Experimental Theology in America is a book filled with intellectual surprises. Consider the implications of just one event reported by Patricia A. Ward in this exemplary study of international devotional culture: the reissue of Thomas Upham's hefty two-volume Life and Religious Experience and Opinions of Madame de La Mothe Guyon (New York: Harper, 1846) in “thirty-seven editions, not counting translations, abridgments, and borrowings” (158).

Here was Upham, a Congregational minister, presenting the nearly mystical self-surrender of Jeanne de la Mothe Guyon (1648–1717), a French Catholic, as a model for Protestants. Upham was also a scientist, whose Elements of Intellectual Philosophy (Portland, Maine: William Hyde, 1827) instructed generations of psychologists. Yet his account of Madame Guyon, and her spiritual protégé, François de Fénelon (1651–1715), praised a spiritual posture linked in Victorian America to Methodist sanctification and the holiness impulse, worlds away, it would seem, from the empiricism of science. His choice of a book as his medium of instruction is noteworthy, too. In the midst of the Second Great Awakening's vigorous preaching and organizational energy, Upham turned to private reading for pious nurture. Madame Guyon might have shocked Americans as a fearsome figure of antinomian irrationality. Instead, her story sold marvelously well. Ward meticulously reconstructs the historical setting to explain the puzzle.

Upham's discovery of French thinkers often classified together as Quietists was not unprecedented among Protestants, and his book succeeded in part because it belonged to an ecumenical devotional tradition. Inner experience was the core interest of Christians across the Atlantic world who were drawn to “experimental theology.” The preeminence of the soul made differences in ritual or Church structure seem tolerable.

Ward's chronicle of this mood in early modern Europe may be seen as a chapter in the complex history of religious privatization. She shrewdly analyzes piety as an emotional journey. In its own way, the transformation of the self was a kind of scientific project based on minute observation and methodical cultivation of the psyche. The process of writing and reading about subjectivity was also inherently subversive because boundaries could be secretly crossed. Clearly Jonathan Edwards did not become a Catholic when he read Fénelon appreciatively, but the teachings of this Bishop of Cambrai nonetheless entered silently into Edwards's lexicon. In all, Ward effectively underscores the protean influences of reading on modern spiritual life. Although spending time with a book is an intimate activity, the consequences may far transcend personal affairs.

The international transmission of the piety of Madame Guyon and Fénelon constitutes a historical journey as eventful as their spiritual quests. Ward, whose specialty is French literature, situates the principal figures in the court of Louis XIV, where they counseled entire submission to God through disinterested love. Their endorsement of emotion as a guide and passivity as a goal elicited criticism from Catholics and Protestants alike. Madame Guyon spent five years in the Bastille, and Fénelon lived in exile from the court in a country town. Later Protestant popularizers resolved similar misgivings editorially. They warned readers against mystical self-annihilation, repeated the duty to behave morally, and omitted all mention of Catholic practices.

The intense yearning for God that made Madame Guyon and her followers seem dangerous, however, also guaranteed their enduring appeal. Using textual analysis and publishing history, Ward tracks their writings across Europe and North America down to the present time. German Pietists and Scottish mystics, American Unitarians and Pentecostals, John Wesley and Ruth Bell Graham—all Protestants—read these French writers. American Catholics were apparently more cautious. Ward observes without elaboration that excerpts from Fénelon appeared as an 1810 catechism, representing “a rare early example of Catholic use” (120). Experimental Theology in America tells a single story: the enthusiastic Protestant reception of a suspect strain of Catholic spirituality.

Anyone familiar with the value historically attributed to personal religious experience by American evangelicalism will easily grasp why this borrowing occurred. Most scholars will also concede that fascination with a type of supernatural encounter fully comprehended only by immediate insight has restrained the development of theology in America as a rational enterprise. In a similar way, Ward's absorbing interest in spirituality seems to deflect her attention from a long-held premise in American thinking: the will as the cornerstone of personality and, indeed, salvation.

Ward enlists Continental categories when she repeatedly contrasts speculative theology and emotional engagement and suggests their resolution in mysticism as a new kind of knowledge. Classic American Calvinism, in contrast, made volition—the turning of the rebellious will toward God—the vehicle of redemption. Upham's psychology textbook was consistent with his clerical training when it pictured human beings as tripartite creatures in possession of “intellect, will, and sensibilities” (156). Virtually every American Protestant writer of note meditated on the will, most memorably Edwards in Freedom of the Will (1754) and William James in “The Will to Believe” (1897). So, too, pragmatism, America's homegrown philosophy, anchored knowledge in volition. Next to these visions of activity and commitment, the yearning heart of the French thinkers seems out of place.

Ward has written a highly original and engrossing book even if she does not fully credit the theological impediments in America to these Catholic devotional texts. Indeed, when Ward identifies marginal sects such as the Moravians as entry points for French Quietism, she demonstrates that evangelicalism of British origin was never monolithic.

Nonetheless, a sharper sense of national religious boundaries might have provoked fruitful questions. Why did Upham, a moderate Congregationalist with a respect for science, present Madame Guyon's self-abasing piety to his contemporaries as worthy of imitation rather than threatening? Circulating her story seemed normal to Upham, and his many readers apparently agreed. Was the appearance of his book one episode in the transformation of a strenuous theology of will into a modern religious sensibility more comfortable with the pursuit of spiritual desire? Ward's compelling story of the unlikely resonance of French and American inwardness opens further intriguing scholarly doors.