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Philip F Gura, The Delight Makers: Anglo-American Metaphysical Religion and the Pursuit of Happiness, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 2, September 2024, Page 353, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae122
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In this wide-ranging book, from seventeenth-century Puritans virtually to the present, Catherine L. Albanese treats what she views as an alternative American religion based not on dogma or long-standing ritual, but rather on “desire” and “delight,” what she terms a “metaphysical” religion. The Delight Makers offers another way to understand what the “happiness” enshrined in the nation's founding documents means; for her that term is best understood as a “theology of abundance.” In this religion, “affirmations of the abundance of good—the delights of prosperity, exuberant health, and sexual bliss”—are basic, even as they are ever available to all people, not just to an identifiable elect (p. 5).
Albanese traces this metaphysical religion from European notions of vitalism, a belief in the interpenetration of matter and spirit, through a fascinating cast of characters who form the backbone on which she builds a case for the persistence of a correspondence between a cosmic or divine world and our own. First, we meet Cotton Mather, with his beliefs in the wonders of the invisible world and chronicler of remarkable providences in the worldly sphere. She then moves on to Jonathan Edwards, who recorded in his surroundings images or shadows of divine things, and promulgated prolonged spiritual revivals in which his parishioners took delight in an overpowering experience of the divine. This ecstatic pleasure inherent in the conversion experience remained central to the revivals in the Second Great Awakening and, Albanese claims, also birthed not only Methodist perfectionism but also the correspondential theory of Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (admittedly borrowed from Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg), and the Christian romanticism of Horace Bushnell, who argued that nature and the supernatural together made up the world we know.
