American Transcendentalism

by Philip F Gura

  He opposed Idealists to “Materialists,” the other party that always vied for mankind’s allegiance. The latter, he explained, base their philosophy on “experience,” the former “on consciousness.” Emerson also noted that Materialists reason “from the data of the senses,” while the Idealists insist that the senses “are not final,” because they cannot explain things themselves. “The materialist,” he continued, “insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man,” while the Idealist focuses on “the power of Thought and on Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture.” For him, “mind is the only reality.”27

  Emerson spun out the implications of the Idealist’s point of view. He “believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to the new influx of light and power.” He also believed “in inspiration, and in ecstasy,” even as such things were experienced differently by different individuals, with different results. Thus, despite the public’s fantasy of a conspiracy of American acolytes of all things German, Emerson opined that there was “no such thing as a Transcendental party” and “no pure Transcendentalist.” Rather, all around him Emerson saw “prophets and heralds” of a resurgent Idealism, eager to return it to public attention. Transcendentalism, he continued, was simply “the Saturnalia or excess of Faith,” indicative of a religion “proper to man in his integrity.”28

  Nor did Emerson provide a roster of those whom he thought were bona fide examples. Indeed, he mentioned none among his contemporaries who by then would have been considered Transcendentalists. Rather, he spoke in generalities about their comportment. Dismissing the notion that they comprised an intimidating battalion ready to storm the conservative ramparts, he described Transcendentalists as few, and “lonely” in their habits, conversation, and writing. They tended to shun “general society” and “shut themselves in their chamber in the house, to live in the country rather than in town, and to find their tasks and amusements in solitude.” This, however, was puzzling obfuscation, for many of Emerson’s cohort, including some of his close friends, at that very moment were assiduously laboring around Boston to remedy the plight of the poor and others disadvantaged by circumstance—prisoners, say, and the developmentally challenged. Emerson chose to ignore these individuals and instead associate Transcendentalism with those who championed an individualistic ethos like his own. He observed approvingly, for example, that the Transcendentalists chose self-imposed isolation “both from temperament and from principle,” as if mere rejection of the crass materialism of their contemporaries guaranteed moral integrity.29

  He did, however, correctly note the Transcendentalists’ strident cultural criticism, for much of the public’s discomfort with them arose from their demands for personal regeneration. “That, indeed, constitutes a new feature in their portrait,” Emerson explained, “that they are the most exacting and extortionate critics.” Contemporary Idealists were greatly disappointed in their fellow men and women for their obliviousness to or denial of the banality of their lives, given as they were to selfishness and monetary gain. Disgusted by the “vulgarity and frivolity” of the majority of their compatriots, Emerson observed, Idealists chose separation rather than keeping such “bad company.”30

  Emerson’s omissions and mischaracterization are accounted for by a simple fact: his friends’ commitment and labors did not square with his own notion of the regenerate life. It was too easy, he believed, to become absorbed in larger causes and to think that such participation validated one’s moral rectitude, when in fact such outward activities might mask a continuing moral callousness. Thinking of church sewing circles where collections were taken for the poor, religious tract societies whose members solicited contributions to bring God’s word to the underprivileged, and other such “benevolent” organizations, Emerson explained caustically that each such cause becomes too speedily “a little shop, where the article, let it have been at first never so subtle and ethereal, is now made up into portable and convenient cakes, and retailed in small amounts to suit purchasers.”31 The better route was to purify one’s own soul and live with full integrity, becoming a model, rather than a nagging goad, to others.

  Emerson understood that to effect social transformation in this more individualistic way took time and that, until the Idealists’ criticism of contemporary life was more widely shared, they would be known, too, by their seeming extravagance. There still will be “cant and pretension” as well as “subtilty [sic] and moonshine,” he said wryly. Further, another drawback, the Idealist pioneers whom he described were not yet “proficients” but only “novices” in their philosophical quests and thus only haltingly pointed the road that all people would walk “when the soul has greater health and powers.” Yet, he insisted, these “novices” had to be seen as sincere harbingers. “Amidst the downward tendency and proneness of things,” Emerson asked his audience rhetorically, “when every voice is raised for a new road or another statue, or a subscription of stock, for an improvement in dress, or in dentistry, for a new house or a larger business, for a political party, or the division of an estate—will you not tolerate one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for thoughts and principles not marketable and perishable?”32

  Emerson’s lecture did little to satisfy the public demand for clarification of the “new views,” but it highlighted an emergent struggle within the group over Transcendentalism’s social implications, one that only intensified through the decade. By 1842 Transcendentalists presumed certain theological and philosophical ideas and had begun to act on the social implications of them. To these individuals, political freedom did not necessarily produce “liberality of mind, nor freedom in church institutions.” “These brave souls,” Margaret Fuller wrote in 1840, thus tried “to quicken the soul, that they may work from within outwards” and thus help their fellow men and women find more meaning in their lives, pulled as they were into the currents of the nation’s rising economic tide. “Disgusted with the vulgarity of a commercial aristocracy,” she wrote, “they become radicals; disgusted with the materialistic working of ‘rational’ religion, they become mystics.” Simply put, she concluded, “they quarrel with all that is, because it is not spiritual enough.”33 At virtually the same time, two conservative clergymen, themselves popularizing German philosophy, also decried the nation’s tawdry pursuit of gain. “Here and there,” they wrote, “an individual may be found who is wary of this ceaseless stir, of this insane eagerness after the perishable and the transient.” His ears “are pained by the incessant clamor of buyers and sellers,” they continued, and he longs “for repose, for calm meditation, for a secure retreat from his jostling and inquisitive contemporaries.” Such men, however, they concluded, were still few and far between.34 To swell their ranks became the Transcendentalists’ goal.

