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American Transcendentalism
American
Transcendentalism
By Ian Frederick Finseth, Ph.D.
Excerpted from "Liquid
Fire Within Me": Language, Self and Society in Transcendentalism
and Early Evangelicalism, 1820-1860, - M.A. Thesis, 1995.
Related Sites...
American
Transcendentalism Web - Ann Woodlief at VCU
American
Transcendentalism: Thoughts and Links - by Ernie Seckinger
Early
19th Century American Transcendentalism: A Brief Introduction - Paul
Reuben
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THE EMERGENCE OF
the Transcendentalists as an identifiable movement took place during the
late 1820s and 1830s, but the roots of their religious philosophy extended
much farther back into American religious history. Transcendentalism and
evangelical Protestantism followed separate evolutionary branches from
American Puritanism, taking as their common ancestor the Calvinism of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
[2]
Transcendentalism cannot be properly understood outside the context of
Unitarianism, the dominant religion in Boston during the early nineteenth
century. Unitarianism had developed during the late eighteenth century
as a branch of the liberal wing of Christianity, which had separated from
Orthodox Christianity during the First Great Awakening of the 1740s. That
Awakening, along with its successor, revolved around the questions of divine
election and original sin, and saw a brief period of revivalism. The Liberals
tended to reject both the persistent Orthodox belief in inherent depravity
and the emotionalism of the revivalists; on one side stood dogma, on the
other stood pernicious "enthusiasm." The Liberals, in a kind of amalgamation
of Enlightenment principles with American Christianity, began to stress
the value of intellectual reason as the path to divine wisdom. The Unitarians
descended as the Boston contingent of this tradition, while making their
own unique theological contribution in rejecting the doctrine of divine
trinity.
[3]
Unitarians placed a premium on stability, harmony, rational thought, progressive
morality, classical learning, and other hallmarks of Enlightenment Christianity.
Instead of the dogma of Calvinism intended to compel obedience, the Unitarians
offered a philosophy stressing the importance of voluntary ethical conduct
and the ability of the intellect to discern what constituted ethical conduct.
Theirs was a "natural theology" in which the individual could, through
empirical investigation or the exercise of reason, discover the ordered
and benevolent nature of the universe and of God's laws. Divine "revelation,"
which took its highest form in the Bible, was an external event or process
that would confirm the findings of reason. William Ellery Channing, in
his landmark sermon "Unitarian Christianity" (1819) sounded the characteristic
theme of optimistic rationality:
Our leading principle in interpreting Scripture is this, that
the Bible is a book written for men, in the language of men, and that its
meaning is to be sought in the same manner as that of other books.... With
these views of the Bible, we feel it our bounden duty to exercise our reason
upon it perpetually, to compare, to infer, to look beyond the letter to
the spirit, to seek in the nature of the subject, and the aim of the writer,
his true meaning; and, in general, to make use of what is known, for explaining
what is difficult, and for discovering new truths.(1)
[4]
The intellectual marrow of Unitarianism had its counterbalance in a strain
of sentimentalism: while the rational mind could light the way, the emotions
provided the drive to translate ethical knowledge into ethical conduct.
Still, the Unitarians deplored the kind of excessive emotionalism that
took place at revivals, regarding it as a temporary burst of religious
feeling that would soon dissipate. Since they conceived of revelation as
an external favor granted by God to assure the mind of its spiritual progress,
they doubted that inner "revelation" without prior conscious effort really
represented a spiritual transformation.
[5]
Nonetheless, even in New England Evangelical Protestants were making many
converts through their revivalist activities, especially in the 1820s and
1830s. The accelerating diversification of Boston increased the number
of denominations that could compete for the loyalties of the population,
even as urbanization and industrialization pushed many Bostonians in a
secular direction. In an effort to become more relevant, and to instill
their values of sobriety and order in a modernizing city, the Unitarians
themselves adopted certain evangelical techniques. Through founding and
participating in missionary and benevolent societies, they sought both
to spread the Unitarian message and to bind people together in an increasingly
fragmented social climate. Ezra Stiles Gannett, for example, a minister
at the Federal Street Church, supplemented his regular pastoral duties
with membership in the Colonization, Peace and Temperance societies, while
Henry Ware Jr. helped found the Boston Philanthropic Society.
Simultaneously, Unitarians tried to appeal more to the heart in their sermons,
a trend reflected in the new Harvard professorship of Pastoral Theology
and Pulpit Eloquence. Such Unitarian preachers as Joseph Stevens Buckminster
and Edward Everett "set the model for a minister who could be literate
rather than pedantic, who could quote poetry rather than eschatology, who
could be a stylist and scorn controversy."(2)
But they came nowhere near the emotionalism of the rural Evangelical Protestants.
