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Restless Souls. Leigh Eric Schmidt
Читать онлайн.Название Restless Souls
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isbn 9780520954113
Автор произведения Leigh Eric Schmidt
Издательство Ingram
So, when and where was “mysticism” born in the United States? On May 20, 1838, in Medford, Massachusetts, in the old parsonage of Caleb Stetson (1793–1870), a seasoned pastor of high ambitions and modest achievements. On that day the Transcendental Club, a symposium of liberal Christian ministers and New England intellectuals in its third year of existence, met specifically to take up, in Ralph Waldo Emerson's phrase, “the question of Mysticism.” In addition to Emerson, on hand for this late-into-the-night discussion were such illuminati in the making as Theodore Parker (1810–1860), Jones Very (1813–1880), and George Ripley (1802–1880). Within months of the gathering, Very, as poet and oracle, would take off on his own distinct mystical flight, roaming from Cambridge to Concord, offering to baptize people with the Holy Ghost and with fire, much to the dismay of his friends and colleagues. Three years later Ripley would leave his pastorate over the Purchase Street Church in Boston and found one of Transcendentalism's most visionary enterprises, the community experiment known as Brook Farm. Parker, just out of Harvard Divinity School in 1836 and with a congregation in West Roxbury, had already been drawn in his voracious studies to “the writings of the Mystics,” “the voluptuaries of the soul.” As Parker noted of the precious flora he had gathered from this literature during his student days, “I was much attracted to this class of men, who developed the element of piety, regardless of the theologic ritualism of the church.” Emerson, Very, Ripley, and Parker were all well primed to take up the question of mysticism as they gathered at Stetson's home on High Street in Medford.
Amos Bronson Alcott, an enthusiastic member of the Transcendental Club, went on to found his own Mystic Club as a successor. (Concord Free Public Library.)
Perhaps the most expectant of all, though, was Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), another key member present for this spirited meeting of the Transcendental Club. By turns vilified and celebrated–Emerson saw him as an almost unrivaled genius; many others thought he was insane–Alcott has had some of his quirks sanded down over the years through the culture's enduring fondness for his daughter, Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women. Even if many of his projects sputtered, including his vegetarian commune Fruitlands (which lasted all of six months in 1843), Alcott was a creative and compelling force, a down-on-his-luck Yankee peddler turned self-taught Transcendentalist with a mission to educate and inspire. He was, not surprisingly, effusive about the conversation the assembled intellectuals enjoyed that evening: “On the main topic of conversation, much was said,” Alcott noted in his journal. “Was Jesus a mystic? Most deemed him such, in the widest sense. He was spiritual…. He used the universal tongue, and was intelligible to all men of simple soul.” Here was one good measure of Alcott's excited and enduring preoccupation with the evening's topic: years later he would organize his own Mystic Club as the aptly named successor to this famed group of Transcendental associates.
Alcott was not one to curb impulsive utterances. He had already become a lightning rod for controversy because of his educational experiments at the Temple School in Boston in which he treated the spontaneity of children as a likely conduit of divine revelation. Rather than catechizing his young pupils, he led them in free-form conversations on the Gospels, confident that spiritual wisdom would well up naturally from their own unspoiled intuitions. Predictably, then, on the topic of mysticism Alcott proved voluble, even inspired. That night at Stetson's parsonage he even feared that he had “overstepped the bounds of true courtesy” by talking too much (certainly a danger to the well-being of any salon). Still, he was unbridled: “A vision was vouchsafed, and I could but declare it.” Emerson, by contrast, was fearful that he had been “a bad associate” at the gathering, “since for all the wit & talent that was there, I had not one thought nor one aspiration.” Trying to quiet this pang of intellectual insecurity, Emerson offered an excuse: “It is true I had not slept the night before.” Alcott's ardor on that spring evening, rather than Emerson's sluggishness, was a better measure of the impact that this Transcendentalist turn to mysticism would have on American religious life.7
Ralph Waldo Emerson appears in this portrait in a pose for the lecture circuit, a main medium for him after he left the ministry. (Concord Free Public Library.)
Two months later, on July 15, 1838, Emerson proved much more inspired when he addressed the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School. Having left the full-time ministry in 1832 over his inability to perform the sacrament of the Lord's Supper with sincere conviction, he had grown only more restive under the sleepy preaching of the New England pulpit over the next six years. Unitarian liberals were mired in doctrinal debates with traditional Calvinists–and often with each other as well–about everything from Original Sin to Christ's divinity to biblical miracles, and Emerson found the whole scene dispiriting. The address to the senior class of the divinity school provided him with the opportunity to declare the emancipation of human curiosity in the realm of religion, the freedom from dogmatic and canonical constrictions, and the awakening of spiritual intuition and individuality. “Truly speaking,” Emerson exhorted, “it is not instruction, but provocation that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject.” Refuse the old path of imitative piety; throw off “secondary knowledge”; eschew “hollow, dry, creaking formality.” “Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost,” Emerson cajoled, “cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.”8
Though his address ended on a cautious note in self-contradictory praise of breathing new life into the old institutions of the Sabbath and regular preaching, the oration nonetheless created a considerable stir. More controversy followed upon its publication the next month, and, since nothing vended quite so well in antebellum America as a religious hullabaloo, Emerson's goading of his alma mater quickly sold out. The rise of religious liberalism had many milestones and monuments in the first half of the nineteenth century: The election of Henry Ware, a theological liberal, as Hollis Professor at Harvard in 1805 pointed ahead to the movement's dominance over religious education there. William Ellery Channing's ringing defense in 1819 of a Unitarian conception of God against Trinitarian orthodoxy was another important sign of the times, as was his affirmation of the powers of self-cultivation against Calvinist notions of human depravity. Then there was the duo of September 1836—the organization of the Transcendental Club and the publication of Emerson's Nature. The latter included Emerson's famed moment of spiritual exhilaration, the experience of becoming a transparent eyeball at one with its surroundings, subsumed into God, all egotism gone. That episode helped earn him his enduring reputation as the movement's greatest mystic. The year 1838 represented another critical passage, and not only because of Emerson's divinity school address, so deeply inspiring to other “heretics” of the period like the young Theodore Parker. The all but forgotten meeting of the Transcendental Club two months earlier to discuss mysticism was perhaps the most telling signal of change: Religious liberals intended nothing less than a redefinition of the spiritual life.
Christopher Pearse Cranch, an artist within the Transcendentalist movement, was also its best in-house caricaturist. Here Emerson, the mystic, appears as transparent eyeball. (MS Am 1506 [3]. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.)
Cranch also pegged Emerson as among those Transcendentalists