Ripley did not wait long to jump into the fray. His “Latest Form of Infidelity” Examined: A Letter to Mr. Andrews Norton bore the date September 5. He published it anonymously, as “an Alumnus of That [the “Cambridge Theological”] School,” but given his sophisticated defense of German theologians, it would not have taken anyone long to recognize the pamphlet’s author. Ripley spent most of his 160-page pamphlet objecting to Norton’s arrogance in claiming the correctness of his own principles, when Unitarians were supposed to champion free inquiry. Norton’s diatribe was particularly inappropriate, Ripley noted, because the alumni of the school to whom he spoke “neither claim authority over each others’ faith, nor profess to regard uniformity of speculative opinion, as desirable, even if it were possible.” The common tie that bound them, he continued, was attachment to “liberal Christianity,” which they valued because “it connects the enjoyment of religion with independence of mind, and enables them to search for truth, free from human dictation.” Concomitantly, he objected to Norton’s uncharitable dismissal of the considerable number of Unitarians who, through their scholarly inquiries, had become convinced of the superiority of the soul’s internal testimony over mere evidence of the senses.39 Norton’s haughty and dismissive tone, coupled with his self-righteous opinions on great questions of the day, was presumptuous to the worst degree and an insult to his audience.
Ripley also took his old teacher to task for his ignorance of Continental theology as well as of the German language. Spinoza was not, as Norton huffed, “a celebrated atheist,” Ripley explained, nor was Schleiermacher a “pantheist” who denied the immortality of the soul. Norton believed this of Schleiermacher, Ripley continued, because he erroneously regarded one of the theologian’s early works, Discourses on Religion, as his definitive statement of doctrine. 40 If Norton wanted to understand Schleiermacher’s God, Ripley observed, he should turn to his The Christian Faith. Norton similarly erred in his claim that the German theologian was a member of the Rationalist or Naturalist school of scriptural interpretation, when in fact he was close to being a Supernaturalist in his understanding of Christ’s role in history. Citing Schleiermacher’s follower Karl Ullmann (1796-1865), Ripley made it clear that Schleiermacher’s theology eventuated from a creative synthesis of Naturalism and Supernaturalism, and as such, was sui generis.
Even more damning was Ripley’s indictment of Norton for his irrational and baseless fear of German theology. He embarrassed Norton by observing that even the theologians at the conservative Andover Theological Seminary evidenced a spirit of Christian liberty by engaging the New Thought, and had translated and republished it for American readers. Ripley cited approvingly the statement of two Andover professors, B. B. Edwards and E. A. Park, in their Selections from German Literature. “Let us see,” they wrote, “how men good and true are now speculating in foreign climes, and we shall be convinced that the sky does not close in with the earth four or five miles from the spot where we happen to stand, however central that spot may be.”41
Ripley landed a final jab when he addressed Norton’s misunderstanding of de Wette. Norton had tried to impress his readers by the weight of his learning, Ripley observed; and, indeed, because of his reputation, for many his opinion carried “the weight of an oracle.” Yet when Norton condemned a writer of such range and intelligence as de Wette by citing only one excerpt of twenty-one lines, and in the course of his explication made “fourteen” errors in translation, readers had reason to doubt his command of the language. “Knowledge of German is no merit,” Ripley wrote, tongue in cheek, “but the want of it in those who undertake to expound German theology is an inconvenience.”42 Indeed!
