American Transcendentalism

by Philip F Gura

  In his first essay, devoting a few pages to Carlyle’s pamphlet, Brownson got to the heart of the matter. In the Western world’s industrial system, he claimed, workers were worse off than those in chattel slavery, for the wage laborer had “all the disadvantages of freedom and none of its blessings.” As valuable property, slaves at least were properly housed, clothed, and fed, while laid-off factory operatives and other workingmen had nothing, a fact that the “hard times” of the depression brought home every day. Utterly reprehensible, then, were capitalists who perpetuated the wage system because it brought them great profit even as the true producers, the workers, suffered. “The man who employs them,” Brownson wrote,

  is one of our city nabobs, reveling in luxury; or he is a member of our legislature, enacting laws to put money in his own pocket; or he is a member of Congress, contending for a high tariff to tax the poor for the benefit of the rich; or in these times he is shedding crocodile tears over the deplorable condition of the poor laborer, while he docks his wages twenty-five percent; building miniature log cabins, shouting Harrison and “hard cider.”

  Wage labor, Brownson concluded, “is a cunning device of the devil, for the benefit of tender consciences, who would retain all the advantages of the slave system, without the expense, trouble, and odium of being slaveholders.”33

  The great work of the age was to elevate the laborer “and to realize in our social arrangements and in the actual conditions of all men that equality of man and man” that God had established but which the nation’s economic system had progressively destroyed. Brownson rejected outright what William Ellery Channing termed “self-culture.” Individual self-improvement could not abolish inequality nor restore workers’ rights, and it bore no relation to the whole-scale changes to the social structure that the times demanded. The entire economic system, not the reading habits of its managers, had to be changed.34

  Christians thus had to return to the essential principles of their faith and “resuscitate the Christianity of Christ,” for the “Christianity of the Church” had done its work and was powerless to do more good. Now believers had to take it into their own hands to bring the kingdom of God to earth,

  To bring down the high, and bring up the low; to break the fetters of the bound and set the captive free; to destroy all oppression, establish the reign of justice, which is the reign of equality, between man and man; to introduce new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness, wherein all shall be as brothers, loving one another, and no one possessing what another lacketh.

  No one, Brownson claimed, was a Christian who did not labor to reform society by molding it to God’s will, a project in which the clergy no longer provided guidance. The established ministry dared not question the established social relations, he explained, lest they “incur the reproach of infidelity, and lose their standing, and their salaries.”35

  Brownson’s essays ignited a firestorm of criticism and made his journal the talk of the election year, with some disgruntled Democrats even claiming that his radicalism had frightened people away from Van Buren and thus contributed to his loss. With the ensuing ascendancy of the Whig Party, the Boston Quarterly Review fell on hard times. In the autumn of 1842 Brownson ceased its publication, contributing essays instead to the Democratic Review, based in New York. By 1844, however, disappointed with that journal’s editorial direction, Brownson started another periodical, Brownson’s Quarterly Review, which ran for decades and which, even more than his previous journal, he frequently filled with his own writings. But it never attained the circulation of his earlier quarterly.

  Prominent in Brownson’s writings from this period was the work of Pierre Leroux, who moved him along to eventual conversion to the Roman Catholic Church. In 1841 Brownson discovered Leroux’s Réfutation de l’eclecticisme and De l’Humanité, the works by which the former Saint-Simonian is best known. Brownson had long traveled toward French Christian socialism. He had read, for example, the works of the Catholic priest Félicité Robert de Lamennais and had even translated parts of his Modern Slavery for a Boston newspaper. Soon, other works by Lamennais appeared in English, and Brownson became familiar with Words of a Believer and The People’s Own Book, in which Lamennais criticized the subjugation of the working classes and which had encouraged Brownson to offer his own thoughts on this subject.

  But Leroux offered more. A few years later, his Réfutation de l’eclecticisme pushed Brownson away from Cousin and toward a deeper understanding of what Brownson came to call “life by communion,” that is, acceptance of a traditional view of Christ’s message and mission, and their commemoration in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Leroux, rejecting what he now viewed as Cousin’s artificial bifurcation of philosophy and religion, championed a new “religion of humanity” based in “socialism,” a term he coined in 1833. As he saw it, a culture of hyper-individualism—today we would call it a philosophical liberalism at the center of which was the protection of personal and property rights—marked the new industrial age and destroyed the possibility of social harmony. Leroux urged contemporaries to resist temptations to set themselves apart in artificially constructed social systems based on income or other artificial status markers, and instead to celebrate their connections to all human beings.

  Leroux’s critique of bourgeois individualism was central to Brownson’s eventual rejection of Transcendentalism and his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Others in his cohort voiced similar, if more muted, criticism of the direction in which some of their friends seemed headed. Peabody, for example, was distraught at and finally repelled by Fuller’s “egoism,” and William Henry Channing joined Brownson as a champion of Leroux’s celebration of humanity in his own socialist writings of the 1840s. But no one took the Frenchman’s ideas as seriously as Brownson, who, in his devotion to the working classes, tumbled headlong into the faith that over two millennia had most emphasized communion and brotherhood. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1844, effectually ending his career in, but not his engagement with, Transcendentalism.