Unitarianism was a religion for upright, respectable, wealthy Boston citizens,
not for the rough jostle of the streets or the backwoods. The liberalism
Unitarians displayed in their embrace of Enlightenment philosophy was stabilized
by a solid conservatism they retained in matters of social conduct and
status.
[6]
During the first decade of the nineteenth century, Unitarians effectively
captured Harvard with the election of Rev. Henry Ware Sr. as Hollis Professor
of Divinity in 1805 and of Rev. John Thorton Kirkland as President in 1810.
It was at Harvard that most of the younger generation of Transcendentalists
received their education, and it was here that their rebellion against
Unitarianism began. It would be misleading, however, to say that Transcendentalism
entailed a rejection of Unitarianism; rather, it evolved almost as an organic
consequence of its parent religion. By opening the door wide to the exercise
of the intellect and free conscience, and encouraging the individual in
his quest for divine meaning, Unitarians had unwittingly sowed the seeds
of the Transcendentalist "revolt."
[7]
The Transcendentalists felt that something was lacking in Unitarianism.
Sobriety, mildness and calm rationalism failed to satisfy that side of
the Transcendentalists which yearned for a more intense spiritual experience.
The source of the discontent that prompted Emerson to renounce the "corpse-cold
Unitarianism of Brattle Street and Harvard College" is suggested by the
bland job description that Harvard issued for the new Professor of Natural
Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity. The professor's duties were
to
... demonstrate the existence of a Deity or first cause, to
prove and illustrate his essential attributes, both natural and moral;
to evince and explain his providence and government, together with the
doctrine of a future state of rewards and punishments; also to deduce and
enforce the obligations which man is under to his Maker .... together with
the most important duties of social life, resulting from the several relations
which men mutually bear to each other; .... interspersing the whole with
remarks, showing the coincidence between the doctrines of revelation and
the dictates of reason in these important points; and lastly, notwithstanding
this coincidence, to state the absolute necessity and vast utility of a
divine revelation.(3)
[8]
Perry Miller has argued persuasively that the Transcendentalists still
retained in their characters certain vestiges of New England Puritanism,
and that in their reaction against the "pale negations" of Unitarianism,
they tapped into the grittier pietistic side of Calvinism in which New
England culture had been steeped. The Calvinists, after all, conceived
of their religion in part as man's quest to discover his place in the divine
scheme and the possibility of spiritual regeneration, and though their
view of humanity was pessimistic to a high degree, their pietism could
give rise to such early, heretical expressions of inner spirituality as
those of the Quakers and Anne Hutchinson. Miller saw that the Unitarians
acted as crucial intermediaries between the Calvinists and the Transcendentalists
by abandoning the notion of original sin and human imperfectability:
The ecstasy and the vision which Calvinists knew only in the
moment of vocation, the passing of which left them agonizingly aware of
depravity and sin, could become the permanent joy of those who had put
aside the conception of depravity, and the moments between could be filled
no longer with self-accusation but with praise and wonder.(4)
[9]
For the Transcendentalists, then, the critical realization, or conviction,
was that finding God depended on neither orthodox creedalism nor the Unitarians'
sensible exercise of virtue, but on one's inner striving toward spiritual
communion with the divine spirit. From this wellspring of belief would
flow all the rest of their religious philosophy.
[10]
Transcendentalism was not a purely native movement, however. The Transcendentalists
received inspiration from overseas in the form of English and German romanticism,
particularly the literature of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Goethe, and in
the post-Kantian idealism of Thomas Carlyle and Victor Cousin. Under the
influence of these writers (which was not a determinative influence, but
rather an introduction to the cutting edge of Continental philosophy),
the Transcendentalists developed their ideas of human "Reason," or what
we today would call intuition. For the Transcendentalists, as for the Romantics,
subjective intuition was at least as reliable a source of truth as empirical
investigation, which underlay both deism and the natural theology of the
Unitarians. Kant had written skeptically of the ability of scientific methods
to discover the true nature of the universe; now the rebels at Harvard
college (the very institution which had exposed them to such modern notions!)
