4
FOUR CONVERTS

Fourteen
Elizabeth Seton: The Sacred Workings of Contagion

Sometime during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the famous revivalist preacher George Whitefield leaned over the prostrate body of a fourteen-year-old black boy and breathed, "Jesus Christ has got thee at last." Soon after this moment of divine seizure and conversion, the boy, John Marrant, a free black, fled his South Carolina town and family for the wilderness. He later described his adventures in one of the three most popular captivity narratives published in America, A Narrative of the Lord's Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black (Now Gone to Preach the Gospel in Nova-Scotia ).^[1] Marrant's story of evangelical enlightenment and ensuing captivity—first as a prisoner of the Cherokee Indians and then, on his return to the settlements, as an impressed sailor in the British Navy—articulates the complex interaction between captivity and conversion in American culture. Edited by the white Reverend Aldridge, who claims that "no more alterations . . . have been made, than were thought necessary" (180), Marrant's conversion and captivity narrative remains inescapably dual, for its conversion heroics are represented through Aldridge—a narrative situation of double inscrutability that both underscores the racial dominion asserted by white spectator over black prodigy and recapitulates the vexed rhetorical status of all convert prose, which dedicates itself to describing the indescribable.

Speaking worldly language to publicize its heavenly discoveries, convert prose characteristically wrestles with its own representations, vehemently intent on language but suspicious of the mimesis so hard won.^[2] Marrant's story, in its association of God with symbolic disguise, abrupt

role reversal, and violent transit between civilization and wilderness, interweaves his conversion with white America's triadic struggle against Britain, Africa, and the Indian nations. Instigating and then resolving into an elaborately patterned series of further self-transformations, captivities, and deliverances, Marrant's tent-meeting conversion functions as a trope through which the black convert and (implicitly) the white reader organize and master the national and racial conflicts that jointly menace them. The radically unknowable God of evangelical Methodism serves paradoxically to control the abrupt transformations of the Revolutionary era while the drama of the interior life, its abysses, reversals, paradoxes, and triumphs, asserts the virtuosity of the black convert, whose "enslavement" to Whitefield's Christ issues into a proliferation of escapes.

Like the originating mystery of the Incarnation—the Godhead's paradoxical and always provisional allegiance to the flesh—Marrant's tale of conversion and captivity oscillates between transcendence and embrace of the sensuous world. The strange agreements and interchanges between the profane and the sacred suggestively implied by the Incarnation manifest themselves in the consummate theatricality of his story of the spirit, his narrative unfolding further dramas of disguise and transformation, play and crisis, as he converts himself from free black to adopted Indian, to British soldier, and finally to Methodist missionary. Having, like other spiritually motivated captives, virtually engineered his abduction by the Cherokees, the prisoner avoids his torture-death by converting his Indian executioner at the sacrifice site—a feat performed by spontaneously praying "with remarkable liberty" (190) in the Cherokee tongue, by quoting Scripture charismatically spoken to the literally and spiritually uncomprehending Cherokees, and, at hints of each deliverance, by singing Watts's hymns. The successful replication of Whitefield's conversion technology not only confirms his own saved status, his mastery, as it were, of his own enslavement, but also advertises the evangelical economy of the Holy Spirit; for like Marrant's various identities, the spirit functions as a volatile commodity amenable to duplication, distribution, and exchange at moments of crisis.

Eventually casting off his adopted princely status, Marrant returns to the town from which he had fled, disguised as a "savage" to proselytize among whites and blacks, first holding revival meetings in the back settlements and, by doing so, coming to know his true vocation. As free black disguised as Indian, Marrant describes his "head . . . set out in the savage manner, with a long pendant down my back, a sash round my middle, without breeches, and a tomahawk by my side" (194). Thus

transformed, he preaches the Gospel of Jesus to the white man from whom it came, the convert turning and turning again inside the constraints of early American culture, extracting power from oppression, liberty from captivity, authentic dissemblance from inauthentic being. He is as visible and invisible as the Lord whom he represents. "The singularity of my dress drew everybody's eyes upon me, yet none knew me" (195). If the return home brings on the expected struggle with spiritual complacency, Marrant uses the occasion to warn the reader, "Don't forget our Lord's exhortation, 'What I say unto you, I say unto all, WATCH' " (197). We are of course to watch for the coming of Christ and for the continuation of Marrant's narrative, to submit our potentially errant attention to his authorial capture.

When impressed by the British for seven years' service during the Revolutionary War, Marrant (now the involuntary servant of his oppressor) undergoes a final displacement and doubling. From "redskin" to "redcoat," the black man submerges himself in cultural conflict; all oppression becomes inscribed on him so that he, like his crucified Lord, might become a strategist of deliverance. Freed in England, he is ordained in the newly rejected Mother Country and concludes his career on another cultural margin, in Nova Scotia, as a Methodist missionary. Thus this virtuoso of New World culture and his adventures in the political and spiritual picaresque proclaim that unity abides beneath the worst of conflicts. As he assumes and sheds the guises of America, he develops into a cross-cultural, interracial, evangelized force who asserts the continuity of the spiritual over the violent and random impact of the cultural.

In Marrant's spiritual autobiography, conversion constitutes a crucial intersection of charismatic agency and coercive historical event. In both the extremity of its events and its representation, his conversion narrative prefigures and provisionally contains political and racial schism. Alternating between black, white, and red man, profane musician and sanctified captive, impressed soldier and charismatic preacher, Marrant embodies fundamental oppositions and inequities in Revolutionary America between the Old and the New World, the savage and the civilized, the slave and the free man, "Old" and "New" lights. Thus his career improbably testifies to the emergent myth of the New Republic—that no social enslavement need be permanent. The sheer availability of liberty—of deliverance—in the spiritual dimension argues for freedom's plenitude in the temporal. There is finally no tangled alliance (or antagonism) between the two, but rather a mimetic accord, one narratively registered with the symbolic precision and splendor of ritual. Marrant's

narrative concludes on the eve of his voyage to Nova Scotia, for which he entreats our prayers that "Indian tribes may stretch out their hands to God; that the black nations may be made white in the blood of the Lamb" (200).

In antebellum America the issue of conversion was no less engaged with the drama of the marginal self and the threat of national disunity.^[3] But the site for the representation of transcendence and its conflicted negotiation between the mysteries of interiority and the burdens of the historical self broadened to include the novel and ideologically suspect domain of the Roman Catholic church. With the increasing standardization of Protestant conversion to a nondenominational "saving faith in Jesus," conversion to Catholicism assumed an obliquely radical position in America; like Marrant's Methodism, Roman Catholicism afforded a sanctified deviance from mainstream culture, offering antebellum converts a paradoxical deliverance from Protestant hegemony through the proverbial captivity to Old World orthodoxy. As Marrant had expertly "converted" captivity into liberty, racial marginality into evangelical authority, so many nineteenth-century Americans found in "popery" their joy, salvation, and regenerated cultural identity.

Those antebellum citizens who converted to one or another denomination of Protestant Christianity were both leaving the world and subscribing to one of their culture's most prized values. Indeed, from the Puritan migration onward, spiritual rebirth had been a primary means of cleansing the community of heterogeneous elements and, for individuals, of attaining status in its purified precincts.^[4] Those antebellum Americans who chose Catholicism, however, adopted what their peers defined as corrupt and defiled. Emerging from the intersection of intense cultural prejudice and an often overwhelming subjective conviction of Catholicism's truth, Protestant converts to Rome consolidated their religious identities through the experience of cultural resistance that not only confirmed their decision but consoled them for its inevitable costs. Wrote one convert: "It seems to me that the difference between my embracing the Roman Catholic Church and any other is the same as the difference between remaining as I am, and selling all that I have and following Christ."^[5] For Catholic converts, the process entailed a series of radical ideological inversions in which the Whore of Babylon became the Mother Church and the Antichrist became the venerated pope—a transformation so amazing that Stowe, fascinated by the submission of

her own character, Father Francesco, to "antichrist," could only attribute it to "some metaphysical process of imaginative devotion."^[6]

Because they were both insiders and outsiders, such nineteenth-century American Catholic converts as Elizabeth Ann Seton (1774-1821), Isaac Hecker (1819-1888), Sophia Ripley (1803-1861), and Orestes Brownson (1803-1876) developed a distinctive critical capacity to diagnose the majority culture they had repudiated.^[7] Their effort to resituate themselves within but not inside that abandoned culture involved an intricate battle with its familiar but now "heretical" influences and at times a subversive reappropriation of Protestant America for Rome. As the eighteenth-century minister John Thayer argued in his conversion narrative, the Roman church was precisely that "City built upon a mountain" memorialized in John Winthrop's sermon aboard the Arbella . The true church was not the one so eloquently envisioned and laboriously pursued by Winthrop and company; rather, it had been elsewhere all along and "visible" for all the world to see.^[8]

Proponents of the mid-century doctrine of Manifest Destiny argued that Protestant purity and redemption were central to the domestic and international expansionist politics of the Republic. American missionaries set off not only for the Hawaiian Islands, but for Catholic Europe, seeking to offset there the presumed machinations of Jesuits and other papal agents in America by proselytizing on the streets of Rome.^[9] At the very time such Protestant missionary efforts were occurring, however, American Protestants in sizable numbers were defecting to Rome. Of the estimated 350,000 conversions to Catholicism in nineteenth-century America, some 57,400 took place between q and 1860.^[10] Although several prominent converts were drawn from the ranks of High Episcopalianism, antebellum conversions were not traceable to any one ideological center, such as the Oxford movement provided in England.^[11] Instead those conversions of which we have written descriptions developed as individual (and regionally diffuse) responses to cultural and individual pressures indigenous to pre-Civil War America. As such, Catholic converts articulated a distinctive indictment of and alternative to the economic and domestic pressures of middle-class life—pressures characteristically experienced as an emptiness within, an absence remedied only by the redemptive "substance" of Catholic dogma. The defection in the ranks provoked some of the culture's most profound and revealing comment on the nature of authority and subversion, interpretation and truth, corruption and regeneration. Indeed, contemporary accounts of Catholic conversion elicited explanatory strategies that pointed to significant ideological tensions in mainstream Protestant cul-

ture. Impelled by their adopted faith, many converts struggled to domesticate their decision, to accommodate themselves and their audiences to foreign modes of ecclesiastical polity and piety. Simultaneously, convert writing, which included conversion narratives, periodical essays, personal correspondence, fiction, and poetry, transcended its struggle to communicate with its surrounding "heretical" culture. Hence, the language of Catholic conversion variously incorporated liberal Protestant (and especially Transcendentalist) views of the spirit and the nativist language against which conversions shaped themselves.

Many Catholic converts were fleeing the psychologically coercive extremes of Calvinism, whose insistence on the worthlessness of human effort appeared increasingly tyrannical and implausible. If the famous eighteenth-century Puritan missionary David Brainerd comfortably lamented that his prayers were like "paddling with my hand in the water," and if Marrant pursued precisely such evangelicalized impotence in the wilderness, later generations resisted such abasement as an unseemly enslavement. Holmes's memorable revulsion at being taught as a child that "we were a set of little fallen wretches" was shared by the Catholic convert and prolific novelist Joshua Huntington, who recalled that his Calvinist education produced only religious indifference. "I constantly heard the doctrine taught that every action, even the prayer, of the unconverted man is wholly sinful, an abomination in the sight of God; so I made none."^[12]

Long-standing theological and clerical debates over the proper morphology of conversion generally followed one of two models: the gradual education of the struggling soul, a spiritual evolution influentially put forth in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress , or the stunning transformation of the worldly soul, an experience typified by Paul on the road to Damascus. Was conversion to be a "natural" and noninstitutional product of the new cult of domesticity and family nurture, as liberal Protestants like Horace Bushnell argued in Christian Nurture (1847)?^[13] Or were the revivalists the correct model, with their increasingly nondenominational but "conservative" terrain of radical impotence, vitiated nature, and blinding grace? Converts to Rome frequently articulated their conversion experiences as an alternative to this debate; they resisted the instantaneous captivity of evangelical revivalism epitomized by John Marrant and systematized by such nineteenth-century revivalists as Peter Cartwright and Charles Grandison Finney; they also resisted the cult of domesticity, choosing a path of gradual enlightenment that had little to do with the "Angel in the House." In claiming that they traveled a "gradual path," these converts denied notions of innate depravity and

transformative domesticity while accepting the use of reason and the possibility of celibacy. Because Catholic doctrine validated the careful use of reason in cooperation with grace, the foreign church was especially attractive to such figures as Orestes Brownson, who spoke for many converts in describing the forcefully cerebral nature of his developing belief in the claims of Rome: "I have disputed the ground inch by inch, and have yielded only when I had no longer any ground on which to stand."^[14]

Catholics were not, of course, averse to marketing the Pauline dynamic of conversion. An influential spiritual autobiography of the period, The Conversion of Marie-Alphonse Ratisbonne: Original Narrative of Baron Theodore de Bussières , reported that "a man, in full possession of all his senses and faculties, entered a church an obstinate Jew; and, by one of those swift flashes of grace which laid Saul prostrate at the gates of Damascus, he came forth, ten minutes afterwards, a Catholic in heart and in will."^[15] If Catholics advertised such miraculous transformations, Protestant converts to Rome typically emphasized the time-consuming complexity of their repudiation of Protestantism. The Apology for the Conversion of Stephen Cleveland Blythe, to the Faith of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church, Respectfully Addressed to Protestants of Every Denomination (1815) records one pilgrim's exhaustive travels through Episcopalianism, Deism, Moravianism, Swedenborgianism, and Unitarianism. "But, as if I were doomed to be the victim of my own fastidious delicacy," Blythe writes, "and endlessly to roam in quest of what I should never find, I soon discovered in the simplest form of Christianity, the most palpable inconsistencies."^[16] Finally returning to Boston after his prolonged spiritual search, Blythe joined the Catholic church in 1809.

The convert Joshua Huntington found that the illogicalities of Princeton seminary training destroyed his respect for Calvinist theology and thus the very basis of his Christian faith. The Reformers' appeal to a pure scriptural rather than (corrupt) apostolic authority was finally a spurious solution, he declared in his Gropings After Truth: A Life Journey from New England Congregationalism to the One Catholic and Apostolic Church (1868), for scriptural interpretation was itself thoroughly shaped by human mediation. "The simple fact is, that the Bible is a rule of faith to Protestants to this extent, and no further, that, having received their faith from the oral instruction of their parents and teachers, without the Bible, they have recourse to it in after-years, merely to find in it the things which they have been taught, and which they already believe."^[17] Training for the ministry, Huntington. Failed in his struggle to experience the

desired descent of the spirit; his "conviction became gradually fixed that this notion of conversion was wholly a delusion" (25), and he finally abandoned his fledgling clerical career to become a schoolmaster. Sometime later, he found himself reading issues of the Catholic World , "merely from curiosity, to see how the advocates of this absurd superstition would attempt to defend it in the brilliant light of this nineteenth-century" (89). The conversion that ensued from this studiously casual exploration conscientiously opposes the antirational morphology of evangelical pietism. "At length, I began to think her [the church's] claims might be well founded, and by a gradual process of change, my admission of the possibility of this was converted, through the operations of my own mind, into a conviction of its probability, and finally into a full belief in its truth" (93). Huntington's defense of the "operations of my own mind" is characteristic of antebellum convert prose, an effort to reassert the legitimacy of the reasoning (or feeling) self against Protestant cultural validations of the willing self, one capable of entrepreneurial, revivalistic, or Emersonian transformations through a sheer assertion of will.

Writing usually in the tradition of Christian apologetics, rather than in the intimate confessional mode of spiritual autobiography, converts like Stephen Blythe and Joshua Huntington at times confirmed contemporary suspicions of Catholic piety. Sharply contrasted to the abasements of Calvinism or the intuitions of liberal Unitarianism, their Catholic conversion narratives characteristically focused less on a saving grace than on a saving epistemology and politics, a way of knowing and of being in society. Converts also unintentionally buttressed pejorative associations between Rome and worldliness by trying to prove the reasonableness of their decision. They struggled to convey that grace was an "objective" as well as a "subjective" matter and that the true church was a visible institution that embodied the living, invisible Christ but whose claims were accessible to human reason.

This stress on objectivity was such a puzzling redefinition of spirituality that some Protestant reviewers of convert authors often found no religion at all in their accounts of spiritual illumination; their narratives seemed hopelessly "outside" the spirit to Protestant readers. They might be stories of fraud or folly, but not of an authentic piety; Bishop Levi Silliman Ives's widely read narrative The Trials of a Mind in Its Progress to Catholicism (1854) deviated so far from conventional representations of spiritual progress that it was judged "utterly deficient in those qualities of solemn and penetrating earnestness which will so profoundly engage our sympathies when we read of the real struggles of a soul with facts and mysteries."^[18] This reviewer's bewilderment was not entirely a matter

of anti-Catholic prejudice, for his inability to credit Ives's narrative with any spiritual sincerity whatever reveals deeply held differences not only about the procedures and fruits of conversion but also about the nature of the interior life. Could that life include sanctified elements of the exterior world, or were such elements an inevitable corruption of the questing spirit? As suggested by Maria Monk's depictions of monastic obedience as a pathological debasement of reason, the divergence between Protestant and Catholic devotional practices signaled deep disagreement over not only what interior life was but also who was to be in it. If, as a writer explained in the Catholic Metropolitan , "in divinizing authority, Catholicity has sanctified obedience," that view inflamed resistance from those preoccupied with the dangers of submission and the perils of intellectualism in a democratic, individualist culture.^[19]

To antebellum readers preoccupied with the expansionist menace of slavery or "unionism"—both threats to the sovereignty of the American citizen—converts spoke a baffling language of interiority, enclosure, and reasoned submission, a vocabulary that inevitably entangled itself with traditional republican anxieties about abuse of authority and the Protestant insistence on the primacy of private judgment. As supposed victims of Catholicism's "false glitter which dazzled and betrayed men into worship of their destroyers," converts were accorded the marginal, if threatening, status of the mesmerized and self-destructive soul.^[20] Converts could respond with their own version of the captivity ethos, declaring of those who persisted in their delusions of independence that "they who have not been illumined by the faith, though they think themselves free, are slaves to the greatest of all tyrants—pride, and the degraded servants of the most base of all masters—self."^[21]

The varied and often vital articulations of Catholic converts belied the nativist Nicholas Murray's confident claim that "if there is any moral position on which the mind of this age is satisfied, it is that Popery is the mystery of iniquity."^[22] Quarreling with the age's developing validation of an increasingly isolate and emancipated subjectivity, antebellum converts used "sanctified" reason to contain the perilous reflexivity of "private judgment." Dismissing Protestant claims for the controlling authority of Scripture, one writer for the Catholic World , in words reminiscent of Melville's portrait of the maddened Ahab, described the Protestant Bible reader as both victim and blasphemous executor of private judgment: "He holds the sacred book before the mirror of his reason. The image it presents, however imperfect or deformed, becomes to him the truth of the Eternal Word. He casts the pure wheat of God between the millstones of his human judgments and his human loves. The

grist they grind is all the bread he has whereon to feed his soul."^[23] For readers familiar with the perils of psychological captivity from the pyrotechnic catastrophe of Brockden Brown's Wieland to Nat Turner's discovery of insurrectionary directives in the dew drops of the corn, this was a powerful image of the dangers of self-involvement. As the writer of the above passage reiterated, submission to the church's teaching authority meant escape from this imprisonment, from the human gristmill of interpretation. "It is to his deliverance from this spiritual state that the name conversion alone properly belongs."^[24]

There, you read what I w[oul]d have carried to the grave, only I wish you to know well . . . the impossibility of a poor protestant to see our meaning without being led step by step & the veil lifted little by little .
Elizabeth Seton to her spiritual director

In October 1803 William and Elizabeth Seton sailed for Italy, accompanied by the eldest of their five children, eight-year-old Anna. While many Americans were already migrating west, the New York couple had set themselves on an opposite course: to recuperate health and possibly fortune in the Old World. In flight from the American winter and the collapse of the family trading business, the young Setons sought therapy in Italy. The warm air might arrest William's advanced tuberculosis, and his loyal Italian friends, the Filicchis, might rescue the family from poverty. Bankrupt and dying, William Seton embodied the mercantile vulnerability of the body in the young capitalist economy—its shameful vulnerability to "reversal" and collapse.^[25]

Elizabeth Seton knew that the voyage was a hopeless one; William was in the final, acute, stage of a disease already famous for its romantic languor, a languor whose alternation between "hectic" and "pallor" visibly enacted the psychomachia fundamental to the Christian's development—the soul's struggle agahist the seductions and confinements of the flesh.^[26] An ardent Episcopalian, twenty-nine-year-old Elizabeth wrote a spiritual journal during the voyage. Like the English Puritans two centuries back, she understood her transatlantic migration in scriptural terms. Only for Seton, the Promised Land lay not in the American wilderness but in the benevolent climate of Italy. Sea voyages, country air, and dry climates were common prescriptions, along with bloodletting and the application of blisters to drain the body of its "congestion." Notwithstanding the shift from corporate Puritanism to individual therapeutic quest, Seton's devotional language in her journal performs the

conventional mediatory function between two orders of petition—that of the invalid body and that of the infirm soul. Hers was a language that sought to control illness by consenting to its presence everywhere, to use disease as an emblem not so much of civic disorder (as yellow fever functioned in the politically divisive 1790s) as of disordered subjectivity, independent of political era. The journal "passage" and the sea passage jointly articulated and interconnected the primary issues of her devotional and social experience: exposure, contamination, corruption, sacrifice, and reunion. She wrote:

Considering the Infirmity and corrupt nature which would overpower the Spirit of Grace, and the enormity of the offense to which the least indulgence of them would lead me—in the anguish of my Soul shuddering to offend my Adored Lord—I have this day solemnly engaged that through the strength of His Holy Spirit I will not again expose that corrupt and Infirm nature to the Smallest temptation I can avoid—and therefore if my Heavenly Father will once more reunite us all that I will make a daily Sacrifice of every wish even the most innocent , least [sic] they should betray me to a deviation from the Solemn and Sacred vow I have now made—^[27]

Seton addressed these words to her husband's half sister Rebecca Seton, who remained in America. That Elizabeth Seton bestowed such complex intimacies on her sister-in-law points to the role her female relatives would increasingly assume for her.^[28] Rebecca, Harriet, and Cecilia Seton (members of her husband's family), as well as Elizabeth's two older daughters, Anna and Rebecca, came to function as precocious saints; recipients and favored exempla of Seton's writing, these young women and girls played a central narrative and devotional function in both her interior and her social life. Amplifying her parental role, Seton fashioned maternity into a spiritual enterprise while her piety correspondingly depended on familial obedience and q union. But the actions of Seton as mother and as Christian creature were laced through with imitation and the consequent struggle toward an ever greater authenticity. In her self-portrait as powerful infantilized subject recorded in her journal "vow," Seton propitiates her "heavenly Father," thus enacting before her sister-in-law Rebecca a filial drama of obedience. Negotiating between the deviant and the gracious, the journal entry confirms the Christian truth that submission masters infirmity while also displaying the mother's authority over her female relatives and children; her self-portrait as an infirm, potentially deviant, self-sacrificing mother

who submits to God implicitly represents the child (ever potentially wayward) who reads her text.

