On December 15, 1851, Andrew Jackson Davis—self-styled Harmonial philosopher and noted scion of the spiritualist world—sent a public letter. Addressed through the Hartford Times to the controversial Congregationalist minister Horace Bushnell, the message concerned the first of a series of lectures Bushnell was delivering at his North Church. Davis, who at the time claimed Hartford, Connecticut, as his base, was clearly excited. The announced topic—“On the Naturalistic Theories of Religion as Opposed to Supernatural Revelation”—already gave Davis “much pleasure,” suggesting a position “entirely unlike any other ever assumed by the clergy of Christendom.” More than that, Bushnell's way of approaching the subject and defining his position was “considerably unlike the method pursued by most clergymen,” since Bushnell relied on his own “reason or judgment” to address “the corresponding faculty in the mind of the hearer.” Davis went on to propose that, with so important an issue, better to move the lectures from Bushnell's North Church pulpit to a different location and to invite “all parties interested” to “analyze and examine before the same audience the various positions.”Footnote ¹

The public letter of 1851 formed part of the opening chapter of a tendentious work first published by Davis himself in 1852 and later, more conventionally, in 1868. Titled The Approaching Crisis, the 1868 edition offered six lectures that Davis had delivered before the Hartford Harmonialists along with the introduction, a conclusion, and a discourse by New York minister F. C. Ewer whose analysis of the failures of Protestantism evidently pleased Davis. Bushnell functioned as a great foil in the lectures, providing an “enemy” against which Davis could, Quixote-like, tilt his rhetorical sword, since Bushnell had not responded to his earlier overtures. Davis longed for the triumph of “the principles of a spiritual republicanism” over the dogma and organization of the conventional church. And he ended his decidedly overwritten work with his rejection of all “unnatural supernaturalism” in favor of the views of those he called “Liberal Christians and Harmonial Philosophers.”Footnote ²

The “approaching crisis” the discourses named in 1852 was not the Civil War but rather the demise of Christianity as it then existed: Davis had pronounced a pox on both Protestant and Catholic houses, and Bushnell was swept away in the anathemas. Davis himself, by the 1850s, had achieved wide notice among spiritualists and metaphysical fellow travelers in a variegated career that included trance productions both in his deliverances of the Harmonial Philosophy and in his work as a psychic physician. A reformer especially concerned with marriage and divorce law, he represented the speculative side of spiritualism by contrast with those who mostly followed it for the drama of the séance circles. He had come from a poor and dysfunctional family in upstate New York, had experienced little in the way of formal education, and had made his way to Poughkeepsie on the Hudson River. There, after an introduction to animal magnetism (an earlier form of what today is known as hypnotism), he had begun to experiment, to travel in radical spiritual circles, and to grow more outspoken and strident in expressing his convictions and views. He believed that the ancient Greek physician Galen and the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg had jointly initiated him for a special mission in society.

Organized Christianity stood squarely in the way of the new spiritual republic Davis envisioned, in which nature and nature's law reigned supreme. In his own romanticized version of the Enlightenment, he claimed that he could see the spirit emerging from the body of the dying. Moreover, he proclaimed that the after-death abodes of the spirit, which he could also see, were part of nature. They were configured in concentric “spheres,” were progressive, and were the temporary dwelling places for spirits as they moved toward a seventh sphere. Spirits, in fact, were refined forms of matter that an evolving science would eventually understand and that, meanwhile, those like himself—on the cutting edge of reason and truth—could announce to others. Davis thus read himself on the side of advancement and progress. By contrast, the Christian clergy generically represented resistance and intellectual oppression, holding the populace back from the enlightenment his Harmonial Philosophy offered.Footnote ³

Davis's clerical opponent Horace Bushnell differed sharply from Davis in more ways than a non-embrace of Harmonialism. Bushnell came from solidly middle-class roots and a stable family setting. Reared in rural northwestern Connecticut, with a Methodist father and Episcopalian mother, he had been baptized Episcopalian (the only church in town was Episcopalian). Thus his Christianity from the first came in a version softer than orthodox Calvinism, even as the farm and wool-carding business that occupied his family brought its ups and downs and perhaps influenced his own search for religious certainty. The young Bushnell had some false starts in finding his place in life, with stints in teaching, journalism, and law. Then—with encouragement from his mother and a conversion experience in which he overrode his “head” because of messages from his “heart”—he ended at the Yale Divinity School. Licensed to preach by the New Haven West Association in 1832, by the following year he was called as the Congregationalist pastor of the North Church in Hartford, a position he held until he felt forced by ill health to resign in 1859—much to the regret and chagrin of his congregation.

Throughout the years of his tenure, Bushnell sparked intellectual conflict and the consternation of both conservatives and liberals. In 1847 his provocative Discourses on Christian Nurture appeared, challenging the revival paradigm of instant conversion with an “organic” and gradualist approach that championed the work of the Christian home and family in shaping the child. Then in 1849, after the publication of his book God in Christ with its lengthy introduction on the metaphorical quality of religious language, a series of “discussions” began among local and larger denominational associations that became, in effect, a heresy trial. Although the Hartford Central Association of Ministers found the “errors” in his book not “fundamental,” the Fairfield West Association did not agree. Matters were partially resolved in 1852 when the North Church of Hartford withdrew from any affiliation to become an independent congregation, but lingering protests continued from official circles until 1854. In the midst of the controversy, Bushnell published still another book to explain his views, Christ in Theology (1851), which reiterated his metaphorical views of language. He even, in one passage, admired Hermes Trismegistus, the mysterious figure of the Greco-Egyptian world (putatively priest of the Egyptian deity Thoth) to whom a series of ancient texts, including the mystical Corpus Hermeticum, are attributed, and who functioned as an icon for an emerging metaphysical movement. The material that formed the basis of the course of lectures that Davis had found so maddening was eventually published in 1858 as Nature and the Supernatural, declaring without reservation that both constituted “one system of God” and that humans belonged to the supernatural realm.Footnote ⁴ Throughout his career, Bushnell published volumes of sermons that were generally well received, and he continued to produce single-topic, book-length works that were not without controversy.

Bushnell apparently found Davis as maddening as Davis found him. In the midst of his lectures, he wrote to Unitarian minister Cyrus Bartol (who had ties with Emersonian Transcendentalists) and told his friend about his work, complaining about Davis's public attention.

I. Man in the Middle

It is easy to read this report in terms of the great disparities of class and education between Bushnell and Davis, and these factors were surely involved in Bushnell's disdain and fear of contact. But there is even more at stake. The unspeakable problem with Davis, for Bushnell, was that the Harmonialist shared conceptual similarities and intuitive perceptions that came strikingly close to Bushnell's own. This is precisely why Davis found himself so drawn to the Congregationalist minister and why, when Bushnell enthusiastically affirmed Christian truth and experience from the premises he employed, Davis became so inflamed. The two men shared a number of basic views and ideas about the nature of the world, and so—in a spiritual sense—they were engaged in a family quarrel. It was a familiar quarrel among those who liked to travel in Christian borderlands. Indeed, this is the kind of quarrel that Ralph Waldo Emerson had with spiritualists (he called spiritualism “Rat-revelation”) and with Davis's Emanuel Swedenborg, whom Emerson himself used in his work via the writings of Sampson Reed. It is the quarrel that longtime Methodist minister Warren Felt Evans, with a background in Oberlin perfectionism and quietism, in his turn would have with spiritualists and Swedenborgians—until he became part of both groups and then a major thinker for what became New Thought. And it is the quarrel that Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy also had with mesmerists, spiritualists, and others moving beyond Christian revelation.Footnote ⁶

In Bushnell's case, ironically Davis—the poor relation—had, as Howard Barnes observed, “used many of the same arguments Bushnell himself had used in his early naturalistic Views of Christian Nurture.”Footnote ⁷ Bushnell's organicism and its connection to a transcendent world were clearly visible then; by 1858 the organicism was, more and more, becoming disguised. To put this another way, Bushnell stood between the representatives of the organized Anglo-Protestant orthodoxy of his day and, with his self-conscious embrace of Christianity, an emerging community of religionists alienated from Christianity who may collectively be termed metaphysical. That not all of the metaphysically inclined melted away from Christian allegiance is very clear, and Bushnell may be seen as a kind of standard bearer for those who did not.

By way of elaboration here, by century's end the term metaphysics would signal beliefs and practices focusing on the power of mind, its correspondence with a realm more vast than the human social world, the energies that connection with the larger realm generated, and its healing, salvific results for present life. Much earlier though, and before the term was in vogue, this form of American religiosity incorporated the mystical Hermetic tradition of the West based eponymously on the writings of the legendary Hermes Trismegistus and similar texts and views. The corpus of Hermetic writings had been rediscovered in the West at the time of the Italian Renaissance, and subsequently the writings became a catchall for other mystical systems that bore a family resemblance. Among them were Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and ancient forms of astrology as well as, by medieval times, the Kabbalah, especially in its Christianized form, and alchemy and Paracelsianism. By the early modern period, Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry mingled in the mix. In America, this high-culture Hermeticism combined with a less elite brew that included imported English country magic and Continental mystical species of millennialism and Native American and African American lore.Footnote ⁸

These spiritual and cultural influences congealed enough in the United States to be identified in the spiritualist movement of the middle nineteenth century. They also pervaded the culture more broadly in and through the European romanticism that was making its way in newly urbanizing middle-class American cultures. Here, love of physical nature in all its wildness and spontaneity existed side by side with Platonic and Neoplatonic idealizations of nature and with a progressivism that melded, in its own way, with Christian millennialism. In its turn, metaphysical religiosity was sometimes expressed in and through vernacular forms of Christianity and sometimes not. Indeed, as with Davis, it respected Jesus but was often hostile to Christianity as an organized tradition. It is this mixed and diffuse growth that began to be studied by an earlier generation of scholars (notably J. Stillson Judah and Charles S. Braden) under the rubric of metaphysics and attention to which has been revived in more recent scholarship.Footnote ⁹

Bushnell himself was interacting with this multi-faceted and shape-shifting religious growth in Christian terms. He was a man in the middle, embracing an orthodox past and taking steps toward an uncertain future, charting a path for other Christians who were beginning to think and speak the language of metaphysics. This meant, as this essay will explore, Bushnell's abiding preference for organicism and its symbolic referent in the world of mind and spirit. It also meant his declaration for analogical thinking according to the “laws” of correspondence in which heaven and earth were glimpsed as one mystical (fused and unified) whole and for clairvoyant “miracles” in which divine energies sifted and shaped earthly manifestations. Similarly, it signaled a theology of delight—understood, in the conventional sense, as a high degree of joy and gratification or satisfaction in divine things. It signaled, too, that delight conferred healing and wholeness by transforming religion into an aesthetic and spirituality of pleasure. Finally, it signaled, in addition, a fundamental turn toward negative theology, the historic way of expressing the unfathomable mystery of divine reality by denying every human predicate with which it might be associated.

