American Transcendentalism

by Philip F Gura

  Andrews Norton was a small man with a “delicate physical organization,” one friend recalled, and had a “light and rather pallid complexion.” Feeble-voiced—he did not have “sufficient compass to fill a large house”—he was at his best in his study and was an assiduous scholar.27 His colleague James Walker, professor of moral philosophy, recalled that Norton never troubled himself “to comprehend the ignorance or errors of other people,” including his students. This led to a rather limited pedagogy, for “he saw things so clearly himself, and stated them so clearly, that if a pupil failed to be convinced, he soon gave him up.”28 The Transcendentalist Orestes Brownson, who despised all that Norton stood for, was more pointed. “It is said,” he wrote in a review of one of Norton’s works, “that he usually sits in his room with the shutters drawn, which has the double effect of keeping the light out and the darkness in.” “This may be a calumny,” he continued archly, but his writings “afford no satisfactory refutation of it.”29 George Ripley, who also had put in time sparring with Norton, was more measured and yet verified the accuracy of both reports. Late in his life he observed that “the predominant qualities of [Norton’s] mind were clearness of perception, rigidity of judgment, accuracy of expression, and a chaste imagination.”30

  Stuart directly attacked William Ellery Channing’s sermon Unitarian Christianity (1819), the most famous manifesto of liberal Christianity, and the bullheaded young Norton quickly jumped to its defense with his Statement of Reasons. Moses Stuart was then probably the best-read scholar in biblical criticism in New England, his immersion in German scholarship so profound that at one point the Andover trustees, who every five years required each professor’s sworn allegiance to a formal creed, feared for his orthodoxy. They realized, however, that if their faculty were to defend the Trinitarian reading of the Bible position against that of liberal Christians, they had to adopt similar methods of textual scholarship, so Stuart escaped with just a censure.31

  The heated exchange between Stuart and Norton turned on the ultimate authority of biblical language. For Stuart the chief question was, what did the writers mean to convey in the biblical passages? His position, dictated by unwavering commitment to scriptural revelation, was that when the textual scholar had examined the Bible with the same philological, grammatical, and literary tools that he brought to any other ancient book—that is, when he had discerned the word’s meaning—the text, as the divinely ordained word of God, was authoritative. “It is orthodoxy in the highest sense of the word,” Stuart declared, and “everything which differs from it, which modifies it, which fritters it away, is heterodoxy, is heresy.” The biblical exegete’s only query should be, what thought did this or that passage convey? When this was answered philologically, a Christian was compelled “to believe what is thought, or else to reject the claim of divine authority.” One conducted scriptural studies by one’s philology, independent of one’s philosophy. But after such investigation, what he discerned was binding, because the Bible was inspired.32

  Stuart depended for his analysis on a group of mid-eighteenth-century Higher Critics subsequently known as the Neologians, specifically Michaelis (1717-91), J. A. Ernesti (1707-81), and, most important, J. S. Semler (1725-91). These scholars and their disciples, many of whom were conservative, evangelical Pietists who took pains not to allow their beliefs to dictate the results of their biblical research, had undertaken a radical reevaluation of Christian revelation and dogma on philological and grammatical grounds. Their highly rationalist view of the exegete’s task provides a textbook example of how the Age of Reason affected the study of the Bible, and their influence lingered well into the nineteenth century. Stuart was attracted to them because of their continuing respect for Trinitarian orthodoxy, attendant on their Pietism, for they still believed in Christ’s miracles as a demonstration of his divinity.33 Despite its novelty, their research supported a conservative understanding of scripture such as Stuart had sworn to maintain at Andover.