It was a frankly intentional and, as the years proceeded, increasingly elaborate strategy of parental discipline and celebration. While Seton was disappointed in her sons, her daughters would fully absorb the spiritual training in the years to come. Three years after her Italian trip, Elizabeth recorded of her daughter Rebecca's precocious piety in "A Journal of the Soul," written for Cecilia Seton: "The innocent ones are playing in a corner Rebecca appealed to me with most powerful eloquence hands and eyes all in motion 'did I not tell Amelia right, if we have the crown of thorns in this World will we not have the roses in the next'—dear love if at 5 years you know the truth, that is, the lesson of the cross what may not an experience of their precious thorns produce in you."^[29] The mother's speculation about her daughter's body pierced by "precious thorns" would soon enough materialize for Rebecca, who later suffered the torments of an injured, perhaps tubercular hip and those of heroic therapeutic intervention.

The immediate reader of Seton's ship diary was, of course, Seton herself. While her text addresses her sister-in-law (who, as mute auditor, symbolically represents Elizabeth's "adored Lord"), Seton is the first witness and recipient of her own "solemn and sacred vow." The artifice that perplexes all confessional prose (the activity of revealing to one's self what one already knows) is especially at issue here, where Seton transcribes her indirect confession to an omniscient Lord by way of the distant Rebecca. Her revelation and vow are simultaneously already known and never knowable—their solemnity, however earnest, a theatrical one, held up before herself for scrutiny and renewed acts of imitation. While the dying William Seton provided the context for such devotional activity, Elizabeth addressed it in particular to his sister Rebecca, also ill from tuberculosis. The very plethora of causes and treatments accorded tuberculosis a horror of the infinite to which Seton's journal fully testifies in her repeated, if implicit, parallels between the workings of the sacred and those of disease. Seton, pressed on either side by dying beloveds, recorded a situation that became a typical one in her life.

In its revelation of the already known and its anxious preoccupation with images of submission and control, Seton's passage metaphorically registered the peculiar impossibilities of the voyage—a journey in search of reprieve from an already-known death that was yet an ongoing contagion. Like the ship carrying her tubercular husband, Seton's entry contains in a single hypotactic sentence a potentially overpowering content, the diseased "enormity" of her own nature. Against a series of future

conditionals ("would overpower," "would lead me," "should betray me") that convey the latent treachery of contaminated nature, Seton's language posits the humbly militant subject who combats potential evil with a definitive past ("I have . . . solemnly engaged, " "I have now made") and a definitive future ("I will not again expose, " "I can avoid, " "I will make a daily sacrifice"). Her humility stands as subversive substitute for her husband's humiliation, her language of exposure, avoidance, and sacrifice that of the penitent bankrupt assuming renewed control.

The specificity and control manifest in both the past and future tenses of Seton's "solemn and sacred vow" issue, then, from a generalized infirmity of the body—whose uninterrupted perils Seton both acknowledges and minimizes in the ongoing present of her opening, "Considering the infirmity and corrupt nature"; her concluding reassertion of the "sacred vow I have now made" confirms the dominion of this new spiritual present over the potentially unregulated dimension of the body. The vow—her statement to God that is both anterior to the journal entry and reiterated in the passage's linguistic transit from deviance to control—bisects Seton's troubled subjectivity with linear precision. Cor-doning off the threatening topography of "exposure" and "deviation" from a purged and newly constrained self ("I will not again expose that corrupt and infirm nature to the smallest temptation"), Seton's vow articulates the linear norm implied by her imagery of deviance.

Like the vow, the voyage was meant to provide a linear control over the family's situation, an exodus from William's bankruptcy and tuberculosis. To preserve the ritual space newly organized by her promise, Seton commits herself to a continuous purgation. Since wishes lead to deviance, the proposed "sacrifice of every wish" is tantamount to the expulsion of every threat; to give up is also to get rid of—a devotional drama that closely allies renunciation to more aggressive activities of decontamination and banishment. Indeed, in imitating the social and financial banishment performed on her and her husband, Seton's renunciations compete against those prior exclusions and diminish their impact. The enormity of the social damage is suggested in the psychological remedy—a daily self-purification, extending into the indefinite future; in continued opposition to the persistent threat of the deviant, this repeated expulsion will ward off the perils of proximity and incorporation, the perils, in Seton's words, of "the least indulgence."

From its opening opposition between the "enormity of the offense" and the "least indulgence," the entry concludes with a corresponding and equally portentous antithesis between "even the most innocent " wish and a traitorous "deviation." The object of her ritually controlled in-

terior purity is the reunion of the family ("if my Heavenly Father willonce more reunite us all ")—a reunion that will motivate and reward the new unity of a self purged of wishes and closed to exposure. Behind such a petition lay diffcult adolescent years as a homeless stepdaughter and, even more painful, the childhood loss of her mother. Years later, Seton recorded as her first memory:" At 4 years of age sitting alone on a step of the door looking at the clouds while my little sister Catherine 2 years old lay in her coffin they asked me did I not cry when little Kitty was dead?—no because Kitty is gone up to heaven I wish I could go too with Mamma—."^[30]

Seton's vow, however, did not produce its desired effect; nor did the Voyage. On landing, the couple were confined to the lazaretto in Leghorn, Quarantined as suspected carriers of yellow fever. They subsisted in this" dungeon" for a month as untouchables, excluded from Italy and America, waiting to manifest their symptoms. But all that occurred in the lazaretto was the rapid advance of William's tuberculosis. Maddeningly, their flight from New York had landed them in the symbolically exact zone for consumptions:a stony, damp, and windy dungeon. The point was not lost on Seton, who wrote home:"Consider—My Husband who left his all to seek a milder climate confined in this place of high and damp walls exposed to cold and wind which penetrates to the very bones, without fire except the kitchen charcoal which oppresses his Breast so much as to Nearly convulse him."^[31] This imprisonment confirmed thefundamental structures of Seton's interior life. The quarantine, like Indian captivity for New England settlers, translated metaphoric captivity and corruption into a reality at once rerrifying and reassuring. Seton's rhetorical and psychic investment in the topos of any "least indulgence" producing an enormity of corruption reflected not just the terrors of fallen nature but also the particular ones of disease—specifically, the contagious, inscrutable workings of yellow fever and consumption. It was no accident that on board ship for Italy she had prayed and written in the language of avoidance, purgation, and self-seclusion, within the linear boundaries of a vow. Nor was it accidental that this world of contagion, cataclysmic suffering, and mute surveillance of the dying body should produce, in turn, her conversion to the Catholic church and illuminate her late rcareer as Mother Seton, first American-born woman saint.

Quarantine was already familiar to Seton, for as the daughter of Richard Bayley, Columbia University's first professor of anatomy and New York

City's chief health officer, she had often witnessed her father's zealous efforts to control yellow fever outbreaks. With her husband's bankruptcy, she and the children moved increasingly in Richard Bayley's world and in particular spent two summers at his Health Establishment on Staten Island.

During the summer of 1801, boatloads of immigrants unloaded at the island, dying of yellow fever and malnutrition. Striving to quell the panic among New York's citizens, Bayley had already published an important treatise, An Account of the Epidemic Fever (1796). Although Bayley did not understand the bacterial etiology of the fever, he correctly suspected the role played by environmental causes and argued that the disease spread because of poor sanitary conditions and lack of ventilation. Like many physicians familiar with the paranoia surrounding epidemics, Bayley's principal concern was to reclassify yellow fever victims as non-contagious, and hence safe to care for. As he explained in his pamphlet: "Indeed, I have been anxious about nothing so much as to fix upon the mind, the great and obvious distinction betwixt contagious diseases, and those which, under very peculiar circumstances, may assume much of that character."^[32] During the last summers of the eighteenth century, circumstances conspired to render the disease seemingly contagious: boatloads of immigrants (Bayley estimated only 150 out of the 800 victims were New York citizens, the rest being immigrants) and hot, wet weather. Bayley's treatment for the disease consisted of providing adequate ventilation, purgatives for the stomach and bowels, occasional use of the lancet (especially if the disease struck a robust person who "had just arrived from the purer and cooler air of the country " [114]), and, in severe cases, the application of blisters to the stomach.

Uncertainty whether the disease was contagious nonetheless continued in the Bayley-Seton household during the summer of 1801. According to one biographer, Seton's father "would not permit her past the extra white railing he had erected to protect his beloved family from contagion."^[33] Seton's correspondence during that summer oscillates between an Enlightenment rhetoric of controlled sensibility and an emergent romantic Christian language of empathy and vicarious agony. Watching the dying immigrants being carried to shore, she spoke like a Gothic heroine, practicing, like Emily de St. Aubigné of Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho , a rational virtue to contain her fears: "To me who possesses a frame of fibres strong and nerves well strung, it is but a passing scene of nature's sufferings, which when closed will lead to happier scenes."^[34] But if she proffered such a language of distanced control to her friend Julia Scott (whom she feared might otherwise

"swoon"), she wrote with abandon to her spiritual intimate, her sister-in-law Rebecca Seton. One letter in particular to Rebecca expresses this critical shift from controlled surveillance to barely disciplined identification, from metaphors of spectacle to those of possession.

Rebecca, I cannot sleep. The dying and the dead possess my mind. Babies perishing at the empty breast of the expiring mother. And this is not fancy, but the scene that surrounds me. Father says such was never known before, that there is [sic ] actually 12 children that must die for mere want of sustenance, unable to take more than the breast, and from the wretchedness of their parents, deprived of it, as they have lain ill for many days on the ship without food, air, or changing. Merciful Father.! Oh, how readily would I give them each a turn of Kit's treasure if in my choice! But, Rebecca, they have a Provider in Heaven Who will smooth the pangs of the suffering innocent.

Father goes up early in the morning to procure all possible comforts for the sufferers. . . . My side window is open, and wherever I look there are lights. Tents are pitched over the yard of the convalescent house, and a large one . . . joined to the dead house.^[35]

The escalation of Seton's language from a controlled sensibility into the release of her agony reflects the psychic configuration of an island divided between healthy and contaminated enclosures. Having recently survived her own fifth "confinement," Seton supervised a busy domestic circle while looking beyond the white railing to the tents that contained, in perilous proximity, the diseased, the dead, and her idolized father, her sole remaining parent. Both obliged and anxious to assert domestic order against the immigrant horror, Seton suffered an increasing sense of illicit plenitude, her mother's milk ("Kit's treasure") literally and figuratively representing her moral plight. Underscoring the distressing presence of the famished immigrant infants, Seton's breast milk, a "treasure" effortlessly produced by her body, pointed to the confused cornmingling of impotence and moral responsibility provoked by witnessing such suffering.

Like the spontaneous but finally restricted abundance of her milk, Seton's access to the suffering was immediate but curtailed—a vision of the dead house through an open "side window." The longing for release from this burden surfaces in her cry, "Oh, how readily would I give them each a turn of Kit's treasure if in my choice!" Moral equilibrium of a sort was finally achieved when her exhausted father contracted the fever and died on August 17, 1801. The contagion had penetrated the barrier of

the white railing and seeped into the domestic precinct, bringing Elizabeth Seton into uninterrupted contact with it. But while, as her father's nurse, she could now touch and soothe the suffering, the maddening sense of exclusion and helplessness deepened. Having imagined a regulation of the suffering through distributing her precious milk, Seton, faced with a dying parent who persisted in his Deist ways, turned from the notion of distribution to that of destruction. Sacrifice might perhaps control the contagion, a vow might rail it off again. Thus, walking outside with her baby Kit, she "offered the life of the sleeping child in exchange for her father's soul."^[36] If her father's body had already been claimed for death, his disturbingly skeptic soul might possibly achieve immortality through the offered body of his granddaughter.

Seton's proffered sacrifice of her newborn initiated a series of agonized engagements with contagious disease that occurred throughout her life. In the twenty years that remained to her, she would lose her husband, two sisters-in-law (Rebecca and Cecilia) and two beloved daughters (Anna and Rebecca) to consumption—a disease that, like yellow fever, was sometimes susceptible to cure but more often not and whose crisis stages of ague and fever recalled the shorter-lived course of the fever that had killed her father. The early instance of the fantasied sacrifice of her child (whom she frequently described as her "dearest self") anticipated her developing strategy of control—to contain the suffering body by taking its contagion within. This psychic alliance between contagion and incorporation found expression and legitimation in Seton's devotional life, specifically the enormous importance she attached as an Episcopalian (and later as a Catholic) to communion. Her devotion to the Eucharist organized an otherwise eclectic spirituality that prior to her Catholic conversion included bits and pieces of the American religious mosaic. According to one of her biographers, she "wore a Catholic crucifix, looked kindly on the life of the cloister, subscribed to the doctrine of angels, liked Methodist hymns, the quietism of the Quakers, and the emotionalism of Rousseau, read general Protestant works, practiced meditation, was inclined to the narrow Calvinism of her ancestors in the matter of sin and punishment, and attended the Episcopal Church."^[37] The Eucharist focused such dispersed denominational affiliations; more profoundly, contagion, community, and communion were inextricably linked in this liturgical rite that enabled her to ingest the wounded body.

After the death of her father, Seton moved back to Manhattan, followed by the fever, which began to claim victims in the city. But if New York represented a renewed threat of infection, it also meant the precious

opportunity to attend the Episcopal service. As if to urge herself on as well as her sister-in-law, Seton wrote to Rebecca in the fall of 1801: "The terror of our fellow citizens seems to be so awakened that I do not believe you ought to come to town, as prudence says; but I say , 'Come dear, let us keep the feast' with sincerity and truth."^[38] Seton's interpolation from 1 Corinthians 5:7-8 emphasizes the nourishment of communion and its symbolic opposition to both the famished immigrant and the citizen too afraid to partake of either community or communion. In Seton's reported response to the Eucharist we understand how the ritual symbolically duplicated the dreaded yellow fever, its ague and its extremities of thirst. "So great was her devotion to the Episcopalian remembrance of the Last Supper, that her teeth chattered against the cup of wine in an ecstasy of trembling awe when she received; and after the service she [and a close friend] would ask the sexton for the remnants of the sacramental wine, that they might renew their devotion in receiving again."^[39]

When Seton and her husband sailed for Italy two years after this, the configuration of her devotional being had achieved its fundamental shape: the informally conventual relationship with younger women (performing their Episcopalian charity work, she and Rebecca Seton had already been dubbed Protestant Sisters of Charity); an almost topographical sense of fidelity and deviance that resisted the contagious disorders of open space: "The misfortune of the afternoon will, I hope, be a lesson for life to my darling sister," wrote Seton to Rebecca, "that you should never violate the strict rule, not to leave home on any persuasion on Sacrament Sunday, and to say openly to whoever may request it that it is your rule"; and finally a profound association between the enclosure of rules and one's proximity to God. Thus, sailing out of New York harbor for Italy, she wrote to her young sister-in-law Cecilia Seton:

Still my heart would dictate to you many anxious requests respecting your habitual observance of that Heavenly Christian life you have so early begun—in order to persevere in this your first attention must be to make yourself a few particular Rules which you must not suffer anything on Earth to divert you from as they relate immediately to your sacred duty to God.^[40]

The lazaretto in Leghorn intensified and partially resolved many of these issues, for it provided the desired access to an enclosed suffering, a captivity whose mythic clarity gave purpose to Seton's transit from the New to the Old World. Along with her eight-year-old daughter and her acutely ill husband, she was finally inside "an immense Prison bolted in and barred with as much ceremony as any monster of mischief might

be—a single window double grated with iron thro' which, if I should want any thing, I am to call a centinel, with a fierce cocked hat, and long riffle gun, that is that he may not receive the dreadful infection we are supposed to have brought with us from New York."^[41] She was now the immigrant, imprisoned, contagious, a feared spectacle. The relief was enormous, its spiritual utility clear from her first description of their confinement in a "room with high arched cielings like St. Paul's —brick floor naked walls and a jug of water."^[42] The family's implicit martyrdom gained daily visual confirmation in William's suffering, displayed before his attentive wife as mute tableau for recording in her Lazaretto Journal: "William could not sit up—his ague came on and my Souls agony with it,—my Husband on the cold bricks without fire, shivering and groaning lifting his dim and sorrowful eyes with a fixed gaze in my face while his tears ran on his pillow without one word—."^[43]

As the suffering icon, William reenacts Christ's crucifixion and its demands; he is both the tubercular husband, entirely dependent on her, and the weighty image of Christ's Passion willingly borne. On November 23, her husband worsening, she began her journal entry with a sentence fragment that swiftly compacted the invalid and her Lord: "Not only willing to take my cross but kissed it too."^[44] From her successful maternal confinements and the plenteous "treasure" of her mother's milk, she now approached the crucifixional center of her captivity in her husband's suffering: "I find my present opportunity a Treasure—and my confinement of Body a liberty of Soul which I may never again enjoy while they are united." Positioned as spectator before her dying husband, Seton recognized that she, along with her husband, had become a spectacle in turn for outsiders. Caged like the animals in New York's zoo, they were prodded by the guard's stick to keep them from getting too close to their visitors. "It reminded me," wrote Seton in her journal, "of going to see the Lions ."^[45]

The lazaretto made manifest the ritual space of Seton's developing interior life that her shipboard journal had rhetorically anticipated. Bounded and marked by suffering, her life found expression in the quarantine chambers, their own past recapitulated theatrically by the guard, whose reminiscences she recorded: "In this room what suffering have I seen—there , lay an Armenian beging an knife to end the struggles of Death—there where the Signora's bed is, in the frenzy of Fever a Frenchman insisted on shooting himself, and died in agonies."^[46] Like American tourist accounts of walking atop the dead in Rome, Seton's transcription of the guard's litany is alive with religious melodrama; her bed on the site of a former suicide, she duly notes her own tenuous control of

mortality. Seton resists the weight of the lazaretto's visual testimony to its Gothic history with the alternative significance of her spirituality: "Little billets of paper pasted on the doors mark how many days different persons have staid and the shutter is all over Notched. . . . I do not mark ours—trusting they are marked above ."^[47] If celestially located, these marks of suffering indelibly imprint themselves on her consciousness, their invisibility to mortal eyes the sign of their heavenly visibility.

In her rhetorical play on economic and spiritual gain and loss and the shifting visibility and invisibility of suffering, Seton monitored her husband's illness. The corruption and confinement of William's body, the sight of her radical impending loss, became necessary pretexts for his spiritual expansion. Impeded breathing and hemorrhage, the inhalation of the spirit and the exhalation of earthly life interlaced into a single lazaretto activity of conversion and dying. On December 5, Seton wrote: "He drew himself towards me and said 'I breathe out my Soul to you,' the exertion he made assisted Nature's remaining force and he threw a quantity from his Lungs, which had threatened to stop their motion, and so doing experienced so great a revolution that in a few hours afterwards he seemed nearly the same as when we first entered the Lazaretto."^[48]

The pattern of crisis and recovery, loss and gain ended within the next three weeks. The ceaseless toil of William's previous trading life, which he had so bemoaned (returning home from a sermon in New York, he had said to his wife, "I toil and toil and what is it, what I gain, destroys me daily Soul and Body I love without God in the world, and shall die Miserably"), was now translated into the inefficient toil of his breathing.^[49] But the extension of bankruptcy's patterns of futile expenditure was intercepted by William's growing capacity for his wife's paradoxical discursive mode. Wrote his wife in her journal, "He very often says this is the period of his life which if he lives or dies he will always consider as Blessed—the only time which he has not lost."^[50] The process of William's conversion in turn translated their joint captivity into contemplative retreat, for, overjoyed at her husband's spiritual development, Seton confessed, "Oh if I was in the dungeon of this Lazaretto I should Bless and Praise my God for these days of retirement and abstraction from the world which have afforded leisure and opportunity for so blessed a Work."^[51] The transformation of William's physical collapse and disintegration into spiritual wholeness is thus allied with monastic retreat, the crises of bankruptcy, tuberculosis, and quarantine providing an ironic leisure for a powerfully efficacious activity dependent on the hidden liberties of captivity, a "work" of sublime import that supplants the frantic and futile work of New York days.

On December 19 the family was freed, and they immediately traveled to their friends, the Antonio Filicchis in Pisa. On December 27 William died. Elizabeth herself prepared her husband's body for burial, as she had her father's, since others feared to touch the allegedly contagious corpse. William Seton was buried on December 28 in the Protestant cemetery in Leghorn.

These clear people [the Catholic Filicchis] are so strange about religion .
Elizabeth Seton

While variously impressed by her sight-seeing of cathedral interiors and religious art, Seton did not become a Catholic during her protracted stay abroad, although the Filicchis tried to convert her.^[52] But her friendship with them as well as her encounter with Italian Catholic culture profoundly impressed her, the "elegance of cielings in carved gold, altar loaded with gold, silver, and other precious ornaments, pictures of every sacred subject and the dome a continued representation of different parts of Scripture—all this can never be conceived by description—nor my delight in seeing old men and women, young women, and all sorts of people kneeling promiscuously about the Altar."^[53] Attending mass at the monastery chapel at Montenaro, she confronted the stark deficiencies of English Protestant culture when at the elevation of the Host an English tourist whispered loudly, "This is what they call there real Presence. " Seton's vivid record of that moment voices a fundamental tension between the spiritual obtuseness of Protestantism and the mystery of transubstantiation. For Seton, the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation led inevitably back to her own experience with the mystery of pregnancy and motherhood.

My very heart trembled with shame and sorrow for his unfeeling interruption of their sacred adoration for all around was dead silence and many were prostrated—involuntarily I bent from him to the pavement and thought secretly on the word of St. Paul with starting tears "they discern not the Lords body" and the next thought was how should they eat and drink their very damnation for not discerning it, if indeed it is not there —yet how should it be there , and how did he breathe my Soul in me, and how and how a hundred other things I know nothing about.

I am a Mother so the Mothers thought came also how was my GOD a little babe in the first stage of his mortal existence in

Mary , but I lost these thoughts in my babes at home, which I daily long for more and more.^[54]

On the eve of their departure for America, her daughter Anna and then Seton herself came down with scarlet fever; once again in the midst of a potentially fatal illness, she acknowledged to her sister-in-law and spiritual confidante Rebecca her growing fascination with Catholicism. Confined to her bed and longing for home, the widow recorded her frustrated proximity to the Catholic Host. As before when she had stared across the white railing to the immigrant tents, she now looked down from her window on a physical representation and potential resolution of suffering.

