Читать книгу Across the Waters of Remembrance - Herbert E. Hudson - Страница 16

To be human is to be paradoxical. To be human is to contain many forces, anyone of which may appear ambiguously weak or strong, beautiful or ugly, creative or destructive. In relation to each other these forces may appear the same yet different, similar yet opposite, complementary yet contradictory. The tension between such forces may be resolved by the dominance of one that is unexpected and perhaps undesired. These paradoxical tendencies of ambiguity, contradiction, and ironic resolution characterize human personality.

The quality of Theodore Parker as a human being, therefore, is best expressed as the paradox of Theodore Parker. The paradox of Theodore Parker emerges in three dimensions: first, Parker as an individual; second, Parker in his relations to others; and, third, Parker’s courage that underlies his greatness.

First, the paradox of Theodore Parker is conspicuous in his individual intellectual and physical powers. Parker’s intellectual powers participate in the paradox. At an early age young Theodore distinguished himself as a scholar. Before he was eight Parker read Homer, Plutarch, and Rollin’s Ancient History; while he was nine the ambitious student read widely in Pope, Milton, Cowley, and Dryden; at ten he began to study Latin, translating Virgil and Cicero’s Select Orations; he tackled Greek at eleven and, as he casually announced, “I took to metaphysics about eleven or twelve” (Weiss 1864, I:43).

The record of such study is doubly impressive considering that Parker was for the most part self-educated. Languages and the classics particularly, Parker said, “I learned . . . almost wholly alone without help” (Weiss 1864, I:368). He continues, “Natural Philosophy, Astronomy, Chemistry and Rhetoric I studied by myself” (Weiss 1864, I:44). Such remarkable scholarship was possible because of Parker’s power of retention: he had a photographic memory. He remembered a poem of 500 to 1,000 lines after a single reading, memorized hymns in church while the minister read them through before singing, retained the table of contents of a book not seen in twenty years, and recited a comic song of more than a dozen verses after having heard it once thirty years earlier.

Into manhood Theodore Parker remained an accomplished scholar. He registered for work at Harvard but reported to the college only to take examinations. He mastered over twenty languages. His constantly growing library of over 11,000 volumes and 2,500 pamphlets caused Emerson to say of him, “It looked as if he was some president of council to whom a score of telegraphs were ever bringing in reports” (Emerson 1860, 14–15). Parker translated and added a definitive commentary to De Wette’s Introduction to the Books of the Old Testament. His Defence, written on the occasion of his indictment before the Grand Jury for aiding a fugitive slave, has been hailed as “the best account extant of judicial and legal tyranny from the reign of James I to the period of his own indictment” (Weiss 1864, II:150).

Parker belonged to the “true race of the giants of learning” (Higginson 1899, 38). Men that grow into giants, however, sometimes have faults in their organic development. In almost a compulsive way Parker seized upon everything there was to learn and know. Even his great mind could not possibly assimilate the endless deluge of material. The overflowing information in letters, sermons, and lectures reflects a want of discrimination. The pre-occupation with study and learning interfered with more imaginative applications.

It is a paradox that in rushing to quench his insatiable thirst at the fountain of knowledge, Parker bloated his mind full of information and thus was not always capable of complete assimilation, fine discrimination, and imagination, Such criticism, however, does not reduce but only qualifies the intellectual stature of Theodore Parker: “It is only the loftiest trees of which it occurs to us to remark that they do not touch the sky” (Higginson 1899, 57–58).

Parker’s physical, as well as intellectual, powers participate in the paradox. From his mother and from the spongy meadows of his farm home Parker inherited a basic source of weakness, consumption. Yet, paradoxically, he possessed great strength and endurance. As a young man Parker could carry a full barrel of cider in his arms. On the farm he had occasionally worked twenty hours a day for several days at a time.

As a man it was not uncommon for Parker to work from twelve to seventeen hours a day in his study. He once walked from New York to Boston, averaging thirty miles a day. When convalescing from a serious illness Parker drove about London with an old friend, Charles Sumner. After six hours of riding Parker decided to go about on foot for more exercise. Sumner went home to rest.

