He is a German by birth, and is called Giant Transcendentalist; but as to his form, his features, his substance, and his nature generally, it is the chief peculiarity of this huge miscreant, that neither he for himself, nor anybody for him, has ever been able to describe them.
Nathaniel HawthorneFootnote 1[T]he Transcendentalists comprised one of the nation's first coherent intellectual groups.
Philip Gura (xi)If any student, graduate or advanced undergraduate, should offer to delve deeper than survey samples and seriously “take on” the Transcendentalists, he or she would be well advised to begin with the histories by Barbara Packer and Philip Gura. For that matter, these sharply differing studies will undoubtedly provoke and clarify the thinking of even the most seasoned scholars, especially if they were to read these works against each other. The more specialized though no less interesting monograph by Elisabeth Hurth, which is not offered as an introductory overview, nevertheless comprises a fully imagined history in its own right, as it places Transcendentalism in the context of crucial nineteenth-century German innovations in Protestant thought, and of the American movement's thence-derived tendency—as its critics alleged—to “atheism.” These three books, as a group, raise interesting questions about how literary history is now being written, what purposes such studies can serve, what coherence “Transcendentalism” might yet retain as a subject of useful historical inquiry, and what kind of importance the movement might have for readers today.
Putting the questions this way has at least the advantage of acknowledging that these books are, of course, for teachers and students, so that the two introductory histories in particular will have their effects not only on the way their subject is taught, but ultimately on the rationale for teaching it at all. It is no longer to be taken for granted that Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalist movement will continue to figure largely in college-level American literature courses, given that salutary efforts over the last several decades to broaden the curriculum to include more women and minority writers and to achieve a better regional representation have steadily undermined older notions of the special entitlement to attention of “classic” works. The need is now great and unavoidable to have explicit, defensible grounds for regarding any particular literary movement, author, or text as a topic to be endorsed by teaching. Thus what passes for “American literature” (a category in constant revision) will be determined by a more deliberate process of active judgment and negotiation of values than ever before, though it may be that not all the agents concerned in the matter as yet fully comprehend the implications. Because such is the academic state of affairs, general histories of the sort presently under review make their appeal as they convince on the point of utility—that is, by showing that there is something indispensable or pragmatically curriculum-worthy about the subject. If they do not, then the eventual penalty is that the subject itself will disappear. What particular attributes have powers of commendation will vary from time to time as cultural values change, and those values that happen to come uppermost or are especially advocated will determine the shape of the historical claims made as well as the total configuration of field-specific controversies.
The categorical oddity of the Transcendentalists lies precisely in their being a group. It is still an uncontroversial way of talking about them to say, as Stanley Elkins did in 1979, that “theirs was the closest thing to a concerted intellectual effort to be found in pre-Civil War America.”Footnote 2 This influential emphasis on the concert and coherence of the Transcendentalists, while it is grounded in a certain set of facts and has a general plausibility, nevertheless often lends itself to problematic narratives of interpretation. In Elkins's case, for example, it permits him to set the “irresponsible” abstract thinking of this New England group against the possibility of effective political action, and, in so doing, he verges surprisingly close to the anti-intellectual conclusion that the examined life is not worth living. To the extent that we are encouraged to see American Transcendentalism as a coherent movement and at the same time as a benchmark representation of the intellectual life, controversies over its usefulness to students or to the educational process more generally will reflect attitudes toward the prestige of thinking. Another and related problem concerns the inertial pressure to insist on the concertedness of the Transcendentalists' “intellectual effort,” so that historical accounts may falsely disguise the “individual talent” in setting forth the “tradition.”
