Unitarian Roots

What seems liberal to one generation often appears conservative to the next. This difference in perspective was strikingly illustrated in the early theological thought of Unitarianism. This movement emerged from Congregationalism in the early nineteenth century. A religion of reason, it sought to subject the Bible and Christianity to the bar of reason. Atonement does not require God to execute an innocent being, they insisted. Man can turn to the God of love on his own ability. They distilled the Christian faith to "The Fatherhood of God, The Brotherhood of Man and the Leadership of Christ." Some wags claimed they believed in "The Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man and the Neighborhood of Boston." That's because Unitarians did not go far beyond the city.

Yet, before these Unitarians passed from the stage, they became targets of criticism from younger ministers in their own communion who were dissatisfied with the older liberalism. These young ministers called themselves "new school" or "movement party" in order to contrast their beliefs with the older static thought of their elders. But in time, they came to be dubbed simply as "Transcendentalists." Transcendentalists were united by the belief that we all possess a divine spark, and that human beings enter the world trailing clouds of glory. This purity and innocence is lost over time, and salvation (if you can call it that) consists of connecting once again with the divinity within us.

The response of the old line Unitarians to such ideas was to charge the Transcendentalists with infidelity. Clearly, this new liberalism had affinities with the old: (1) both accented divine benevolence, (2) both attacked traditional trinitarianism (3) both affirmed the essential divinity of man, and (4) both rejected classical theories of the atonement. On other hand, Transcendentalists went far beyond the Unitarians in four ways. They believed in: (1) divine immanence (2) intuitive perception (3) rejection of external authority and (4) a radical social ethic.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The first foreshadowing of Transcendentalism occurred when Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to John Boynton Hill, a Harvard classmate. "When I have been to Cambridge and studied Divinity," he wrote in January, 1823, "I will tell you whether I can make out for myself any better system than Luther or Calvin, or the liberal besoms of modern days. I have spoken thus because I am tired and disgusted with the preaching which I have been accustomed to hear."

Put simply, transcendentalism was a reaction to the rationality and reason of Unitarianism. It choose, instead, to focus on the moral sense of a person, on their intuitional faculty. Right and wrong, they insisted, is a perception of the human mind, not one's reason.

Emerson entered Harvard Divinity School in 1825. At the time, it was dominated by two liberals: Henry Ware and Andrews Norton. The faculty was well satisfied with the traditional tenets of rational Christianity, but not Emerson. He never finished his degree. He refused to be a spiritual pensioner on his ancestors. Instead, he choose to strike out on his own in an effort to find a more vital faith. The church as he knew it was dead. Emerson was looking for a vital, lively faith.

In 1826, Emerson applied for a license to preach at the Middlesex Association of Ministers. The trial sermon he submitted was on the text in I Thessalonians 5:17 "Pray without ceasing." In this introduction to this sermon, Emerson laid out two basic philosophical ideas that would come to characterize his mature religious thought: (1) the primacy of spirit over matter; and (2) the immediacy of God to the human soul. As to the primacy of spirit over matter, Emerson had become concerned with the same problem that preoccupies the Hindu faith. Perhaps that was because he had been reading the Vedas. There Spirit is treated as the ultimate reality. Nature is little more than God's dress. Interestingly, these same ideas also have roots in the Christian tradition. St. Bonaventura, for instance, wrote that one sees the footprints of God in nature. As to the immediacy of God to the human soul, Emerson was greatly influenced by Platonic and Neo-Platonic thought, which was reinforced by German idealism as mediated to him by such Romantic writers as Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Although Emerson was one of the first Transcendentalists, other young churchmen were attracted to this new religious liberalism among them: Orestes A. Brownson, Theodore Parker, William Henry Channing, and Margaret Fuller. Almost to a person, they were graduates of Harvard Divinity School and shared a dim view of Lockean philosophy to which older the Unitarianism was committed. (Locke was an empiricist; that is he taught that knowledge comes from the use of one's senses.) That is because they discovered in Coleridge something better. Where the church had previously taught that an epistemology based on revelation (the orthodox) or reason (the Unitarians), the Transcendentalists under the influence of Coleridge believed it possible to know things intuitively. In this, they were heavily influenced by the whole idealistic tradition from Plato to Kant, and were particularly shaped by such German theologians as Friedreich Schleiermacher.

Schleiermacher believed that one could no longer demonstrate the truthfulness of Christianity to its "cultured despisers" by appealing to reason or revelation. All one could do was appeal to the sense of "awe" one feels in the presence of that which is greater than one's self [Say, standing on a mountain looking at the sunrise]. This "gefule" [which in German can mean: feeling, sentiment, emotion, sensation, sense, instinct, intuitive grasp] is the only foundation for religious faith, Schliermacher argued.

Transcendentalists began with the supreme theological question: what is the nature of Ultimate Reality? Emerson's answer was that human beings belong to two worlds: that of the Spirit and that of matter. Emerson believed that the latter is "more certain and stable than the material universe." Nature, he insisted is "but the web of God." (Emerson, American Scholar) Emerson was often vague in defining the nature of this Divine Spirit, but he was in his latter years a pantheist.

Theodore Parker

Theodore Parker was too poor to attend Harvard, and he never got a degree. But he knew 20 languages, 18 of which he taught himself.

As to the issue of the nature of God, Parker believed it was fruitless to speculate as to whether God personal or impersonal, even though he held to a personal deity. Parker agreed with the Unitarians on two basic points: (1) the oneness of God (he too, rejected Trinitarianism); and (2) the benevolent character of God. He held to the doctrine of "the infinite perfection of God." Of all the attributes of the Deity, he was most impressed by the all-lovingness of God, often referring to God as "Mother." As for Jesus, he sought to distinguish between the truth witnessed to by Christ and Christ as an object of worship, choosing to focus on the former.

