by J. Barkley Rosser, Jr.
August 15, 2021
It has been widely argued that New England transcendentalism was the first genuinely Americanintellectual movement, strongly influencing philosophy, theology, politics, and literature. Many date its clear beginning to the first meeting of the Transcendental Club on September 12, 1836, never really a club rather than a series of meetings. That first meeting had only three participants: two Unitarian ministers, Frederic Henry Hedge who hosted and initiated it and George Putnam, along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had stopped being Minister of the Unitarian Second Church in Boston in 1832 , following the death of his first wife and his developing doubts about communion and Biblical miracles.
Later male “members” (attendees of the meetings) included Bronson Alcott, experimental educator and father of Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women; Theodore Parker, abolitionist and Unitarian minister whose parishioners in his West Roxbury church included the abolitionist leader, William Lloyd Garrison; Henry David Thoreau, author of “An Essay on Civil Disobedience” and Walden, which exalted mystically merging with nature in accordance with Hindu and Buddhist views; William Henry Channing, nephew of the main founder of the American Unitarian Association in 1825. William Ellery Channing, who resisted transcendentalism even as his views influenced the movement; and George Ripley, journalist and Unitarian minister who would found the utopian Brook Farm experiment in 1841 in West Roxbury (which would fail in 1847).
Along with being a seed bed of abolitionist sentiment, the group also strongly supported womens’ rights and had numerous active women members as well, including Margaret Fuller, viewed as the best educated woman in America who would edit the movement’s journal starting in 1840, The Dial, author in 1845 of the first American feminist work, Women in the Nineteenth Century, and whose death in 1850 led Emerson to declare this ending the transcendentalist movement; Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, owner of an influential Boston bookstore and who made the first translation into English of a Buddhist work, the Lotus Sutra, published in The Dial in 1844; Julia Ward Howe, who would later compose The Battle Hymn of the Republic during the Civil War and who in 1870 announced the first Mothers’ Day, and Sophia Dana Ripley, who with her husband George would co-found and lead Brook Farm.
While the Transcendental Club and other aspects of organized transcendentalism were pretty much over after 1850, many later figures were strongly influenced by it, including most of the abolitionist movement whose base was in New England, the womens’ movement with Elizabeth Cady Stanton who co-organized the Seneca Falls meeting with Susan B. Anthony a strong follower, and numerous figures in literature, including poets Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, and novelists Louisa May Alcott and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the latter a close friend of Emerson in Concord, MA, who would be an initial member of the Brook Farm community, although he would leave it after a year and criticized it.
It would also have tremendous influence on American Unitarianism, even as it was initially opposed by the establishment of organized American Unitarianism. Among its important ideas that would enter into Unitarianism included the idea of people having individual moral intuition that does not depend on formal religious doctrines or even reason, a view of transcendent unity that includes humans and nature under the influence of eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, and a deeper criticism of Biblical stories such as of miracles as well as of traditional Christian theology. Even as intuition was advocated, reason and science were also strongly supported, including in the analysis of problems in Biblical texts and ideas, arguably a contradiction.
The dispute between the original American Unitarian establishment and the transcendentalists broke out into the open after Ralph Waldo Emerson gave a famous address to the Harvard Divinity School on July 15, 1838, two years after the Transcendental Club got going, and in which he expressed various of its ideas, especially its emphasis on individual moral intuition and criticism of many Biblical passages still accepted by the establishment, although use of reason to critique such passages and traditional Christian theology was already accepted. But they had mostly focused on Old Testament miracles rather than those in the New Testament, which Emerson critiqued. He had been invited by six out of seven of the students of the school, one of whom was Theodore Parker, an early member of the Transcendental Club.
The talk was also attended by two professors who were leading figures of the establishment: Andrews Norton and Henry Ware, Jr., the latter an old friend of Emerson’s. They soon publicly criticized this address, with Norton declaring that “Transcendentalism is the latest form of infidelity,” and Ware declaring that “God plays multiple roles, not simply a matter of divine laws.” An anonymous statement in The Christian Examiner, the leading Unitarian newspaper, declared “…so far as they are intelligible, are utterly distasteful to the instructions of the school and to Unitarian ministers generally, by whom they are esteemed to be neither a good divinity nor good sense.” Emerson was declared to “be an atheist.” But in the longer run the transcendentalists would become the establishment.