Over the course of my own career (to speak for a moment of the past) I have had occasions aplenty to offer graduate seminars on the American Transcendentalists, and while I invariably populated the syllabus with the “usual suspects,” I never had a sense that all these choices strictly followed from any well-established definition of the movement's traditional title. Fortunately or otherwise my students were too sophisticated ever to ask me directly what Transcendentalism was. Neither, as it happened, were they much concerned to work out a definition of their own, sensing perhaps that the effort would prove as futile as Nathaniel Hawthorne and many another bemused contemporary supposed. Instead, what more often occupied us was the delightful and satisfying strangeness of a literary vision that took some things seriously (as if by experiment) that the culture in general, then as now, clearly did not—such things as self-reliance, philosophical idealism, the moral sentiment, nature and language as an index of spirit, the primacy of one's own consciousness, freedom from the trammels of the past, the value of the abstract and impersonal, the inhumanity of conservatism, the entitlement of youth to the world. As an educator I never felt more as if I were earning my pay than when I was making the subversive attractions of these concepts more practically evident and identifying their opposites, as I supposed the literature did, as non-obligatory features of conventional American life. Had my students pressed me to say what I thought “Transcendentalism” was, I suppose I should have had to reply that I thought it was a synonym for Emersonianism, seeing that no American writer has ever been held up as a Transcendentalist who did not exhibit traits and positions first signalized in works by Emerson, who was assuredly the movement's strongest writer and its gravitational center, both intellectually and socially. If, conversely, anyone developed a gambit not anticipated by Emerson or uncongenial to his thought, it would be impossible to identify that writer, in that moment or in that gambit, as even remotely Transcendental. By the sign of Emerson are they known, and if so (and of course it may not be so) then the movement is the shiniest example of literary influence and of widely contagious encouragement that American literature has to offer.
Such a view of the subject has its problems, to be sure, not the least of which is that it does not intrinsically lend itself to a conventionally structured historical treatment. Moreover, an Emerson-centric view of Transcendentalism, as Philip Gura's history would appear to suggest, burdens us with a declining reputation. The patience it requires in regard to a canonical writer is a drag on the renovating academic impulse to throw off such summary figures in favor of the previously marginalized. Thinking of Transcendentalism as extended Emersonianism might even imply that the associated authors are perhaps a little redundant: the implication needs to be energetically resisted but not denied outright. It is clear that the satellites have each their own real piquancy and importance, and yet one cannot help but think that Theodore Parker would be better known today if “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity” had not been substantially anticipated in Emerson's Divinity School Address. One might suppose that the development among these other writers of recognizably Emersonian patterns of thought (e.g. of self-reliance in Margaret Fuller) would be fundamental to seeing the movement as coherent or as susceptible of such definition as the writing of a history of it might seem to require, yet the signal curiosity is that no amount of manifest divergence seems to dislodge a member from the received order. Both Packer and Gura have a high regard, for example, for Orestes Brownson's “The Laboring Classes” (1840), a sharply argued plea on behalf of America's working poor, but neither faces very directly the question of how “Transcendental” this rather un-Emersonian performance really is. Its intellectual sources, as Gura shows, lie mainly with the French socialists Pierre Leroux, Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, and Felicité de Lamennais; other important influences include Fanny Wright, Robert Owen, and Thomas Paine, the latter largely accounting for the essay's ferocious attack on “priests.” The moral problem with the essay is of a kind that Emerson was never charged with: that at a crucial moment it offered aid and comfort to slaveholders, whose labor system Brownson thought superior to the wage slavery that industrial operatives confronted in the North.Footnote 3 This essay is the only “Transcendental” work that John C. Calhoun is known to have admired, though he did balk at Brownson's advocacy of a hundred-percent estate tax. Not even the practical failure of Brownson's radical reform essay was in the Transcendental mode, since it was rejected because it was understood. Meant to support Democratic candidate Martin Van Buren in the election of 1840, the essay was circulated to great effect by the Whigs, who noted that its superheated depiction of labor conditions was disavowed even by the Lowell mill girls. Abashed, Brownson never collected the essay.
Anyone who thinks of Transcendentalism as extended Emersonianism must pause over this example, not least because of John Carlos Rowe's profound if mischievous argument that Emerson's own corpus can be divided into two mutually exclusive categories: his Transcendental writings and his reform writings.Footnote 4 If Emerson can take on the Fugitive Slave Law only by first dismissing his private Transcendental persona, what are we to say of Brownson here? What gives “The Laboring Classes” a place in these histories? Is it as simple as that Brownson had earlier attended Transcendental Club meetings and consorted with members? Such an outward circumstance would have to weigh pretty considerably against the factors that made him such an anomalous figure—the fact, especially, that his consistently indulgent position on slavery, like his commitment to the Democratic Party, only deepened with his conversion to Catholicism, by which time he had explicitly disavowed Emersonianism and, in an essay entitled “Protestantism Ends in Transcendentalism” (1846), joined the ranks of counter-Reformation heresy-hunters. If such straightforward repudiation of Transcendentalism does not get one kicked out of the Club, then perhaps other, less emphatic disavowals should not be held against the Vermont Coleridgean James Marsh or the Boston Swedenborgian Sampson Reed, neither of whom enjoys the standing that Brownson does as a movement figure, but whose credentials are arguably much stronger. In an Emerson-centric construction of Transcendentalism the development is inevitably away from Catholicism, its genetic history predicted by the logic of the Reformation in moving, as Brownson lamented, through Puritanism and rational Protestantism and out the other side into a revolutionized, individualized realm of antinomian liberty, where, in a circumstance terrifically favorable to the imagination, everything was to be reconsidered, apart from tradition, under the new light obtained.
