American Transcendentalism

by Philip F Gura

  Noticeably absent, however, from the pages of The Christian Examiner—indeed, from any early discussion of philosophical Idealism—was the young Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson, even though these European thinkers, in different ways, contributed to what became his cardinal tenet, the supremacy of individual consciousness. Soon enough Emerson joined the incipient revolution, if on his own terms. But in 1836 the growing insurgency’s leadership lay in different hands, among individuals more deeply affected by firsthand exposure to European thought who recognized that the Idealists’ emphasis on consciousness could lead not only to egotism but also to a profound sense of universal brotherhood. When Transcendentalism burst on the scene, its adherents aligned themselves on one side or the other of this intellectual and moral fault line that defined the movement’s ethical dimensions.

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  TRANSCENDENTALISM EMERGENT

  On September 12, 1836, thirteen hundred alumni, eighty invited guests, and two hundred undergraduates sat down under a pagoda-like pavilion in Harvard Yard to celebrate the university’s bicentennial. Earlier that day the institution’s chief marshal had called forward the alumni sequentially by year of graduation, with an eighty-six-year-old member of the class of 1774 leading the procession to Cambridge’s Unitarian Church. There the assembly heard the first rendition of Samuel Gilman’s song “Fair Harvard,” and a two-hour historical address from university President Josiah Quincy. The attendees then filed back into the yard for toasts, libations, and dinner, a celebration that lasted until 8:00 p.m., after which they dispersed, their way lit with lamps in the dormitory windows “arranged in patterns and mottoes.” All agreed that it had been a celebration befitting the august occasion, the two hundredth anniversary of the nation’s oldest institution of higher learning.1

  That day marked another meeting, of less immediate significance. At some point during the festivities four alumni repaired to Willard’s Hotel in Cambridge to discuss plans for regular meetings of a new discussion club. Frederic Henry Hedge, frequent contributor to The Christian Examiner who the year before had left Cambridge to minister to a church in Bangor, Maine, had called the group together. Since June he had corresponded with Ralph Waldo Emerson about what Emerson termed “the project of the symposium.”2 George Ripley and George Putnam, Unitarian ministers in Boston and Roxbury, respectively, joined them. As Hedge later recalled, the four met to “confer together on the state of current opinion in theology and philosophy,” which they found very unsatisfactory. In particular, they criticized the empiricist philosophical foundation on which Unitarianism was based. James Marsh’s edition of Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, as well as some of the essays of the Scot Thomas Carlyle, had moved them to new considerations, and they sensed “a promise of a new era in intellectual life.”3

  The initial discussion went well, and the foursome adjourned until September nineteenth, when a much larger group met at Ripley’s home in Boston. Among the number, in addition to Hedge, Emerson, and Ripley, were Amos Bronson Alcott, an educational reformer; Robert Bartlett, a recent Harvard graduate; Cyrus Bartol, another Unitarian minister; Orestes A. Brownson, a social reformer embarking on a new ministry for Boston’s laboring classes; the Reverend James Freeman Clarke, visiting from Louisville, Kentucky, where he edited a liberal Christian journal, The Western Messenger, and preached to a Unitarian congregation; Convers Francis, minister to Watertown and a prominent Unitarian; Theodore Parker, a recent graduate of the Divinity School; and Charles Stearns Wheeler, a Harvard undergraduate and Emerson protégé. Over the next four years the club, with an ever-shifting membership, but with Emerson, Ripley, and Hedge as anchors, met nearly thirty times, maintaining a focus on significant religious and philosophical issues and occasionally broaching topics of wider social concern, from “Is Mysticism an element in Christianity?” to “the doctrine of Reform.”4

  The meetings had only one cardinal rule, “that no man should be admitted whose presence excluded [discussion of] any one topic.”5 People of less radical sympathies, as long as they were open-minded, were welcome. The great Unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing occasionally attended, as well as James Walker, editor of The Christian Examiner.6 Late in his life Emerson fondly recalled the intellectual give-and-take at these gatherings. One unsympathetic and disgruntled participant, for example, declared that, “it seemed to him like going to heaven in a swing.” Another reported that at one knotty point in a discussion a visiting Englishman interrupted one of Alcott’s monologues because a lady near him wished “to inquire whether omnipotence abnegates attribute.”7

