American Transcendentalism

by Philip F Gura

  Longfellow accurately assessed these pioneering works, indebted as they were to Johann von Herder’s notion that a people’s religious beliefs were closely linked to their cultural identity. Johnson, his friend noted, not only explained “the mythologies, theologies, and worships of these Eastern nations” but also “held religion to cover, or at least to grow out of, or be modified by, all the national life of the peoples,” work that necessitated chapters on government, education, science, and society.66 Johnson based his massive work on what he considered scientific principles and termed it “a contribution to the Natural History of Religion.”67 Influenced by the rise of social Darwinism, he believed that men’s religious beliefs progressed through various stages. This development was natural, Johnson explained, and proceeded “by laws inherent and immanent in humanity.”68 Most important, in these works Johnson treated Christianity as just one faith among many, itself moving through evolutionary changes.

  The “Universal Religion” toward which mankind tended, Johnson wrote (in a vein reminiscent of Eclecticism), could not be “any one, exclusively, of the great positive religions of the world.” Rather, it had to comprise what was best in each.69 Thus, he did not write as an apologist or advocate of Christianity or of any other distinctive religion, but as one “attracted on the one hand by the identity of the religious sentiment under all its great historic forms, and on the other by the movement indicated in their diversities and contrasts toward a higher plane of unity, on which their exclusive claims shall disappear.” The time had arrived for mutual interchange of religious experience between the East and the West, for which neither was fully prepared but which was “indispensable to the advancement of both forms of civilization.”70 Johnson penned his volumes to help mankind attain this noble dream of an inclusive faith.

  Sadly, for all his efforts to categorize beliefs still little known in the West, Johnson’s heroic scholarship met with little popular or scholarly success. Roberts Brothers, the firm to which he first brought his manuscript on India, turned it down as too polemical and theological. 71 Making minor changes, he submitted it to James Osgood and Company, who also found it too argumentative but agreed to publish it if Johnson paid close to sixteen hundred dollars toward its production. He did, but two years after its publication a mere fifty copies had been sold. His second volume, China, fared no better. Criticized by scholars for the author’s reliance on Western scholarship rather than on primary sources, and his problematic claim to study religion in a scientific manner, neither India nor China made as large an impact as Johnson wished.

  It did not help that, the year before India appeared, James Freeman Clarke had published The Ten Great Religions (1871), his own treatment of the world’s various faiths, which proved immensely popular, going through no fewer than nineteen editions. Clarke was the popular minister to Boston’s Church of the Disciples, established in 1841 and meeting in the Melodeon, where Parker’s church had begun. As early as 1857 he had published a review essay in The Christian Examiner on “Comparative Theology of Heathen Religions” that demonstrated his interest in cross-cultural matters, and in 1867 Harvard appointed him lecturer on non-Christian religions at the Divinity School.72 The following year in The Atlantic Monthly he began to issue some of the essays that eventually became his book on the subject.73

  What differentiated Clarke’s work from Johnson’s was his staunch Unitarianism. Although much involved with antebellum Transcendentalism and a lifelong friend of Margaret Fuller’s, Clarke never left the denomination, and he remained an important player in the American Unitarian Association. Thus, when he came to discuss, say, the “Oriental” religions that Johnson explored, he subordinated them to Christianity, viewing them as indicative of various stages through which humanity passed before it arrived at Christianity, the universal religion. A less threatening (and admittedly more readable) book than any of Johnson’s, Ten Great Religions proved immensely influential into the early twentieth century and solidified Clarke’s position as one of the nation’s major Unitarian voices.

  Despite the disappointing reception of his works, Johnson was not bitter. When he resigned his pulpit in Lynn, he gave an eloquent valedictory to his Free Church. He was proud, he stated, that in all his years with them, he had repudiated denominational religion and never sought to build an ecclesiastical institution for transmitting personal and local interests from generation to generation. His goal had been simple: “to make the place where I stand a centre for the freest communication of thought and faith, of stimulus to public and private duties, to fearless inquiry according to conviction and conduct according to conviction.”74 Given Johnson’s receptivity to and interest in the universal human impulse to believe, Theodore Parker would have welcomed his commitment as well as his scholarship, even as the majority of his contemporaries, beginning to experience a great wave of immigration from eastern and southern Europe, were content to maintain theirs as a Christian nation.

