American Transcendentalism

by Philip F Gura

  Peabody coupled this with what she knew of Greek mythology, for she discerned congruence between the allegorical truths in the poetry and mythology of both the Greek and Hebrew cultures. She regarded primitive man as an original poet who named everything around him through the interaction of his instinctual speech and his environment. Originally, there was a reason why such a word meant such a thing, a position radically opposed to Locke’s notion of the arbitrariness of language. Peabody welcomed Herder’s suggestion that if one went back far enough in the study of a language, he not only located a tongue’s original roots but also could ascertain how these roots themselves were derived from nature. This suggested universality to the oldest forms of languages, which, if properly understood, revealed a universal grammar. In addition to providing a key to the more economic assimilation of the various modern languages, such insight, she believed, demonstrated the common origin of thought in nature.

  Her reading of Herder led her to search for an ur-language, the parts of which were intimately connected to the exterior world—what we might term a “language of nature” that others like Emerson soon enough elaborated with even more sophistication. Peabody’s interest in this subject eventually led her as well to sponsor and publish the work of language theorists who similarly argued a universal origin to speech. In the hands of readers like Peabody and an ever-expanding group of sympathetic readers, the Higher Criticism thus had the potential to alter radically their understanding of language and symbol.

  The young Waldo Emerson’s struggle with the tenets of his Unitarian faith offers a final example of the potential for the Higher Criticism to challenge long-established tenets in organized religion as well as of its liberating effect on notions of representation. In the early 1830s, shortly after his wife’s death from tuberculosis, Emerson, a minister to Boston’s Second Church, gave a series of lectures to his congregation’s young people that display his growing allegiance to the Higher Criticism and indicate his increasing disenchantment with the Unitarian fellowship. Like Elizabeth Peabody, he believed that the Higher Critics had erred in trying to resolve hermeneutical questions through reason or logic alone. “My friends,” he addressed his youthful parishioners in 1831, “if we leave the letter and explore the spirit of the apostles & their master, we shall find that there is an evidence that will come from the heart to the head, an echo of every sentiment taught by Jesus, that will make the evidence to us as strong as that of the Primitive Church.”48 This is precisely what Peabody had discovered through her comparison of Herder’s work on Hebrew poetry with her knowledge of classical mythology.

  Emerson came to similar conclusions. For example, he based his sermon “The Lord’s Supper”—delivered after he had decided that he could no longer in good conscience administer the sacrament of Holy Eucharist—on the same exegetical principles as those of the Unitarians whose judgment in matters of doctrine he had begun to question. His rejection of the sacrament came from rational examination of the scriptural evidence for administering it. After reviewing the relevant scriptural evidence, he concluded that “Jesus did not intend to establish an institution for perpetual observance when he ate the Passover with his disciples.” The ritual of the Supper was based in local, Hebraic custom, and Christ’s followers (particularly Saint Paul) had erred in their assumption that he wished his disciples to maintain the institution permanently after his death. Moreover, Emerson reminded his contemporaries that on such doctrinal matters they should seek a judgment more in accordance with the spirit of Christianity than had been “the practice of the early ages [that is, the early church fathers].”49 Sifting through historical and textual evidence, he turned the Unitarians’ exegetical principles against them and claimed that the commonly accepted practice of Communion was not in line with the deeper, more intuitive truth of the Christian religion.

  Over the next few years, particularly in his book Nature (1836) and his address to the graduating students of Harvard’s Divinity School in 1838, his reasoning on scriptural language evolved more radically, ending in his decisive break with Unitarianism. In particular, Emerson believed that the literal, contextual meaning of scriptural language was not as important as its more symbolic function, a view ironically congruent with that of the archconservative Stuart. Speaking of Christ’s parables, Emerson noted that over time, “the idioms of His language and the figures of His rhetoric” had “usurped” the place of his truth, resulting in churches being built on Christ’s “tropes” rather than on his principles. Mankind was left to derive Christ’s principles intuitively and subjectively, and not merely through study of the historical context of scriptural language. Emerson thus looked not for more biblical scholars but for “the new Teacher” who would “follow so far those shining laws” of nature that he could see the world as “the mirror of the soul.”50 Truth was not such because the Evangelists had so recorded it, but because they had witnessed it and spoken it in words that were themselves the expression of the laws of God and nature.

  Scriptural exegesis lost none of its interest or force over the next two decades. Beginning in 1837, for example, Andrews Norton published the first of what became a three-volume magnum opus on the subject, Evidences of the Genuineness of the Gospels, and younger ministers like Ripley and William Henry Furness offered their own refinements of the scholarship. Thus, among those who soon enough were termed Transcendentalists, there was interest in a philosophy of language that took distinctive shape from debates that the Higher Criticism initiated. As these debates became more strident, and as their participants expanded their reading to other European thinkers whose work had fertilized influential biblical scholars, what began as an attempt to discredit erroneous interpretations of scriptural language opened the doors to a novel theory of literary symbolism that placed individual consciousness front and center.