How happy would we be if we believed what these dear souls believe, that they possess God in the Sacrament and that he remains in their churches and is carried to them when they are sick, oh my—when they carry the Blessed Sacrament under my window while I face the full loneliness and sadness of my case I cannot stop the tears at the thought my God how happy would I be even so far away from all so dear, if I could find you in the church as they do (for there is a chapel in the very house of Mr. F.) how many things I would say to you of the sorrows of my heart and the sins of my life—^[55]

Seton's acute topographical sense of God's presence and her exile from that presence increased on her arrival in New York with her daughter Anna on June 4, 1804, for the next month Rebecca Seton died of consumption. Bereaved once again, Seton entered on a yearlong struggle over the competing claims of Catholic and Protestant Christianity, dutifully reading polemical defenses of Protestantism such as Thomas Newton's Dissertation on the Prophecies , as suggested by her much-loved pastor, Henry Hobart, and similar defenses of Catholicism such as Robert Manning's England's Conversion and Reformation Compared , as suggested by Antonio Filicchi. These various polemics left her fully instructed but maddeningly unconvinced, while repeated reading of Thomas à Kempis, St. Francis of Sales, and The Lives of the Saints left her still reluctant to join the Catholic church. Suffering increasing opprobrium from her family for her errant theological proclivities, the indecisive widow also faced disapproval from her Catholic friends, some of whom suggested that her protracted uncertainty might be due to an insufficiently purified soul. Once again Seton's tormented situation curiously duplicated her exclusion from the suffering on Staten Island. In the journal of her conversion that she kept for Amabilia Filicchi, she

wrote of her continuing but increasingly uncomfortable attendance at Episcopal service: "Yet I got in a side pew which turned my face towards the Catholic Church in the next street, and found myself twenty times speaking to the blessed Sacrament there instead of looking at the naked altar where I was."^[56]

In the middle of January 1805 she wrote to Amabilia of her decision to become a Catholic, having (like many other converts) finally lost faith in her Episcopalian bishop's capacity to absolve sins. As much as she looked for apostolic authority, she sought as well the Real Presence, no longer satisfied with the Protestant Episcopalian formulation of communion.^[57] By Ash Wednesday in February 1805 Seton had found her authentic interiority. In the journal of her conversion, she wrote of going for the first time to a Catholic church to worship, a decision she knew would likely cost her the crucial financial support of her New York family and friends. Her description of entering St. Peter's Church resonates with the intense excitement of crossing into an unexplored place of spectacular dimensions in which divinity was both grandly exhibited and carefully enclosed: "—when I turned the corner of the street it is in, here my God I go said I, heart all to you —entering it, how that heart died away as it were in silence before the little tabernacle and the great Crucifixion over it—Ah My God here let me rest said I—and down the head on the bosom and the knees on the bench."^[58]

The picture beneath which Seton sank in relief was The Crucifixion by the Mexican artist José Maria Vallejo; displayed above the "little tabernacle," Vallejo's portrait of Christ's naked and suffering body created a heretical and, for Seton, utterly compelling pictorial space in which God was both visually explicit and intimately framed. On March 14, 1805, when she formally joined the church, Seton returned again to Vallejo's painting suspended above the hidden Christ, whose visual and emotional impact vanquished her intellectual doubts and provided a bodily location for her formerly vagrant subjectivity.

For as to going a walking any more about what all the different people believe, I cannot, being quite tired out. and I came up light at heart and cool of head the first time these many long months, but not without begging our Lord to wrap my heart deep in that opened side so well described in the beautiful crucifixion, or lock it up in his little tabernacle where I shall now rest forever.^[59]

Pointedly reversing the captivity imagery conventional to anti-Catholic discourse, Seton not only prayed to be locked within the "little

Tabernacle" but also acknowledged to Amabilia the emancipation of her first confession—"How awful those words of unloosing after a 30 years bondage."^[60] Such liberation led directly to an experience of ecstatically possessing God that again found topographical expression in Seton's description of attending her first communion, a passage into a physicalized interiority that dramatically contrasted with her prior "walking . . . about" among different beliefs: "—The long walk to town, but every step counted nearer that street—then nearer that tabernacle, then nearer the moment he would enter the poor poor little dwelling so all his own" (167). Ever afterward the heart of Jesus would be her "asylum into which she would retreat, the Eucharist her medicine against all illness." Three years after her conversion, she mourned the "naked unsubstantial" Protestant faith, "founded on Words of which they take the Shadow while we enjoy the adored Substance in the center of our Souls."^[61]

In June 1808 Seton left New York for Baltimore with her five children, having been invited by the superior of the Baltimore Sulpicians, Father William Dubourg, to found a girls' school. In opening the Paca Street School, Seton founded the American parochial school system. Writing to her young sister-in-law Cecilia, who had converted by this time as well, Seton described the first communion of one class of her schoolgirls as a moment of subterranean descent and emotional liberation like that American tourists exploring the catacombs in Italy imagined of the early Christians: "This morning in the subteraneous Chapel of the Blessed Virgin in the very depth of solitude . . . he celebrated the adorable sacrifice and despensed the sacred Passover—his tears fell fast over his precious hands while he gave it, and we had liberty to sob aloud unwitnessed by any, as no one had an idea of our going there."^[62]

On March 25, 1809, Seton took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and thereafter became known as Mother Seton. Permitted to keep her children with her until they came of age, Mother Seton quickly attracted a small band of women who wished to become nuns under her supervision. On June 1, 1809, Seton and four others assumed the habit of the American Sisters of Charity; that same month, the small group removed to the remote Catholic village of Emmitsburg, Maryland, where during the next ten years they constructed the permanent house for their order. The regularity, rural seclusion, and maternal intensity of convent life brought Seton great happiness. From Sabbath picnics in the woods to teaching in the school to regulating the spiritual development of her children and "daughters," Seton experienced a powerful combination of contemplative retreat and community. She recalled these early days in Emmitsburg as a time of aesthetic, social, and spiritual coherence:

"Woods, rocks, walks—Harriet's first anxieties to go to Mass, evening Adoration—our visit at 11 to the church the bright moon light night of St Mary Magdaline—the Evening I ran from the woods to meet Nina, Jos, and Rebec—oh oh oh how sweet—."^[63] Such pastoral intimacy and maternal spontaneity rotated around the austere regulations of convent life, whose rules (particularly those requiring an initially difficult submission in turn to three different Sulpician male superiors) led Seton to express the joy of subordinating her will: "I am so in love now with rules," she wrote to her close spiritual friend Gabriel Bruté, "that I see the bit of the bridle all gold, or the reins all of silk."^[64]

But during these same years, Seton also endured the deaths of her most intimate female companions. Her sister-in-law Harriet Seton died suddenly of "an inflammation of the brain" in December 1809.^[65] But no horror equaled that of her eldest daughter Anna's death from tuberculosis at age sixteen on March 12, 1812. As Seton had recorded her husband's illness and death, so she registered the torturous progress of her daughter "Annina's" disease in a deathbed journal. As the tuberculosis spread through her lungs and bones, Annina called in the schoolgirls to reveal her tortured flesh as religious exemplum: "Pulling up her sleeve to show her bony arm to one of the boarders she said gaily 'Oh when you see that in the resurrection' to the little ones when they came to see her she said, 'You come to look at what the worms will soon devour and see how soon you may die, remember how short a time ago I was playing with you all—Love Our Lord'—."^[66] A cord, known then as a "Seton," was daily pulled under the child's skin to keep a passage open for drainage; the terrible painfulness of this procedure was converted as well by this intensely religious girl into a cause for her spiritual development and the salvation of her family. Or in her words: "All my cough and distress in continual spitting I seem to suffer for you, and the pains of my side and breast and the poor Seton for my brothers dear William and Richard. How much I think of their souls."^[67] On November 3, 1816, Seton's younger daughter Rebecca died in an equal agony; having long suffered the crippling effects of a hip injury (and probably tuberculosis in the hip joint), the child finally succumbed to her disability, nursed throughout by her mother. Seton wrote a journal for this daughter's death as well. On April 18, 1820, she wrote to her old and close friend Antonio Filicchi of her own impending death from tuberculosis. She was trying, she wrote, "to make my very breathing a continual thanksgiving."^[68]

Fifteen
Sophia Ripley: Rewriting the Stony Heart

As the later writings of Isaac Hecker, Sophia Ripley, and Orestes Brown-son demonstrate, the effort to reposition antebellum culture in the "interiors" of Roman Catholic orthodoxy was no less radical than the questioning of Protestant orthodox conventions by writers of the American Renaissance. As evident in Sophia Ripley's unpublished correspondence; in Hecker's journals, letters, Questions of the Soul (1855), and Aspirations of Nature (1857); and in Brownson's periodical essays, The Spirit-Rapper (1854), and The Convert (1857), the imposition of a Catholic discourse on preexistent modes of perception and articulation produced conceptual innovations that both paralleled and subverted those of American romanticism and utopian thought. "Mr. Emerson's maxims must be converted," wrote Hecker in Questions of the Soul . "Substitute humility to obey, for 'self-reliance'; courage to believe, for 'trust thyself';—deny thyself, for 'act out thyself';—master thy instincts, for 'obey thy instincts';—self-sacrifice, for 'self-culture';—surrender thyself to God, for 'be thyself.'"^[1]

As suggested by Hecker's reformulation, the distinctive position of these Catholic converts in their native culture—a position of internal exile—produced a unique and often penetrating criticism of the ideological and rhetorical conventions of liberal American Protestantism. Indeed, as their biographies suggest, the two religious worlds, Rome and New England, were closely, even competitively, intertwined. Brook Farm in particular provided the ground where several key figures met and separated. There Hecker and Sophia Ripley first met; the conversations between the educated Ripley and the mystically inclined young baker from New York who would found the Paulist Fathers eventuated in their conversion and lasting closeness. Referring to their Brook Farm reading

course in Dante, Ripley reportedly said to Hecker when he returned from Europe a newly ordained Redemptorist priest: "I am without doubt the only convert you and Dante have made between you."^[2] Greatly admired by George Ripley and almost venerated by Sophia, Hecker served as her father confessor from 1851 until her death in 1861. From the 1840s onward, Brownson and Hecker were also close friends and maintained an active correspondence; at one point, Brownson credited Hecker with converting him: "I am more indebted to you for having become a Catholic than to any other man under heaven, and while you supposed I was leading you to the Church, it was you who led me there. I owe you a debt of gratitude I can never repay."^[3] Although he converted in 1844 and was already a devastating critic of Transcendentalism, Brownson nonetheless sent his son Orestes to the Brook Farm School; still later, in his spiritual autobiography, The Convert (1857), the militant anti-Protestant declared his deep love for Brook Farm's founder George Ripley:

One man, and one man only, shared my entire confidence, and knew my most secret thought. Him, from motives of delicacy, I do not name; but, in the formation of my mind, in systematizing my ideas, and in general development and culture, I owe more to him than to any other man among Protestants. We have since taken divergent courses, but I loved him as I have loved no other man, and shall so love and esteem him as long as I live.^[4]

For his part, George Ripley tried to recall Hecker to Brook Farm by advertising the spiritual aspirations of the community: "When will you come back to Brook Farm? Can you do without us? Can we do without you? Oh! That you would come as one of us, to work in the faith of the divine idea, to toil in loneliness and tears for the sake of the Kingdom which God may build up by our hands."^[5] On escorting her converted niece, Sarah Stearns, to the Mount St. Vincent Sisters of Charity, Sophia Ripley vividly recalled the uncanny resemblance of the two worlds: "We sat on the rocks under some trees and talked over old times before she took the irrevocable step of entering the house. . . . Something within and without seemed so like Brook Farm, that the whole was more a revival of some former experience than anything new and strange."^[6]

So sweetly linking at every point the visible with the invisible . . .
Sophia Ripley on Easter Mass, Flatbush, New York, 1855

"What glorious summer weather we have had, particularly the last two or three weeks," wrote Sophia Ripley to her cousin Ruth Charlotte Dana

from Brook Farm in September 1846. With energetic lyricism, Ripley continued:

I cannot describe to you the joy of my physical existence these hottest days. It seemed to me I had a glimpse of that angelic state with a body as glorified, and the soul aided and supported by it in its highest action. I trod on air, my brain was clear, my spirit serene. No amount of labor was too great for me, four or five hours of sleep was all I required. I rose at 4 1/2 and went through the woods in the fields, a most lovely walk, to the river with the girls, and there we were in the river awaiting the sunrise. All the long evegs [sic ] were spent in the woods or walking in the garden, and the golden, brilliant light of the moon turned night into day, put to shame all the recently announced theories of the ruined condition of that planet.^[7]

Ripley's description of her summer days at Brook Farm, like those of Seton at Emmitsburg, breathes with the excitement of an attained faith in which the "glorified" body no longer contradicts but fully mobilizes the powers of the soul. If Hawthorne was exhausted and depressed by manual work at Brook Farm, Sophia achieved (however momentarily) an invigorated union both of soul and body and of that integrated self in a community. After long days directing the Brook Farm School, or nursing the sick, or ironing sometimes for ten hours straight, Ripley enjoyed a signal aesthetic alertness, registered by her presence at those inopportune hours of dawn and midnight when nature revealed her feminine self most splendidly. Exploring the illumined landscape of the river at sunrise or the garden in moonlight, Ripley portrays herself as an angelic being, her powers of discernment and articulation perfectly equilibrated with a body freed from the debilitating purities of middle-class domesticity. Easefully converting her masterful energies into intimate, inspirational prose, Ripley completed the Transcendentalist circuit, elevating her reader into those heights where she, as author, claimed a continued dwelling. Short of the Emersonian essay, no better format existed to convey the elliptical features of Transcendentalist spirituality than the abbreviated confessional mode of the private letter to an intimate friend.

But while her passage testifies to the early success of the utopian experiment, Ripley was simultaneously engaged in strangely different pursuits. As cousins in the prominent (Unitarian) Dana family and soon-to-be Catholic converts, Sophia and Charlotte were well aware of the subversive nature of their developing intimacy. Thus Sophia confided to

Charlotte in the same letter that her romantic pastoralism was already linked to Rome, for she had consecrated her Brook Farm School to "our Blessed Mother," who has "tenderly" guarded it ever since.

In September 1846 Ripley sent some issues of the Harbinger to her cousin, urging her to take special care of her husband's Fourierist journal: "The Harbinger is like a precious child to me, and I would not see it used for curl-papers, or lamp-lighters, except to light a torch before the Image of our Holy Mother." In referring to her husband's journal as a potentially sacrificial offspring, the childless Ripley aptly conveyed her precarious position in antebellum New England. Jealously guarding her reform ideology (an increasingly uneasy amalgam of Brook Farm associationism and Fourier's doctrines of "universal unity"), she was also willing to offer her soul's progeny—improbably enough—to the Virgin Mary.^[8] Ripley wrote these words a full year or more before officially joining the Catholic church. If the Harbinger would still be, several years later, a treasured possession in a crass industrial culture, it was therefore only the more fit for sacrificial burning. But notwithstanding her ambivalent possessiveness toward the journal, Ripley's position was hardly a confused one. In artfully opposing the vain waste of a modernizing economy (the back issues used to curl hair and light lamps) to an alternative productive sacrifice (the paper flaring in honor of the Virgin), Ripley's language is charged with purpose and the secret pleasure of unorthodox conclusions—in this case those of Roman Catholic orthodoxy. As Ripley drew nearer to the church, confidential references in her letters to her cousin increased. Although she had not yet officially converted, her sense of community was clearly shifting from the girls in the river to the "little band" of communicants she observed at mass in a Boston church, of whom she wrote to Charlotte in September 1846: "I seemed to partake more largely of the depths of its richness, and I truly longed to follow the little band, without saying a word or . . . being asked a question , who had the privilege of partaking of the Blessed Sacrament."^[9] For "Sacrament," Ripley had originally written "Sacrifice"—her emendation illustrating her self-conscious struggles with the vocabulary of a novel Catholic piety. And like Seton before her, Ripley longed to circumvent the polemical arena for an intensified relation to the heart, to regain the "heart religion" of Edwardsian revivalism while conspicuously denying its Calvinist roots.

The intensity of her correspondence with Charlotte during these years was undoubtedly fueled by the familial and marital isolation Ripley suffered because of her unseemly conversion.^[10] From Brook Farm in 1846, Sophia had expressed her love for Charlotte in the Transcenden-

talist vernacular of affinity: "Meanwhile we are not separated. I feel you always near to me. It is true that where there is any sympathy between beings of the same kindred, there is a mystic tie of union that binds them; each soul has a fragrance for the other, that does not breathe from merely selected friendships."^[11] In the manuscript, Sophia originally wrote that "each has a fragrance for the other" only to insert "soul" later in order to assure the ideality of her love. After she and her husband had reorganized Brook Farm into a Fourierist phalanx in a last attempt to finance the community, they saw the expensive phalanstery burn down in March 1846.^[12] It was a time of exhaustion and increasing poverty and, for Sophia Ripley in particular, a time of growing alienation from all re-formism. As early as 1843 Ripley had voiced her frustration with the passivity and self-absorption of Brook Farmers to Emerson, himself a sympathetic visitor to the community: "This worship of beauty and unceasing life search for it is it not, after all, only living in the outskirts of truth. Beauty and truth are sometimes told to us to be one, but my increasing conviction is, that beauty is the attitude of truth, not truth itself."^[13] Ripley's disavowal of romantic aestheticism marked the beginning of her transition from idealism to a more objectivist epistemology, a reorientation simply described by Isaac Hecker: "It is not the mind that creates things, or originates their qualities or characteristics, but it is these which inform and shape the mind."^[14]

The fierce enmities of anti-Catholic literature, as we have seen, inhabited a terrain of ambivalent observation and imitation that contained the cultural mystery of conversion to this "objective" truth. With characteristic acuity Sophia Ripley, herself on the verge of joining the church, articulated the complexities of attending mass with an unnamed anti-Catholic friend—a Brook Farm excursion into a Boston immigrant church that unfolded a fascinating drama of domestic tourism and transgression.

I accepted the cross of going with a person of my acquaintance who has always had in the greatest degree that mixture of hatred and contempt for the Catholic Church, so common among Protestants. A person of the coolest, keenest and most subtle intellect and one who out Emersoned Emerson, in his skepticism. He for the first time, on this visit, spoke respectfully of the Church, so much so, that I was able to tell him all that was in my soul about it, which could be spoken out; for he has spiritual tendencies, and many other fine traits which have always bound me to him. I could hardly believe my senses when I actu-

ally found him there. He says he was deeply impressed by the service, and bore with the meekness of a child Father O'Brian's public reproof of his unholy use of his opera glass—he —who is more keenly alive to reproof than anyone I know.^[15]

The ironic implications of this triangulated watching unfold when the Protestant spectator becomes the main spectacle in turn, subject to "public reproof," to exposure and priestly evaluation. The emotional transactions and ambivalent bondings between Ripley, her unnamed friend, and Father O'Brian circulate between two competing cultural models, Emersonian distance and Irish-Catholic engagement. Himself the original object of surveillance by a native member of the elite culture, the immigrant priest reverses the embarrassment of spectacle by performing his own judgmental scrutiny. As a woman, a near-convert, and a member of Brook Farm, Ripley arguably possessed the greatest cultural marginality of the three. Although witness to both spectacles (the mass watching and the reproof), Ripley is vulnerable to both audiences: as a "pro-Catholic," she forms part of the service surveyed by her friend, while as one "bound" to her companion, she shares his humiliation, just as surely as she still retains the memory of her own "heretical" skepticism. Culturally allied to him who watches, she articulates the moral drama of the spectacle in a way that reveals her uncomfortable negotiation of this terrain of shifting intimacies and distances. The sudden embarrassing inversion of cultural authority uncovers not only the peculiar burdens of the convert (and of the priest in an anti-Catholic culture) but the complexities of the Protestant-Catholic gaze, caught in a mutual surveillance. The borders between spying, prayerful "witness," and conversion were volatile ones made all the more so by the possibility of ethnic, class, and gender transgression.

Ripley joined the Catholic church sometime between September 1847 and March 1848.^[16] Moving with her husband to New York in search of employment after the collapse of Brook Farm, she spent the remaining thirteen years before her death from cancer teaching and translating religious texts while her husband pursued an increasingly successful career as literary critic for the New York Tribune . Sophia's Catholicism both created and compensated for her occupational and cultural marginality during these years. She quickly moved toward an informally cloistered existence by joining a lay order that permitted her to develop

an iconographic self whose symbolic intentions anticipated Hawthorne's characterization of Hester Prynne. She wrote to Charlotte in 1848: "I have joined the Gray Sisters, in a slate colored linen embroidered so as to shew that I am not yet wholly withdrawn from the world."^[17] Committed to her membership in this lay order of Franciscans (which required neither vows nor seclusion but submission to certain rules and the practice of charity), Ripley adopted and, like Hawthorne's Hester, carefully modified a costume of conspicuous cultural resistance. Ripley's highly stylized process of identity reformation transpired with frequent, often subversive, reference to her liberal Bostonian background; her most Catholic writing invariably registered her abandoned Transcendentalism. Thus in one anecdote she mentions an Irish priest who "congratulated us . . . upon having transcended a great deal of transcendental trash."^[18] From her converted perspective, nature was no longer a spiritual reality that transcended and negated the confines of theology. Spiritual illumination was not bestowed on those who stood in the river at Brook Farm to await the sunrise but was reserved for those who stood in the illumined interiors of the Catholic church, with its "countless blazing lights" and the "retirement & shadowy stillness of Lent."^[19]

In addition to its evident compensatory function, Sophia's epistolary relationship to her cousin, which continued through the New York years, provides a fascinating record of ongoing cultural conflict and identity struggle. The correspondence itself provided countless opportunities for the witty subversion of Protestant conventions of self-formation. Writing to "Dear Lotty" in 1856, Sophia opened on a characteristic note of religious whimsy: "I really feel some self-reproach at not having written you for a long time, but as that condition is the very best for me, I shall look upon it as a 'happy fault,' bringing the sweet fruits of compunction."^[20] Such whimsy rested on a serious but very private work of self-revision. Frequently composed in cross-hand, Ripley's letters to Charlotte record the development of her new piety and even reenact the private drama of the confessional in her struggle to overcome a reserve and temperamental "coldness" that plagued her throughout her life. Her belief in church dogma and discipline and her excited exploration of new devotional practices increasingly excluded her, along with other converts, from mainstream culture, an isolation that intensified the church's reality for her. As she wrote to Charlotte in 1855, her life in New York City divided itself between Protestant work weeks and Catholic Sabbaths, a division that symbolically confirmed one of her operative distinctions between the enervating worldliness of Protestantism and the sublimities of her new faith.

