Transcendentalism was a religious, philosophical, and literary movement that began to express itself in New England in the 1830s and continued through the 1840s and 1850s. It was born in dissatisfaction with the-current opinions in liberal theology (Unitarianism) and the philosophic views on which these theological opinions were based (materialism). (Blau, 1965, p. 111)
For several reasons, however, Transcendentalism is not simple to define as such. “It encompassed complex philosophical and religious ideas. Its tenets were tinged with a certain mysticism, which defies concise explanation” (“Transcendentalism Major,” 1998, para. 1). Clarence L. F. Gohdes (1931, p. 1) states that "American Transcendentalism, an eddy in the current of Romanticism, has never been satisfactorily defined. It has been variously regarded as a distinct philosophical system, a mere ‘faith,’ revolt against Calvinism in an age of developing national consciousness, a reaction against the domination of Locke and Scotch theologians, pantheism with a peculiar admixture of skepticism, and so on."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most important practitioner and chief spokesman of the movement, himself could not give a definite definition to what his friends and he, himself, were doing. He called Transcendentalism “the Saturnalia or excess of Faith.” That which is "popularly called Transcendentalism among us, “he wrote,” is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842” (Lundin, 1997, para. 7).
Transcendentalism was never a party of any form. Instead, it was a loosely knit group of authors, preachers, and lectures bound together by a mutual loathing of Unitarian orthodoxy, a mutual desire to see American cultural and spiritual life freed from bondage to the past, and a mutual faith in the unbounded potential of American democratic life. Located in Concord, Massachusetts, Transcendentalism build formed not a tight group, but, rather, a loose federation (Lundin, 1997, para. 8). The term Transcendentalism itself, moreover, was not self-imposed, but rather applied by outsiders in an attempt to easily classify and categorize another group of people (Myerson, 2000, p. 1).
George F. Witcher in his book The Transcendentalist Revolt against Materialism (1998, p. 4) affirms that “the neighbors in fun christened the gathering [Emerson and friends] the Transcendental Club, borrowing what may have seemed an untouched term from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The name, however, stuck and has since become an accepted label for the New England idealists of this time [1830s].” Thus, Transcendentalism has never been satisfactorily defined. Yet no one doubts of its great influence on American society during its time and since then.
The Origin of Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism or Transcendental movement was at first a small gathering of several persons who desired to talk and discuss about things occurring in America at the time. Most of them were young well educated men and Unitarian.
The transcendentalists, the group, generally met in the study of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a former Unitarian minister who had left his pulpit in order that he might be free to think and write his own unfettered thoughts. It included other youthful and earnest clergymen such as Theodore Parker of West Roxbury, George Ripley of Boston, and F. H. Hedge of Bangor, but among the members were also numbered the progressive schoolteacher and philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott, the poets W. E. Channing and Jones Very, and a recent graduate of Harvard named Henry Thoreau. Thoughtful women were represented by Mrs. Ripley, Elizabeth Peabody, and Margaret Fuller. The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, the journalist Orestes W. Brownson, and several now forgotten figures sometimes attended the highly informal meetings (Whicher, 1998, p. 4).
Although a movement such as transcendentalism cannot be said to have had one distinct leader, Emerson (1803 - 82) was clearly its central figure. The publication of his Nature in 1836 is generally considered to mark the beginning of an identifiable movement. The next two decades were to see numerous new works from Emerson and poems, essays, and books from other transcendentalist figures, such as Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 62), Orestes Brownson (1803 - 76), Amos Bronson Alcott (1799 - 1888), Margaret Fuller (1810 - 50), George Ripley (1802 - 80), and Theodore Parker (1810 - 60). (Lundin, 1997, para. 9)
Those Transcendentalists, however, were not actually always in agreement on everything. They often had debates and consultations without a clear conclusion. It is known also that besides sharing admiration and respect, they also had a bit ‘opposition’ to each other; whether it was thoughts or personal characteristics. Paul F. Boller, Jr (1974, p. 8) writes "Emerson liked Thoreau's free and erect mind but was vexed by his penchant for paradox; he hailed Alcott as an original thinker, but sometimes thought he was a ‘tedious Archangel.’ Margaret Fuller worshipped Emerson, but complained (as did other Transcendentalists) that he ‘always seemed to be on stilts,’ and Emerson for his part found her a little too impetuous for his nature. George Ripley was disappointed in Emerson for refusing to join the Brook Farm Community and he deplored Alcott's humorlessness. Thoreau was repelled by Ripley's experiment at Brook Farm, but Emerson took a friendly interest in it. Brownson sent his son there but his enthusiasm for Ripley's enterprise was highly restrained…Ripley found strengths and limitations in his Transcendental friends and they in him…Theodore Parker (whom Emerson called ‘our Savonarola’) told John Sullivan Dwight, the musician of the group: ‘You love vagueness, mistaking the indefinite for the Infinite.’ Dwight told Parker: ‘You write, you read, you talk, you think, in a hurry, for fear of not getting all.’ And so it went."
