Aspirations of Nature (1857)

AUTHOR: Hecker, Isaac Thomas

PUBLICATION: New York: James B. Kirker, 1857.
https://archive.org/details/a587173700heckuoft

Written more than a decade after his experience at Fruitlands, this text is a religious tract that makes no explicit reference to diet. However, Hecker provides valuable context for the intersection of the ethical vegan values practised at Fruitlands and the ideas that motivate Transcendentalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in particular, is discussed and Hecker makes a passing reference to the water-cure.

KEYWORDS: nature, spirituality and religion, Transcendentalism

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

Aspirations of Nature addresses those keen on “obtaining the solutions of the dark enigmas of life” without “gainsay[ing] the dictates of Reason” (8, 7). To do so, the book attempts to delineate the relation of humans to nature. While in childhood we are all enchanted by nature, Hecker maintains, this enchantment gives way to alienation in adulthood. But this alienation is positive, because it comes with “new-born capacities […] which reach beyond earth's boundaries”:

All great minds have recognized this fact: that man has capacities to conceive sublime truths; powerful aspirations, noble presentiments which carry the soul beyond the region of sense, and lead it on to that brighter world where dwells the First True, the First Good, the First Fair the eternal type of all perfections, and aim of all our strivings (12).

Neither philosophy nor literature can access this world, only religion and, fortunately, “[t]here is a large class of men who […] feel deeply their religious necessities.” “We have it from authentic sources of information,” he even claims, “that this class of minds compose more than one-half of our population who have arrived at the age of manhood” (25). America is also exceptional in this sense. “The new world promises a new civilization” (45), as Hecker remarks. But as of yet, there is no religion that would adequately meet these necessities. For Hecker, it is imperative to acknowledge that the exercise of reason demands religion; religion is the necessary result of the proper use of our faculties. Thus, true religion is completely rational. Anything else is false religion. America, “the country of the Future” (48), is ripe for the institution of such true religion, for its “youthful people are ready to offer their hearts to the embraces of the Religion of heaven, as the soil of our country presents its virginal bosom to our countrymen for its cultivation” (46).

In his critical account of unsatisfactory systems of belief -- the “religious beliefs of Arabia, Gaul, the British Isles, or those of the savages of America or Australia” as well as “the writings of the Persian, Chinese, and Indian sages and philosophers” (127) and Protestant Christianity –  he praises recent homegrown attempts at “exalting the dignity of man” (177), including those of Ralph Waldo Emerson notwithstanding Emerson's contribution to “the circulation of the abominable theories of the German Pantheistical atheists” (179). Having extensively quoted from Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity (1841), which reduces “baptismal water” to “real water” and the bread and wine of the Eucharist to mere satisfaction of hunger and uplifting of one's mood, Hecker arrives at the following scathing diagnosis: “Practical Christianity, according to the latest developments of Protestantism, consists in eating and drinking, and bathing. And the best representation of the Protestant Church in the Nineteenth Century which we can imagine, is a cold-water-cure establishment with a tavern attached” (191).

It is at this point that Hecker finally turns to the discussion of the singular benefits and superiority of Catholicism. Returning to the three fundamental problems of reason, free will, and human nature at large, Hecker purports to show how only Catholicism provides “sincere and satisfactory answers” (193). For the Catholic, the human “is good in possession of all his faculties, which retain all their natural power to act in accordance with the great end of his being” (227-228). Catholicism “unites divine authority with perfect free-inquiry” (305) where Protestantism, in contrast, “is the exaggeration of the authority of private judgment to the entire exclusion of all other authorities” (307). Given that humans are sensual beings, religion must also “captivate [humans'] senses and imagination” (315). Catholicism offers lived fellowship and communion with spirits, saints, angels, and the religious splendor of its sacred places, relics, and monuments. Thus, “[t]he only road open for us to be Christians, consistent with Reason, with moral rectitude, and with a proper respect for ourselves, is to become Catholic” (259).

 

Last updated on February 26th, 2024

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