None of this made Bushnell an exception or a maverick religiously, although it did get him into trouble with denominational officials. Rather, the language that Bushnell spoke and wrote shared common characteristics with rhetorical formations that were becoming powerful mediating symbols in the public discourse of his time. Although Bushnell himself could not have known or used the late nineteenth-century term to name his new spirituality, what later came to be known as metaphysical religiosity was in the air, and Bushnell—from a variety of sources—had breathed its message.

Significantly, Bushnell criticism has from the first read him as a mediating figure. Summarizing the scholarship in the classic first edition (1965) of his religious history of the United States, Winthrop S. Hudson headed his treatment of Bushnell with the title “The Mediating Theology of Horace Bushnell.” For Hudson and the critical consensus he represented, Bushnell was “both ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ in his emphases.” The famed Congregationalist found “much of Christian truth in the older tradition of New England,” but he also appropriated and incorporated “insights derived from the Unitarian critique.” Hudson presented a Bushnell who acknowledged human freedom in an individualistic context but also underlined the ties and connections to organic communities in home, church, neighborhood, and nation. Bushnell sought to restore harmony between revival enthusiasts and those who stressed “the formative influence of the community of faith.” “His endeavor was to be a mediator,” wrote Hudson, “seeking to reconcile the intimations of Christian truth that were to be found in diverse theological camps.” Joining together revivalism and the “ordered life of home and congregation,” declared Hudson, Bushnell “reconciled the major contentions of the Unitarians with an evangelical understanding of the Christian faith.”Footnote ¹⁰

Even a cursory glance at Bushnell's major biographers corroborates and continues Hudson's estimate and, in fact, multiplies the mediations. Bushnell's daughter Mary Bushnell Cheney, for example, thought that nobody since famed Unitarian William Ellery Channing “had so much the power of becoming a kind of mediating agent between different tendencies in religion.” Bushnell's student and disciple Theodore T. Munger saw his mentor's general method as “a careful adjustment between destruction and construction, with strong emphasis on the latter.” He went on to declare emphatically that “Bushnell took nothing away from theology without restoring fourfold; he was always and in all ways a builder.” Much later and more professionally distant in her assessment, Barbara Cross read the mediation as between Christianity and romanticism. “These tensions between traditional Christianity and nineteenth-century romanticism played through Bushnell's religious thought,” she observed, “and much of his achievement lay in his complex mediation between two realms of value.” Writing much later than Hudson, Robert L. Edwards summarized his biography with an evocation of religious experience: “Bushnell's Eternal had come closer to the human condition than consistent Calvinists could allow, and he was more gentle, thus opening a new theological day. Yet for him, the Divine never lost majesty or moral command.” Most recently, Robert Bruce Mullin has stressed Bushnell's ties to Puritanism and read him both as a “proto-liberal and proto-Pentecostal,” casting Bushnell's memory of the Puritans as a “symbol of pan-New England unity in the face of both revivalism and episcopacy.” “The Congregationalists and the Unitarians were really one community of the children of the Puritans, who had tragically divided over theological questions earlier in the century,” he wrote. Bushnell was trying to heal the rupture even as he nudged the putative community into new times.Footnote ¹¹

Yet as the Davis–Bushnell episode hints and this essay argues, there was another mediation that Bushnell accomplished, and arguably it was even more significant than the mediations that these biographers were noticing. Bushnell mediated between Anglo-American Protestant orthodoxy and an emergent form of Protestantism ready to rethink itself into a borderland in which metaphysical religiosity was beginning to take shape as a recognizable way of believing. The metaphysical religiosity that Bushnell saw from the margin embraced many traditions including aspects of Christianity, but in many cases it turned its back on a Christian past in favor of other spiritual reports. Bushnell talked the talk familiar to other metaphysicians and also walked their walk, especially, as we will see, in terms of the mystical side to his character. But in the end, there was a fork in the road in which many walked away from Christianity. Bushnell did not, and in his choice and his mediation he charted a path for others who would continue to be Christians metaphysically. Still more, when he talked the metaphysical talk in terms of a basic semantics, he always brought the working vocabulary home to Christian concepts and doctrines. For Bushnell, the important words were God, Christ, sacrifice, sin, atonement, grace, baptism.

Socially, Bushnell was surprisingly comfortable with many who might themselves be described as proto-metaphysical. Cyrus Bartol, with his Transcendental connections, was, according to Robert Mullin, Bushnell's closest clerical friend during the period of his heresy trial. Still further, Mary Cheney tells us that her father spent an evening in 1843 with Theodore Parker, with whom he discussed the entire terrain of theology, and that he locked arms with George Ripley in a procession at a “Bunker Hill Celebration,” as they walked to hear Daniel Webster orate. He also may have known Ralph Waldo Emerson slightly. At least once, in a letter to George Partridge Bradford, Emerson noted that he had seen Bushnell among “other notabilities” in Lenox, Massachusetts, on an 1854 visit.Footnote ¹²

These personal ties are important and set a frame to Bushnell's published remarks concerning Transcendental views and concerning several of the Transcendentalists themselves. Nature and the Supernatural, especially, can be read as a long rebuttal to Theodore Parker's controversial views in support of natural religion and against miracles in his 1841 sermon “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity” and his 1842 Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion. Wrote Bushnell: “Mr. Parker undertakes to frame a rational view of religion that sets it on the footing of nature. I have undertaken to frame a rational view of religion that comprehends nature and the supernatural as co-eternal factors in the universal system of God.”Footnote ¹³ In the case of Emerson, the rebuttal came more crisply. As leader of the “new school of naturalistic literature” and with no one a “finer master of English than Mr. Emerson,” a reader would be “surprised to find—who has ever failed to notice it?—that he is disabled . . . disempowered, reduced in tone” as a result of the reading. Emerson had “no great thought or purpose in him,” and his work was, in fact, “somehow mephitic.” It lacked, for Bushnell, the acknowledgment of the “living God, and objects of faith” so central to his own life.Footnote ¹⁴ More than that, Bushnell's understanding of the role of humans in terms of nature represented a direct inversion of Emerson's in his groundbreaking 1836 book Nature. Whereas Emerson had seen human technology applied to natural sources as, in a philosophical sense, part of nature, Bushnell thought otherwise. “Nature never built a house, or modelled a ship, or fitted a coat, or invented a steam-engine, or wrote a book, or framed a constitution. These are all events that spring out of human liberty.”Footnote ¹⁵

Yet—less defensive, less intent on drawing a line in the sand—at the end of his life in his unfinished treatise on the Holy Spirit, Bushnell could hail Emerson in a remarkable note of commendation. He clearly resonated to Emerson's Oversoul. It meant, Bushnell declared authoritatively, “in fact, the Holy Spirit,” and Emerson was “writing as one who is captivated by the beauty of his character and office.” Bushnell's confident claim to knowledge of the Transcendentalist's authorial intention surprises: “He [Emerson] conceives him to be a kind of all-infolding Soul, communicating God and life to man and filling the office of an all-cherishing all-correcting nurture in the race. He has no questions to raise concerning the universality of the conception. Its beauty proves it, he would say, to be true.”Footnote ¹⁶

There is yet more to be said about the Bushnell–Emerson connection. The two had a common literary hero in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose Aids to Reflection in the James Marsh edition of 1829 attracted almost a cult following among those drawn to literature, philosophy, and religion from a romantic perspective. It was from Coleridge that Bushnell drew major components of his “Preliminary Dissertation on Language,” which formed the controversial introduction to God in Christ (other components came from his Yale teachers, especially Josiah W. Gibbs). Here was Bushnell's own version of the Emersonian and later metaphysical theory of correspondence. Assessing the importance of the “Preliminary Dissertation” for a Bushnell who had thought it “key to his line of thought throughout the book,” his daughter Mary Cheney found it more significant still. Bushnell's views of language, she stated, were the keystone for all his thought. “Here, we repeat with emphasis, is the key to Horace Bushnell, to the whole scheme of his thought, to that peculiar manner of expression which marked his individuality,—in a word, to the man.”Footnote ¹⁷

If so, the key to Bushnell suggests the common territory he was sharing with Emerson and other Transcendentalists, as Philip F. Gura long ago recognized when he called Bushnell a Christian Transcendentalist.Footnote ¹⁸ Arguably, the most repeated technical term throughout the “Preliminary Dissertation” was analogy, a restatement of the idea of correspondence that permeated Emerson's work and that of others who had become familiar, on this side of the Atlantic, with the writings of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. Bushnell himself used the term analogy favored by his teacher Josiah Gibbs. But the grand theory of language that Bushnell unfolded showed notable, even stunning, similarities to Emerson's in Nature and to the general symbolic thinking of emerging metaphysicians that led them to the kind of theological permissiveness critics attributed to Bushnell. As Donald A. Crosby observed, “In view of the attention attracted by Emerson's essay, it is difficult to see how Bushnell could have avoided reading it at some time during the twelve-year period from the time of its publication until he came to the writing of his own dissertation on language.”Footnote ¹⁹