One imagines the indignation at Norton’s Shady Hill estate on the appearance of Ripley’s pamphlet. To Ripley’s “personal attack” Norton issued early in 1839 Remarks on a Pamphlet Entitled “‘The Latest Form of Infidelity’ Examined.” His riposte comprised an extended and deadening display of pedantry as he countered every charge Ripley had made. He never acknowledged, however, the real issue, whether religious feeling trumped the “facts” of Christ’s miracles. Unfortunately, Ripley too was drawn offtrack, for neither did he, in his Second Letter to Mr. Andrews Norton, dated late in December that same year. Herein he only presented more evidence of Norton’s misreading of Spinoza.43
What looked like a barren end to the controversy acquired new vigor when two others weighed in on Emerson’s behalf. Shortly after Ripley’s last barb, the young Unitarian Richard Hildreth, another Harvard graduate (1826) then editing the daily Boston Atlas, offered a Letter to Andrews Norton on Miracles as the Foundation of Religious Faith (1840). Given his peremptory tone toward Norton, it is no surprise that he published it anonymously, for his views were as novel as his tone was imperious. Hildreth did not present himself as “a dogmatist, or a mystic, a naturalist, or a pietist, a believer, or an unbeliever,” he explained, but “simply in the character of a rational man—a rational man not in the German, but the English sense.” Hildreth objected to Norton’s attempt “to strip Religion of the transcendental and supernatural character which it has ever borne; to reduce it to the rank of natural, historical science.” After all the advances in science over the past centuries, Hildreth found it remarkable that Norton would try to establish “the bare text of the Scripture as the sole source of all useful knowledge, and the science of scriptural interpretation as the only science worthy to be cultivated.”44 In other words, Norton was not rational enough.
Hildreth summed up Norton’s doctrine as he had gleaned it from his recent writings. “Religion consists in knowledge, which knowledge leads to certain feelings, called Religious feelings.” Further, such knowledge is only “to be attained by a critical study of the Greek and Hebrew scriptures,” very difficult to understand, liable to misinterpretation, “and which in fact, have been interpreted to your satisfaction by no one but yourself.” Hildreth did not stop his rudeness here. All who did not know such languages, he continued, had “nothing to do, but to look up for ‘testimony’” to Norton and “meekly and faithfully” receive his pronouncements under an “awful sense of the ‘responsibility’” they should incur did they dare, with their “small means of knowledge,” to “suggest a difference or doubt.” By Norton’s rule, no one should proffer opinions on religion except those few privileged individuals, like Norton, “who are so lucky as to possess the gift of infallibility.”45 Although Hildreth went on to a distinguished career as a journalist and historian, his role in the Transcendentalist controversy began and ended with this pamphlet, which at least had the effect of further exposing Norton’s arrogance to public view.
Although Ripley had effectively ended his involvement in the controversy, Norton fired one last shot across his opponents’ bow. It was an anomalous pamphlet entitled Transcendentalism of the Germans and of Cousin and Its Influence on Opinion in the Country (1840), not his own work but a reprint of two articles from the conservative Presbyterian periodical The Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, authored by J. W. Alexander, Albert B. Dod, and Charles Hodge, professors at Princeton and stalwart Trinitarians, who had originally published them early in 1839. Like their counterparts at Andover, the Princeton theologians were learned in German scholarship and philosophy, and had navigated its choppy waters to their and their charges’ satisfaction. That Norton turned to those who fifteen years earlier had been his sworn enemies was a bitter irony or, perhaps, a sign of his increasing desperation.
