Questions of the Soul (1855)

AUTHOR: Hecker, Isaac Thomas

PUBLICATION: New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1855.
https://archive.org/details/questionsofsoul00heck/page/n5/mode/2up

Written more than a decade after his brief experience at Fruitland, this text is a religious tract with no reference to diet. Hecker does discuss Transcendentalism, particularly Ralph Waldo Emerson, and makes a passing reference to the water-cure.

The text is primarily a religious tract. But it quotes and discusses other writers relevant to our project and includes brief accounts of Fruitlands and Brook Farm. In these accounts, it also touches – however briefly – on questions of ethical veganism, which it connects to religious asceticism and the contemplative life.

KEYWORDS: food, slavery and Abolition, nationalism, religion and asceticism, Transcendentalism

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

Questions of the Soul is a defense of Catholicism against Protestantism and an inquiry into the destiny of humans and the purpose of human life. Notably, Hecker repeatedly quotes Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, along with such writers as Goethe, Schiller, Wordsworth, and Tennyson. As befits a Catholic convert, Hecker describes the human as “the crowning piece of God's workmanship” and “the high-priest and king of nature” (16, 261). This is obvious, Hecker maintains, from the many accounts of saints gently enticing all kinds of animals and plants to obey them (261-267). These saints “were the true friends of nature, her deliverers, her interpreters,—her kings and priests; and God, man, and nature were one in them, as in Adam in paradise before the curse” (267). However, “Nature is less than man. She cannot meet the inmost want of the soul; though in her bosom dwell truth, peace, and love” (26). This is why, although Hecker lauds him for “taking a stand upon man's simple nature” (278), Emerson's insistence on instinct ultimately “has no future” and “no aims but false ones” because, for Hecker, all life needs to be “directed to God” (31); and God is not to be found in nature, which is a projection of God.

Hecker is an Abolitionist for Christian reasons, decrying those who “make of their fellow-men, servants, drudges, slaves, and consider them unfit to sit with them at their tables, or mingle with them in their drawing-rooms” (40). Hecker then describes “the several efforts that men have made to realize [...] divine life” (45), noting the dietary restrictions and general asceticism practised by Pythagoras, the Essenes (a Jewish sect from 2nd-1st century BCE), the Therapeutae (another Jewish sect), and the customs and habits of Buddhism. At Pythagoras' Institution, for example, “flesh meat was severely prohibited” (47); the Essenes “were content with one meal a day, and that of bread and vegetables” (49); the Therapeutae, too, only ate one meal a day, after sundown, “composed of bread and salt, seasoned with hyssop” (50). Hecker concludes that “this class of persons is large, and larger here in the United States than in any other Protestant country,” even going so far as to assert that “this desire, after a more spiritual life, is one of the chief characteristics of the American people” (54, 55).

His accounts of Brook Farm and Fruitlands serve as examples and proof of his claim. He quotes extensively from William Henry Channing, Orestes Brownson, and Charles Lane's “The Consociate Family Life.” Hecker depicts these experiments in self-sustained, communal life as predominantly Christian, based on “the desire to realize the Christian Ideal” (Brownson qtd. in Hecker 61) and “to bring Eden once more upon this poor planet of ours” (77). Fruitlands, he remarks, was the more “ascetic, spiritual, and religious” of the two (73). Notably, in both cases, the fulfillment of this ideal included “no wine,” “no flesh” (qtd. in Hecker 63) and, in the case of Fruitlands, “[n]o animal substance” whatsoever (Alcott and Lane qtd. in Hecker 81). Hecker thus inscribes the ethical veg*nism of the reformist communities into the larger story of Christian contemplative life and asceticism: “What was attempted by those engaged in such movements as Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and other places of a similar character, the religious orders in the Catholic Church have always realized” (275).

Despite the failure of these specifically American experiments in spiritual life, Hecker urges his readers to follow their example. The model for such a life is that of Jesus Christ's simple, ascetic life of “the most sublime and heroic poverty” and “abstinence and self-denial” (239, 250). Notably, Hecker criticizes certain types of contemporary reform: “Jesus Christ knew better than any votaries of Fourierism the wants of man's nature, and the means, too, of bringing man to his true destiny” (251). The Trappists serve as a prime example of a devout, ascetic life, which, again, includes restrictions in the dietary regime:

Their fare consists principally of a thin soup made of peas, or a dish of beans seasoned with salt, and moistened with water. A pear for each, or a small quantity of some other fruit, forms their dessert. The Trappist knows neither meat, fish, butter, nor eggs. He rises every morning at two o'clock, on Sundays at one, and on great festivals at midnight; prayer and manual labor occupy all his hours until eight o'clock in the evening, the hour of retiring to rest. The Trappist eats less, and labors more, than the workmen of our cities, or the inhabitants of our country districts; and he does this voluntarily, for the love of God and his neighbor. What is this but saying that he is more a man than other men? (255-256)

Only by such “an act of perfect love” as exemplified in the Trappists' asceticism can any soul hope to “lose itself in God” (258). For Hecker, the Catholic faith is the only legitimate facilitator of this endeavor. “The Catholic Church alone,” he concludes, “is able to give unity to a people, composed of such conflicting elements as ours, and to form them into a great nation” (293).

Last updated on February 21st, 2024

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