The Transcendentalists in the US

Amy Kulesza DeBeck

If you have not been to Walden Pond and Concord, Massachusetts, I urge you to do so. Perhaps our discussion today might lead to a field trip next summer to Boston, Concord, and its environs. Today I want to talk about Transcendentalism and three of its participants, Thoreau, Emerson, and Fuller. We owe these three a debt of gratitude in three specific areas, upon which I will expound and we can discuss. Emerson, who was a Unitarian minister and gave up his parish for writing, introduced the concept of the Oversoul, an idea which can be found in our pluralistic faith today, and ushered in a type of Transcendent belief in humanity, or religious humanism as it is called today, based on Kant’s philosophies. Thoreau, a literary failure in his time, influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr with his treatise about Civil Disobedience, and is the forebear of every Western Nature writer since the Civil War. Margaret Fuller was a prolific writer and acclaimed editor who published an essay called “Woman in the 19^th Century,” which has influenced every woman involved in the pre-feminist and slavery abolitionist movements of the nineteenth century. The women’s rights group in Seneca Falls, NY, convened by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and early feminist Susan B. Anthony, and others all acknowledged Fuller’s influence.

While as a group they sought to change their society by protesting against it, and change literature by sculpting out a place for Americans among British luminaries, they probably would not categorize their particular interests the way I have, with each one having a particular niche. This is for the purpose of discussion, as a learning tool. Surely they all believed in gender equality, the pluralistic Transcendent essence that is in Nature, and peaceful civil disobedience, but let us look at each of them in their specialty area as we discuss Transcendentalism.

Transcendentalism was a movement whose participants upheld the principles of an ideal spiritual reality that transcends the empirical and scientific and is knowable through intuition. Today we encounter people whose beliefs are in line with them; as a movement it never died or failed, but the Circle stopped meeting and its journal’s publication ended. The group began meeting, intentionally, with Bronson Alcott and Waldo Emerson, as he preferred to be called. By 1835 Emerson was a Unitarian minister who had become troubled with both the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper and with the intellectualism of the Unitarian church. Believing that religion is more intuitive than rational or logical, he left the pulpit to write, lecture, and study philosophy. By 1842 he was involved with numerous Transcendentalist publications, including The Dial, a journal started by him, George Ripley, and Bronson Alcott, edited by Margaret Fuller. Emerson always made it clear that, while he believed in the principles of Transcendentalism, he also never believed that it was possible to live by them perfectly. From his essay, The Transcendentalist,

“there is no pure Transcendentalist, yet the tendency to respect the intuitions, and to give them, at least in our creed, all authority over our experience, has deeply colored the conversation and poetry of the present day; and the history of genius and of religion in these times, though impure, and as yet not incarnated in any powerful individual, will be the history of this tendency.”

He taught a sort of natural religion, not refuting or debunking existing practices, but rather pointing out their unity, citing the commonalities of the human religious experience, namely, in being able to commune with God, one-on-one in nature. He had become aware of Immanuel Kant’s belief in universal principles of goodness and truth, and he had studied some eastern and middle eastern religions as well. He believed that there exists a unity between the faiths. Inherent in all is the possibility for communion between God, man, and nature, the Over-Soul, and this was the title of another of his famous essays. More of a moral philosophy than a call to some new religion, his teaching of the Over-Soul lays groundwork for what we today would call humanism. Not atheism, wherein belief in God is refuted, but a belief that the Truth of God is intuitive for any person who can think about or feel the connection with Nature. From the essay, the Over-Soul in 1841,

“As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up, and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come.

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart, of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character, and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand, and become wisdom, and virtue, and power, and beauty.”

Emerson, who lived to be the elder statesman of Transcendentalism, dying at 79 years, is described as being overly optimistic, a great friend, always cheerfully attempting to live the life of an idealist, while engaging in the world as was necessary to support oneself and one’s family. His home was full of children and his friends would often come and stay for long periods of time, helping his wife, Lydian, with the kids while he was out lecturing, teaching, and earning. Central among these friends were Thoreau and Fuller and many others who were in the movement. Many other poets and writers of the time were influenced, encouraged, and associated with the movement, including Walt Whitman, Fredrick Douglass, and Emily Dickinson. Notable also were those who made their names by lashing out against the idealistic movement, such as Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.

As Emerson laid the philosophical groundwork for the communion of God with Nature, Thoreau attempted to carry forth with the project. He chose to live alone on Walden Pond and keep a journal about the experience, which we know today as Walden. Other Transcendentalists set up and lived in Utopian societies, or communes, with varying success, to live the ideals, and there is interesting reading to be done on these projects, too. George Ripley started Brook Farm, and Fruitlands, begun by Bronson Alcott, was written about by his daughter, Louisa May Alcott of Little Women fame.