Whether one comes to Gura's American Transcendentalism: A History with a predilection to find Emerson at the center of things, or, following Rowe, with an assumption about the incompatibility of Transcendentalism and reform, there are bound to be problems. Interestingly, the tactics by which Gura denies a central place to Emerson seem at the same time to accommodate Rowe's allegation of a basic incoherence in that writer's thought, as also, by implication, in the movement more generally. For if reform is an exclusive alternative to “Transcendentalism” in Emerson, it must be so for such figures as Brownson, George Ripley, William Henry Channing, Theodore Parker, and even Margaret Fuller, to whatever extent they are identified less with inwardness and individualism than with specifically reformist and cooperative social visions. Gura solves this problem by embracing, as if it were unproblematic, the very incoherence that Rowe had identified in his attack on Emerson—and inevitably with the same result: a sharp devaluation of Emersonian Transcendentalism, amounting nearly to a dismissal. Here is how Gura puts it, most succinctly, in his Preface:
The Transcendentalists were split, however, over how best to effect such reformation [of values]. One group, which Emerson epitomized, championed introspection and self-reliance—what one precursor to the movement termed “self-culture”—as keys to the spiritual life, an ethic that fitted conveniently with the antebellum economic expansion known as the Market Revolution. Another group, centered on Ripley and Brownson, stressed the brotherhood of man and outer-directed behavior for the common good, an ethic inherited from the civic republicanism of the post-Revolutionary generation as well as from contemporary European socialism. Friction between those who emphasized hyper-individualism—what one participant called “egotheism”—and those who championed men's and women's irreducible equality marked Transcendentalism from the time of its initial coalescence as an identifiable movement. (xiv)
One wonders how the Miserly Party and the civic-minded Philanthropic Party ever got themselves into the same room so as to make their squabbles intramural. The problem here is not that the classification is oversimplified, but that it is rather tendentiously unhelpful. Gura repeats the old canard that Emerson was somehow a forerunning apologist for the post-Civil War robber barons. Whatever tinge of plausibility this claim may generously be supposed to have depends on holding Emerson responsible for other people's self-interested misreading of a philosophically idealist program, one that includes, somewhere near its center, the dissatisfied observation that, as Emerson put it in the “Ode to Channing,” “Things are in the saddle/And ride mankind.” The American economy and its associated materialism were among the things that Transcendentalism consciously transcended, as Emerson's reaction to the Panic of 1837, neatly compacted into his poem “The Humble-Bee,” clearly shows. Nor did that acquisitive hedonist Henry David Thoreau ever utter a word of encouragement for the Market Revolution. Indeed it were easier to argue that the Emersonians were motivated by a profound disgust at the way the Market Revolution, with its competitive getting and spending, threatened the spiritual life by obscuring—or usurping the place of—principles. Gura even quotes Margaret Fuller (17) and Theodore Parker (221) to that effect. If Ripley reacted to the Panic with more attentiveness to the material suffering of its victims, as Gura shows he did, his praiseworthy concern (such as might occur to any conscientious orthodox minister) has on it no very clear stamp of the Transcendental movement. Over the years the critique of Emerson's position has wavered between contradictory judgments: that it is too otherworldly to manifest itself productively in politics or so worldly as to offer aid and shelter to capitalist rapaciousness.
Gura is consistently unsympathetic to the claims of the individual, all of which, however expressed, seem to implicate “the Imperial Self,” a term borrowed from Quentin Anderson but shorn of the nuance. This fact tends to flatten out his responses to Emerson and Thoreau while strengthening his respect for the movement's incipient socialists, whom he treats far more authoritatively. The “egotheism” that allegedly makes Emerson indifferent to all other human beings and rules out the principle of human equality has in fact, of course, no such upshot, principally because egotheism is an inaccurate descriptor of Emerson's belief. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, the “participant” whom Gura quotes as introducing the term, saw that egotheism was a temptation to Transcendentalists, whom she represents as standing on its “verge,” but that it was actually embraced, as of 1858, the year of her essay, only by the Fourierists. Their “new organization” of human life, she felt, arrogantly superseded (rather than renewed) such virtues as were commended by Him “whose memoirs are named GOSPEL.”Footnote 5 As in the case of Brownson on the laboring classes, so here again we have the principle of admitting any statement as “Transcendental” that happens to be formulated by persons who are sometimes Transcendental. Such practice must tend to increase the general confusion, especially when it is conceded that historical accounts do not always show an interest in discriminating the group-consistent behavior of accredited members from behavior that is simply independent.
