American Transcendentalism

by Philip F Gura

  Settling the matter of what precisely the Bible said—and what it meant for subsequent generations of Christians—became the work of scriptural exegetes like Eichhorn, Griesbach, and a host of other European and American scholars who pioneered the “Higher Criticism” of the Bible, a term that Eichhorn coined.10 Higher Critics enlisted the rational, critical tools of modern inquiry to discover the deeper truths of Christianity. In general terms, they focused on historical documents and tried to establish their authorship, date, and place of composition, as opposed to the Lower Critics, who worked primarily on the language and grammar of biblical texts. In particular, Higher Critics challenged the idea that Moses was the author of the first five books of the Old Testament, positing several different sources for the book of Genesis alone, and they urged the study of the Bible as a literary artifact rather than as divinely inspired text. To them, it was a book like any other, to be interpreted through immersion in the cultures and languages of its various authors. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, advanced scholars in this discipline transformed the debates about biblical and, by implication, figurative language.

  American scholars’ interest in the Higher Criticism also coincided with their discovery of Germany’s rich religious and artistic culture. At first they got their information secondhand, particularly from the widely circulated Germany (1810), by Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, the baroness of Staël-Holstein (better known as Madame de Staël), which was available in French and, after 1813, in English translation. In addition to providing a road map to the “manners,” literature, and arts of the nation, de Staël devoted many pages to a discussion of the country’s philosophical and religious thinkers, particularly Kant, and demonstrated the richly symbiotic relationship between their thought and national culture. Here American readers encountered for the first time a lengthy discussion of philosophical Idealism. For those who chafed under the rationalism and materialism to which Locke’s empiricism led, an introduction to German Idealism and its ethical implications was both liberating and exhilarating.

  De Staël also touted the superiority of the German educational system; and with the conclusion of the War of 1812 and the reopening of safe travel to Europe, Americans began to visit the Continent and to study at German universities. Among the most prominent of these pioneers were George Ticknor, Edward Everett, George Bancroft, and Frederic Henry Hedge, all of whom eventually carved out positions of intellectual leadership in New England and led efforts to disseminate German language and thought.

  By the time Ticknor was nineteen, and a Dartmouth graduate, for example, he had read in de Staël of the great university at Göttingen and was determined to sample its educational resources. He knew little German, however, and turned to his friend Edward Everett for guidance. Everett provided him with a German-French dictionary, with which he began his tutorial. Eventually, in 1815 he, Everett, and two others sailed for Europe and made their way to Germany’s cultural centers. At Göttingen, Ticknor took classes with, among others, Eichhorn himself, whom he found “lively, gay, full of vigour, though not young, and interested in everything.” The young Bostonian luxuriated in this intellectual hothouse.

  During his European sojourn Ticknor met other prominent intellectuals, including at Weimar the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and in Paris the philosophers A. W. von Schlegel and Alexander von Humboldt. He continued his introductions in London, where he greeted the American author Washington Irving and the English writers William Hazlitt, William Godwin, and Charles Lamb, among others. Upon his return to the United States in 1819 Ticknor assumed the position of Smith Professor of French and Spanish Languages and Literature at Harvard, which had been held for him while he studied abroad. Although he was not responsible for teaching the German language per se, his experience abroad made him attentive to students’ needs, and in 1825 he convinced Harvard to hire Karl Follen (1796–1840), a German expatriate whom he had met in Switzerland, to teach the language.