Yet, no man has so much strength that with the burden of hereditary disease he can continually tax himself without injury and eventual destruction. So, it is a further paradox that with all he had to offer the world intellectually, Parker virtually destroyed himself physically. He went too far. He sustained a voluminous correspondence, writing thousands of letters a year. During 1856 he consented to preach twice a week, riding to Watertown every Sunday afternoon regardless of the weather.

It was the lecturing, however, that most deeply taxed Parker’s endurance. Appointing himself a “home missionary for lectures,” Parker went about in every Northern state east of the Mississippi lecturing eighty or a hundred times a year (Weiss 1864, II:479). He took pride in signing himself as “Theodore Parker of everywhere, and no place in particular” (Frothingham 1874, 301). The lecture tour to central New York State was typical. On this trip Parker slept in the railroad cars or between the “damp sheets” of a tavern, had few meals except what fruit he carried in his wallet, and contracted a sharp pain in his side and the chills of an incipient fever. Parker continues to describe the tour:

I lectured, took the cars at 2 or 3 A.M. having waited for them three or four hours in the depot, and reached Albany in time for the 4 P.M. train, Friday, and got to Boston about 2 A.M. on Saturday, having had no reasonable meal since noon, Thursday. Sunday I preached at Boston and Watertown, as my custom was. The next week I was ill, but lectured four times; so the next, and the next, until in March I broke down utterly, and could do no more. Then I had a regular fever, which kept me long in the house; but soon as I could stand on my feet an hour, I began to preach. (Weiss 1864, II:246)

When Parker preached on this occasion, he tells of the effort: “I spread out my feet as far apart as I could . . . to make a wide basis, and kept my hand always on the desk, so that I need not fall over” (Frothingham 1874, 492). The strain of lecture tour and sermon resulted in pleurisy and an effusion of water on the lungs that lasted eight months. Parker had an operation, lost twenty pounds, admitted that it was all a nuisance, but said, “It did not much interfere with my work” (Commager 1936, 273).

How can such a man hope to recover? On Sunday, January 9, 1859, Parker wrote to his congregation, “I shall not speak to you to-day; for this morning, a little after four o’clock, I had a slight attack of bleeding in the lungs or throat” (Frothingham 1874, 504). The “slight attack of bleeding” proved to be a serious hemorrhage of the lungs. Parker scurried to the West Indies and Europe attempting to recover lost health, but it was too late, and on May 10, 1860, he expired in Italy.

Theodore Parker presents a paradox, then, as an individual in his intellectual and physical being. He also presents a paradox in his relations to others. John Weiss, one of Parker’s first biographers, identified the basis of this paradox: “For he would be loved by men, as well as love and worship truth” (Weiss 1864, I:51). It is one of the most tragic paradoxes of Theodore Parker that, although he desperately wanted the affection and approval of others, his relentless search for religious truth made him bitterly hated.

Theodore Parker was a man hungry for affection. Born on August 24, 1810, Theodore was the last of eleven children; the next youngest child was five years older. Thus, as the baby of the family young Theodore was the favorite; the little fellow in his brown home-spun petticoats would eagerly dash from one member of the family to another for a pat on the head and a word of approval. Young Parker received great care and love and hence learned to need great love. He later wrote, “I remember often to have heard neighbors say, ‘Why Miss Parker, you’re spilin’ your boy! He never can take care of himself when he grows up.’ To which she replied ‘she hoped not,’ and kissed my flaxen curls anew” (Weiss 1864, I:24).

Throughout his life, Parker was an extremely sensitive person. J. H. Morrison, who sat near him each time Parker preached, said:

More than half the time, in his prayer, I could see the tears run down his face before he was done. Two years, on attempting to read on Easter Sunday the story of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus, he could not get through, but, overcome by his emotions, had to sit down, and give way to his tears. (Morrison 1875, 251)

His need for human closeness and affection continued. As he declared, “I want someone always in the arms of my heart, to caress and comfort; unless I have this, I mourn and weep” (Weiss 1864, I:51). With this great need for someone to lie in his arms and comfort, it is a paradox that Parker and his wife, Lydia, were not able to have children. Instead, Parker treated the children of his friends as if they were his own. They climbed the long flights to have a chat with “Mr. Parkie,” and it warmed his heart to have them call him that. He opened the top drawer of a secretary and out tumbled a store of carts and jumping-jacks. The floor became a playground and Parker on his hands and knees was the biggest child of them all.