“Still,” he continues, “amid all the rumbling and grumbling, the Transcendentalists were in essential accord on fundamentals; they were familiar with each other's work, commented on it freely, and exchanged opinions amicably enough most of the time. There was both conflict and consensus among the Transcendentalists.” James Freemen Clarke, a member, later said, "We are called like-minded because no two of us think alike." (“Transcendentalism,” 1995, para. 3)
Despite all those differences and conflicts between the Transcendentalists, there was one thing which almost all of them did share. It was the heritage of Unitarianianism. Paul F. Boller, Jr (1974, p. 8) states that “It [Transcendentalism] concerned mainly young people in the Boston and Cambridge area during the Age of Jackson who were mostly educated at Harvard, theologically trained, middle-class, and Puritan and Unitarian in background.”
Perhaps more than anything else, this fact helps to explain the development of transcendentalism and its later and larger significance for American culture. The transcendentalists broke with Unitarianism for two reasons. First, they objected to the Unitarian desire to cling to certain particulars of Christian history and dogma. Emerson called this clinging a “noxious” exaggeration of “the personal, the positive, the ritual,” and he asked instead for a direct access to God, unmediated by any elements of Scripture and tradition. And second, the transcendentalists lamented the sterility of belief and practice they found in the Unitarian faith. (Lundin, 1997, para. 8)
“They were tired of a stale Unitarianism,” Ernie Seckinger (2001, para. 8) writes, “whose theological basis from Locke deprived the human mind a direct understanding or connection to God.” They rejected the narrow orthodox Christian concept of God. Theirs was a broader view of seeing God in his creation, and not only as the Creator. (“Transcendentalism,” 1995, para. 6)
Major Tenet: The Oversoul
What the Transcendentalists wanted to achieve and thought that they could achieve by a discipline of their intuition was a direct relationship between the soul and God. This direct relationship was to “transcend,” to pass beyond, all the conventional avenues of communication—not only to transcend the senses, but also to transcend church, clergy, and Scriptures. (Blau, 1965, p. 111)
The Transcendentalists believed in the importance of a direct relationship with God and with nature. Theodore Parker spoke of man’s relation to God in particular in his powerful sermon “A Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity” (also known as the “South Boston Sermon), which was delivered in 1841. Parker (cited in “Transcendentalism Major,” 1998, para. 16) wrote, "In an age of corruption, as all ages are, Jesus stood and looked up to God. There was nothing between him and the father of all; no old world…no sin or the perverseness of the finite will…He would have us do the same; worship with nothing between us and God;…and we never are Christians as he was the Christ, until we worship, as Jesus did, with nothing between us and the Father of all."
In 1865, moreover, a student at William College asked Emerson what Transcendentalism was. His remarks, as recorded by his questionnaire, (Gohdes, 1931, p. 3) included these words: "Is God far from any of us? There is an equality of the human spirit to the world’s phenomena. We look neither up to the universe nor down to it but confront it…You shall find God in the unchanged essence of the universe, the air, the river, the leaf; and in the subjective unfolding of your nature, the determination of private spirit, everything of religion."
The same tone was also spoken by another influential Transcendentalist, Thoreau, in his book “Walden.” In a chapter of his book entitled “Solitude,” he wrote of his connection with nature as a very intimate, two-way relationship: “The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature,—of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter,—such health, such cheer, they afford forever! . . . Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?” (cited in “Transcendentalism Major,” 1998, para. 24-26)
These expressions of oneness with nature suggests the concept at the very heart of Transcendentalism, that of the Oversoul. The Oversoul formed the encompassing framework within which a direct relationship with God and with nature was so essential to the Transcendentalists. Simply described, the Oversoul was a kind of cosmic unity between man, God, and nature. (“Transcendentalism Major,” 1998, para. 29-31)
Emerson wrote an essay titled “The Over-Soul,” which was included in the first series of his Essays published in 1841. In it (Emerson, 1841, The Over-Soul, para. 2), he described the Oversoul as: "…that great nature in which we rest…that Unity, that Over-Soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other…We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE."
The idea of the Oversoul had roots in the ancient philosophy of Plato, whose writings the Transcendentalists read. To the Transcendentalists, the Oversoul was the divine spirit or mind that was present in each and every man and in all of nature. It was an all-pervading, omniscient, supreme mind. Each particular example of nature or of humanity was a reflection of the divine mind, and the whole of the cosmos could be extrapolated from each particular. In each manifestation of God, man could discover, in encapsulated form, all universal laws at work. The presence of the divine spirit in both nature and the human soul made a direct understanding of God and an openness to the natural world avenues to self-understanding. Self-understanding led to the perception of higher truth. (Wilson, 1998, para. 7-10)
Horton and Edward (1974, p. 117) writes “…[Transcendentalism] exhorting young men to slough off their deadening enslavement to the past, follow the God within [this is the Oversoul], and to live a life with a strenuousness that rivalled [sic] that of the Puritan father...and pointed to nature as the great object lesson proving God’s presence everywhere in his creation.” Therefore, the Transcendentalists called for an independence from organized religion; they saw no need of any intersections in the relationship between God and the individual man. Divinity is self-contained, internalized in all beings (Brulatour, 1999, p. 13). Hence, Emerson, like others, rejected the narrow definition which the term “Christian” implied when referring to God. They preferred the term “theist” which seemed to then a more universal designation of the divinity (“Transcendentalism Major,” 1998, para. 15 ).
Firstino Wimphy H. 2008.
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