  Upon his arrival at Göttingen, Ticknor’s traveling companion Everett, similarly promised a chair (in Greek) at Harvard upon his return, took private classes with Eichhorn in Hebrew and Arabic and engaged him as well for a tutorial in German literature. In addition, Everett pursued advanced studies in Greek to fulfill his obligation to Harvard, and in 1817 he received a doctorate in philosophy, the first such awarded an American from a German university. After his and Ticknor’s audience with Goethe in 1816, Everett prepared an essay on him, published in 1817 in the North American Review, the first important notice of this writer to appear in the United States.11 The following winter Everett continued his travels. In Paris he met the German naturalist and explorer Wilhelm von Humboldt, the philosopher Benjamin Constant, and de Staël herself. He returned to the United States the same year as Ticknor to assume his duties at Harvard. From that position he influenced countless students, many of whom sought him out to learn more of German language and thought. Years later Emerson testified to this professor’s large influence, observing that “the genius of Everett” was “almost comparable to that of Pericles in Athens,” as even “the rudest undergraduate found a new morning open to him” in Everett’s lecture hall.12

  In the summer of 1818 eighteen-year-old George Bancroft, later a prominent Democratic politician and one of the country’s most distinguished historians, followed in Ticknor’s and Everett’s footsteps for study at Göttingen, with Frederic Henry Hedge, the twelve-year-old son of Harvard professor of logic Levi Hedge (with whom Bancroft had boarded), in tow. Everett had convinced Harvard’s president Kirkland to provide Bancroft a stipend to study philology and biblical criticism, and shortly after his arrival in Göttingen he enrolled in two of Eichhorn’s courses, in the New Testament and Syriac. In a letter written in 1819 to Harvard’s own biblical exegete, Andrews Norton, Bancroft provided a good description of how he spent his day at the great German university. “5 a.m., Hebrew and Syriac,” he reported;

  7–8, [Arnold Hermann Ludwig] Heeren in Ethnography; 8–9, Church history by the elder [Gottleib Jakob] Planck; 9–10, Exegesis of the New Testament by old Eichhorn; 10–11, Exegesis of the Old Testament by old Eichhorn; 11–12, Syriac by old Eichhorn; 12–1 p.m., Dinner and Walk; 1–2 Library; 2–4, Latin or French; 4–5, Philological Encyclopedia by [Ludolph] Dissen; 5–7, Greek; 7–8, Syriac; 8–9, Tea and Walk; 9–11, Repetition of the old lectures and preparation for the new.13

  It was a rigorous schedule, but Bancroft made remarkable scholarly progress and received his doctorate from the university in 1820.

  In the interim he also visited Berlin, where for five months he took courses from that university’s distinguished faculty. He attended lectures under the renowned philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and as well enrolled in the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher’s offering on the philosophy of education, a memorable experience that prompted him to report to Kirkland that Schleiermacher brought to his subject “a mind sharpened by philosophical meditation and enriched with the learning of all ages and countries.” Although much in Bancroft’s education prepared him for a career as a biblical scholar, early on he decided against it, believing it destructive of true spirituality. As a case in point, he noted that exegetes like Eichhorn seemed little interested in religion per se. In their courses, Bancroft complained, “the bible is treated with very little respect, and the narratives are laughed at as an old wife’s tale, fit to be believed in the nursery.”14 After his return to the United States in 1823, Bancroft took Kirkland’s advice to start a secondary school on the model of the German “gymnasium.” At his Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts, he put into practice many of the progressive educational ideas to which he had been exposed abroad, particularly in Schleiermacher’s course.

  While Bancroft studied at Göttingen, he installed his young traveling companion Frederic Hedge in a gymnasium in the city and later at one in Ilfeld. The precocious teenager flourished in the German educational system and immersed himself in German language and philosophy. U
pon his return to the United States five years later Hedge was placed in Harvard’s junior class and eventually graduated from its infant Divinity School. By the early 1830s he was hands down the Unitarian most at home in German language and culture. He later told Caroline Dall that when he published his essay on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another exponent of German thought, in The Christian Examiner in 1833, no one else in the United States had ever studied German metaphysics “in the original.” She saw no reason to doubt his claim.15

  Others, too, made the pilgrimage to Germany. By 1824, for example, Emerson’s older brother William, influenced by fellow Bostonians Everett and Ticknor, also had found his way to Göttingen. He wrote Waldo to “learn German as fast as you can” and urged a visit. “Read Eichhorn’s critical, but not his historical works,” he added, signaling his own exposure to biblical criticism.16 He repeated the advice to his college classmate John Fessenden and added, “My mind seems to have undergone a revolution” through “the books and lectures of Eichhorn.” 17

