American Transcendentalism

by Philip F Gura

  He also discussed Protestantism’s revolt against the Catholic Church after that church had bastardized Christ’s message, and Protestantism’s subsequent failure, when it had superseded Catholicism, to embrace the world of the spirit. Now Christians raised a universal cry against “the frigid utilitarianism of the last century,” its “money-getting” and “desire for worldly wealth and renown.” Men were leaving “the Outward for the Inward, and craving something more fervent, living and soul-kindling.”24 Brownson’s church of the future would reconcile Spirit and Matter. “We must go forward,” he urged, “but we can take not a step forward, but on the condition of uniting these two hitherto hostile principles.” “PROGRESS is our law and our first step is UNION.” And what of Christ’s Second Coming? It would be realized “when the idea which he represents, that is, the idea of atonement, shall be fully realized.”25

  Brownson ranged through world history to illustrate how different religions had emphasized one or the other side of this great duality, Matter and Spirit, pointing out that all faiths had some good in them, originating as they did in man’s inherent spirituality. He invoked Cousin’s Eclecticism, which synthesized these opposing elements. Other philosophers—Hegel, Fries, and Jacobi, he noted—had anticipated or contributed to this Eclectic method, but Cousin had “perfected” it. He had demonstrated that “Humanity, Nature and God have precisely the same laws, that what we find in Nature and Humanity we may also find in God.”26 All that was needed was a church to embody and act on this philosophy.

  Brownson saw glimmerings of hope in Germany’s churches, especially in the movement commenced by Herder. He had the most faith, however, in Schleiermacher, “a man remarkable for warmth of feeling, and coolness of thought, a preacher and a philosopher, a theologian and a man of science, a student and a man of business.” Brownson also believed that the atonement of which Schleiermacher spoke would be realized first in the United States, where more than in any other country “the man of thought” was united “with the man of action.” The time was not distant, Brownson prophesied, “when our whole population will be philosophers, and all our philosophers will be practical men.” He sought to align his church along the same great principles that Christ, the “God-Man,” symbolized. “UNION” and “PROGRESS” thus was the only authentic creed of the New Church.27

  Brownson’s small book was both paean to and a blueprint for a universal harmony it was his task to help initiate. Everywhere he saw signs of men’s eagerness for such a new social order. “There is a universal language already in use,” he wrote. “Men are beginning to understand one another, and their mutual understanding will beget mutual sympathy, and mutual sympathy will bind them together and to God.”28 In his Boston ministry he sought to expedite the arrival of this church of the future.

  Troubled by the book’s social radicalism yet respectful of its author, James Walker, editor of The Christian Examiner, apologized in the March 1837 issue for not allotting it more space. He explained that he thought it would not find wide readership because of its “novel application throughout of a few terms, such as spiritualism, materialism, and atonement, which have the effect to give the whole a strange and foreign air,” code for Brownson’s indebtedness to French and German thought. Walker never doubted Brownson’s sincerity but was disappointed that his odd locutions probably would make him lose public sympathy.29 This did not bother Boston’s minister at large, however, who adhered to Saint-Simon’s maxim, “Eden is before us, not behind us.”30 For the next several years Brownson preached a gospel of union and progress in ever stronger terms and never flinched from exposing the hollowness he found at the core of American democracy. Constant, Cousin, and other European thinkers had shown him the dignity of each human being. He would not let his colleagues forget it.

  During this period Ripley’s interests ran parallel to Brownson’s. He touted Cousin’s Eclecticism, becoming the Frenchman’s foremost American exponent. He also was increasingly committed to social reform, particularly as Boston’s poor began to encroach on the neighborhood surrounding his Purchase Street Church. Like Brownson, he, too, welcomed the Higher Critics’ scholarship on the New Testament. But more than his friend, he emphasized Schleiermacher’s contribution to nineteenth-century theology—specifically, his insistence on the primacy of feeling to the spiritual life. Concomitantly, Ripley grew increasingly concerned with the Unitarians’ emphasis on Christ’s miracles as proof of Christianity’s truth. In several publications at mid-decade Ripley broached these topics in ways that preoccupied Transcendentalists into the early 1840s.

