In America before the Civil War, men lived without the traditional borders of their ancestors in Europe. Men of thought and culture in America felt a release within themselves as though the old limits that gave unity to experience no longer applied to them.
New England Transcendentalism was a new secular religion that transcended both secularism and religion. Modern secularism excludes religious experience and walks on rationalistic and scientific grounds. Transcendentalism included any element of this kind of secularism but refused to allow its narrow view to limit other elements of experience. Descartes in the 17th century convinced thinkers that truth can be expressed only in rational and mathematical forms and this led most important thinkers to exclude thought not based on reason. Hegel, the German philosopher, wrote famously that whatever is real is rational. For Descartes, a Catholic, a whole area of experience existed beyond what could be categorized rationally. For the philosopher Kant, reality was composed of the phenomenon, the rational side, and the noumenon, the non-rational side. A New England Transcendentalist considered this split dishonest and harmful. He kept the phenomenon and the noumenon united. He was open to all possible experience and refused to conform his mind and spirit to any influence that did not register with him as genuinely his own. He lived in a land without borders and refused any borders blocking worthy experiences within himself. Ralph Waldo Emerson considered the imitation of any man a form of suicide. His non-conformity had a religious side because he believed openness to all morally good experience must lead to discoveries of the divine infused in nature by God himself. Nature held the keys to a perfect and holy human life. An individual who refused all foolish conformities must learn eventually that something is real when the divine in nature teaches that it is also morally right.
The new secularism that transcended secularism and the new religion that transcended religion did develop however from within the Christian religion. Catholic Christianity very early introduced practices that secularized the divine. Pelagius in the 4th century taught that moral conduct and salvation could be achieved independently of God’s grace. Saint Augustine fought Pelagianism with his doctrine that only through grace could a believer be saved. Only God’s grace operating in the soul could give a human the power to resist evil and do good. Calvinism agreed with Saint Augustine’s doctrine about grace. Humans were either directly elected by God through grace or else were not elected and doomed to suffer the consequences. Transcendentalism took its stand with the mass of humans condemned to live without grace and taught that they had the power within themselves to elect themselves to a glorious human life by opening their minds and souls to all possible worthy human experience.
European thinkers criticized apostles of Transcendentalism like Emerson and Thoreau of Concord for their naïve disregard for the presence of evil. But Emerson touched the heart and mind of optimistic Americans when he taught them in his popular essays to create their own world and to rely on no one but themselves. Some American critics, eager to find nationalistic inclinations where none existed, describe Transcendentalism as a cultural break of a new nation with the old nations of Europe. It was not. Transcendentalists in New England and elsewhere, frustrated by the lack of higher experience derived from their native circumstances, sought to enlarge their experience with anything gleaned from the past in European art, philosophy, religion and literature or from any higher experience at all available to them from worldwide cultural and religious influences. Dante’s synthesis of art, poetry, philosophy and christianity was a major influence on Transcendentalists. They opened their souls to any experience that transcended their normal experience provided it was genuine.
Transcendentalism was an expansive humanism that reached into realms of the divine that Christianity for centuries had kept locked in sacred practices and traditional constructions. The transcendentalists were genuinely out to find the truly human. New England men with a long Protestant tradition behind them accepted the Calvinistic duality between election and damnation but refused to limit their human experience because of it. They were open to the influence of everything including Christian grace. But they knew that grace did not come from any human merit and its influence came and went without any direct human control. As far as they were concerned, everyone was morally obliged first and foremost, whether saved or unsaved, to be a worthy independent human being.
Traditional Christian experience was an element in Transcendentalism but it influenced it indirectly and came into it, so to speak, through the back door. Christ’s life and death introduced a new human persona in history that broke radically with humanity’s past. A person could no longer be a real person with only a purely human experience. It had to also include the divine because Christ was divine-human and belief in him now added a divine experience to the merely human. Christ’s self-sacrifice mysteriously allowed grace to enter a Christian’s soul. A Christian became truly a person by grafting onto himself the divine. Put differently, a Christian became a whole person by finding the power through Christ to transcend the human. Transcendentalists were also after the whole person, but they believed they could become whole and thus genuine on their own. Their becoming whole and therefore truly human was their aim. Emerson’s great lecture at Harvard College, The American Scholar, expresses the ideal of wholeness among Transcendentalists. So does Thoreau’s Walden. New Englanders in Hawthorne’s last novel, The Marble Faun, search for higher inspiration in the great creations of art in Rome. They conscientiously ascend towards divine epiphanies in their experience while remaining steadfastly human. But the ideal of wholeness in the human makeup that transcendentalists sought and experienced did not survive the Civil War. A unified and whole America was broken. The cultural wholeness of Transcendentalism was shattered into parts that splintered off in individualistic directions that were selfish or limited. In Christian Science, a new religion with New England origins, the spiritual became totally divorced from material and human realities. It transformed the search for wholeness by belief in Christ’s divine humanity into a science that detached a practitioner from reality. Christian Science believed that only spirit was real and the material world an illusion. The new Mormon religion taught that rather than believe in Christ and miraculously discover the world of God, believers should instead raise the quality of their behavior to make themselves somehow the equal of Christ. Transcendentalism promoted the value of an active human life oriented towards spiritual and mental wholeness, but after the Civil War in a fractured society that had lost its previous unity men rushed headlong into opportunities for material success and sensual pleasures for their own sake without any connection to higher ideals. The Civil War shattered the wholeness of a union of states each with a deep sense of its own individual worth because none doubted the power and integrity of their political sovereignty. American culture, with Transcendentalism at its top, was shattered too. At the Concord School of Philosophy founded in 1879 in Concord, Massachusetts, Hegelianism became popular. Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne believed that that the poet’s truth was the truest truth and that true poetry could arise only from a truly whole man. They would have been shocked to learn that following their deaths a German philosophy that preached that whatever is real is rational became the dominant philosophy in Concord, the home and holy ground of Transcendentalism.
Daniel McNeill
Daniel McNeill’s books are for sale at: www.amazon.com/author/graceisall
Some of his longer writings are at: www.usoftheworld.com