Not the least interesting aspect of Gura's American Transcendentalism is its demonstration of what happens when the center is conceptually shifted from Emerson to the Ripley–Brownson wing. The proposition is that as late as 1840 (i.e. after Nature; the American Scholar Address; the Divinity School Address; “Literary Ethics”; a hundred and fifty miscellaneous public lectures; his crucial early encouragement of Alcott, Fuller, and Jones Very; his establishment of Carlyle's reputation in America; and his suggestion to Thoreau that he keep a journal) Emerson's “contributions to the movement remained minimal” (116), while Brownson, Ripley, and Alcott occupied center stage. This allocation of importance seems to reflect a somewhat constricted and overly literal application of Perry Miller's idea that the movement was “a religious demonstration.”Footnote 6 If one concludes that the group's coherence is mainly an effect of its protest relation to conservative Unitarianism, then literary judgments tend proportionately to become irrelevant, and Transcendentalism, at least in its early phase, contracts into a mere theological commotion, the principal effect of which was to agitate Andrews Norton. It is possible that students new to the subject will get through the long early chapters on the influence of German “higher criticism” and the Cambridge-based “Miracles Controversy” with their enthusiasm intact, but one feels that within these well-researched and important chapters real opportunities are missed for increasing the odds. Gura's commentary is most rewarding on the implication of these parochial topics for language theory, the subject of his fine earlier book, The Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Literature in the New England Renaissance (1981), but to the extent that he here virtually ignores the writerly or belletristic dimensions of Transcendentalism, the larger literary and cultural point about the emancipation of language is, for lack of any clear demonstration, almost lost.
Another consequence of displacing Emerson (and Thoreau, who occupies fourth place in a chapter otherwise devoted to William Batchelder Greene, Eliza Thayer Clapp, and Sylvester Judd, none of whom is so much as mentioned in Packer's history) is that it plays havoc with the chronology. Transcendentalism, we are told, “burst on the scene” in 1836 (68)—less in consequence of Emerson's “idiosyncratic tract” Nature (96) than of solid books by Ripley, Brownson, Convers Francis, and William Henry Furness that took straighter aim at what passed for Unitarian orthodoxy. Still, within two years the movement “already was splitting” (109), implying that its twenty-four months of actual coherence (its defining moment?) centered on the intra-Unitarian reform program associated with the Miracles Controversy. By 1840, the year of the last Transcendental Club meeting, when the Dial and Brook Farm were launched, the movement had come to an end as “a unified entity” (71). Nevertheless it is said to be “emergent” (123, 127) in that same and subsequent years, offering patronage to Elizabeth Peabody's West Street bookstore (home also to Margaret Fuller's Conversations), even as Transcendentalism was “becoming a many-headed Hydra” (122). Still it is claimed that “the coherence and focus of the movement” persisted through the decade only to be “dissipated” in 1850, the year of Fuller's death and of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law (240). Thoreau falls among the movement's afterthoughts: Walden, published in 1854, is conjured up and dismissed in a single sentence as “arguably the literary masterpiece of the Transcendentalist movement” (269). But the shorter reform writings are given their due.
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Barbara Packer's The Transcendentalists, newly issued by the University of Georgia Press, first appeared in 1995 as part of the second volume of The Cambridge History of American Literature. Highly regarded ever since, it nevertheless languished on the reference shelf, a victim of the functional obsolescence of massive multivolume national histories. It now has the convenient, independent format it ought to have had from the start.
Packer's commitment to writing a literary history avoids, at a stroke, many of the conceptual difficulties that bedevil Gura's treatment of Transcendentalism as an episode in the history of ideas. Seeing the movement as a series of literary performances, Packer implicitly conceives of the relevant intellectual and historical background (which she by no means stints) as contributions to a specific, culturally significant economy of imagination. Having the literary context constantly in view means that ventures into philosophy, theology, church history, or social reform become perforce interdisciplinary gestures—which comprise, for good reasons, an essential feature of successful intellectual history. Her very few summary assertions about the coherence of the movement, its ascendancy, its effect on innocent bystanders, or its subdivisions and declension, are not offered as the governing structure of an argument. Indeed the study scarcely suggests an argument at all, but a chronologically arranged appreciation, most luminous in details of inference and observation as it moves from text to text.