  In another letter from the same period, Fuller praised Emerson’s recent lectures in Providence, Rhode Island, on “The Present Age” and “Human Life,” in terms that make clear how important she regarded his, and her cohort’s, work. With the flames of religious revival licking at New England’s churches as evangelical clergy promised salvation only to those who had an experiential awareness of saving grace, Fuller applauded Emerson’s very different, ecumenical work. “You really have got up a revival there,” she said, “though [the townspeople] do not know it.” Because of Emerson’s insistence on the universality of the religious sentiment, she continued, daily they grew “more vehement in their determination to become acquainted with God.”35

  A notion of such universal divine inspiration—grace as the birthright of all—was the bedrock of the Transcendentalist movement. As one late-nineteenth-century historian put it, “the fundamental ideas which make the basis of the religious life,—the idea of God, of duty, of immortality,—the Transcendentalists asserted, are given outright in the nature and constitution of man, and do not have to be learned from any book or confirmed by any miracle.”36 But the practical implications of this heady premise
, the spiritual equivalent of the democratic ideal that all men (and women) are created equal, was problematic, and particularly so in a nation that did little for the rights of women or labor, and that still protected slavery.

  The Transcendentalists’ belief in a democracy of the spirit, Frothingham wrote, thus opened the door to speculation “which carried unlooked-for heresies in its bosom.” To them, “all things” had to be “new.” Toward that end they called “for immediate application of ideas to life,” so that in this brave new world a thinker “was called on to justify himself on the spot by building an engine, and setting something in motion.” For this group, Frothingham concluded, the test of a truth was its “availability,” its potentially transformative power.37 How the Transcendentalists found their “truths,” subsequently built their various “engines,” and adjusted them to the evolving meaning of America occupies the remainder of these pages.

  1

  SEARCHING THE SCRIPTURES

  In the late summer of 1812, Harvard students and professors, local clergy, scholars, bibliophiles, and curious onlookers gathered in Boston “at the Mansion-House of the late Rev. Mr. Buckminster” for the sale of the minister’s library, one of the largest in New England. Although he was only thirty-eight when he died, for the previous eighteen years Joseph Stevens Buckminster had presided over Boston’s prestigious Brattle Street Church. A civic, intellectual, and religious leader, he was widely regarded as one of New England’s most influential ministers, a bold and moving pulpit orator as well as a scholar of the first rank; his premature death was much lamented.1 Over two days the auctioneers Whitwell & Bond sold more than eleven hundred volumes from his collection, some titles individually, others in lots grouped by topic, many published in London or on the Continent. Given the recent embargo of European goods attendant on the War of 1812, these volumes were particularly enticing. The auctioneers requested payment in “Cash, Boston-money,” and the quality of the library guaranteed good prices: during the two days the sale brought close to six thousand dollars.2

  The bidding was spirited, at no point more so than when the Reverend Moses Stuart, professor of sacred literature at the recently founded Andover Theological Seminary north of Boston, went head-to-head over one set of books with eighteen-year-old Edward Everett, a recent Harvard graduate with clerical aspirations who two years later would be installed over Buckminster’s Brattle Street Church.3 Making this competition seemingly incongruous were the very different religious affiliations of the two bidders. The thirty-two-year-old Stuart, a Yale graduate, was charged at Andover with defending the strictest form of Calvinist theology, based in the works of Jonathan Edwards and his followers Samuel Hopkins and Joseph Bellamy. Everett, on the other hand, had been raised among Boston’s liberal Christians, in Buckminster’s church, where parishioners were suspicious of overtly emotional religion and were tutored in a rational view of the Bible that revealed a unitary rather than triune God. What in Buckminster’s library could have attracted the interest of two such different men?