  The year after O. B. Frothingham published Transcendentalism in New England (1876), the Radical Review carried Samuel Johnson’s lengthy essay on the same topic, which, when it was reprinted in a book of his essays, The Atlantic Monthly singled out for particular praise. “America,” the anonymous reviewer wrote, “has furnished no other statement at once so full and compact of this philosophy.”75 Johnson aimed his essay at recent “materialists” who, he believed, underestimated the import of Transcendentalism to current philosophical debates. Far from finding Idealism obsolete in light of scientific materialism, he presented it as “the primal condition of knowing, the transmutation of sense-impressions by original laws of mind, whose constructive power is not to be explained or measured by the data of sensation.” Mind, he continued, “is obviously the exponent of forces more spontaneous and original than any special product of its own experience.” All that we know is ideas, he insisted, “yet not as unrealities,” for it was man’s recognition of them as reporting objective truth that made them the root of all knowledge.76

  Johnson insisted on the centrality of consciousness to religious belief. By an intuition of God, he wrote, he did not mean “a theological dogma or a devout sentiment,” nor “‘a God,’ Christian or other.” Rather, he meant a “presumption of the infinite as involved in our perception of the finite, of the whole implied by the part, of substance behind all phenomena, and of thought as of one nature with its object.”77 Intuition comprised the recognition of the inevitable step beyond experience or observation by which man lived and grew. The Positivists’ miscalculation in their war against the Idealist method was thus in their erroneous divorce of science from the internal sense of the unlimited and universal. If science were to account for the infinite, Johnson believed, it had to recur to Transcendentalism, which posited universal principles for mankind’s acquisition and comprehension of supernal knowledge.78

  The St. Louis Hegelians, Bartol, Weiss, Wasson, Dall, and Johnson, each in his or her own way, promulgated this same religious principle, directly inherited from antebellum Transcendentalism, even as they eschewed the moniker. They continued to insist that faith was, finally, beyond external proof. But so insisting, they failed to capture the public’s imagination enough to redirect America’s moral direction from selfishness to selflessness. The future lay with those who acknowledged the world of the spirit but also, in their embrace of science, explained faith as, at best, a pragmatic proposition.

  11

  TOWARD THE GENTEEL TRADITION

  In 1876 Edmund C. Stedman, New York author and prominent member of the city’s Independent Liberal Church, republished in book form an essay on his minister Octavius Brooks Frothingham that he had first issued in the popular periodical The Galaxy. Stedman’s reason for so doing, explained publisher George Haven Putnam in an introductory note, was because the growing interest “in the purport and influence of what are known as Radical ideas” demanded notice of the life and teachings of the man “who, more probably than any other American, is the representative and a
postle of the liberal faith.” Frothingham, Stedman believed, was the one in whom the now-legendary Theodore Parker’s ideas and ideals were most expanded and developed. 1

  Putnam noted one difference, however. While Parker had “stormed traditionalism in its stronghold, Boston,” a provincial city, Frothingham’s field was “the world as represented in a metropolis,” New York, where a cult of celebrity had risen around certain personages. Frothingham, much more than Parker, had become someone to “see,” his church visited each week not only by loyal followers but by crowds of curious visitors who wished to acquaint themselves with the characteristic men and places of the city. Among New York’s clergy, only the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn Heights, drew a larger gallery.2

  Stedman left a memorable description of Frothingham in his pulpit. After moving from smaller venues, his congregation had leased a large hall, the Masonic Temple, at the corner of Twenty-third Street and Sixth Avenue. As befits Masonic architecture, it had a high ceiling resting upon two rows of imposing pillars that led to a semicircular recess from which Frothingham spoke. Religious services began at 10:45 a.m. on Sundays, when the doors were closed for an organ voluntary and hymn, followed by a reading, usually from Moncure Conway’s Sacred Anthology, a collection of sacred texts from the world’s religions.3 Deacons reopened the doors for latecomers, who swarmed to available seats in time for a prayer in which Frothingham recalled the sacred ties of human brotherhood. After another hymn, the doors were opened again for a final rush of people who arrived for the sole purpose of hearing the sermon.4 The hall held a thousand auditors.