It is a strange life I live here. Not a word ever heard during the week that could in the most indirect manner imply the existence of the Catholic Church & everything around so Protestant, that I have to go alone to realize that the beautiful life of the Church is not a dream, & then Sunday comes, when we are all bathed in the sea of joy that pours in like a flood with the worship of Holy Church.^[21]

Notwithstanding her isolation, Ripley's new faith often motivated significant commentary on key concerns in that Protestant society. She in fact ironically assumed the oppositional role that her reformer husband was gradually abandoning as he moved into his position as primary literary reviewer for the New York Tribune . Such vexed issues as the nature of religious authority, of ecclesiastical community, of sinfulness and justification underwent an informal revision in her correspondence. While her husband, George, busily reviewed new books, Sophia used her own language skills to translate Catholic texts. The two major works she translated were St. Catherine of Genoa's Life and Writings and St. Alphonsus de Liguori's Glories of Mary , a defense of the devotion to Mary directed against the Jansenists and originally published in 1750.^[22] As suggested by the works she chose to translate, Ripley was deeply engaged by Catholicism's sanctification of womanhood. Speaking of her literary efforts, she acknowledged the formative opposition in her life between her motherless and disapproving earthly family (Sophia's father had abandoned the family years before only to return and disinherit her) and the kinship of her Catholic community, sustained by the intercessory love of the Virgin Mother. "I accept with thankfullness the mortification of the unqualified condemnation of my small share of the work by my family," Ripley wrote to Charlotte of her translation efforts, "though I must confess I did not look to them for much sympathy in this my first literary enterprise."^[23] With Charlotte she shared "the double bond of kindred and faith" and could confide her painful alienation from both father and husband.^[24]

Ripley's application of the language of mortification and confession to the difficult issue of familial rejection illustrates the strategy by which she developed her new sense of identity. Deprived of her Brook Farm association and alienated from the Dana clan, she gingerly appropriated the freighted language of a still alien church. Through its vocabulary of penance, she simultaneously accused her family and acknowledged her slightly insincere use of the term "mortification." Ripley continued to express her sublimated hostility toward her Boston family by conspicuously using Catholic theological terms in reference to them. Discussing

her father, for example, she was careful to distinguish between actual sin and Original Sin, just as Bishop Hughes of New York had done for her during various crises. While such a distinction had virtually "saved" Ripley, in her angry hands it became the instrument of entombing her father. "It fills my heart with sadness to think of my poor father, so lonely in every sense of the word, sinking under the burden of old age, with the accumulated and cumulating burden of actual and original sin still heavier upon him."^[25] If the past of her familial times stretched behind her like a troubling void, she carefully and even graphically delineated for her own enjoyment the new experience of time made available to her as a convert. Her sense of time newly pervaded by the Catholic liturgical calendar, Ripley frequently dated her letters by Latin salutations to the Holy Family or to the day's patron saint. Her delighted appropriation of the ecclesiastical calendar and the novel sense of an intercessory community now revealed to her a shapelessness and insincerity in her prior Protestant reformism and family life.

Writing to "Dear Lotty," Sophia lampooned the pretensions of her abandoned culture: "Let us congratulate our Protestant friends that they at length have a saint in their calendar. The minister says 'Daniel Webster has left the senate of earth to join the senate of the skies—& is already admitted into the Councils of God! We shall find things going on much better I presume now he is there!'"^[26] In turn, her converted perspective reframed long-standing problems of gender, vocation, and epistemology that Brook Farm had failed to resolve. Linked to the church's corporate liturgical time, her daily life became a disciplined routine. "Although my life exteriorly and interiorly is far from bearing any resemblance to a religious, yet my daily work is planned for me by my director (who does the same for all his penitents), with the same exactness, as if we were under a superior, and very little time is given us for letter writing."^[27] Spurned by her family, she was suddenly and intensely visible to herself.

I had a nice little mortification Sunday morng, which seemed at the time a very great one. The Bishop told me to go to the Sacristy to confession as usual on Sunday morng, and as I sat there waiting, in came the Western Bishop, then priest after priest, til they seemed Legion & almost all Jesuits! There sat the poor lone woman, without even being allowed the chance of excusing herself, by saying "I am performing an act of obedience, it is not my boldness that leads me to intrude here." I wished the floor would open and swallow me up, but it did not, & I am preserved to tell the tale.^[28]

The rhetorical impact of this passage derives partially from Ripley's self-conscious (and self-delighted) inversion of anti-Jesuit discourse. As the chief emblem of the duplicitous seductive power of the papacy, Jesuits attracted great enmity in Ripley's America. Ripley's situation of her lone self within the Jesuit "Legions" is energized by her still Protestant fascination with Loyola's soldiers. She is the individual, gloriously terrified and distinct, they the representatives of European absolutism and collectivity, fascinatingly uniform and quiet. It is a moment of exhilarating contact with the formerly taboo interiors of the alien faith. It is, moreover, a moment of suspenseful juxtaposition of her womanhood and their malehood, an encounter that records not only a woman's successful trespass on masculine terrain but also an encounter between two transforming sexualities. They are celibate, she a wife abandoning the Protestant ideology of the hearth.

In letter after letter, Ripley informally outlined a new language that revised customary boundaries between "inside" and "outside," individual and community. These letters, now that the Catholic church mediated the intimate bond between the cousins, drawing them together as it divided them from their Unitarian origins, constructed a powerful exile that was yet a protective interiority. They looked out on the unchurched world from the redemptive enclosure of their new theology. It was a strategy that operated in self-conscious opposition to its twin and rival: the Protestant evangelical ideology of the hearth and the sacred enclosure of the home. The world disclosed by Sophia's letters to Charlotte was well described by René de Montalembert in his intensely nostalgic biography of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, a volume (and a saint) treasured by Ripley. Before recounting Elizabeth's life of legendary piety, the author depicts a thirteenth century safely ensconced in its faith and inextricably connected to the other world: "It would be an endless task to specify all the innumerable bonds which thus connected heaven and earth; to penetrate into that vast region, where all the affections and all the duties of mortal life were mingled and intertwined with immortal protection."^[29] If Montalembert's thirteenth century differed almost point by point from bourgeois antebellum America, American converts such as Seton and Ripley struggled to re-create the communalism of the Age of Faith in their own lives. Writing to Charlotte in 1857, Ripley expressed her hopes that "the holy guardian angels and saints have surrounded you in close circle, interposing their blessed presence between you and this moving panorama of men and women."^[30]

No longer Sophia Willard Dana Ripley, she now signed her correspondence Sophia Elizabeth Ripley, adopting her confirmation name

from her favorite saint, Elizabeth of Hungary, whose own two daughters, as Ripley delightedly discovered, both bore the name Sophia.^[31] But such happy identifications struggled against a persistent and penetrating isolation; for all her rebirth, she remained problematically unchanged, her transformation still haunted by her original identity. These troubling, even shameful, continuities of personality were mercifully disrupted with her confirmation, whose cordoning off of the past provided a momentary euphoria: "There is no moment since that could possibly be mistaken for the moment before; so entirely is our state changed by it."^[32] But Ripley's correspondence records as well the more strenuous reality of disavowing her husband's initially progressive but finally bourgeois culture for an alternative and principally female Catholic community. Of all her letters, one in particular vividly conveys the culturally specific suffering involved in that pilgrimage. Throughout her years as a Catholic, Sophia struggled against the lingering and, for her, malign presence of Protestantism, which she even detected in the vehemence of Orestes Brownson's conversion polemics.^[33]

In March 1848, the new convert wrote a lengthy and passionately confiding letter from her new home in Flatbush, Long Island, to her cousin. With its narrative coherence and exacting self-examination, Ripley's letter powerfully condenses her conversion experience. Scrawled across the fourth page in cross-hand, Ripley's "No one" (Fig. 11) signaled the urgent privacy of her communication. Like other letters to Charlotte, this one extended and confirmed the activities of the confessional by reporting what occurred within it. Skillfully negotiating between the spontaneous intimacy of the epistolary context and the psychological immensity of her subject, Ripley brings a traditional Christian language of retrospection and prophetic enlightenment to bear on her particular spiritual crisis. Before Charlotte, she redescribes her labored ascent from a terrain of spiritual inferiority and cultural alienation to a redemptive discharging of her burden in the confessional. Her beginning narration of her confrontation with unworthiness suggests the obsessional intensity of her self-exploration, an intensity produced by her conflation of her deficiencies with those of Protestantism.

Sunday morng I woke long before light, & my thoughts fastened themselves on a subject, I often mentioned to you when you were here, the coldness of heart of Protestantism, & my own very cold heart in particular. A clear revelation of myself was made to me as never before. I saw that all through life my ties with others were those of the intellect & imagination & not warm human heart ties; that I do not love anyone & never did,

Fig. 11.
Facsimile of a page of correspondence written in cross-hand from
Sophia Dana Ripley to her cousin Ruth Charlotte Dana. The page
discusses Ripley's momentous spiritual conversation with New
York's Bishop Hughes. 
Courtesy, The Massachusetts Historical Society.

with the heart & of course never could have been worthy in any relation.^[34]

Sophia's poignant confession at age forty-five of never having loved invokes the familiar preoccupation of many antebellum New Englanders with the coldness of their culture and themselves. Hawthorne's re-

peated fictional examinations of sinful separation from the obligations of the heart, Melville's haunting portrait of Bartleby the Scrivener, and Emerson's repudiation of corpse-cold Unitarianism and his own terrible confession of emotional numbness in his essay "Experience" are well-known instances of a regional malaise.^[35] For Sophia Ripley, the burdens of this culturally constructed reserve became identified with the traditional evangelical burden of the unconvicted heart, reserved because of its own torpor and sterility. Ripley fought against the dead-ness (and the anxieties suppressed and controlled by that deadness) of the carnal self by indicting the cold Protestantism of New England. During one of her difficult visits to her family, she again conflated her fallen self and her Boston home to reject them both outright: "Protestant life is very dreary, and Protestant thought very shallow, and Protestant feeling has no worthy objects." .^[36] Such projection facilitated her cure, for each distancing from her native culture enabled her to recontextualize the coldness of her own heart; recalling long-standing theological debates over how Christ's grace is either imputed to or infused in the regenerate, Sophia struggled to have the "warmth" of Catholicism not only extended to her but incorporated within her. Ripley's 1848 "No one" letter proceeds to reveal the mutual implication of problems of "grace," of competing religious and cultural affiliations, and of familial relationships; these theological, political, and familial terrains were all involved in an urgent cultural project to rejoin subject to object, the suffering soul to Christ, the emotional interior to the cultural exterior.

Borrowing prophetic imagery to convey her enlightenment to Charlotte, Sophia continued her confession of emotional distance:

I saw what had caused my greatest difficulties & trials. I saw above all that my faith in the Church was only a reunion of my intellect with God; I saw that faith requires to strike root in the heart, & if the stony soil refuses to receive it, it has nowhere to plant itself & therefore has no root at all. I saw how, all through my life I had been trying to do good to people, to repair the injury of this deathlike coldness & yet it never brought me into kind & equal relations.

Ripley's use of Christ's parable (Matthew 13:20-21) to convey the culpability of her stony heart suggests the terrible failure of Brook Farm (abandoned the summer before), whose stony soil had resisted cultivation, and whose bankruptcy signaled the abrupt end of Ripley's vocation as utopian reformer. Recognizing that her stoniness persisted beneath the

"gratified imagination," which, according to her, she shared with so many converts, she struggled to move beyond the warmth of a newly satisfied aesthetic sensibility to the truer warmth of a "sanctified heart." Ripley's quest voices her anxious response to Christ's warning against those who receive "the seed into stony places" and therefore will be unable to endure any challenges to their faith.

Behind her fear that her heart was not sufficiently rich to anchor her new faith and behind her failed efforts at self-cultivation at Brook Farm lay an unspecified early wounding that had left her icy and denatured. The stark dissociation of her nocturnal introspection, in which she "looked on it as a dreadful fact that the heart of a human being should be turned to stone," reenacts this severance from feeling as she gazes Medusa-like onto her guilty, inadequate self. In memorable contrast to the ardor of Elizabeth Seton, Ripley can only acknowledge numbly her disconnection and lack of spiritual potential.

Ripley's letter dramatically recounts her resolution of this crisis when the next morning she sets out to unveil her stony isolation to her "Blessed Director." Reenacting her dread and suspense for Charlotte, she portrays herself as a "beast of burden" walking through the still and sunlit streets of lower New York, her sin of emotional deadness ironically increased by her failure to feel "wretched, though I thought I ought to be." For all her supposed lack of emotion, Ripley's short pilgrimage is laden with a fearful anxiety of rejection. Will the priest banish the new convert, disgusted by her inadequate and still "Protestant" uncertainties? Tormented by the conflict between her habitual self-restraint and her longing for intimacy, Ripley, in her imagery of stone, covers an ongoing familial crisis of paternal rejection so profound that she later described the spiritual direction given her by Isaac Hecker and by the mother superior of the Sisters of St. Catherine as enabling her to be "a child for the first time, one of their children." .^[37]

But the passage from psychological orphanhood to such a regained childhood entailed a painful confrontation with her defensive emotional dissociation from that past. Abandoned as a child by her father and later scorned by him until his death, Ripley felt a profound sense of personal culpability for this rejection. It was this, arguably, that formed her cold heart, and in desperation she resolved to expose what she had hidden within: "I determined to make a clean breast of it to my Blessed Director, take this heart out & let him see that it was all of stone; & calmly take the consequences." Ripley's ensuing encounter with Bishop Hughes produced an epiphany in her life. The bishop's response to his convert's confession of coldness—as she recounts it—constructs a new familial

narrative of paternal acceptance whose intimacy she extends in turn to Charlotte:

My child, this is not to cause you a moment's uneasiness, or a moment's thought; there is no sin in it, anymore than that you are tall & not short. If you have ever consented to sin, when you had a moment to reflect on what you were doing, of this repent, for this, ask forgiveness; but that your heart is not tender, is no concern of yours. God does not ask from you what you have not. If you had been bred up in the church, perhaps habit & its various influences would have softened your nature.

Ripley's narrative of Hughes's response opposes her still lingering, virtually Calvinist ethos of vitiated human nature to her adopted Catholic theology that limited the effects of Original Sin and further distinguished those effects from those of actual sin. The Catholicism made available to her through her momentous conversation with Bishop Hughes removes from her the burden of her personality, proffering a radical solution to her urgent sense of inadequacy and emptiness by declaring the matter beyond her control. The bishop responds to Ripley's anxious bewilderment about how her "cold" heart is to fulfill the commandment to love God and neighbor by tellingly connecting her painful isolation to that suffered even by the sainted. He explains that we are told to love, "Not with the heart you have not my child, but with the heart you have. Such states of mind are wholly independent of ourselves. . . . This heart of yours is a cross which you must patiently bear to the end if need be. You suffer in common with many of the Saints. Have you never read of St. Theresa, how she suffered for years with coldness & dryness of heart?"

To Ripley, these therapeutic words came with the force of divine assurance and ushered her "as it were from death unto Life." Even so, Ripley proceeded to press Bishop Hughes on whether "one who could read over the mysteries of the Passion of our Lord without emotion, was worthy of partaking of his Blessed Body." The bishop's response resolves Ripley's anxiety over her emotionlessness by claiming it for the Gospel accounts as well: "'What' said he, 'could be more cold than the narration itself. The narrators did not feel it in its fullness. They relate it as they would something they met at a crossing of the road. Did you never notice this. Go to the communion, my child, in peace.'"

Cultivating the heart by accommodating its coldness led Ripley in turn to find in Catholicism's "blessed books" a cure for her related struggle with the deadness of the written word. Ripley's conversation with Hughes finally consolidated her "Transcendentalist" concerns with "cultivating"

a self freed from both Calvinist liabilities and Unitarian emptiness. Concluding her account of the encounter for Charlotte, she describes "with what a gentle shudder and tone of profound compassion the Bishop spoke in his instructions of the horrible doctrines of original sin and total depravity so diffused through Protestantism, 'that even those who have never believed in them feel their withering power.'" The stoniness of her heart, the thieving coldness of Protestantism (especially the repressive effects of its Calvinist and Unitarian extremes), and the coldness of "narration itself" all constitute a barren world to be abandoned for the cultivated and forgiving substance of Catholicism, whose novel materiality released the emotions: Ripley described a requiem mass she later heard as an experience that "would have drawn tears from stones." .^[38]

Issuing from the stony self, such tears break through bodily boundary, not, as in sentimental fiction, to ease the woman's renewed submission to the domestic cult of purity, but to claim a foreign model of expressivity for a previously pallid selfhood, one pained by its own absence from itself. Writing from New York to console Charlotte for the pain she suffered in her back, Sophia emphasized the sweet meaningfulness of such pain by turning to a significant metaphor: "Is not every new leaf of life as we turn it over by the light of the sanctuary lamp more richly illuminated than the last?" .^[39] Her life newly lit by the aesthetic constructions of her new faith, Ripley moved increasingly in a world of womanly piety dedicated to the overcoming of inhibition. Fascinated, Ripley pondered the rare, even magnetic, self-presentation of her niece Sarah Stearns (soon to become a Sister of Charity), that enabled her while still a Protestant to be taken for a Catholic and accordingly given access to the foreign domestic interiors of the Catholic immigrant community. "I believe with all these Protestant sins she has a more Catholic look than any of us, for all the Catholic men, women and children in the street speak to her, and give her seats in churches, and take her home, and refresh her with cold water, and present her with nice little books of devotion and choice spiritual reading, such as cannot be procured at any price in this country." .^[40] If Sarah Stearns, by virtue of her "Catholic look," enjoyed a series of novel and nourishing attentions that included "choice" books otherwise unavailable to Protestant Americans, the Catholic convert Julia Metcalf surpassed even this achievement, managing indeed to be seen not as a convincing imitation but as the original itself. Sophia wrote of her singular achievement of authenticity:

Tell Julia she passes for a born Catholic I find & and I am devoured with envy. She is said to be the only one among the new

converts who by her voice, manner & expression of countenance could be mistaken for one! Though I am a little cheered by having been asked at Radde's yesterday where I went to enquire for pictures, if I did not wish for Catholic ones; & certainly they had no reason to suspect this except from the expression of my countenance! .^[41]

As Ripley's repeated discussion of sanctified womanhood suggests, the Catholic veneration of Mary and the intercession of the saints enabled her to resist the angers of Protestant womanhood by focusing on the Church's "consecration" of the feminine. A "Miss B—" served as one instance of the secular feminism to be abandoned:

I was as explicit with her as language would permit, talked to her fully of the fall of woman, and consequently the fall of man; told her instead of allowing her imagination to dwell upon the sins of men, she was to fill it with celestial pictures of the virginal purity of saints, by whom mankind is to be redeemed; that every woman must share in this sanctity . . . and she can only attain it, by accepting the consecration of womanhood offered in the church, through our Blessed Mother. .^[42]

Ripley's confident embrace of woman's original culpability and redemptive powers directs female attention away from the "sins of men" to an empowering focus on the sins of woman. Her numerous references to the Virgin suggest how the Madonna enabled her to practice a repeated, even scheduled, loss and recovery of Mary as well as Christ. Lamenting the passing of the month of May, Sophia confessed that "it makes one feel sad to have this sweet month close, and yet if we did not separate from Her as well as from our dear Lord at this season, the spirit would not come to us." .^[43] An intriguing, if brief, description of heaven in which Ripley imagines the dead "sitting at the feet of our Blessed Lady, listening to the tale of her holy childhood," .^[44] enables her to enjoy the closeness and hearth-side storytelling so central to the Protestant cult of domesticity while avoiding its debilitating subordination to the authority of the husband and (absent) "Papa." Ripley's holy women, be they the Virgin and female saints or the nuns of her acquaintance, enjoy an institutional sanction that permits them to exert their redemptive feminine influence outside the home. Thus, accompanying the sisters on their prison rounds, Ripley gained entry to an otherwise inaccessible masculine region and vicariously enjoyed a feminine control over its latent violence and the stoniness of human nature beneath. "We went to the cells of the convicts

and there are six under sentence—and stood by the side of the most ferocious murderers in the narrow gallery and no keeper near—but one cannot fear under their holy protection. Their conversation and prayers with these poor fellows would almost have melted the stones upon which we knelt." .^[45]

To Ripley's confessor and close friend Isaac Hecker, her Brook Farm utopianism led naturally to her conversion and ensuing vocation as a lay sister. "I believe," declared Hecker in his tribute written the year following Ripley's death, "that the grace to believe was accorded to her by Heaven in reward for the straightforwardness, earnestness and purity with which she labored at Brook Farm to carry out the precepts of this charity." .^[46] Ripley's intense identification with nuns and fallen women led to her work for the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, an order dedicated to the rehabilitation of prostitutes. To raise the thousand dollars per year the order needed to support its work, Ripley spent the last three years of her life begging eight hours daily on the streets of New York. Far from the ecstatic summer days of Brook Farm, Ripley ended in the heart of immigrant New York, practicing the mendicancy Emerson so vehemently warned against in "Self-Reliance." But the sense lingered of an internal unworthy Protestantism, of exile from the "warmth" of the Catholic interior. Directing Charlotte what to say to some new converts for example, Ripley wrote in 1855: "Tell them I am one of the door-keepers, and never expect to be anything else; for daily is my mind more and more impressed with our worthlessness as Catholics. The Church, with all her power may just save us, but nothing more, and we can do nothing for her. We are too hardened in our old ways." .^[47]

While Sophia frequently expressed hopes for her husband's conversion, the closest she came was to an implicit parallel between her church and his literary project, the American Cyclopedia . As her husband reportedly said, "The Church has a place for everything and everything is in its place." .^[48] But much to her disappointment, his "church" never materialized beyond the encyclopedic confines of his book, which finally brought him financial stability. Ill with breast cancer, Sophia retreated to Staten Island in 1860 and returned, however partially, to the rural seclusion and beauty she had known at Brook Farm. In an image of the final recovery of a pastoral refuge, she wrote to Charlotte on July 5,

1860: "All ordinary objects of interest have faded in the distance, & our Lord has led me around to the other side of life, where helpless, and passive, I find myself lying in the cool shade at his feet." .^[49] She died in February 1861. In a final and fitting irony, funeral services were held at Boston's Purchase Street Church, where her husband had been Unitarian pastor for ten years before leaving to found Brook Farm. In 1855 the church had been sold to a Catholic parish.