  Brownson’s writings and example, if not his final journey to Rome, strongly affected Ripley, his initial sponsor in Boston and close friend. Since 1826 Ripley had ministered to a church near one of the wharves in southeast Boston, a location then occupied by people of the “middling class” but that soon became primarily a working-class enclave.36 Ripley came from the clerical purple and had married into the wealthy Dana family of Cambridge. He could not but have remarked the difference between his Cambridge professors and his in-laws and those who sat in the pews of his unexceptional small stone church, for there was a great social distance between Harvard College and Griffin Wharf.

  By outward markers, Ripley should have been content in his ministry. He attended to its tasks without complaint and, while not known as a charismatic speaker, enjoyed his church’s confidence and approval. Moreover, residence in the city—the Ripleys lived near the church, on Chauncey Street, within walking distance of the Athenaeum and other cultural sites—allowed him contact with William Ellery Channing, Emerson, Fuller, and other intellectuals on the Boston–Concord axis, as well as the frequent opportunity to participate in the debates within the Unitarian ranks.

  During his tenure, however, and particularly after the depression of 1837, Ripley became increasingly concerned about the impoverished laboring population proliferating around his church, as well as with his parishioners’ apathy toward their neighbors’ plight. In a powerful sermon on The Temptations of the Times, he warned that the great danger to the country lay in “the inordinate pursuit, the extravagant worship of wealth,” based in “temptations to an excess of selfishness.” Everything, he insisted, “tends to fix our regards upon ourselves and to withdraw them from others,” while “a fancied independence is counted as the highest good.” Convinced that he had to take action to stem this profligacy and reinstate a “deeper sense of our dependence on one another,” Ripley wondered whether, given his inability to spark his flock to concerted
action, he should seek another church or perhaps even leave the ministry altogether, the better to fulfill his mission to the needy. 37

  By 1840 his personal crisis had come to a head. In May he wrote his church indicating his wish to resign if they consented. For one thing, he explained, the church never had grown to its capacity of three hundred seats; and as the decade passed and the neighborhood changed its character, some parishioners had moved away, contributing to a serious financial shortfall. Further, Ripley was troubled by both the increasing conservatism that he detected in the Unitarian ranks, particularly after his debate with the truculent Norton, and by the smugness of his own congregation, who wished him to play the honorific role of “priest” but would not walk with him in the city’s streets to demand social justice. Following the ordination of his young protégé John Sullivan Dwight in Northampton, Massachusetts, that May, Ripley returned to the city convinced that the ministry, so entangled financially to its constituency, would never take the lead in social reform. Still unclear about whether he should entirely abandon the ministry or seek appointment outside the Unitarian fold, in early October he penned a lengthy letter to his congregation indicating his intention to resign, an action the church long had feared.

  His missive was poignant. He deprecated his own labors. Even if some of his preaching had been effective, he observed, too often there were topics of concern to him that failed to attract their attention. As a result, over time he had begun to avoid such subjects, lest he was seen to depart “from the usual sphere of the pulpit.” Over time, such evasion embarrassed and depressed him, for Ripley believed that unless a minister could speak out “on all subjects which are uppermost in his mind, with no fear of incurring the charge of heresy, or compromising the interests of the congregation, he can never do justice to himself.”38

  Moreover, Ripley explained, over the decade he had been with them, things had indeed changed, particularly so in the Unitarian faith. Theological questions had given way to “a new order of ideas” that needed acting upon. He had always believed, he explained, that the essential principles of liberal Christianity made religion “to consist, not in any speculative doctrines, but in a divine life,” and “established the kingdom of God, not in the dead past, but in the living present.”39 A portion of the liberal clergy now wished to act from these principles, but in doing so, they risked alienating some of their supporters and even losing their positions. Ripley had arrived at this point.

  Admitting his increasing disillusionment with one segment of the Transcendentalist cohort, Ripley also made it clear that invidious social arrangements could not be addressed merely through calls for personal regeneration of the sort Emerson counseled in his writings and lectures. “The attention of some good men,” Ripley wrote, “is directed chiefly to individual evils.” These reformers wished to “improve private character, without attacking social principles which obstruct all improvement.” Others (himself included) directed their attention to “the evils of society” and believed that “private character suffers from public sins,” making it imperative to work to advance society past this point.

  As he explained how he had come to his own position on these matters, Ripley provided as good a definition of Transcendentalism as any in the movement ever wrote.

