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Emerson’s Unitarian Transcendentalism
A Sermon Given
by Rev. Roger Fritts
on May 25, 2003
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
What is Transcendentalism? The word has always been difficult to define:
Charles Dickens during a visit to America in the 1840s said "that
whatever was unintelligible would certainly be transcendental."
Edgar Allan Poe instructed a young author that the way to write
transcendental essays was to use small words but turning the words upside
down.
A Baltimore minister, commenting on transcendentalism, said "a new
philosophy has risen, maintaining that nothing is everything in general, and
everything is nothing in particular."
American Transcendentalism started in the mid 1830s and came to an end by
the late 1840s. The Transcendentalists were young Unitarians, mostly
ministers, mostly living near Boston. The most famous was Ralph Waldo Emerson,
whose two hundredth birthday we celebrate today.
The word "Transcendentalism" came from the book The Critique of Pure
Reason by the German Philosopher Immanuel Kant. Published in German in
1781, and translated into English by the 1830s, Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason is divided into two parts. The first part he called a
"Transcendental Doctrine of the Elements," which deals with the sources of
human knowledge. Kant wrote that space and time are "nothing more than formal
conditions of our sensory faculty," that space and time are "not real
properties that adhere to the things in themselves" but "mere forms of our
sensory perception." We can only know things as they appear to us through the
forms of space and time. We can never know things-as-they-exist-in-themselves.
Therefore, Kant concluded, we cannot know of the existence of God. We can only
make a leap of faith that God exists. For Immanuel Kant transcendental
elements are another name for things-as-they-exist-in-themselves.
In March of 1833 the Unitarian minister Frederic Hedge published an article
on Coleridge and Kant in the Unitarian magazine, The Christian Examiner.
Emerson must have read the essay and this is likely his first encounter with
Kant. Emerson also heard about Kant from the English poet Samuel Coleridge and
the English historian Thomas Carlyle. An English translation of Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason was published in 1838. Emerson bought a copy and
examined it enough to mark a few passages.
Kant believed that we humans could never know transcendental elements,
never have direct knowledge of God. We can only accept the existence of God by
a leap of faith. Emerson had more trust in the ability of human beings. He
believed that we could have direct knowledge of God through our intuition.
Emerson’s American Transcendentalism is the belief that we humans can intuit
the existence of God. An 1828 dictionary defines intuition as "the act by
which the mind perceives . . . the truth of things, immediately, or the moment
they are presented, without the intervention of other ideas, or without
reasoning and deduction."
The argument was between the young Unitarians of the 1830s and the older
generation who had found the New England Unitarian churches. Although the
older Unitarians had come to the conclusion that Jesus was a human being and
not God, they continued to hold to the belief that the proof of God’s
existence was in the miracles that Jesus preformed. Unitarians in the 1820s
taught that the miracles of Christ confirmed the supernatural basis of
Christianity. They believed that Jesus Christ was divinely commissioned to
recover humankind from its darkness and folly, and to disclose the way to
eternal life.
In his early preaching, as minister of the Second Church in Boston, Emerson
followed this theology. For example in a sermon in 1831 Emerson said that "a
miracle is the only means by which God can make a communication to men . . "
His basis for religious truth was the special revelation attested to by the
miracles described in the New Testament.
But he had doubts about this theology. After the death of his first wife
Emerson resigned his position as minister of Second Church in Boston. By 1837
he had settled in Concord, Massacahutts. Living off the income of his wife’s
estate, he went for long walks in the woods. He re-though his religion. After
the tragic death of his first wife, Emerson began to see God not in the New
Testament miracles, but in the beauty of nature.
Sundays, when he was in Concord, he went to First Church to hear the
sermons of the new Unitarian minister the Reverend Barzillai Frost. We know
from Emerson’s private journal that he hated Rev. Frost’s preaching because
Frost talked only about the Bible and never used examples from his own
experiences. For example, on Sunday May 7, 1837, Emerson wrote in his journal:
Here is a young man who has not yet learned the capital secret of his
profession, namely to convert life into truth. Not one single fact in all
his experience has he yet imported into his doctrine, and there he stands
pitiable and magisterial, and without nausea reads page after page of
mouth-filling words and seems to himself to be doing a deed. This man has
ploughed and rode and talked and bought and sold. He has read books, and
eaten and drunk; his cow calves; his bull genders; he smiles and suffers and
loves yet all this experience is still aloof from his intellect; he has not
converted one jot of it all into wisdom.
Emerson concluded that in all of Frost’s sermon there was "not a surmise a
hint . . . that he ever lived at all. Not one line did he draw out of real
history."
Two weeks later Emerson found his mind wandering during the sermon. Later
he wrote in his Journal "The next best thing to good preaching is bad
preaching. I have even more thoughts during or enduring it than at other
times."
It must have been difficult to have Ralph Waldo Emerson as a member of the
congregation. Emerson referred to Frost as "the young preacher," although
Frost was only a year younger than Emerson himself. Born into a poor family
Frost graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1835 at the age of 31. Rev.
Frost was a good pastor and he stayed as minister in Concord until he retired
in 1857. However, he could not please at least one member of his congregation.
What Emerson wanted in a minister was not a friend but a preacher who could
weave personal experience into the sermon. Transcendentalism was the ability
to feel the presence of God while walking in the woods or while playing with a
child. For Emerson a great preacher was a person who could describe the
experience of feeling the presence of God.