With metaphysical religiosity and its views of mind and correspondence on the horizon, consider, for example, Bushnell's declarative statement in the “Preliminary Dissertation.” “All things out of sense get their names in language through signs and objects in sense that have some mysterious correspondence or analogy, by which they are prepared beforehand to serve as signs or vehicles of the spiritual things to be expressed.” In a striking earlier statement, Emerson had proposed in Nature that words were “signs of natural facts,” that “particular natural facts” were “symbols of particular spiritual facts,” and that “nature” was the “symbol of spirit.”Footnote ²⁰ Bushnell, reading nature in a direction apparently different from the one he reproduced in Nature and the Supernatural, saw a “logos in the form of things,” with the “outer world” a “vast dictionary and grammar of thought” and “also itself an organ throughout of Intelligence.” “Whose intelligence?” The answer was clear. It was “God, the universal Author” who stood “expressed every where, so that, turn whichsoever way we please, we behold the outlooking of His intelligence.” There was no need “to hunt for Him by curious arguments and subtle deductions. . . . No series of Bridgewater treatises, piled even to the moon, could give a proof of God so immediate, complete, and conclusive.” Indeed, “the whole universe of nature” was “a perfect analogon of the whole universe of thought or spirit.”Footnote ²¹

How was divine thought expressed in and from nature? Again, the answer, for Bushnell, was clear. The “words” in nature, like the words on pages and on human lips, were metaphors. Hidden in the etymology of any word was a poetic apprehension derived from the observation of nature. But, to use the dictum of a later time, religious and theological words, especially, were dead metaphors. “Words of thought, though based on mere figures or analogies in their original adoption, gradually lose their indeterminate character, and settle down under the law of use.” Unfortunately, too, “in a long course of repetition, the figure dies out, and the formula settles into a literality”; it becomes what is untrue. This estimate led Bushnell to the judgments that many church leaders found so troubling. As in metaphysical religiosity with its ideas of divine energies needing to permeate the earth, Bushnell was on a mission to move away from rationalistic theological arguments and into the life-giving realm of poetry and beauty. His disdaining reference to treatises suggests much. Study the scriptures, yes, he said. But do not “be rationalists over the scriptures.” Using methods predicated on his views of language, “the scriptures will be more studied than they have been and in a different manner—not as a magazine of propositions and mere dialectic entities, but as inspirations and poetic forms of life; requiring, also, divine inbreathings and exaltations in us, that we may ascend into their meaning.”Footnote ²² The practical result was that religious disputes should fizzle away, since no statement about the nature of divinity could be exact and precise. Feeling, not logic, brought one to the threshold of the divine, and words could help because they could excite the passions of the soul.

As early as 1839, invited to Andover Seminary to give an address on the occasion of his election to the Porter Rhetorical Society, Bushnell had presaged these essentially metaphysical views of language. In words that evoked the talk of “hieroglyphs” that was part of the discourse of the age in certain circles, he told the Andover audience that “not the Bible only reveals him but the whole temple of being around us and above is written over with spiritual hieroglyphs all radiant with his light.” God had created the “outward world” as “a vast store house of types or images fitted to represent thoughts and be interpreted between man and man.” There were words for things and words for thoughts, and humans used the words for things to signal the words for thoughts and the spiritual truths that they sought to express.Footnote ²³

Later, after critics panned God in Christ and in the midst of his heresy dispute, Bushnell would publish a revised version of his defense before the Hartford Central Association of Ministers in a new book-length work, Christ in Theology (1851). Ironically given his desire to clear himself, again he began with a chapter on language that evoked Transcendentalists and metaphysical fellow-travelers. A “single principle,” he declared, was the key to what he meant to say: “that all religious truth, as well theological as practical, is and must be presented under conditions of form or analogy from the outward state.” The unselfconscious metaphysical company he was keeping became clearer as Bushnell admired Sir Thomas Brown, who had embraced the philosophy of Hermes Trismegistus, and agreed with him enthusiastically. “It is remarkable,” Bushnell pronounced, “that this Egyptian Hermes, to whom he refers, and who is computed to have lived even twenty centuries before Christ, was able, in the depths of nature, and apart from the aids of revelation, to verify it as a truth that ‘all things which are in heaven are in the earth, after an earthly manner; and all which are in the earth are in heaven, [the world of thought and spirit,] after a celestial manner.’”Footnote ²⁴

As above, so below. It was the central working proposition of metaphysical religiosity. As late as 1869, in an essay that first appeared in the magazine Hours at Home, Bushnell in effect reaffirmed the adage, reading the Christian gospel as a “Gift” to the “Human Imagination” and one that—as metaphysicians would have it—worked in healing, salvific ways. “Every line or lineament” was “traced in some image or metaphor,” and the reverberations of that message extended as high as heaven. Readers needed, according to Bushnell, to “look into language itself and see how the great revelation of God is coming and to come.” Religious truth arrived through images, and the images—to use a term both technical and devotional—were charged sacramentally; they conveyed the very reality they symbolized. The power to create and perceive truth through images—imagination—had “nothing to do with ornament.” By contrast, it was “that which dawns in beauty like the day because the day is in it; that power in human bosoms which reads the types of the creation, beholding stamps of God's meanings in their faces; the power that distinguishes truths in their images, and seizes hold of images for the expression of truths.” Words, too, were images with faces. They could bring fire and healing life—“so that a free, great soul, when it is charged with thoughts so high, and fresh beholdings in such vigor of life, that it cannot find how to express itself otherwise, does it by images and metaphors in flame that somehow body the meaning in imaginative apprehension.” In the end, there was one great Logos that was also one great Metaphor, as Bushnell summarized: “We can say nothing of Christ so comprehensively adequate as to call him the metaphor of God: God's last metaphor!”Footnote ²⁵

The message of the metaphysicians was all here. The Logos—Mind or Thought—could be found in nature and in language, especially, for Bushnell, biblical language. Both were mediating symbols that catapulted a soul into divine presence and life because the symbolic correspondence held a secret power of symmetry. If, as in metaphysically oriented belief, everything was like everything else, everything could act on everything else. Here was mystical union as an active principle in the world. Bushnell had entered an essentially magical metaphysical universe, and one galvanized by divine energy. The result was healing and salvation. Nor were these connections only theoretical. Like so many attracted to emerging metaphysical religiosity, throughout his life Bushnell demonstrated the mystical inclinations and experience that followed from the premises—indeed and perhaps ironically, more than Emerson.

II. Mystical Devotion and Metaphysical Theologizing

Conrad Cherry, in fact, has argued that the mystical strain in Bushnell brought discord to his theory of language and imagination (and doctrine) because his theoretical argument was based “on the utter necessity of finite forms for religious knowledge.”Footnote ²⁶ To invoke mysticism is to speak of direct presence and apprehension, and it invites entry into the paradox at the center of metaphysical religiosity. The quasi-dualism of the theory of correspondence (as above, so below) here disappears before the comprehension of/participation in the mystical Whole. Still, the sacramentalism (that is, the use of the sign as a vehicle to reach the divine presence) implicit in Bushnell's perception of language and image hints of another way to make sense of the paradox. As in the iconic theology of Eastern Orthodoxy, Bushnell's words and images proved to be windows into another world, shadowings forth of eternity that could bring the devotee to eternity itself. In the context of a series of challenges in his life—the hostile reception of his work on Christian nurture, the death of his son, and chronic bouts of “throat trouble” (tuberculosis)—he had turned to reading seventeenth-century French devotional literature. For a time he was drawn to the writings of the French archbishop François Fénelon, with his theocentric mysticism and tendencies toward quietism, as well as the more thoroughgoing quietism of Madame Jeanne Marie Bouvières de la Mothe Guyon as presented in a biography of her by Thomas C. Upham. Early in the morning in February 1848, Bushnell announced to his wife, Mary Apthorp Bushnell, that he had seen the light and that the light was the gospel. “It came to him at last,” wrote Mary Bushnell, “after all his thought and study, not as something reasoned out, but as an inspiration,—a revelation from the mind of God himself.”Footnote ²⁷

There had been harbingers, though, from Bushnell's days at Yale. In an essay he wrote in 1832 on the differences between natural and moral philosophy, he championed the latter in terms that sounded almost Hermetic. By rising to “a steady contemplation of the spiritual,” he asserted, one could feel “no longer a clod, but a particle of the divine nature.” He was also not without direct experience of the anomalous. As early as his college years at Yale before 1827, after one period of long study he had gone to bed exhausted but “wide awake.” According to Cheney, he had experienced his body “rising and floating in the air.” He grasped for the bed and could not feel it. And so “he began to believe that he was dead, and that this was his voyage to the world of spirits. This condition lasted, according to his impression, for the space of an hour or two.”Footnote ²⁸

