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Visibility beyond the Visible

COSTERUS NEW SERIES 196

Series Editors:
C.C. Barfoot, László Sándor Chardonnens
and Theo D’haen
Visibility beyond the Visible
The Poetic Discourse of
American Transcendentalism

Albena Bakratcheva

Amsterdam-New York, NY 2013

Translated by Olga Nikolova

Artist Picture on Cover: Theodora Konstantinova

Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of

“ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for
documents - Requirements for permanence”.

ISBN: 978-90-420-3556-0
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0831-4
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013
Printed in the Netherlands
 Life as Vocation 5

For my daughters Theodora and Kossara

 CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ix

Preface xi

I CORE TENETS OF AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISM

Chapter One: The New England Identity of the Term 3

Chapter Two: Puritanism and Eighteenth-Century Rationalism 13
Chapter Three: Unitarianism and Transcendentalism 25
Chapter Four: The Emphasis on Inspiration in Transcendental
Aesthetics 37
Chapter Five: Transcendentalism:
Poetic-Religious Practice and Way of Life 65

II TRANSCENDENTALISM AND ROMANTICISM

Chapter Six: The New England Horizons of Post-Kantianism:

Emerson 85
Chapter Seven: The Vision of the New England Transcendentalist:
Thoreau 117
Chapter Eight: The Enchantment of the Voyage Back:
Margaret Fuller 135
III TRANSCENDENTALISM: A CREED OF SELF AND NATURE

Chapter Nine: Traditions and Individual Talent:

Emerson and Thoreau
Self-Reliance 149
“Thoreau” 169
Chapter Ten: Life as Vocation
The Harmony with the Not-Me:
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers 183
The Artistic Harmony: Walden 199
Chapter Eleven: Homocentrism and Ecocentrism 229

Bibliography 251

Index 261
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

During the long period of this book’s inception and development I

was helped by several people whom it is my pleasure here to thank.
I am deeply grateful to Lawrence Buell for his interest in my
work over the course of years and for the intellectual pleasure with
which his own work always provides me. I have special debt to
Richard Schneider who read the entire manuscript, in all its stages,
for his perceptive observations and the bountifulness with which
they were rendered. For his extraordinary moral support and
generosity I wish to specially and warmly thank Vidar Jorgensen.
Thanks are due to Joel Myerson and Leo Marx for the
encouragement they have given me. I will always keep with
gratitude the memory of Walter Harding and the rewarding and
enriching Fulbright year I spent researching in his study. Finally, I
owe thanks to my family for their co-operation while I was
working on this project.
 PREFACE

American Transcendentalism did not introduce a coherent system of

aesthetic or theological thought. Neither did it embrace ideas of “pure
art”. By bridging wide-ranging intellectualism and an exaltedly poetic
worldview, the aesthetic-religious group of the American Transcen-
dentalists, so influential in shaping young America’s cultural identity,
retains a unique place in the spiritual and literary history of the United
States. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the group constituted
the intellectual elite of New England and set the literary and
conceptual parameters which for decades remained the indispensable
framework of reference for writers as diverse as Walt Whitman, Emily
Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman
Melville.
The combination of profound religious faith with artistic
sensibility, of theological enlightenment with verbal perfectionism, of
philosophical awareness with aesthetic daring constitutes the very
essence of American Transcendentalism. Ignoring some of these
components or isolating them unnecessarily has led some researchers
to unjust or even unfounded criticisms: the Transcendentalists have
been accused of philosophical and theological incoherence, of
eclecticism and lack of originality at the expense of literary
accomplishment, of conceptual weightiness which rendered their art
“impure”, etc. Such criticisms, however, spanning the gamut of
critical biases with a propensity for discovering contradictions, can
neither explain, nor invalidate the image of wholeness and perfection
which the written oeuvre of the Transcendentalists emanates. And the
impression this image has left is undeniable: American Transcendent-
alism exerted immense power over generations of poets, writers and
readers. It seems, therefore, best to examine the American Transcen-
dentalists not as adherents to an intellectual or aesthetic movement,
but through the personified categories they themselves invented,
namely, the universalized figures of the “poet”, the “thinker” and the
“prophet”. Only then can the spiritual and poetic scope of their work
be clearly perceived, so that even the apparent nonsystematic nature of
 Visibility Beyond the Visible

their thinking, enveloped as it is in immeasurable poetic beauty, will

begin to emerge as the expression of personal achievement, of noble
faithfulness to oneself, and of spiritual elevation. For, in taking as
their foundation the Word, the true Word in the biblical sense, but also
the Word in its crafted writerly perfection, the most prominent among
the Transcendentalists invariably sought – created and shaped – their
own selves. The notion of the self as an all-encompassing presence
and the gauge of human dignity, underlies all the writings of the New
England Transcendentalists. Hence the relevant critical approach
should be directed specifically to this comprehensive personal
dimension and the ways in which it underpins the Transcendentalists’
significance. Indeed, precisely there is located that which gives
American Transcendentalism its recognizable character: the sublime
unity of philosophical and religious divergences, achieved through the
all-encompassing poetic reach of the creator’s gaze and voice.
In order to enter the finely sculpted verbal sanctuary of the New
England Transcendentalists, the unique qualities of their thought and
artistic achievement, both to a large degree determined by the deeply
American character of their spiritual heritage, should be established
first: in this American heritage lies the source of their faith, their
strength and poetic inspiration, to the extent that the
Transcendentalists exalted verbal perfection, that is, the aesthetic
power of the word as truth, as the ultimate existential value for the
creative individual.
These are the terms in which the present investigation posits its
task.
 PART ONE

CORE TENETS OF AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISM

 CHAPTER ONE

THE NEW ENGLAND IDENTITY OF THE TERM

I am a transcendentalist ....1

In his lecture “The Transcendentalist”, originally given in Boston in

1842, Ralph Waldo Emerson says:

It is well known to most of my audience that the Idealism of the

present day acquired the name Transcendental, from the use of that
term by Immanuel Kant, of Königsberg, who replied to the skeptical
philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the
intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by
showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative
forms, which did not come by experience, but through which
experience was acquired; and that these were intuitions of the mind
itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms. The
extraordinary profoundness and precision of that man’s thinking have
given vogue to his nomenclature in Europe and America, to that
extent, that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought, is
popularly called at the present day Transcendental.2

Emerson’s words in this passage are significant for several reasons.