  By 1840, however, with many competing activities and organizations centering different participants in the Transcendentalist movement, the gathering, sometimes called Hedge’s Club in his honor when he returned to Boston for visits, came to a close. In attendance at the last recorded meeting, on September 20 of that year, were the clergyman and reformer (and nephew of the Unitarian leader William Ellery Channing) William Henry Channing; Margaret Fuller, the most remarkable woman in the group; Elizabeth Peabody, who had been William Ellery Channing’s amanuensis and recently had opened a foreign-language lending library and bookstore in Boston; and Hedge, Ripley, and Parker. In keeping with the club’s focus, that night they debated “the organization of a new church.” They could not know it, occupied as they were with so many other plans—they soon would start their own journal, for example—but in retrospect this meeting was as momentous as the first. As one historian of the movement has written, it signaled the end of the Transcendentalist movement as “a unified entity.” The proliferation of so many different views of what constituted reform, he observed, prevented their meeting “any longer on common ground.”8

  The remark is just, but of more immediate concern is the group’s coalescence in 1836, for they then had quite specific views of what constituted “Reform,” specifically as it flowed from their reading in contemporary European philosophy and social theory. That was, indeed, the year of wonders for the movement, as the novel ideas then beginning to circulate began to move American liberal religion in wholly new directions.9 What motivated Ripley, Hedge, and their cohort to initiate these meetings, and how did their conversations (and other, less formal ones) eventuate not only in challenges to the religious status quo but also in a spectrum of reform activities?

  Among the younger Unitarians who attended the Transcendental Club’s meetings, none was more remarkable than Orestes Brownson (1803–76). Born with a twin sister, Daphne, in Stockbridge, Vermont, to a poor farming family, Brownson knew years of privation. His father died when the twins were two, leaving his wife with five small children and no means of income. She eventually sent them to live with friends and relatives, and placed six-year-old Orestes with a family in Royalton, fifteen miles away. He did not return to his mother and siblings until 1817, when they moved to Ballston Spa, New York.

  While he was in Royalton the boy’s interest in religion intensified, particularly after a revival in a nearby church in which conservative evangelical principles reigned. At Ballston Spa, the relatively new creed of Universalism was all the rage; and for a short time he joined his mother, aunt, and other family members at this denomination’s services. As Brownson relates in his autobiography, however, he remained religiously unsettled, unable to shake his nagging skepticism about most religious doctrine.

  In 1822 a Presbyterian minister comforted him in his spiritual distress. Brownson soon joined this man’s church as a full member, having testified to a conversion experience and been baptized. But this spiritual respite proved as brief as his others. Bristling at Calvinism’s seemingly unreasonable demands, he returned to the Universalists, admiring their belief in the inherent dignity of each individual and the promise of eventual salvation to all believers. After more geographical and intellectual wandering—he traveled throughout western New York and even as far west as Detroit—Brownson prepared for the Universalist ministry. In June 1826 he was ordained over his first congregation, in Jaffrey, New Ha
mpshire.

  The next year, however, he returned to Ballston Spa to marry Sally Healy, and he commenced a series of moves through eastern and central New York, as far west as the Finger Lakes region, ministering to different Universalist groups and working on a number of religious periodicals. In his contributions he expressed what would become lifelong concerns, particularly a distrust of established religion and sympathy for the plight of the lower classes. Some of these essays drew the attention of prominent freethinkers, including Frances (Fanny) Wright and Robert Dale Owen, leaders of the radical Working Men’s Party. When Wright lectured in Utica, New York, she accepted Brownson’s invitation to speak in nearby Auburn, where he was living. Her free-thought views met much opposition, however, and soured Brownson’s relationship with his parishioners. He spent much time explaining how he could be allied with such a supposed infidel and still maintain his faith. By 1830 his situation had become untenable, and he left his ministry just before the General Convention of Universalists in New England excommunicated him.

