by Larry Herz
Most of us study the Transcendentalists at some point in our schooling, and read (or read excerpts from) Thoreau and Emerson. It’s easy to get the impression that these people were doing very eloquent woolgathering, because from our viewpoint almost two centuries later, their back-to-nature quotes seem heady and a bit vague.
Reading Conflagration by John Buehrens helped me understand better what all the fuss was about. The mainstream New Englanders were in a bit of a crisis. Their Puritanism was full of Calvinism, a grim and harsh religious outlook. The Enlightenment had raised some interesting possibilities for this life, but while science was making inroads in the Europe and the Americas, humanism was still scandalous to the Puritan sensibility. In the European reaction to scientific progress, Keats was decrying “dark satanic mills” and Kant was positing structures of understanding innate to the soul. Americans gradually began absorbing European advances in philosophy, which began to pose major challenges to their religious and ethical outlook. To sensitive souls, scripture and doctrine began to seem less adequate to describe the whole human situation. Predestination of the soul began to seem arbitrary; the Trinity began to seem contrived and Popish; material progress and its foundation on slave labor began to seem soulless. Although these were deeply religious people, the religious conventions of the time seemed less relevant than their own awoken spiritual convictions.
This is the crux of the movement: the urgent need to find new expression of imminent spiritual realities, and to thrash it out together. The literary Transcendentalists expressed the stirrings of their inner lives in increasingly non-religious and individualistic terms. Others began to propound the divine within all people, and found that social or racial strata had lost all validity for them. Living in emulation of Christ began to outshine traditional Old Testament guidance. Many of these thinkers were in the clergy (most of them educated at Harvard Divinity School), so this discussion played out publicly in New England sermons. The most radical, such as James Clarke and Theodore Parker, alienated the power structure, but were so persuasive that hundreds thronged to their sermons. Partly through them, Boston became the heart of the opposition to slavery and of the nascent Women’s Rights movement. Emerson and Thoreau were supportive, and Thoreau’s essay on Civil Disobedience became an important model for activists (later including Gandhi and King). But much of the crowd-moving and fund-raising went on in the congregations and drawing rooms of Boston. Parker penned ideas later amplified by others: “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it tends toward justice” (used by Martin Luther King), and “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people” (used by Abraham Lincoln).
It’s impressive to reflect that religion, art, literature, oratory, and music can awaken a broad movement of conscience so dramatically, as the U.S. started to come to grips with the institution of slavery and women’s disenfranchisement.