American Transcendentalism – Forms and Doctrines
October 31, 2024 § Leave a comment
This is Theodore Parker, taken from an essay titled “A Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity,” dated 1841. Parker was another Unitarian minister, a second-generation Transcendentalist. Like Emerson, he’s pushing back on mainstream Unitarianism and got pushback in return. But in the mid-1840s, in spite of this establishment resistance, he moved to Boston and built one of the largest congregations in New England.
It must be confessed, though with sorrow, that transient things form a great part of what is commonly taught as Religion. And undue place has often been assigned to forms and doctrines, while too little stress has been laid on the divine life of the soul, love to God, and love to man. Religious forms may be useful, and beautiful. They are so, whenever they speak to the soul, and answer a want thereof. In our present state some forms are perhaps necessary. But they are only the accident of Christianity; not its substance. They are the robe, no th angel, who may take another robe, quite as becoming and useful. One sect has many forms; another none. Yet both may be equally Christian, in spite of the redundance or the deficiency. They are a part of the language in which religion speaks, and exist, with few exceptions, wherever man is found. In our calculating nation, in our rationalizing sect, we have retained but two of the rites so numerous in the early Christian church, and even these we have attenuated to the last degree, leaving them little more than a spectre of the ancient form. Another age may continue or forsake both; may revive old forms, or invent new ones to suit the altered circumstances of the times, and yet be Christians quite as good as we, or our fathers of the dark ages. Whether the Apostles designed these rites to be perpetual, seems a question which belongs to scholars and antiquarians, not to us, as Christian men and women. So long as they satisfy or help the pious heart, so long they are good. Looking behind, or around us, we see that the forms and rites of the Christians are quite as fluctuating as those of the heathens; from whom some of them have been, not unwisely, adopted by the earlier church.
Again, the doctrines that have been connected with Christianity, and taught in its name, are quite as changeable as the form. This also takes place unavoidably. . . . Now there can be but one Religion which is absolutely true, existing in the facts of human nature, and the ideas of Infinite God. . . . Now it has often happened that men took their theology thus at second hand, distorted the history of he world and man’s nature besides, to make Religion conform to their notions. Their theology stood between them and God. Those obstinate philosophers have disciples in no small number.
As Emerson does, Parker speaks of Nature in parallel terms, seeing correspondences between natural law and divine law, and, to a degree, science and religion. In the middle of this excerpt, where I have inserted ellipses, he discusses how different observers and philosophers will come to different theories about Nature, just as the divines do about Religion; yet:
“the true system of Nature which exists in the outward facts, whether discovered or not, is always the same thing, though the philosophy of Nature, which men invent, change every month, and be one thing as London and the opposite at Berlin. Thus there is but one system of Nature as it exists in fact, though many theories of Nature, which exist in our imperfect notions of that system, and bu which we may approximate and at length reach it.”
These Transcendentalists are never very far from their consideration of Nature, no matter how deep they get into the theological weeds.
American Transcendentalism and Quakerism—Direct Experience
October 27, 2024 § Leave a comment
The quote below is from Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” (1838). About the essay the editor of The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings, Lawrence Buell, writes in his introduction:
“This is Emerson’s most incendiary work. It was delivered as a commencement oration at the behest of the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School, Unitarianism’s academic home base and Emerson’s own graduate alma mater. Emerson takes aim at the two related arguments on which Unitarian theology chiefly rested its case for being a distinctive form of ‘rational’ Christianity: that the Gospel narratives of Jesus’ miracles proved the authenticity of Christianity, and that Jesus was God’s unique and authoritative messenger. After this comes an equally acerbic denunciation of ineffective preaching, in which Emerson charges each graduate to think of himself by contrast as ‘a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost’ and preach prophetically. The address caused an irreversible rift between Unitarian liberals and radicals. Emerson was not invited back again to speak at Harvard for nearly thirty years.”
This quote comes from Emerson’s strongly worded injunction to preach from one’s own experience and in what we would call continuing revelation. In it, he mentions George Fox and admonishes against relying on past religious personages rather than on one’s own “soul.” More about soul after the quote. And please make allowances for his use of “man” for humankind.
