American Transcendentalism

by Philip F Gura

  William Batchelder Greene (1819-78) made so strong an impression in Boston and Concord that even so severe a judge as Margaret Fuller described him as the “military-spiritual-heroico-vivacious phoenix of the day.”3 Starting in orthodox Calvinism, in just a few years Greene moved through a variety of philosophical and religious positions. An encounter with Emerson converted him to self-reliant individualism, that is, until Orestes Brownson introduced him to the Christian socialism of Pierre Leroux and, later, Philippe Buchez. From there Greene found his way to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s “mutualism”—a system based on a belief that equal amounts of labor should receive equal pay. It was an intellectual odyssey indicative of how Transcendentalism’s centrifugal force pushed individuals in ever more radical directions.4 By the late 1840s, in an elaborate program for economic reform based in Leroux’s and Proudhon’s ideas, Greene rivaled even Brook Farm’s Fourierists in his criticism of America’s market economy and his advocacy of a general renovation of social relations.

  Born in Haverhill, Massachusetts, on April 4, 1819, Greene was the son of Nathaniel Greene, a newspaper editor whose prominence in Democratic politics secured him a position as Boston’s postmaster from 1829 to 1849.5 Believing that military service was a sure way to preferment, in 1834 his father wrote to Lewis Cass, secretary of war, requesting his son’s admission to the United States Military Academy at West Point. Testimonials to the application indicate the young man’s preparation at several academies in Massachusetts and also, in 1833, a stay of several months in Paris with a relative and a tutor, a signal experience that whetted Greene’s interest in French thought. His application was successful, and he attended West Point for two years, when he withdrew owing to poor health.

  He returned to Boston to convalesce but within a year restarted his military career by volunteering for duty in the Seminole War (1835–42) then being waged in Florida. His commission supported by none other than Daniel Webster, Greene was promoted to second lieutenant, and in July 1839 he was sent to Florida, where he served for six years. He abruptly resigned, again ostensibly owing to ill health, but his own testimony, as well as that of his friend Elizabeth Peabody, indicates that he underwent a profound spiritual crisis whose resolution pushed him toward a career in the ministry.6

  Greene joined the Charles Street Baptist Church—he had been raised in the Calvinist faith—but at the same time, perhaps at the prodding of Brownson, a family friend, he also stepped boldly into the world of the Transcendentalists, visiting Brook Farm and browsing at Peabody’s West Street bookstore for a translation of Kant. Peabody was enough impressed by Greene’s “different cast and method of thought” that she introduced him to her mentor, the Reverend William Ellery Channing, and soon enough Greene was visiting Emerson himself. By January 1842 Greene had published in The Dial and was encouraged to attend various conversations and meetings then so central to Transcendentalism’s development.7

  Later that spring, Greene again visited Emerson, probably to ask for advice about the ministry. Given his religious background, he decided to study at Newton Theological Institution, a Baptist seminary, but after reading in contemporary biblical criticism, he began to doubt the “tri-personal Godhead” and moved toward Unitarianism. In 1844 he crossed his Rubicon, the Charles River, and successfully applied to Harvard’s Divinity School, where, given his theological sophistication, he was enrolled as a senior and quickly made his mark. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, his contemporary at the school and later a Unitarian clergyman and editor of The Atlantic Monthly, recalled him as one of the “most interesting men in the Divinity School.”8

  Greene threw himself into his studies and graduated in the summer of 1845. Married to Anna Shaw, the daughter of one of Boston’s merchant princes, by autumn he preached on trial to a small Unitarian church in the rural Massachusetts community of West Brookfield, seventy miles from Boston. His liberal Christianity pleased the parish, and in October he accepted their call. James Freeman Clarke preached his ordination sermon, and Greene remained in that pulpit for five years, when he ended his pastoral relationship and also left the ministry.