  Such enthusiastic reports to New England of German culture and scholarship prompted a great interest in the German language. Before long Harvard began to cast about for native instructors and found them among recent émigrés who not only provided basic instruction in the language but also firsthand knowledge of some of Germany’s most prominent biblical scholars and philosophers. The most important of these teachers was Karl Follen, well known for his German nationalist sentiments.18 He had been a leader in the influential student movement that arose after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and resisted the subsequent formation of the German Confederation. This group, which began at the University of Jena but then spread to other campuses, had as its goal the creation of a German state based in democratic and constitutional principles, including freedom of expression. For years Follen taught law at Jena, another great center of learning, but he went into exile following his implication in the assassination of the reactionary playwright August von Kotzebue, who supported the Confederation and ridiculed the insurgent student movement.

  Follen and his friend Karl Beck (1798–1866), the stepson of the renowned biblical scholar Wilhelm de Wette, had visited the family of Karl Sand, Kotzebue’s assassin, shortly before the murder and thus were, erroneously, linked to the plot, as was de Wette himself. 19 Although the prominent literary historian Wolfgang Menzel testified that Follen had nothing to do with Kotzebue’s death, Follen thought it prudent to emigrate to Paris, where he met the philosophers Benjamin Constant and Victor Cousin; and then to Basel, where, following his own interrogation by the German authorities, de Wette also had gone, resigning his post at the University of Berlin. There Follen and de Wette edited a literary magazine that promoted German patriotism, and they numbered among their friends and supporters none other than J. F. Fries, another eminent Idealist philosopher, as well as other German nationalists. Continually hounded by Prussian authorities because of the Sand affair, however, Follen and Beck began to consider leaving Europe altogether.

  In 1824 they crossed the Atlantic to Philadelphia. Ticknor thereupon recommended Follen for a position at Harvard as instructor in German, the school’s first. A few years later he offered courses in ethics to the divinity students, among whom were George Ripley and James Freeman Clarke, both destined to be great students of German thought. In 1830 Follen became Harvard’s first professor of German, a position he held until 1835, when the administration did not renew his contract, purportedly because of his increasingly strident antislavery views.20 Having previously studied for the Unitarian ministry, he turned to the pulpit and was soon installed over a new church in East Lexington, Massachusetts, which he served until his untimely death in 1840 in a steamboat accident.

  Follen’s comrade Beck had an equally illustrious career. From Philadelphia he found his way to George Bancroft’s Round Hill School in western Massachusetts, where he taught Latin and gymnastics. Then, in 1832, he too was called to Harvard, as professor of Latin, a position he held until late in his life. These two émigré scholars, personally acquainted with de Wette, one of the greatest living biblical exegetes, as well as with Cousin, Constant, and Fries, introduced a generation of Harvard students to German language and culture.

  Follen threw himself into this work. Lacking German textbooks, he prepared a reader at his own expense. “Dr. Follen was the best of teachers,” Unitarian clergyman Andrew Preston Peabody recalled. “Under him we learned the grammar of the language, in great part in situ.” He worked through “forms and constructions” as the students met them in their reading lessons, explaining them “with a clearness and emphasis that made it hard to forget.”21 Keeping tabs on the young man whom he had recommended for the position, George Ticknor concurred. Follen “is a fine fellow,” he wrote to a friend in 1826, “an excellent scholar, and teaches German admirably … [He] will do good among us.”22 Writing after Follen’s death, Elizabeth Peabody paid him the highest compliment. “I never knew any foreigner,” she said, “who seemed to be so easily and widely understood by Americans.” “In fact,” she continued, Follen “was less of a German than a Christian cosmopolite.”23

  By the end of the 1830s the study of German was all the rage. From his bastion at Andover, Moses Stuart observed that “our youth are every day resorting to Germany for education; and our colleges are filling up with Professors, who have been educated there.” The German language, he continued, is “becoming an object of classical study in our public seminaries of learning, and in a multitude of ways, through the medium of translations as well as by the knowledge of the German language,” its literature was transforming what constituted serious scholarship in a variety of fields.24 Divinity students and clergymen—Unitarian or Trinitarian—exposed to the language never were the same.