Packer's Transcendentalists attains a fine ab intra quality (as if to vindicate Emerson's idea of the right use of history) in consequence of its enhanced subjectivity and its way of conciliating what might be thought of as “the student in the text”—that is to say, the reader understood as a present intelligence, curious, and looking for reasons to become affectively invested in the subject. Aesthetic and subjective responses (as exemplified in various strategies of literary-critical commentary) tend better to address the compound question that students are constantly and properly asking: what is the meaning of all this and why should we care? Such an approach puts the reader in a fundamentally different relation to the material than is generated by the historian who is bent mainly on explanation, and involves a commendatory gesture similar to Emerson's pragmatic rationale on behalf of idealism: that it “presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind.”Footnote 7 A writer in sympathy with Emerson's idealistic project has, in other words, a discursive advantage that runs deeper than the factitious benefits of simple bias. As William James pointed out, “ordinary empiricism, in spite of the fact that conjunctive and disjunctive relations present themselves as being fully co-ordinate parts of experience, has always shown a tendency to do away with the connections of things, and to insist most on the disjunctions.”Footnote 8 Packer's axiomatic assumption is that the payoff of Transcendentalism for the student (as well as its ultimate coherence) lies in the realm of the imagination, in an altered way of seeing; this assumption is procedurally friendly both to the registering of conjunction (enhancing meaning) and to the repair of the kind of disjunction or dissevering, arising from “ordinary empiricism,” that Emerson everywhere complained of.
For example, if Transcendentalism is a “religious demonstration,” it is also, coordinately and inseparably, a literary demonstration, concerned with texts and intensities of meaning, as Packer shows in her handling of the significance, with respect to Transcendentalism, of the “higher criticism” and the whole German background. Certainly all historians of the movement, from Octavius Brooks Frothingham to Gura and Hurth, meet their obligation to treat this topic, but it makes a difference whether the emphasis is on doctrinal issues like the fine tuning of Unitarian Christology (as is often appropriate with such church-abiding Transcendentalists as Theodore Parker, Frederic Henry Hedge, W. H. Furness, Convers Francis, Cyrus Bartol, and others, who collectively give to the movement a distractingly sectarian feel), or whether the emphasis is on the imaginative ground gained in a vastly more important revolution against all that is accidental in the authority of texts, sacred or otherwise, and the compensatory rise in the moral and interpretive authority of the independent apprehending self. This revolution, which is implicit in German scholarship from Wolf, Herder, and Eichhorn forward (proceeding from a decision to treat the Bible as a literary text), achieves its finest imaginative consequence in works by the unchurched Transcendentalists, Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. Students who will never care about the pressures brought to bear on Unitarian orthodoxy in the 1830s may appreciate—indeed ought to appreciate—how Emerson (who by 1832 had surpassed the need to trim his speculations to the views of a particular body of liberal Christians) decided that truth was less available from institutions and scriptures than from a personally immanent moral sense or the “god within.” This belongs, of course, to the background of Emerson's notion of self-reliance, which Gura is far from alone in regarding with suspicion, and yet it must be considered that it was offered as a liberating, modernizing antidote to superstition, a better, freer, more independent, meaningful, and dignified way of looking at the world—a way, indeed, of taking responsibility for looking at the world at all. One might illustrate the immense practical difference that this inward transfer of authority makes by citing the example of John Fletcher of Louisiana, one of the more elaborate defenders of chattel slavery, and his response to the abolitionist “higher law” argument of Francis Wayland that “the moral laws of God can never be varied by the institutions of man.” Right, replied Fletcher,
the laws of God, as once revealed to man, never lose their high moral qualities nor their divine character, at any subsequent age of the world. The law, which God delivered to Moses from Mount Sinai, authorizing his chosen people to buy slaves, and hold them as an inheritance for their children after them, is, therefore, the law of God now.Footnote 9
The post-slavery world of independent, self-reliant critical thinking that Emerson helped (and still helps) to bring on, in which even the constitutional slavery of the master to a text is opposed and broken—a world in which intuition trumps tuition and self sits in judgment on tradition—arrives by “present[ing] the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind.” The challenge and provocation of Transcendentalism consist in its being an organized (and specifically literary) demonstration of the ways and means of not taking everything literally. As Packer points out, what Walden best communicates is “sympathy with intelligence” (257). Which is why it is so useful in the classroom.