This is the same man who was to write President Fillmore, “No man out of the political arena is so much hated in Massachusetts as myself” (Weiss 1864, II:100). Because of his religious conviction, this man with such an intense need for affection was destined to become bitterly despised.

Parker’s quest for religious truth resulted in an early rejection of Calvinism and a serious qualification of Unitarianism of the time. Parker’s earliest recorded protest against traditional religious forms was at the age of two and a half. It was the occasion of his christening, and a larger concourse of friends than usual made the event impressive. As the water was sprinkled on his head, however, little Theodore vigorously fought off the dismayed clergyman and lustily shouted, “Oh, don’t!”

Of more serious character was the effect of the doctrine of eternal damnation. Having heard the doctrine expounded from a near-by pulpit, little Parker lay in bed for hours weeping in terror and praying until sleep gave him repose. As a young man, Parker attended meetings of the famous Calvinist preacher, Lyman Beecher. “The better I understood [Beecher’s theology],” said Parker, “the more self-contradictory, unnatural and hateful did it seem. A year of his preaching about finished all my respect for the Calvinist scheme of theology” (Weiss 1864, I:57).

So, Parker, confirmed in his Unitarianism, went to Harvard Divinity School and entered the Unitarian ministry. To understand Parker’s qualification of Unitarianism we should place it in the perspective of Unitarian history. Under the influence of William Ellery Channing and his famous “Baltimore Sermon” Unitarianism had abandoned the major dogmas of Calvinism such as the Trinity, a wrathful God, total depravity, and pre-destination, but still held that the Scriptures were the final authority. Although interpreted by reason, the Scriptures were considered a source of revelation external to man.

After the initial thrust by Channing, Unitarians had little interest in going further. They had achieved a degree of respectability that felt good. They fell to defending a new orthodoxy based on the authority of the Scriptures. The creative period had passed. Parker characterized the situation this way:

Alas! After many a venturous and profitable cruise, while in sight of port, the winds all fair, the little Unitarian bark, o’ermastered by its doubts and fears, reverses its course, and sails into dark, stormy seas, where no such craft can live. (Weiss 1864, II:483)

Then, on July 15, 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his “Divinity School Address” to an astonished convocation of Harvard Divinity School students and faculty. Emerson disputed the final authority of the Scriptures since they were a source of revelation external to man and insisted that all knowledge of truth must come from within each man through intuition. A year later Andrews Norton answered Emerson in his speech before the alumni of the Divinity School, “The Latest Form of Infidelity.” And, on May 19, 1841, a day of infamy for orthodox Unitarians, Parker with transcendentalist sympathies responded with his well-known sermon at the ordination of Charles C. Shackford, “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity.”

Parker was now a marked man. Fellow Unitarians cancelled and avoided pulpit exchanges because of “ill health,” “home engagements,” and “frequent absence from their desks” (Frothingham 1874, 152). Other ministers refused to serve with him on committees, to attend the same funeral or wedding, to sit on the same bench at public meetings, to remain in the same public apartment, to trade at the same bookstore, to reply to his letters, or even to return his salutation on the street. Parker sadly said, “I see men stare at me in the street, and point, and say, ‘That is Theodore Parker,’ and look at me as if I were a murderer” (Frothingham 1874, 345).

In 1842 Parker published his Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion, the most thorough statement of his transcendentalist qualification of Unitarianism. He believed that man has the ability to perceive truth directly, that God is in the soul of man and man in the soul of God, that the term “sin” is tainted and of little value, that the Bible should be read as Plato, Seneca or any other book, and that Jesus was human, a religious genius as Homer was a poetical genius.

This was too much for the Unitarians, and they summoned Parker before the Boston Association of Ministers, of which he was a member. With few exceptions, members of the Association criticized Parker, exhibiting the orthodoxy and disregard for freedom of speech that then characterized Unitarianism. Some attacked his works as “vehemently deistical,” others as “subversive of Christianity.” Chandler Robbins asked that Parker withdraw from the Association. The Unitarians, however, failed to intimidate him, for despite the criticism of that meeting and the abuse to follow for the rest of Parker’s life, he refused to withdraw or retreat. A typical sentiment about Parker was voiced by a Boston layman:

I would rather see every Unitarian congregation in our land dissolved and every one of our churches occupied by other denominations or razed to the ground than to assist in placing a man entertaining the sentiments of Theodore Parker in one of our pulpits. (Angoff 1927, 85)