  During the next two years Brownson edited the Genesee Republican, a paper devoted to working-class issues in which he touted such radical proposals as free universal education, strict laws against monopolies, and the abolition of imprisonment for debt. In 1830 he discovered William Ellery Channing’s sermons as well as the writings of the French Christian socialist Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon. Fertilized by Channing’s emphasis on the inherent goodness of man and Saint-Simon’s belief that a true Christian has to work for social justice and harmony among all classes, Brownson took what he saw as the next logical step, to Unitarianism. By the summer of 1832 he had a small liberal congregation in Walpole, New Hampshire, and within two years moved to another, in Canton, Massachusetts, closer to Boston. He continued to read in French thought, particularly Benjamin Constant’s writings on religion and Victor Cousin’s on philosophy, and he began as well to explore German Idealism, to which he was introduced through the writings of Karl Follen.10

  Brownson’s move to Canton brought him in contact with many other young Unitarians. These clergymen, aware of his powerful articles about the working classes and his advocacy of rational free inquiry, viewed him as an important ally in their attempts to extend their faith to the urban masses. Brownson might offer, through Unitarianism, a Christian alternative to such freethinkers as Abner Kneeland, whose skepticism had led to his total disparagement of religion and several public trials for blasphemy.

  Foremost among these younger Unitarians was George Ripley, who recognized in Brownson a powerful voice in the same register. In 1837 Ripley wrote George Bancroft, a prominent member of the Democratic Party, that with such men as Brownson he “hoped to see the time, when religion, philosophy & politics will be united in a Holy Trinity, for the redemption & blessedness of our social institutions.” 11 Through Ripley’s efforts, Brownson soon was presented with just such an opportunity—to replace Joseph Tuckerman as minister at large to Boston’s poor. Chafing under a low salary and the needs of an ever-growing family, and lobbied heavily by Unitarian friends in the city, Brownson accepted. In the summer of 1836, the year of Harvard’s bicentennial and the Transcendental Club’s first meeting, he moved his family to Chelsea, near the center of the Unitarian universe. “I am trying to democratize religion and philosophy,” he wrote Bancroft.12 Now he walked shoulder to shoulder with other liberal Christians who derived from Romantic philosophy and religion the impetus to reinvigorate their faith and work toward a realization of more democratic ideals.

  In these years Brownson was not easy to miss. He was imposing, over six feet tall and broad-shouldered, his black hair brushed straight back without a part. He had hazel-brown eyes, a long upper lip, and hands in proportion to his large frame. Particularly distinctive was a swallowtail coat, worn “at all hours of the day, even in his study.” A powerful speaker, to some he was abrasive; to others, uncouth; and to some, who feared his social radicalism, downright intimidating. His regimen was Spartan: he frequently worked until three in the morning, ate little (but drank strong coffee all day long), and at a time when temperance was in the air, already had sworn total abstinence. His only noted vice, besides being cantankerous, was chewing tobacco.13

  His intellect was just as striking. Although he had never attended college, making him unusual among his fellow Unitarian ministers, he read Latin, French, and German and had a seemingly boundless appetite for works on religion and philosophy. He also wrote prodigiously. When he did not have enough copy for an issue of his Boston Quarterly Review, he dashed off articles and reviews (even of his own works), frequently filling an entire issue and thus lending an ironic justness to the journal’s subsequent name, Brownson’s Quarterly Review.14 His collected works, far from complete, comprise twenty volumes. His friend Isaac Hecker put it baldly: Brownson, he recalled, “was routine in nothing.”15