Packer does a superb job of teasing out such hints as this that Transcendentalism is systematically favorable to that which students are encouraged by a liberal education to care about. The historian's effort here is not just a matter of identifying sources; it lies not merely in noting that Kant (first of the German Transcendentalists) “restored to the mind its centrality and dignity” (22) or that Fichte (popularized in America by Carlyle) went further and “made the whole universe ‘consist in the activity of mind’” (22), but it is ultimately to make the reader feel something of the encouraging excitement generated by this liminal sense that whole regions of mentality had suddenly become available by virtue of being identified, called out, and believed in. It was of this that Sampson Reed had written in his Growth of the Mind (1826):
Both mankind, and the laws and principles by which they are governed, seem about to be redeemed from slavery . . . We appear to be approaching an age which will be the silent pause of merely physical force before the powers of the mind; the timid, subdued, awed condition of the brute, gazing on the erect and godlike form of man. (quoted in Packer, 27)
The gathering ascendancy of “the powers of the mind” over “merely physical force” was, for the Transcendentalists, the very meaning of progress. Whether in the schoolroom, as Bronson Alcott particularly noticed, or in the old life in New England under the disciplinary tuition of Calvin's God, or on Southern plantations not so distantly modeled on that monarch relation, the world as education was everywhere exemplary of fact and force and so, necessarily, of pain as well. Alcott reasoned that if “the German philosophers were right about the mind's structure and relation to the world, then the prevailing system of education was hopelessly and radically wrong,” and so his reform would aim at assuring that “students would come to associate the classroom with pleasure and not with pain” (42). Marianne Dwight at Brook Farm likewise understood the intimate sources of progress in discriminating between conditions that educate and conditions that diseducate:
Look into your inner life. Did you ever feel that sorrow in itself gives you strength? Wasn't it rather an obstacle, an enemy, that, from some higher and happier source, some hope or faith or joy that was in you, you must draw strength to conquer? Have you not sometimes felt almost omnipotent from the impulse of some joyful emotion? (160, original emphases)
This is perhaps as good a gloss as the period gives us on the famous transparent eyeball passage in Nature—or on the proposal that Packer quotes from an early essay by Thoreau: “Surely joy is the condition of life” (125). In such comments we are reacquainted in a richly contextualized way with the value of Emerson's empowering optimism and are led to see it as a culturally significant response to what William Ellery Channing had observed at the outset of the period in 1820—that “Calvinism owes its perpetuity to the influence of fear in palsying the moral nature” (5).
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Elisabeth Hurth's Between Faith and Unbelief offers a deeply informed survey of German biblical scholarship and religious historiography from about 1780 to 1880 in such a way as to demonstrate that here was the original and responsible party in destabilizing the Western world's Calvinist-inflected popular theology and its associated worldview. The suggestion is that American Transcendentalism, at least with respect to its central concern for the inward or spiritual life (and with respect, ultimately, to all that follows from that), consisted largely of vibrations sympathetic to the long series of intellectual concussions emanating from Göttingen and Berlin. Hurth's discussion takes note of specific intellectual influences where appropriate (as, for example, Theodore Parker's indebtedness to de Wette), but she is more concerned with the broader context of evolving Protestant thought and the newer shapes that speculation was assuming on both sides of the Atlantic. The summary effect of the first wave of the “higher criticism” (or “form criticism” as it has come to be known) was to introduce organic ambiguities into the Bible text: if it was not the univocal, inerrant, and timeless “word of God,” but instead (as it increasingly presented itself to scholarship and the imagination) a culturally layered, multivocal, human text with some sort of recoverable bottom in history, then its significance lay open in altogether new ways to the determination of human interpreters. Readers and the needs of readers assumed a new prominence in the creation of meaning, a development that might have been enough by itself to account for the privileging of individual consciousness so central to Transcendentalism. Notions of political democracy, including emergent socialist thought, together with Romantic theories of subjectivity had in turn their own revisionist implications for theology, such that, for example, while very few in the eighteenth century could have appreciated the point, it would be obvious to the next century's Transcendental ministers that every proposition in, say, Jonathan Edwards's “God Glorified in Man's Dependence,” including its title, could be deconstructively stood on its head without violence to logic or sense and with a great deal of practical advantage. Clearly, too, such an anti-Calvinist bouleversement was modern, revolutionary, emancipatory, and humanistic. But was it atheistical?
