American Transcendentalism

by Philip F Gura

  One place they found it was in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). “There is one man of genius,” Emerson wrote in 1837, “who has done much for this philosophy of life, whose literary value has never been rightly estimated.” “I mean Swedenborg,” he continued, “the most imaginative of men, yet writing with the precision of a mathematician.”39 Emerson’s effusive praise was not idiosyncratic, for Swedenborg, founder of the Church of the New Jerusalem, constructed the final wing of the edifice in which disaffected young Unitarians were making themselves comfortable.

  Swedenborg studied at Uppsala, Sweden, but also was educated in England, where the young scholar absorbed Locke’s philosophy and studied natural science. This first phase of his career eventuated in an administrative position in Sweden’s Board of Mines, and he wrote widely on metallurgy, mathematics, and even anatomy. All this changed when Swedenborg was fifty-seven, however, for that year while in London he had a religious experience that reoriented his life. As he described it, after he finished a meal, “a kind of mist” spread before his eyes, and he saw the floor of his room “covered with hideous reptiles, such as serpents, toads and the like.” When the mist dissipated, Swedenborg discerned “a man sitting in a corner of the chamber who said to him, ‘Eat not so much!’” This was not a dyspeptic dream, however, for the next night the vision reappeared, with a more serious message. “I am God, the Lord,” he told Swedenborg, “the Creator and Redeemer of the world,” who had chosen the Swede “to unfold to men the spiritual sense of the Holy Scriptures,” lessons which he himself would dictate to the astonished Swedenborg. 40

  He took the assignment seriously. For the next five years he professed to have frequent intercourse with the world of spirits, from which he produced scores of theological works that form the cornerstone of the Church of the New Jerusalem. Central among its tenets is what he termed the doctrine of series and degrees, links in the chain from the natural world to the spiritual. The natural series, for example, comprises the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, each of which can be traced to its first series or source, from whose simplicity and primacy stems the world’s complexity and yet harmony. These series culminate in God, supernal yet announced in the created, physical universe.

  Even more important to young Unitarians than Swedenborg’s conception of the final unity of the worlds of matter and spirit was his depiction of the natural world as the very emanation of God. The New Jerusalem would come, Swedenborg believed, when humanity used his “key” to the correspondence between the worlds of matter and spirit, and thus discovered the truth of God’s word. A seer who sought to bring mankind a true understanding of Christianity, Swedenborg bequeathed to emergent Transcendentalism an insistence that the “correspondential” relationship of nature to spirit is available in and through language, itself an analogue to nature.

  Late in his life, when Emerson assessed New England’s intellectual life fifty years earlier, he described Swedenborg as a man of “prodigious” mind who had exerted “a singular power over an important intellectual class” in New England.41 The British Swedenborgian and biographer of the religion’s founder, James John Garth Wilkinson, perhaps best explained Swedenborg’s appeal. The doctrine of “Universal Correspondency,” Wilkinson wrote, claims “that bodies are the generation and expression of the souls, and that the frame of the natural world works, moves and rests obediently to the living spiritual world.” Now, he continued, “this plainly makes all things into signs as well as powers.” The “events of nature and the world become divine, angelic, or demonic messages,” he concluded, “and the smallest things, as well as the greatest, are omens, instructions, warnings, or hopes.”42

  In the 1820s Swedenborg’s thought found its way to New England primarily through early American disciples. First among these was Sampson Reed (1800–1880).43 A clergyman’s son, Reed was introduced to Swedenborgianism as a student at Harvard College (class of 1818), where he also met Emerson. Although Reed subsequently entered the fledgling Divinity School in Cambridge, after taking his M.A. in 1821, he became a wholesale druggist, all the while contributing to Swedenborgian publications, including the New Jerusalem Magazine, which he helped found in 1827. His “Oration on Genius,” delivered at his commencement, greatly impressed Emerson, who had received his A.B. the same day. The piece had a long afterlife. Reed eventually published this work in Elizabeth Peabody’s journal, Aesthetic Papers, in 1849.