  Channing, however, took the same propositions in a different direction. He was influenced by the important distinction, popularized by Semler, that the Bible, rather than being literally the word of God, instead only contained it, a semantic distinction that opened the gates to linguistic and historical research that eventually undermined orthodox readings of scripture. Channing contended, following Semler, that before any text could be considered authoritative, it had to agree with the general spirit of the Bible, part of the universal truth Christ and his disciples revealed in the New Testament. The question Channing posed addressed not only what the original writer meant to convey, but whether his text was valid for all ages or merely referred to local, temporal situations, a distinction an informed interpreter could make. Channing also maintained that in many places the Bible dealt with issues about which men had received ideas from sources other than scripture itself, that is, from the writer’s culture. The biblical exegete thus had to restrain and modify scriptural language by known truths furnished by observation and experience, in a textbook application of the Common Sense philosophy.

  Trinitarians like Stuart rejected this idea because it placed final authority in man’s reason rather than in revelation. No one could modify a scriptural proposition to make it agree with man’s flawed judgment, a result of his fallen state. To Stuart, the significance of God’s word never changed over time, and assertion to the contrary only displayed man’s innate depravity. Because he sought to establish the theological authority of scripture within the tradition of orthodox Calvinism, Stuart used German scholarship to reinforce beliefs he already held. In a crucial admission, he vowed that he and his fellow Trinitarians never would undertake to “describe affirmatively the distinctions of the Godhead,” because such terms as “proceeding from the Godhead” and “the Logos made Flesh” were merely “a language of approximation,” feeble attempts to describe the indescribable. While language expressed enough of the truth of such matters to “excite our highest interest and command our best obedience,” words were only suggestive.34

  Although installed as Buckminster’s successor as Dexter Lecturer, Channing was not a profound textual scholar, and he never replied directly to Stuart’s attack on his sermon. Channing was much more important in his homiletic role and was widely regarded as America’s foremost Unitarian—Emerson even termed him, affectionately, “our Bishop”—who served as a model of the liberal Christian piety.35 The redoubtable Andrews Norton, however, needed little prompting to reply to Stuart, and in his inaugural discourse as Dexter Professor he clarified the role of the biblical scholar. In studying the Bible, he said, the responsible exegete had to acquaint himself “with all that collection of facts and rules, by the application of which the original text of the sacred writings is recovered as far as possible.” In addition, he had to master the languages in which they were written and thus be, “in the most comprehensive sense of the word, a philologist.” By studying the character of scriptural language, he continued, the philologist discovers “its intrinsic ambiguity and imperfection,” for “words taken alone” (that is, without exegesis) were “often inadequate to convey any one definite meaning.” Further, that meaning itself might be “loose and unsettled,” and thus could be fixed only by the exegete’s attention to “extrinsic considerations.”36

  In defending Channing, Norton elaborated these ideas and invoked Locke’s principles of language to argue that biblical words, like any others, were only “human instruments for the expression of human ideas.” Words expressed nothing but an idea or an aggregate of ideas that men associated with certain sounds or letters. Language represented what “the human understanding is capable of conceiving.” Thus, all that had ever been recorded (in scripture or elsewhere) could be understood rationally by intelligent men, for so far as words have meaning, Norton magisterially declared, “they are intelligible.” He was humble enough to admit that some truths finally were incomprehensible, but these could not be expressed explicitly through verbal signs. He did not specul
ate on hypothetical matters: his research led him to grapple only with “the historical circumstances surrounding scriptural language, its peculiarities of idiom, and the prepossessions of writer and audience.”37 He did not condescend to consider how divine wisdom was transmitted to earthly creatures, especially when it contradicted common sense, and he had no time for or interest in language’s “intrinsic ambiguity.”

  Intuition, then, the flights of imagination during an inspired state, had nothing to do with understanding scriptural truth. Cultural differences and lack of linguistic sophistication accounted for most misrepresentations of biblical language and misunderstanding of Christian doctrine (like those, for example, between Unitarians and Trinitarians) because “figures and turns of expression familiar in one language are strange in another.” Correct interpretation of passages that seemed to “bear a Trinitarian sense” but in fact, on closer study, supported a Unitarian reading, could be achieved only by considering the writer’s character, his “habits of thinking and feeling,” his “common state of expression,” his “settled opinions and beliefs,” the “general state of things during the time in which he lived,” and the “particular local and temporary circumstances present to his mind while writing.”38 A writer’s specific words, Saint Paul’s or Tertullian’s, were the result of social and historical context.

