knowledge of God could be attained via human reason as it reflected on the data of ordinary experience or via a logic which conformed to " the real order of things." Since this search was carried out intermittently in the pages of his Quarterly Review, his theology lacked the systematic character found in the later Barth's Church Dogmatics or Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology. In spirit, however, his theology would be more akin to the philosophical theology of Tillich than to the confessional-biblical theology of Karl Barth; his approach to God as real and necessary Being would be much closer to veloping the implications of Plato's thought. Brownson to Cousin, Sept. 1, 1844, Brownson Papers, University of Notre Dame Archives (henceforward UNDA). 8 Cf. Brownson's Quarterly Review, (edited by O. A. Brownson, Boston & New York, 1844-1864, 1873-1875; (henceforward BrQR) April, 1852, 146-7 and January, 1854, 34-5; also The Works of Orestes A. Brownson (20 vols., collected and arranged by Henry F. Brownson, Detroit: Thorndike Nourse, 1882-1887; henceforth Works) II, (1875), 519l-3; I, (1855), 306-23. Traditionalism was concerned with how we achieved certainty in regard to religious truth; it felt this certainty to have been undermined by Cartesian methodic doubt. According to Traditionalism, a philosophical and theological doctrine prominent in certain parts of Europe (especially in France) during the 19th century, human reason by itself was not capable of attaining truths of a metaphysical or moral nature. Human reason needed to be supplemented by external instruction in the form of divine revelation which taught man not only supernatural truths but also such natural truths as the nature of being, the moral law, and the immortality of the soul. The existence of God...