  It was a four-volume work in German, J. G. Eichhorn’s Introduction to the Old Testament, published between 1780 and 1783, the first comprehensive modern treatment of the Old Testament’s books. Years later Stuart still remembered, “with lively and pleasant emotion,” how Everett and he had jousted for it. Stuart had gone to the auction thinking Eichhorn’s work “unknown to our literary community.” Moreover, the set was not even beautifully made or bound—“moderate octavo on coarse hemp paper,” he recalled. Thus, he was surprised at Everett’s aggressive bidding, up to the extraordinary price of six dollars per volume. But the young man stopped when Stuart subsequently bid a quarter more per book. Stuart had to have it, he explained, and he believed it worth the price. The acquisition of that book, he recalled in 1841, spread its influence over his whole life.4

  Other attendees were similarly enthralled by the offerings and surprised at the prices fetched, particularly for European theology. The Salem minister William Bentley, for example, was chagrined to be outbid on another of Eichhorn’s works, an edition of his multivolume Universal Library of Biblical Literature (1787-1801). Why were the works of this scholar, a faculty member at the universities in Jena and Göttingen, so prized? Why were so many of the other volumes in the Buckminster sale similarly in German and devoted to scriptural criticism? What was the fascination of such abstruse works, in a language few New Englanders read? And why among bidders at the sale did bitter interdenominational rivalries seem forgotten? As a result of their meeting at the Buckminster auction, for example, Stuart tutored his new friend about other German works and even encouraged Everett to undertake the translation of some. Why was it that during this period, as the Unitarian clergyman Ezra Stiles Gannett recalled, “he who could buy nothing else bought a [J. J.] Griesbach,” that is, the work of another German biblical scholar?5 The answers lie in the crucible in which New England Transcendentalism was formed, a widely prevalent interest in scriptural language and its meaning.

  The intellectual genealogy of Transcendentalism began in early-nineteenth-century New England among clergymen caught up in unresolved theological battles initiated more than half a century earlier, specifically between “New Light” supporters of the wide-spread religious revivals known as the Great Awakening and their “Old Light” opponents. The pro-revivalists, epitomized by the great theologian Jonathan Edwards, stressed the necessity of an emotional conversion experience, a change of heart that realigned one’s priorities from selfishness to selflessness. The anti-revivalists, led by Boston clergyman Charles Chauncy, argued for the primacy of reason in religion and found the New Lights’ emphasis on an emotional religious experience—a “New Birth”—an insult to human intelligence. To Chauncy and his supporters, religion was a matter of the head and not of the heart.6

  Over the remainder of the eighteenth century, the Old Lights continued to stress reason in religion, a point of view that eventually led some of them—Buckminster, for example—to become what first were termed “liberal Christians” and then, early in the next century, “Unitarians.” That is, they rejected the notion that the Bible described a Trinitarian deity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and argued instead for a unitary God. In this reading, Jesus Christ, rather than being a part of the Godhead, was simply the supreme model for humanity, God’s gift to show that to which all good Christians should aspire.7

  Before 1820, those who traveled the full distance to Unitarianism remained few and were vociferously opposed by significant numbers of Trinitarians who controlled the majority of New England’s—indeed, of America’s—pulpits. The warring camps jousted with scholarly—primarily historical and philological—weapons on the fields of scriptural exegesis.8 These clergy fought over language, over what precisely the Bible said with regard to the personality of the deity. They sought to know whether scripture was the direct, un-mediated word of God or merely the words of men who interpreted the divine Logos in their own languages and through their own cultural predispositions. To spar in this arena required knowledge of the language and culture of the Bible, information at that time best provided by contemporary German scholars. Thus, Eichhorn, Griesbach, and others had become significant for New England intellectuals.

  Until the second decade of the nineteenth century, most participants in these battles over scriptural interpretation began from similar premises about the relation of language to meaning, derived from John Locke’s famous discussion of the subject in Book III of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). Specifically, they seized upon his declaration of the arbitrariness of language. To Locke, words were merely external stimuli, and the “truth” of language consisted in its utility. The source of meaning, Locke wrote, was simply “rational usage derived from sensory perception.” Words were contrivances designed for human convenience. If they came to be used by men as the “signs of their ideas,” it was not through any “natural connection, that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas,” but o
nly through “a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark of an idea.” The world’s languages thus had no underlying unity, and words in their primary or immediate signification stood only for ideas “in the mind of him that uses them.” Concomitantly, if men employed terms for which they had not experienced sensory analogues, they did not truly know the meaning of what they said. Words could not be universal symbols, for each man to whom the word-idea was expressed had to learn the truth of the idea empirically. 9

  Language was thus an artificial construct that rested upon a contract voluntarily entered, or, more precisely, upon a contextual arrangement. As with laws in the political state, neither vocabulary nor syntax had inherent rationale but were created to serve particular needs—in this case, human communication. Words were not gifts from God that stood as ciphers to reality, but only noises with no direct correspondence to what they named. Words had “meanings” that were narrowly cultural, and acts of human communication were only approximations of experience, not magical invocations of it. Language thus had to be interpreted by the intellectual tools that men, as rational creatures, possessed.

  The stakes in these debates were high when one applied such ideas to the language of the Bible. Was the word of God merely contextual, for example, or did it possess transcendent significance? According to Locke’s logic, if the Bible was the word of God, it was in a vocabulary set down by men in a particular place and at a particular time, and so had been affected by the vagaries of human circumstance. In this light, scripture did not consist of divinely inspired words but rather of a vocabulary that was the result of the time and chance above which no human being, Trinitarian or Unitarian, could rise.