would turn the ammunition against their elders. In an 1833 article in The
Christian Examiner entitled simply "Coleridge," Frederic Henry Hedge, once
professor of logic at Harvard and now minister in West Cambridge, explained
and defended the Romantic/Kantian philosophy, positing a correspondence
between internal human reality and external spiritual reality. He wrote:
The method [of Kantian philosophy] is synthetical, proceeding
from a given point, the lowest that can be found in our consciousness,
and deducing from that point 'the whole world of intelligences, with the
whole system of their representations' .... The last step in the process,
the keystone of the fabric, is the deduction of time, space, and variety,
or, in other words (as time, space, and variety include the elements of
all empiric knowledge), the establishing of a coincidence between the facts
of ordinary experience and those which we have discovered within ourselves
.... (5)
[11]
Although written in a highly intellectual style, as many of the Transcendentalist
tracts were, Hedge's argument was typical of the movement's philosophical
emphasis on non-rational, intuitive feeling. The role of the Continental
Romantics in this regard was to provide the sort of intellectual validation
we may suppose a fledgling movement of comparative youngsters would want
in their rebellion against the Harvard establishment.
[12]
For Transcendentalism was entering theological realms which struck the
elder generation of Unitarians as heretical apostasy or, at the very least,
as ingratitude. The immediate controversy surrounded the question of miracles,
or whether God communicated his existence to humanity through miracles
as performed by Jesus Christ. The Transcendentalists thought, and declared,
that this position alienated humanity from divinity. Emerson
leveled the charge forcefully in his scandalous Divinity School Address
(1838), asserting that "the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches,
gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing
clover and the falling rain."(6) The same year, in
a bold critique of Harvard professor Andrews Norton's magnum opus The
Evidence of the Genuineness of the Four Gospels, Orestes Brownson identified
what he regarded as the odious implications of the Unitarian position:
"there is no revelation made from God to the human soul; we can know nothing
of religion but what is taught us from abroad, by an individual raised
up and specially endowed with wisdom from on high to be our instructor."(7)
For Brownson and the other Transcendentalists, God displayed his presence
in every aspect of the natural world, not just at isolated times. In a
sharp rhetorical move, Brownson proceeded to identify the spirituality
of the Transcendentalists with liberty and democracy:
...truth lights her torch in the inner temple of every man's
soul, whether patrician or plebeian, a shepherd or a philosopher, a Croesus
or a beggar. It is only on the reality of this inner light, and on the
fact, that it is universal, in all men, and in every man, that you can
found a democracy, which shall have a firm basis, and which shall be able
to survive the storms of human passions.(8)
[13]
To Norton, such a rejection of the existence of divine miracles, and the
assertion of an intuitive communion with God, amounted to a rejection of
Christianity itself. In his reply to the Transcendentalists, "A Discourse
on the Latest Form of Infidelity," Norton wrote that their position "strikes
at root of faith in Christianity," and he reiterated the "orthodox" Unitarian
belief that inner revelation was inherently unreliable and a potential
lure away from the truths of religion.
The religion of which they speak, therefore, exists merely,
if it exists at all, in undefined and unintelligible feelings, having reference
perhaps to certain imaginations, the result of impressions communicated
in childhood, or produced by the visible signs of religious belief existing
around us, or awakened by the beautiful and magnificent spectacles which
nature presents.(9)
Despite its dismissive intent and tone, Norton's blast against Transcendentalism
is an excellent recapitulation of their religious philosophy. The crucial
difference consisted in the respect accorded to "undefined and unintelligible
feelings."
[14]
The miracles controversy revealed how far removed the Harvard rebels had
grown from their theological upbringing. It opened a window onto the fundamental
dispute between the Transcendentalists and the Unitarians, which centered
around the relationship between God, nature and humanity. The heresy of
the Transcendentalists (for which the early Puritans had hanged people)
was to countenance mysticism and pantheism, or the beliefs in the potential
of the human mind to commune with God and in a God who is present in all
of nature, rather than unequivocally distinct from it. Nevertheless, the
Transcendentalists continued to think of themselves as Christians and to
articulate their philosophy within a Christian theological framework, although
some eventually moved past Christianity (as Emerson did in evolving his
idea of an "oversoul") or abandoned organized religion altogether.
[15]
Transcendentalists believed in a monistic universe, or one in which God
is immanent in nature. The creation is an emanation of the creator; although
a distinct entity, God is permanently and directly present in all things.