  Some theologians began to view human communication as more than man’s arbitrary imposition of meaning on sound. Having advanced the idea that scripture was a kind of primitive poetry of the soul, some biblical scholars advanced the concomitant notion that this poetry had been draped most effectively in the imagery of nature. Natural eloquence, they believed, stemmed from the poetic language nature provided men. If one also agreed that verbal signs originally stemmed from man’s observation of the natural world, one might posit a “natural” language analogous to the spiritual truths for which men for so long had sought adequate expression. But to arrive at such an understanding of the relations among the individual, nature, and God, dissatisfied Unitarians had to substitute for Common Sense epistemology another that took different account of man’s subjectivity. This was expedited by their discovery of philosophical and spiritual Idealism that flowed from the same European founts from which they had taken such deep draughts of the Higher Criticism.

  2

  REINVIGORATING A FAITH

  Beginning in 1838 and continuing for the next four years, every few months George Ripley (1802–80), minister at Boston’s Purchase Street Church, delivered to the publishing house of Hilliard, Gray, and Company another hefty manuscript for his series Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature. Especially interested in making available titles in philosophy, theology, and history, he had conceived the project late in 1836 and proposed to issue each year two or three volumes of about 350 pages each, and to find “true scholars, studious men” among his contemporaries who would translate these works of “truly classical reputation” and append “original notes and dissertations” to guide readers. He needed five hundred subscribers to make the project feasible, and he promised an honorarium of two hundred dollars to each contributor when a thousand copies of each volume were sold, “& in that proportion on every copy, after the first 600.”

  He offered his friend and potential contributor Convers Francis the following sampler of authors and works he had in mind:

  [Benjamin] Constant on Religion, [Théodore] Jouffroy’s Survey of Ethical Systems, Philosophical Miscellanies from [Victor] Cousin, [Theodore Si
mon] Jouffroy & [Benjamin] Constant, [W.M.L.] De Wette’s Lectures on Religion, Selections from [F. H.] Jacobi, [Wolfgang von] Goethe’s Autobiography, Selections from [Johann Gottfried von] Herder, Life of [Jean Paul] Richter & Selections, [Friedrich] Schleiermacher’s Discourse on Religion, Miscellanies from [Johann Gottlieb] Fichte, [G. E.] Lessing’s Life & Selections, [Wolfgang] Menzel’s History of German Literature, Extracts from Goethe’s Correspondence, Historical Notes on German Philosophy. 1

  Ripley successfully assigned many of those titles, with such prominent individuals as the feminist Margaret Fuller and the Unitarian clergymen James Freeman Clarke, John Sullivan Dwight, and William Henry Channing (nephew of the Unitarian leader) proffering important translations and introductions. By the time the series ended, in 1842, when Ripley, having resigned his ministry, was immersed in a new project, fourteen volumes of translations from French and German authors had appeared.2

  Ripley did not restrict his solicitations to Unitarians. It was more important for editors to have full command of the language of the authors whom they were to translate and to be sympathetic to the general tenor of their works than for them to toe some doctrinal line. As he expressed it to the onetime Congregationalist minister and now professor of moral and intellectual history at the University of Vermont, James Marsh, the important thing was “to give some idea of all parts of that enchanted circle in which the German mind has been revolving for the last seventy or eighty years.”3 Still believing that Unitarians and Trinitarians might end their divisive bickering over doctrinal matters and unite in their labors to revivify Christianity, Ripley sought to ensure that the authors whom he earmarked for translation shared one characteristic: they all were part of that “enchanted circle,” that is, contributors to the great philosophical shift from eighteenth-century rationalism to nineteenth-century subjectivity, typified in such German writers as Goethe but also in contributors to the new philosophical and theological currents that defined the Romantic age.

  At stake for New Englanders like Ripley was the reconciliation of experimental inquiry, spawned in the seventeenth century and now fully matured, with their belief that vital religion demanded assent to the heart, to create, in other words, a scientific theology that included—indeed, welcomed—the emotions. This explains Kant’s absence from Ripley’s desiderata, testament to his understanding that, as central as this philosopher had been to eighteenth-century philosophical inquiry, a new generation of thinkers had found his rationalism inadequate to their philosophical and theological concerns. Ripley’s prospectus thus comprised writers whose work spoke directly to those in search of a revivified, emotional faith.

  How did Ripley establish his list of authors, and what were their contributions to the ongoing and increasingly heated debates within New England churches about the true grounds of religious belief? To suggest that Kant’s challenge to Lockean epistemology, an eigteenth-century debate, was at the root of some Unitarians’ rebellion against the faith of their fathers not only greatly oversimplifies their knowledge of European thought but also gives short shrift to several thinkers whose ideas were formative to this crucial moment in theology and philosophy, in America as well as Europe. Unitarians like Ripley sought a new way to look at the world. It was provided by those who championed man’s self-consciousness and, especially, the idea that subjectivity allowed one to reconstitute a vital, heartfelt religion.