Sixteen
Isaac Hecker: The Form of the Missionary Body

Brownson Alcott dead! I saw him coming from Rochester on the cars. I had been a Catholic missionary for I don't know how many years. We sat together. "Father Hecker," said he, "why can't you make a Catholic of me?" "Too much rust here," said I, clapping him on the knee. He got very angry because I said that was the obstacle. I never saw him angry at any other time. He was too proud.
Isaac Hecker, March 5, 1888

Confiding in his diary in 1843 that "I would not take it on myself to say I have been 'born again,' but I know that I have passed from death to life,"^[1] Isaac Hecker voiced his increasing experience of internal transformation that ineluctably forced his withdrawal from his family and business obligations, his retreat to Brook Farm, and his eventual conversion to the Catholic church. Hecker's reception into the Catholic church on August 2, 1844, concluded a decade-long interrogation of various political, Protestant evangelical, and finally utopian communitarian solutions to social reform and internal regeneration. His diary of 1843 and 1844 reveals how these cultural struggles interacted with the intensity of his interior emotional life, its "flow," its estrangements, and its violence. Hecker's passage from death to life—a passage that soon led him to identify life with Catholic truth—entailed a lifelong involvement with opening the way for others to join the church; he confessed at one point that "I feel that I am a pioneer in opening and leading the way. I smuggled myself into the Church , and so did Brownson."^[2] Acutely aware of the transcendent validity and cultural peculiarity of his new faith, Isaac Hecker, like Sophia Ripley, for whom he served as confessor, also remained complexly indebted to his home culture, dedicating himself after his own conversion and ordination to the conversion of other Americans: "I believe that Providence calls me . . . to America to convert a certain class of persons amongst whom I found myself before my conversion."^[3]

Hecker's preoccupation with his own conversion and that of his fellow Americans is recorded not only in his diary but in his two works of the 1850s, Questions of the Soul (1855) and Aspirations of Nature (1857). The diary and these two works reveal a fascinating and recurrent problem of negotiating the boundary between his worldly and spiritual selves, as well as the boundary between his divided self and the "spiritual presence" of others. Often solitude and radical community were strangely welded together for him: "I feel in better health than I ever have both mind and body at the same time having an increased sensitiveness so that the touch of anyone I cannot bear," he wrote in his diary; but he continued: "Also I am conscious of a more constant and spiritual communion, feel more vividly and distinctly the . . . spiritual presence of others."^[4]

Like the writings of Elizabeth Seton and Sophia Ripley, Hecker's diary, correspondence, and two published works are nostalgically, sometimes angrily, engaged with the Protestant culture left behind, a culture fully identified as the "world" repudiated by the spiritual pilgrim yet still at the core of his distinctive converted selfhood. Abandoning the Unitarian-Transcendentalist argument for self-sufficiency, whose three spokesmen Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau he dubbed "three consecrated cranks,"^[5] as well as the doctrine of Calvinist depravity, Hecker early experienced a dreamlike dissociation from his New York origins and the New England associations later established by his stays at Brook Farm and, briefly, at Fruitlands. "My past seems to me like a dream," he wrote to his close friend and mentor Orestes Brownson in 1843, "and so it is but a day dream. The deeper we drink of life the more mysterious it seems."^[6]

Hecker's dreamlike past and mysterious present were alike informed by a series of decisive confrontations between the marketplace and the monastery that led to his transformation from a morally troubled worker in his family's increasingly successful bakery enterprise to a charismatic missionary preacher, a transformation that for Hecker was instigated by the "heathenish selfishness of business competition."^[7] Recorded in the diary that he began in April 1843 while at Brook Farm (to which he had gone, with his family's support, to pursue his studies), Hecker's disengagement from the conventional matrimonial and business expectations of the American male involved a protracted effort to extract himself not only from the contaminations of capitalism but from those of the body itself—all in order to ingest what he called the "true eternal food of life."^[8]

Returning to New York from Brook Farm in 1843, Hecker persevered in his Thoreauvian enterprise of self-purification—only his project was conspicuously guided by a concern for achieving union with what he called "the Spirit" that was always pressing within him, leading him he knew not where, and always suggesting to him the insufficiencies of his contemporary existence. Frustrated by his efforts to continue the prayerful, abstemious life he had practiced at Brook Farm and had witnessed at Fruitlands, Hecker questioned in his diary the very possibility of extricating the body from culture: "What yet remains? My diet is all purchased and all produced by hired labor. My dress I suppose the most of it by Slave Labor. And I cannot say that I am rightly conditioned until all that I eat and drink or wear is produced by Love ."^[9] Only twenty-four years old at the time he recorded this entry, Hecker berated himself for missing out on the heavenly life that, paradoxically, he continually felt within yet could not, as he understood it, achieve; he longed to enjoy this heavenly life in his temporal self, although its internal presence, labeled the Spirit, continually urged him forward in a maddeningly uncertain direction. Fleeing the distractions of the family business, Hecker went to board at the Thoreau home in Concord to study languages. From there he wrote a letter home pointedly directed at his family's immigrant industriousness in terms that Thoreau would soon make famous in Walden : "What is it that costs so much labor of mind and body? Is it not that which we consume on and in our bodies? Then, if we reduce the consumption there will be less need of production."^[10] But Hecker's ruminations about how best to purify the self through disciplined abstention were intricately challenged, even thwarted, by an equally powerful passivity that at times removed him from control of his ascetic project, simultaneously estranging him from himself and somehow leading him closer to himself. At times expressive of profound inhibition, a maddening inability to study or write or do the task at hand, this passivity also bordered on release and even Adamic regeneration, a regeneration dependent on a developing distinction between a "will-fullness" that "locks up" and a "willingness" that "unlocks the portal to the divine mysteries of God."^[11] He recorded in May 1844 the following acknowledgment of this interior sense of ceaseless passage toward an unknown destination.

My life is beyond my grasp, and bears me on will-lessly to its destined haven. Like a rich fountain it overflows on every side; from within flows unceasingly the noiseless tide. . . . It is to me now as if I had just been born, and I live in the Sabbath of

creation. . . . It is a singular fact that, although conscious of a more interior and potent force at work within, I am now more quiet and will-less than I was when it at first affected me. I feel like a child, full of joy and pliability.^[12]

Such flowing passages covered a tremendous, even violently compacted, energy, a warring closeness with the "constant presence of invisible beings": "If I remain where I am still, it by collecting its scattered rays burns in my soul so deeply, bringing forth deep sighs groans and at times making me almost utter an unnatural howl which to repress takes all my energy."^[13]

Hecker's return to an original, pliant, childlike self coincided with his joining the Catholic church. Against the pressured psychological interiors of an increasingly secular nineteenth-century psyche, converts like Hecker argued for the highly structured but "flowing" interiority of the church. Many, having suffered the emptiness of a post-Unitarian existence, knew precisely the torments of Melville's Pierre, who suffered, if with unrepresentative vehemence, in his bondage to the void: "Appalling is the soul of a man! Better might one be pushed off into the material spaces beyond the uttermost orbit of our sun, than once feel himself fairly afloat in himself!"^[14] In several intriguing respects, Hecker's diary and even his later proselytizing works register the agonies of Pierre, afloat in an unconfined and undetermined space of subjectivity, only Hecker pointedly redirected those very pressures of boundlessness into a subordination to the authority of the church. Entering the Catholic enclosure represented an ideological break not only from the agonies of Pierre but also from the culture's various Protestant versions of the unmediated spirit and the invisible church. While antebellum popular fiction urged an increasingly nondenominational development of one's soul in the privacy of the "closet," popular Catholic literature, apologetics, and convert writing like Hecker's insisted that the Catholic church was the one true enclosure; it and it alone, according to another convert, exhibited the "positive marks of the true Church, namely, 'Unity, Sanctity, Catholicity, and Apostolicity.'"^[15] For Hecker, such abstractions were far less important than the developing urgency of the spirit within that led him finally into the church, not because it offered "Unity," but because it appealed powerfully to his personal enterprise of both controlling and releasing the body. Salvation, in short, depended on membership in a public and consecrated "bodily" space at once visible and invisible.

Convert prose repeatedly diagnosed torments like Pierre's as a cultural problem, an unfortunate result of Protestantism's private judgment, sectarian controversies, and debilitating theologies of human depravity.

As a largely uneducated twenty-four-year-old, Hecker decisively—and with aggressive insight—attributed life's ambiguities to the willful flaws of the elite culture's Protestantized human consciousness: "The reason why men are perplexed and in darkness about their being and the questions which their being often asks, is not that these are insoluble, but that the disposition and spirit in which a solution is attempted is so contrary to that in which they may be solved, that they appear as hidden mysteries."^[16] This formulation on Hecker's part is crucial, for his diary indeed records an extended, even painfully protracted, process of inter-rogation—interrogation often wrongly phrased, as one might surmise from this quotation. The rhetorical structure of the diary is characterized by a restless alternation between a relentless interrogatory and a series of declarative outbursts. In Hecker's understanding of antebellum cultural perplexity, conversion to the alien faith was as much a new way of asking the question as the discovery of an answer.

For some, this new mode of phrasing the question meant, as it did for Sophia Ripley, the redescription of culture entire as Protestantism. For the convert author Joshua Huntington, the conversion process entailed a cognitive resolution that systematically reconceptualized various "truths" as the heretical errors of an errant subjectivity. Somewhat disingenuously, Huntington suggested to his readers that his devastating critique of Calvinist depravity and predestination "may, perhaps, awaken a suspicion in your mind that some other things which you have always taken for granted are equally false."^[17] The doctrine of private judgment now led in the works of these various converts directly to the modern, implicitly insipid, ethos of sincerity; according to Huntington, it "has led vast numbers of persons to the conclusion that, since there are very few articles of the Christian creed which can be established with certainty, it is of no importance what a man believes, so long as he is sincere, and acts according to his own convictions of duty."^[18]

It remained for Orestes Brownson in his 1857 spiritual autobiography The Convert to indict even this notion of sincerity. According to Brown-son, the emptying of any rationality from Protestantism meant in turn a pervasive hypocrisy in the culture, the inability of the average Protestant American to believe in anything and a further inability to stand up for any convictions, should he or she have any. Like Huntington and Brownson, Hecker found it frustrating as well to witness how the American struggle against Calvinist depravity and the rejection of reason could become what was for him a disreputable argument for a meaningless progressive benevolence or Pelagianism. Of Catharine Beecher's Common Sense Applied to the Gospels (1857), Hecker wrote to Brownson

(with whom he remained in active correspondence throughout his life, both prior to his conversion and throughout his career as a Paulist):

Miss C. confounds the Jansenistic interpretation with the true interpretation of St. Augustine, consequently confounds the Catholic doctrine of original sin with that of Calvin. She is strangely ignorant for one who writes in theology, ignorant of what the Catholic Ch[urch] teaches, and seeing no escape from Calvinism except in Pelagianism she embraces it in preferrence [sic ]. . . . To this class of minds it seems to me, we have the task to show that it is not necessary to repudiate nature to be a Xtian, on the contrary, Xtianity supposes nature, & esteems it at its real & true value.^[19]

Hecker's critique of Catharine Beecher isolates what perhaps remained for him the single most persuasive point about Catholicism: that it allowed the union of nature and spirit and indeed, as Hecker claimed, the completion, the perfection of nature through the jointly romantic and ascetic workings of spirit. Antebellum discussion of Catholic piety continued to be informed by disagreement about the relation not only between the converted individual and the redeemed community but between the individual spirit and the recalcitrant body. Just as Protestants attributed enormous power to priests, they acknowledged in the Catholic church a successful, if deeply alien, form of embodied community, hierarchically organized around the living Christ. No image better conveyed the highly systematic but organic structure of the rival church than the illustration of the "Apostolical Tree" that figured at the center John Milner's End to Religious Controversy (1818), the age's most influential polemical work, used extensively by American Catholics to defend and to explain their faith (Fig. 12).^[20] Convinced that "the most fruitful source of conversions to the Catholic Church, are the detected calumnies and misrepresentations of her bitterest enemies" (xxviii), Milner wrote a series of studiously congenial letters disproving various accusations against the church. Throughout, he insisted that no community could be established without a centralized authority, the most legitimate one available in this world being that faithfully and organically transmitted from the apostles.

Milner's emphasis on the organicity and continuity of Catholic community received brilliant scholarly exposition in Johann Adam Möhler's Symbolism; or, Exposition of the Doctrinal Differences between Catholics and Protestants (1832). Explained Möhler, whose book Isaac Hecker read carefully while at Brook Farm (the volume being loaned to

him by none other than Theodore Parker), the true church both conceals and embodies Christ, and each mass serves as both commemoration and renewed sacrifice. "If Christ, concealed under an earthly veil, unfolds, to the end of time, his whole course of actions begun on earth, he, of necessity, eternally offers himself to the Father as a victim for men; and the real permanent exposition hereof can never fail in the Church, if the historical Christ is to celebrate in her his entire imperishable existence."^[21] By 1845 Isaac Hecker himself was pondering what he called the

strange fact [of] this faith in a Sacrifice. Nothing but blood will satisfy. I know not how it is this thing seems different to me now from what it has. I never could contemplate this faith of the past in a favorable light until now. . . . It is true that true love is most cruel. See what Abraham in will at least did do. . . . These' and many such facts I have not been able to give a right account of until now. They are strange but nothing truer. Revenge & Love do act alike. We would kill that we most lover—shed its blood. This is the virtue of a Sacrifice that it be that which is pure and of our deepest affection.^[22]

Möhler, regarded as the founder of the historical school of theology in the nineteenth century, first published his Symbolism in America in 1844; in Europe it had gone through five large editions within six years of its publication. The Tübingen professor's penetrating analyses of the creedal distinctions between Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, Quakerism, and even Swedenborgianism addressed contemporary concerns over the proper relation between spirit and letter, subjectivity and objectivity, faith and its institutional embodiment. Outlining the ironic development by which rationalism emerged from the Reformers' repudiation of reason and "infidel" liberalism from Calvin's excessive emphasis on depravity, Möhler diagnosed Swedenborgianism as a misguided effort to reestablish objectivity, "as subjectivity, striving after objectivity, became to itself an outward thing, in order to replace the external, visible Church founded by Christ" (427). Möhler's extended defense of Catholicism continually recurs to the church's blending of substance and interior spirit. "Everything which is truly interior must, according to Catholic doctrine, be outwardly expressed" (301). Indeed, it was precisely this image of a fully externalized and substantial form of Catholicity that inspired the "paranoid" depictions of the church in anti-Catholic discourse. In the words of one "escaped nun":

Every part of the great machine called popery, is of such a nature as to require study to be fully understood. Every part is

Fig. 12.
"The Apostolical Tree." From John Milner,  The End of Religious Controversy,
in a Friendly Correspondence between a Religious Society of Protestants,
and a Roman Catholic Divine  (London, 1818). 
Courtesy, Boalt Law School Library, University of California, Berkeley.

complex, & adapted to operate in particular ways, upon particular classes of people, and for particular ends, though subservient to the whole system, and secretly directed by the same head. Every part has also an exterior and an interior; the former is assumed and false, but protruded upon public attention in order to make deceitful impressions; and the other is secret, concealed and difficult of discovery, cautiously guarded and surrounded with arrangements invented, prepared, and ready to be used, to quiet suspicion or to mislead it.^[23]

If this image of a highly mechanized, secretive, and excessively organized Catholicism characterized the anxiety of such "escaped nuns," it was precisely such organic systemization that formed the primary ingredient of Möhler's defense of Catholicism. From his perspective, Protestant theology was characterized throughout by a rupture between internal and external that left the human creature only partially regenerated, the church insufficiently materialized, and the relation between body and spirit antagonistic. Explains Möhler: "The Protestants conceive justification to be a thing chiefly external, and the Church to be a thing chiefly internal, so that, in either respect, they are unable to bring about a permeation of the inward and the outward" (188). It was of course precisely such "permeation" that troubled nativist fiction of the period. Because of what Möhler understood as an unnatural separation born of Luther's personal despair of sanctification, Protestantism (especially Lutheranism) necessarily curtailed the possibility of conversion. An irreducible duality was lodged at the heart of Protestant regeneration. "In the Lord's supper, Luther could not find Christ alone,—bread and wine ever recurred to his mind, because, in the will of those regenerated in Christ, he saw a permanent dualism, a perpetual co-existence of a spiritual and a carnal inclination, so that the latter—evil principle in man—could never be truly converted into the former" (320).

Anticipating Andrews Norton's objection to the Transcendentalists, Möhler charged that the Reformers "entirely merged the objective historical Christianity into their own subjectivity" (407). In contrast to the Reformation's deviation from an objective truth, Roman Catholicism remained loyal to the essential and eternal meaning of the Incarnation. "As from the beginning, the abstract idea and positive history, doctrine and fact, internal and external truth, inward and outward testimony were organically united; so must religion and Church be conjoined, and this for the reason, that God became man " (342). In contrast to the fearful interiorities projected by anti-Catholic rhetoric, this language of Catholic apology emphasized a redemptive corporeality available to

human beings, an embodiment that disgusted or perplexed many Protestant observers. But as the missionary Isaac Hecker rhetorically inquired of his American Protestant audiences: "For what else is the Church, but God made manifest to the hearts and minds of men—his Body."^[24] Like other converts, Hecker labored to demonstrate that truth was an organic "body" independent of and superior to any linguistic expression or book. To ground one's faith solely in Scripture was to endanger this embodied truth, since "no account of Christ is Christ." Teaching people to read the Bible "broke Christendom into fragments, multiplied jarring Christian sects, [and] produced swarms of doubters."^[25] Converts and sympathetic observers of the church increasingly voiced their opposition to the divisiveness of a mass print culture by appealing to the human need for spiritual substance and sustenance, substances implicitly antitextual. Liberal Protestants frequently conceded their hunger, frankly admitting that they were "word-ridden Anglo-Saxons, thirsting for forms of beauty which they cannot devise."^[26]

Writing home from New England on June 11, 1844, to declare his intention of joining the church, Hecker appealed precisely to this cultural idiom of bodily need: "I feel like affirming, in the spirit of the man whom Christ made to see, I know not whether this Church be or not be what certain men call it, but this I know: it has the life my heart is thirsting for, and of which my spirit is in great need."^[27] In a thirty-nine-page manuscript account of conscience written in October 1848, Hecker refined his expression of this appetite in terms that recall Seton's hunger for the Eucharist: "I have a constant hunger and thirst for Our Lord in the sacrament of His body and blood. If it were possible I would desire to receive no other food than this, for it is the only nourishment that I have a real appetite for."^[28]

Finding themselves happily externalized into a populated, "objective" region, converts like Isaac Hecker confirmed Möhler's formulations about the body's relation to the spirit. That space, densely inhabited by the interconnected members of the church "militant," the church "suffering," and the church "triumphant," functioned for them as an all-embracing and significantly inhabited interiority. But emanating from the mystery of the Incarnation as embodied and expounded by the supernatural teaching authority of the visible church, that interiority reached into the public world as well. Explained one American Catholic in an essay entitled "The Two Sides of Catholicism," the church's invisible faith and visible papal hierarchy were two necessary halves of the whole: "The most profound and supersensual characteristic of the Church is, therefore, closely though mysteriously allied with the palpable

exterior."^[29] Like many converts, Isaac Hecker employed this Catholic vision to criticize the disembodied and unnecessarily conflicted vision of union expounded by Transcendentalists. Indeed Hecker's critique of some Transcendentalists, especially Emerson, focused precisely on the aberrant notion of the body created by the doctrines of Transcendentalism:

A Transcendentalist is one who has a keen sight but little warmth of heart: Fine conceits but destitute of the rich glow of Love. He is in rapport with the Spiritual world, unconscious of the celestial one. He is all nerve and no blood [—] colour less. He talks of self reliance but fears to trust himself to Love. He never abandons himself to Love, but always is on the look out for some new facts[.] His nerves are always tightly stretched like the string of a bow, his life is all effort. In a short period they loose their tone. Behold him sitting in a chair! He is not sitting but braced upon its angles as if his bones were of iron and his nerves of steel. Every nerve is drawn his hands are clinched like a miser it is his lips and head that speaks not his tongue and heart.^[30]

Hecker's extraordinary formulation of the Emersonian body as a mechanized, and profoundly uncomfortable construction perched tensely on his chair, a creature whose self-alienation is so profound that his body is no longer body but a miserly machine hoarding its human affections from expression, remains perhaps his most powerful criticism of the Protestant culture from which he was gradually extricating himself. As late as the years immediately following the Civil War, Hecker returned to the phenomenon presented by Emerson, writing to Brown-son that a lecture recently delivered by Emerson once again falsely repudiated the connection between the internal and external worlds: "You will find a passage in Emerson's speech which I have marked. He professes to find a contradiction between 'the without' and 'the within'—an imaginary one—as between faith and science, or revelation and reason."^[31] Influenced by such apologists as John Milner and, especially, Johann Möhler, Hecker continued to insist that genuine conversion meant not a rupture from the world but the completion of its promise. There need be no irremediable gap between spirit and letter, between ascetic discipline and affective expressivity.

The rhetorical structure of Hecker's Aspirations of Nature , its chapters headed by epigraphs from such antidogmatic spokesmen of a divine spirit emancipated from denominational constraints as William Ellery Channing, William Cullen Bryant, and even Emerson, underlines the

continuing interaction between his converted sensibility and that of American romanticism. Hecker's understanding of his own conversion and continuing obligation to the unconverted of New England's liberal elite recurrently thematized itself around the dynamics of captivity through which the reunion of inner and outer was to be accomplished. Thus one chapter's epigraph, from Bryant, implicitly posits Hecker, the son of German immigrants and new advocate for the papacy, as New England's mythic deliverer:

My spirit yearns to bring
       The lost ones back—yearns with
       desire intense—

And struggles hard to wring
       The bolts apart, and pluck thy
       captives thence.^[32]

That Hecker, himself profoundly influenced by European romanticism, used its emancipatory rhetoric for his own apologias demonstrates provocatively that various Protestant theological tenets were indeed excerpts from the Catholic whole.

Concluding his Aspirations of Nature with an argument for the primacy of the Holy See, Hecker subversively borrows from Emerson his own Transcendentalist dictum: "The world is awakening to the idea of union" (358). Hecker had developed his Transcendentalist interest in "union" from his close friendship with the Associationist George Ripley, who several years earlier had published the following description in the Harbinger of a Catholic mass he had attended: "It is to me the embodiment of that instinctive aspiration for unity, which the heart clings to so fondly, that not even the perversions of modern society,—of an antagonistic, dollar-worshipping, common-place age, can quite expel. I love to regard it as an anticipation of the choral harmonies of a better day."^[33] To Hecker, as to Sophia Ripley, George Leach, and Sarah Stearns (the other Brook Farmers who converted), the Catholic church anticipated no such future unity but embodied it at the present moment. The church's various and interrelated forms of community, particularly the intercessory bonds between the living and the saints, led Hecker to admit at one point that he "seem[ed] to feel their presence much more intimately and really than that of those around me."^[34] It was finally this supernaturally sensed community that disciplined Hecker's otherwise boundless communings with the spirit, for it provided (like Hawthorne's "ideal reader") a loving but manageably distant audience that enabled his vocation to emerge.