  Ripley was born in 1802 in Greenfield, on the Connecticut River in north-central Massachusetts, the second youngest of ten children. Compared with Brownson’s, his religious pilgrimage was straightforward. Although his family had been orthodox Christians, during his adolescence his father, a merchant who had moved from Boston, adopted Unitarianism. When his son was ready to enter college, the elder Ripley encouraged him to apply to Harvard rather than to more conservative Yale, the choice of many Connecticut Valley residents. In 1819, to prepare for his entrance examinations, Ripley moved in with relatives near Boston and was tutored by the Reverend Ezra Ripley of Concord, a patriarch among Unitarian ministers. The young Ripley also got reacquainted with his cousin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, then a sophomore at Harvard. Ripley entered the college that fall.31

  Upon graduation in 1823, not yet fully won over to Unitarianism, he briefly considered attending Andover Theological Seminary, but his father convinced him to stay in Cambridge to study divinity. Ripley’s notebooks for the years 1824 through 1827 display much soul-searching about whether to abandon orthodoxy for the new liberal Christianity, and in particular how Unitarians might remedy their seeming inability to invest their faith with heartfelt piety. What sealed his commitment to Unitarianism, however, were the ministry and writings of William Ellery Channing, who epitomized the faith that the young man sought. Meeting Channing, Ripley knew that he wanted to become a Unitarian minister. Accordingly, in September 1826, with the imprimatur of both Channing and Andrews Norton (who had taken a particular interest in him), Ripley laid the cornerstone of a new Unitarian church on the corner of Purchase Street at Pearl Street, near Griffin Wharf in Boston, an occasion at which Henry Ware, Jr., Professor of Pulpit Eloquence and Pastoral Care at Harvard Divinity School, officiated. Later that fall, John Kirkland, Harvard’s president, preached the young man’s ordination sermon, another sign of Cambridge’s high hopes for the young man’s ministry.

  During these years Ripley was clean-shaven, his brown hair “curled in close, crisp ringlets,” and his pale face set off by goldrimmed spectacles. Although appearing sober, formal, punctilious, and almost ascetic, he actually had “a fund of humor in which his friends delighted” and an intellect every bit as voracious as that of his new friend Brownson.32 Assuming the pulpit in the small stone Purchase Street Church, over a congregation composed primarily of the “middling” sort, Ripley preached in earnest Unitarianism’s central message, a belief in a universal, internal religious principle that validated faith and united all men and women.

  Ripley’s studies and writings made him America’s foremost proponent of Eclecticism, but he also lived by Schleiermacher’s theology. Ripley had come to this point after extensive reading not only in the Common Sense philosophers and Kant but as well in Jonathan Edwards, America’s foremost eighteenth-century theologian, whose sense of grace as an internal, transformative principle accorded with Ripley’s belief in the centrality of intuition or feeling to the spiritual life. As late as 1838, Ripley had praised Edwards for his belief that the human mind, under certain conditions, had “the power of perceiving and judging spiritual truth.” Despite Edwards’s Calvinist vision, Ripley added, his advocacy of the faculty of the spiritual intuition formed “an invaluable contribution to a sound religious philosophy,” a tantalizing suggestion that Transcendentalism was descended from the religion of the heart that the New Lights of the Great Awakening h
ad championed.33 Schleiermacher postulated a religious element in all mankind from birth, prompting Ripley, as he translated Friedrich Lücke’s “Recollections of Schleiermacher” and introduced it to The Christian Examiner’s readers, to praise Schleiermacher as someone who sought to reconcile religion and science. His theological principles, Ripley proclaimed, had announced nothing less than “a new era” in religious history.34

  What precisely did Schleiermacher offer? To Ripley, it was religion “in its primitive elements.”35 For Schleiermacher, religion did not consist in knowledge or action but in feeling, in religious emotion. Grace was one’s perception of the divinity of the quotidian through this religious “feeling,” an insight that was utterly transformative, making one’s entire life an experience of the holy. Schleiermacher’s relocation of religion in the heart of each believer powerfully expressed the philosophy of Romantic individualism that swept the Continent. Enshrining as it did the individual consciousness, this belief also was congruent with America’s democratic experiment, making Schleiermacher, as Ripley put it, the chief “exponent” of his age.