Some Distinctive Beliefs of Transcendentalists

The God of the Transcendentalists sustained an intimate relation to the world of nature and of man. This God immanently vitalizes the whole cosmos, and especially the human soul. Emerson wrote that "God is the substratum of all souls." At another point, he said, "the soul is the Kingdom of God, the abode of love of truth, of virtue." (Journals II, 361)

Because they accepted the idea of divine immanence (God indwells his creation), Transcendentalists denied the sharp antithesis that Unitarians drew between the natural and supernatural. As a result, they rejected interventionist idea of miracles. Parker put it this way: "God, ever present, never intervenes; acting ever by law a miracle becomes needless, and also impossible." Transcendentalists also erased Unitarianism's distinction between revealed and natural religion. Again, Parker puts the Transcendentalist position well: "all religion is revealed to us, or it could not be felt, and all revealed religion is natural or it would be of no use to us."

This faith in divine immanence also led Transcendentalists to abandon the sharp antithesis between Christianity and other religions. They believed that the same God discloses himself in all religious traditions, therefore non-Christian faiths are erroneous. Not surprisingly, the Transcendentalists took an active interest in oriental religions, and were the first in this country to seriously study them.

The Transcendentalists also fashioned a distinctive doctrine of humanity: one has a native capacity to apprehend spiritual reality directly in terms of perceptive intuition. If one depends on one's senses (Locke), one is doomed to religious skepticism (that is to say, one can never proved God empirically by use of the five senses). Therefore one must depend on super-sensory abilities. Parker believed in a three "primal intuitions:" God, moral law, and immortality. This led Transcendentalists to deny Paley's attempt to prove the existence of God by citing the design in all things. (Paley argued that if one finds a watch on the heather, one assumes the watch had a maker. Likewise the intricacy and design in creation must mean it had a Creator.) The only proof of God, they argued, was in our moral instincts.

Faith in the virtual infallibility of human intuition gave the Transcendentalists their distinctive name. They believed in an order of truths that transcends the sphere of the external senses. The Truth of religion is not to be found in tradition or creeds, but in the witness of one's own soul. Therefore, they refused to bow to any external authority, be it church, book or person. Again, Parker spoke for them when he wrote: "I take not the Bible for my Master, nor yet the Church, nor even Jesus of Nazareth for my master."

Transcendentalists had a high opinion of humanity's moral estate and potentiality. In this, they resembled their Unitarian colleagues who also allowed for the essential divinity of man. Parker believed that "all evil of the world is something incident to man's development, and no more permanent than the stumbling of a child who learns to walk...it will be outgrown, and not a particle of it or its consequences shall cleave permanently to mankind. This is true of individual wrongs which you and I commit; and likewise of such vast wilderness as war, political oppression, and the hypocrisy of priesthoods."

Religion then, was not a matter of being born again--a change of nature--but a development of nature, a blossoming. Again, Parker stated the Transcendentalist position well: "Religion will not be a regeneration, being born again, a change of nature...but a development of nature, what the blossom is to the bud, what growth to mankind or womankind is to girl or boy."

As for the Transcendentalists view of Jesus, they held that his only mission had been to lead men into a fuller fellowship with the Father. And he had done this by actualized the full potential of his humanity, not by dying in substitution for some sinner. The saving nature of this death was not to be found in sacrificial shedding of blood, but in this manifestation of love for others. Jesus was not, they contended, divine. But he was, Parker wrote, the best teacher of "absolute religion," that is love of God and love of man. Jesus was a religious genius, a model of religious excellence, but he was only a man. Therefore, according to Parker, the church "should aim to have it's member Christians as Jesus was the Christ--sons of man as he was;--sons of God as much as he."

In this, the Transcendentalists stood to the left of the Unitarians in their social thinking. If every man has within him Divine reason, they contended, every person must be free to realize their fullest potentiality. If people could reach their fullest potential, then it would be possible to realize Heaven on Earth. Therefore, the Transcendentalists were reformers. War, capitalism, intemperance, and slavery found some their greatest enemies among the Transcendentalists.

Brook Farm was an effort by the Transcendentalists to frame a new society. This effort was also part of a broader movement toward communism in the intellectual circles of the 19th century. The principles for this new community were simple: each person was to contribute what one could; all work had its own dignity; and each person was to be as self-reliant as possible. As Emerson had put it, in relying on the true self, one relies on God. (Or to put it another way, if one peels the onion of the self, one finally gets to Ultimate Reality.)

Brook Farm was a hit among the cultural elite. Nathaniel Hawthorne, for instance, was in residence for a while. The community was also distinguished by its interest in education. One of those in residence who explored new educational ideas was Bronson Alcott. His work was build on the principle that since the mind comes from God, education should teach people how to attach themselves to the Spirit. At his Temple School, he tried to teach children while they still remembered something of heaven. He asked them questions about what they remembered about God. When he discovered the children knew nothing about their birth, much less God, he tried to assist their memories by filling in the details of conception and birth which led to a storm of debate in Boston.

Some Deficiencies of Transcendentalism

Ultimately, Brook Farm and the Temple School were failures, and as such, they point out some of the deficiencies of Transcendentalism. No matter how much stress they put on Spirit, they ignored the extent to which they were part of the world. We live in a world of time and place. They, however, were oriented to a world of eternity and spirit.

Second, the Transcendentalists forgot the one thing that they were always talking about--individuality. They sought in the end to merge the individual into the Spirit of the Universe, but they forgot that we are born alone, and we die alone.