  This seminal debate over the import of Higher Criticism on American Christianity involved figures from two distinct and opposed denominational camps, each drawing different conclusions from similar historical and linguistic exploration of the Bible. The influence of the Higher Criticism, however, also was felt within individual denominations, with equally divisive effects. The Unitarian clergyman Orville Dewey recalled, for example, how after attending Williams College, a bastion of orthodoxy, he entered Andover with the thought of using the new biblical criticism to buttress orthodoxy. “But the more I studied it,” he wrote, “the more I doubted.” Ironically, Stuart himself was the problem. In his “crucible,” Dewey continued, “many a solid text evaporated and left no residue of proof.” Dewey eventually found his way to Unitarianism and ministered to its largest New York congregation.39

  James Marsh was another orthodox scholar challenged by the Higher Criticism. Born in Hartford, Vermont, in 1794, he was raised in a staunchly orthodox household. When in 1817 he decided to pursue a career in the ministry, his family assumed that he would attend Andover. He was not happy with that institution’s academic regimen, however, and late in 1820, as Channing’s sermon on Unitarian Christianity was making such a stir, he thought that the stimulation of Cambridge might cure his intellectual unrest. Two months there convinced him of the Unitarians’ moral and spiritual failings, and he soon reentered Andover, where Stuart won him over to the new exegetical studies. By February of 1821 Marsh reported that under Stuart’s guidance he felt as though he had “conquered” the German language. He plunged into biblical exegesis head-on by undertaking a critical reevaluation of both testaments.40

  In 1824 Marsh was ordained to the Congregational ministry in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he served for two years, until the University of Vermont in Burlington, seeking new intellectual leadership, offered him its presidency. Throughout his association with that institution—in 1833 he stepped down to become professor of moral and intellectual philosophy—the influence of the new German thought on his writings was everywhere apparent. He believed that because of the Higher Criticism, Christians needed a new way to describe and discuss religious experience; that is, they had to rethink the power of language to capture and make accessible Christianity’s essence—the same problem that preoccupied Stuart and Norton.

  Marsh’s interest in this subject was evident as early as 1829 in a review of his mentor’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews, in which Stuart sought to reconcile belief in an intuitive faith—one based in the heart rather than the head—with Trinitarian Calvinist dogma. Arguing that the fragmented state of New England’s churches resulted from misconceptions of the vocabulary deployed by differing factions, Marsh moved inexorably toward Stuart’s position, that language was best understood as figurative rather than literal. The concept of “redemption,” for example, was comprehensible only when one realized that rational analysis of scriptural language yielded only that which could be comprehended by one’s logical faculties. To have a true sense of what the ancients meant by “redemption,” one had to consider the term imaginatively or intuitively, coming to know, as Marsh put it, “the inward and subjective nature of it.” Unfortunately, most scholars neglected to do so. “Situated as we are in society,” Marsh wrote, “we unavoidably learn words before we can have much insight into the meaning of them.” Men acquired the habit “of using them without any definite and precise meaning.”41

  The apostle’s description of the doctrine of redemption once had been vital, but it no longer made sense in analytic or rational terms. “For those who have the whole of the New Testament in their heads,” Marsh wrote, “and read it aright, and feel its powers, the language of the Apostles ought to mean more, than these metaphorical representations, literally interpreted, could express.” Head and heart thus had to be reconciled; and anyone, Unitarian or Trinitarian, who set out to explain the doctrines of faith through logical analysis alone evinced a failure of imagination.