Bushnell's fascination set him in proto-metaphysical company, as the mid-century efflorescence of mass spiritualism testifies. He would never lose interest in such occurrences, and his later book Nature and the Supernatural would especially speak of them. More typical, though, became experiences of extraordinary illumination or union with the divine in nature—with the metaphysical sign obviating its own existence as an analog, and almost effaced in the experience of God. Take, for example, his account of what happened to him on a trip to Mount Washington (New Hampshire) in 1835. Married and a minister, he wrote home to Mary: “Every step something glorious opens upon us here. . . . Here it is not things that interest me, but God. Surely I see God as I never did before.” Decades later, natural vistas continued to thrill him and bring him into close proximity to the divine. At Niagara Falls in 1852, he watched the water crashing down: “Oh this pouring on, on, on,—exhaustless, ceaseless, like the counsel itself of God. . . . Verily, my soul revelled within me to-day, as never since I was a conscious being, in the contemplation of this tremendous type of God's eternity and majesty. I could hardly stand, such was the sense it gave me of the greatness of God.” He had felt as if his “soul” was shut into “concentric shells of brass or iron” and that he had begun to “break through one shell after another, bursting every time into a kind of new, and wondrous and vastly enlarged heaven.” He had now, with his “experience of God” that “opened his greatness,” reached “beyond all physical images and measures, even those of astronomy.” “Simply to think God” was “to find and bring into . . . feeling more than even the imagination can reach.” And in 1870, six years before his death, he wrote to Mary about his experience on the shores of Lake Waramaug, Connecticut. “I never so saw God, never had him come so broadly, clearly out. . . . There has been nothing debatable to speak for, but an infinite easiness and universal presentation to thought, as it were by revelation. . . . O my God! What a fact to possess and know that he is! . . . he has been the all, and the altogether, everywhere, lovely. . . . I never thought I could possess God so completely.” A year later, he recalled his gospel experience of 1848 as he reminisced with his wife. She herself later remembered that he said he seemed, then, to “pass a boundary,” moving from “those partial seeings, glimpses and doubts, into a clearer knowledge of God and into his inspirations, which I have never wholly lost.”Footnote ²⁹

Because of its premises of mind, correspondence, and divine energy flowing through all things, metaphysical religiosity carried with it a high doctrine of human nature. Humans were the grandest and most complex signs of the work of the creator even as they embodied the creative and healing powers of the divine. For Bushnell, the high doctrine, along with his reported sense of glimpsing God—of something akin to mystical certainty and a bonding with divine reality—appeared again and again in writings and sermons. In Christian Nurture, for example, he took exception to the idea that humans were “born sinners.” “They may just as truly and properly be born saints,” he countered. In God in Christ, he built his Christology, with its emphasis on Christ's divinity, by first contemplating humanity. “As the spirit of man is made in the image of God, and his bodily form is prepared to be the fit vehicle and outward representative of his spirit, it follows that his bodily form has also some inherent, a priori relation to God's own nature.” And in Nature and the Supernatural, he explained with apparent approval that Emanuel Swedenborg and his followers taught “that God creates the world through man.” Creation, for Swedenborgians, was “a purely gerundive matter—God's perpetual act,” with God holding “the work to man, at every stage.” Sharing the life of God, thus, for Bushnell was a fact of Christian life. Christ was the metaphor of God because in contemplating him humans saw their deified selves. “Beholding in him as in a glass the glory of the Lord, we shall be changed into the same image. The metaphoric contents are ours, and beyond that nothing is given.”Footnote ³⁰

This felt sense of participation in the divine life stands out on the pages of many of Bushnell's printed sermons, which were much better received, in general, than his intentionally theological works. Yet titles and lines nuance a different, metaphysicalizing path that ought to have provoked clerical colleagues. “Christ the Form of the Soul” (1848), the sermon cited by Mary Bushnell in her account of his breakthrough experience of the gospel, already conveyed in its title its message. To use her words, Bushnell was announcing to the North Church “his spiritually illuminated conception of Christ, as the indwelling, formative life of the soul.” His homiletic text was as definitive: the formation of Christ in the soul was “the grand object of the gospel plan,” and it was for this reason that Christ was “incarnated in the world.” In “The Immediate Knowledge of God,” as another example, he saw such non-mediated and, it followed, mystical knowledge of God as available freely to Christian souls. Given this knowledge—which came “out of no report, or statement, or any thing called truth, as being taught in language”—a soul was “raised out of its mere finite speck of magnitude, into the conscious participation of being infinite.” In “Our Advantage in Being Finite,” he extolled the human situation because in and through it humans became creatively involved in the labors of God. They “put their finishes on his works and so could rightly be called “sub-creators” and “sub-saviours.” “The rich fields, and gardens, and green meadows and lawns, the open vistas of ornament, the road-ways, bridges, cottages and cleanly dressed shores of water—all that constitutes the special beauty of the world, is something added, as finish, after the world is made.”Footnote ³¹

Much before, in 1852 when spiritualism was in its early heyday and Mormons were teaching the afterlife rule of humans “as Gods,” Bushnell's sermon “God Preparing the State of Glory” echoed in astounding ways the progressive, unfolding terrain of the post-death experience taught by Davis and Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet. In the afterlife, Bushnell told listeners, souls would experience their “character and capacity” as “forever rising, growing great and divine.” Indeed, “the beings we now call men will at last be raised in volume and rank so as to overtop all our present conceptions of their significance,—kings, priests, principalities, powers, thrones!”Footnote ³²

Nature and the Supernatural, which at once disturbed Andrew Jackson Davis, orthodox clergy, and Unitarian dissenters, presented an essentially metaphysical and mystical vision that encrypted the message of union with God in a semantic capsule rendering it opaque. Its message had been part of Bushnell's thinking in rough outline for years. As early as 1839, he had told listeners at Andover that “the truth-world having no form, a form-world must be constituted to be its mirror.” This was Bushnell's familiar analogical thinking, his statement of the theory of correspondence. However, he went on to address the “intelligence” of the beings who were to receive the revelation in the mirror. These beings could not be “animals” because animals lived “in their senses only.” By contrast, “man” was “quickened by the divine principle of intelligence” and so could feel the “mysterious analogy between forms and truths,” darting “through one to the other scarcely conscious of the transition.” There was an implicit division in the representation. On one side, the animals and the world of nature; on the other, humanity and the world of truth or God. A decade later, in a letter to Transcendentalist and minister Cyrus Bartol, Bushnell was giving voice to the division in the language of the supernatural. There was “a great deal more of supernaturalism in the management of this world than even orthodoxy” had “begun to suspect,—even a systematic, world-ruling, nature-redeeming supernaturalism.”Footnote ³³

Bushnell's argument in Nature and the Supernatural signaled his metaphysical predilections, his sense of the presence of divine and healing energy present in the world through the presence and action of humanity. The work rested on a distinction between what Bushnell called “Powers” and “Things.” The supernatural was the realm of Powers; the natural world, of Things. God stood on the side of Power. Most significantly, so, too, did humanity. In almost a theological sleight of hand, humans were removed from the world of Things to be reconstructed as the very Powers that altered, shaped, and re-created Things. To put this another way, nature represented the world of cause and effect, of regular law that operated in fixed modes. The supernatural, as the domain of Powers, was the world where miracles were made and where nature could be trumped. Nature never built a house, but humans, operating out of their supernatural inheritance, not only could build one or write a book or frame a constitution. They could also stand in the Power of God and participate in divine interventions in the natural order. So humans, in Bushnell's rendition, had become “as Gods,” sneaking into divinity by the back door as he closed off the front against his critics by condemning naturalism. Meanwhile, a general Neo-Platonism pervaded Bushnell's vision. As David L. Smith saw it, “every person” was “for Bushnell a miniature neo-Platonic God,” with a “selfhood” that emanated and reproduced itself “socially.” Cast in more Christian terms, in the measure in which a person was “awakened to his normative being through the influence of Christ,” he or she became “a vehicle of divine life for others.”Footnote ³⁴

But here again was the metaphysical rub: the natural and the supernatural were not, in the words of William A. Johnson, “two realms worlds apart.” Instead, they were “co-factors in the one system of God,” both of them “functions of the divine.” Deeply concerned lest he be considered a pantheist, Bushnell found his happy solution in a semantic flourish. He could cast diatribes at pantheists and pantheism but still maintain his “one system of God,” with natural and supernatural its “necessary phases.” As Donald Crosby has explained, in Bushnell's own thinking he could address the “rigid dualism, as he conceived it, of the conventional theological attitude toward the relation of nature and the supernatural.” “The rift between the two realms was healed, in other words, when nature was teleologically conceived, and when man was regarded as standing in dominion over it in keeping with the Genesis account of his creation.” If, in the words again of Johnson, Bushnell “did not deny a certain antithesis between nature and the supernatural,” it was also true that “he defined the supernatural in such a way that the two could be embraced in the one category of nature when viewed as the order of God in creation.” Thus, by implication, words—language—became a ministry of nature, providing matter for mind, ready “to fall under the dominion of spirit, for there words cease[d] to be ‘Things’ and [became] themselves ‘Powers.’”Footnote ³⁵ Out went theologians and rationalists; in came poets and metaphysicians.

III. Miraculous and Clairvoyant Episodes

In came another aspect of metaphysical religiosity—its fundamentally magical premise that if everything resonates with everything else, one piece of the world can act powerfully on another in healing ways. So in, too, came miracles, and what miracles! To be sure, the topic of miracles provoked controversy almost automatically among clerics of Bushnell's time. Probably the most significant factor in the separation of the Transcendentalist party from other Unitarians had been the miracles controversy of 1836. In brief, Unitarians, especially through the polemics of Andrews Norton, argued that documented miracles offered the strongest evidence for the claims of Christianity, grounding their position on the sensationalist (that is, sense-based) philosophy of John Locke. As the Transcendentalists broke away, Ripley, Emerson, Parker, and others thought that the mind's internal evidence trumped external data. Intuition—far broader than the rationalist preoccupations of Unitarians—meant more. “The very word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster,” Emerson had declared in his controversial Divinity School Address. Emerson had harbored his own ideas of what constituted a miracle—in the Divinity School Address it meant phenomena that were “one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.” But earlier, in Nature, he had been more specific when he detailed “occasional examples of the action of man upon nature with his entire force” and then went on to cite, among other items, “the traditions of miracles in the earliest antiquity of all nations; the history of Jesus Christ; . . . the miracles of enthusiasm, as those reported of Swedenborg, Hohenlohe, and the Shakers; many obscure and yet contested facts, now arranged under the name of Animal Magnetism; prayer; eloquence; self-healing.”Footnote ³⁶ It was a motley list, encompassing traditional sorts of miracles and also others that pointed in the direction of a later-century metaphysical repertoire that some would call “occult.”