  More significant was his Observations on the Growth of the Mind (1826), which Emerson deemed “in my poor judgment the best thing since Plato of Plato’s kind, for novelty & wealth of truth.”44 The pamphlet’s message was congruent with what readers encountered in Marsh’s redaction of Coleridge as well as in their primary readings in Fries and de Wette. Rather than regarding the mind (as empiricists did) as a vacant receptacle to be filled by sensory experience, Reed described it as a “delicate germ, whose husk is the body,” put into the world so that “the light and heat of heaven may fall upon it with a gentle radiance, and call forth its energies.” The mind must grow, Reed maintained, not from “external accretion,” but from “an internal principle.”45 Further, he believed (following Swedenborg) that the growth of the mind was closely linked to a proper perception and interpretation of the natural world. At Creation, God impressed the fabric of nature with a set of correlatives or symbols, which man, after discovering his mind’s creative power, could read with ever-increasing clarity. Before this occurred, however, the poetic imagination had to be refined into a “chaste and sober view of unveiled nature” and to find “a resting place in every created object.” When man reached this state of meditative attention in which he discerned the relation of the natural object to his mind as well as to its creator, he discovered, in Reed’s felicitous phrase, a language “not of words but of things.”46

  A language not of words but of things, a suggestion that utterly contradicts the Unitarians’ belief that language consists of conventions based on contrivance and convenience. Reed proclaimed a set of universal symbols that, when made apparent, allowed a more profound comprehension of the Creator than was possible through logically contrived dogma. To Reed, the genius of the age would be he or she who recognized that everything, “whether animal or vegetable,” is “full of the expression of that for which it was designed,” as a symbol of the infinite. “The very stones cry out,” Reed exclaimed, “and we do well to listen to them.”47

  Reed injected into New England’s increasingly heated theological atmosphere the heady suggestion that if humanity was to regain its proper relationship to nature and, by extension, the Creator, people had to stop bickering over grammar and syntax and pay more attention to the visible, universal proofs of God. Synthesizing religion and science with poetry, Reed, following Swedenborg, proclaimed “the marriage of the rational with the imaginative powers,” which others like Coleridge, Fries, and de Wette also had done, in their own ways.48

  Reed’s pamphlet excited the same young Unitarians who gravitated around Marsh’s edition of Coleridge and the English translations of Cousin’s works, and they quickly purchased Swedenborg’s books when they were republished in the United States. As early as 1838, however, Reed took pains in the third edition of his Observations to disavow any connection to the emergent Transcendentalist wing of liberal Christianity. “Transcendentalism,” he observed, “is the parasite of sensualism; and when it shall have done its work, it will be found to be itself a worm, and the offspring of a worm.”49 Two years later, in the New Jerusalem Magazine, the Swedenborgian Theophilus Parsons made the divorce more explicit. “The New Church teaches,” he explained, “that to be wise, man should look from himself.” But Transcendentalism “teaches him to look always to himself.” Whereas the New Church declares “the renunciation of self-love as the beginning of all true wisdom,” the Transcendentalist believes “the pride of self-intelligence is itself the beginning and end of all wisdom.” “Its whole religion,” he concluded, “is self-worship.”50 By this time,
many others had begun to associate Transcendentalism with just such excessive egotism, even if this did not characterize all associated with the movement.