  Ripley’s endorsement of Schleiermacher’s theology informed his Discourses on the Philosophy of Religion, Addressed to Doubters Who Wish to Believe (1836), a book that joined Brownson’s New Views as a direct challenge to Unitarian orthodoxy and whose title was indebted to Schleiermacher’s On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. Comprising six discourses that Ripley had preached two years earlier, his book was aimed specifically at those with “a lurking suspicion” that there was something “unsound in the fabric of their faith.”36 Acknowledging his indebtedness to Idealism in general and Schleiermacher in particular, Ripley proposed that every truly religious man was “conscious of an inward nature, which is the source of more important and comprehensive ideas, than any which the external senses suggest.” God revealed himself to man through “Reason,” the faculty of perceiving “primitive, spiritual truth.” Reason, Ripley continued, was “the ultimate standard.” “Existing in different degrees, in different men, it is found in some degree in all.”37

  In his fifth discourse, the only one previously published, Ripley addressed the common error of confounding Christianity with the entire contents of the Bible, a topic that related to questions of scriptural exegesis. “How are we to ascertain the real doctrine of Christ?” Ripley asked. Quite simply, by the “rational interpretation of the language of the sacred writers.”38 In other words, if scriptural language, properly translated, suggested something contrary to reason, it was not part of Christ’s message.

  Here Ripley stepped into the unresolved debate initiated by Channing and Stuart that continued to roil the Unitarian denomination, now challenged by those within its ranks. In an essay in The Christian Examiner later the same year, he so infuriated conservative Unitarians (including his mentor Norton) that the Purchase Street minister soon found himself lumped with other young members of the denomination polluted by “German” ideas.

  Ripley’s occasion was his review of the English Unitarian James Martineau’s Rationale of Religious Inquiry (1836), a volume that, to Ripley, epitomized responsible scriptural interpretation. Ripley welcomed Martineau’s call for fundamental reform in English theology so that “controversy can cease to resemble a contest in the dark.”39 Of particular interest was Martineau’s chapter on “Rationalism,” in which he raised the question of how to treat scriptural evidence not in accord with reason. Martineau’s position was unequivocal. No apparent inspiration can establish anything contrary to reason, for reason is “the ultimate appeal, the supreme tribunal to the test of which even Scripture must be brought.”40 This identified the American Unitarians’ logical inconsistency, dependent as they were on belief in Christ’s miracles as the seal of their faith.

  Ripley offered his own view of what lay behind Martineau’s book. How could Unitarians, who professed to base their faith in reason, claim that Christ performed miracles? “As far as we can judge at this distance of time,” Ripley wrote, “it was the truth which Jesus Christ announced rather than the wonderful works that he wrought, that called forth the faith of his disciples.” Christ’s miracles, in other words, were ancillary to his message. Now committed to Idealist philosophy, Ripley deemed it an error “to rest a system of spiritual truth, addressed to the soul, upon the evidence of miracles addressed to the senses.”41 He had learned from Schleiermacher and others that religion was an ineffable, inward feeling of dependence on God and not something validated by sensory experience. He simply set aside as irrelevant the thornier question of whether Christ actually performed the miracles attributed to him. Theology commenced with the study of human consciousness as Cousin and others were examining it, not with debates over such irreconcilable matters as whether Christ turned water into wine or walked on water.42

