A Journey Into the Transcendentalists' New England - R. Todd Felton ArtPlace

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growth. From the pulpits of the newly established Unitarian churches across the city, Harvard-educated ministers clarified and expanded upon the theological underpinnings of many of the movement’s central tenets. The various Transcendentalist clubs and societies that formed to share observations and readings met most often in Boston. Schools and discussion groups formed here, too, and allowed the Transcendentalists to introduce their ideas to a receptive audience of inquiring minds.

       Boston was the preeminent U.S. city in the mid-nineteenth century.

      And, not least in importance, Boston housed the publishers who gave the Transcendentalists access to wider audiences throughout New England, the country, and the world. The city also provided the Transcendentalists with places to work and think, as well as a network of colleagues in related movements, such as those pressing for women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery. Although many of the movement’s major figures made their homes in Concord, the world knows them largely through their activities in Boston.

      Poetry of Insight: British Romanticism and American Transcendentalism

      What Emerson and the Transcendentalists were trying to do for theology was in many ways a continuation of what poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had done for English poetry at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads, a collection of their poems. In the preface to the book (which was republished in 1800 and 1802 with extended and revised prefaces), Wordsworth defined the main tenets of the Romantic movement: an emphasis on individual experience and imagination along with a concurrent breaking away from traditional forms and imaginative conformity. Wordsworth also strove to use the language of the common man to illustrate his unique visions.

      Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem The Prelude, Coleridge’s The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, and the shorter poems of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley are among the best-known works of the Romantics.

       The Reverend William Ellery Channing attracted the attention and admiration of many of the Transcendentalists for his radical sermons, just as he attracted the ire of some of Harvard College’s more dogmatic leaders.

      Pulpits of Change

      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

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