Life of Father Hecker Part 5

CHAPTER VI

INNER LIFE WHILE AT BROOK FARM

THE private journals from which we are about to quote so largely were an unhoped-for addition to the stock of materials available for Father Hecker's biography. Until after his death not even their existence, still less the nature of their contents, was suspected.

With the exception of two important doc.u.ments, one written while he was in Belgium, in obedience to the requirements of his director; the other in Rome, for the consideration of the four venerable religious whose advice he sought before founding his community, no records of his interior life have been discovered which are at all comparable in fulness to those made during the eighteen months which preceded his admission to the Church. In his years of health and strength he lived and worked for others; and in those weary ones of illness which followed them, he thought and wrote and suffered, but apparently without making any deliberate notes of his deeper personal experience.

On those of our readers whose acquaintance with Father Hecker dates, as our own does, from his intensely active and laborious prime, these revelations of the period when he was being pa.s.sively wrought upon and shaped for his work by the hand of G.o.d, may produce an effect not unlike that we have been conscious of in studying the greater ma.s.s from which our extracts are taken. They will, perhaps, be struck, in the first place, by the unexpectedly strong witness they bear to the wholly interior and mystical experience of the man. They testify, moreover, to the real and objective character of that leading which he was constrained to follow; and not only that. They do so in a way which furnishes a convincing reply to a very plausible doubt as to whether the narrow and uncongenial surroundings of his early life might not, by themselves, be sufficient to explain the discontent of a poetic and aspiring nature such as his.

He was at Brook Farm when that community was at its pleasantest. The shadow of care and the premonition of failure were, indeed, already looming up before those who bore the chief responsibilities of the undertaking, but the group by virtue of whose presence it became famous had hardly begun to dwindle. And besides those whose names have since become well known, there were others, young, gay, intelligent, and well bred, acquaintance and familiarity with whom were in many ways attractive to a susceptible youth like Isaac Hecker. What impression he made upon the circle he entered, how cordially he was received and held in high esteem, our readers already know. And if he gave pleasure, he received it also. At first the new circ.u.mstances were a little strange and embarra.s.sing to him.

After a fortnight, or thereabouts, we find him noting that he is "not one of their spirits. They say 'Mr. Hecker' in a tone they do not use in speaking to each other." But the strangeness soon wore off and he yielded to the influence of the place with a wholeness which would have been entire but for the stronger drawing which never let him free.

On this point, too, the witness of the journal is peremptory. So it is as to the unity and consistence of his interior experiences from first to last. Child, and boy, and man, there was always the same ardent sincerity of purpose in him, the same docility to the Voice that spoke within, the same att.i.tude toward "the life that now is"

which Mr. Curtis, in the letter given in the preceding chapter, has described, with so fine an insight, as one of reserve and observation. "He was the dove floating in the air, not yet finding the spot on which his foot might rest," writes Mr. Curtis of Isaac Hecker at that period of his youth when his surroundings and companions were for the first time, and very possibly for the last, wholly congenial to his natural inclinations. And again: "There was nothing ascetic or severe in him; but I have often thought since that his feeling was probably what he might have afterward described as a consciousness that he must be about his Father's business."

These words are significant testimony to the n.o.bility of the impression made on others by Father Hecker's personality in early manhood. Even if our only addition to such scanty knowledge of his life at Brook Farm as could be gathered from his own conversations in later years were this happily-touched sketch, it could hardly be more interesting than it is. But, fortunately, it does not stand alone.

Its fine recognition of the lofty purity of his nature is everywhere borne out by the unpremeditated and candid self-revelations of the diary. Their characteristic trait is everywhere aspiration--a sense of joy in elevation above the earthly, or a sense of depression because the earthly weighs him down. Then come eager glances of inquiry in every direction for the satisfaction of his aspirations, little by little narrowing down to the Catholic Church, wherein the dove of Mr. Curtis's image was finally to rest his foot for ever. And in all this he scarcely at all mentions a dread of the Divine wrath as a motive for his flight. It is not out of the city of destruction, but toward the celestial city that he goes. He is drawn by what he wants, not hounded by what he fears. Always there is the reaching out of a strong nature toward what it lacks--a material for its strength to work on, a craving for rational joy, coupled with an ever-increasing conviction that nature cannot give him such a boon.

