American Transcendentalism

by Philip F Gura

  Emerson’s most radical proposition, however, was his interpretation of Christ’s mission. Jesus Christ “belonged to the true race of prophets,” Emerson explained, because “he saw with open eye the mystery of the soul.” He clearly recognized the symbiotic relationship of matter and spirit, and understood his divinity in and through it. “Alone in all history,” he continued, Christ “estimated the greatness of man.”

  One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, “I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest [sic] as I now think.” But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet’s lips, and said, in the next age, “This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man.”

  In subsequent ages, however, the “idioms” of Christ’s language and the “figures of his rhetoric” usurped the place of his truth, so that now churches were not built “on his principles, but on his tropes.”15

  There was more. Emerson rubbed salt into the raw wounds from the debate over miracles. Christ spoke of miracles because he believed that “man’s life was a miracle,” Emerson declared. But over time “the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches,” Emerson continued, was redefined. It became “Monster”—that is, something outside the natural order of things—and was “not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.” Here was a proposition more unsettling than anything Furness had offered, for not only did Emerson dismiss any interest in Christ’s purported miracles but he also claimed that Christ enjoined man to appreciate the miracle of every moment. “Historical Christianity” failed to acknowledge this, and thus men spoke “of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead.”16 This was not the case, as a glance at the refulgent summer day proved.

  Emerson also excoriated the contemporary clergy for their inability to preach from their own personal experiences. He recounted his own disappointment in a local minister (unnamed but patently Concord’s Barzillai Frost) who had “sorely tempted” him to stop attending services. “A snow storm was falling all around us,” he explained, but while the storm was real, the preacher was “merely spectral.” “The eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him,” Emerson continued, “and then out of the window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow.” Sadly, this clergyman had never spoken “one word that intimated that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined.” He had failed dismally at “the capital secret of his profession,” to “convert life into truth.”17

  How could the graduating students avoid similar failure? Go alone, Emerson directed them, and “refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men.” “Dare to love God without mediator or veil.” “Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost,” he proclaimed, “cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.” By trusting their own hearts, the young men would win the respect of their congregations and have the courage to stand up for social justice. Emerson told the young clergymen to recover true, rather than historical, Christianity. He looked, thus, “for the new Teacher” who would follow “so far those shining laws, that he shall see them come full circle; shall see their rounding complete grace; shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with the purity of the heart,” for nature and spirit were so intimately linked. “In the soul,” Emerson counseled, “let the redemption be sought,” for “wherever a man comes, there comes revolution.”18

  An inspirational call to arms, the address also was a studied insult to the assembled clergy. Shortly after the address Francis wrote to Hedge that it had given “dire offence to the rulers of Cambridge” and raised the question of whether and, if so, how, the address should be disseminated.19 Usually, the students themselves initiated such publication, customary for such lectures; but given the tenor of Emerson’s remarks, which all the students did not endorse and by which most of the faculty were embarrassed, the decision was difficult. The students finally took the middle road and decided to print the address privately; but after Emerson revised the manuscript at the advice of friends, they published one thousand copies of An Address before the Senior Class. It was available in late August.

  Depending on their predilection to what Emerson had already expressed in Nature, those who heard the address had different views of it. Cyrus Bartol was impressed; Emerson’s “textless discourse” was nothing less than “the return of the Holy Ghost, with voices.”20 The young Theodore Parker called it “the noblest of all performances,—a little exaggerated, with some philosophical untruth, it seems to me, but the noblest, most inspiring strain I ever listened to.” But others, he continued, differed, with one person shouting, “The Philistines be upon us,” and another, “We be all dead men.” Dean Palfrey, he reported, said that the part of it “which was not folly, is downright atheism.”21 The Swedenborgian Sampson Reed was also critical. He took the occasion of the third edition of his Observations on the Growth of the Mind to assure the public that he did not wish to be linked to Emerson’s ideas. Transcendentalism, he explained, was only a step away from “sensualism” and far from the spiritual purity of Swedenborg’s faith. “Transcendentalism,” he explained, “is the parasite of sensualism,” and he went on to characterize both as worms, poised to contaminate the beliefs that he and his fellow Swedenborgians held dear.22

  Others were more measured. Francis told Hedge that he had heard the talk and found it “crowded with stirring, honest, lofty thoughts” but regretted that Emerson did not make “the peculiar significance of Jesus as prominent as he ought.”23 Henry Ware, Jr., wrote to Emerson the day after; he was one of those who suggested that Emerson revise it before publication. Emerson found his friend’s letter filled with his usual candor and charity but insisted that, as to the doctrines expressed to the class, his “conviction” was “perfect.” He believed that he owed it to his friends and colleagues to speak as he did and not “to suppress any opposition to their supposed views out of fear of offence.”24 Although Emerson had girded himself for some criticism, he did not expect what followed. For their part, the Divinity School faculty believed that he had thrown down a gauntlet.

