Читать книгу A Journey Into the Transcendentalists' New England - R. Todd Felton - Страница 23

The energy and momentum of Boston’s early-nineteenth-century Unitarianism provided the foundation and the freedom for a new theology, divorced from the restricting doctrine of Calvinism. Unitarianism supplied, literally and figuratively, the forums where clergy and laypeople could hold spiritual beliefs up to the new light supplied by German philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and British Romantic writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

While much of the initial Transcendentalist activity took place at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, where the appointment of the liberal Henry Ware Sr. to the Hollis Chair of Divinity in 1805 was viewed as a landmark victory for liberal Christianity, the theological underpinnings of Transcendentalism were born across the Charles River at (1) the Federal Street Church, 100 Federal Street (now the regional headquarters of Bank of America). The Reverend William Ellery Channing served as minister here from 1780 until his death in 1842.

Channing’s landmark sermon “Likeness to God,” delivered in 1828, contains many of the fundamental beliefs of the Transcendentalist movement. “True religion consists in proposing as our great end, a growing likeness to the Supreme Being,” he proclaimed, and this likeness “belongs to man’s higher or spiritual nature.” For a community that had persecuted Anne Hutchinson for suggesting that the Holy Ghost could reside in a “justified” person, this was a radical position.

Channing’s sermon further laid out the path for the Transcendentalists. First, it gave parishioners permission to look within for proof of a deity that the Church had claimed could be found only in the miracles described in the Bible. In order to know that deity, Channing said, humans must know themselves: “That unbounded spiritual energy which we call God, is conceived by us only through consciousness, through the knowledge of ourselves.” In order to understand what they experienced while looking inward, Channing encouraged his audience to develop “a kindred mind, which interprets the universe by itself,” as opposed to an “outward eye,” which perceives merely the surface of things.

Channing also brought his audience’s attention literally outside, to nature, which previously had been more connected with primeval danger and the devil. In a move that anticipated Thoreau’s Walden, Channing found God “in the structure of a single leaf” and encouraged his audience to “discern more and more of God in every thing, from the frail flower to the everlasting stars.” In doing so, he said, “true religion thus blends itself with common life,” and his followers could “strive to awaken in men a consciousness of the heavenly treasure within them.”

These ideas brought animosity both from the established churches and from Harvard’s more dogmatic leaders, but they also attracted some of the finest minds of the time to his pews. Among his acolytes was Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, a young woman from Salem eager to engage him in a discussion of ideas. Soon the future publisher and critic was helping the minister prepare his sermons and acting as a theological sounding board. She served as his unofficial secretary for ten years and did much to aid the progress of his liberal theology.

Channing was not the only progressive thinker in Boston, however. Another theologian who became an integral part of the Transcendentalist movement was George Ripley, the minister of the Purchase Street Church from 1826 to 1841. In addition to his sermons and published pamphlets promoting Transcendentalism, Ripley was involved in a number of significant activities of the movement. He was a founding member of the Transcendental Club, and he carried on a lengthy published debate with Harvard professor Andrews Norton in defense of Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” of 1838. But his best-known contribution to Transcendentalism was an experiment in utopian living known as the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education (see chapter 7).

Federal Street Church was the home pulpit of the Reverend William Ellery Channing, who was viewed by many of the Transcendentalists as the father of their movement.

Boston Common today looks much the same as it did to the members of the Transcendental Club.

Another progressive voice in Unitarianism, perhaps its most radical, was that of Theodore Parker. A native of Watertown, Massachusetts, Parker graduated from Harvard Divinity School after being mentored by fellow Transcendentalist and Unitarian minister Convers Francis. In 1837 he landed a job with the small sixty-member Spring Street Church in the Boston suburb of West Roxbury.

Parker provoked the anger of the Boston Unitarian establishment with his 1841 ordination sermon, “Discourses on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity.” In examining what was inherent and true in the Christian faith, Parker tried to push his audience out from behind the metaphorical skirts of their ministers and into a firsthand relationship with God by first questioning the necessity of the ministers, and even Jesus, in understanding religious truths:

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was involved at some level with many Transcendentalist ventures. Her West Street bookstore was an important gathering place for Boston’s literati. Brook Farm was conceived in its back rooms; the Dial was produced there. The bookstore even hosted the marriage ceremonies of Sophia Peabody to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mary Peabody to Horace Mann.

Yet it seems difficult to conceive any reason, why moral and religious truths should rest for their support on the personal authority of their revealer, any more than the truths of science on that of him who makes them known first or most clearly. It is hard to see why the great truths of Christianity rest on the personal authority of Jesus, more than the axioms of geometry rest on the personal authority of Euclid or Archimedes. The authority of Jesus, as of all teachers, one would naturally think, must rest on the truth of his words, and not their truth on his authority.

Parker also attempted to wrest the moral authority of religion out of the hands of the ministers and into the individual consciences of his congregation: “If Christianity were true, we should still think it was so, not because its record was written by infallible pens; nor because it was lived out by an infallible teacher,—but that it is true, like the axioms of geometry, because it is true, and is to be tried by the oracle God places in the breast.” This “oracle” in the breasts of his congregation allowed them to see that “Christianity is a simple thing; very simple. It is absolute, pure Morality; absolute, pure Religion; the love of man; the love of God acting without let or hindrance. The only creed it lays down is the great truth which springs up spontaneous in the holy heart—there is a God.”

Theodore Parker’s fiery and radical speeches brought many to his pews at the Spring Street Church in West Roxbury and, later, Boston’s Music Hall.

Parker clearly understood that the radicalism of his statements would provoke a strong reaction. He attempted to defend himself against cries of blasphemy by pointing out that religion is always in a state of change: “The heresy of one age is the orthodox belief and ‘only infallible rule’ of the next.”

Unfortunately for him, much of Unitarian Boston was not ready for his progressive thought. An anonymous layperson, writing in the newspapers following the sermon, made this point abundantly clear: “I would rather see every Unitarian congregation in our land dissolved and every one of our churches razed to the ground, than to assist in placing a man entertaining the sentiments of Theodore Parker in one of our pulpits.”

Parker did remain in his pulpit until 1845, however, when he resigned to found his own Unitarian church in Boston. His new Twenty-eighth Congregational Society was enormous, and he often preached to thousands of worshippers in Boston’s Music Hall.

It is perhaps impossible to complete any discussion of the connections between Unitarianism and Transcendentalism without mentioning Ralph Waldo Emerson’s three-year post at the Unitarian Second Church of Boston. His father had been the minister of the First Parish Church of Boston, just as his grandfather, William Emerson, had been the minister of Concord’s First Church. The younger Emerson’s stint, however, was perhaps as unremarkable as his passage through Harvard College and Harvard Divinity School. Although a gifted orator and a passionate examiner of theological ideas, Emerson was not a complete success as a minister; he had difficulty connecting with his parishioners and was a weak spiritual guide, partly due to his ambivalence about his position.

Parker’s Twenty-eighth Congretional Society rented Boston’s Music Hall and filled it with thousands who came to hear Parker preach.

In his letter of resignation and his farewell sermon of 1832, Emerson explained that he could not, in good conscience, perform the communion when he did not believe that Jesus meant for it to be a ceremony. Privately, though, he admitted to the difficulty of having to pray publicly when he was not moved to do so. He was also not confident in his ability to perform all the duties required of a minister. His departure from the church was not a clean break, though; he continued to speak from the pulpit both in and around Boston, as well as back in Concord, for many years; toward the end of his life, he returned to the Unitarian church as a member.