So what were the influences that led to the outbreak of this philosophy, especially on the thought of the crucial figure of Emerson, who for all his radicalism would later become a kind of all-American acceptable source of wise quotations for commencement speeches that now seem almost cliches? For all the claims of its being very American, important influences came from outside. The term “transcendentalism” came from German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his 1781The Critique of Pure Reason, in which he posed “transcendental idealism” through which people create the meaning of objects in their minds through direct observation. This influenced other German philosophers and theologians who also were involved in studying which parts of the Bible could be true based on reason and history. The bridge between this German philosophy and Emerson and the Americans passed through the English Romantic poets, notably William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The latter was especially important as he was not only a Unitarian minister in the late 1790s, but he wrote on philosophy and politics. Emerson visited both of them in England in 1833 and absorbed this transcendental idealism from them.
Wordsworth influenced Emerson in the idea of the possibility of a mystical unity with nature, a strong theme in Wordsworth’s poetry. Later in his essay, Nature, Emerson declared “Go into nature; be solitary, This leads to delight, exhilaration and the vanishing of ‘mean egotism.’ On becoming a transparent eyeball…nothing…seeing all…I am part and particle of God.” Of course Thoreau would act on this with his move to Walden Pond in 1845 that led to his famous work on this in 1854, and in which he more clearly brought in the influence of eastern religion as an inspiration: “In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, since whose composition years of the Gods have elapsed and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial…The pure Walden water is mingled with the water of the Ganges.”
It was Elizabeth Palmer Peabody who first brought Buddhist thought into the purview of the transcendentalists with the 1844 publication of her translation (from a French translation) of the Lotus Sutra in The Dial, but Hindu ideas had already been coursing through transcendentalist discussions, not just from the Bhagavad-Gita, but also especially The Upanishads. Again it looks that the crucial initiating figure on this was Emerson. Apparently he first became aware of Hindu thought from an aunt of his who wrote to him in 1822 about “Vishnoo” and The Upanishads. As with transcendental idealism, these ideas came through England, unsurprisingly, given its role in ruling India. Emerson’s views of morality would come strongly to resemble the Hindu doctrines of dharma and karma. In his 1841 essay Compensation, all actions bring about their reaction: “Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty…If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own…The Indian mythology end in the same ethics.” He also saw in Indian thought the foundation of the mystical unity side of transcendentalism: “In Hinduism’s experiments there has always remained a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin than the will I call mine.”
I shall conclude this by noting a curious and more direct influence from India, with a further curiosity that Emerson’s writings would from the 1850s into the late nineteenth century became influential back in India itself upon various Hindu philosophers. But in the 1820s and early 1830s a figure from India, a Bengali named Ram Mohan Roy, would play a more directly influential role in all this, as well as providing a vision of how these ideas would combine to produce a mystically founded social reform movement. Raised as a Hindu, but a student of Islam and Christianity, he sought to reform anti-woman traditional Hindu practices such as child marriage and having widows burned on the pyres of their dead husbands. He attempted to develop a combination of these three religions, drawing on the mystical transcendence of Hinduism with the monotheism of Islam and the morality of Christianity. This effort led him in 1819 to found the Calcutta (now Kolkata) Unitarian Society as well as a social reform movement, Brahma Sanaj, which would last and act long after his death. In 1830 he traveled to England as ambassador of the Mughal emperor, calling for various reforms in British-Indian relations and would interact with British Unitarians, among others. He would die in England in September, 1833, the month that Emerson arrived there to visit Wordsworth and Coleridge. And, unsurprisingly, Roy was also an influence on Emerson and through him on American transcendentalism.
EDITED TO ADD FROM BARKLEY:
I also want to add something I meant to say near the end of the discussion, but which has to do with a core split between the Puritan Congregationalist and the Unitarians in New England in the early 1800s, but really going back much earlier. The Calvinist Puritans believed in Original Sin and that most people were fundamentally wicked and damned. Only a few would be saved, and God knew who they were, the basis of the predestination idea.
The Unitarians, and even more so the Universalists, believed most people were fundamentally good, in contrast. People could fall into evil, it existed, but people were mostly good. This was a view of the Established Unitarians, but it was reinforced by the Transcendentalists as well.