  He had one other distinguishing characteristic. As the conservative Trinitarian clergyman Noah Porter wrote, Brownson was “manifestly and avowedly in a state of continual transition,—in a certain condition of perpetually becoming, but of never being.”16 But although he may have been, by his own account, “mercurial” in intellectual matters, he never wavered in his vocation. His was one long attempt to realize a social harmony he had never been fortunate enough to know, and particularly to provide the laboring classes with the education and ministry they needed to better their lot. This devotion to bringing the kingdom of God to earth is what convinced Ripley and his friends that the Canton minister, born and raised on society’s margins and yet versed in the same Continental philosophy that captivated them, should succeed Tuckerman as minister at large to Boston’s poor.17

  In Ripley, Brownson found a soul mate. Later in life, long after he had broken with the Transcendentalists, he testified to his friend’s influence. “In the formation of my mind,” Brownson wrote, “in systematizing my ideas, and in general development and culture, I owe more to him than to any other man among Protestants.” Brownson concluded, “I loved him as I loved no other man.”18 In 1836 these two were the de facto field generals of the emergent Transcendentalist movement, popularizing Idealist thought through their seminal publications and applying it to pressing social needs. Despite Frederic Hedge’s introduction of European philosophy to readers of The Christian Examiner, for example, in Bangor, he was too distant to exercise any concerted influence on his peers. Convers Francis, despite his presence at the Transcendentalist Club’s early meetings, was only a fellow traveler in Transcendentalist circles.19 His good friend, Theodore Parker, eventually a lion among the group, was still at divinity school. Waldo Emerson, another promising foot soldier, had few publications to his credit and none with the intellectual heft of Ripley’s or Brownson’s essays in The Christian Examiner.

  Accepting his new position, Brownson lost little time in making himself heard. What he said, both in journals and from the pulpit, derived primarily from the French thinkers whom he had read since his days in New Hampshire. Taking his cue from Benjamin Constant, for example, he argued that man “is determined to [religion] by an interior sentiment,” a “fundamental law of his being, a law invariable, eternal, indestructible.” He also believed that the world’s religious institutions were in dialectical evolution, and as each faith failed to satisfy man’s continuing hunger for spiritual truth, another superseded it and moved him closer to that goal. Protestantism’s break with Catholicism was one such event, and Unitarianism’s revolt from Calvinism another. The current ferment within Unitarian ranks was the most recent example of each age’s subsequent rediscovery of the internal, eternal wellspring of religious belief.20 Brownson also recognized a “distinction between head and heart, the mind and the soul, the understanding and the affections,” and thus was convinced of the justness of Constant’s belief in a universal religious “sentiment.”21 Locating this in the “heart” or soul opened a way for dissident Unitarians to revivify what they viewed as an emotionally bankrupt faith.

  Prior to mov
ing to Chelsea, Brownson had given a series of free lectures on Christianity in the Swedenborgian Chapel in Boston, approvingly reported by the Boston Daily Advertiser. Before long he became a sought-after intellectual property in the city. In May 1836 he began to preach at Lyceum Hall on Hanover Street, and soon thereafter he garnered enough support to organize a Society for the Promotion of Christian Union and Progress, his chief congregation for the next three years. This meeting averaged no fewer than five hundred attendees, and after only a few weeks it had to move to a much larger hall, the city’s Masonic Temple. Word of Brownson’s success, based on his heartfelt response to his parishioners’ needs, spread through the city. Soon enough he was ready to offer the general public the principles on which he had founded his “church of the future.”

  Brownson’s New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church appeared late in the autumn of 1836.22 In it he was most indebted to Constant, particularly to his great Of Religion. Brownson’s main argument was that his contemporaries misunderstood the true meaning of Christ. What was that? Nothing less than the reconciliation of the two great social systems on which the world had developed: one based in “Spiritualism” and represented by the Eastern world and Asia; the other on “Materialism,” which had ruled Greece and Rome. The former, Brownson (again redacting Constant) explained, regarded purity or holiness as a matter of the Spirit alone and Matter as essentially impure. The latter rejected the claims of the Spirit and “count[ed] the body everything, earth all, heaven nothing.” These two terms had to be harmonized, and Christ had shown mankind how to do this. This was “the true idea of Christianity.” This, Brownson insisted, is the “atonement,” the at-one-ment with God.23