Hurth quotes a comment that Convers Francis made in the “annus mirabilis” of 1836 predicting that Unitarianism must inevitably split between the “English school, belonging to the sensual and empiric philosophy” of John Locke, and “the New one, or the German school . . . belonging to the spiritual philosophy” (31). Francis and other Transcendentalists welcomed the German influence because they saw that (precisely as William James would later say) empiricism intrinsically favored disjunction, whereas religion, no less intrinsically, had to be about the vitalities of connection. The Lockean party, which controlled Harvard and its Divinity School, early found its champion in Andrews Norton, from whose perspective the “New Views” out of Germany, now making headway with a talented portion of the younger Unitarian clergy, were quite simply a form of “Infidelity.” Nor, in his dismay at upstart heterodoxy, did he stop, rhetorically, short of the charge of atheism. Neither he nor other anti-Transcendentalists of the period had in mind, of course, the sort of vulgar atheism associated with what Emerson called “the village blasphemer.” Rather, the assertion was a dramatic way of characterizing a disagreement over acceptable “evidences” for the truth of Christianity, the empirics going for the testimony of top-down Power as seen in the miracles of Christ and recorded in the gospels as history, the heterodox party insisting, instead, on the sufficient answering echo that truth found in the soul of the believer—reflecting the experiential and self-centering theology of Friedrich Schliermacher as well as the Romantic, egocentric psychology of J. G. Fichte.
The assumption was that without the evidentiary demonstration for the senses that the loaves and fishes made, the Son of God would not be clearly authorized in his mission, given the historic tendency of the merely intrinsic excellence of truth to go dishonored and unrecognized. But as Emerson made clear in the Divinity School Address, he and the Transcendentalists thought quite otherwise: if religion were not commemorative, having reference to singular events long past (and dubiously attested to as matters of history), if Christianity were not, disjunctively, a “historical Christianity” but a present and spiritual connection to truth instead, then truth had no need of props or formal recommendation, and all that was pharisaical, ceremonial, and legal in the “corpse-cold Unitarianism of Brattle Street” could retire before the advancing spirit, or the equivalent unfolding of the “powers of the mind,” which made, now as then, for the miracles of every day. However much Emerson may have owed to German scholarship (and Gura points out that he was far from the most accomplished germanist in his circle), he could have gathered much of this opposition to formalism, force, and fact from the negative example of average preaching, in which religion “comes out of the memory, and not out of the soul”—or from the Quakers—or for that matter from the close attention he so clearly gave to Luke 17:21: “the kingdom of God is within you.”Footnote 10
None of this sounds especially atheistical, except, perhaps, to such as Andrews Norton, who had positions to defend and heresies to hunt. It is difficult to detect the atheist in Emerson's adoption of “first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul” as his prescription to candidate preachers.Footnote 11 But as Hurth moves in her discussion from such early figures as Eichhorn, Griesbach, Schliermacher, and de Wette through the hugely controversial Jesus biographies by Strauss and Renan and finally to the militant atheism of Feuerbach and Schopenhauer, Norton comes to look a little prophetic about the tendencies. Hurth is (sensibly enough) not interested in the question of whether the trajectory of the religious speculation she examines might seem to imply a certain incompatibility between theism and modernity, but the progressive devaluation of old-fashioned supernaturalism on the one hand and the submission of old certitudes to critical, humanistic reassessment on the other provide the intellectual context in which the concept of “atheism” gains just as much vital ambiguity on its side as the canonical gospels do on theirs—both, as it were, appealing from the ecclesiastical courts to the courts of scholarship, intelligence, and present human need. The finding of atheism had been simple for Norton and Henry Ware, and soon enough for Brownson, too: do you acknowledge Christ's exclusive capacity to work miracles? Do you think that “Father” is a genealogical term as Jesus speaks it and not a mere synecdoche of ideal relation? Have you no need for a personal God? Do you regard the crucifixion and resurrection as an effectual legal payment? No? Then you disbelieve in the very basis of our religion and are, ipso facto, an atheist.