  James Marsh was one of the earliest and most important purveyors of this New Thought to New England intellectuals. In his attempts to bridge the divide between rational religion, championed by the Unitarians, and an affective faith with its emphasis on personal spiritual experience, advocated by Trinitarians who led the so-called Second Great Awakening of these years, Marsh embraced a new understanding of religious experience, one similar, ironically, to that discovered virtually simultaneously by some of the younger, more radical Unitarians. This explains Marsh’s continuing attraction to Ripley, who later also solicited him for contributions to The Dial, the Transcendentalist periodical, with the plea that Ripley’s party of “heretics and radicals” nevertheless had “large sympathies with ideal conservatives in church and state” such as Marsh.4

  Marsh’s interest in such reconciliation was visible in his first published effort, a review in the prestigious North American Review in 1821, a few months before he completed his clerical training at Andover. Assessing a recent book by the Italian scholar Ludovico Gattinara di Breme (1780-1820) defending modern Romantic literature against its detractors, Marsh displayed his familiarity with biblical scholars such as Herder and Eichhorn. Echoing the arguments of Herder, for example, Marsh observed that in the earliest days of the church, religious faith had been based on an imaginative understanding of the natural world.5 With the Enlightenment’s emphasis on science and reason, however, and particularly after the seminal work of Locke in epistemology and Isaac Newton in physics, such poetic use of nature was subordinated to scientific understanding. Marsh believed, however, that for Christianity to remain significant, imagination still had to inform religious sensibility. Because ancient peoples had based their faith in a subjective, affective response to their environment, they “had not learned to write their poetry,” Marsh declared, but “had lived it.”6 In contrast, modern writers worked in a world marked by skepticism debilitating to faith. He lamented that, to his contemporaries, it seemed a virtue “to exclude the influence of feeling, and [to] reduce the operations of the whole soul to the measured movements of a machine under the control of our will,” a posture that discouraged deep religious faith. Modern man mistrusted emotion, but without it, his faith was not vital.7

  Marsh’s review so impressed readers that some believed that Edward Everett himself had authored it. For his part, Everett, then editor of the North American Review, told his friend George Ticknor, who knew of Marsh’s intellectual interests and had recommended him for the assignment, that the piece could only have been written by someone with firsthand knowledge of Europe, high praise for a young man who had traveled only as far as Virginia.8 Marsh’s maiden effort was a striking indication of his capability, and thus it was surprising that he waited eight years before again venturing into print, with his review of his mentor Stuart’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews. He had spent the intervening years deeply engaged in scriptural exegesis, and this essay located the center of his intellectual agenda, an attempt to reconcile intuitive faith with orthodox, Trinitarian dogma.

  Acutely aware of how controversies in scriptural exegesis arose from misunderstandings of language, Marsh predicted that New England’s fragmented churches would be united only when Christians considered scriptural language poetically, a view akin to that of his mentor, Stuart. Christian doctrine was comprehensible only when one realized that rational analysis of scriptural language could not encompass or describe it. For a true sense of what the ancients meant by a concept like the Trinity, one had to consider the word imaginatively, intuitively, or poetically, coming to know, as Marsh said, its “inward and subjective nature.”9 Thus, while the terms used by the apostles to describe Christ once had been meaningful, now, because of the nineteenth century’s slavish adherence to empirical fact, relevant passages had lost their evocative power. Some theological concepts could not be rationally understood, but if approached imaginatively, filled as they were with beauty and grandeur, they might still inspire faith. Through appreciation of such heightened language, the believer could reconcile head and heart.

  For the previous year this subject had been much on Marsh’s mind, for he was preparing a lengthy introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, whose first American edition his brother-in-law, Chauncey Goodrich, published in Burlington, Vermont, in 1829. Marsh applauded Coleridge’s attempt to reinvigorate the Church of England, for he viewed the task as congruent with his own efforts to reconcile quarreling factions in American Congregationalism. Marsh’s contemporaries demanded a broader and more imaginative understanding of faith, akin t
o Herder’s appreciation of the Hebrew poetry in the Bible, which Marsh thought could be provided through careful study of writers (including Coleridge, but Kant’s German successors as well) who emphasized the subjective nature of religious experience. As Marsh read more deeply in the philosophy of religion, he became convinced that a group of German Idealist philosophers provided answers to many of the thorny interpretive questions that the Higher Criticism raised.

  Marsh welcomed Coleridge’s writings because they helped break the stranglehold of “popular metaphysicians of the day” who continued to champion Lockean empiricism. He objected to a philosophy that tended inevitably to undermine man’s belief in the reality of anything spiritual and then “coldly and ambiguously” referred him for the support of his faith to the authority of Revelation. Here he alluded to the Unitarians’ illogical opinion of Christ’s miracles, which, even as rationalists, they defended, against their own logic, as confirmation of Christ’s mission. In contrast, Coleridge argued “the reality of something spiritual in man” and the futility of all modes of philosophizing “in which this was not recognized, or which were incompatible with it.”10