There are two things to be noticed here. One is that Bushnell, with his gospel of humans operating on the side of Power upon a nature filled with Things, had actually been preceded in that declaration by Emerson, his naturalist foil. What is the difference, for example, between Emerson's “action of man upon nature with his entire force” and Bushnell's “supernatural is that range of substance . . . that acts upon the chain of cause and effect in nature from without the chain”—save that Emerson's instances were occasional and people evidently had to try harder?Footnote ³⁷ The second is that, in Bushnell's narrative discussion of what he meant by miracles, he demonstrated a high comfort level with the kind of assorted collection of metaphysical “miracles” favored by Emerson and championed by later enthusiasts in Theosophy and New Thought.

A “miracle,” pronounced Bushnell—narrowing his definition of the supernatural—was an act that operated “on the chain of cause and effect in nature from without the chain, producing in the sphere of the senses, some event that moves our wonder, and evinces the presence of a more than human power.” So far so good. But what were the miracles? Stunningly, a large number of them clearly involved cases of clairvoyance, and thus cases especially beloved by metaphysical religionists because of their illustration and enactment of the basic worldview of correspondence. In one example of his own, Bushnell recounted the story of the preacher Arthur Howell, who met a funeral procession en route to Germantown (near Philadelphia) and knew with certainty that the deceased was a woman falsely accused of a crime. He told the news to those at the service, repeating a conversation that the dead woman had had with her minister shortly before her death and declaring that soon she would be exonerated. The minister, present for the funeral, corroborated Howell's words, and things turned out just as Howell had said.Footnote ³⁸

For Bushnell, Howell's amazing gift echoed others that lay all around.

Still more, there was Bushnell's firsthand experience of a clairvoyant during his visit to California. In the public space of a hotel in the Napa Valley, he had encountered one Captain Yonut who had come to the West Coast as a trapper forty years earlier. The talk, reported Bushnell, turned “on spiritism and the modern necromancy.” With hints of a personal story behind the captain's interest in these topics, at Bushnell's request the stranger recounted a dream of six or seven years before. “He saw what appeared to be a company of emigrants, arrested by the snows of the mountains, and perishing rapidly by cold and hunger. He noted the very cast of the scenery, marked by a huge perpendicular front of white rock cliff; he saw the men cutting off what appeared to be tree tops, rising out of deep gulfs of snow; he distinguished the very features of the persons, and the look of their particular distress.” The captain woke, then fell asleep once more “and dreamed exactly the same dream again.” The next morning, disturbed by his nighttime experience, he told the dream to “an old hunter comrade,” who immediately recognized the site “over the Sierra, by the Carson Valley Pass.” The captain acted forthwith, gathering “a company of men, with mules and blankets, and all necessary provisions.” Neighbors laughed, but the men set out to their destination 150 miles distant. “And there they found the company in exactly the condition of the dream, and brought in the remnant alive.”Footnote ⁴⁰

For Bushnell, the “coincidences of that dream” gave clear evidence of “a supernatural providence.” Cases of clairvoyance, such as these, lined up with sudden and unexplained answers to prayer: in one case when a landlord appeared at a tenant's door demanding the rent, which the renter—a physician—did not have. At the same time, a stranger appeared to pay the physician for “attending me in a fever,” and the sum was the exact amount of the rent. There were also reports of tongues speaking. Still further, there were miraculous healings. Bushnell told readers he himself had heard of “three distinct cases”—one in which a father saw his daughter with brain fever in answer to prayer “rise up almost immediately”; one in which a “bad and dangerous swelling” was instantly cured; and one in which “a sick man was restored, when life was despaired of by his family.” In yet another case, Bushnell reported on an Englishman's manuscript account in his possession. The man—an invalid—after his conversion threw away his medicine and instead “threw himself on God.” He was “immediately and permanently made whole.” If the narrative did not already smack of Christian Science to come, Bushnell's informant testified also about the healing of his son from scarlet fever. Persuaded by another to call a medical professional, the anxious father became convinced he had “fallen into a snare, by turning away from the Lord's healing hand, to lean on medical skill.” The doctor came and went, but the father “resolved to withdraw the child, and cast him on the Lord.” Instead of medicine, the boy got prayer, and the father got “a mighty conviction that my prayer was heard.” Making his way to the nursery, he found that “the boy was sitting up in his bed” and asking for his dinner. As yet another flourish, the English healer told an additional tale of laying hands on a boy who had been given up by his doctor and immediately healing him.Footnote ⁴¹

Bushnell's cases meandered again back to the clairvoyant. A father dreamed the healing of his invalid daughter in the midst of her own religious conversion, and she, indeed, was later healed. In a culminating story, that Mary Cheney also chronicles, Bushnell—who held racist views of blacks typical of his time—recalled a visit by “a fugitive from slavery” well-known in his community and, for Bushnell, a divine messenger and prophet. His visitor, with “a good deal of mental agitation,” told Bushnell that he had been praying for the minister “for more than a year.” What did the prophet need to tell? “On a certain occasion, and in reference to a certain public matter, I had undertaken that which could not but withdraw me from God's teaching, and was certain to obscure the revelations otherwise ready and waiting to be made.” (Cheney identified the project as the public park for the city of Hartford, which Bushnell had been working to create.) The minister tried to justify himself before his African American “prophet”-visitor. He had “brought no scandal on religion,” and the project concerned “the real benefit of the public.” “And yet,” wrote Bushnell, “I am obliged to confess to a strong and even prevalent impression that my humble brother was right.” Later, Bushnell visited his visitor and asked the former slave how he knew the message he was delivering came from God. Did he hear words audibly? Did he think something and become convinced it came from God? Not so, the prophet explained, but “I know it, I feel it to be not from me, and I can tell you things that show it to be so.” Bushnell was a born-again believer, as the “humble brother” recited “facts which, if they are true, prove beyond a question the certainty of some illumination not of himself.”Footnote ⁴²

Bushnell had embraced a conglomeration of anomalous happenings that metaphysical people make their stock in religious and healing trade and consider part of nature. And he had done so with aplomb, baptizing them in one declarative act by pronouncing them supernatural. The declarative act did not deter Perry Miller from rendering a different judgment of Nature and the Supernatural. Here, he declared, “was preached anew the immanence of God in nature: ‘God is the spiritual reality of which nature is the manifestation.’ With this publication the latest—and yet the oldest—form of New England infidelity stalked in the citadel of orthodoxy, and Calvinism itself was, as it were, transcendentalized.”Footnote ⁴³

IV. A God-Filled, Magnetic Universe

It is also clear in Nature and the Supernatural and elsewhere that Bushnell knew the metaphysical tribe well (he called them “naturalists”), from pantheists to phrenologists to new enthusiasts for the South Asian “Brama” (read Transcendentalists). For someone deeply immersed in an Anglo-Protestant world, he had read widely outside it, and he knew who his metaphysical “enemies” were or, at least, what their sort of foolishness and wrongheadedness was. There were echoes here of the family quarrel with Andrew Jackson Davis with which I began. As important, Bushnell named many of the phenomena he disdained as products of a longing the churches were not addressing. The “necromancy” (spiritualism) that preoccupied the Captain Yonut of his miracles anecdote, for example, had surfaced elsewhere in his book. “It may occur to some,” he observed, “to raise the question, why it is, that the lying wonders of necromancy, and magic, and demoniacal possessions are wont to be grouped contemporaneously with the true wonders of prophecy and divine gifts.” Bushnell, of course, was not alone among ministers in condemning spiritualism. But he went on to link the “strange zeal observable in the new sorcery of our day” to unfulfilled spiritual yearnings in his time, in which the “facts and functions of religion” were “reduced to a second-hand character—a reported history, a contrived and reasoned dogma, a drill of observances, where no fire burns.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Fire or not, Bushnell's semantic solution—the “one system of God” containing natural and supernatural—had not worked with critics. The charge of pantheism dogged him continually (the “everything is everything” and “everything is divine” that were embraced by the metaphysically inclined). Even Theodore Munger, who called him “God-intoxicated” like Spinoza, wrote that Bushnell “was not a pantheist” but was “pantheistic.” He did not explain the difference. More provocative still, like Davis and Swedenborg before him, Bushnell acknowledged extraterrestrials. Thus, like other metaphysical people, he thought that the Mind active in our world flowed as well through other ones. In a sermon preached at his North Church in 1852, he had referred to “all the good minds of all worlds” and seen them as affected by “God's love through Christ.” “God has planned in the work of Jesus Christ, as in all other works in all other worlds,” he asserted, “to show to the ages to come the exceeding riches of his character and the greatness of the love wherewith he loves us all.” In another sermon preached at the North Church in 1857, he was even clearer. These “worlds” were not other earthly cultures. Rather, explaining Paul to the Ephesians (3:15) with its reference to “the whole family in heaven and earth,” he told his congregation that “the modern astronomic discoveries force it on us, as a conviction not to be resisted, that worlds innumerable exist in habitable order, and, doubtless, that they have their inhabitants.” Making sure listeners understood, he repeated later on: “Worlds on worlds are reported, their count is innumerable and they appear to be habitable.” This to explain that Paul meant “principalities and powers in the heavenly places, those nameless mighty ones that fill the unknown tiers of worlds.”Footnote ⁴⁵

For his part, Andrew Jackson Davis, who had traveled in trance to other worlds like Swedenborg, had made his way to spiritualism by passing through the portals of animal magnetism, with its sense of primal tides or energies permeating all things.Footnote ⁴⁶ Keenly aware of the cultural preoccupation with the phenomenon, Bushnell, in turn, could comment on the fascination with magnetism and, as in other cases, glimpse a religious search beneath it. In Nature and the Supernatural, magnetists figured clearly in Bushnell's introductory catalog of deplorable naturalists. The “magnetists or seers of electricity” had prepared “a religion out of the revelations of natural clairvoyance and scientific necromancy.” One wonders here, of course, how Bushnell distinguished “natural clairvoyance” from his own list of supernatural clairvoyant happenings. Still, he explained to readers that the “propensities to mere naturalism” of his day were “instigated in their eagerness” by an “impulse” that scorned “all the boundaries of mere knowledge and reason.”