Men who knew Father Hecker only in his royal maturity, sometimes cavilled at his words of emphatic faith in guileless nature; but they had only to know him a little better to learn his appreciation of the supernatural order, and his recognition of its absolute and exclusive competency to satisfy nature's highest aspirations. Reading these early journals, we have constantly recalled the later days when he so often, and sometimes continually, repeated, "Religion is a boon!" No one could know that better than he who had so deeply felt the want it satisfies.

The diary was begun in the middle of April, 1843, when Isaac had just returned to Brook Farm after a fortnight spent at home. It opens with a prayer for light and direction, which is its dedication to the uses not only of an earnest but a religious seeker. He addresses himself directly to G.o.d as Father, not making either appeal or reference to our Lord. But there is in it an invocation to those "that are in heaven to intercede and plead" for him, which recalls the fact, so often mentioned by him, that it was the teaching of the Catechism of the Council of Trent on the Communion of Saints which cleared away his final clouds and brought him directly to the Church. There is a note, too, among his later papers, in which, speaking of the phenomena of modern spiritualism, he says that the same longing for an a.s.surance of personal immortality which leads so many into that maze of mingled truth and error, had a great share in disposing his mind to accept the authoritative doctrine of the Church, which here as elsewhere answered fully the deepest longings of his soul.

We shall not attempt to follow the chronological order of the journal with exactness, but in making our extracts shall pursue the order of topics rather than of time. By the middle of April the question of the Church had presented itself so unmistakably to Isaac Hecker, as the necessary preliminary to further progress--to be settled in one way or another, either set definitely aside as unessential or else accepted as the adequate solution of man's problems, that his struggles for and against it recur with especial frequency. Faber has said somewhere that the Church is the touchstone of rational humanity, and that probably no adult pa.s.ses out of life without having once, at least, been brought squarely face to face with it and made to understand and shoulder the tremendous responsibility which its claims impose. There would be no need of a touchstone if there were no alloy in human nature, no feebleness in man's will, no darkness in his understanding. Were that the condition of humanity, the call to the supernatural order would be simply the summons to come up higher, its symbol a beacon torch upon the heights. As it is, the path may be mistaken. He whose feet have been set in it from birth by Christian training may wilfully forsake it. He whose heart is pure and whose aspirations n.o.ble, may be so surrounded by the mists of inherited error and misapprehension that the light of truth fails to penetrate them when it first dawns. The road is always strait which leads any son of Adam to supernal joy in conscious union with his Creator, even when his will is good and his desire unfeigned.

We shall find, therefore, that Isaac Hecker's struggles were many and painful before he fully recognized and attained the necessary means to the end he craved. They were characteristic also. He was looking for the satisfaction of his rational aspirations rather than for the solution of historical problems, although his mind was too clear not to see that the two are inextricably bound up together. But inasmuch as at the period of which we are writing, which was that of the Oxford Tracts, controversy turned mainly on questions of historical continuity and of Divine warrant in the external revelation of holy Scripture, it follows that he, and such as he, must have taken a lonely and unfrequented road towards the truth. Every time he looked at the Church he was greeted with the spectacle of unity and uniformity, of discipline and order. These are elements which always have been, and probably always will be, most attractive to the cla.s.ses called educated, to men seeking for external notes of truth, flying from disorder, fearful of rebellion. But to Isaac Hecker, the only external note which deeply attracted him was that of universal brotherhood. If he were to bow his knee with joy to Jesus Christ, it would be because all, in heaven and earth or h.e.l.l, should one day bend in union with him.

It takes an intimate knowledge of Catholicity to perceive the interior transformation of humanity by its supernatural aids. On the one hand, the influence of Isaac Hecker's Brook Farm surroundings was to persuade him to confide wholly in nature, which there was very nearly at its unaided best. On the other hand, the treasures of Catholicity for the inner life were hidden from him. Religion, in his conception of it--in the true conception of it--must be the binding of all things together, natural and supernatural. Hence we find him at times complaining that the Church is not sufficient for _his wants._ If it were not personal in its adaptation to him, it was little that it should be historical this, hierarchical that, or biblical the other. It must be his primarily, because he cannot live a rational and pure life without it. An ordinarily decorous life, if you will; free from l.u.s.t or pa.s.sion, and without gross unreason, but nevertheless tame, unprogressive, dry and unproductive, without any absolute certainty except that of the helplessness of man. Such a life seemed to him hardly more than a synonym for death. "The fact is," as he writes on a page now lying before us, "I want to live every moment. I want something positive, living, nourishing. I negative only by affirming."

