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AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY |
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Select: Introduction: Unitarianism , Transcendentalism - William Ellery Channing Amos Bronson Alcott -- Theodore Parker - Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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Unitarianism: Unitarianism is a form of Christianity that asserts that God is one person, the Father, rather than three persons in one, as the doctrine of the Trinity holds. In America the religious liberalism that came to be known as Unitarianism appeared within the congregational churches in Massachusetts as a reaction against the revivalism of the Great Awakening (1740-43). The election (1805) of Henry Ware as Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard University touched off a controversy, as a result of which the liberals became a separate denomination. The sermon (1819) entitled "Unitarian Christianity" by William Ellery Channing was an influential statement of their beliefs. In 1838, a divinity school address by Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that religious truth should be based on the authority of inner consciousness, not on external historical proofs. More conservative Unitarians were critical of Emerson and his followers, known as transcendentalists, fearing that such subjectivism would destroy the claim of Christianity to be a divinely revealed religion. Since the controversy over transcendentalism, some within the denomination have always felt it important to maintain continuity with the Christian tradition, whereas others have found Christianity to be intellectually limited and emotionally restrictive. Transcendentalism: New England Transcendentalism was a religious, literary, and philosophical movement that flourished especially between 1836, when the essay Nature, by Ralph Waldo Emerson, was published, and 1844, when the semiofficial journal of the movement, The Dial, ceased publication. Influenced by Unitarianism, Transcendentalists denied the existence of miracles, preferring a Christianity that rested on the teachings of Christ rather than on his supposed deeds. Many Transcendentalists, in fact, were Harvard-educated Unitarian ministers who were dissatisfied with their conservative Unitarian leaders as well as with the general conservative tenor of the time. Transcendentalists experimented with communitarian living and supported educational innovation, the abolitionist and feminist movements, and a reform of church and society generally. They were committed to intuition as a way of knowing, to individualism, and to belief in the divinity of both humans and nature. Background Online E-Book The Significance of Being Frank: The Life & Times of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn by Tom Foran Clark William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) William Ellery Channing was born in Newport, Rhode Island, on April 7, 1780 and was one of the most eloquent preachers and the most prominent spokesman for American Unitarianism in the early 19th century. After graduating from Harvard, he became (1803) minister of the Federal Street Church in Boston. Soon thereafter the Congregational churches of Massachusetts were convulsed by dispute over the spread of religious liberalism. When lines were drawn, Channing was found in the liberal camp. Though a reluctant controversialist, he preached a sermon in Baltimore in 1819 that was widely accepted as a manifesto of the liberal party, which thereafter accepted the name Unitarian. He won an international reputation by his critical reviews. In his later preaching he turned increasingly to social reform as an expression of his religious concern for the worth of human personality. Channing's ideas influenced several American writers, including the transcendentalists. As a liberal and humanitarian, Channing was unconditionally opposed to every sort of oppression and injustice, particularly to slavery, on the ground that all men at all times are by nature and by right free; consequently, he declared in his book Slavery (1835), no human being can be justly held and used as property. Another traditional injustice is denial of education to large numbers of people. To avail ourselves of the full extent of our opportunities, all of us -- men and women, white and black -- should be given adequate instruction in useful arts and crafts as early as is feasible. These views on education antedated similar views of Froebel and were greatly admired by his intimate friend, Horace Mann. As a philosopher, Channing was the main precursor of Transcendentalism. Like Henry Hedge and Emerson, he believed that it is impossible to know God through his works in external nature. It is rather human nature that is divine. Intelligence and good will reflect our kinship to God. By developing our inherent ability to see and do good, by cultivating sympathy toward others, we unfold our sublime nature. By learning to understand fellowmen, we avail ourselves of the key to the divine attributes of the world. Toward the end of his life, Channing projected a big work, unfortunately never written, to be entitled The Principles of Moral, Religious, and Political Science. The central ideas of the book, as we learn from Channing's son, William Henry, were a search for the true perfection of man, cultivation of social morality, clarified interpretation of religion, and continual reforms of political institutions. The plan still remains to be realized in the history of humanity. He died in Bennington, Vermont, on October 2, 1842.
Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888) Amos Bronson Alcott (picture) was born in Wolcott, Connecticut on November 29, 1799 and was a transcendentalist philosopher and educator. Because his teaching methods were radically egalitarian, the schools he established failed. He and his family were poor until his daughter Louisa May became a literary success. He was a reforming superintendent of the Concord, Massachusetts' public schools from 1859 to 1865 and conducted the Concord School of Philosophy from 1879 until his death. He was a vegetarian, an abolitionist, and a women's-rights advocate. Alcott is frequently referred to as a "dreamer" because of his unsystematic, deeply veiled philosophy. Yet, like his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, he is truly representative of the New England transcendentalist movement. He was best received at small gatherings, where people listened patiently to his rambling ideas, eager to catch the secret meaning of his orthodoxy. His critics like to dwell upon his personal oddities with the result that his virtues and thoughts are little known. However, many of his lectures throughout the East and Middle West were published in The Dial. He is also the author of Orphic Sayings, Tablets, and Concord Days. Principally a distributor of ideas, a reiterator of previously formulated concepts, he was a teacher by conversation rather than indoctrination. He established several schools based upon these ideas, and was a member of the short-lived Utopian experiments at Fruitlands. Through his solid friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson and William T. Harris, he was able to realize his dream of a school of philosophy at Concord, Massachusetts. It is frequently said, despite his contributions to American letters and philosophy, that his life was a failure -- largely because his household larder was empty most of the time. This is no way detracted from his family's allegiance to him. His daughter, Louisa May Alcott, portrayed him as the grandfather in Little Women. In spite of his critics, this peripatetic lover of wisdom remains one of New England's most lovable sons. He died on March 4, 1888. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On the Internet
Theodore Parker (picture) was a nineteenth century Congregationalist minister who strongly influenced Unitarianism. He attended the Harvard Divinity School and in 1837 became minister of the Unitarian church in West Roxbury, Mass. Parker was a preacher and social reformer whose activist ministry has been an example to succeeding generations of ministers. He became the focus of controversy in 1841 when he preached a sermon -- "The Transient and Permanent in Christianity" -- which undercut Christianity's claim as a unique revelation from God. The liberality of his sermons aroused strong criticism, and he took a leading part in antislavery agitation. In 1845, Parker became minister of the Twenty-eighth Congregational Society of Boston. His religious philosophy, strongly influenced by transcendentalism, was the basis for vigorous attacks on the popular theology and for advocacy of social and ecclesiastical reforms. An abolitionist, he risked imprisonment in attempting to free a fugitive slave by force. When he was not yet 50 he contracted tuberculosis; he traveled through Europe in a vain search for health and died in Florence, Italy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) Ralph Waldo Emerson (picture), lecturer, essayist, and poet, was born on May 25, 1803, and is generally considered the leading exponent of American transcendentalism. He was the son of a Boston Unitarian minister and he followed in his father's footsteps by attending the Boston Latin School (1812-17) and Harvard College (1817-21). After running a school for young women, Emerson returned (1825) to Harvard to study divinity and was licensed to preach the next year. Suffering from tuberculosis, he sailed to Charleston, South Carolina and St. Augustine, Florida in late 1826. When he returned to Boston, he preached from various pulpits before being ordained (1829) pastor of the prestigious Second Unitarian Church in Boston. In September 1829 he married Ellen Louisa Tucker. After Ellen's death in February 1831, Emerson underwent a religious and personal crisis, and the next year he resigned his pulpit and sailed for Europe. There he met William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle, forming a lifelong friendship with the latter. After his return to the United States in 1833, Emerson moved (1834) to Concord, Massachusetts, which became his home. And it was here that he joined a remarkable group of kindred souls -- Amos Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Theodore Parker, and Henry David Thoreau. It was in the company of these friends that he developed his speaking style as well as clarity of thought. At last he found himself mature; he had ideas to convey, to explain. He fitted himself into a new trend, and his poetic imagination helped to bridge the gap between his ancestral puritanism and the rising mood of modern science. In 1835 he married Lydia Jackson and began a successful career as a lecturer. He soon became one of the leaders of the transcendental movement, questioning the established views of literature, philosophy, and