Writing home from Holy Cross College in June 1844, Hecker presented his decision to join the church in the familiar antebellum language of "influence": "There is a conviction which lies deeper than all thought or speech, which moves me with an irresistable influence to take this step, which arguments cannot reach, nor any visible power make to falter."^[35] In light of Hecker's unorthodox plans, such language effectively removed his decision from the polemical (and family) arena that proved such a trial for both Seton and Ripley. Depicting himself as uncontrollably subject to such mysterious persuasions, Hecker skillfully thwarted any possible family attempts to dissuade him. To declare himself beyond the reach of family and friends, he portrayed himself as beyond his own reach. Throughout his ensuing Catholic career, Hecker frankly luxuriated in the indeterminate influences of his newfound church, for as he argued, the very susceptibility of human consciousness to apparently extramundane desires and influences was the most persuasive proof of God's existence; the truthfulness of Catholicism was correspondingly confirmed by the presence of these persuasive mysteries. Even to the antimystical Brownson, Hecker insisted on these vital forces as a necessary protection against the "charnal" vision typical in nativist depictions of a morbid Catholicism: "We feel ever an imperceptible influence in attending the mysteries of the Church. The mysteries of the Church are the mediums of the mystic life. A church without mysteries is without a Soul, a congregation of corpses."^[36]

While still a new member of the church, Hecker recorded in his diary the continuing quandary that had precipitated his conversion, namely "how to live a life which shall be conformable to the life within and not separate from the persons and circumstances around me."^[37] Following his brief stay at Brook Farm and his entry into the church shortly thereafter, he finally decided to train for the priesthood, sailing in 1845 for Europe, where, in Belgium, he took vows in the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer on October 15, 1846. After three difficult years struggling to apply himself to his studies, he was ordained a priest on October 23, 1849. Returning to America in January 1851, he became a missionary priest and writer, founding the Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle, known as the Paulists. In his books and articles, he practiced what he felt to be his divinely inspired urge to convert his fellow Protestants, convinced that the Calvinist repudiation of reason and of the redemptive potential of the body had no place in the optimistic ideology of the American Republic. Catholicism's defense of reason and its more cooperative relation between spirit and flesh, by contrast, made it the ideal religion for America. What he was up against is suggested by

Thoreau's rejection of Hecker's invitation to journey through Europe together on a pilgrimage to Rome: "I remember you, as it were, with the whole Catholic Church at your skirts. And the other day, for a moment, I think I understood your relation to that body; but the thought was gone again in a twinkling, as when a dry leaf falls from its stem over our heads, but is instantly lost in the rustling mass at our feet."^[38]

Overcoming Thoreau's chilling dismissal, Hecker became an influential priest who held missions throughout America that often attracted large crowds. Having been released from his Redemptorist vows by the pope, Hecker in 1858 established his Paulist community, held together not by vows but by American republican principles of voluntary agreement. It was, in Hecker's view, the long-awaited solution to the problem of how to live in America: "The civil and political state of things of our age, particularly in the United States, fosters the individual life. But it should do so without weakening the community life: this is true individualism. The problem is to make the synthesis. The joint product is the Paulist."^[39]

For many years, Hecker enjoyed success as a missionary priest and an interior life that brought him sustained and ardent spiritual happiness. He had long felt himself peculiarly blessed with intuitive apprehensions of the presence of the Lord, his angels, and his saints. As he himself frequently acknowledged, Catholicism gave structure and purpose to an otherwise undisciplined visionary nature that threatened to succumb to excesses of enthusiasm and passivity. But toward the end of his life, Hecker met with the terrors of spiritual dryness and the physical debility of what was probably chronic leukemia.^[40] No longer could he find God within himself or the divine energy and glory he had celebrated for so many years. That "inseparable synthesis" between the "action of the Holy Spirit embodied visibly in the authority of the Church, and the action of the Holy Spirit dwelling invisibly in the soul" had broken apart.^[41]

Father Hecker left New York in 1873 to travel in Europe, seeking out health spas and shrines. During these years he traveled up the Nile and returned to the Continent via the Holy Land. Still faithful to the church and to his brother Paulists, Hecker endured a profound loss of spiritual and physical vigor; writing from Switzerland in the autumn of 1874, he expressed his desolation over the loss of God's presence: "The only words which come to my lips are 'my soul is sad unto death' and these I repeat and repeat again."^[42] Hecker's allusion to Hezekiah's lament, the same that Poe had selected to introduce his hero's plight in "The Pit and the Pendulum," shows his poignant descent into a suffering captivity, one mysteriously welded of bodily and spiritual exhaustion. Wandering

in the vague and humiliating terrain of this ennui, he recorded in his memoranda the fracture of his sublimely integrated being into competing voices of lamentation and sardonic self-depreciation. "I used to say, Oh Lord! I feel as if I had the whole world on my shoulders; and all I've got to say is, Oh Lord! I am sorry you have given me such small potatoes to carry on my back. But now—well, when a mosquito comes in I say, Mosquito, have you any good to do me? Yes? Then I thank you, for I am glad to get good from a mosquito."^[43]

Hecker continued his European travels, seeking to recover the spiritual consolations he had known so abundantly in his youth. Like Melville's Clarel, he painfully combined the tourist and the pilgrim, attempting to experience God in a wandering travail of sight-seeing, struggling in the seemingly inextricable bonds of a physical and spiritual malaise that greatly tested but did not destroy his faith. No longer directing his assured apologetics for Catholicism toward his benighted Protestant countrymen, Hecker took up a new genre, that of the captivity narrative:

I have taken to writing fables. Here is one: Once upon a time a bird was caught in a snare. The more it struggled to free itself, the more it got entangled. Exhausted, it resolved to wait with the vain hope that the fowler, when he came, would set it at liberty. His appearance, however, was not the signal for its restoration to smiling fields and fond companions, but the forerunner of death at his hands. Foolish bird! Why did you go into the snare? Poor thing; it could not find food anywhere, and it was famishing with hunger; the seed was so attractive, and he who had baited the trap knew it full well, and that the bird could not resist its appetite. The fowler is our Lord. The bait is Divine Love. The bird is the soul. Oh skilfull catcher of souls! Oh irresistable bait of Divine Love! Oh pitiable victim! But most blessed soul; for in the hands of our Lord the soul only dies to self to be transformed into God.^[44]

Returning to America, Hecker spent the last thirteen years of his life in an invalid state, sitting dejected and apart during community recreations, infrequently officiating at mass and doing so only with great emotional difficulty. According to his original biographer Walter Elliott, Father Hecker sought to avoid becoming oppressed with his fear of Judgment Day by "mending old clocks, a pretty well mended collection of which he kept in his room against such occasions."^[45] Isaac Hecker died on December 22, 1888.

Seventeen
Orestes Brownson:
The Return to Conspiracy

Threatened and perplexed by Catholic conversion, liberal Protestants typically trivialized the phenomenon. As the Transcendentalist James Freeman Clarke assured his readers in his critique of Orestes Brownson's conversion from Transcendentalism to the Roman faith: "The conversions to Romanism are mere eddies in the stream,—dimples of water turning backward, and showing thereby the power with which the main current is setting forward. For all reaction merely proves the strength of the action. It is the wave falling back a little, that it may return again, farther up the shore."^[1]

But no one knew better than Brownson himself the enormous difference between all versions of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism or the energy it took to fight this "main current." He offered an extraordinary description of what lay behind his theological struggles:

To pass from one Protestant sect to another is a small affair, and is little more than going from one apartment to another in the same house. We remain still in the same world, in the same general order of thought, and in the midst of the same friends and associates. We do not go from the known to the unknown; we are still within soundings, and may either return, if we choose, to the sect we have left, or press on to another, without serious loss of reputation, or any gross disturbance of our domestic and social relations. But to pass from Protestantism to Catholicity is a very different thing. We break with the whole world in which we have hitherto lived; we enter into what is to us a new and untried region, and we fear the discoveries we may make there, when it is too late to draw back. To the Protestant mind this old Catholic Church is veiled in mystery, and

leaves ample room to the imagination to people it with all manner of monsters. . . . We enter it, and leave no bridge over which we may return. It is a committal for life, for eternity. To enter it seemed to me, like taking a leap in the dark; and it is not strange that I recoiled, and set my wits to work to find out, if possible, some compromise, some middle ground on which I could be faithful to my Catholic tendencies without uniting myself with the present Roman Catholic Church.^[2]

Brownson failed entirely in his effort to find such a middle ground; indeed, as a Catholic convert he developed a sustained career as a vehement controversialist. For him, as for Hecker, the debate between an autonomous subjectivity and an authoritative objectivity, the effort to reunite nature and grace, was the core spiritual and epistemological issue. As a convert, he fought strenuously for the legitimate place of reason and objective reality in the spiritual life, arguing that to reject reason was to eventually (and rather quickly) reject faith. "Unhappily, the religious belief of my Protestant countrymen," he wrote in his 1857 spiritual autobiography The Convert , "as far as religious belief they have, is built on scepticism, and hence, if they think at all, they have a perpetual struggle in their minds between faith and reason."^[3] For Brown-son, such skepticism derived from the Kantian claim that the subject finally determines the object; once dependent on subjective thoughts and sensations, human consciousness will inevitably degenerate into the mental and spiritual indifference of "modern pantheism, which represents God as realizing or actualizing himself in idea, idea as realizing itself in the race, the race as realizing itself in individuals, and individuals as realizing themselves in the act of thinking, that is, feeling, knowing, and loving: a superb system of transcendental nullism."^[4]

How to reconcile inner and outer, the individual and the community, logic and intuition? Like Hecker's distaste for the "heathenish competition" of the business world, Brownson's initial motivation to join the church was his quest for a just society; "it was not in seeking to save my soul, to please God, or to have the true religion, that I was led to the Catholic Church, but to obtain the means of gaining the earthly happiness of mankind."^[5] Brownson's political reformism was closely but problematically allied with a profound personal alienation from his local New England culture. The son of an impoverished Vermont couple who was given over to foster care between the ages of six and fourteen, Brownson was indelibly imprinted by his orphaned youth, later claiming that he had "had no childhood."^[6] During his years as a Presbyterian, then Unitarian, then Transcendentalist preacher and writer in New England,

he remained the outsider—accepted into the inner circles of the New England clergy and literati but never really one of them. If his intellectual project during these years was to reconcile subject and object through careful philosophical study of Kant, Victor Cousin, Benjamin Constant, and finally Pierre Leroux, he was also struggling to make himself at home in Boston's antebellum culture. Working to free himself from his filial dependence on William Ellery Channing, Brownson made an extraordinary confession of the isolation and lack of understanding he endured during these Boston years.

In my happiest moments my thought has never been clear to myself, and I have felt that there was more in it than I had mastered. With more than tolerable powers of utterance, both as a speaker and as a writer, I have never been able to utter a thought that I was willing to accept when reflected back from another mind. Neither friend nor enemy has ever seemed to understand me; and I have never seen a criticism from a friendly or an unfriendly hand, with but one single exception, in which there was the remotest allusion to the thought I seemed to myself to have had in writing the piece criticized.^[7]

Almost ten years prior to his conversion in 1844, Brownson had argued for the reunion of subject and object, spirit and letter in his New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church (1836), where as a Unitarian he expounded, with passionate anti-Calvinist vagueness, his Church of the Future. Unlike Protestantism's excessive secularism or Catholicism's excessive supernaturalism, his church would unite spirit and letter and hence encourage the "illimitable progress" of a humankind that, like Jesus, would incarnate the progressive principles of divinity.^[8] In his seminal letter, "The Mediatorial Life of Jesus" (1842), addressed to his "spiritual father" William Ellery Channing, Brownson first publicly repudiated this personal theology of Christian progress for a doctrine of "communion" derived from the ethical theories of Pierre Leroux. Against Channing's Unitarian stress on subjective individualism, Brownson now insisted on the more authentic reality of mediated existence and, following Leroux, argued that the individual lived only through communion with the other:

Now man's object, by communion with which he lives, is other men, God, and nature. With God and nature he communes only indirectly. His direct, immediate object is other men. His life, then, is in himself and in other men. All men are brought by this into the indissoluble unity of one and the same life. All

become members of one and the same body, and members one of another. The object of each man is all other men. Thus do the race live in solido , if I may use a legal term, the objective portion of each man's life being indissolubly in all other men, and, therefore, that of all men in each man.^[9]

Through this doctrine of communion adapted from the work of Leroux, Brownson argued himself into agreeing with the Christian dogma of Original Sin, for to him it was the objective nature of the human community that made logical the theological position on transmissible sin. Original Sin "is hereditary by virtue of the fact stated, that the preceding generation always furnishes the objective portion of the life of the succeeding generation, and without the objective portion the subjective portion would be as if it were not."^[10] Brownson's doctrine of communion served as the turning point in his intellectual and spiritual career, for not only did it provide him for the first time with "a doctrine to preach," but it also persuaded him of the existence and necessity of the historical Christ: "And as he by living by the Father lives the life of God immediately, so they by living by him so live the life of God, mediately."^[11] Thus this open letter to Channing (which Emerson termed "local and idolatrous"), in its thorough critique of individualism and perfectionism, entirely revised Brownson's former understanding of political reform.^[12] Reform was no longer a matter of revolutionary action against the structures of a nascent industrial capitalism, as he had argued in his controversial essay "The Laboring Classes" (1840). Brownson now argued that man "cannot lift himself, but must be lifted, by placing him in communion with a higher and elevating object."^[13]

But this new theology of communion did not mean that Brownson had no interest in the affective dimension of faith. On the contrary, his spiritual autobiography records an epiphanous discovery of God's freedom that meant in turn that he was "no longer fatherless," no longer "an orphan left to the tender mercies of inexorable general laws."^[14] As a loving subjective force, this free God pierced through nature's objective order to rescue his child.

If to those outside the Protestant consensus its claims were obviously biased, from Brownson's Catholic perspective the nation's "truth" was deformed by the distortions of its own rampant individualism. As one Catholic journalist declared, public opinion in the United States was not a "product of our free institutions" but an" 'olla podrida ' of old English prejudice, Irish party feeling, French infidelity, German rationalism and modern paganism [that] is decidedly against Catholics."^[15] Brownson became the most significant spokesman for this Catholic countercon-

sensus view, devoting his polemical talents to elucidating and defending the "foreign Church" (and his doctrine of communion) to largely suspicious Protestant audiences in his own Quarterly Review and his two most significant literary ventures, The Spirit-Rapper: An Autobiography (1854) and The Convert .

As America's most prominent and vocal Catholic convert, Brownson readily detected and criticized the artfulness of such self-professedly realistic romantic historians as George Bancroft, William H. Prescott, and Francis Parkman. Having stepped outside the Unitarian-Transcendentalist circle by converting, Brownson knew firsthand the Brahmin culture from which their histories emerged. Liberal Protestant New England and its national historians alike suffered from dangerous self-deceptions from which Brownson himself had only recently been rescued. Subscribing to a view of the northern imperial genius considerably less sanguine than that of New England historians, Brownson berated them for their liberal Protestant or, worse yet, agnostic progressivism that transformed history into a chain of providential events—events that finally depended more on the ostensible "genius" of the Anglo-Saxon than on God or any instituted church. For its confusion of historical facts with "speculative science," George Bancroft's democratic Transcendentalism especially irked Brownson. Adept at turning the tables on his liberal adversaries, Brownson even hurled the traditional anti-Catholic accusation of idolatry at Bancroft: "The worship of humanity has taken, in the uncatholic world, the place of the worship of God, and become the dominant idolatry or superstition of the age."^[16]

The accusation carried particular force in light of Prescott's and Parkman's shared fascination with Indian "idolatry" and Catholic "papadolatry." To what extent were their accounts a distorted reflection of their own Protestant or even agnostic idolatries? Brownson's subversive reading of Protestant historiography on America accused it of a covert agenda: the celebration of man's power over God, a celebration only faintly disguised by the historians' habitual reference to Providence. The nation that understood itself as singled out for especial sanctity, as righteously triumphant over the diabolic and the savage, was in Brown-son's newly militant reality an atheist culture whose reformist essence was the true demon. Just as many anti-Catholic Americans were indulging in fantastic visions of papal conspirators subverting America's republican traditions, Brownson, for whom "Satan was the first Protestant,"^[17] argued that Reformed Christianity was a global demonic plot against the pope and his flock. But such a potentially powerful critique of official culture did not inspire in Brownson any especial sympathy for

conquered native groups. A strong nationalist, Brownson defended America's providential mission, simply insisting that it be a Catholic, not a Protestant one. Until America submitted to the dominion of Mother Church, its seeming victory over the diabolic would remain a self-delusion, the achievement of its Manifest Destiny a failed effort. Seeking to inspire (and advertise) American Catholic patriotism, Brownson argued that America's Manifest Destiny was available to Catholic immigrants as well as Protestant natives:

Especially should [this manifest destiny] endear the country to every Catholic heart, and make every Catholic, whatever his race or native land, a genuine American patriot; for it is the realization of the Christian ideal of society, and the diffusion through all quarters of the globe, for all men, whatever their varieties of race and language, of that free, pure, lofty, and virile civilization which the church loves, always favors, and has from the first labored to introduce, establish, and extend, but which, owing to the ignorance, barbarism, and superstitions retained, in spite of her most strenuous exertions, from pagan Rome and the barbarian invaders of the empire, she has never been able fully to realize in the Old World.^[18]

As a militant anti-Protestant, Brownson felt continuously compelled to challenge his New England culture's liberal assumptions and especially its increasing post-Calvinist optimism about humankind. "Man is not naturally progressive," Brownson insisted, opposing Emersonian romanticism and its efforts to divinize the human, if not humanize the Deity.^[19] True Brownsonian progress could occur only through a human agency sanctioned and controlled by the Roman church. By the same reasoning, Catholic dogma, as a continuous and undistorted account of temporal and supernatural reality, provided the only starting point for an accurate American history. Reform theology, being of human fabrication, was necessarily biased and headed for extinction; Catholicism, being of divine origin, was impartial and eternal. "Facts are never to be feared," declared Brownson, "for they can never come into conflict with religion."^[20]

In writing history himself, Brownson revealed a strong penchant for extravagant explanation that oddly mirrored the prior extravagances of such Protestant apologists as John Foxe and Cotton Mather. The age's skepticism and theological liberalism signaled nothing less than demonic possession. Brownson's own major attempt at narrative history, The Spirit-Rapper: An Autobiography , unfolds the story of an American

social reformer who becomes an evil mesmerist and sets out to radicalize the world by hypnotizing its masses. In certain respects, the Spirit-Rapper represents Brownson's alternative and former self, whose liberalism is now diagnosed as pathogenic evidence of satanic possession. Not only does the mesmerist utterly fail in his insurrectionary schemes to perfect society, but his skills with animal magnetism also invite literal satanic invasion. Brownson's egomaniacal hero eventually confirms antebellum conservative progressivism: as Stowe and Thoreau also argued, no true social reform can occur without individual spiritual regeneration. Repenting his "demonic" radicalism, the mesmerist eventually converts to Catholicism, exposing his emancipatory politics as tyrannous egotism in disguise. Brownson's narrative trajectory from spiritualism to Catholicism enables a panoramic review of nineteenth-century Western culture, a reexamination of Transcendentalism, reformism, and spiritualism from the Roman perspective, his portrait of the radical mesmerist particularly aimed at the pretensions of liberal and utopian New England thought.

The most recent development in a long train of post-Reformation catastrophes, the spread of mesmerism powerfully indicated to Brown-son the godlessness and consequent vulnerabilities of modern culture. To him, the lust to control and be controlled inevitably issued from an abandonment of Catholicism's ecclesiastical policy of sanctified authority and obedience; contemporary America, in its faddish pursuit of spiritualism, demonstrated the enslavement, not the advance, of Western culture. Brownson's curious book is one of the few historical texts to internationalize antebellum America, for in it he labored to demonstrate that theological liberalism and the European revolutions of 1848 were insidiously, indeed satanically, connected. For Brownson, a man of refined religious distrust, contemporary American fascination with mesmerism and spiritualism indicated a developing network of dangerous revolutionary trends: "The connection of spirit-rapping or the spirit manifestation, with modern philanthropy, visionary reform, socialism and revolutionism, is not an imagination of my own."^[21]

Strongly influenced by Hawthorne's critique of mesmerism in The Blithedale Romance , Brownson in The Spirit-Rapper extended his deterministic Catholic analysis of his domestic culture to all Europe. In this sense, his text represents an ironic instance of the expansionism characteristic of American national politics. America's degeneration is now cast as part of a global struggle between Satan and Christ for control, not just of the New World, but of world history. Brownson's Catholic mouthpiece Merton explains to the Spirit-Rapper that the past is "little

else but the history of the conflict between these invisible powers" (220). Brownson's Augustinian vision struggled against what he thought a hubristic progressivism that celebrated man's interventionist role in history. Such attempts, whether by mild philanthropist or wild revolutionist, would soon issue in the dominion of Satan, not Christ.^[22]

But Brownson's energetic critique of the Spirit-Rapper's various forays into the avant-garde of socialism and spiritualism persuaded few readers. With studied contempt for Brownson's provocatively reactionary history, the Unitarian press found in the work "many old legends disinterred and exhibited as unquestionable truths."^[23] Indeed, most of his New England readership was already convinced, in the wake of 1848, that European radicalism was as distasteful as European repression; there was little need to satanize its excesses. Certainly Brownson's argument that American reformism was conspiratorially connected to such foreign socialism was little more than dogmatic excess on his part. But it was less Brownson's attack on the occult than his proffered remedy that alienated his Protestant readership. Like many New England liberals, Emerson viewed the spiritualist craze as the "rat-hole of revelation" but hardly saw a return to ecclesiastical authority as the solution. And while Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance subtly exploited anti-Catholic anxiety in its portrait of the nunlike veiled Priscilla bonded by mesmerism to Westervelt/Hollingsworth, Brownson vigorously denied any such connection between monastic and mesmeric subordination. In stark contrast to Hawthorne's ironic vision, Brownson insisted that the Catholic church afforded the only reliable protection against a malleable human nature, one that Brownson, like the theoreticians of the new domesticity, understood as inherently susceptible to dangerous influences. As a convert, Brownson was himself no longer interested in accepting the compromised resistance to mesmerism offered by The Blithedale Romance . If Hawthorne's unchurched vision offered the petty and commingled servitudes of ordinary life in exchange for the exaggerated bondage of mesmerism, Brownson insisted on a reality free of both imprisonments. The church afforded refuge not only from Satan but also from the pressures of a desiring and dependent human nature.