  Greene’s publications from the 1840s and early 1850s provide another example of how Transcendentalist thought affected young clergymen reared in conservative rather than liberal Christian churches, and of how second-generation Transcendentalists received and modified the ideas of the movement’s first exponents. Two major influences marked Greene’s early theological development. First, he strove to reconcile the New Thought with conservative Trinitarian theology. Indeed, more than any other second-generation liberal minister, and very much as James Marsh had set out to accomplish in the 1830s, Greene strove to reconcile the relationship between Calvinism and liberal religion, and thereby illustrated the continuing influence of Calvinist theology on liberal religious reform.

  Second, and probably as a result of his contact with Brownson, an old friend of his father’s, he drank deeply at the well of French socialism. Even as a divinity student, he admired Buchez. Both Greene’s essay in The Dial and his first separate publication, The Doctrine of Life, for example, depended heavily on this thinker’s elaborately schematized notion of mankind’s moral and spiritual development and, concomitantly, on his belief that human progress is predicated on certain spiritual revelations, progress recapitulated in the spiritual development of each individual.9 Further, in Buchez as well as Leroux, Greene found strong criticism of the class divisions that characterized nineteenth-century society, which were based primarily in inequalities of property. For these French intellectuals, acquisitive capitalism, rather than marking the height of civilization, signaled mankind’s continuing thralldom to its baser instincts.10

  Greene was set on the road to these ideas by his conversion experience in Florida. In a dark night of his soul, he had realized his own helplessness in the face of God’s omnipotence. As he later told Peabody, he was brought to an acknowledgment of God’s sublime majesty, so that now his problem became how he might “obtain communion with the FATHER.”11 This obsession with man’s helplessness in the face of God’s awesome power explains why he gave so much early attention to the problem of the freedom of the will. But even as Greene’s early work demonstrates a struggle with his Calvinist legacy, his exposure to Transcendentalist thought allowed him to modify his theology through the insight that a person’s actions—his attempts to put himself in line with what he believes is the higher Ideal—finally are the religious life. As he put it, glossing Buchez, “there is no soul which does not desire, think, and act: in other words, there is no soul without sensibility, intelligence, and power.” Thus, if man always has before him the proper idea of what he wants to be, Greene concluded, “he will ascend toward it.”12

  When Greene entered Newton, he had begun to organize his theology systematically and publish the results as he did so. He felt compelled to relate his new ideas to his own conservative religious background, and thus he tackled such cardinal doctrines as the Trinity, Adam’s Fall, and the Atonement. He strove mightily to square his Transcendentalist notions with the Christian mysteries. In his treatment of the Atonement, for example, Greene rejected the validity of the more well-known mediatory schemes, emphasizing not that Jesus was himself made perfect through sufferings, but that “through sufferings he was made a perfect captain of salvation.” In other words, in striving to emulate Christ, “the ideal man,” men move toward that conformity with God that as moral beings they always seek. Greene had reflected on this as early as the winter of 1841–42, struck by a passage in William Ellery Channing’s sermon Likeness to God (1828) as having the “whole Transcendental [ist] movement … wrapped up in it.”13

  While at Harvard he penned two essays for the American Review, an important New York publication, one a review of Emerson’s Essays, Second Series (1844), the other on “The Bhagvat Geeta, and The Doctrine of Immortality,” both of which he later incorporated with little change into a pamphlet, Transcendentalism (1849), an effort critical of the mov
ement. After emphasizing that Kant’s idea that an individual’s sensory perceptions ultimately were erroneous because subjective, Greene examined the Transcendentalists’ solution to this dilemma—to “transcend” subjective space and time. He found their reasoning confused. “When a man has cut himself off from every thing which is not himself,” Greene noted, “he must find the reason of all things in himself.” But, he continued, “the reason of God and the universe are not to be found in man.” If one believed that it was, as Transcendentalists did, this was “a sort of human Pantheism.”14