religion. He helped to start the Transcendental Club in 1836 and published Nature (1836), a book showing the organicism of all life and the function of nature as a visible manifestation of invisible spiritual truths. In 1837 he delivered his address "The American Scholar," often called America's literary declaration of independence, before Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa Society; in 1838 his address before the Harvard Divinity School challenged the very foundations of conservative Unitarianism. He cofounded (1840) the transcendentalists' periodical, The Dial, and edited it from 1842 until its collapse in 1844. When Emerson spoke of the realm of the soul which embraced the mind and the spirit, it was with certainty and strong conviction, not theoretical knowledge. He distinguished between philosophers like Spinoza, Kant, and Coleridge and others like Locke, Paley, Mackintosh, and Stewart. He held that the former spoke from within or from experience as parties to or possessors of the fact; while the others spoke from without, as spectators whose acquaintance with the fact came from the evidence of third persons. He treated the latter and their doctrines contemptuously, and characterized them as coarse translators of things into conscience, ignorant of the relationship of the soul to the divine spirit. The latter relationship was the only thing that mattered to Emerson, for him no facts as such were sacred; none unworthy but which became instantly important when they indicated or symbolized the history of the living soul, regardless of whether they voiced a mythical imagination, history, law, customs, proverbial wisdom, the creative spirit of artists and poets, the contemplation of a saint, the decision of a hero, or the conversation of ordinary persons. Emerson believed that the worth of any individual man was derived from the universe which contained all human life and was therefore mysterious. He regarded every man as the entrance to the universal mind, capable of feeling and comprehending that which at any time befell any man. Emerson shows the interconnectedness of all life in an almost pantheistic view of god-in-matter in The Over-Soul. The Poet lists Emerson's qualifications for the artist who is "the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty." Experience describes the "lords of Life" that form man's existence: illusion, temperament, succession, surface, surprise, reality, and subjectiveness. These optimistic early essays are balanced by conservatism in Emerson's later work, best illustrated in Fate (1860). Here, Emerson warns of a "pistareen-Providence" that keeps man from seeing and facing "the terror of life." He says, "Nature is no sentimentalist, -- does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman, but swallows your ship like a grain of dust....; The way of Providence is a little rude. We cannot whitewash this fact." Emerson also balances his earlier belief in absolute freedom by tempering it with fate or necessity, now holding that the natural order of things, which once served merely to guide man, now limits him and prevents him from destroying it as well: "If we thought man were free in the sense that in a single exception one fantastical will could prevail over the law of things, it were all one as if a child's hand could pull down the sun." Emerson's discussions of organic form (everything proceeds from a natural order that is followed but not imposed by man), self- reliance, optimism (evil does not exist as an actual force, being merely the absence of good), compensation, universal unity (or the Over-Soul), and the importance of individual moral insight were all influential in forming the literature and philosophy of 19th-century America. In poetry too Emerson was an important force. His organic theory of poetry ("it is not meters, but a meter-making argument that makes a poem") and his view of poets as "liberating gods" or prophets did much to counteract the poetic conservatism of his day. It led to the experimental verse of Walt Whitman, who once hailed Emerson as his master. William James pointed out that there were two Emersons: one was the instinctive New Englander whose sharp eyes penetrated the defects of the American republic without despairing of it; the other was the Platonizing Emerson who exalted the Over-Soul, and before whom revelations of time, space, and nature shrank away. Emerson was often aware of the fact that his readiness to perceive various phenomena and to expand his spiritual interests could lead his mind in disparate directions. The elder Henry James asserted that Emerson "had no conscience, in fact he lived by perception." Emerson looked upon consistency as the hobgoblin of little minds. In Self-Reliance, he stated: "With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do." Emerson was the most important figure of the American romantic period. He inspired optimistic transcendentalists such as Thoreau and provided a challenge to such authors as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, who believed in the "power of blackness." Emerson died at home, in Concord, on April 27, 1882. But he will be long remembered, partly for his thoughts, but mainly for his style. In The Radical Academy
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