The Legacy of French Visitors to America - Essay Example

Philosophy The Legacy of French Visitors to America Matthew in his book about the intellects Tocqueville possessed, discusses some of the key observations Tocqueville observed at the time he entered America. He had read about the creation of this country and American regime and their religious believes. But as soon as he came here he saw a changed scenario. The industrial revolution had bought changes in the country affecting the mind of each individual. Things had changed from mysticism to materialism.

According to Alexis, people had changed themselves unconsciously. (Mancini, Matthew J, 2006) Alexis de Tocqueville, a Roman catholic of French origin, belonging to a royal family, came to the US at the age of twenty six. With his quick observation he soon recognized the spiritual differences between Europe and the US. He arrived at the New York City and clearly noticed the divergence relative to his French homeland. As Tocqueville noticed, US neither had cathedral domes nor any of the churches had bell towers; hence it gave him an impression of being in a village.

The essentials symbols of Christianity were missing yet he saw that American Catholics were highly devoted and spiritual people. Tocqueville reached US on May 1831 and began exploring new advancement for political and religious life in the initial stages of democracy. He first reflected his art of thinking on 1835, when his first insight about spirituality and democracy got published. In the subsequent pages we will scrutinize Tocqueville immense work and democracy in US and note the significant alteration in religious life that Tocqueville experimented under way in premature nineteenth century United States of America and which still bears great weightage to this day.

When Tocqueville entered America, the only thing he knew about the religious life of people living here was that American majority practiced Christian faith. He was now to examine some critical questions regarding their faith those were: how the lives of people were conformed to their religious doctrines? And how the religious teachings entered their souls? Only later than his thorough encounter with spiritual life in the new independent world did Tocqueville start in on to draw endings about spirituality on this area of the Atlantic region.

Soon Tocqueville realized that America had made a great leap from the rest of the world and amongst the history of the Western Civilization. America was a place where democracy ruled, and due to it the people only came closer for their benefits. At this time Tocqueville was to teach them the aged old lessons of faith to scrutinize the evaluating democracy. He was of the idea that the US citizens should focus their minds to prepare for the life after death, for a place they were going to live forever.

Americans need not to chase the worldly desires every day. From the words of faith, he wanted Americans to shift their thinking from materialistic world to the faith of “distant objects” and reform them as were in the “ages of faith”. Apart from the fact that the Americans were moving away from the path of faith, they were also parting away from the aristocratic age. The noble ones were not considered anymore and the legacy of the “white man” was abolishing. Tocqueville was an aristocrat and a crusader by nature, and this shift was bothering him.

He saw that the ethics and spirituality of Christianity was going to suffer the most with the developments of the Democratic America. According to Tocqueville, aristocratic rule was both the redeemer and conveyor of religious blessings and spiritual realities. He knew that the Americans wanted to play apart from the European traditions and would likely encourage the new democratic order. From the human perspective we know that the traditions never dies very easily, but here in America the society was developing so rapidly that it was feared that the historical traditions would be very soon lost from the personal life.

Once he said: "In the middle of the continual progress that agitates a democratic community, the knots that unite one generation to any other are stress-free or broken; individuals there lose every trace of the ideas of their forbearers or take no concern about them" With the shift from religious traditions, Tocqueville also observed that the American thinking was not moving parallel with the supernatural believes. This shift was inducing some critical points among each individual, they were losing the way to judge them and eventually leading an aimless life.

The intellect of the American community, Tocqueville experienced, was surely not seized captive by heavenly revelations from on high, but in its place the new "democratic age" signed a entire new problem: holiness without positioned divine revelation or visionary revelation. References: Mancini, Matthew J. Alexis De Tocqueville and American Intellectuals: From His Times to Ours. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Print.