  Joseph Buckminster was one of these, and he had assembled his library in great measure to help him examine the scriptural canon in terms of its history and language, a project well under way in Europe. Given his position as a leading Unitarian, he sought to decide to his satisfaction the degree of consistency among New Testament accounts of the life of Christ, a task in which he was particularly encouraged by the works of the German biblical scholar Johann David Michaelis, the Anglican bishop and scholar Robert Lowth, and Griesbach.

  Michaelis taught at the Universities of Halle and Göttingen and specialized in the changes in the Hebrew language over time; his philological works were much studied. Lowth, in his Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753) and commentary on Isaiah (1778), presented the Old Testament as a complex literary creation penned by various groups of religious people and thus not easily reducible to one clear story or doctrine. He argued as well that the Bible was a complex mixture of history and myth that had to be disentangled before one arrived at the core of Christian doctrine. His insights led Buckminster to observe that “to understand the unconnected writings of any person, written in a remote period, and in a foreign language,” one had to consider “the character of the writer, the opinions that prevailed in his time, his object in writing, and every circumstance peculiar to his situation.” Then one might be “sure of having reached the whole of his meaning.”25

  Like many other Unitarians, Buckminster was frustrated by the metaphysical hairsplitting that preoccupied New England clergy, and he believed that enlightened attention to the history and language of the Bible might end such divisive and fruitless bickering. Griesbach was the biblical exegete whose work most immediately encouraged him. Griesbach’s two-volume edition of the Greek Testament and its elaborate critical apparatus encouraged Buckminster in his attempts to ascertain the veracity of the New Testament books. He was so taken with Griesbach’s scholarship that he even convinced Harvard to subsidize, for those who sought easier access to his criticism, a reprint of an abbreviated manual on the New Testament that this scholar had prepared. In print and from his pulpit Buckminster touted Griesbach’s conclusions, arguing that one should not regard the Bible as God’s word but only as its vehicle and, as such
, a text one had to interpret through sophisticated philological and historical scholarship.

  By 1811 Buckminster’s proselytizing for the Higher Criticism eventuated in his appointment at Harvard as the first Dexter Lecturer in Biblical Criticism, an indication of the institution’s growing commitment to the new European scholarship. Buckminster posthaste wrote European booksellers to acquire other key scholarly works that he needed, and he also began to learn the German language so that he could read them in the original.

  Following his untimely death, his torch passed to Andrews Norton, who had read theology with both him and the equally well regarded Unitarian Henry Ware, whose appointment to the Hollis Chair of Divinity at Harvard in 1805 had ignited a firestorm of criticism from conservative Trinitarians who viewed his elevation as Harvard’s capitulation to liberal Christianity.26 In 1813 Norton succeeded William Ellery Channing as Dexter Lecturer, a position Channing had held for only a year and which in 1819 (after much lobbying on Norton’s part) became the Dexter Professorship. Norton, now proficient enough in German to read Eichhorn’s Introduction to the New Testament in the original, began his lifelong project of proving the “genuineness” of the Gospels. With his seminal Statement of Reasons for Not Believing the Doctrines of the Trinitarians (1819), the locus classicus of the Unitarians’ understanding of scripture, Norton initiated a long-running battle with none other than Stuart, who, from his influential position at the Andover Theological Seminary—which was founded in the wake of Ware’s appointment to the Hollis Chair to provide a comparable seminary for Trinitarians—resorted to the same Higher Critics to defend a very different notion of scriptural language and meaning.