  Despite Swedenborgians’ disavowals of any connection between themselves and Transcendentalists, through the late 1830s Swedenborg’s remained a name to conjure with among New England’s Unitarians. In 1839, for example, Emerson observed that it was pleasant “to hear of any fine person that he or she is a reader of Swedenborg,” for the Swede’s influence on the age, he continued, was “an uncomputed force—his Genius still unmeasured.”51 Through the 1840s, however, his influence waned. Meeting Sampson Reed in town one day, for example, Emerson “commended” Swedenborg as “a grand poet.” Reed thought that Emerson had missed the point and wished that, if he “admired the poetry,” he “should feel it as a fact.”52 A few years later, in his lecture on “Swedenborg; or, The Mystic,” later published in Representative Men (1850), Emerson concluded that finally Swedenborg’s system was too severe and restrictive, the “vice” of this thinker’s mind “its theological determinism.” This mystic fastened “each natural object to a theological notion,” Emerson observed, but forgot that “the slippery Proteus is not so easily caught.” In nature, individual symbols played “innumerable” parts, and hence mankind inhabited a symbolic, not an allegorical, universe.53

  Given the fissure between the New Church and Transcendentalism, George Willis Cooke, an astute historian of the movement, accurately accounted for Swedenborg’s influence. He observed that few Transcendentalists were drawn “in any large degree” to the religious element in Swedenborg’s teachings. Rather, the Swede influenced them through “the vast suggestiveness of his ideas, and especially by means of his doctrine of the correspondences between the material world and that of spiritual realities.”54 In this light, Emerson’s lifelong interest in Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondence makes perfect sense, as does the fact that Linberg, whose translation of Cousin’s work was the earliest on the American strand, counted himself a member of the Church of the New Jerusalem.

  In the late 1820s and early 1830s, notices of Swedenborg and of other theologians and philosophers were frequently met with in the pages of The Christian Examiner, which liberal Christians had founded in 1813 (as The Christian Disciple). Prior to the establishment of the American Unitarian Association, in 1825, this journal held together the varied clerical membership of the emergent denomination through its publication of original essays and lengthy reviews of European and American publications. Between 1831 and 1839, under the editorship of James Walker (1794–1874) and his assistant, F.W.P. Greenwood (1797-1843), the journal was particularly receptive to European philosophy, theology, and scriptural exegesis, and it served as the major conduit through which American Unitarians learned of such important Idealist thinkers as Coleridge, de Wette, Jouffroy, and others.

  During these years Walker continued as pastor to the Unitarian congregation in Charlestown, Massachusetts. He, too, had contributed to the ferment within Unitarian ranks. In his lecture The Philosophy of Man’s Spiritual Nature in Regard to the Foundation of Faith (1834), for example, he emphasized how true religious experience derived from internal, intuitive principles; the American Unitarian Association frequently reprinted the piece through the 1830s. After 1839, when he became Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity at Harvard, Walker moderated his theological radicalism but through his classes still exerted much influence in American philosophical circles. On his watch, The Christian Examiner provided a highly visible forum for younger clergy increasingly uncomfortable behind the Unitarian standard. In the process he turned the journal into an index of those in the vanguard of the Transcendentalist movement.

  Here, for example, the Unitarian clergymen George Ripley, Orestes Brownson, and Frederic Henry Hedge, soon leaders of the insurgent group, introduced their cohort to the excitement and promise of Idealist philosophy. Asked late in his life what role he had played in the emergence of Transcendentalism, for example, Hedge pointed to his essay on Coleridge in the March 1833 issue of The Christian Examiner. He claimed that it was “the first word which any American had uttered in respectful recognition of the claims of Transcendentalism,” by which he meant the thought of Kant and his followers.55

  A short, balding man of prodigious intellect, Hedge had been one of the first New Englanders to master the German language and that country’s Idealist philosophers. Among the cognoscenti he was known as Germanicus Hedge and a “fountain of knowledge in the way of German.”56 His stubbornness was legendary. His friend Cyrus Bartol, for example, recalled that when someone told Hedge that “the facts were against him,” he replied, “So much the worse for the facts.”57 Although he attended meetings of the Transcendental Club, like his friend Theodore Parker, another giant in German studies, he never relinquished his belief in the centrality and efficacy of the Christian church.