  One wonders whether James Walker, editor of The Christian Examiner, realized how Ripley’s review would offend conservative Unitarians. He did not have to wait long to find out, however, for Norton responded sharply, outraged that the journal of which he was coeditor (Walker had not run Ripley’s essay by him) had published such a wrongheaded and insulting piece, by one of his own students. Norton thereupon severed his association with The Christian Examiner and turned to The Christian Register to explain his resignation and register dissent from Ripley’s position. But that journal’s editor, not eager for a dogfight, demurred for “personal considerations” and forced Norton to the extraordinary step of publishing his rejoinder in a newspaper, the Boston Daily Advertiser. The November 5, 1836, issue carried his letter, in which he made it clear that no callow student, no matter how promising, was going to controvert what his mentor had taught him about Christ’s miracles.43

  Ripley, however, was not cowed. The Advertiser published his reply four days later. After thanking Norton for seriously considering his views, he observed that if Norton found heresies in his essay, he also found some in Norton’s comments upon it. Ripley reiterated his view that “the evidence of miracles depends on a previous belief in Christianity, rather than the evidence of Christianity on a previous belief in miracles,” not his own theological novelty, but a position that had “the sanction of devout and thinking minds of every age of the Church.” Further, he resented Norton’s condemnation of his ideas without offering any counterproof, save his Harvard credentials. “I had thought that we lived at too late a day for this,” Ripley noted, and “breathed the air of freedom too long, to substitute an appeal to popular prejudice in the place of reason and argument.”44 So much for Norton, the vaunted champion of rationality!

  The controversy between Norton and Ripley sat there for two years, until another Unitarian’s view of miracles reignited Norton’s wrath. In the interim, emergent Transcendentalism had permeated other reform activities—childhood education among them. Although it may seem a long step from the complexities of post-Kantian philosophy to schooling a child, some New Englanders, excited by the idea that everyone, from birth, possessed a divine element, altered long-established pedagogy to cultivate this divine essence. They sought to replace Locke’s influential psychological paradigm—which posits the mind of each child at birth as a tabula rasa, or a blank slate, upon which sensory experience writes its lessons—with the Idealists’ notion that the mind has innate principles, including the religious sentiment, a view of education that requires a different pedagogy. The teacher has to help each child recognize and cultivate his internal principles. The classroom no longer was a place of rote learning, but an arena where even very young students were taught to cultivate heightened self-consciousness.

  By the 1830s, prominent among the American educators moving in this direction was Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888). Like Brownson, he had not entered Boston’s cultural hothouse until he was an adult. Born to a farming family in rural Wolcott, Connecticut, Alcott had little formal education. He was, however, an autodidact, devouring the few books of Christian piety—Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was a favorite, as was Milton�
�s Paradise Lost—available to him and then progressively expanding his intellectual reach. By his mid-teens he was on the road as a peddler in western Massachusetts and New York, and in 1818 he sailed on a coastal vessel from New Haven to Norfolk, Virginia, hoping to secure work as a schoolteacher in what he regarded as the benighted South. No positions were available, however, and he resumed peddling, traveling as far as Charleston, South Carolina. 45

  Returning to New England, between 1825 and 1828 Alcott worked as a schoolmaster in Cheshire and Bristol, Connecticut, not far from where he had been raised. Frustrated by both his school’s restricted physical space and its narrow curriculum, he set out to improve both. He constructed movable desks so that the center of the room was open for group activities, and he purchased books for a school library. He broke from the common-school method of instruction by rote and varied the day’s work with nature walks, physical exercises, storytelling, and directed conversation. He thought that good teaching came through the Socratic method. Most important, he believed in the innate goodness of each child whom he taught.

  Alcott decided to try out his pedagogy in Boston. To move from rural Connecticut to one of the nation’s largest cities was exhilarating, even if he could not immediately find a permanent position. In the interim he rubbed shoulders with other prominent reformers, including Josiah Holbrook, the father of the American lyceum movement, who boarded at the same address; and the free-thought lecturer Fanny Wright. William Ellery Channing particularly impressed him, and as he realized how Unitarianism’s positive and inclusive vision of humanity accorded with his own, he began to spend more time with members of this faith.