  Despite Greene’s pointed criticism of Transcendentalism’s tendency to egocentrism, he dedicated his book to Emerson, whom he considered “the profoundest metaphysician, after Jonathan Edwards, which this country has ever produced.” Yet he strongly objected to Emerson’s understanding of how each individual soul “creates all things.” This amounts to an identification of God with man, Greene wrote, and thus to an “absorption of God in the human soul.” To illustrate this, he quoted one of his friends, himself a pantheist, who had memorably explained the implication of such selfabsorption. “I hold myself to be a leaf, blown about by the winds of change and circumstance,” he told Greene, “and holding to the extreme end of the branches of the tree of universal existence.” But the Transcendentalists, his friend continued, “think themselves to be some of the sap.”15

  True to his Calvinist upbringing, Greene tried to preserve the notion of majestic divinity apart from man. Just as it requires a man to create a poem, it requires “a living and transcendent God, to create this transcendent poem which we call nature and man, or the visible universe.” So, he continued, “the world is the thought of God,” but “rendered firm and stable in its manifold relations, by the simple volition of the Divine mind.” Because both the Vedas and the Gospel of John preserved this sense of divine omnipotence, Greene wanted people to focus Emerson’s and other Transcendentalists’ work through the lenses of such mystical texts. “Man is dependent, for the continuance of his life,” Greene concluded, “upon that which is not himself.”16 To think otherwise deifies the ego in an illusory manner.

  In his West Brookfield pulpit Greene continued such explorations, where the local press issued his Remarks in Refutation of the Treatise of Jonathan Edwards on the Freedom of the Will and his treatment of The Incarnation. Having satisfied himself as to man’s liberty—and thus his moral accountability—in the first pamphlet, Greene turned his attention to an understanding of Christ’s role in history. Rather than embracing Transcendentalist self-reliance, a hallmark of Emerson’s and Fuller’s understandings of the implications of Idealist philosophy, he urged communion with all humanity. Influenced by the French socialists, Greene also relied on his study of the New Testament to argue that therein “is taught the great doctrine of the mutual solidarity of the members of the Christian Church; and by implication, the solidarity of the whole human race.” 17

  Greene’s understanding of Man’s Fall was directly related to this notion of each person’s linkage to, and responsibility for, all others. When man was created, he explained, all his “passions, feelings, sentiments, and aspirations” were in harmony with “the course of universal nature.” But as soon as one made his own private enjoyment the main end of his life, both the harmony of the universe and the unity of the human race shattered into “as many fragments as there were individual men, and these fragments repelled each other, for each was intensely selfish, and each cared for his own, and not for the common good.” The only remedy for such sinfulness was the Incarnation, for the work of Christ, “the second Adam,” was to make men “one in the bond of charity.”18

  Needless to say, such selflessness was not common in a society in which legislative fiat protected the individual’s right to pursue self-interest, usually defined by the acquisition of property and profit. But Greene championed the “solidarity” with all people that Christ had typified. Borrowing an analogy from one of the pseudosciences of the day, Greene memorably stated his understanding of Christ’s message. Although Greene knew “but little of the truth or falsehood of mesmerism,” he wrote, he found it an apt metaphor for what he sought to express of man’s relation to God. “As one man by a prolonged and earnest gaze,” he continued, “can obtain control over another, transmitting his thoughts and feelings into the mind of the other, bringing the will of the other into complete subjection to his own, so the Father, by the might of the overpowering effulgence of his glory, magnetized our Lord, bringing him into conformity with the perfect image of his own infinite holiness.” Christ in turn “magnetized” his disciples, and “these others still others,” so that the succession had come down to the present day. At that very moment, he claimed, Christ’s disciples could transform “the unconverted into the form and image of Christ, through the magnetism of a holy life.” Seemingly unaware of the implicit elitism this analogy suggested, Greene saw himself in this apostolic succession.19