Matters quickly became more complicated, however, as various concepts of egotheism gained currency, especially after the appearance of Feuerbach's work in George Eliot's translation of 1854. Initially, as in Brownson's response to the Divinity School Address, there had been a good deal of confusion about the precise bearing of Emerson's challenge to the conventional polarity of God and Self; nor, arguably, has the confusion been much clarified since. Brownson set things off in the wrong direction by framing the issue in terms of what was being “worshipped” in Emerson's scheme, and he concluded that it was the self, in illogical consequence of what he took to be Emerson's gesture of simply collapsing the categories. (“If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God.”Footnote 12) One might point out that ego and theos were, each separately, less stable concepts in the nineteenth century than ever before, so that a simple maintenance of their time-honored relation of privilege was rather too much to expect, though conservatives did, precisely, expect it. But Emerson's way of talking stressed tropes of inclusion more than tropes of equivalence. The “God within” is the phrase most frequently resorted to in representing Emerson's position. We may never know for certain what he understood by the proclamation that “The kingdom of God is within you,” but the best evidence on the point is the symphonic ending of Nature, where the “New Views” culminate in a prediction of the new life. The “kingdom of God,” seen there as breaking forth, curing blindness, offers a particular regime of symbolic vision in which joyful meanings of great vividness are realized—poetic meanings, arising from the connections and mutualities that only an ideal faith could enable or a skeptical empiricism postpone. Such might seem a modern version of the Puritan's “renewed understanding” and belongs in any event to an Emersonian “conversion experience.” In the concluding pages of her study Hurth uses Feuerbach's wholly secular and skeptical brand of egotheism to underscore, by contrast, the essentially theistic nature of Emerson's position, pointing out that he “always interpreted his [own] existence with reference to a primary experience of the Deity” (202). Heterodox and church-averse as Emerson clearly was, that judgment sounds right.
***
One has to wonder whether Hawthorne might not have been right after all in the little joke about “Giant Transcendentalist” and his indescribability. Turn him one way and he looks like a group of utopian socialists pitching hay and manure in a George Inness landscape; turn him a few degrees more and he begins to look like a solitary Sufi mystic or a Yankee Plato in suspenders and straw hat. Frequently, and on average, he looks like a sedate and sociable Unitarian minister, frocked and collared, smoking a cigar in the parlor. The “laboring classes” occupy him—and the rights of women and the freedom of slaves—and “extra-vagance” and wildness and irony and more irony and lone boating over the crystal depths of Walden Pond. He has the anger of Parker facing down slave-catchers in a Boston boardinghouse and the ecstatic joy of Emerson crossing the bare common in snowy Concord. Whether the movement was riven or coherent, it was surely diverse, its strengths great, yet, with the passage of time, increasingly obscure, its weaknesses many and forever obvious. The problem for the historian is that there is no describing such a thing except in closest relation to some motive for doing so. What, then, does all this mean and why should we care about it? What is at stake?
Until recently the opinion of historians was nearly unanimous that the Transcendentalists had been “aloof” and disengaged in regard to the slavery debate. A more correct view, recognizing the contributions of Emerson, Parker, T. W. Higginson, and Thoreau, among others, still properly concedes the leadership of that crusade to figures like William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and a variety of evangelical abolitionists. Other Transcendental reforms, including Brownson's abortive intervention on behalf of labor and George Ripley's intervention on behalf of associative social arrangements in the experiment at Brook Farm—or Alcott's efforts at Fruitlands—have to be seen as interestingly quixotic failures. It is not clear that Transcendentalism will ever figure consequentially in the history of American socialism. Even setting aside the question of whether the social activist impulse is un-Transcendental by definition, the movement's success in that field is spotty at best, with the sole exception of the impetus provided by Margaret Fuller to the woman's movement, a singular achievement of the imagination that led immediately out and away from the Transcendental orbit.
If there is any substantial motive for writing histories of Transcendentalism at the present time, especially given the fact that the largest available audience for them is the student population of our colleges and universities, it cannot be to commend an antique model of social engagement. The effective motive will emerge from a recognition that the movement's successes and importance, and the reasons for studying it, are literary. Even its theology is relatively of no interest, Perry Miller notwithstanding, since, as Hurth shows, there were no strikingly innovative theologians in the group—merely active cooperators in the international trends of the time, who, indeed, only cooperated because the attendant adjustments away from standard epistemologies offered them assistance in thinking in new ways about their own relation to the world—which is more or less what teachers want still to offer their students.
Late in life Orestes Brownson looked back with something like nostalgia to an era when heresy was still possible, for now, in 1872, the energizing conflict he had experienced in his youth between orthodoxy and heterodoxy had given way to a starkly desperate last struggle, as it seemed to him, between religion and no-religion.Footnote 13 What we need—those of us who are students still—is less orthodoxy and more heresy in our lives, a present model of intelligent heresy such as Transcendentalism provides, not, of course, for religion's sake (God forbid), but for the mind's sake.