On October 1, 1837 Emerson wrote: "The Young preacher preached from his
ears and his memory, never a word from his soul. His sermon was loud and
hollow."
On Sunday, March 18, 1838, a stormy, snowy day, he wrote:
The snowstorm was real the preacher merely spectral. Vast contrast to
look at him and then out the window. . . . he had not one word intimating
that ever he had laughed or wept, was married or enamored, had been cheated,
or voted for, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted we were none the
wiser for it.
On July 15, 1838 Waldo Emerson got a chance to say this directly to his
colleagues. He had been invited to give the address to the graduating class at
Harvard Divinity School. It was a key turning point in the development of the
young America Unitarian movement, Unitarianism. Emerson’s Divinity School
Address is still required reading for anyone who wishes to enter the Unitarian
Universalist ministry.
The chapel in Divinity Hall seats less than one hundred, and it was full
that night, as Emerson rose to speak. While speaking for over an hour he made
two key points. First he dismissed as irrelevant the reports of miracles in
the New Testament. He put his trust not in Bible stories about miracles, but
in the power of the human soul to apprehend truth in nature, in the clover and
the rain.
In the soul, then, let the redemption be sought. Wherever a man comes,
there comes revolution. The old is for slaves. When a man comes, all books
are legible, all things transparent, all religions are forms. He is
religious. Man is the wonderworker. . . . But the word Miracle, as
pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster.
It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.
This is American Transcendentalism: the belief that we do not need the
miracles of the Bible to know that God exists. All we need is to trust our own
intuition and nature will tell us that God is real.
In the second part of the address Emerson attacked the sermons of the day.
Without mentioning Rev. Frost by name, Emerson took his comments directly from
his journal. He described his experience in church:
A snow storm was falling around us. The snow storm was real; the preacher
merely spectral; and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and
then out of the window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He
had lived in vain. He had not one word intimating that he had laughed or
wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined.
If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital
secret of his profession, namely, to convert life into truth, he had not
learned. Not one fact in all his experience, had he yet imported into his
doctrine. This man had ploughed, and planted, and talked, and bought, and
sold; he had read books; he had eaten and drunken; his head aches; his heart
throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet was there not a surmise, a hint, in all
the discourse, that he had ever lived at all. Not a line did he draw out of
real history. The true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to
the people his life, — life passed through the fire of thought.
The Divinity school professors felt Emerson showed very poor taste in
criticizing the other ministers’ sermons on such an occasion. They were also
critical of his theology. Emerson had dismissed a doctrine of miracles
regarded by both Unitarians and orthodox as essential to Christianity. One
professor at the divinity school said, "this latest form of infidelity strikes
directly at the root of faith in Christianity."
On the other hand, the young transcendentalists in the audience were
delighted by Emerson’s words. Overtime their view prevailed. Gradually
American Unitarians abandoned the traditional theory of miracles. Today most
of us teach that Jesus was a great moral teacher, but not God, and not a
performer of miracles.
Back in the 1830s and 1840s transcendentalism spread from religion to other
parts of America culture:
Bronson Alcott and Elizabeth Peabody started a school where children
shaped and shared their own thoughts in discussions and journals instead of
rote memory and textbook recitation. This led to the first sex education
classes. The school was called "one-third absurd, one-third blasphemous, and
one-third obscene."
Elisabeth Peabody founded the Kindergarten movement in America, also
based on Transcendentalist faith in the children’s minds.
Margaret Fuller pioneered the uniquely Transcendentalist form of adult
education, the Conversation, where women who we not allowed to attend
Harvard talked and taught each other. This led to Fuller’s book Woman in
the Nineteenth Century.
George Ripley founded Brook Farm as an experiment in communitarian
living.
Bronson Alcott founded Fruitlands community based on simplicity and
cooperation.
A basic tension existed in Transcendentalism between communal living and
radical individualism.. Because of this tension both Brook Farm and Fruitlands
failed.
Perhaps a more successful experiment was Thoreau’s decision to live alone
near Walden Pood. It remains today a part of the mythology of individualism in
America.
Today transcendentalism’s influence remains:
The writings of Thoreau shaped the non violent methods of the Gandhi and
Martin Luther King and the underlying vision of the ecology movement.
Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody are role models for feminist
intellectuals.
The Transcendentalist efforts in education were reincarnated in John
Dewey’ laboratory school, the open school movement of the 1960s and 1970s,
and in the thousands of Kindergartens across American. It is no accident
that a man who became a Unitarian minister after reading Emerson in college,
is the author of Everything I Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten.
Brook Farm was the prototype of many of the communes of the 1960s and
1970s. When I Left collage in 1971 to join an apple picking commune in New
Hampshire, I was following in the footsteps of the Transcendentalists.
The word Transcendentalism has always been difficult to define:
Charles Dickens joked that whatever was unintelligible would certainly
be transcendental.
Edgar Allan Poe joked the way to write transcendental essays was to turn
the words upside down.
And a Baltimore minister joked that with transcendentalism nothing is
everything in general, and everything is nothing in particular.
Joking aside, transcendentalism is the belief that each of us can
experience the existence of God through the beauty of nature. It is a theology
of radical individualism. It is alive today in this Unitarian community, 200
years after the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson. As the summer begins I have an
assignment for each of you. Go out and experience the existence of God through
the beauty of nature, and report back to me in September. Now let us join in
singing Emerson’s hymn, # 79, No Number Tallies Nature Up.
Office@CedarLane.org
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