  Frothingham then rose for the sermon. He was not so much imposing as striking in “temperament and person,” a representative, Stedman thought, of the “purest New England type.” He was “sinewy but light and graceful,” his parishioner recalled, and had a clear-cut face, an intellectual forehead, a “large unarched New England nose,” and a pointed chin, all suggestive of “equally[,] the most delicate refinement and the sturdiest polemical vigor.” Also distinctive was his delivery, for although Frothingham carefully prepared his address, he did not read but spoke it extempore, each week a virtuoso performance. He preached not on a biblical text, but on an announced theme that was cleverly woven throughout his sermons which, Stedman contended, were almost without a modern counterpart. There was no other preacher with a spirit more eloquent and imaginative, yet who relied “so utterly upon the force of reason in his teachings” and made his discourses so intellectually satisfying.5

  Most important, while profoundly reverential, Frothingham reversed the method of the evangelical preachers, trying to reach “the heart through the brain—through the perceptive, reasoning, and aesthetic faculties.” More logically organized and synthetic than Emerson’s sermons, Frothingham’s were as poetical and riveting. Every face was directed toward him, Stedman explained, “young and old hang upon his lips,” anxious not to lose a word. When he was finished, people felt that they had been “subjected to a certain mental tension,” watching “his free and fine intellect at play,” and they left the hall well nourished on spiritual food that “carries its own digestion.”6 More than anyone else in the 1870s, Frothingham shone Transcendentalism’s light into the moral and spiritual darkness of the Gilded Age.

  Stedman was correct: Frothingham was a New Englander through and through. His family were first generation Puritan settlers; and his father, Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham, had ministered to Boston’s First Church, on Summer Street, from 1815 to 1850, succeeding William Emerson, Waldo Emerson’s father.7 During the Transcendentalist ferment, the elder Frothingham remained a conservative Unitarian, taking the lead in Parker’s trial for “heresy”; but his son, after graduating from Harvard in 1843, entered the Divinity School and became a disciple of the New Thought. Among his classmates were Samuel Longfellow, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Samuel Johnson. Before his graduation in 1846 Frothingham far surpassed what his father had found objectionable in Parker’s theology.8

  Frothingham’s first pastorate was in Salem’s North Church, where his views soon met with resistance from more conservative Unitarians. He had been fertilized through contact with Parker, who not only awakened his social conscience but introduced him to the Higher Criticism of Ferdinand Christian Baur, a disciple of Schleiermacher. At this point, in theology Frothingham was a non-denominational theist who rejected the need for any external assurances of faith. When he added to this his increasingly strident indictment of slavery, the congregation bristled. After preaching an inflammatory sermon on the rendition of Anthony Burns, in which he indicted fellow Christians for tolerating and excusing slavery, Frothingham’s position became tenuous.

  In 1855 the Unitarian Society in Jersey City, New Jersey, on the recommendation of the influential Henry W. Bellows of All Souls Church in New York, expressed interest in his candidacy, and Frothingham accepted their call. But he again was disappointed, for this church, too, was lukewarm to his radical views. He cast about for another position, and Bellows again lent support, this time for a position in the city. In 1859 Frothingham moved to a new Unitarian society, the city’s third (the other two overseen by Bellows and Samuel Osgood). He remained there for two decades, eventually redefining it—though it cost him the support of Bellows and Osgood—as an “Independent Liberal Church” rather than as Unitarian. In this venue Frothingham preached a powerful theism that posited man’s inherently spiritual nature, even as he remained skeptical of what precisely one could say about “God.”

