Today, Boston has the Red Sox and the Patriots, but in the 1800s, New England's superstars were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau of the Transcendentalists.
Besides those luminaries, however, the movement had many notable members, and its legacy survives in our modern religious debates, says Philip F. Gura, author of a new book called "American Transcendentalism: A History." The University of North Carolina scholar wraps up a book tour in Greater Boston with an appearance tomorrow at the Concord Bookshop at 2 p.m. Excerpts from a recent interview follow.
Q. We all know Emerson and Thoreau, but you write about names that many people will have never heard of.
A. One of the narrative structures of the book is an ongoing dialogue between those who followed Emerson and were interested in individual reform - self-culture, they called it - and a group who were more interested in social reform, like Orestes Brownson, a Unitarian minister who became a well-known reformer, and George Ripley, another minister who left the profession to start a socialist commune at Brook Farm in West Roxbury.
Q. I suspect many people associate the Transcendentalists with literary efforts, notably Thoreau's "Walden," but what was the role of religion in their movement?
A. Almost to a person, these were people who had been members of the Unitarian Church, a very liberal Christianity. But they thought the way the doctrine was being presented was dry, was not touching the heart. They began to explore, in sermons or other ways - Emerson, for example, as a lecturer - ways of broadcasting a different religious experience that touched the emotions.
They were shifting to a different paradigm about the human being. They felt you were born with a religious impulse, but over time, it had been buried under social conformity [and] norms. They wanted to alert people that they all were part of divinity, that divinity flowed through them. Everyone in a sense was good but simply had not realized this way of accessing this new religious experience. To transcend literally meant to leave behind the mundane and realize the higher beauty of every moment.
Q. I asked the role of religion in Transcendentalism. What about the reverse? Did the Transcendentalists change American religion?
A. I think [they] did. Emerson and Ripley left the [ministerial] profession. Theodore Parker was an important minister; finally, though, he upset so many Unitarians in Boston that he formed a new church [the Twenty-eighth Congregational Society]. As American Unitarianism developed, both Emerson and Parker were folded back in and now are considered important people in the Unitarian tradition.
Q. One of the great debates of the Transcendentalists' day - do you read the Bible with reason or with faith in divine revelation? - would resonate today.
A. The Transcendentalists didn't want to have to believe that Christ performed miracles. For them, Christ was the example of what we could be if we developed in a moral way. We could become like that human being, who was God's example for us. That's what the Unitarian position was: There was one God, the father, and Christ was a kind of emissary. He was a man who showed the divine possibilities of each human being. In terms of today's alignment, for many Christians, that would still be heretical.
Let me give you another example. [Transcendentalists] were among the first Americans to embrace scriptures of other nations. Emerson and Thoreau and Parker and Brownson were fascinated by the scriptures of Persia, by Hindu scriptures. Also, [their] sense that everyone had a particular way of finding that soul within. You didn't need necessarily to be in a church. We all had this divine spark.
Q. There was also a legacy the Transcendentalists might not be proud of. In their elevation of the individual, they pushed a "rugged individualism" that, from the Gilded Age to the Reaganesque 1980s, was the antithesis of their social agenda.
A. I mentioned the two parties, one around Emerson and others around Ripley and Brownson. One of the things I think I contribute [to scholarship] is that Emerson was not the de facto leader. There was debate around this question: Is our society best reformed by cleaning up ourselves or by outward social reform, activity for the poor, the maimed, the prisoner? The party that triumphs is the Emersonian line. Although he wouldn't have endorsed a simplistic notion of rugged individualism, that's how his thought filtered down into popular culture.
Q. Did they matter to average people in the pews?
A. Once Emerson left the ministry, he made a living by public lecturing. Common people would hear him. That was seen as a kind of entertainment. Some of that work continued from the pulpit [of others], as well.
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