  The first attack was not long in coming. Two days after Emerson’s address was available, Andrews Norton used the pages of the Boston Daily Advertiser to express his disgust and outrage. As an example of the vituperation to which the new views pushed an otherwise cautious man, the letter is remarkable. Significantly, Norton rang all the changes expected from one who had little sympathy for the European ideas that underlay not only Emerson’s address but a whole series of recent contributions to The Christian Examiner. Norton waited until he was halfway through his “New School of Literature and Religion” before mentioning Emerson’s publication, and he used it as only the most recent example of what for a number of years he had found so offensive in the writings of some of the younger Unitarians.

  Lacing his communication with sarcasm and condescension, Norton began by observing how the current climate in literature and religion was marked by a “restless craving for notoriety and excitement.” He knew where such things originated: in “illunderstood notions, obtained by blundering through the crabbed and disgusting obscurity of some of the worst German speculatists [sic],” which had been received “by most of its disciples at second hand, through an interpreter.” In particular, he singled out as villains “that hasher up of German metaphysics, the Frenchman, Cousin”; the “hyper-Germanized Englishman, Carlyle”; and behind them all, “the veiled image of the German pantheist, Schleiermacher.”25

  The adherents of this �
��school,” as he termed it, believed that they could discern transcendental truths by “immediate vision,” and that these could not be understood unless one had similarly experienced them. In this group’s writings, Norton continued, common thoughts were “exaggerated, and twisted out of shape, and forced into strange connexion”; and language was abused and “antic tricks played with it.” “Inversions,” he continued, “exclamations, anamalous [sic] combinations of words, unmeaning, but coarse and violent, metaphors abound, and withal a strong infusion of German barbarians.” Most insidiously, “silly” young men and women were drawn from their Christian faith to such heretical ideas, a “disastrous and alarming” situation. Emerson’s address typified all this, and it was “extraordinary and ill-boding evidence” of Unitarianism’s betrayal from within.

  The first response to Norton’s intemperate missive came from an odd quarter. The Swedenborgian Theophilus Parsons took Norton to task, not for his arguments but for his excessively harsh tone. Whatever Norton wished to say about the European thinkers who lay behind the New Thought, Parsons observed, they were men of international standing whose reputations were not diminished by one man’s rant in a provincial newspaper.26 A few days later, in the Boston Morning Post, Orestes Brownson weighed in. He praised Emerson’s honesty and bravery in so openly stating his views and warned that to persecute him for his ideas would only bring him more followers.

  Brownson also made another telling point: Norton’s notion of a unified “New School of Literature and Religion” was simply off base. He had erred in conflating two different groups of Unitarians. The Transcendentalists, whom Emerson represented, based their ideas on Carlyle’s redaction of German Idealist philosophers. The Eclectics, of whom Brownson himself was an exemplar, took the most from Cousin’s works. Carlyle and Cousin, he pointed out, could not be more different in their manner and goals, even if they were both indebted to German Idealism. “The Transcendentalists, so called,” he wrote, “are by no means philosophers, they are either dreamers, or mere speculatists [sic], condemning logic, holding the understanding in light esteem.” The Eclectics, on the other hand, are “a very sober and rational people,” and while not Materialists, followed an “experimental mode of philosophizing,” an allusion to Cousin’s writings on psychology.27 Brownson’s classification proved prescient, and even more so was his sense that Emerson’s theology was not that of every dissident Unitarian, nor even every Transcendentalist. He worried, for example, about Emerson’s “obedience to self,” for it smacked of a dangerous “egotism.” “The soul’s conception of God is not God,” Brownson wrote, and if there was no God “out of the soul, out of the me, to answer to the soul’s conception,” then there was no God.28

  In September, Emerson’s friend and colleague Henry Ware, Jr., offered his own response in his sermon, The Personality of the Deity, also delivered at the Divinity School. In a measured and civil tone, he strongly reaffirmed the deity as more than a set of principles or code of laws; “Divine Personality” was central to a Christian’s creed. To deny this, Ware claimed, amounted “to a virtual denial of God.” If the material universe, he continued, “rests on the laws of attraction, affinity, heat, motion, still all of them together are no Deity.” And if the moral universe “is founded on the principles of righteousness, truth, love, neither are these the Deity.” There must be some “Being” to put these principles in action, he explained, and “to exercise these attributes.” But to call such things themselves God violated “the established use of language.”29

  Emerson and Ware, for all their cordiality, were at loggerheads, for Emerson sought to startle readers into discovering the divinity within each of them. On the other hand, Ware warned that if one denied the personality of the deity, there remained no higher mind than his own, and man was left wholly to himself. Emerson simply agreed, as he did with Ware’s contention that concomitantly, such a belief destroyed the possibility of any revelation “by making all truth a revelation, and all men revealers.” This was precisely the thrust of Emerson’s message at the Divinity School, as it had been, two years earlier, in Nature. And in his journals the summer before, he had anticipated Ware’s criticism. “I deny Personality to God,” he wrote, “because it is too little not too much.” “Life, personal life,” he continued, is “faint & cold to the energy of God.”30 Emerson’s deity was no longer Ware’s, as painful a realization as this was to Emerson’s friend.