Spirit and matter are perfectly fused, or "interpenetrate," and differ
not in essence but in degree. In such a pantheistic world, the objects
of nature, including people, are all equally divine (hence Transcendentalism's
preoccupation with the details of nature, which seemed to encapsulate divine
glory in microcosmic form). In a pantheistic and mystical world, one can
experience direct contact with the divinity, then, during a walk in the
woods, for instance, or through introspective contemplation. Similarly,
one does not need to attribute the events of the natural world to "removed"
spiritual causes because there is no such separation; all events are both
material and spiritual; a miracle is indeed "one with the blowing clover
and the falling rain."
[16]
The Transcendentalists can be exasperatingly vague in their prescriptions
for spiritual transformation, a vagueness which derives principally from
their distrust of all forms of ritual and inherited religious forms. The
transcendent individual is often a solitary figure, contemplating his soul
(and by analogy, the soul of all humanity), and contemplating other souls
through the reading of serious literature. But the central recurring theme
that emerges is a return to nature, where the artifice and depravity of
society cannot reach. Thus Thoreau leaves Concord and heads for Walden
Pond to explore the great truths of the natural world. Thus Jones Very,
in his poem "The Silent," distinguishes between the sounds that strike
the ear and those that strike the soul when one walks in the woods:
'Tis all unheard; that Silent Voice,
Whose goings forth unknown to all,
Bids bending reed and bird rejoice,
And fills with music Nature's hall.
And in the speechless human heart
It speaks, where'er man's feet have trod;
Beyond the lips' deceitful art,
To tell of Him, the Unseen God.(10)
[17]
Emerson, in "Nature," tries to capture the feeling of conversion as experienced
during his (or his narrator's) sojourn in the woods. In a famous passage
that has become a classic yet frequently parodied description of the "transcendent
moment," he writes:
In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I
feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving
me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my
head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean
egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all;
the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or
parcel of God.(11)
[18]
For the reading or listening audience of the Transcendentalists, however,
the question remained whether this kind of spiritual experience was the
inevitable result of a walk in the woods. It is a question that the Transcendentalists
would have answered indirectly, implicitly, through the demonstration of
spiritual transformation rather than instruction in its causative methods.
That is, they were less interested in mapping out the precise route to
conversion than in describing the general feeling of spiritual awakening.
Experiencing nature was of critical importance because the natural world
was the face and essence of God; becoming physically closer to nature,
contemplating it, understanding it—these were the actions that brought
man closer to his maker.
[19]
Transcendentalists, who never claimed enough members to become a significant
religious movement, bequeathed an invaluable legacy to American literature
and philosophy. As a distinct movement, Transcendentalism had disintegrated
by the dawn of civil war; twenty years later its shining lights had all
faded: George Ripley and Jones Very died in 1880, Emerson in 1882, Orestes
Brownson in 1876, Bronson Alcott in 1888. The torch passed to those writers
and thinkers who wrestled with the philosophy of their Transcendentalist
forebears, keeping it alive in the mind more than in the church. At his
one-hundredth lecture before the Concord Lyceum in 1880, Emerson looked
back at the heyday of Transcendentalism and described it thus:
It seemed a war between intellect and affection; a crack in
Nature, which split every church in Christendom into Papal and Protestant;
Calvinism into Old and New schools; Quakerism into Old and New; brought
new divisions in politics; as the new conscience touching temperance and
slavery. The key to the period appeared to be that the mind had become
aware of itself. Men grew reflective and intellectual. There was a new
consciousness .... The modern mind believed that the nation existed for
the individual, for the guardianship and education of every man. This idea,
roughly written in revolutions and national movements, in the mind of the
philosopher had far more precision; the individual is the world.(12)
[20]
The Transcendentalists had stood at the vanguard of the "new consciousness"
Emerson recalled so fondly, and it is for their intellectual and moral
fervor that we remember them now as much as for their religious philosophy;
the light of Transcendentalism today burns strongest on the page and in
the classroom, rather than from the pulpit.
Notes
1. Cited in Anne Rose, Transcendentalism
as a Social Movement, p. 11. - back
2. Perry Miller, The Transcendentalists,
p. 10. - back
3. Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian
Conscience, pp. 2-3. - back
4. Miller, "From Edwards to Emerson,"
Errand
into the Wilderness, p. 198. - back
5. Miller, The Transcendentalists,
pp. 70-71. - back
6. Stephen Whicher, Selections from
Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 105. - back
7. Miller, The Transcendentalists,
p. 207. - back
8. Ibid., p. 208. - back
9. Ibid., p. 212. - back
10. Ibid., p. 365. - back
11. Whicher, Selections from Ralph
Waldo Emerson, p. 24. - back
12. Miller, The Transcendentalists,
p. 494. - back
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