Alexander and Dod, who authored the first of the two reprinted articles, made it clear that when they described the dangerous tendencies of German philosophy, they knew of what they spoke, not like most of the “young philosophers” in America who received their lessons by “installment,” that is, through redaction in periodicals. Indeed, they were as critical of the Transcendentalists’ scholarly abilities as Norton was—presumably why he republished their works.46 The bulk of their text comprises a dismissal of Idealist philosophy from Kant through Fichte to Sch
elling, with Hodge, in the second installment, applying his cudgel to Hegel as well. The trio also devoted much space to a demolition of Cousin’s Eclecticism. The Princetonians disdained the way that the Frenchman’s philosophy “removes the God of the Bible, and substitutes in His stead, a philosophical abstraction.” Cousin’s “nonsense” merely “aped the German impiety,” they continued, and they were distressed to see the progress that it already had made in their country.47
Alexander and Dod also had attacked Emerson’s recent Divinity School address, for it confirmed their worst fears about the silliness that accompanied half-baked allegiance to German thought. Indeed, they hardly knew how to express “the nonsense and impiety” that pervaded the address. Rightly charting its genealogy, they called it “a rhapsody, obviously in imitation of Thomas Carlyle, and possessing as much of the vice of his mannerisms as the author could borrow, but without his genius.” They also understood precisely what Emerson was saying of Christ—that “any man may now become Christ”—and lamented that there was not “a single truth or sentiment in the whole address that is borrowed from the Scriptures.” Finally, they labeled Emerson’s work as “the first fruits of transcendentalism in our country,” and “warning evidence of the nature of the tree which has produced it.”48
Norton’s republication of these reviews was not the final volley in this pamphlet war, but by 1840 the Transcendentalist group, having rallied to Emerson’s defense, began to find other ways to promulgate mutual interests. Norton’s attack on Emerson had brought the former minister front and center as a chief purveyor of the New Thought, even if he declined to engage Norton directly and his overall contributions to the movement remained minimal. Francis understood how all this had occurred. In a letter to Hedge at the height of the controversy he observed that “the truth was, the fluid of malignity had been collecting a good while,—and needed but a slight point of attraction to draw it down on Emerson’s head.” His popularity “among the brightest young people,” Francis continued, “had become very annoying to the dei majores [major deities] of the pulpits & the Divinity school.”49
Emerson’s increasing visibility and the new directions in which Ripley’s and Brownson’s ministries were taking them eventuated in a split in the emergent group over the relation of self-culture to social reform. Joining this debate was a relative newcomer to the Transcendentalists’ ranks who was destined to exercise great influence on the movement. Shortly after Norton’s reprint of the Princeton Review articles, a young minister, Theodore Parker, writing under the alias of Levi Blodgett, a “plain man,” offered The Previous Question between Mr. Andrews Norton and His Alumni Moved and Handled, in a Letter to All Those Gentlemen.50 Prior to this, Parker had parodied the Princeton pamphlet in a fable called “Transcendentalism” published in the liberal Unitarian journal The Christian Register, but after being criticized for so blithely dismissing the opposition’s arguments, he decided to respond more formally, albeit still anonymously. He also had recently published, in the July 1840 Christian Examiner, a lengthy, favorable review of Strauss’s Life of Christ, in which he endorsed Strauss’s method and some of his conclusions. Parker was ready to break out in a more forceful way with his own statement of where critical and unbiased scholarship on the New Testament led.
Parker was a powerful and striking presence. O. B. Frothingham, one of his first biographers, remembered him as “sturdy, strong in the arms and legs,” and “with a muscular grip of the hand that knit one to him at once.” His visage displayed a comparable strength of character but occasionally was “a little grim in expression.” His forehead massive, Parker had piercing blue eyes, a “slightly Socratic nose” that “had the possibilities of sarcasm,” and lips that curled “easily.”51 In the pulpit these characteristics made him a riveting and seemingly uncompromising presence. No one wanted to incur his wrath.
At the age of thirty, he ministered to the small town of West Roxbury, just west of Boston; Convers Francis had preached his ordination sermon, and George Ripley had given the right hand of fellowship. That was a great day for Parker, for he was from humble origins. The youngest of eleven children from a poor farming family in Lexington, Massachusetts, early on he was recognized as an intellectual prodigy. Though unable to attend classes because of his family’s impoverished circumstances, he passed all his examinations at Harvard and began to prepare for the Divinity School. Beginning in 1832 he studied with Francis, then minister to Watertown, where Parker also kept a school. His mentor remembered “a young man in homely and awkward dress” who introduced himself by saying that he had heard that Francis welcomed young people to study. “I long for books,” Parker said, “and I long to know how to study.”52 He attended the Divinity School between 1834 and 1836, where his intellectual gifts were so evident that Ripley invited him to attend meetings of the Transcendentalist group. He also began to publish articles in The Scriptural Interpreter and The Christian Register, where more advanced Unitarian voices could be heard. In these efforts he frequently cited de Wette, Eichhorn, Michaelis, Paulus, Herder, and other European scholars. Parker even went so far as to purchase a forty-five volume set of Herder’s Complete Works, in German.