Scorning Calvinism's simultaneous insistence on private judgment and human depravity, Brownson's Catholic vision argued for the utopian potential of a human reason guided by the church's teaching authority. Notwithstanding the original Fall, the historical church provided an avenue back into near-Edenic unity. Those who joined could recover soul, mind, and homeland all at once. Thus Merton, the novel's young Catholic layman, persuades the dying Spirit-Rapper that because the

Roman church fulfills the ancient tradition of monotheism, it is the vessel for true history and hence serves as man's most original home. Subsequent religious developments occurring outside the church's domain are at best flawed imitations of this original Catholic monotheism.

Brownson's historical vision provided a novel understanding of the reasons for declension and the possibilities for progress—novel, that is, to his antebellum Protestant readership. Against Prescott's and Parkman's argument for a providential American power, Brownson and other Catholic controversialists asserted a contrasting vision of apostasy and decline. This conservative Catholic position (one that strenuously advocated the papacy's own increasing conservatism), ironically resembled the "underground" vision of nineteenth-century culture articulated by such disaffected observers as Thoreau and Melville. Indeed, Orestes Brownson continued to support the radical social reformer Fannie Wright, notwithstanding his new defense of the pope. In its strenuous materialism and fractured allegiances, Protestant modernity was contaminated, if not demonically tinged, for such outsiders. Brownson's vociferous historical critique illustrated continued orthodox Catholic dismay with Reformed Christianity.

The Reformation, which Americans from John Winthrop on had seen as the European preamble to the settlement of America, was in truth a calamitous and perhaps a satanically inspired departure from Catholic unity. Instead of bringing liberation, the Reformation initiated a renewed and more terrible bondage to temporal powers from which emerged, in turn, the various maladies of nineteenth-century modernism, particularly the evils attendant on industrialism, political radicalism, and religious experimentation. As William Cobbett remonstrated in The History of the Protestant "Reformation" in England and Ireland Showing How That Event Has Impoverished and Degraded the Main Body of the People in Those Countries (1824): "What that is evil, what that is monstrous, has not grown out of this . . . Protestant 'Reformation!'"^[24] Although Brownson disdained Cobbett's political subversiveness, regretting to "see any alliance of Catholics with vulgar radicals, whose proffered aid should be spurned rather than accepted," he basically agreed with and even amplified Cobbett's alarmist antimodernism.^[25] If for the Anglo-American Cobbett such disturbing aspects of the Industrial Age as jails, factories, standing armies, poor rates and pauper houses, the stock exchange, and England's national debt all resulted haphazardly from the Reformation's destruction of the feudal order, this tangle of interrelated problems was menacing enough to Brownson to amount to a contemporary Protestant conspiracy. Arguing that the church was the only site

for an authentic eternity and temporal history, Brownson concluded by 1854 that the opposition must necessarily be supernatural as well. Satan masterminded all historical forces that militated against Catholic unity. "Mahomet," Calvin, Knox, and Luther were no "hypocrites" but, like the Greeks and Romans, were "demonically infected." Leaders of the Puritan and French revolutions were alike "driven onward by infuriated demons" (Spirit-Rapper , 220).

The Reformation had traumatized human beings by cutting them off from history and leaving them exposed to a virulent present, according to the newly enlightened Spirit-Rapper. Thus does he diagnose his countrymen's faddish pursuit of mesmerism as a response to their displacement from the Catholic fold:

They have been transplanted from the old homestead, are without ancestors, traditions, old associations, or fixed habits transmitted from generation to generation through a long series of ages. They have descended, in great part, from the sects that separated in the seventeenth century from the Anglican Church, which had in the sixteenth century itself separated from the Church of Rome, and to a great extent broken with antiquity. (15)

This three-century-old act of separation defines the Protestant temperament. Rootlessness, rebelliousness, and isolation are part of the Protestant's genetic equipment as the false creed blights each successive generation. Ironically, the only historical continuity in such a world is that provided by the devil, who in his interlocking conspiracies reorganizes, however fatally, the synthesis shattered by the Reformation.

If for Cobbett, England "became, under a Protestant Church, a scene of repulsive selfishness,"^[26] for Brownson the Reformation produced an even more problematic modern character. Lutheran and Calvinist theology had not only spoiled the ethical nature of Americans but also deeply damaged their interpretive capacities, for the Reformation's rejection of authority opened up a "Pandora's Box" of unrestricted individual interpretations of the Word. Premised on the validity of private judgment, Protestantism finally reduced to the single absurd principle that "each and every man is in himself the exact measure of truth and goodness."^[27] For Brownson, this fate (which was precisely Emerson's goal), led simply to disease; unless an absolute standard constrained the human mind, it would degenerate into chronic confusion and eventual nihilism. The Spirit-Rapper speaks as a typical Brownsonian Protestant casualty when he recalls of his secular days: "My freedom and inde-

pendence of mind were in denying, not in believing" (226). Neurosis as well as eternal damnation inevitably result from such a life based on the "infidel premise . . . that liberty is the absence of all restraints" (230).

Unlike the conspiratorial vision of anti-Catholic Protestants, Brown-son's vision of satanic plots strangely protects human beings from serious moral condemnation. In Brownson's cosmos, man is more victim than villain, an unwitting dupe of the devil's machinations. Thus does his imperialist supernaturalism produce a kind of tenderness toward human foibles that adds dimension to his cultural critique. Having utterly repudiated any secular vision of human agency, Brownson deprives his historical actors in The Spirit-Rapper of any innate power to change history; when they manage such a feat, it is only thanks to Satan. By contrast, progressive Protestants were increasingly dispossessing the devil of agency; but as the ascendant historical agent, humanity unwittingly laid claim to malignant as well as divine attributes. Endowed with such proto-numinous power, Americans could become agents of regress as well as progress: it was supremely villainous humanity in the form of scheming Jesuits, lecherous confessors, and despotic popes who frightened nineteenth-century Protestants.

Having suffered satanic invasion, Brownson's Spirit-Rapper finally regains his senses when he converts to Catholicism. Continuing perfectibility, the Unitarian-Transcendentalist program for American society, eventually strikes him as a Sisyphean absurdity that deprives him of all desire to continue living. Like Melville's Ishmael in Moby-Dick , the Spirit-Rapper flirts with suicidal longings before being saved, not by a sea voyage but by conversion. Like other antebellum Catholic apologists, Brownson drew parallels between the integrity of the individual psyche, the unity of the Catholic church, and the fate of the nation. Only by becoming Catholic could America expect to heal those sectarian and sectional disputes that threatened to disband the Union. The shattered Spirit-Rapper prior to his conversion resembles antebellum America, an imperiled nation, splintered by democratic liberalism into conflicting ideologies, corrupted by materialism, enervated by rampant ecclecticism. The material affluence and religious pluralism of mid-century life (which many Americans were celebrating) only confirmed Brownson's orthodox perspective. Unless bonded to the Lord and his one church, men and women would inevitably suffer a cultural bondage, captured and enslaved by the sheer variety of contemporary ideologies.

Spurred by his converted perspective, Brownson used The Spirit-Rapper to scrutinize marginal as well as significant nineteenth-century movements, repudiating each in turn. If to the romantic historians most

events kept time to the progressive march, to Brownson post-Reformation history dimly and distortedly reflected an original but now abandoned Catholic unity. The past four centuries aped the true past. Protestantism disguised its atheism in a "livery stolen from Catholicity,"^[28] and all that it produced was a false imitation. Such a view arrested the dynamism of Protestant liberation into repetitive historical examples of the demonic conspiracy to overthrow Catholicism. Brownson's "history" consequently depicts a curiously leveled nineteenth century, crowded and motionless like Irving's Westminster Abbey, each "liberal" event encased as a separate instance of demonic invasion. As this veteran of antebellum America's major cultural trends tours the ruins of his recent past through the persona of the mesmerist, one senses the profound alienation of his adopted Catholic sensibility from both past and present. Externalizing his isolation, Brownson assigns non-Catholics to a void resembling the one he himself endured as the alienated convert. The most adequate refuge from a present whose very essence is Protestant lies in the aggression of an obsessive polemical discourse.

Buoyed by the victory of Union forces in the Civil War, Brownson initially put forward a more optimistic diagnosis of American culture in his postwar political treatise The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny (1865). As he reasoned in that work, America would eventually become Catholic because the country was "dialectically constituted, and founded on real Catholic, not sectarian or sophistical principles."^[29] But this optimism soon subsided into the alienated vision that had characterized The Spirit-Rapper . The more secure Brownson's own rescue, the less he predicted salvation for his culture. While, like Hecker, he argued energetically throughout the 1850s that Catholicism and American democracy shared basic affinities and needed only each other to produce the just society on earth, his confidence finally wavered. By 1870 his politics of community had virtually repudiated the public sector for the sustaining interiors of Roman Catholic orthodoxy; Catholicism and democracy were fundamentally at odds with one another, the spirit and the flesh enemies once again. Convinced, finally, that America was to be "permanently Protestant," the aging Brownson concluded his career as a revisionist historian committed to the political relevance of a repudiated Catholic past.^[30] Writing to Hecker in 1870, Brownson implicitly acknowledged that he had abandoned the project of a lifetime, the reunion of interior and exterior, self and culture.

I defend the republican form of government for our country, because it is the legal & only practicable form, but I no longer

hope anything from it. Catholicity is theoretically compatible with democracy, as you and I would [e]xplain democracy, but practically, there is, in my judgment, no compatibility between them. According to Catholicity all power comes from above and descends from high to low; according to democracy, all power is infernal, is from below, and ascends from low to high. This is democracy in its practical sense, as politicians & the people do & will understand it. Catholicity & it are as mutually antagonistic as the spirit & the flesh, the Church and the World, Christ & Satan.^[31]

Conclusion:
"Heaps of Human Bones"

The incorporation of Romanism into authorial domains of narratological complexity lies behind the era's most significant Protestant fiction of Rome: Hawthorne's Marble Faun; or, The Romance of Monte Beni (1859). The story of two American artists and their adventures in Rome, Hawthorne's novel has been judged the most ambitious failure of his career. In this final Hawthornian romance, religious difference figures not only as ethnic and existential alienation but, more damaging, as narrative crisis. Vagrant, alternately too controlled and insufficiently so, The Marble Faun represents a well-known dispersal of Hawthorne's aesthetic powers in the face of cultural and psychological conflicts that a decade before had produced great works of fiction. A similar constellation of antebellum issues—a longing for the Old World, a resistant embrace of Victorian patriarchy, a fascination with sexual crime and confession—"work" for The Scarlet Letter and against The Marble Faun . As the strange underside to the earlier masterly romances in which narrative ambiguity and secrecy create powerfully confidential texts whose characters are weighty in their evanescence, this last completed romance of Rome is narrated not by an artful dodger but by a voice that cannot seem to get out of the way and confides only conventions, not original literary creations. Certainly there was no lack of effort on Hawthorne's part, as he confessed to William D. Ticknor: "If I have written anything well, it should be this Romance; for I have never thought or felt more deeply or taken more pains."^[1] Narrative inhibition over revealing the history of its characters and an often overtly expressed difficulty integrating the allegorical and the psychological, the pictorial and the dramatic make The Marble Faun a fascinating instance of a painstaking, ultimately failed, Protestant effort to comprehend Cathol-

icism. If Hawthorne's earlier use of romance aimed at a purposeful, even aggressive, defamiliarization, the same techniques operate in his last completed romance as unwitting de-realization.

In contemporary cultural criticism of The Marble Faun , a vital language of crisis, conflict, and conclusion replaces that of the novel's own artificial and inconclusive speech. Recent readings include as relevant narratives of cultural crisis those at work in antebellum fears of conspiracy, or in the formation of the antebellum literary marketplace, or in the maintenance of middle-class marriage.^[2] Hawthorne's conflicted expressions of emergent (and constricting) cultural forces of canon production or of the proliferating modes of gender necessary to middle-class companionate marriage are the significant features on which this new scholarship of repression focuses. The character of Hilda, high priestess of high art and exemplar of psychological and sexual sublimation, a character dubbed the Dove (Hawthorne's nickname for his wife, Sophia) illustrates the literary convergence of these differing modes of repression. Economic, political, and sexual coercion, in the logic of this recent cultural criticism, issues in the novel's own repressed aesthetic, one in which vitalized representations are excluded by psychologically (and culturally) motivated literary artifices that preclude the mimetic unreality of successful romance. The sheer unlifelikeness of Hilda's character (among others) ironically registers the authenticity of the extratextual cultural narratives at work behind her construction; if the novel is dead, there is a vital cultural life behind it that partially remedies its awkward impairments.

The narrative's fragmentations, although they are clearly disabled representations of various cultural and psychological forces of inhibition, have something further to tell us about how cultural and psychological problems can produce not only schism but also a stasis and artifice born of religious conflict. Differences in The Marble Faun , whether thematized in the hybrid figure of Donatello, or in the narratorial voices of tourism and fiction, or in the novel itself as writing, sculpture, and painting, are not in conflict so much as adjacent to one another, strenuously segregated from contact. In this novel, antebellum anxieties about sexuality and class produce a Roman romance that is hostile not only to the "flesh" but to itself as organic narrative. The contents of these extratextual cultural concerns spill over into the world of the text's own making, enough so that the narrative voice palpably resists creating an embodied text; as the narrator admits, his novel's "idea grows coarse, as we handle it, and hardens in our grasp" (10). Instead of constructing the illusion of autonomous story, Hawthorne's narrative voice recur-

rently intervenes to disrupt the mimetic relations it simultaneously struggles so hard to construct.

Hawthorne's inability to release his materials into an interactional space of representation, to allow them to become aesthetic , has arguably less to do with the various ideological issues mentioned than with the situation of those issues in Rome. In his preface to the novel, Hawthorne explains that he chose Italy as a "sort of poetic or fairy precinct, where actualities would not be so terribly insisted upon" (3), as a place, then, that would enable his romance to embody itself, as seventeenth-century Boston did for his making of The Scarlet Letter . But it turned out quite otherwise, for in selecting Italy, Hawthorne painfully tangled his own authorial practices with a competing, conspicuously religious, romance tradition: that of the antebellum Protestant encounter with Rome. Hawthorne selects this Protestant romance as the subject for his own romance techniques, his story recounting the stay of two young American (and very much Protestant) artists in Rome, their witness of a crime, the conventual captivity of the Protestant heroine, and finally their return home to marriage and homemaking.

But the recounting of this ultimately anti-Catholic romance unleashes a disabling narrative conflict. The Protestant romance tradition—one articulated by Elizabeth Seton as well as Maria Monk—interferes with Hawthorne's idiosyncratic romance techniques, those forged in his famous twelve-year seclusion from the world after college. For the Protestant romance of Rome endows the Eternal City, as we have seen, with an obdurate material excess, composed of heaps of ruins, images, and "ponderous remembrances" (6), a materiality resistant to translation, let alone to Hawthornian etherealization. Such a city precipitates an anorectic crisis in this American romance: after wandering the palaces, churches, and galleries of Rome, Hawthorne confessed in his notebooks to his "misery": to "see sights after such repletion is, to the mind, what it would be to the body to have dainties forced down the throat long after the appetite was satiated."^[3] The Eternal City's aggressive, finally unassimilable, materiality in The Marble Faun suggests that its difference is entirely other than that of Hester Prynne's Boston, where sparseness paradoxically encloses a richness of sexual, theological, and political conflict. Italy, it turns out, is not a "fairy precinct" but the opposite: a region of excessive representation, of gorgeous, decadent, or even morbid representations of the body that clog the romance's efforts to distill and rearrange them. By mid-century, the Protestant romance tradition imaged both Italian and American Catholicism as a region of seductive but finally contaminated embodiment, there to intrigue and capture an

ascetic Protestant spirituality with the tangible visual splendors of transubstantiation and of crucifixes inhabited by visually powerful bodies of Jesus—its various self-representations serving as embodiments that not only sensually engaged the Protestant tourist, as we have seen, but also rivaled the tourist who happened to be an author.

In Hawthorne's view, New England Protestantism was jointly compromised by the patriarchal repressions of Calvinism and the matriarchal coercions of Victorian Protestantism. Against both repressive parental alternatives, Hawthorne posited a postdenominational, overtly domestic language of "spirit" that dovetailed with his signature rhetoric of "romance" to create his "fairy precinct." This precinct is removed from the toxic embodiments of realism; but once situated in Rome (rather than, say, in Boston), these sexual, theological, and narrative vocabularies of "spirit" and (Hawthornian) "romance" form a style not of subversive de-realization but of orthodoxy, artifice, and literary inhibition. The narrative action, segregated from the place of its own telling by an anxiously intervening narrator, cannot etherealize its location into "fairy precinct" and so instead pictorializes it and hence excludes it from the narrative's verbal plane.

It is through this Protestant adventure with Romanism that Hawthorne images Rome as a monolithic corpse being slowly buried by time, as Capuchin cemeteries disgustingly crowded with monkish skeletons, as the sexualized interiors of confessionals and convents. His four tourist characters descend into the catacomb of St. Calixtus and "wandered by torch-light through a sort of dream, in which reminiscences of church-aisles and grimy cellars—and chiefly the latter—seemed to be broken into fragments and hopelessly intermingled" (24). These dismantled and commingled cellar images are not just those of emotional disturbance before embodiment but also those of a repulsed professional fascination with the representational practices of a foreign religion, whose foreignness depends on its uncanny familiarity as the parent religion to Protestantism. Hawthornian romance, the idiosyncratic construction of a symbolically saturated but always linear ideality that provocatively resists the confusions of "actuality," tries in The Marble Faun to subsume this engagement with Romanism in plot and scenic precinct. But Romanism's self-representational powers as theme continually threaten to overwhelm Hawthorne's own romance powers as technique. Hence our narrator, besieged by the Eternal City's rival authorial splendors, remorselessly deadens Rome—not just by pathologizing it as corpse but by artificializing it with didactic literary conventions that deny it membership in the suggestive representational space of New England romance.

Rome's materiality and provocative representations urge the narrative, not into an evasive and symbolically resonant asceticism (the logic of The Scarlet Letter ), but rather into an obsessive self-purification and self-regulation, obsessions registered in the recurrent appeal to melodramatic event, stylized dialogue, obtrusive narrative interventions, and overguided interpretation. To write a Hawthornian romance about a Protestant romance in Rome demands a narrative vigilance over this Roman subject matter, "rising foglike from the ancient depravity of Rome, and brooding over the dead and half-rotten city" (412); there can be no mixings and distillations with this "fog," no etherealizations, but rather only anxious segregations, not only of the teller from the tale but also of the action from the setting. The novel's recurrent musings on transformation and interchangeability between animate and represented beings signal precisely the absence of such transformative powers in the novel, formally speaking.

The Marble Faun , then, is a post-Calvinist seeing into, gazing onto, and internal speculation on its own romance of Roman Catholicism. Thus viewed as a competitive aesthetic, Rome cannot deepen the antebellum Protestant representational space of this novel, as it does in Middlemarch or The Portrait of a Lady , but instead crowds into and engulfs it. Overpoweringly "real," this Catholic background for the novel's action is therefore forced constantly back into the pictorial and didactic, then to the implausible, and finally into the disjoined, as the narrative itself is dismembered into "the fragments of a letter, which has been torn and scattered to the winds" (92-93). Assimilation of this Roman context can only go so far as a qualified Protestant appropriation of Catholic vocabulary, an appropriation still so risky that the narrator feels himself compelled to take it from his own character. Thus Kenyon cannot reflect on meeting a veiled penitent, a foreign religious figure, without suffering the Protestantizing intervention of his narrator: "It occurred to him that there is a sanctity (or, as we might rather term it, an inviolable etiquette) which prohibits the recognition of persons who choose to walk under the veil of penitence" (393). Thus the narrator enforces religious difference by renaming "sanctity" as "inviolable etiquette," cordoning off his Protestant American character from even this fleeting exploration of Catholic practice. These parenthetical interventions accumulate to damage the mimetic aura of Hawthornian romance; with them, Kenyon lapses into a fictional artifact that cannot compete with the projected charismatic lure of Catholic artifacts. Kenyon's overtly contrived quality bespeaks Hawthorne's efforts to rival Catholic representation with the purified representation of his romance tech-

niques. But having given over all the powers of embodiment to Rome, his only representational recourse is toward the dubious purity of convention and metafictional interruption. Kenyon and his friends thus wander, not through Rome but through the pages of the book.

Catholicism is further refused access to the temporal narration and the narrator's own belief in his narrative when cordoned off into gently mocked convention. Thus the narrator imagines Hilda in a convent where "Innocence might shriek in vain" (412). As the taboo site designed to make palpable Hilda's studiously pure Protestant sensibility, one that might otherwise have great difficulty knowing and sensing itself, the convent interior as a scene of captivity makes Protestant subjectivity real to itself: substantial yet pure. Structured by conventions of diseased or seductive embodiment, this unredeemed matter of convent and confessional enabled Protestant tourists, authors, ministers, and readers to reformulate their felt sense of emptiness, ghostliness, and weakness as energized, form-making purity. The Marble Faun , however, displays the novelistic difficulty of this enterprise.

The disturbance arises in incorporating this Protestant dynamic of self-substantiation as a convention, one whose acknowledged artifice will illuminate the originality and aesthetic power of Hawthornian romance. But even incorporated as convention, Hilda's confessional and convent captivities are engaged with a Catholicism still imagined as overpoweringly original and toxic. Rome, particularly the Rome of the catacombs and monastic burial grounds, verges beyond metaphor into the literal embodiment of decaying flesh and bones. It doesn't stand for, it is the region of creative mixture, of excessive materiality that Hawthornian romance must distill. Hence the characters are ghostlike, not saintlike, continually on the point, not of an aesthetic disciplining of matter, but of simply vanishing within it or falling into and finally under it. As Miriam explains to Hilda in reference to Curtius's chasm: "A footstep, a little heavier than ordinary, will serve; and we must step very daintily, not to break through the crust, at any moment. By-and-by, we inevitably sink!" (162). Miriam's perilous walk across the artificial surface of life, a covert critique of Victorian womanhood, offers a picture of dainty stepping that will fail, notwithstanding the vigilance, deference, and delicacy of her transit. Miriam's bodily self-control of her fleshly weight and anger not only dramatizes Victorian American sexuality but also mirrors the narrative's fearful clinging to its own surface, its reluctance to engage with its setting, its apprehensiveness at its impending engulfment.

