American Transcendentalism

by Philip F Gura

  In Discourses on the Christian Spirit and Life, Bartol proclaimed Christ’s unique dispensation. “He is not, in the phrase of the day, a ‘representative man,’” Bartol noted (a nod to Emerson’s recent book, Representative Men), “but representative of deity.” “The world recedes not from him, but approaches him. He seems in the future, not in the past. He transcends all our transcendentalism.”12 Bartol also shied away from the ecumenical embrace of the world’s religions that characterized Parker and, in less theological and intrusive ways, Thoreau. Mankind should not let the Bible, Bartol urged, “be classed with other books of inferior quality, lower proof, of different import and from a different source,” for it had “a divinity possessed by no Koran, by no oriental documents, which with their strange names decorate of late the fond speech of some, by no teachings of pagan sages, or proverbs of nations.”13

  After the Civil War, in good measure because of his continuing advocacy of intuitionist beliefs, Bartol became a major voice among radical Unitarians, some of whom (though he was not among them) formally organized in 1867 as the Free Religious Association. This group coalesced after 1865, when Henry W. Bellows organized a National Conference to unite American Unitarians and, in the debate over the group’s principles, succeeded in keeping the phrase “Lord Jesus Christ” in its constitution’s preamble, effectively eliminating from membership more broad-minded clergy. Hedge and Clarke joined him in this effort, for like Bellows, they supported a “confessional” denomination, that is, one associated with a Christian creed.

  At the conference’s second meeting, in 1866, disaffected Unitarians reopened the confessional question but again were defeated, prompting some of them to meet a few months later in Boston at Bartol’s elegant Beacon Hill home to discuss their own association. By their third meeting their number had grown to thirty, primarily clergymen and a few lay leaders, and they finally agreed on a constitution for an organization to express their diverse views. Much debate centered on the question of whether, if one advocated “free religion,” one should organize at all.14 Their Free Religious Association, they declared, thus would promote the interests of “pure religion,” encourage “the scientific study of theology,” and “increase fellowship in the spirit.”15

  Thirty-seven members subsequently signed the document and elected O. B. Frothingham their first president. Despite his initial enthusiasm, however, Bartol was not among them, probably because, an unreformed intuitionist, he objected to the constitution’s emphasis on the “scientific” basis of theology as well as subscription to an overarching statement of principle.16 Hedge, too, demurred, committed to the American Unitarian Association and uneasy with the emphasis on science. “The only element in which religion can thrive and be a power in society,” he opined, “is an element of mystery and faith.” “The world of knowledge and the world of faith,” he wrote in 1867, “are principally distinct.”17

  The Free Religious Association was never numerically large. However, it exercised considerable influence on American church history, for it erected a spacious tent under which those uncomfortable with the confessional emphasis of the American Unitarian Association met to share ideas. Bartol remained an important contributor to the ongoing religious debates that engaged the membership, but he also founded, in 1867, the Radical Club, to promote unfettered discussion of subjects of interest to freethinkers. This group had no formal membership requirements and at one time or other in its thirteen-year history numbered among its attendees virtually all of Boston’s prominent intellectuals.18

  In a contemporary essay, on “Radicalism,” Bartol explained the relation of the Free Religious Association to the Radical Club. Some radical Unitarians chose not to join the Free Religionists, he explained, because they had neither talent nor relish for what amounted to a new sect. They loved free thought, “coveted no personal publicity, and would not put their principles in any conventional gear.” The Radical Club, he explained, was “against any final wording” of a person’s faith.19 Its principles were simple and broad: “It denies to affirm, clears the way to travel, vetoes less than it signs, and tears down to build. Its affirmation is, Spirit takes in all.”20 In support of the club’s premises, he invoked the controversial Trinitarian Congregationalist, the Reverend Horace Bushnell, who worshipped a deity that the believer could approach through the medium of language but never know entirely. Bushnell could “swallow” all creeds, Bartol explained approvingly, for he saw “the centre of the target they all hit.” No word, he continued, sufficed to describe God, so people had to use many, “as a surveyor his triangular series for a measure.” When “love” repeated and overworked sounds sentimental, Bartol explained, we use “truth”; and the designation “Allah is refreshing when God has become trite.”21 Members of the Radical Club agreed.

  The surest mark of Bartol’s continuing Transcendentalism was his acknowledgment of the eternal presence of the spirit in the world. In a scientific age, he wrote, in which everything had to be clearly observed, conceived, and described, mankind could not “overlook what no sphere of definition can include.” There was no strict definition possible for even the meanest thing, he continued, for there was something transcendent “in the origin and orbit of every particle, and a conscious infinity in the soul they serve.” In short, God is present throughout creation.22

  Proponents of science promised to prove the idea of God, he continued, but in their materiality provided “but a coroner’s inquest over the dead,” never the living spirit. Bartol cared not if deity was personal, for this in no way negated his inward sense of divine presence. God’s personality was not mankind’s raised to the highest power, he explained patiently, “but ours is his reduced to the lowest terms.” Science could not find a deity external and separate from the worshipper, but such was revealed daily in “our conscience and heart,” where the true proof lay.23 Unthreatened by new scientific and technological advances, Bartol insisted on the interpenetration of the worlds of matter and spirit, even as he strenuously resisted capitulation to materialism alone.

