Our Transcendentalist Legacy
Ralph Waldo Emerson, descended from a long line of New England ministers, was educated at the Boston Latin School
and at Harvard College. Following the family tradition he was ordained and called to serve Boston's prestigious
Second Church, Unitarian. That same year,1829, he married the great love of his life, Ellen Louisa Tucker. All
indications pointed to a quiet, successful life following the tradition of his father and his father's fathers.
Eighteen months later, disaster struck: his wife died of tuberculosis, and Emerson faced a deep and soul-shattering
spiritual crisis. It would appear that little or nothing in his family tradition or in his preparation for ministry
sufficed to soothe his great pain. Finally, he resigned his pulpit and left the ministry. The ostensible reason
centered on the observance of the Lord's Supper at Second Church: Emerson found the service empty and meaningless,
a ritual which he could no longer conduct with any sense of integrity; the church, however, was unwilling to give
up its tradition; so they came to a parting of the ways.
With money from his wife's estate, Emerson sought to escape his troubles by traveling in Europe. He returned to
the United States much changed. He purchased a house in Concord and began to collect a group of friends and associates
around him to discuss his developing insights. A perjorative aimed at the group gave it its enduring name: the
Transcendental Club. At the same time, Emerson was creating a new career for himself as essayist, poet and lecturer--a
career for which he was eminently suited and which would establish him as a preeminent force in the intellectual
life of the United States.
In 1837, Emerson was invited to address the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. For an hour and a quarter he spoke
on the subject, "The American Scholar," urging his hearers to abandon slavish imitation of European styles
and concerns and find their own unique voice, a voice appropriate to a new and young and vital culture. Oliver
Wendell Holmes, one of his listeners, styled his address "our intellectual Declaration of Independence."
The next year, Emerson was back at Harvard. This time his "Divinity School Address," infuriated the faculty
as well as the most respected of the denomination's ministers; in a brief afternoon he transformed American Unitarianism
forever. Critics charged that his address was "neither good divinity nor good sense." His words were
dismissed as "just the latest form of infidelity." Emerson himself was described this time by Oliver
Wendell Holmes as "an iconoclast without a hammer, who took down our idols from their pedestals so tenderly
that it seemed like an act of worship." Emerson, an alumnus of the school, was virtually exiled from Harvard
for the next thirty years.
To understand the impact of Emerson upon the development of the Unitarian movement, we need to examine the historical
and intellectual context in which the Sage of Concord was living. American Unitarianism had emerged as a consequence
of disputes within the Calvinist churches of New England. The earliest settlers had conceived of their venture
to the new world as a temporary expedient; so the early churches had not deemed it necessary to hedge their orthodoxy
about with creeds or disciplinary structures. Rather, the churches were gathered on the basis of simple covenants
in which congregants agreed to walk together in truth as God gave them to see the truth, and each congregation
was its own final authority in matters of doctrine and practice.
With the passage of time, as the original religious fervor cooled, preachers, who often served the same congregation
for decades, were shaping their congregations according to their changing views and the standard of orthodoxy was
weakening. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Calvinist churches of New England were divided into two major
camps--liberals who had softened harsh Calvinist doctrines like original sin, and who modified, if they did not
outright reject, the doctrine of the trinity; and evangelicals who sought to recall the people to the sterner,
harsher standards of their ancestors. These divisions resulted in a permanent schism in which the liberal wing
embraced the name, Unitarian.
These Unitarians understood themselves to be Liberal Christians, or Rational Christians, describing their faith
as "the religion of Jesus rather than the religion about Jesus." What distinguished them was a strong
commitment to the use of reason in matters of religion. They revered the sacred scriptures but believed that the
Bible must be understood by use of that reason which God had bestowed on humanity so that his revelation might
be properly understood.
When the Unitarians spoke of reason, they were speaking from an understanding shaped by the Enlightenment. Following
the teachings of John Locke, they believed that all truth is the result of sensory experience-- what can be tasted
or felt or seen or heard or smelled. All else is illusion.
In terms of this philosopohy, if all truth is the result of experience and if Christianity is true, then the job
of the church and of the preacher is to present that experience which proves Christian claims. Lockean philosophy
led the Unitarian rationalists to argue that the evidence for the truth of Christian teaching is to be found especially
in the miracles recorded in the Bible. The Bible, they held, was the written record of the factual experience of
eyewitnesses to miracles which had actually happened, thus proving the truth of Christianity. And so, they embraced
the scriptural miracles as the evidence received by human senses that proved the unique sanctity of Christianity.