  In West Brookfield, Greene demonstrated his commitment to this ethic of Christian mutualism through the publication of two radical economic pamphlets, Mutual Banking and Equality, which display Proudhon’s influence. In these works Greene, like Fourier and his American disciples, deplored the growing distance between owner and worker, and (citing an example from Henri de Saint-Simon) noted that moneylenders were unprofitable drones in an economy to which they had no organic relation. The sudden disappearance of a thousand capitalists, he noted, would cause “a sentimental evil only, without occasioning any inconvenience to society,” unlike, say, the death of fifty of the state’s best surgeons. Greene thus urged the creation of “mutual banks,” cooperatives not under the control of robber barons. 20

  To Greene, mutual “Love” was the only response to the inevitable strife the Industrial Revolution engendered. Because all men are brothers, they “gravitate toward the same spiritual Sun, toward the same common Father.” If people were but centered fully in “INDIVIDUALISM,” for Greene “a holy doctrine,” they would respect the holiness of their fellow beings. Whoever contended against the rights of an individual man, he concluded, also contended against the divine, for in the indwelling of God in every human soul lay the origin and foundation of all basic human rights.21

  Greene’s legacy to American social thought thus resided in passionate sponsorship of a radically egalitarian Christian individualism that, ironically, demanded full devotion to one’s fellow men and women. While virtually every other Transcendentalist, including his mentor Brownson, offered very different solutions to the growing problems between labor and capital, Greene urged both a practical cooperative movement and a Christian mysticism leavened with Transcendentalism. In his later years his thought only widened and deepened in these channels, even as his operative word remained “mutualism.” Maintaining that freedom is realized only when one recognizes the divine equality of every other, he eventually moved to the Jewish mystical tradition to reinforce his belief in man’s centrality to divine creation. In one of his last works, The Blazing Star; with an Appendix Treating of the Jewish Kabbala (1872), Greene argued that the world is “in one aspect, a poem,” in another, “a logical argument.” But in every respect it is “a work of art.”22 His predisposition to such mysticism marks the lasting effect of New England Transcendentalism on his unorthodox thought.

  In 1848 the government functionary and aspiring writer George Wood (1799-1870) published Peter Schlemiel in America, a rollicking satire of contemporary American life. In the course of the novel Peter converses with a series of cultured people on topics that allowed Wood free rein to pillory the intellectual and cultural foibles of his contemporaries. Among these were Unitarianism; its stepchild, Transcendentalism; and the Fourierist movement. In the course of conversation a Mrs. Julia Smith relates how, a few years earlier, a distinguished clergyman from the city of Boston introduced her to “an entirely new set of opinions.” Soon she learned from his sermons that much of what she had assumed as Christian doctrine was erroneous. As she gradually rea
lized that the Bible was not what she had taken it to be, God’s revealed word, but was only a set of myths and stories assembled over the years by apologists for their own brand of Christianity, “the Redeemer was shorn of his divinity.” 23 When Wood wanted to poke the most fun at the New Englanders’ extreme religious views, however, he cribbed his words from a text cited simply as “Studies in Religion,” which to him epitomized fatuous Transcendentalist language.24

  He was referring to Eliza Thayer Clapp’s anonymously published Studies in Religion. Born in 1811 in Dorchester, Massachusetts, adjacent to Boston, Clapp lived there her whole life, never marrying.25 Early on she moved from her orthodox faith to Unitarianism, and for many years she taught Sunday school to teenage girls. Like many others, she gradually made the transition to Transcendentalism and numbered among her close friends both Elizabeth Peabody and William Henry Channing. Describing her religious pilgrimage, she wrote, “When I was sixteen I was a belligerent Unitarian, while my friends were mild seceders from orthodoxy.” “In my twenties,” she continued, “when Unitarianism was in the ascendant, I was caught off into the aerial regions of Mr. Emerson and the iconoclastic zeal of Mr. Parker.”26 Believing in the ethic of self-culture popularized by William Ellery Channing and cultivated by the Transcendentalists, in her home she gave classes to young women, gratis, in history, literature, and philosophy. She read from and commented on texts and then elicited discussion, much as Fuller did. Never having sought a public life, Clapp’s lasting influence came through this teaching, for which she was highly praised.