  Other, younger members of Bartol’s religious circle met the challenge of Positivism in various ways, some by returning for more draughts at the sources of philosophical Idealism. Among these was Thoreau’s classmate John Weiss (1818-1879), who graduated from the Divinity School in 1843 and spent several months at the University of Heidelberg. From Worcester, Massachusetts, grandson of a German Jew and son of a barber, at Cambridge Weiss quickly found his way into the Transcendentalist circle. After completing his theological studies, he succeeded his friend Convers Francis in the pulpit in Watertown but four years later was forced to resign because of his increasingly radical abolitionist views. He moved to a Unitarian church in New Bedford, where he remained until 1859, when ill health made him relinquish that pulpit. In 1862 Weiss returned to the Watertown church and ministered there through the decade. Closely associated with radical Unitarianism, he was a founder of the Free Religious Association and a member of the Radical Club.

  Parker’s activism greatly influenced Weiss. One of his earliest published sermons, for example, treated the Anthony Burns affair; and after 1854 he traveled more and more in the great abolitionist’s orbit, a debt he repaid a decade later with his two-volume Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker (1864), long the definitive biography. This memorial solidified his position as a key figure among second-generation Transcendentalists, and his many essays in The Radical and The Christian Examiner provide an index of progressive Unitarian thought.

  Bartol left the most revealing portrait of Weiss. His ethnicity was evident, his friend recalled, and “soft lines of manly beauty enclosed his olive-colored oriental features, and his fluent, half-feminine form.” He never was vigorous, and in middle age his figure was “so thin and sepulchral” that he seemed to have just risen from the grave. Indeed, he looked so weak that Parker was once reputed to have judged him a “doomed man.” But this “strangely blended tenderness and strength,” Bartol continued, served him
well in the pulpit, for it “issued in the singularity of his voice,” so mellow “that no woman’s utterance could exceed, and among men was beyond compare.”24

  Weiss was an equally effective writer. In 1871 he published an ambitious book of essays, American Religion, that revealed a worthy successor to Parker in trying to consummate, in the wake of the Darwinian revolution, a viable marriage between science and religion. It also was a telling artifact of the inward turn that marked Transcendentalism in the 1850s, for more than any of his contemporaries Weiss emphasized America’s unique social conditions and their relation to emergent theology. In the book Weiss was clearly indebted to Fichtean Idealism, for he resurrected the study of the relationship between mind and universe all but forgotten during the 1850s and 1860s. Weiss accurately identified, for example, the population’s aversion to serious philosophical inquiry as a major factor contributing to the saccharine culture of the Gilded Age. “A great deal of American literary and religious striving,” he wrote, “runs to sentimentalism because the fatigue of discovering the order of the world” was too great for citizens so obsessed with progress and gain. He proposed a return to German Idealism—he had, after all, studied at Heidelberg—so that mankind might discern the relation between natural and spiritual things. This identity of mind with universe underpinned Weiss’s theology, which he termed “theistic naturalism.”25

  He had a dynamic understanding of the relationship of world to spirit, and he believed that such a religious vision was particularly suited to America, from its origins a country blessedly free of “priestcraft.” Colonizing of a new world, he wrote, allowed an experiment on a continent where every man could have his religion “like air, gratis, by opening the window.” With its political democracy, the United States provided the ideal location to base religion in the sacredness of the individual, as God had intended. Each person, Weiss wrote, is sacred by virtue of the “organic fellow-feeling that moral and spiritual truth has for itself wherever it is found”; hence, mankind’s need to tolerate—nay, embrace—all people of all faiths. This was the basis of an American religion. His countrymen, he counseled, had to cultivate “the natural affinity which demands and secures the service of each individual for the other, and prompts the sacrifices of the republic.”26

  Fichte would have approved of Weiss’s individualism. There was nothing outside of the individual, Weiss declared, for consciousness is all that one can know. There is nothing beyond the phenomena that we embrace and apprehend.27 Knowing this, an individual recognizes the same in all others and thus respects all humanity. This was Weiss’s dream of America’s gift to the world: a true, all-encompassing, nonjudgmental democracy.

  If each person is so miraculous, self-contained, and sacred, what then is the divine? Weiss used the phrase “Divine Immanence,” what Emerson had termed the “Oversoul.” God was simply everything, Weiss declared, the whole of life, the whole of history, the whole of science and religion, “an immeasurable Presence, holding the roots of every sweet or noxious thing.” Further, this was the source of all moral law. “Immanence,” Weiss continued, “is in all intuitive comprehension of all principles, or it is in none. It exists in all characteristic excellencies, or it exists in none.”28

  Thus, Weiss loyally carried Emerson’s standard of individual consciousness into the postbellum period, shoring Idealism against both the amorality of the new science and the rapacious market economy. Fichte’s chief American representative, Weiss was convinced that the project of his generation was to establish as the bedrock of a genuinely inclusive American faith “some necessary truths that express real organic relations between the finite and the infinite.”29 Toward that end, Bartol recalled, Weiss always had been “earnest.” If some were troubled by his unusual temperament, “so like a rustling changeable silk, or an opal flashing with many hues,” still, he loved truth and was “as steady as a drillsergeant at his post.” Weiss’s courage never shifted or flinched, Bartol concluded.30 To him, consciousness was supreme, and the scientific materialism of the Positivists but the lantern show of their minds.