Thoreau’s entrance into the movement came after he had suffered major loss in his life. In 1838 Henry David and his brother, John, had opened their own grammar school in Concord, Massachusetts after being dismissed from teaching for not practicing corporal punishment. After two years, in 1841, John died and Henry David was devastated. Having befriended the Emerson family, he served as their tutor, handyman, and lodger for two years, becoming deeply enmeshed in the Transcendentalist movement. At that time around Concord, there were discussions, which people paid to attend, lectures, essays, all led by people who were either in or protesting the Unitarian church, and these are our forebears today. I believe that this movement becomes manifest today whenever we argue about what our faith actually is, or what our church’s tenets actually are, or the course of human nature and its impact on Nature. That culture around Boston was shaped by the Transcendentalists and is inextricably bound to the Unitarian church. Emerson had come out of the church, and many Transcendentalists were still preachers, like Frederic Henry Hedge and Theodore Parker.

From 1845 to 1847 Thoreau practiced simple living in a cabin owned by Emerson on Walden Pond. We heard some of the book before this sermon, but I urge you to read it, or re-read it. One day during those Walden years, he was walking into town, probably so that his mother could do his laundry, when he met up with a tax collector. He refused to pay the tax supporting the Mexican War and spent a night in jail. His essay on this matter, Civil Disobedience, is one of America’s treasures, teaching and giving reasons for non-violent activism. Non-violence was a theme for Thoreau, even as he supported John Brown after his bloody raid because he was also an abolitionist. He was an idealist whose writing and desire for simple living, while not appreciated in his time, is understood by many to be one of the all-time greatest American writers in any genre. Among nature writers such as Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, John Muir and more, he is the standard by which one measures their work. In the scientific field of ecology, he is an amateur scientist but of interest, nonetheless. Working much of his adult life as a surveyor, always preferring the outdoors, he tirelessly journaled about phenomena such as the migration schedule of birds and the extinction of particular apples, in which today’s ecologists find great value. He died at 44 years old of tuberculosis, which he suffered from for many years. It is reported that when a relative asked him, at the end of his life, if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau commented that he didn’t know they had ever quarreled.

Our final figure of interest today is Margaret Fuller. One of her claims to fame is for being an unapologetic unwed mother in 1850, living with her lover. Although unclear whether she ever married Mr. Ossoli—a man ten years younger than she--they were the parents of a son. She had grown up in the home of her father who was a lawyer and a congressman who treated her no differently than if she had been a son. Mr. Fuller taught her Latin and Greek, and sent her to good schools. When he died, she had to help with the care of her siblings, and she turned to teaching and writing. She had been introduced to Emerson and his circle early on. In By 1938 she was a full participant in the Transcendentalist society, although female, and was known to challenge Emerson constantly. When she realized that these tasks took up too much time for her to write, she started to hold Conversations.

Many women had very good educations, but never got to flex their mental muscles in groups. She opened the door, for a fee, to 25 women to discuss philosophical and intellectual ideals among other women. The one time that she opened her conversation to men she found that they took over the discussion and she kept it to just women after that. Her meetings were held in the home of one of the Peabody sisters and were attended by the women behind many of the men who were leaders. These women became leaders in their own right, such as one of my heroes, Lydia Maria Child, Julia Ward Howe, many wives of clergy, Mrs. Emerson, the Peabody sisters, and many in the anti-slavery movement. Fuller led these discussions weekly for five years, making more money than if she taught school, and was able to keep up with her writing. During this time, she did befriend men and work with them, such as becoming editor of, and contributor to, the transcendentalist journal, The Dial, for two years.

She traveled out west and wrote of it in her book, Summer on the Lakes. Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, admired her work and hired her as the book review editor. After the publication in The Dial of “Woman in 19^th Century America,” calling for equal rights for women, she was well known even outside of Transcendentalist circles. The New York Tribune installed her as foreign correspondent and she traveled to Italy in 1847. Becoming involved with the Revolution rather than merely reporting on it, and falling in love with Ossoli, she stayed in Europe for 3 years. In 1850 she and her family planned to return to America where she would publish her manuscript about the failed revolution. Their ship ran aground during a storm and the family drowned, even in sight of land off of New York’s Fire Island. Margaret Fuller was only 40 when her life, those of her partner and son, and her manuscript were all lost in the shipwreck. Her legacy for all of us is one of social reform, for women and any oppressed group.

While not every Transcendentalist was a Unitarian, I believe that each of us is a Transcendentalist to some degree. In valuing experience, believing in justice, and finding our spirituality in nature, we are offsprings of this movement. Recently I had the pleasure of discussing these transcendentalists with someone from our congregation as we were discussing our potential for growth, our preferred style of building, and why we are still a religion with small numbers. Our UU churches tend not to be on thoroughfares accessible to all, but hidden in the woods like Thoreau’s cabin on Walden. Our buildings by and large incorporate aspects of nature, whether it be our wooden beams or another sanctuary’s huge windows. It is not so much that we visit a house of God when UU’s worship, but that we have found a place inside where perhaps God also may be, as surely as God is in Nature, and there is unity in the communion of human, God, and Nature. As Waldo said, God enters by a private door into every individual.

May we always be ready for the experience. Blessed be and amen.