Back to the Future

Neo-Transcendenalism and the Prospects forLiberal Religion

Dr. Brent A. Smith

A paper presented to the Prairie Group

Topic: Neo-Transcendentalism

I. Introduction

It seemed innocuous enough for those of us who routinely enter pulpits and engage in conversations with religious communities that intentionally employ it. In early 2003 Unitarian Universalist Association President Rev. William Sinkford invited Unitarian Universalists “to find a language of reverence, a language that can acknowledge the presence of the holy in our lives.”[1] In my twenty years in ministry I have heard many such calls, but for some reason this invitation elicited an excited response from the faithful. Some have rallied behind it as an echo of their own call to the religious life, while others feared either the appearance of an implicit creed or, worse still, the rewriting of the Purposes and Principles. The degree of the response caught my eye. That a man called to the religious life as head of a religious institution would allude to a personal religious experience, so as to issue a call back to the importance of religious language in acknowledging the presence of a sacredness in existence, seemed routine to me. But, that a religious leader who headed a religious institution would see a need to call religious leaders and member communities to considering religious language is itself slightly unsettling.

Rev. Sinkford was voicing what many of us have suspected: That life in our churches has something to do with religion, and that we have lost the capacity to talk about it amongst ourselves and with a culture for whom we represent a distinctive tradition of interpretation and discourse. We can talk about what goes on or should go on amongst us politically, demographically, psychologically, even generationally. But, have we arrived at a place where we can no longer wield religious or theological language in community and, hence, to a culture? In the past, the call for finding or creating a “new religious language” seemed to originate in the recognition that the world of experience outside the sanctuary had far surpassed the capacity of all religion to engage it meaningfully. I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. Instead, I think it is our inability to use the capacities of the sanctuary, the tools of religion, to interpret profoundly the world of experience. We do not need “to find a language of reverence,” but to confess we don’t know how to wield in community the language our tradition has bequeathed to us. How can we communicate the deepest experiences we have with one another and the world in ways that help elicit meaning from those events, without a common language? Is Sinkford’s call an admission of the limits of “human-centered biases of perception”[2] echoed in the caution of E. O. Wilson: “No intellectual vice is more crippling than defiantly self-indulgent anthropocentrism.”[3] I wonder.

In other words, have we become a movement that can only hear the call of a religious leader to return to the religious task, as a declaration of inclusion and exclusion in a body politic? Have we lost the capacity to exercise the religious imagination in community together and within a tradition? Or, even more incomprehensible and dangerous, does Sinkford’s analysis that we need this particular call at this time mean we’ve lost a perspective on God, human nature, and the world that formed the religious tradition we inherited and for which we are responsible to the future?

The thesis of this paper is simple: We represent a religious movement in American history that is at a crossroads in terms of its religious identity in part because of the extent of its embrace of the religion derived from Transcendentalism. Over a 175 year time span the influence of American Transcendentalism, in conjunction with other factors in our development, has brought us to this juncture where we do not possess the capacity as a community and tradition to reflect upon human religious experience together because we lack the one cultural tool needed to converse about human experience: language. Language is a public tool because it ties people to one another, and to employ it in conversation involves implicit agreements amongst the conversationalists. If religious experience originates in the inner life of the individual as the liberal theological tradition has maintained since Friedrich Schleiermacher, “any expression of religion necessarily involves communication… the indispensable basis of community.”[4] “The influence of Christ… consists solely in the human communication of the Word… If there is religion at all it must be social, for that is the nature of man, and it is quite peculiarly the nature of religion.”[5] Is it that we don’t have a language of reverence largely because we don’t have ties that bind congregations or individuals to one another in religious community? I wonder again.