  Hedge’s essay on Coleridge alerted his cohort to the force of German thought, but his influence did not stop there. Within the year he followed this effort with one on Swedenborg’s True Christian Religion, recently reprinted in Boston, and thus built on the foundation Reed had laid for an appreciation of the theory of correspondence developed by this “constructive mystic.”58 Anticipating Emerson’s argument against Swedenborg a decade later, however, Hedge lamented that Swedenborg’s vision was being presented as gospel truth. “When the wine of mysticism is poured into sacred vessels and drunken as the inspiration of God,” he warned, worship is degraded “into a heathenish mystery.” 59

  At the same time, George Ripley, another young Unitarian clergyman, was introducing The Christian Examiner’s readership to other European thinkers who decisively influenced the course of New England Transcendentalism. In the May 1835 issue he reviewed Marsh’s translation of Herder’s Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, published two years earlier, and six months later he treated readers to a rigorous assessment of the same author’s eighteen-volume Complete Works, on Religion and Theology (1827-30). In his first essay, Ripley argued that Herder’s work contained “the germ of most of the important thoughts which have since produced such a mighty revolution in the prevalent conceptions of religion.”60 He further explored this proposition in his second essay.

  Ripley most appreciated two of Herder’s ideas. First, religion had to be understood apart from theology, for it was “a matter of the inward nature, the higher consciousness of man.” Theology, on the other hand, was a set of propositions “for and against which we may dispute” and should never be confounded with religion, verified as it was not by logic but by internal spiritual principles.61 Second, Herder insisted that men should not “rest the divine authority of Christianity upon the evidence of miracles,” for Christ had never claimed that they should be the criterion of his truth nor compared to the value of his “moral endowments.” A miracle might direct attention to doctrine but could never prove its truth, which came only through a “conviction of the understanding.”62

  Within a few months the young minister gave more evidence of his mastery of German philosophy and theology (as well as of an astonishing productivity), offering an introduction to and translation of Friedrich Lücke’s “Recollections” (1834) of the great German Romantic theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), whose countrymen, Ripley remarked, placed him “at the head of all theologians of the present day.” In his work, Ripley observed, Schleiermacher reconciled the conflicting claims of religion and science by clarifying the essential character of the former. He believed that it is “neither knowledge nor action, but a sense of our dependence on God, and of our need for redemption from sin,” not an intellectual proposition, but a feeling.63 This accorded with what Ripley had gleaned from other Idealist philosophers and, through Schleiermacher’s moving formulation, became a rallying point as the Transcendentalist group separated from their conservative brethren.

  Schleiermacher had been raised in a Moravian pietistic family, and after graduation from the Universi
ty of Halle he preached locally for several years. He returned to his alma mater in 1802 as professor of theology and four years later assumed a similar position at Berlin. Early in his career he published one of his most influential books, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799), in which he argued that religion is a deep emotion arising (as Morell put it) “from the absorption of the man—the individual man—in the infinite.”64 His indebtedness to Schelling and Jacobi was evident, but the force and originality of Schleiermacher’s own defense of such propositions marked him as a new lion in German—and, soon enough, American—theological circles. By the spring of 1836 Orestes Brownson, who now read German fluently, had access to a manuscript translation of On Religion, very likely Ripley’s own.65 And in his preface to his translation of de Wette’s Theodore, Clarke asked rhetorically, “Where, in England or America, can minds be found like that of Schleiermacher, to investigate the first principles of the religious life?”66

  Through the mid-1830s The Christian Examiner published other briefs of philosophical Idealism. Brownson, for example, popularized the French Eclectics with essays on recent translations from both Cousin’s and Jouffroy’s works. New England’s intelligentsia also were introduced to Cousin in the pages of the venerable North American Review as early as 1829, when Alexander Hill Everett noticed his History of Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, but Brownson’s essay spoke more directly to Cousin’s applicability to New England’s peculiar religious situation. In another issue of The Christian Examiner, Brownson assessed Benjamin Constant’s Religion Considered in Its Origins, Forms, and Development (1824–31), a pioneering work that grounded Schleiermacher’s insight about the universality of the religious principle in wide consideration of many of the world’s religions. 67