More than that, Bushnell implicitly accepted the magnetic view of the world with its strong metaphysical implications. For magnetists, who followed the path charted by Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1739–1815), the invisible tides swept through individuals, maintaining them in a flow of energy. The magnetist could manipulate the flow so that individuals were subject to one another and, in so doing, the magnetist reproduced the metaphysical model of energy streaming from its intangible Source through all things. Bushnell's work on Christian nurture had been predicated on ideas of unconscious influence from parent to child. In his later sermon “Unconscious Influence” (from the 1850s), Bushnell was still convinced of the ability of people, unaware, to affect one another for good or ill. “The most active feelings and impulses of mankind are contagious,” he affirmed. Indeed, “simply to be in this world, whatever you are, is to exert an influence—an influence, too, compared with which mere language and persuasion are feeble.” “Streams of influence” flowed out from individuals “unbidden on the world,” representing “the power men exert insensibly over each other.” In a similar vein, writing on Bushnell's essays on preaching, Theodore Munger cited his mentor this way: “He rates as indispensable what he calls ‘a man's atmosphere,’—an undefinable quantity which may be hinted at as ‘the moral aroma of character;’ or ‘magnetic sphere of the person.’” And in his “Life, or the Lives,” Bushnell himself rejected the notion that laws of gravity or “chemical attraction,” like other laws of nature, were “only collections, classifications of facts.” Instead, gravity was “the intellectual or idealized conception of a power by which bodies go towards each other, Chemical Attraction the conception of another kind of power by which atoms go towards each other.” Ironically, Andrew Jackson Davis in The Approaching Crisis had written of the law of “Attraction.” It was the “paramount law” of human nature, and humans obeyed it “every instant of time; true as the needle to the positive magnet.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Davis, to be sure, owed as much to Charles Fourier as to Franz Anton Mesmer in this declaration. The French utopian socialist had built his passional system of societal bliss on the law of attraction, and Davis had adapted it to his own ends enthusiastically. The third (of three parts) of Davis's trance-produced Principles of Nature, which applied his ideas to society, was built on Fourier's “law of universal association, affinity, or gravitation.” Fourier had gloried in the instinctual drives of humans and envisioned his perfect society as one freed from the oppressive forces that shackled attempts to follow the passions. In the American version of his system, these ideas moved mostly in economic (more than sexual) directions in concepts of the phalanx, the perfect social unit of 1,620 people in which each would follow inborn desire and still contribute to the perfect whole.Footnote ⁴⁹ Davis, like Fourier, pursued the fulfillment of desire that rendered delight; and so, in his own way, did Horace Bushnell.

V. Organic Connection and the Affirmation of Desire

Bushnell had, in no uncertain terms, relegated Associationists in general to his catalog of dangerous naturalisms and had cited Fourier disdainfully at several other points in Nature and the Supernatural. His was an “inconsequent and baseless theory.” Yet, in the midst of his condemnation, Bushnell could opine that “fallen society” still existed in a condition “far less dreadful than it would be, if the organic force of natural affinities and affections were not operative still . . . to produce institutions, construct nations, and establish a condition of qualified unity and protection.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Bushnell's hints of organicism have already been identified as what enticed Davis all along because of their suggestion of a unitive energy pervading all things, restoring them to their true metaphysical correspondence with one another. In Bushnell's earlier work on Christian nurture—his first controversial book—he had argued the case for organicism relentlessly. He examined the relation between parent and child and, still in the 1860 version, discovered “something like a law of organic connection, as regards character, subsisting between them.” Children were joined “by an organic unity,” not with their parents' “instructions” but with their “life.” In fact, at no age, even adulthood, were people “wholly out of the reach of organic laws” affecting character. “All society is organic,” Bushnell stated flatly. Even revivals came because of this law of connection and affinity: “A very great share of the power in what is called a revival of religion, is organic power; nor is it any the less divine on that account.” And so, a “pure, separate, individual man” was a “mere fiction.”Footnote ⁵¹

The argument of Christian Nurture had company. As Conrad Cherry showed in a substantive exposition of Bushnell's ideas, “an organic mode of thought pervaded the whole of his reflective life.” Cherry found the organicism in the ways that Bushnell viewed language, nature, and nation. Important here, though, is the familial and small-community context in which the organic ties that brought religion and grace also brought peace, harmony, and delight. Bushnell's renditions of family and community life, clad in their idyllic trappings, announced a religion of joy that came with the territory. In his well-known “secular” sermon for the centennial celebration of Litchfield County in 1851, for instance, he memorialized “The Age of Homespun,” in which people “spontaneously gathered, for the most part, in terms of elective affinity.” There were “foot excursions of young people, or excursions on horseback, after the haying,” “boatings,” “evening schools of sacred music,” and “neighbors called in to meet the minister and talk of both worlds together.” Most of all, in his nostalgic ode to an organic past, Bushnell recalled “those friendly circles, gathered so often round the winter's fire,” the “home circle” to which “a good neighbor and his wife drop in shortly.” People took “their recreation, all together, in reading, or singing, or happy talk, or silent looking in the fire, and finally in sleep—to rise again, with the sun, and pray over the family Bible for just such another good day as the last.”Footnote ⁵²

So the law of attraction so loved by Davis meant here the magnetism of small societies in which Bushnell reveled and took delight. Still further, the delight represented more than nostalgia for a once and former Eden. In God in Christ, he enthused that “when God appears in His beauty, loving and lovely, the good, the glory, the sunlight of soul, the affections previously dead, wake into life and joyful play, and what before was only a self-lifting and slavish effort becomes an exulting spirit of liberty.” By then, he had already begun working out his theology of play and desire, with ideas that paralleled those that were building among others in the proto-metaphysical community. His Phi Beta Kappa oration “Work and Play” (1848) painted the picture of a family setting (again), in which “a man of large meditation” looked down on “his children and a kitten playing on the floor together.” The man surveyed “with a meditative feeling, this beautiful scene of muscular play,—the unconscious activity, the exuberant life, the spirit of glee.” It made its mark: there rose “in his heart the conception, that possibly he is here to see the prophecy or symbol of another and higher kind of play, which is the noblest exercise and last end of man himself.” “Work,” he explained in a distinction that others have made, “is activity for an end; play, activity as an end.” But there was more. “We play,” he told listeners, “because we have in us a fund of life that wants to expend itself.” Indeed, life began with “muscular play,” passed through “the hard struggles of work,” and emerged “at last, into a state of inspired liberty and spontaneous beauty.” “In short,” Bushnell pronounced, “we are to conceive that the highest and complete state of man, that which his nature endeavors after and in which only it fulfills its sublime instinct, is the state of play.” As Barbara Cross has observed, Bushnell did not share the Kantian model of “the conquest of desire by conscience.” For him, “virtue was the ‘play’ of the soul, in which inclination and duty merged.”Footnote ⁵³

Indeed, praising God brought delight and joy in this life, and the joy included “every faculty in us” that could be made “to vibrate with feeling or glow with energy.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Desire fulfilled, delight, joy—they were all of a piece, and for Bushnell, they summoned the vitalistic impulse we can see running through metaphysics. In brief, metaphysics functioned as energy medicine, calling desire to evoke the juice of life. As already noted, the language of “vibration” and “energy” became ubiquitous, modeled already in the magnetic tides and the new science that revolved around “electric” concerns. It would be 1880 before Thomas Alva Edison filed his patent for the incandescent lamp, but the “electric” precursors, in the wake of magnetism, had spread abroad their language.

Bushnell was a buyer and speaker. “It is the grand distinction of humanity,” he announced in one sermon from the 1850s, “to receive and entemple the Infinite Spirit; to be energized by him,” so that “as matter is open to the free access and unimpeded passage of the electric flash, so is the soul open to the subtle motions of the Eternal Spirit.” Disdaining “a certain class of devotees,” who practiced “abnegations, penances, macerations, poverties, mortifications, vows of solitude, and complete withdrawment from the world,” he preached instead a gospel of blessed longing. Significantly, the heavenly bliss toward which the true Christian soul tended was parsed in the language of subtle energy and desire. It was “the beginning to have boundless and divine desires,” he explained in 1848. The soul thus rested “in God because the full current of God's desires flow[ed] in her, and so floating in the full current, as a boat upon a river, she seem[ed] to be at rest.” Bushnell was adamant: “To have no desires is to be a stone, not a man. To fall into God, and there . . . to become inert and cease from all real movement of soul, is Brahminism, not Christ, not Christianity.” “Our gospel,” he assured listeners in “Christ Regenerates Even the Desires,” “is never jealous of the desires, puts us to no task of repression, or extirpation.”Footnote ⁵⁵ He elaborated:

When we praise God, Bushnell proclaimed in 1859, “the joy we have includes, though we call it praise, every faculty in us that can be made to vibrate with feeling or glow with energy.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Moreover, if Bushnell had relegated “poverties,” along with “abnegations,” “penances,” and “macerations,” to his spiritual trash heap, he also had a message to deliver about prosperity as a form of energy and virtuous desire. Presaging the evangelical Gospel of Wealth and the New Thought version in its own prosperity gospel, he had written approvingly in Christian Nurture that wealth would “be unfolded more rapidly under the condition of Christian living than elsewhere.” “A true Christian society,” he observed, had “mines opened . . . in its own habits and principles.” “The wealth accruing” was “power in every direction.” Even further, prosperity was “our duty,” as one sermon from 1847 gave notice. “It is the duty of every man to be a prosperous man, if by any reasonable effort he may,” he told his congregation. The same was true for a community: “An industrious, enterprising, hopeful, prosperous community” was “far more easily moved by the demands of duty and religion than one . . . drooping and running down.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Energy and desire turned outward to yield individual and societal abundance. It also turned inward, and when that happened it became prayer. If we are to accept the word of his daughter Mary Bushnell Cheney, from early childhood Bushnell—in an echo of Jonathan Edwards—found spiritual energy and delight in nature, and the delight became a form of prayer. “The religious impressions of childhood which he was able to recall in later life were of the simplest and most natural kind, coming to him unforced, often in the fields, and quickened by his delight in nature, impressions, as he said, ‘not of fear, nor in a sense of wrong, but in a sense of the divine beauty and majesty.’” Years later, in 1871, he confessed on paper that he “fell into a habit years ago of talking with God, and it became so natural, that in all my open spaces I do it without thought. . . . It is not supplication or ejaculation or adoration, but a friendly way of contemplation and personal intercourse.”Footnote ⁵⁸

It is surely not surprising that this Edwardsean strain—the contemplation of God in the beauty of nature and its spontaneous prompt to prayer—shaped the spiritual sensibility of Bushnell, whose background included long familiarity with the great Puritan divine. Indeed, in Edwards's “Images or Shadows of Divine Things” (1728), we have an early version of the doctrine of analogy or correspondence so championed by Bushnell. For Edwards, as for the later Bushnell, the divine beauty and its contemplation came as well through a sense of the heart (stimulated, in part, by a beauteous world but moving to a register beyond it). Edwards's well-known sermon “A Divine and Supernatural Light” (1734), invoking a “spiritual and divine light” and “a sense of the loveliness of God's holiness” and connecting both to a “sense of the heart,” set an important precedent. Here, with a light within the heart that reflected the divine light beyond, a thoroughgoing delight and the energy of prayer played swiftly and subtly off one another. “‘Tis a kind of emanation of God's beauty,” Edwards had written of the inward light, “and is related to God as the light is to the sun.” The prayer and delight melded as Edwards averred that “the mind having a sensibleness of the excellency of divine objects, dwells upon them with delight; and the powers of the soul are more awakened, and enlivened to employ themselves in the contemplation of them, and exert themselves more fully and much more to purpose.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Resonating with the Edwardsean past and its employment of the powers of the soul, Bushnell's Christian Nurture had insisted that by “the whole economy of prayer,” God was “working toward the largest, most inclusive harmony.” Prayer was “successful, just according to the amount of concurrency . . . in it.” It was “only one of the great causes of the world,” and, in an inversion, “all the causes, natural as well as supernatural,” were, “in a certain sense, prayers.” In terms of the individual, the vast economy of prayer became one of enrichment for separate persons, who did not change God or “prevail” with him but instead changed themselves. Looking forward as well as backward, his words seemed a harbinger of New Thought ideas of affirmative prayer in which the affirmation of desired results as already present stirred emotional desire and imaginal action and thus brought a new situation. In Bushnell's version, he dismissed a God who answered in favor of one whose energies could flow freely into a human life because seekers themselves had been transformed. The “precise point” on which the success of a man's prayer “hinged, was on the subjective change or prevailing realized in himself.” But Bushnell complained that “we only faintly believe in prayer.” Defending himself against his critics with innuendos about living “a kind of second hand religion, a notional religion, which is distant and dry,” he lobbied for “the immediate experience of God, in a state of Divine Consciousness.” This, for Bushnell, was prayer—prayer that meshed with a metaphysical culture-to-come that used affirmations as vehicles into just such states, in which all things became possible. We bring our desires to God, taught Bushnell, and “if they accord with the highest goodness and reason, he declares that he will give us what we ask for. And so he is training our desires into coincidence even with his own.”Footnote ⁶⁰

VI. A Bushnellian Via Negativa

Read one way, all of this may seem like Christian pietism as usual. But read in the context of an emerging metaphysical tradition—with attention to events, allusions, and life experiences—it assumes new colors and stripes. Probably the capstone of all of this—its return from the land of delight and spiritual pleasure in prayer to the austerity of the divine mystery, is Bushnell's alliance in his thinking with his own homegrown form of Western negative theology. The via negativa, or negative way, of the mystics signaled an approach to the divine that affirmed its mystery by denying any possible predicate that could be attached to God. Associated in the West with the late fifth-century work of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in his treatises on Mystical Theology and the Divine Names, negative theology bowed before a God beyond all being and all human knowledge.Footnote ⁶¹ This God was totally inaccessible to ordinary human avenues of perception and comprehension, unreachable by any human register of understanding. The radically negative statement represented a categorical denial of the ability of human perceptual equipment to grasp the inner meaning of deity by any means—as if humans were shining flashlights in dark caves and could see only the smallest glimmer of the reality that contained them. The glimmer functioned as a distorting lens. In the end, they knew nothing about the inner being of God.

There is no discernible evidence that Bushnell or those who disputed him were reading Dionysius. Yet arguably what enraged Bushnell's critics so much (both left and right) was in large measure the continuing presence of what might be called negative theology in his thought—not the classical version but still a way of thinking that implicitly and explicitly disturbed other Protestant clerics. No critic quite made all the connections and identified the precise nature of the “heresy.” But clearly, Bushnell had rankled others, and the results came tumbling in. Indeed, from young adulthood there were hints of what was to come. Consider more closely his conversion while he was a tutor at Yale College when Timothy Dwight was president and the Second Great Awakening rolled through. According to Mary Cheney, Bushnell's fellow classmate and lifelong friend Robert McEwen recalled that at a meeting with other tutors in 1831, Bushnell finally threw in the towel:

Read one way, this is heart religion and evangelicalism pure and simple; read another, it is an incipient metaphysical message, setting the stage for Bushnell's lifelong war against dogmatism and his refusal to join any digitally precise theological party. Whereas in Christian Nurture he could wax enthusiastically on the (divinely connected) organic virtues of the nuclear family and list, element by element, their influence on the child, God in Christ and later works taking the measure of divinity came up with space and silence. Bushnell found such blessed assurance in his theory of language because it gave him a nineteenth-century Anglo-American way to negate “that dead body of abstractions, or logical propositions, called theology.” “Words of thought or spirit” always affirmed something false because they imputed “form to that which really is out of form.” Still, there was a “latent presence” within words, a “certain power of form” that was paradoxically good. As Bushnell told his readers, because words were “inexact representations of thought, mere types or analogies,” language always had to be busy mending itself “by multiplying its forms of representation.” Paradox, therefore, came closest to the truth we could not know. Given that argument, “mental science and religion” could not properly include their subject matter “under the fixed forms of dogma.” Bring in the poets, then, Bushnell urged. “If there be any complete science of man to come, they must bring it.” The scriptures had gotten it right because in “providing a clothing for religious truth,” they exhibited little of “mere dialectics” but much of “the freer creations of poetry.” They were at home in the world of “analogies, signs, shadows, so to speak, of the formless mysteries above us and within us.”Footnote ⁶³

Bushnell had come full circle, with religious language—as metaphor—an “instrument of suggestion,” not of “absolute conveyance of thought.” It was at the doorsteps of mystics that seekers could “receive the truth of God” as “an essentially vital power.” And mystics and their experiences were, indeed, the end and delight that metaphysical religiosity, with its theory of correspondence or analogy, promised. To be sure, Bushnell counseled readers not to be “apprehensive that the views here offered may bring in an age of mysticism and so of interminable confusion.” He soothed them instead with the hopeful news that mystics found secret meanings signaling life “both in words and in things.” Bushnell hinted that he stood in good company. Christ and “almost every writing of the New Testament” revealed its mystical element, and readers would do well, he reiterated, to “make a study, to some extent, of the mystic and quietistic writers.” “Man” was “designed, in his very nature, to be a partially mystic being.” Since one could not chop logic to arrive at Christian truth, since every formula turned out to be false, ideas like “trinity and atonement” had “their reality in and through the imaginative and morally aesthetic powers—truths of form and feeling, not of the logical understanding.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Bushnell had set the stage for the accusations of Sabellianism that would hound him. For the orthodox, Sabellianism—named for the third-century Roman theologian Sabellius—was a Christian heresy. It taught the unity of God so unequivocally that the Father, Son, and Spirit of the Trinitarian formula became “modes” of expression of the divine, perhaps with the Father as the initial projector of Son and Spirit. Bushnell would insist that he was no modalist. The evidence suggests that he was right. He had read the Moses Stuart translation of Friedrich Schleiermacher on Sabbelianism, which clearly asserted the interior unity of God, but as Fred Kirschenmann shows, Bushnell's views cannot be identified purely and simply with those of Schleiermacher.Footnote ⁶⁵

In the context of the Sabellian accusations, Bushnell would begin to use the term instrumentalism to describe his position regarding God's expression to humans. But the “unrevealed” God haunted him, and—although, as I have ready noted, there is no clear evidence that he had read deeply in the classic statements from the early Christian mystical tradition—his words paralleled the language of negative theology. “God unrevealed” was “God simply existing, as spirit, in Himself.” “Who, now,” he asked rhetorically, “is God thus existing in Himself? Has He any external form, by which He may be figured or conceived?” The answer was clear. “No. Is He a point without space—is He space without limit? Neither. Is His activity connected with any sort of motion? Certainly not. . . . Is there any color, sound, sign, measure, by which He may be known? No. Does He, then, act under the law of action and reaction, as we do? Never. . . . Does He, then, reason? No. . . . Does He, then, deliberate? No. . . . Does He inquire? No. . . . Does He remember? Never. . . . Does He believe? No.” So it went for the predicates of thinking and feeling emotion. The unrevealed God was an “Absolute Being” and “the I Am that I am, giving no sign that He is, other than that He is.”Footnote ⁶⁶