The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology. It is the office of a true preacher to show us that God is, not was; the He speaketh, not spake The true Christianity,—a faith like Christ’s in the infinitude of man,—is lost. None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think society is wiser than their soul; and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world. . . . Once leave your own knowledge of God, your own sentiment, and take secondary knowledge, as St. Paul’s, or George Fox’s, or Swedenborg’s, and you get wide from God with every year this secondary form lasts, and if, as now, for centuries,—the chasm yawns to that breadth, that men can scarcely be convinced there is in them anything divine.
Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those mosts sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. . . .
Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost,—cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. . . .
What attracted me to this passage and urges me to share it is its mention of Fox in a warning germane to us Friends to look within for Truth rather than to Fox or any past and outward authority, and its partial development of the idea of the Soul and some correspondence I see in it to our liberal Quaker use of the phrase “that of God in everyone.”
The idea and reality of what Emerson calls the Soul seems to be central to his theology and philosophy. I’ve not yet plumbed the full depth and breadth of this idea in his writing. But it seems that the Soul is for Emerson something similar to what many Friends today call “that of God in everyone.” Certainly, it is universal. It is an inward indwelling of a divine aspect. It is the true source of religious teaching. It seems to have some affinity for the atma and brahma of Vedanta philosophy, with which Emerson was familiar, brahma being pure consciousness, of which atma is like a drop from the brahma ocean from which it “comes,” with which it communicates, and to which it will return; atma is part of Mahatma Ghandi’s popular name, meaning “great soul”. Emerson’s soul is an American, nineteenth century Neoplatonic idea.
Emerson was an Idealist in the Platonic and Neoplatonic mold, in which the idea, the ideal, the mind, is the only thing that is truly real. He cites the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume in this regard in this essay.
So in this, he differs from the faith of Friends. As I’ve written many times before, our modern liberal Quaker idea of that of God as a divine spark is far from what Fox intended with the phrase, having been given to us by Rufus Jones. But almost no one goes on to develop what this phrase means beyond the vague idea of a “divine spark”. We are not metaphysically inclined enough to develop the idea much further. Emerson has no such compunction. He was a philosopher to the core, just as he was a preacher, theologian, and poet to the core.
American Transcendentalism and Quakerism—The Light Within
October 19, 2024 § 2 Comments
No passage I’ve read in this book so far (The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings) comes closer to the heart of Quaker spirituality than this one from George Ripley in an 1840 essay titled “Letter of Intent to Resign.”
Here’s the opening paragraph of the editor Lawrence Buell’s introduction to the essay:
Ripley began his ministry at almost exactly the same time as Emerson, but he stayed much longer within the fold, being a more devoted pastor though less gifted as a public speaker. But Ripley, too, came to feel irksomely constrained. His sense of constraint was all the greater given the mainstream Unitarian reaction of the 1830s against the Transcendentalist challenges with which he himself deeply sympathized.
Here’s the Quaker-ish quote from Ripley’s letter:
There is a class of persons who desire a reform in the prevailing philosophy of the day. These are called Transcendentalists, because they believe in an order of truths which transcends the sphere of the external sense. Their leading idea is the supremacy of mind over matter. Hence they maintain that the truth of religion does not depend on tradition, nor historical facts, but has an unerring witness in the soul. There is a light, they believe, which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world; there is a faculty in all—the most degraded, the most ignorant, the most obscure—to perceive spiritual truth, when distinctly presented; and the ultimate appeal on all moral questions is not to a jury of scholars, a hierarchy of divines, or the prescriptions of a creed, but to the common sense of the human race.
Ripley’s reference to the light comes, of course, from the prologue of John’s gospel, one of the foundational texts for Friends since the beginning.
His reliance on “common sense” is a common theme throughout the several essays I’ve read so far. I have a hunch that “common sense” meant something more or slightly different to these writers than it does to us today. Emerson makes a subtle distinction between what he calls Intellect and Reason, Reason being some higher faculty of understanding that has a spiritual aspect. From my limited reading so far, I sense that “common sense” is akin to this faculty Emerson defines, a universal and natural capacity to see things as they are, and all things, for the Transcendentalists, have a spiritual dimension.