  There is a class of persons who desire a reform in the prevailing philosophy of the day. These are called Transcendentalists, —because they believe in an order of truths which transcends the sphere of the external senses. Their leading idea is the supremacy of mind over matter. Hence they maintain that the truth of religion does not depend on tradition, or on historical facts, but has an unerring witness in the soul. There is a light, they believe, which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world; there is a faculty in all, the most degraded, the most ignorant, the most obscure, to perceive spiritual truth, when distinctly repented; and the ultimate appeal, on all moral questions, is not to a jury of scholars, a hierarchy of divines, or the prescriptions of a creed, but to the common sense of the race.

  “These views I have always adopted,” he explained, and they were “at the foundation” of all his preaching and his success as a minister. Taught “in every Protestant university in Europe” and “the common creed of the most enlightened nations,” Transcendentalism, he was ashamed to say, was still miserably misunderstood and held suspect in the United States. But in it he had found his calling to preach the Gospel to the poor and give them what succor he could.40

  At the first of the year Ripley wrote the parish another letter in which he requested dismissal in three months’ time. They consented, and on March 28, 1841, Ripley delivered a moving farewell sermon, notable for its lack of rancor. It simply boiled down to this: he could dissimulate no longer. He confessed that he was “a peace man, a temperance man, an abolitionist, a transcendentalist, [and] a friend of radical reform” in social institutions, but his flock was not following him down these paths as far as he wished. He and they parted in peace, he told them, over “an honest difference of opinions.”41 Ripley’s wife, Sophia, reported that there were tears flowing all around them when he ended the sermon.42

  Ripley had no immediate prospects, but he did not lack for plans. Emerson suggested that he, Ripley, Alcott, and others combine to form a sort of Transcendentalist university in some rural town, where students would pay tuition to be taught in lectures and conversations. Nothing came of the idea. Among other reasons, it did not satisfy Ripley’s pressing urge to work among the disadvantaged. More appealing was the notion of an entire community devoted to the kind of social change that Ripley envisioned. Such communities could serve as models for the society of the future, their success at all levels—economic, intellectual, social—worthy of emulation by the nation, and the world at large. But in October 1840, when Ripley broached the idea for such a community at one of the Transcendental Club’s meetings, he met only a lukewarm reception. Ripley, however, was on fire. Within a month of delivering his farewell sermon, he was ready to move his family to Brook Farm in West Roxbury, only a few miles from Theodore Parker’s church, to realize a new social order.

  Brownson’s and Ripley’s vocal and visible commitment to social reform drew sustained criticism from conservative segments of the public and caused friction among the Transcendentalists. So too did some of the members’ increasingly radical religious views. The most pressing problem originated with Theodore Parker, who on May 19, 1841, at the ordination of Charles Shackford in the Hawes Place Church in South Boston, delivered A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity. Interestingly, he had preached the same sermon to his West Roxbury congregation only two weeks before Shackford’s ordination, and it had not caused a ripple. But as he contemplated preaching it in a much more public setting—this was his first ordination sermon—he grew worried, perhaps anticipating the criticism that would follow a more public airing of his views.43 Subsequent events proved him correct, for after he spoke at Shackford’s ordination, Boston’s Unitarians were in an uproar.

  Parker’s central point in this sermon was that “transient things form a great part of what is commonly taught as religion.” For centuries, he noted, men had argued over theology and ecclesiology, and in so doing had forgotten the Christianity of Christ. Their theology stood between them and God. Indeed, he continued, “many tenets that pass current in our theology seem to be the refuse of idol temples, the off-scourings of Jewish and heathen cities, rather than the sand of virgin gold which the stream of Christianity has worn off the rock of ages.”44

  No doubt with his work on de Wette in mind, Parker also contended that current notions respecting the infallible inspiration of the Bible had no foundation in scripture. Similarly, many religions made Christianity stand on the personal example of Christ rather than on his truths, even though it was “hard to see why the great truths of Christianity rest on the personal authority of Jesus, more than the axioms of geometry rest on the personal authority of Euclid or Archimedes.” In Parker’s view, even
if one proved that Jesus had never lived, Christianity still would exist because of its inherent truth. Christ was simply “the son of man, as we are; and the son of God, like ourselves.” In him “heaven has come down to earth, or rather, earth has become heaven.”45 Christ’s beauty and the mystery of Christ thus lay in the message that he was all that we can be, when we live as he did.

  After the ceremony the guests adjourned for libations and dinner at Tufts’ Tavern, a mile away, and all seemed well. But some attendees did not let the sermon pass unnoticed. Three orthodox Trinitarian clergymen—J. H. Fairchild of the Phillips (Trinitarian Congregational) Church, Thomas Driver of the South Baptist Church, and Z.B.C. Dunham of the Fifth Methodist Church, whom Shackford had invited as pastors of neighboring churches—recognized an opportunity to split the Unitarian ranks. Thus, they made the first parry in a duel that resulted in the sermon’s notoriety. Parker’s apparent unwillingness to publish his sermon led them to the bold step of writing an open letter to the New England Puritan, an orthodox newspaper, in which they summarized his message and challenged Parker’s fellow Unitarians to speak out on his performance.