Transcendentalism

The movement began as a quarrel inside Unitarianism, which had itself been the liberal wing of New England Congregationalism, and the quarrel had a precise subject. Unitarian theology rested the authority of Christianity on the miracles: the reported events authenticate the messenger, and the messenger authenticates the teaching. Emerson and those with him held that this makes religion depend on testimony about the past, and that the soul has direct access to the divine now.

Emerson had already resigned his Boston pulpit in 1832 because he could not administer communion in good conscience. In 1838 he was invited to address the graduating class at the Harvard Divinity School and told them that historical Christianity had erred by dwelling with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus, and that the preacher who speaks from tradition rather than from experience speaks of a dead thing. Andrews Norton, the senior Unitarian scholar, replied in print under the title The Latest Form of Infidelity, and Emerson was not invited back to Harvard for thirty years.

Theodore Parker took the argument further in a sermon on the transient and the permanent in Christianity, distinguishing the doctrines and rites, which change, from the truth of the teaching, which he held would stand even if it could be shown that Jesus had never lived. Parker remained a working minister and was ostracised by most of his Unitarian colleagues for it.

The positive doctrine is set out in Emerson essay Nature of 1836. The natural world is not merely useful and not merely beautiful; it is a language, in which particular facts stand for particular spiritual facts, so that reading nature attentively is a form of revelation available to anyone with eyes. Thoreau took the claim literally enough to test it, living beside Walden Pond for two years and writing the book that came out of it, which is at once a natural history, an economic argument and a religious exercise.

The movement had no creed and no organisation, only a discussion club, a journal called The Dial edited first by Margaret Fuller and then by Emerson, and a set of friendships. Fuller Woman in the Nineteenth Century came out of the same circle and is among the first substantial American works of feminist argument.

The Dial ran a series of extracts under the heading Ethnical Scriptures, printing passages from the Laws of Manu, from Confucius and from Buddhist material beside Western sources, and treating them as scripture rather than as anthropological curiosity. Emerson read the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads in the translations then available and wrote the poem Brahma out of them; Thoreau kept a copy of the Gita at Walden. The reading was selective and filtered through idealist assumptions, but it was the first sustained American engagement of its kind, and the later American reception of Asian religion runs back through it.