They became staunch defenders of the inerrancy of the ancient witnesses as offering the only assurance of the truth
of Christianity.
Unitarian ministers of the period used their sermons for long and intricate and scholarly discussions of the ancient
sources and their relevance for Christian tradition. It was this brand of Unitarianism which Emerson savaged--ever
so gently--with his Divinity School Address. In it Emerson voiced his dissatisfaction with the "corpse cold
Unitarianism" of his day. He criticized Unitarian ministers for sermons focused on the reported experiences
of men long dead, while ignoring their own first-hand experience of life. In unforgettable terms, he described
the preacher who tempted him never again to go to 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 at 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....there [was] 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.
Emerson went on to urge his listeners to abandon the traditional focus on the testimony of the past as the source
of religious truth, and to focus instead upon their own lives, their own experience of the sacred. He insisted
that God not only spoke in the past, but speaks today to those who open themselves to the meaning of their own
experience of the world. He did not so much challenge Lockean philosophy as he replaced ancient authority with
immediate experience.
The response was swift, and for the most part hostile. Newspapers, ministers, and professors all hastened to distance
themselves from Emerson's sentiments. His successor at Second Church pointed out that Emerson was not representing
the denomination, and that he was no longer a regular minister. The denominational press reviewed and denounced
the address.
Defenders of the status quo had reason to be offended. They understood that Emerson's address was more than an
embarrassment to a denomination intent on proving its right to the label, "Christian." Indeed it represented
a profound threat; for, if his views prevailed, Unitarianism would be altered beyond recognition. The Divinity
School Address challenged the ancient assumptions concerning the fundamental authority of Christianity. Emerson
had substituted a far more personal authority--the experience of the individual passed through the fire of thought.
The role of reason was no longer to address the objective meaning of a shared sacred text. Now it would be the
function of reason to sort out the interior meaning of personal and individual experience. Each person's encounter
with the holy now acquired the authority once attributed to the reports of those long dead. This life and a reasoned
understanding of it contained all necessary authority.
Whatever his intentions may have been, Emerson permanently weakened the authority of Christianity within American
Unitarianism and replaced it with an intuitive and mystical quality. In one summer afternoon, Ralph Waldo Emerson
transformed the nature of religious discussion.
Emerson was a thinker, an essayist, a poet, a lecturer, but not a controversialist. Having presented his best thought,
he was prepared to allow others to attack, defend, work out the further implications. It is possible, then, that
the Divinity School Address, heard only by a handful of people, might have left little trace as the controversy
faded away. But before the controversy could fully run its course, another event renewed the excitement.
Among the theological students listening to Emerson's Divinity School Address was Theodore Parker. The son of a
poor farmer, Parker graduated from Harvard and was called to be minister of a country church at West Roxbury. He
earned wide respect for his skills as a parish minister, for his broad knowledge and his deep scholarship, though
he was suspected, in some quarters, as being one of the Transcendentalists. An anecdote out of Parker's childhood
may explain the deep impact Emerson's words had on the young minister.
Parker told the story that when he was a small child out walking through the woods alone he happened upon a turtle.
Without thinking, he swung his stick preparing to strike the creature. But he was stopped by a sudden mental impulse
which halted his swing and forbade his action. When he told his mother about it, she explained to him that this
was his conscience speaking, and that conscience was the voice of God within him. Parker always insisted that his
subsequent life was the continued out-working of his mother's teachings.
It is not surprising that Emerson's call for a religion focused on a God who speaks continually through human experience
would strike so resounding a chord in Parker's soul.
Nearly three years after Emerson's Address, Parker was invited to preach at the ordination of one Charles Shackford.
He entitled the ordination sermon, THE TRANSIENT AND THE PERMANENT IN CHRISTIANITY. If Emerson had rejected the
supernatural authority of Christianity, Parker took the argument to a new level by suggesting that if Christianity
is true, its truth must be axiomatic and self-evident, and would be just as true if Jesus had never existed, or
if the message had been proclaimed in Athens rather than in Palestine. The forms and the doctrines of Christianity,
he insisted, are all transient. What is permanent is the word of God as it is expressed in each human heart, the
word of God as it is spoken through Conscience, Reason, and Faith and that truth existed before Jesus, and after
him and in all times and places and has no need of miracles to justify it.