Religious difference between the Protestant narrator, Kenyon, and Hilda, on the one hand, and the Catholicized regions of plot, of setting,

and of the hybrid characters Donatello and the Model, on the other, enforces the novel's unintegrated generic differences and finally propels the narrator's efforts to escape his own fiction, to seek respite from a narrative whose material elements are imaged as oppressive Catholic clutter. Thus in the Capuchin cemetery the narrator intrudes himself between his characters and their setting, forbidding them (and hence the reader) any unmediated contact with the narrative moment while voicing his own need to look from and outside his own fiction. "The cemetery of the Capuchins is no place to nourish celestial hopes; the soul sinks, forlorn and wretched, under all this burthen of dusty death. . . . Thank Heaven for its blue sky; it needs a long, upward gaze, to give us back our faith! Not here can we feel ourselves immortal, where the very altars, in these chapels of horrible consecration, are heaps of human bones!" (194).

The ideological motivations behind this antebellum Protestant romance of a bone-filled Catholicism force the narrator to overthematize the distinctions between his evanescent characters and their corporeal environment. Such didactic excess is meant to dramatize the vitality, agency, and substance of their spiritual purity in the face of Catholicism's multiple sensory representations. But this liberal, virtually postdenominational Protestantism feels acutely its own disabled incarnational powers, and thus it authors its romance of Rome in the hopes that it might vicariously identify with Rome's incarnational powers, not to possess but to deny them. Thus Hawthorne imagines a magically efficacious Catholicism in which confession is a bodily restorative: afterward, penitents rise, "unburthened, active, elastic, and incited by fresh appetite for the next ensuing sin" (412). Such an envious portrait of resilience, appetite, and unburdened selfhood automatically expels these Catholic worshipers from the "real" of prior Hawthornian romance, constituted opposingly of burden, torpor, and sinfulness.

Theologically and spiritually split in its narrative structure, The Marble Faun is in a religiously fearful relation with itself as narrative. Defensively positioned on the borders of his own story, the narrator maintains his telling of the Protestant romance by reducing Catholic Italy to a "land of picture." A tremendous not-seeing is necessary to keep Italy at this distance, to keep it there in such a way that it cannot participate in the action, repeatedly killed off to unleash the self-purifying mobility of Protestant subjectivity. But it is precisely that self-purifying mobility—a trait enabled by the religious romance tradition—that disrupts the authenticity of Hawthornian romance by advertising the "writtenness" of the characters. Their ideological verisimilitude, in other words, cancels their fictional persuasiveness.

Thus Hilda's liminal position between New England Protestantism and Italian Catholicism, her tending of the Virgin's shrine, her transit through confessional and convent, and her sympathetic copying of the Old Masters, does not signal the breakdown of religious antipathies, finally, but their continuance in the form of narrative crisis. It is not just that she purifies corrupt environments by passing through them without being passed through but that such touristic impenetrability is encoded in the artifice of Hawthorne's depiction of her character. And thus we have Kenyon stultify what little representational vitality remains to Hilda's disappearance by enclosing the episode within the weary platitudes of convent incarceration.

The novel's Catholicism, then, is a hybrid construct disjointedly composed of visually described artifacts and a series of unconvincingly narrated episodes. This discourse yokes a threatening, eroticized materiality—repulsive altars of bones and fat "leering" priests—with the unreal literary conventions of confessional and convent captivity, a hybrid vision fashioned from divisions internal to Hawthorne's own spirituality: his post-Calvinist sympathy for an anciently suppressed Catholic materiality, maternalism, and ceremony and his ethnic, regional, and sexual distaste for contemporary Italian (and Irish) Catholic practices and urban spaces. The religious anxieties that motivate Hawthorne's flattening of Rome into a touristic prose of pictorialized units and the conventions of confessional and convent captivity narrative disable the renowned powers of his voyeurist prose. In this final, failed, romance, the voyeur-narrator images Roman Catholicism as the secret interior to his fiction, but he wants not only to stay outside but to look outside. Thus he moves Hilda through Catholicism's secret spaces while resolutely thwarting his own engagement with these episodes. Hawthornian interiority gives way to the artifice of interiority at the conventional heart of anti-Catholic romance, a convention that functions aesthetically and politically to maintain a surface relation to the foreign faith. That surface relation prevents authentic contact, hence any genuinely dimensional representation of Protestant character in a Catholic setting, and as a result the narrative stays supremely on its own surface, both formally and ideologically. Its melodramatic imaging of Catholicism as illicit bodily interior that empowers a purified Protestant subjectivity—an ideological positioning that is shaped by the conventions of anti-Catholicism—forbids precisely what Hawthornian romance requires: a contact of character, setting, and narrator so commingled that it can risk the repeated evasions and concealments of narrative disembodiment.

The novel's generic crises of boundary between description and narration, between the visual space of artifacts and the verbal space of storytelling, between the obtrusive autobiographical voice of tourism and the ideally evasive voice of romance testify finally to a barely survived competition of religiously discordant powers of representation. Hawthornian romance ingests but cannot assimilate Italy as Romanism. For all his effort, Hawthorne's construction of a representational interior for The Marble Faun using the material of foreign religious interiorities led inescapably to the surface conventions and stasis of religious difference.

The double exhibition of what seems almost like two religions . . .
"Modern Saints, Catholic and Heretic,"
North American Review, 1853

The Catholic-Protestant debate produced a generically diverse literature, one preoccupied with issues of imitation, appropriation, and sometimes subversive doubling. ^[4] The uncanny sense of a suppressed identification between Catholic and Protestant implicit in Prescott's history of the sacerdotal Aztec and Parkman's of the Jesuit missionaries, like Hawthorne's disabled ruminations on Rome, underscores the complexity of masculine Protestant affinities to a Catholicism imagined as antidote to and rival of a (virile) purity harbored within. The writings of Mother Seton and Sophia Ripley testify in their turn to a repudiation of the felt emptiness and inhibitions of Protestantism for the intensities of a female expression conspicuously different from the constraints of domesticated sentiment. "By the heart, " wrote Mother Seton toward the end of her life, "we understand the most secret part of the Soul, Where joy, and sadness, fear, or desire, and whatever we call sentiments or affections is formed— then the love of God in the heart is that sweet attraction which draws us incessantly to him." ^[5] Seton's efforts to keep the affections of the heart connected to those of the soul remain a saintly eccentricity in nineteenth-century culture, which moved steadily toward their separation, a separation that in large part motivated Protestantism's entanglements with the sentimental attractions and menace of Romanism. ^[6]

In 1847 Brownson, in a rhetorical performance that was one of the age's most haunting expressions of the convert's investment in his secular double, appealed to Emerson to leave off Satan and embrace God:

One who was as proud as thyself, and who had wandered long in the paths thou art beating, and whose eye was hardly less

keen than thy own, and who knew by heart all thy mystic lore, and had as well as thou pored over the past and the present, as well as thou had asked

The fate of the man-child
The meaning of man,

and had asked the heavens and the earth, the living and the dead, and in his madness, hell itself, to answer him, and whose soul was not less susceptible to sweet harmonies than thy own, though his tones were harsh and his speech rude,—nay, one who knows all thy delusions and illusions, assures thee that thou shalt not in this be deceived, and thy confidence will not be misplaced or betrayed. ^[7]

Alternately imperious, visionary, and brotherly, Brownson's promise to Emerson verbalizes the multiple tensions of antebellum Catholic conversion. If Brownson had been initially deceived by Emerson, he would not deceive in turn; the convert's precarious management of his own disappointed love depends, finally, on exposing Emerson rather than himself as the vulnerable child who is afraid to extend his trust and who is fearful of adult betrayal. As a Christian who has found his true father, Brownson refrains from exercising his child's rage against the teacher whose Transcendentalist wisdom had betrayed his confidence. But as the liberated underling, he speaks a language of precarious charity as well. Directed to the ideologue of independent manliness, Brownson's invitation to Emerson is an instance of expertly tailored rhetorical irony, the competitive pressures of the exchange between the convert and his Emersonian "double" all the more poignant in light of Brownson's lifelong admiration for Emerson.

Inverting stereotypical anti-Catholic imagery of spellbinding priests and deluded worshipers, other Catholics asserted that it was Protestants, not themselves, who suffered from the mesmerist bonds of false belief. As Brownson had suggested to Emerson and as he advertised in The Spirit-Rapper , Protestants were victims of their own conspiratorial vision, which needlessly alienated them from Rome and rendered them pathetic (and dangerous) orphans. Another Catholic commented on the propagandizing of Protestants with lies about the Holy Church: "This is only, or mainly to be deplored on account of the poor victims who are duped and deluded; yet who, at the very moment . . . are betraying the symptoms of those who think themselves the witnesses of a delusion practiced upon others, and not the subjects of it themselves, as in fact they are." ^{[ 8]} In his influential indictment of Brownson's conversion, the Tran-

scendentalist James Freeman Clarke had himself resorted to a similar rhetoric of projection and doubling, arguing that "It is an old trick of proselytes to ascribe to the party they have left, all the blunders and errors which were peculiar to themselves. . . . [Brownson] believes himself to be describing the gyrations of Protestantism, when he has given us merely the natural history of his own intellectual instability." ^{[ 9]}

The mimetic dynamics of this Protestant quarrel with Catholicism are well illustrated not only in criticisms of conversions but also in short fiction like "My Confession," published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in 1855, a tale that captures the peculiar embarrassments of the rivalry. ^{[ 10]} The narrator recounts how as a child he accidentally murdered his best friend and thereafter endured a tormented inability to confess his crime, "the secret always . . . clogging on my tongue" (767). Like the deep ambivalence toward Elizabeth Seton, whom one writer elsewhere described as a "lovely woman, possessed of almost genuine and undoubted piety, yet whose mind, in many respects so clear and luminous, 'rayed out darkness' of the intensest quality wherever penance was in question," this Harper's story debates the legitimacy of bodily mortification and the possibility of expiation. ^{[ 11]} Although the narrator becomes a devoted doctor in hopes of atoning for his crime, he still wonders whether "deeds of reparation [could] dispel that darkness which a mere objectless punishment—a mere mental repentance—could not touch" (768). The answer is both yes and no; for through his medical skill, he heroically saves the life of a young woman to whom he is mysteriously drawn, and who, predictably enough, turns out to be his murdered friend's twin sister. Thus mythic themes of doubling, expiation, and sacrifice serve to articulate the incestuous nature of antebellum Protestant struggles with the Catholic rival.

Casting off his professional authority, the doctor kneels before his patient and confesses his childhood crime. Although quickly forgiven by the redemptive mercy of the female invalid, he carefully emphasizes that this is a Protestant, not a Catholic, scene: he is forgiven, but not absolved. He didactically insists that his crime "still shades my life; but as a warning, not as a curse—a mournful past, not a destroying present" (769). Such blunt distinctions record his simultaneous disavowal of the burden of a Protestant sin that can never be relieved by confession and repudiation of the Catholic doctrine of absolution. From his conflicted appropriation and dismissal of the confessional emerges a brave (although somewhat unconvincing) pre-Freudian resolution: "Work and love: by these may we win our pardon, and by these stand out again in the light" (769).

The pressure toward trivialization imposed by such simplified contrasts between "Catholic" penance and "Protestant" repentance at times resulted in overtly absurdist pieces. Four years after "My Confession," Harper's published "One of the Nunns," which again approached the alternative discourse of Catholicism through the theme of the double. ^[12] Undoubtedly influenced by Poe's "Pit and the Pendulum," this story unfolds in a context of improbable, even ludicrous, captivity: the narrator, a young journalist, describes how he climbed inside the huge bell of Notre Dame Cathedral in Montreal—one in a long line of American tourists fascinated by the immensities of a Catholic "interior." The reporter succeeds in his attempt to examine the inside of the bell but emerges slightly injured, and a girl whom he has been told is "one of the nuns" nurses him back to health. The mystery of her identity is comically developed. When sailing back to America, he unexpectedly encounters her and says that he thought her "a real nun; not only by name, but—." To his perplexed silence she coyly responds: "Oh, no Sir; I am nonesuch" (805). This confusion of names, like that of Maria Monk, mirrors the commingled taxonomies at the heart of Protestant Romanism. Ending on the hint of possible marriage between the two, this vaguely Shakespearean moment of mistaken identity reduces religious schism to punning farce, the image of the nun yielding finally to the culturally ascendant perception that behind nuns lurked the specter of "none-such" and nothingness.

Reviewing the Reverend Charles White's 1853 biography of Elizabeth Seton, the North American Review used the occasion to contrast female Catholic saintliness to its Protestant counterpart in the Unitarian Mary Lovell Ware. Widow of the Reverend Henry Ware, Mary Ware lived a life of charitable labors, suffering all the while a personal life full of illness and the tragic loss of children. Fascinated by the prodigious goodness of both Seton and Ware, the writer approvingly notes that both meet his anticontemplative specifications for pragmatic labor in the world. "The Saint is especially a worker. He is somebody who does something; not who fasts, or prays, or talks, or preaches merely, but who does what he finds to do for his fellow-creature." ^[13] The similarity between the two "saints" however, begins and ends there, for what ensues is an extended rumination on the factors that explain the extreme differences between the two women—differences that continually threaten to topple Seton from the "niche" provided for her by the conspicuously tolerant author. Having declared that "canonization is not, in our day, the privilege of popes and counsels" (149), the author labors to discredit the Catholic church that produced the excessively

penitential but still admirable Seton: "But the system, with its will-worship, its egotism under the transparent disguise of self-abasement, its passionateness, induced by a friction no less obvious than that by which we heat sealing-wax til it will attract to itself all the needle-points that are near enough—this is what strikes us painfully throughout the account of Mrs. Seton's life, her sufferings, her labors and her excellencies" (159). Intent on proving that each sect has its "own natural, inseparable genius" (165), the author then unreservedly celebrates the "cool" saintliness of Mary Ware.

Such predictable defenses of a temperate Protestantism yield in turn to an intriguing moment of authorial identification with both women when the author attempts to imagine their attitudes toward one another, independent of his masculine evaluation. Mrs. Seton, he theorizes, would have mourned for Mrs. Ware "all the more surely lost for those deluding virtues which would soothe the conscience that needed rather wounding; while Mrs. Ware, calm, reasonable, and self-governed, would look with a tender pity, scarcely consistent with respect, on the dramatic virtues and ecstatic devotions of the more tropical Saint" (165). What produced such a fascinating "double exhibition" (165)? Could such radical distinctions possibly emerge from a single Christianity? Or was Christianity itself producing progeny each with its own "natural, inseparable genius" (165) ? Faced with such riddles, the author resorts finally to the influence of family heredity, suggesting that if each woman had had the other's childhood environment, their characters would have been accordingly modified. The author speculates that Seton's ardent piety was a temperamental and environmental inheritance from her good but "violent" father, while Ware's father, shy, delicate, and literary, similarly imprinted himself on the reserved saintliness of his daughter. Thus does the author suggest, as Holmes argued in Elsie Venner , that Catholicism and Protestantism are finally derivative systems obeying the superior determinant of heredity. Paternal (not maternal) inheritance is the true influence and one that operates more powerfully than individual aspirations or institutionalized theologies, an argument that effectually displaces the transformative influence of supernatural grace and conversion with that of heritable bodily transmissions. Dispelling the threatening specter of two religions and their competing communities, such a biological view translates the issue of salvation or damnation into that of family heredity and nurture. Thus the two "saints" are doubles in the safe sense that all human beings are alike while the dread sense that their "double exhibition" might signify a profound metaphysical disagreement is gingerly laid aside.

The proximity between the physical and moral not only elucidates the frightened assessments of Catholic power but also suggests the impending redescription of all religion in terms originally dedicated to ostracizing Catholicism. Already in 1833, George Ripley (then a Unitarian minister) was using the dogma of transubstantiation to discuss what to him seemed the even more irrational notion of the Trinity. In his letter to a Trinitarian friend, The Doctrines of the Trinity and Transubstantiation Compared , Ripley argued that the Trinity had even less scriptural basis than transubstantiation. In his Unitarian view, the Trinity emerges as yet another Catholic idea, one surrounded by the appropriate rhetorical imagery of fictionality and rank fertility: "I should place it among those fictitious creatings, of a strange fancy, of which the dark ages were fertile." ^[14] The dilemma such a position could lead to surfaced even in Bishop William Whittingham's bewildered and indignant question about how to proceed if one indeed still felt the power of the spirit:

Must we be claimed as advocates for monkery with all its abominations, or for Jesuitism with its unspeakable iniquities, because we laud the "Catholic feelings" of self-renunciation, mortification, subjection of the individual will, and devotion to the life and work of Christ, that furnished the spark of life with which these monsters stalked abroad to conquest? ^[15]

Whittingham's somewhat rhetorical question suggests the developing cultural perception that religion in any form was beginning to participate not only in the pathologies of Catholicism but in those of the body as well.

Edward Beecher's evangelical attack on the evil organizational genius of the Roman church ironically anticipates this same fear that religion in any form is diseased. "For holy as religion is, all the bad passions gather about its perverted standard, and under the sanctions of its hallowed name, and by all the augmented motives of eternity, let loose the malignant passion of the desperately wicked heart." ^[16] Beecher's unease about the unsavory aspects of religion qua religion led many in postbellum America to deny religion any place whatever in developing taxonomies of what constituted the healthy human being. The "mental physiologist" William Carpenter argued, like Holmes in Elsie Venner , for a new unity of mind and body against the harmful dualisms of metaphysics, claiming in his Principles of Mental Physiology that "it is the high prerogative of Science to demonstrate the unity of the Power which is operating through the limitless extent and variety of the Uni-

verse, and to trace its continuity through the vast series of ages that have been occupied in its evolution." ^[17]

In this newly scientific controversy about the role of the body (not the spirit) in the evolutionary production of union, Catholicism's incarnational theology presented a unified discourse that still bore a strange resemblance to the new physiology, for it too was self-perpetuating, mysterious, yet accessible to rational exploration. But when the British "mental pathologist" Henry Maudsley (1835-1918) published his Body And Mind: An Inquiry into Their Connection And Mutual Influence, Specifically in Reference to Mental Disorders in an effort to dispel "the metaphysical haze which still hangs over the functions of the supreme centres," he spoke like Oliver Wendell Holmes against all religion in the terms of a transposed Calvinism. "Multitudes of human beings come into the world weighted with a destiny against which they have neither the will nor the power to contend; they are the step-children of Nature, and groan under the worst of all tyrannies—the tyranny of a bad organization." ^[18] As Elsie Venner's death makes clear, the physicalization of the doctrine of Original Sin was hardly a liberation, the transition from the confinements of theology to the captivity of the body still creating an unduly coercive community, one now of an uncontrollable heredity. In "The Anatomist's Hymn," Holmes bids readers look for God neither in the world outside nor in the traditional, if fearful, interior of the soul, but in the new, sacralized space of the body itself: "Look in upon thy wondrous frame,— / Eternal wisdom still the same!" In Holmes's anticreedal celebration, the body emerges as the new pastoral landscape, one whose automatic processes of self-purification remove it from its prior religious associations with corruption:

The smooth, soft air with pulse-like waves
Flows murmuring through its hidden caves
Whose streams of brightening purple rush
Fired with a new and livelier blush,
While all their burden of decay
The ebbing current steals away,
And red with Nature's flame they start
From the warm fountains of the heart. ^[19]

Although the biological heart is now the fountainhead for this new sacred, a sacred that is warm, pure, and effortlessly autonomous, it still is a "slave" to its task, its freedom from external authority consigning the person to the new constraints of gratitude for (and fear of) invisible processes of circulation. Like the woman at the hearth of the 1850s

domestic novel, Holmes's heart nourishes and ennobles but can never leave its task, its own captivity disguised beneath its cleansing powers. After marveling at the body's strong exterior that protects its inward flame, the poet goes on to portray this wondrous human as a chained beast, one ceremonialized with Homeric imagery, but captive nonetheless:

Its living marbles jointed strong
With glistening band and silvery thong,
And linked to reason's guiding reins
By myriad rings in trembling chains,
Each graven with the threaded zone
Which claims it as the master's own.

In this celebratory anatomy, we still ponder whether the flesh is a sacred mediation of spirit or a site for renewed captivity. Although the poet applauds the body's capacity to produce that quintessential Protestant product—white light—from the spectrum of deviant color, this very act of purification is still one of authoritarian control:

See how yon beam of seeming white
Is braided out of seven-hued light,
Yet in those lucid globes no ray
By any chance shall break astray

The body struggles here to assert its new primacy within the terms of an abandoned sacred and its attendant evils. Thus Holmes's celebration of the "cloven" brain is still mediated through an ancient Luciferian imagery. The brain's covert identification with the devil's proverbial cloven hoof transposes into another dubious image of an abandoned religious interiority—the "cell." The word's traditional associations with asylum or monastery chambers cling to Holmes's new conception of the cerebral landscape as an electrical field; the brain of "The Anatomist's Hymn" advertises biologized powers still structured according to a pictorial tradition reminiscent of Protestantism's vision of Catholicism: a light-infused but dim interior that encloses within it monastic intensities:

Think on that stormy world that dwells
Locked in its dim and clustering cells!
The lightening gleams of power it sheds
Along its slender glassy threads!

Holmes's use of what we recognize as imagery born of profound theological conflict in the decades prior to the Civil War points to the developing postbellum conviction that religion was in fact only an anal-

ogy to the more genuine and pressing concerns of human physiology and psychology. Melville's 1876 poem of religious quest, Clarel , in its depiction of a tour to the Holy Land, deposits its readers in a sterile Palestinian landscape that insists on the desiccation at the heart of theology. Melville's Holy Land is not so much putrescent, like antebellum descriptions of Rome that focus on the charnel aspects of Christendom, as utterly sterile, empty even of decomposing flesh. In the step beyond Rome to Palestine, the evidences for a true Christianity vanish in Clarel's bleached and bone-filled landscape. As an extended example of the postbellum Protestant movement toward and through a sacred past, Clarel's directionless pilgrimage embodies the anxiety of a theological search that has become futile before it has even begun. His exploration of the historical Jerusalem's barrenness suggests the weariness of his search, the terrible irrelevance of any incarnational aesthetic. If such futility is also the generating motive for Melville's postwar poetry, the repeated failure of the poem's characters to find resolution forming the very material of his plot, it offers an image of what would become the paradox of so much postbellum fiction, an ambiguous indebtedness to the faith it eschewed, the duress of literary creation a mimesis of the rigors of prayer but certainly not that activity itself. Maudsley's Victorian resignation is one Melville shared; it is a resignation to a postreligious cosmos—"The cage may be a larger or a smaller one," ventures Maudsley of his physiological vision, "but its bars are always there." ^[20] Such a sensibility is entirely different from that of antebellum Americans, for whom captivity, and even the bars of the cage, always promised to dissolve into the light with the resolution of theological dispute.