This last declaration affirmed more than the classical tradition would, since it had denied even the predicate of existence for God. But what of Bushnell's revealed God, the instrumental God who acted as Father, Son, and Spirit? Here the human conceptual predicament became more pragmatically acute. “In whatever thing He appears, or is revealed, there will be something that misrepresents, as well as something that represents Him.” The “revealing process” would “envelop itself in clouds of formal contradiction.” Bushnell was back in the land of paradox as the best that humans could do. It was only “through relations, contrasts, actions and reactions” that people came “into the knowledge of God.” So the Trinity and Jesus were “relatives, to conduct us up to the Absolute.” If God were “revealed at all,” it would be “through repugnances and contrarieties.” For “a vast circle of mystery” would be “the back ground of all other representations,” with God “a Being infinite, undiscovered, undiscoverable, therefore true.”Footnote ⁶⁷

“I do not undertake to fathom the interior being of God, and tell how it is composed.” Bushnell had made his point in no uncertain terms. But in Christian life, Father, Son, and Spirit, “each and all together” would “dramatize and bring forth into life about us that Infinite One, who, to our mere thought, were no better than Brama sleeping on eternity and the stars.” Exploring the terrain one more time in the more defensive Christ in Theology, Bushnell pulled at his contradictions further. The link to the unknowable God was language, in its analogies and correspondences that led followers into the land of high mystery. Yet the language—the words—were friendly; as we have seen, they had “faces.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Instead of approaching them with the “logical method” or “mere notation,” Bushnell exhorted that they be read “by looking in their faces, as we do our friends.” What they would carry “into our soul's feeling or perception, or awaken in it by expression” was “their only truth.” And that, Bushnell went on, was “a simple, internal state of the soul itself.” So when it came to understanding the inner being of God, the faces of words led nowhere except back to ourselves. Negation and silence surrounded the divine. The message, for Bushnell, was clear, and he hammered it home repeatedly. The nature of reality meant that “the best and truest doctrine” would not be “settled by the logical faculty” with its system-building. Rather, it would be “that which a soul, purified and cleared by love,” discovered “under manifold terms of analogy.” This happened when the soul turned to receive God “through simple contemplation, perusing the faces of those words and symbols by which he is expressed.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Couched in these terms, Bushnell was saying in his own way what the spiritual injunctions for the mystical path of the earlier Christian centuries had taught. “The categories of the Infinite Mind are not matched by the categories of thought in ours,” he had insisted.Footnote ⁷⁰ Yet in the soul's own self, brought back there by the analogies in words and things, could come the space and energy of revelation. At the same time, Bushnell's words with faces were pointing in the direction of end-of-century Theosophy and New Thought. The metaphysical movement, as it developed, distanced God ever more insistently from human comprehension. Late century metaphysicians often equaled Bushnell in their devotionalism and heart religion (and there are increasing suggestions that many of their rank and file and even major leaders came from evangelical backgrounds).Footnote ⁷¹ But they clothed God in abstractions—Mind, Truth, Intelligence, Principle, and, in the twentieth century, Source and All That Is. The life of the seeker generally had little to do with any direct rendezvous with so remote an entity, and evangelicals often became come-outers.

Bushnell's devotion to the person of Jesus meant that he did not join them. His rendezvous was continually with God in Christ. And to be sure, he castigated those who through their logic-chopping turned faith into “self-management, self-excitement, self-culture, self-illumination.” Yet, standing squarely within his Christianity, there was an aura quite metaphysical surrounding the rhetoric of religion he employed, and it meshed well with what was to come. “Something in the divine nature called the Word” proved to be the “fountain . . . of all the forms of things” and “the medium of the creation of the worlds.” It was “a Form of God, a Mirror of Creative Imagination,” and in it God beheld and might “body forth images of his thought.”Footnote ⁷² Embedded in a traditional linguistic frame, such declarations carry their own weight and seem innocuous enough. What were all those clerical contemporaries getting so upset about? But measured against an emerging metaphysical religiosity, much of it outside the churches, they point toward a newer kind of religious world.

There was, however, another way in which Bushnell was teaching negative theology. Metaphysicians in the broad-based Hermetic tradition of the West, with its Neo-Platonic resonances, had defined evil as the absence of good that should be present, a failure to comprehend and instantiate the good that ought to be. So had a number of early Christian church fathers under the general rubric of sin. Viewing evil as the privation of good, so that humans who sinned fell away from their good, these fathers—influenced to some extent by the classical thought of ancient Greece—linked the privative idea of sin to biblical themes of the Fall. Thus they explained a universal need for redemption in a world that had departed from the good. This privative view was only one of a number of theological descriptions that sought to elaborate on the presence of evil, or sin, in the world.Footnote ⁷³ Yet significantly, it was this view of evil, cast—as among the church fathers—in the language of sin but resonant with Hermetic ideas, that Bushnell adopted and employed. Again, the development is a parallel one, without an unmistakable trail of reading on Bushnell's part to buttress it through an immersion in the writings of church fathers. Still further, it is likely that Bushnell was being influenced more by Neo-Platonizing translations of Plato than by church fathers. Indeed, scholars of the romantic culture of mid-nineteenth-century America have pointed consistently to the pervasive Thomas Taylor translations of Plato, with their Neo-Platonic interpretive stance.Footnote ⁷⁴

In Nature and the Supernatural, as a key case, Bushnell had insisted that the human will belonged to the realm of the supernatural, outside the chain of cause and effect that characterized nature. For him, as William A. Johnson noted, the human dilemma was not occasioned by an “inherent evil” in the will. Yet because humanity belonged to the realm of powers and not of things, humans acted in ways uncaused by divine force; in effect, they chose evil—they sinned.Footnote ⁷⁵ Somehow they did not comprehend what was meant for their good. “Made organically perfect,” Bushnell wrote, “set as full in God's harmony as they can be, in the mould of their constitution, surrounded by as many things as possible to allure them to ways of obedience and keep them from the seductions of sin,” humans still had to contend with the (biblical) “fact of their begun existence, and their trial as persons or powers.” Thus they lived “in a condition privative” that involved “their certain lapse into evil.” Bushnell hastened to explain that by a “condition privative” he meant a “moral state” that was “only inchoate or incomplete, lacking something not yet reached,” which was “necessary to the probable rejection of evil.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Still, he had said enough to set the stage for the Christian drama of redemption through Jesus. And he had done so by means of an argument that, in basic outline, agreed with ideas that pervaded metaphysical religiosity.

Still more, the negation negated the unalloyed goodness of God's created world. As a consequence of human action, as a result of the “fact of sin,” came “a general disturbance or collapse of nature.” “What we call nature,” Bushnell declared, was “in fact, a state of un-nature induced by the penal or retributive action of causes provoked by sin.” Sin had “fallen into nature as a grain of sand into the eye.” The “laws of nature” remained, but they were “met and provoked by a new ingredient not included in nature.” And so, Bushnell mourned, “the whole field of nature, otherwise a realm of harmony, and peace, and beauty,” took on “a look of discord, and with many traces of the original glory left,” displayed “the tokens also of a prison and an hospital.” Here was metaphysical thinking under the law of correspondence, looking like what was to come after 1875 with Theosophy, the movement that attempted to reform spiritualism and so promoted occultism as the power to unlock the secrets of nature and use them to advantage. Humans, as sources of power, had destroyed the order of their world. “The immense power of the human will over the physical substances of the world and the conjunctions of its causes, is seldom adequately conceived,” Bushnell told readers. “Almost everything, up to the moon, is capable of being somehow varied or affected by it.”Footnote ⁷⁷ But unlike non-Christian Theosophists, who would proclaim the powers of mastery humans in themselves possessed, Bushnell looked to a Redeemer. The human power to dis-order things was not, for him, a power to make them right again.

Still, Bushnell had by his own devices come a long way into a metaphysical thought world that was still distinctly Christian. Negative theology functioned, in the end, to exalt the human place in the scheme of things. Deprived of the good that ought to be present, caught in the web of the First Parents and their wrongful deed, haunted by a continuing human willfulness that struck out against the divine, humans—as powers and not things—had yet managed miracles. Similarly, Bushnell had managed a rhetorical miracle of his own. He had traveled the same conceptual ground and built with much of the intellectual scaffolding that characterized other metaphysicians who left Christianity. Yet he took this all home to the Congregational Church. He saw himself as squarely and wholeheartedly a devotee of Jesus of Nazareth. If he was a man pulled by the mystical and metaphysical, he had also clearly committed himself to the person of Jesus and the power of the ecclesiastical structures he inhabited. Bushnell loved the Church, mourned for sin, and exulted in the vicarious sacrifice and atonement brought by Jesus.

We are back where we began, with Bushnell in the middle—Christian and among the metaphysicians, demonstrating, in fact, an unorthodox and innovating Christianity that could absorb certain forms of metaphysical religiosity. Like all readings, of course, this one is partial and needs to be set beside other familiar readings of Bushnell and also new ones. Bushnell may easily be read, for example, in terms of a theology of beauty and an aesthetic approach to religion—a project begun already to some extent by earlier work by Conrad Cherry.Footnote ⁷⁸ The importance of a metaphysical reading, however, is that it teases out the connections between thought worlds, de-reifying constructions that would place Christian church people and early metaphysicians in hermetically (pardon the pun) sealed worlds, separate from one another. They were not and are not. The complexities of lived religion in a vernacular world continue to give the lie to neat and tidy pigeon-holing. In the kaleidoscopic richness of theological construction on the ground, leading Christians and leading metaphysicians often had very much in common, and they inhabited a world that in many ways they made together.