Disapproval was most desperate, however, from clergymen of even more orthodox persuasions, who publicly prayed against him:

O Lord! Send confusion and distraction into his study this afternoon, and prevent his finishing his labor for tomorrow . . . confound him, so that he shall not be able to speak. O Lord! Put a hook in this man’s jaws. . . . O Lord! If this man will persist in speaking in public, induce the people to leave him, and come up and fill this house. . . . Lord, we know that we cannot argue him down; and, the more we say against him, the more will the people flock after him, and the more will they love and revere him. O Lord! What shall be done for Boston if thou dost not take this and some other matters in hand? (Frothingham 1874, 495)

The Liberator once called Parker “more of the hyena than the jackal” (Liberator, July 18, 1856) and a Rev. Mr. Burnham said, “Hell never vomited forth a more wicked and blasphemous monster than Theodore Parker” (Frothingham 1874, 495).

All this hatred and abuse for a man so much needing approval and acceptance simply because of a difference in theological belief—a paradox, indeed! We are not to assume, however, that Theodore Parker stood passive before such an affront. He returned the fire. It is a further paradox that this man who was so gentle with the children became such a terrible opponent. It is a paradox that, despite his sensitivity to abuse from others, Parker was sometimes insensitive to his sarcastic and bitter denunciations of them. More often, however, the sensitivity of Parker succumbed to melancholy. O. B. Frothingham, perhaps Parker’s best biographer, wrote:

Parker was brave; but, as has been said already, he was tender, with an immense capacity for suffering. He could battle long and well; but to battle alone cost him dear. He wanted love; and they from whom he had the best right to expect it failed him. (Frothingham 1874, 175)

When he preached the Thursday lecture in 1840 and was accosted afterwards by an abusive colleague, Parker “left him, not in anger, but in sorrow, and went weeping through the street” (Weiss 1864, I:142). Suddenly Parker realized, “I am alone—ALL ALONE!” (Frothingham 1874, 172). His loneliness sometimes gave way to depression. His periods of depression were almost never evident to others, but were occasionally expressed in letters, as in this one to his friend, S. P. Andrews: “You detected something in my bearing which argued that there was unhappiness, at least discontent of some sort, in the wind. I admit its existence in a greater extent than you imagine; but of the cause, not a word” (Frothingham 1874, 94–95). Usually, however, his feelings of depression were poured into his mighty journals, of which many a line were “blotted with his manly tears” (Chadwick 1900, 208). At places his prose becomes poetry:

I know not why, but heavy is my heart;

The sun all day may shine, the birds may sing,

And men and women blithely play their part;

Yet still my heart is sad. . . . (Commager 1936, 34)

So, the greatest paradox of all: despite the difficulty, discouragement, and even depression that were often with him, Theodore Parker was a man of courage. We have seen that Parker represents paradox as an individual and in his relations to others. The third general paradox of Theodore Parker is that adversity served only to summon his courage, which in turn underlies his greatness.

He would lift himself from depths of depression and declare, “What a fool I am to be no happier. . . . I have sterner deeds to do, greater dangers to dare, I must be about my work” (Frothingham 1874, 110, 68). When going to Boston, where he knew he would for the most part stand alone, Parker said, “I feel that I have a great work to do; I think I shall not fail in it” (Frothingham 1874, 217). And when in the midst of controversy with pulpits closed against him, he proclaimed:

I will go about, and preach and lecture in city and glen, by the roadside and field-side, and wherever men and women can be found. I will go eastward and westward, and southward and northward, and make the land ring. (Weiss 1864, I:184)

Parker’s courage is evident in his personal discipline, his fearless scholarship and his pioneering in Unitarianism, but is perhaps most apparent in his fight against slavery. Slavery was to Parker “the sum of all villainies,” and his struggle against it absorbed the last ten years of his life and over-shadowed even his activity in Unitarianism.

Parker never forgot his grandfather, Captain John Parker of the Minute Men, who precipitated the Revolution by bravely facing the redcoats on the Lexington Green. Parker needed the same courage to speak against slavery in a Boston that had mobbed Garrison and which greeted the Fugitive Slave Bill with a salute of one hundred guns.