Parker made clear and unmistakable the implication of Emerson's thought. Christianity was to be seen as one of
many transient expressions of eternal truth, that same truth that finds expression in other religions and is rooted
in the human soul. And so, the Christian claim to uniqueness could no longer be sustained. What is more, Parker
delivered his message in language which was clear beyond question--so clear, in fact, that some felt he had treated
the most ancient virtues and values with irreverence. Many in the audience were hurt and shocked by what they heard.
To make matters worse, several orthodox ministers in the audience took notes, and published their review of what
Parker had said.
Embarrassed by the publicity, stung by the suggestion that Parker's views were normative in their denomination,
and eager to distance themselves from such heresy, many Unitarians were quick to cast Parker beyond the pale. Some
ministers, calling him an unbeliever and an atheist, refused to speak to him, to shake his hand, or to sit beside
him in meetings. Most of the Boston ministers refused to exchange pulpits with him. Many doubted that he could
be considered Christian any longer. The Boston Association of Ministers to which Parker belonged considered ejecting
him, and finding that unacceptable, sought to have him withdraw voluntarily. Parker, however, refused to resign.
Unlike Emerson, Parker stayed in the ministry and under Congregational polity, there was no way to remove him from
that ministry so long as his own congregation was satisfied with him. Just the same, after 1846, the Unitarian
Year Book never again listed his name among the ministers of the denomination.
It should not be assumed that Parker was without supporters. When it became clear that most the city's pulpits
were closed to him, a group of Boston laymen, hired a hall and arranged for him to preach. A large congregation
was gathered and organized in 1846 as the Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society, with Parker as its settled minister.
So large were the crowds coming to hear him preach on the topics of the day that it soon became necessary to find
a larger hall. For years Theodore Parker, rejected by most of his own denomination, would be the most popular,
the most influential preacher in Boston and his influence would extend well beyond the confines of the city.
Parker quickly saw that transcendentalism had clear social implications. If, in truth, God is a living force, speaking
and acting in the world, was it not his, Parker's, task to attempt to discover where in the world the sacred was
at work and align his efforts with that sacred imperative? If the human conscience is the voice of God in the human
soul how could he, Theodore Parker, refuse to respond to its monitions?
It was central to his ministry that Parker threw himself into social reforms. He grew steadily more radical as
he became active in the temperance movement, in the movement for prison reform and opposition to capital punishment,
in his concern over slavery and women's rights, in his opposition to war. In time, Parker would write his sermons
with a loaded pistol on his desk, ready to defend the runaway slaves he was harboring. Skeptical of all sacred
writ, in time, Parker would burn the Constitution of the United States in public, denouncing it as a pact with
the devil because it countenanced slavery.
After years of lonely, intense labor, Parker's health broke. In 1858, he undertook a European trip in the hope
that rest and new vistas might restore his vigor. But in 1860, at age 50, Theodore Parker died and was buried in
the English Cemetery in Florence. There is a story told--I would like to believe that it is untrue, though it has
the unfortunate ring of truth about it--that when word reached Boston that Parker was dying in Italy and the Unitarian
ministers were invited to join in a prayer for him, some of them refused to participate until they could be assured
that there was no chance for his recovery.
In the biography of Theodore Parker, and to a lesser degree, in that of Ralph Waldo Emerson, we see again the ancient
conflict between the needs of the institution for acceptance and respectability and survival and the call of the
prophetic voice to embrace new and untried possibilities. In time, the man who had been an embarrassment to colleagues
in his own generation, and who had been an outcast in his own time, would be seen as a great Unitarian prophet.
Because of Theodore Parker, Transcendentalism was more than a literary movement; it became a religious alternative
which moved Unitarianism even further outside the Christian concensus.
Theodore Parker had said that his entire career could be understood as the outworking of his mother's teachings
about the voice of conscience in the human soul. In many ways, subsequent Unitarian Universalist History can be
understood as the outworking of the vision, the passion, the integrity, the courage of Theodore Parker. It is our
Transcendentalist legacy, the insight of Emerson mediated by the genious and passion of Parker, that has shaped
modern Unitarian Universalist spirituality and makes ours not just a Christian heresy, but an alternative faith.
The sermon in a Unitarian Universalist setting is never the last word on any subject, but rather an invitation to further dialog.
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