The earliest entry in this diary has been already quoted in the first

CHAPTER of the present biography. On its second page occurs the following account of his impressions while in church on Easter Sunday:

"Monday, April 17, 1843.--Yesterday I went to the Catholic church at West Roxbury. It was Easter Sunday. The services were, to me, very impressively affecting. The altar-piece represented Christ's rising from the tomb, and this was the subject-matter of the priest's sermon. In the midst of it he turned and pointed to the painting, with a few touching words. All eyes followed his, which made his remarks doubly affecting. How inspiring it must be to the priest, when he is preaching, to see around him the Saviour, and the goodly company of martyrs, saints, and fathers! There may be objections to having paintings and sculptures in churches, but I confess that I never enter a place where there is either but I feel an awe, an invisible influence, which strikes me mute. I would sit in silence, covering my head. A sanctified atmosphere seems to fill the place and to penetrate my soul when I enter, as if I were in a holy temple.

'Thou standest in a holy place,' I would say. A loud word, a heavy footstep, makes me shudder, as if an infidel were desecrating the place. I stand speechless, in a magical atmosphere that wraps my whole being, scarcely daring to lift my eyes. A perfect stillness comes over my soul; it seems to be soaring on the bosom of clouds."

"Tuesday, April 18.--I confess that either the Church is not sufficient for my wants or I have not seen it in its glory. I hope it may be the latter. I do not want to say it, but I must own that it fills me no more. I contemplate it, I look at it, I comprehend it. It does not lead me to aspire. I feel that either it has nothing to give, or that what it has is not that for which my soul is aching. I know it can be said in reply that I cannot know what the Church has until I am in communion with it; that it satisfies natures greater than mine; that it is the true life of the world; that there is no true spirituality outside of it, and that before I can judge it rightly my life must be equal to it in purity and elevation. Much more might be said. But, after all, what is it? The Catholic shows up the Anglican; the Anglican retorts with an accusation of corruption, and even a want of purity; the Protestant, the Presbyterian, claim their own mission at the expense of consistency and good logic. . . .

"The whole fact, I suppose, is that if there is anything in Succession, Tradition, Infallibility, Church organism and form, it is in the Catholic Church, and our business will be to stop this controversy and call an Ec.u.menical Council which shall settle these matters according to the Bible, Tradition, and the light of the Church."

There is a touch of unconscious humor in the final paragraph which clamored for quotation. But it was plainly written in profound earnest.

"Thursday, April 20.--My soul is disquieted, my heart aches. . .

Tears flow from my eyes involuntarily. My soul is grieved--for what?

Yesterday, as I was praying, the thought flashed across my mind, Where is G.o.d? Is He not here? Why prayest thou as if He were at a great distance from thee? Think of it. Where canst thou place Him--in what locality? Is He not here in thy midst? Is His presence not nearest of all to thee? Oh, think of it! G.o.d is here. . . .

"Am I impious to say that the language used in Scripture for Christ's expresses the thoughts of my soul? Oh, could we but understand that the kingdom of heaven is always _at hand_ to the discerner, and that G.o.d calls upon all to 'Repent, for ye shall not all disappear until it shall open. This generation shall not pa.s.s away.'"

Then follows a page of philosophizing on time and eternity, immensity and s.p.a.ce, and "monads who may develop or fulfil their destiny in other worlds than this," a reminiscence, perhaps, of the lectures on such topics at which Mr. Curtis says Isaac used to "look in," hoping to "find an answer to his questions." Such speculations are a trait throughout the diary, though they are everywhere subordinate to the practical ends which dominantly interest him. A day or two later comes a pa.s.sage, already given in a preceding chapter, in reference to certain prophetic dreams which it has been given him to see realized. And at once this follows:

"April 24, Noon.--The Catholic Church alone seems to satisfy my wants, my faith, life, soul. These may be baseless fabrics, chimeras dire, or what you please. I may be laboring under a delusion. Yet my soul is Catholic, and that faith responds to my soul in its religious aspirations and its longings. I have not wished to make myself Catholic, but that answers on all sides to the wants of my soul. It is so rich, so full. One is in harmony all over--in unison with heaven, with the present, living in the natural body, and the past, who have changed. There is a solidarity between them through the Church. I do not feel controversial. My soul is filled."