When the Fugitive Slave Bill was passed on September 18, 1850, Parker became chairman of the unpopular Vigilance Committee, dedicated to protecting fugitive slaves. In this position Parker penned a bold letter to President Fillmore:

I will do all in my power to rescue any fugitive slave from the hands of any officer who attempts to return him to bondage. I will resist him as gently as I know how, but with such strength as I can command; I will ring the bells and alarm the town; I will serve as head, as foot, or as hand to any body of serious and earnest men who will go with me. . . . (Weiss 1864, II:102)

This was no idle boast. Parker’s courage was not reserved for speaking and writing against the Fugitive Slave Bill: he armed himself and took a dramatic part in the rescues of Shadrach and the Crafts, as well as the attempted rescues of Thomas Simms and Anthony Burns. “I have had to arm myself,” he said, “I have written my sermons with a pistol in my desk, loaded, a cap on the nipple, and ready for action. Yea, with a drawn sword within reach of my right hand” (Parrington 1927, II:415).

The greatness of Parker grows from his courage as a man. Curious and sympathetic throngs came from everywhere to hear the brave prophet. While lecturing Parker spoke to sixty or a hundred thousand people a year. When preaching in the great Music Hall of Boston, butchers, bakers, small-tradesmen and farmers came from hundreds of miles in such garments as they had, sat in such seats as were vacant, and listened attentively to sermons that were seldom less than an hour and sometimes as long as three hours. These were the people he wanted, for Parker had said, “My chosen walk will be with the humble” (Weiss 1864, II:211). He consistently commanded weekly audiences of 3,000, and there were 7,000 names on his parish register! Nor was this all. Parker achieved national, even international, fame. Little did he exaggerate one Sunday when he remarked:

I know well the responsibility of the place I occupy this morning. Tomorrow’s sun shall carry my words to all America. They will be read on both sides of the continent. They will cross the ocean. (Parker 1867, II:86)

Parker’s fearless adherence to principle brought congressmen, governors, and even presidents to rely on him. William Seward, who came to Boston and canvassed the political situation with Parker, remembered his “restless and sagacious and vigorous ability” (Commager 1936, 258). Henry Wilson could not come immediately to Boston, but wrote, “I want to see you some day when you can give me an hour or two, for the purpose of consultation in regard to affairs” (McCall 1936, 28). Charles Sumner affectionately wrote, “I shall always be glad to hear from you, and shall value your counsels” (McCall 1936, 28). Parker’s picture occupied a prominent position in the home of Ohio’s Governor Chase, who wrote Parker, “I always like to read your heroic utterances” (Commager 1936, 258).

The most dramatic instance of Parker’s influence, however, was on Lincoln. Parker sent Lincoln’s junior law partner, William Herndon, a copy of his sermon, “The Effect of Slavery on the American People.” Henry Steele Commager describes the effect:

. . . Herndron read it eagerly. “Democracy is direct self-government, over all the people, for all the people, by all the people,” Parker said. It was a good definition, thought Herndon, and he underscored that passage. It might interest Mr. Lincoln. (Commager 1936, 266)

The paradox of Theodore Parker, then, is seen in three spheres: Parker’s individual intellectual and physical being, his relation to others and religious truth, and the courage underlying his greatness as a response to adversity. When Parker was dying in Florence, Italy, he summoned his friend, Frances P. Cobbe, to his bedside and gathering breath uttered a final paradox:

I have something to tell you—there are two Theodore Parkers now. One is dying here in Italy, the other I have planted in America. He will live there, and finish my work. (Weiss 1864, II:438)

The Theodore Parker planted in America has taken root and grown. Slavery has disappeared, although racial discrimination continues. Unitarianism has unfolded in freedom and tolerance, although many religions still cling to the past. The significance of Theodore Parker, however, is not just in what he did, as our significance does not lie only in what we accomplish. The significance of Theodore Parker is in his quality as a human being: in his strength and weakness, in his personality and life of paradox, and in the triumph of what was great in him.

5. Sermon delivered by the author at the Church of the Reconciliation Unitarian Universalist, Utica, New York; the Unitarian Church of Cortland, New York; the Unitarian Fellowship of Gainesville, Florida; the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Detroit, Michigan; and the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, California. Reprinted as “The Paradox of Theodore Parker,” The Crane Review (Spring 1959), 111–20.