  If Weiss continued to champion the pure Idealism that had so inspired the first-generation Transcendentalists, David Atwood Wasson (1823–87) cultivated a mystical sense of unity everywhere revealed in the universe that links him to the young Emerson. Another minister present at Bartol’s during planning for the Free Religious Association, Wasson, like his host, never formally joined the group but often spoke at its meetings and contributed to The Radical and its intellectual successor, The Index.31 He was born in Brooksville, Maine, son of a shipbuilder, and raised in an isolated, orthodox religious environment. He was a hardy child until his eighteenth year, when a fight with a bully during “the political contest of 1840” left him with a painful spinal injury that progressively crippled him. After a prolonged period when he was bedridden and in pain, he attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and in 1845, Bowdoin College, a logical choice for someone of his background. In 1849 he entered the Bangor Theological Seminary, a conservative seminary second in reputation only to Andover, to pursue his goal of the ministry.

  Around this time, Wasson encountered Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. As one of his biographers puts it, to Wasson, Carlyle’s “freedom of mental action, the sincerity, the hatred of pretence, the passion for spiritual light, the faith in the soul, came like a breath of inspiration.” Transcendentalism was in the air, and he “was swept by it towards divinity.”32 He was never the same. When he left Bangor two years later, he was ordained over an orthodox church in Groveland, Massachusetts, but he ran into difficulties because of his increasingly liberal religious views, particularly his belief that regeneration and salvation were not gifts of faith, but were obtained by “intelligent moral culture and spiritual development.”33 His preaching satisfied the congregation, that is, a majority of the parishioners, but not the church members, who controlled the organization, and on their complaint a council of neighboring churches urged Wasson’s dismissal.

  Shortly thereafter he met Higginson, ministering in nearby Newbury, who lent him books and introduced him to fellow Unitarians. Wasson’s intellect grew exponentially—in natural history, in Swedenborg’s doctrines, and in the German language. When Higginson took a leave from his new parish in Worcester, Massachusetts, Wasson substituted for him and after his return remained as his colleague. Wasson’s chronic ill health, however, prevented him from settling long in one location. There followed a year and a half in Concord, after extended hydropathy for his painful spine, and then a year in Medford, as the houseguest of George Luther Stearns, abolitionist and member of the Secret Six. In the early 1860s Wasson preached to much acclaim as far west as Cincinnati and also in Boston-area churches, most notably at Parker’s Music Hall; and in May 1865 that congregation, finding him a worthy successor to their recently deceased minister, installed him over the Twenty-eighth Congregational Society.

  His biographer remembered him as one of the finest minds of his generation—“clear, sinewy, delicate, careful, well furnished.” His preaching was not “effusive, glittering, wordy, or ‘eloquent.’” Rather, it was “compact, full of movement for thoughtful listeners, but demanding close attention, unconventional, original, [and] free from the commonplaces of the pulpit.”34 But Wasson was also a harsh judge of what he took as others’ weaknesses. He complained of the unfinished character of Emerson’s compositions, for example, and detected in him “a disposition to catch the common ear by the point of his sentences” rather than through closely reasoned argument. 35 For his part, Emerson approved of this sharp new voice among the faithful and loomed large behind Wasson’s theological pronouncements.

  It was Theodore Parker, however, who influenced Wasson’s understanding of the clergy’s central role in reform, making all the more significant his installation over Parker’s Twenty-eighth Congregational Society, when Wasson delivered his own sermon, on The Radical Creed. Clearly honored by his selection, he assured the assembled—“th
e most radical religious society in America”—of his commitment to their founders’ ideals.36 He described his belief in a “supernatural” God, as opposed to a “preternatural” or “contranatural” one. “The supernatural is God; the supernatural is the only Reality,” Wasson explained, while nature was “the form under which Reality condescends to be seen by the physical eye.”37 Wasson also weighed in, as his predecessor had done, on the ongoing debates over Christ’s miracles. He explained that belief in a supernatural God precluded the kinds of events most Christians thought of when they used the word “miracle.” One could only believe in preternatural miracles if one held that nature was “an opaque screen or wall between God and man, sundering and hiding them from each other,” a notion, he concluded, “the spawn of a materialistic mock philosophy.”38 Rather, miracle implied the constant revelation of God to man, through nature.

  Wasson believed that the church was a spiritual community with distinctive bonds. “My life is distinct,” he explained, but not separate from someone else’s. Men are not merely “tagged together by fate and natural necessity; by one’s liability to take infection from another; by your need of some one to make your coat, and the like.” Rather, the bond of unity was “a root of faithfulness,” as “soul is fertilized by soul; inspiration goes with a true communion; God is implicated in the relationship between man and man.” He separates himself from heaven, Wasson explained, who separates himself “in love, in interest, in spiritual fellowship,” from his fellow man.39