From this point he speedily recedes. By the next day he is "lost almost in the flesh"; "fallen into an ident.i.ty with my body," and notes that for some time he has "done little in study, but feel that I have lived very much." What hinders him he supposes to be "contemplating any certain amount of study which I ought to accomplish--looking to it as an end. Why should I not be satisfied when I am living, growing? Did Christ and His apostles study languages? I have the life--is not that the end?"

"April 28.--What shall I say? Am I wrong? Should I submit and give myself up to that which does not engage my whole being? To me the Church is not the great object of life. I am now out of it in the common meaning. I am not subject to its ordinances. Is it not best for me to accept my own nature rather than attempt to mould it as though it were an object? Is not our own existence more than this existence in the world?

"I read this morning an extract from Heine upon Sch.e.l.ling which affected me more than anything I have read for six months. The Church, says Sch.e.l.ling in substance, was first Petrine, then Pauline, and must be love-embracing, John-like. Peter, Catholicism; Paul, Protestantism; John, what is to be. The statement struck me and responded to my own dim intuitions. Catholicism is solidarity; Protestantism is individuality. What we want, and are tending to, is what shall unite them both, as John's spirit does--and that in each individual. We want neither the authority of History nor of the Individual; neither Infallibility nor Reason by itself but both combined in Life. Neither Precedent nor Opinion, but Being--neither a written nor a preached Gospel, but a living one. . . .

"It is only through Christ we can see the love, goodness, and wisdom of G.o.d. He is to us what the telescope is to the astronomer, with this difference: He so exalts and purifies us that our subject becomes the power to see. The telescope is a medium through which the boundaries of our vision are enlarged, but it is pa.s.sive. Christ is an active Mediator who begets us if we will, and gives us power to see by becoming one with Him."

"May 3.--We all look upon this world as suits our moods, a.s.similating only such food as suits our dispositions--and no doubt there is sufficient variety to suit all. . . . Every personality individualizes the world to himself not subjectively but truly objectively. . . . Every individual ought, perhaps, to be satisfied with his own character. For it is an important truth of Fourier's that attractions are in proportion to destinies. Fear in proportion to hope, pain in proportion to pleasure, strength in proportion to destiny, etc. But it is mysterious that we know all this. 'Man has become as one of us.' We are all dead.

"Ah, mystic! dost thou show thyself in this shape? But now, being dead, shall we receive life and immortality (for I imagine immortality the solidarity of life--i.e., the union of the two lives, here and heaven) through Jesus Christ, the Son of the living G.o.d, and so lose 'the knowledge of good and evil.' For as in Adam all died, so shall ye all be made alive through Jesus Christ.' The effect of the fall was literally the knowledge of good and evil. G.o.d knows no evil, and when we become one with Him, through the Mediator, we shall regain our previous state. Knowledge is the effect of sin, and is perhaps destined to correct itself. Consciousness and knowledge go together. Spontaneity and life are one. Knowledge is no gain, for it gives nothing. I can only know what has been given through spontaneity. Spontaneity is unity, one; knowledge is division of being. If Adam had not been separated he would doubtless not have sinned. 'The woman that Thou gavest me said unto me, Eat, and I did eat.' Still, through the seed of the woman, which will be the union restored, is the serpent to be bruised."

"May 4.--The real effect of the theory of the Church is to isolate men from the outward world, withdraw them from its enjoyments, and make them live a life of sacrifice of the pa.s.sions. This is one statement. Another would be this: all these things can and should be enjoyed, but in a higher, purer, more exalted state of being than is the present ordinary condition of our minds. The only opposition to them arises when the soul becomes sensual, falls into their arms, and becomes lost to higher and more spiritual objects. . . .

"All is dark before me, impenetrable darkness. I appear to live in the centre. Nothing seems to take hold of my soul, or else it seeks nothing. Where it is I know not. I meet with no one else around me. I would that I could feel that some one lived in the same world that I now do. Something cloudy separates us. I cannot speak from my real being to others. There is no mutual recognition. When I speak, it is as if a burden acc.u.mulated round me. I long to throw it off, but I cannot utter my thoughts and feelings in their presence; if I do, they return to me unrecognized. Shall I ever meet with one the windows of whose soul will open simultaneously with mine?"

