The Mediatorial Life of Jesus
From Corvus Editions
(1842; 36 pages) - Orestes Brownson (1803-1876) ended as a conservative, a staunch defender of the Catholic Church, but not before making remarkable contributions in a variety of radical movements. He was among the key figures introducing New England intellectuals to the cutting edges of European thought in the 1840s, and was responsible for introducing American mutualist William Batchelder Greene to the writings of Pierre Leroux—an introduction which contributed directly and significantly to the emergence of an American mutualism. Indeed, Greene’s work might well have remained in the shadow of Brownson’s, had Brownson not abandoned the field, leaving others, such as Greene, William Henry Channing and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody to draw their own conclusions about Leroux’s “doctrine of humanity,” and forge an American version of radical theory in the revolutionary period around 1848.
As part of an attempt to recover the origins of the mutualist tradition, Corvus Editions is making the key radical writings of Orestes Brownson available again in pamphlet form. This edition of The Mediatorial Life of Jesus should be considered, as Brownson himself noted, a continuation of Brownson’s review of Leroux’s De l’Humanité, and an important part of the context for Greene’s The Doctrine of Life (both published separately.) Apart from this anarchist context, however, it should still be consider as representative of the cutting edge of radical Unitarianism in the early 1840s.