  Where did Marsh get such ideas? In good measure through his receptive reading of Johann Gottfried von Herder’s On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782), whose first American edition he translated and shepherded through his brother-in-law’s press in Burlington the same year that he resigned his university presidency. Herder had long been of interest to American biblical scholars. As far back as 1812, for example, Stuart had tried to persuade his young friend Everett to translate Herder’s works and was willing to lend his own copies for that purpose. Everett made some progress but never published the result, and it was left to Stuart’s younger student Marsh to complete the task.42 In 1826 he published several installments of his translation in the Biblical Repertory, and seven years later he made the entire work widely available.43

  Herder was a progenitor of the “mythical” school in biblical criticism. He argued that the Bible’s stories, like Greek or Roman mythology, were not factual but true only poetically, whetting mankind’s appetite for higher things by appeals to the imagination. The historical appurtenances of a biblical story were thus incidental to its main instructional and inspirational purposes, which the reader could grasp if he treated the text as he would any other example of complex literature. Further, Herder believed that such inspirational texts derived from a people’s culture, their “spirit,” a notion of literature that saw religious belief as formative of a people’s nationhood, an idea that resonated in Europe, caught as it was in the throes of nationalist aspirations. Inspired poetry thus was the fount of both national identity and spiritual inspiration.

  When young George Ripley reviewed Herder’s eighteen-volume collected works in The Christian Examiner in 1835, he provided readers with a detailed intellectual pedigree of the German scholar. Herder, Ripley wrote, derived from Semler, Ernesti, and Michaelis, who had sought to make theology “a science resting on its own merits.” But their descendant was unique in having recognized that scripture had to be read as sacred poetry—“Oriental writings” that belonged “to the infancy of the world.” If any doubted the importance of this observation, Ripley continued, in Herder’s voluminous writings one “found the germ of most of the important thoughts, which have since produced such a mighty revolution in the prevalent conceptions of religion.”44 Ripley’s comment proved prescient, for Marsh’s role in the transfer of European culture to the United States was not restricted to the Higher Criticism. With the introduction of Herder, however, to a wider audience through his translation of On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, anyone interested in the topic could entertain a wholly new way of understanding the language and meaning of scripture.

  One such person was Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804–94),
a Salem, Massachusetts, native then working as an assistant in Bronson Alcott’s Temple School in Boston. Peabody had strong Unitarian credentials and in 1834 was well enough known among Boston’s intelligentsia for The Christian Examiner, the Unitarian publication of record, to ask her to evaluate Marsh’s edition of Herder’s On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry. She admired Herder’s work enough to use it as a text for discussion in a series of “conversations” she held for women in Boston, and she welcomed the opportunity to weigh in on the work’s significance.45

  Given her Unitarian upbringing, Peabody began her review predictably. She stressed that the words of the Old Testament were the product of men “limited in their power of taking in what was so freely poured upon them by their partaking in the spirit and character of the age in which they lived.” But she quickly recognized that the uniqueness of Old Testament texts resided in their poetry, what she described as the “expression of abstract and spiritual truths by sensible objects, by the forms, colors, sounds, changes, [and] combinations of external nature.” This poetic language, she wrote, existed because the human mind “in its original principles,” and natural creation “in its simplicity,” were but different images of the same creator, who had linked them “for the reciprocal development of their mutual treasures.”46

  Primitive languages thus were “naturally poetic.” But as society “ramified” and people communicated more by imitation and custom than spontaneously, “a thousand arbitrary and accidental associations connected themselves with words” and deadened the impressions they naturally made. Language moved to a level of analytical or technical expression in which words were no longer pictures of the natural world but merely social conventions, as Locke had argued. This language she termed “prose,” which, although it provided a more precise expression of the differences among things, sacrificed, Peabody noted, the “force, impressiveness, and exciting power” of poetry. While the most poetic expression existed only in the earliest stages of the human civilization, it remained as a part of all subsequent language through metaphor. Herder had recognized this when he investigated the primitive poetical radicals of the Hebrew language, pointing out that the true genius of the Hebrew tongue was displayed in its “formation and derivation of words from the original roots, and of those original roots from external and internal nature.”47