  For twenty years he regularly published articles and reviews in The Christian Examiner. These reveal deep reading and sophistication in theology as well as in the Higher Criticism, and he often was attacked for the severity—some said the honesty—of his assessments. This journal was the official voice of Unitarianism, and its editor, George E. Ellis, often sparred with Frothingham over his submissions before publishing them.9 By 1865 Frothingham had moved even farther from his father’s generation’s understanding of Unitarianism, to a more skeptical faith buttressed both by intuition and experience, a “scientific theism” with no special dependence on the person of Christ or any other religious leader. He found his voice in this new pitch through the Free Religious Association, which he helped organize and lead in its early years.

  When the rump of radical Unitarians meeting at Cyrus Bartol’s home enlisted Frothingham in their deliberations, they made a wise move, for as one participant said, Frothingham’s name on their roster was “worth a thousand men.”10 He always insisted on free inquiry in spiritual matters, without any dogmatic fetters. Members of the Free Religious Association thus accepted any and all personal creeds as individual statements of belief that might themselves comprise theism, agnosticism, or even atheism. Further, they held that even in its most liberal manifestations, traditional Christianity was bankrupt because it did not make room for the claims of scientific materialism. The Free Religious Association did, even as its members kept intuitive religion in play.

  Later in life Frothingham recalled his ambitions for this organization. He believed that all the world’s religions were on equal footing and assumed man’s inherent spiritual nature. Universal, too, was a tendency to worship, which led to the movement’s chief foundation, a “pure Theism” in which members contemplated the progressive “elevation of all mankind to the dignity of children of the Highest,” a sentiment in accord with Frothingham’s commitment to Hegelian philosophy and its emphasis on “Becoming,” as well as to sociologist William Graham Sumner’s theory of social evolution.11 Fervently democratic and respectful of each individual soul, Free Religionists did not fear or resist the latest scientific postulates but greeted them as new information for their spiritual journeys. Frothingham remained the leader of this dynamic group until 1876, publishing essays and reviews in The Radical, The Index, and North American Review as well as a series of books and pamphlets that made him one of the most prolific of the new generation of religious thinkers.

>   His fullest and most influential statement of the new religion was The Religion of Humanity (1873), reprinted several times and widely regarded as a benchmark of the Free Religion movement. Herein Frothingham incorporated what most distinguished the modern age—a belief in “Natural Science”—into a meaningful religion. All around him he saw “primeval faiths” disintegrating under “the chemical influence of this quick and subtile [sic] Naturalism.” Even Unitarianism was affected, but although his father’s generation had integrated this “naturalism” into their “understanding and affections,” they had left “the reason, the conscience, and the soul, under the dominion of traditional beliefs and instituted forms,” the result a hybrid religion, Janus-like, with one foot in each world. “Unconscious, as pioneers always are,” he wrote, “of the idea that defined their own positions, allowing inconsistent elements to lie side by side among the first principles of its thought,” the old Unitarians “struggled between the upper and nether millstones of Nature and Grace.”12

  Frothingham, however, discerned that the spirit of God has its workings “in and through human nature,” and this became the basis of his “religion of humanity.” In this system of belief “the inspiration of the moral sentiments, the divine character of the heart’s affections, the heavenly illumination of the reason, [and] the truth of the soul’s intuitions of spiritual things” took their places among “the axioms of theological thought.” In countless ways, a deeper understanding of nature complemented the supernatural. Revelation, for example, was “the disclosure of truth to the active and simple reason.” Inspiration was the “drawing of a deep breath in the atmosphere of serene ideas.” Regeneration was “the bursting of the moral consciousness into flower.” Miracle was not a suspension or violation of law, but “the fulfillment of an untraced” one. Christ’s humanity proved his divinity, and so “the child of human nature is the true son of God.” All that man considered divine was part of the natural order. Thus, the new “Liberal Church” had a rational method of attaining truth that demanded “the harmony of principles—the orderly sequence of laws,” just as science did. Finally, this religion of humanity was particularly appropriate to the United States and its faith in democratic institutions, for such belief had “confidence in the human nature that is in man,” while “the word Liberty is always on its lips.”13