On the first Sunday of May Isaac went into Boston to hear Brownson preach, and a day or two later made the subjoined shrewd comments on the sermon in a letter to his mother:

"May 9, '43.--His intention is to preach the Catholic doctrine and administer the Sacraments. How many of them, I suppose, depends on circ.u.mstances. He justifies himself on the ground that he that is not against us is for us, and that in times of exigency, and in extraordinary cases, we may do what we could not be excused for doing otherwise. And he thinks by proclaiming the Catholic faith and repudiating the attempt to build up a Church, that in time the Protestant world will become Catholic in its dispositions, so that a unity will be made without submission or sacrifice. Under present circ.u.mstances it would be impossible, even if the Protestant churches should be willing to unite with the Catholic, that the Catholic could even supply priests for forty millions of Protestants, the Protestant priests being most of them married, etc.

"I confess the sermon was wholly unsatisfactory to me, un-catholic in its premises, and many of his arguments and facts chimerical and illusive. If you grant that the Roman Catholic Church is the true Church, there is, to my thought, no stopping-place short of its bosom. Or even if it is the nearest to the truth, you are under obligations to join it. How any one can believe in either one of those propositions, as 0. A. B. does, without becoming a Catholic in fact, I cannot conceive. This special pleading of exceptions, the necessity of the case, and improbable suppositions, springs more, I think, from the position of the individual than from the importance or truth of the arguments made use of. Therefore I think he will give up in time the ground upon which he now supports his course--not the object but his position. . . . I have bought a few Catholic books in Boston which treat upon the Anglican claims to Catholicity, and I think I can say, so far, I never shall join a Protestant Church--while I am not positive on the positive side, nor even in any way as yet decided."

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CHAPTER VII

STRUGGLES

THE citations thus far made from Isaac Hecker's youthful diary, although penned at Brook Farm, bear few traces of that fact. They might have been written in a desert for all evidence they give of any special influence produced upon him by personal contact with others.

It is not until the middle of May, 1843, that he begins to make any reference to his actual surroundings.

Before following him into these more intimate self-confidences, and especially before giving in his own words an account of that peculiar occurrence which so permanently affected his future, some preliminary remarks seem necessary.

It has been said already, in an earlier chapter of this biography, that but for some special intervention of Divine Providence, it is more than probable that Isaac Hecker would have led the ordinary life of men in the world, continuing, indeed, to cherish a high ideal of the duties of the citizen of a free country, but pursuing it along well-beaten ways. There is no doubt that, unless some such event as he has narrated, or some influence equivalent to it in effect, had supernaturally drawn him away, he would of his own volition have sought what he was repeatedly advised to seek by his most attached friends, a congenial union in wedlock. He was naturally susceptible, and his attachments were not only firm, but often seemed obstinate.

Of celibacy he had, up to this time, no other idea than such as the common run of non-Catholics possess. At home, indeed, when afterwards pressed to seek a wife, he had answered, truly enough, though holding fast to his secret, that he "had no thought of marrying and felt an aversion to company for such an end." And again he writes to his mother, anxious and troubled for his future, that the circle which surrounded him in New York oppressed and contracted him, and abridged his liberty. There was no one in it who "increased his life."

But at Brook Farm he met some one, as is revealed by his diary and correspondence, who deeply attracted him, and who might have attracted him as far as marriage had he not already received the Holy Spirit's prevenient grace of virginity. That is to say, he found "a being," to use his impersonal term, whose name and ident.i.ty he is careful to veil, awkwardly enough at times with misleading p.r.o.nouns, whose charm was so great as to win from him what would have been, in his normal state, a marital affection. But he was no longer normal.

Although still beyond the visible pale of that garden of elect souls, G.o.d's holy Church, he was already transformed by the quickening grace which "reaches from end to end mightily and orders all things sweetly." Our next quotations afford explicit proof on this point:

"Tuesday, May 16.--Life appears to be a perpetual struggle between the heavenly and the worldly.

"Here at Brook Farm I become acquainted with persons who have moved in a higher rank in society than I--persons of good education and fine talents; all of which has an improving influence on me. And I meet with those to whom I can speak, and feel that, to a great degree, I am understood and responded to. In New York I am alone in the midst of people. I am not in any internal sense _en rapport_ with them.