His forte was languages. Along with German he could read in twenty other tongues, including Danish, Dutch, Chaldee, and Arabic. Moved by Emerson’s address at the Divinity School, he wanted to use his scholarship to buttress Emerson’s case, particularly because, given Ripley’s last rejoinder, he felt that the parties had strayed from the central question. Parker sought to answer this question: “Do men believe in Christianity SOLELY on the ground of miracles?” To argue his case that men should not, the “obscure” Blodgett had recourse to none other than Schleiermacher, who based his theology on a belief “IN THE EXISTENCE OF GOD” and “A SENSE OF DEPENDENCE ON HIM.” These “natural and essential sentiments of the soul” were found in all religions but reached their highest expression in Christianity, Parker believed. But not in the Christianity of Luther or Calvin, or of the Unitarians or Quakers, for all those were “one-sided and false.” He meant quite simply “the Christianity of Christ.” “I need no miracle,” Parker wrote, “to convince me that the sun shines” nor of “the divinity of Jesus and his doctrines.” 53
Parker’s masquerade as the homely Levi Blodgett was short-lived, for within a few months of this publication he, like Emerson, began to make waves in Boston’s frog pond. As he put it, “I intend in the coming year to let out all the force of Transcendentalism that is in me, come what will come.”54 He was well prepared to do so. Although in 1836 he had lost the Concord pulpit to another candidate, the same Barzillai Frost whose ministry Emerson pilloried in the Divinity School address, Parker was content in West Roxbury, close to his mentor Francis as well as to others involved in discussions of Unitarianism’s future. In addition to meetings with the infant Transcendentalist Club, for example, Parker enjoyed gatherings of the Society of the Friends of Progress, a group centered on William Ellery Channing that included Ripley, Brownson, Alcott, Hedge, and Karl Follen.
Moreover, Parker was committed to serious scholarship. In addition to publishing scores of articles and reviews, he began to prepare a translation of C. F. Ammon’s four-volume Fortbildung des Christenthums zur Welt-religion (1836–40) for Ripley’s series, Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature. Parker never finished it, but by the spring of 1837 he had completed a draft of a translation of de Wette’s Critical and Historical Introduction to Canonical Scriptures of the Old Testament. Expanded with commentary of his own, he eventually published the work in two volumes. Incubating for years, Parker’s religious radicalism was everywhere evident in it. Much larger than the original and of astonishing erudition, this expanded translation provides essential background to Parker’s theological development.55
This project confirmed his skepticism about the Bible’s divine authority, for his assessment of the most recent biblical scholarship convinced him of the composite nature of many of the Old Testament books as wel
l as of the lengthy and complex historical process that produced the Bible. Few of its books’ authors or compilers could be identified definitively, and each individual book contained central passages that contradicted one another. The reader left Parker’s translation of de Wette with the sense that there was no good reason to believe that the Bible was a divinely inspired (and so, a miraculously authoritative) text.
Parker republished his massive scholarly tomes twice, but disappointingly, reviewers showed little attention. He did, however, receive a sympathetic reading from his old friend and mentor Convers Francis, who wrote him that the book filled him “with astonishment at your labors and learning,” and predicted that it would become a “standard work,” even if not a great seller “like a novel.” Francis blamed the low sales on many of the younger clergy’s lack of interest in such erudition. Instead, “the cry is all for action—for doing something, not moping over books as they say.”56 Without knowing it, Francis had recorded a seismic shift among Parker’s cohort, one epitomized in Orestes Brownson’s ministry.
What was Brownson doing and saying immediately before and after his brief contribution to the controversy over miracles? He continued to preach to his Society for Christian Union and Progress, which Alcott and other incipient Transcendentalists frequently attended. Also, through the good offices of George Bancroft, a prominent member of the Democratic Party, he held the position of steward to the Marine Hospital in Chelsea, a sinecure that provided a generous income in the difficult years following the national financial panic of 1837. Most significantly, Brownson finalized plans for a new journal, the Boston Quarterly Review, which he envisioned as a mouthpiece for more advanced Unitarians. Its first issue appeared in 1838, and it grew to a circulation of one thousand and was the most popular Transcendentalist organ.
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