Our inabilities to engage in the public event of religious conversation are a microcosm of our society’s inabilities to do the same. Both are to some extent the product of Transcendentalism and American Romanticism as they have shaped both our religious movement and the larger culture. The first part of this paper will circumscribe what is meant by Transcendentalism, with particular attention to describing it in its historical context as a break from traditional, revealed Christianity, rooted in revelation as protected and promoted by certain institutional means like creed, doctrine, and theologies derived from them, and towards a religion of immediate inspiration to the individual, what Theodore Parker called “Absolute Religion.” The second part of this paper will look at the influence of Transcendentalism on literature in the 20th century by taking three literary texts and examining the ways each is expressive of and can be contrasted to Transcendentalism’s literary and religious perspective, giving us clues to the modern form of a religion of inspiration. And the third part of the paper will return to the central thesis to analyze what this might mean for Unitarian Universalism as a religious movement and institution in the 21st century.

II. Circumscribing an Unintelligible, Original, and Inspirational Topic

I was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be certainty Transcendental. -Charles Dickens

In chapter two of his book, Hard Times, aptly titled, “Murdering the Innocents,” Charles Dickens introduced his imaginative portrait of “the sadistic relationship of machine to man”[6] through the relationship between Professor Gradgrind and his students in the School of Hard Knocks:

Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities. A man of fact and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over… With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to…

[Thomas Gradgrind stands before his students]

… who were to be filled so full of facts.

Indeed… he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away.

'Girl number twenty,' said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger, 'Give me your definition of a horse.' [No response]

'Bitzer,' said Thomas Gradgrind. 'Your definition of a horse.'

'Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.' Thus (and much more) Bitzer.

'Now girl number twenty,' said Mr. Gradgrind. 'You know what a horse is.'[7]

How accurate, unimaginative, and puny Bitzer’s definition appears when applied to the natural miracle of those magnificently complex creatures, especially as experienced firsthand in the exhilaration of a trip to the horse race track!

Yet, how timely was the fictional scene and Dickens’ critique. By the time the book had been published in 1854, and dedicated to Thomas Carlyle, England was choking from the “Satanic Mills” of the Industrial Revolution, leaving the human imagination gasping for creative air. Authors like Dickens used art to rage against the machine:

… the "mechanical apparatus" of Gradgrind's jaw and the "elephant" of mills are alike emblems of mechanical oppression, while the empty jars in the classroom connect with the abandoned coal pits and other instances of hollowness into a general image of Nature undermined -- the green fields made hungry as the grave. The Idol Reason, finally, blends into the Moloch machine of Coketown to form a single, horrific image devouring both child and workman alike. But weakness, not power, is the prevalent theme of this book. The factory is a "melancholy, monotonous elephant," and its opponent, a very frail thing, is the robber Fancy, which becomes for Dickens the guardian of morality and, finally, a synecdoche of the whole life of the Spirit.[8]

It was the life of the Spirit for which many like Dickens searched. It was not a search or a situation confined to Europe, but one that stretched over “the pond” to engage a young and burgeoning United States. Although “discovered” and “imagined” by Europeans to be a 17th century Biblical Eden or a wilderness fit for the strenuousness of spiritual exercise, by the middle 19th century there were evidences that these religious metaphors had been uprooted. The wilderness was civilized and the garden overgrown. For our spiritual ancestors the environs of Boston had changed dramatically. Settled in the 17th century, two centuries later “Unitarian” had become a self-proclaimed title, and by the year of the publication of Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden and Dickens’ Hard Times Beantown was the country’s third largest city with a population of 137,000.

In his groundbreaking book The Machine in the Garden historian Leo Marx suggested how the juxtaposition of machine and Nature, the ostensibly opposing forces of technology and the pastoral ambiguously played itself out in a “New World.” Nature and the cosmos possessed an exquisite regularity that exhibited the positive connotations of “machine-like,” only to be later superseded by the poetic ideal that a “retreat” to Nature was necessary to discover something divinely elemental in a world choked by machinery. The Transcendentalists tossed in an additional ingredient in this cultural stone soup. The “organizing design” of Thoreau’s Walden was “the hero’s withdrawal from society in the direction of nature” as a “method of redemption.”[9] But, unlike the poet’s ideal of the pastoral prevalent in his time period, Thoreau himself actually went on his sojourn of the spirit. He traveled the empiricist’s path and pioneered the “break down in common-sense distinctions between art and life.”[10]