  Nowhere in his sermon did Ware allude to Emerson’s address, but everyone knew that he intended his talk as a rejoinder. Unfortunately, the debate did not remain so civil. When Norton received an invitation the following July from the “Association of the Alumni of the Cambridge Theological School” to speak at the First Parish Church in Cambridge at the first such meeting of the graduates (essentially on the anniversary of Emerson’s speech), he fired a broadside directly at those in thrall to German philosophy. His address, The Latest Form of Infidelity, again put Emerson in the public eye as a chief exponent of the New Thought and ensured that hitherto he would be branded by the epithet Transcendentalist, even as the movement already was splitting into separate camps. For his part, Emerson could not understand all the attention. “It strikes me very oddly & even a little ludicrously that the good & great men of Cambridge should think of raising me into an object of criticism,” he wrote Ware. Moreover, signaling his refusal to answer Norton meanness for meanness, he added that there was “no scholar in America less willing or less able to be a polemic” than he.31

  But Norton was spoiling for a fight. Even the title of the address was a provocation, for people in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts quickly recognized the allusion to the recent celebrated case of another “infidel,” Abner Kneeland, an erstwhile Baptist and Universalist minister whom Fanny Wright had converted to her Society of Free Inquirers and who, between 1834 and 1838, endured no fewer than four trials for blasphemy. In light of the confluence of Kneeland’s (and Wright’s) sympathies with the lower classes and Emerson’s notion of the divinely empowered individual, Transcendentalist doctrine now was linked to disruption of the social as well as religious order. Further, the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s conviction of Kneeland on the blasphemy charge in the spring of 1838 did not augur well for Emerson, who, if not likely to be indicted, still would be tarred as another purveyor of “infidelity.”

  Norton wasted no time in getting to his main point. Alumni of the Divinity School had to defend the propositions “that Christianity is a revelation by God of the truths of religion” and that “the divine authority of him whom God commissioned to speak to us in his name” was attested by miraculous displays of power.32 Ominously, Christianity’s most threatening enemies now came from within Unitarianism’s ranks. They were intoxicated by foreign ideas that undermined the faith even as they pretended still to be Unitarians. The “latest form of infidelity” was distinguished “by assuming the Christian name,” Norton wrote, even as it struck “directly at the root of faith in Christianity, and indirectly of all religion, by denying the miracles attesting the divine mission of Christ.”33 To deny the possibility of miracles, he bellowed, amounted to a “denial of the existence of God.”34

  For any remaining doubters, Norton appended a note consisting of “Some Further Remarks on the Characteristics of the Modern German School of Infidelity.” He assaulted the vacuity of the German philosophers then in such favor among younger Unitarians. After quoting a passage from de Wette, for example, Norton exclaimed in exasperation, “The shadowy meaning of this sentence I have quoted, escapes any attempt to grasp it.”35 He also went after Schleiermacher’s “system of pantheism, wrought up in a highly declamatory style, in which the language, often soars beyond meaning.” To Schleiermacher, religion, he went on, is nothing but “the sense of union of the individual with the universe, with Nature, or, in the language of the sect, with the One and all.” It is “a feeling,” he sneered, and has nothing to do with “belief or action.” Norton ended this passage by admitting his ast
onishment that, holding such views, on his deathbed Schleiermacher had the presumption to take the sacrament “as a Christian.”36

  Norton concluded with a lengthy note, “On the Objection to Faith in Christianity, as Resting on Historical Facts and Critical Learning.” What most exercised him and other conservative Unitarians about Schleiermacher’s belief in the primacy of internal religious feeling was that it discounted—indeed, made irrelevant—the education and scholarship to which scriptural exegetes had dedicated their lives. Those who undertook to influence the opinions of their fellow men on religious subjects, Norton wrote, “should have natural capacity for the office.” They also should have “the requisite knowledge, of which extensive learning commonly makes a part.” Moreover—here he presumably had in mind Emerson and other upstarts—such an individual must be animated by “no motives inconsistent with a love of truth and goodness, by no craving for notoriety, no restless desire to be the talk of the day, no party spirit.”37 He did not say but deeply believed that the insurgents sought nothing less than to make his scholarship, and so him, irrelevant.

  Emerson was taken aback at the brouhaha and adamant not to fuel it, but by October things only worsened. In his journal he confided that “the feminine vehemence with which the A[ndrews]. N[orton]. of the Daily Advertiser beseeches the dear people to whip that naughty heretic [Emerson] is the natural feeling in the mind of those whose religion is external.” The aim of a “true teacher,” he continued, “would be to bring back men to a trust in God & destroy before their eyes these idolatrous propositions: to teach the doctrine of perpetual revelation.”38 With Emerson’s continuing refusal to spar with Norton, Ripley, who had been promoting the German thinkers in a series of essays in The Christian Examiner, took up Norton’s affront and challenge. Championing his cousin’s religious views, even if they were not fully his own, Ripley hoped to consolidate the young religious reformers who so worried the infant American Unitarian Association. To engage Norton might engender such cohesion.