Ripley does not expound further on his theology of the light, but goes on to describe how his own experience has confirmed this idea.
American Transcendentalism and Quakerism—On Reading the Bible
October 19, 2024 § 2 Comments
On Reading the Bible
This quote is from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 essay Nature:
“Every scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth,” is the fundamental law of criticism.
It’s as if Emerson had taken this principle directly from early Quaker writings, and maybe he had. Or maybe from Friends he knew. Or perhaps this is a principle that the Unitarians of his time shared with Friends, for Emerson, like many of the Transcendentalists, started out as a Unitarian minister. I don’t know enough about 19th century Unitarianism to know the answer.
Throughout this essay, Emerson has been making a case for a spiritual understanding of and relationship with Nature as a text, a sacred scripture written by God. In the paragraph that has this quote, he goes on to say:
A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text. By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.
This harkens back to the idea expressed in part one of this series on Transcendentalism, that: “In proportion as we receive this spirit, we possess within ourselves the explanation of what we see. We discern more and more of God in everything, from the frail flower to the everlasting stars.”
Creation is the first, and still continuing, divine revelation, and when embraced with arms of Spirit, it reveals the truth and beauty of the Divine Mind. That Mind is the Logos, the Word, the source and wisdom and purpose of evolution.
Of course, Darwin had not published On the Origin of Species yet (1859), so Emerson had only a limited intuition of how nature was evolving. But he had a deep understanding of how it teaches.
American Transcendentalism and Quakerism—Likeness to God
October 17, 2024 § 4 Comments
I have been reading The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings, edited by Lawrence Buell. It’s a collection of essays by the main figures in the American Transcendentalist movement, of whom the most famous are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
I keep coming across passages that so align with our Quaker thinking that I want to pass some of them along. I’m going to do them one by one in subsequent posts.
“Humanity’s Likeness to God,” by William Ellery Channing (Buell, p. 12)
“It is only in proportion to this likeness that we can enjoy either God, or the universe. That God can be known and enjoyed only through sympathy or kindred attributes, is a doctrine which even Gentile philosophy discerned. That the pure of heart can alone see and commune with the pure Divinity, was the sublime instruction of ancient sages [thinking of Plotinus, here, and the neo-Platonists, I suspect] as well as of inspired prophets. It is indeed the lesson of daily experience. To understand a great and good being, we must have the seeds of the same excellence. How quickly, by what an instinct, do accordant minds recognize one another! No attraction is so powerful as that which subsists between the truly wise, and good; whilst the brightest excellence is lost on those who have nothing congenial in their own breasts. God becomes a real being to us, in proportion as his own nature is unfolded within us. To a man who is growing in the likeness of God, faith begins even here to change into vision. He carries within himself a proof of a Deity, which can only be understood by experience. He more than believes, he feels the divine presence; and gradually rises to an intercourse with his Maker, to which it is not irreverent to apply the name of friendship and intimacy. The apostle John intended to express this truth, when he tells us that he, in whom a principle of divine charity or benevolence has become a habit and life, “dwells in God and God in him.”
“It is plain, too, that likeness to god is the true and only preparation for the enjoyment of the universe. . . . I think, however, that every reflecting man will feel, that the likeness to God must be a principle of sympathy or accordance with his creation; for the creation is a birth and shining forth of the Divine Mind, a work through which his spirit breathes. In proportion as we receive this spirit, we possess within ourselves the explanation of what we see. We discern more and more of God in everything, from the frail flower to the everlasting stars.”
Some thoughts
The first paragraph reminds me of Rufus Jones, who was influenced I believe by neo-Platonism himself, and talked of “that of God’ in similar terms. In his books on mysticism, Jones makes a similar case, that mystical experience is made possible by some aspect of the Divine that dwells in the human. It is through the affinity of this divine principle in the human with its divine source that enables and indeed conducts the mystic into the Divine Presence.
This second paragraph reminds me of Fox’s recounting of one of his first visions: “Now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. . . . The creation was opened to me, and it was showed me how all things had their names given them according to their nature and virtue. . . . in which the admirable works of the creation, and the virtues thereof, may be known, through the openings of that divine Word of wisdom and power by which they were made.”
Through the Flaming Sword 