Although the tension between the Industrial Revolution and the pastoral ideal is one characteristic of the historical context within which Transcendentalism arose, and I think the most important, there were others as well:

Puritan and Revolutionary idealism, the birth of an American culture, the tradition of religious revivalism, the contemporary surge of antinomian reform movements, the rise of European Romantic literature and philosophy, the discovery of Asian literature, the spread of American democracy, the repression of the spiritual in rationalistic liberal Protestantism, the ‘modern’ longing for an organic culture…[11]

It could be asserted that the loss of a sense of immediate connectedness to the origins of human being in Nature, more than all other factors, contributed to the summons the Transcendentalists heard to create “an original relation with the universe.”[12] Dickens was sympathetic to the aim of Transcendentalism as it arose in the American context of confronting industrialization. “If I were a Bostonian, I think I would be a Transcendentalist,” he wrote in his American Notes. But he also hinted at the reigning confusion as to what that declaration actually meant: “I was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be certainty Transcendental.”[13]

Whatever were the social, cultural, and historical conditions within which Transcendentalism arose, this was for certain. Transcendentalists wanted the immediacy of inspiration. They yearned to be enfolded by the refulgent spirit and touched by genius. They wanted new bread where their churches, preachers, and culture gave them degenerating, hardened, moldy, soot encrusted, European stone. And they wanted their Unitarianism to fulfill spiritually the promise of a piety liberated from the restrictions of a Calvinist view of human nature, free to pursue and cultivate “self-culture.”[14]

Transcendentalism was a “religious demonstration”[15] arising out of the context of a Unitarianism still wet behind the ears from surfacing out of the Calvinist deep of inherent depravity, but it was also a rebellion against religion too narrowly understood and a spiritually too narrowly sought. “In its deepest reaches Transcendentalism was a quest for authentic religious experience. It rejected forms, creeds, rites, and verbal explanations and sought to penetrate to the heart of things by a direct, immediate encounter with reality.”[16]

It steered Unitarianism out of a Christianity content with past revelation and towards the free faith frontier of an individual’s immediate and creative inspiration. It fashioned out of the Puritan piety arising within a covenanted community, a religion of the creative genius of selfhood aimed at its unfettered unfolding within a world of spirit. It was not a repudiation of Unitarianism.[17] Welcomed by many in the pews, Transcendentalism was a response “on the part of rational religious liberalism to the emotional enthusiasm of the Evangelical movement.”[18] The primary impetus came from within the Transcendentalists’ own faith tradition, as they engaged Nature, the religious wisdom from a diversity of perspectives, and aimed their spiritual life towards a broader receptivity to things of the Spirit. Transcendentalists sought “Absolute Religion.”

Transcendentalism was both a response to given historical and cultural circumstances and the form a maturing Unitarianism took as it emerged out of New England Calvinism into a distinctive faith perspective. But even in its own time it proved elusive to categorize. Bitzer, your definition of Transcendentalism! Okay, then, of Neo-Transcendentalism! Bitzer’s response would have driven the precise Professor Gradgrind insane, much to the delight of Dickens, Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller! So, how would one describe or define a return to, or a “neo” form of something that eluded definition in its own day? The world’s foremost Transcendentalist literary scholar, Harvard’s Lawrence Buell, shared his bafflement at our choice of topic, writing: “I confess that the term ‘Neo-Transcendentalism’ is new to me.”[19] Alas, such are the hazards of living inside a faith tradition shaped so deeply by Transcendentalist influences and more than its share of a rampant romantic idealism “persuaded of the importance of private judgment.”[20] Scholarly opinion be damned! Let’s study something someone somewhere identified as Neo-Transcendentalism!