On the one hand, he acknowledges his debt to Kant’s philosophy,
unambiguously identifying the origins of the term “Transcendental” as
it was used at that time in America. Moreover, he addresses an
informed audience, which, it appears, hardly needs such a
clarification. On the other hand, Emerson’s words suggest a deeply
felt resistance to the excessive popularity of an otherwise significant
terminology, his displeasure at a passing fashion, which in its
superficiality inevitably lead to mistaken identifications. Emerson
1
Henry David Thoreau, The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, eds Bradford Torrey
and Francis H. Allen, 14 vols, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906, V, 4-5.
2
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward
Waldo Emerson, 12 vols, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-1904, I, 317.
4 Visibility Beyond the Visible

ultimately does not mention “American Transcendentalism”: in the

same lecture he emphasizes that “what is popularly called
Transcendental among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in
1842”.3 Significantly, he chooses the personification of the term for
.

the lecture’s title – “The Transcendentalist”. Taking into consideration

that for Emerson there was no such thing as “a pure
Transcendentalist”,4 or if he existed, he could only have been one of
the biblical prophets, it becomes clear that the leading figure of the
intellectual elite in New England at the time thought it most accurate
to speak of a modern form of idealism, less important in itself than in
its personified embodiments.
Emerson also deliberately avoids the plural form of the word – the
Transcendentalist or the New Idealist blurs the notions of the singular
and the plural, blending the individual and the universal into one
organic being. Emerson’s attention, in fact, is not focused on the
philosophical doctrine itself: he perceives it as imported, as someone
else’s. He is attempting, rather, to create an image of being, hence also
an image of a certain way of life. It is worth emphasizing as well that
Emerson delivered his message in the manner most strongly favored
by his contemporaries and his Harvard milieu – not by means of a
journal article or an essay, that is, text meant to be read, but in a
lecture, through speech meant to be listened to. The fine molding of
the image of the American Transcendentalist took place not in front of
readers, but in front of a listening audience (the effect, no doubt,
amplified by the strong presence and charisma of its creator). Thus, in
the old New England tradition of speaking from the lectern – or from
the pulpit, which in the context of New England culture at the time
meant the same thing – the Transcendentalist was enunciated into
being and took his place in the spiritual life of America.
The majority in his audience, as Emerson explicitly points out,
were familiar with the name of Kant and with his terminology, so the
dialogue between lecturer and listeners was posited on the favorable
premise of an already established relationship between initiates. Such
a relationship was made possible by Harvard University. Despite the
fact that “neither the curriculum nor the teaching in many departments
had kept abreast of the philosophical, social, or literary movements
which had produced the work of Kant, Wordsworth, or Carlyle, there
3
Emerson, The Complete Works, I, 318.
4
Ibid., 338.
 The New England Identity of the Term 5

were faculty members that actively read, wrote, and talked about their
work”. Thus, being “far more interested in nurturing Christian ethics
than in pushing specific Christian doctrines”,5 Harvard University in
the first few decades of the nineteenth century was creating an
attractive atmosphere of tolerance and intellectual and cultural
refinement. This spiritual environment gave New England mostly
ministers, all of whom were brought up to uphold as their highest,
sacred value the mission of the spiritual leader, the Puritan pastor.
Imbued with the elated revelatory discourse of Unitarian Christianity,
the environment of Harvard influenced the spiritual outlook of the
Transcendentalists to an extraordinary degree. That is why Emerson
could rely on shared knowledge with his audience: evidently, a title
such as “The Transcendentalist” attracted to the lecture hall all those
for whom the Transcendental was already in the air, evoking names,
concepts and frames of mind, foreshadowing the change, the opening
up of New England’s traditional religious culture.
By 1842 Emerson was already established as a figure of authority
and exemplified the transformation of the religious minister into a
spiritual leader of a different kind and with a different stature.
Precisely a person of such grandeur was called upon to describe and,
more importantly, to name the new American Idealist in his
manifestations up to and during the 1840s. Never before in the
intellectual climate of New England, had the time been so propitious
for the idea of the “New Adam”. The audience was ready to receive
the words of their lecturer-leader-preacher-poet. The Transcendental,
already an organic animate presence in their spiritual life, started
developing its properly New England character. Thus, in accordance
with the long American tradition of personification, the
Transcendentalist came into existence.
Not long after Emerson’s lecture, Henry David Thoreau wrote in
his Journal, “The fact is that I am a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a
natural philosopher to boot”, commenting on his refusal to become a
member of the Massachusetts Association for the Advancement of
Science:

I should have told them at once that I was a transcendentalist. That

would have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not
5
Walter Harding, A Thoreau Handbook, New York: New York University Press,
1959, 112-13.
6 Visibility Beyond the Visible

understand my explanations .... If it had been the secretary of an

association of which Plato or Aristotle was the president, I should not
have hesitated to describe my studies at once and particularly.6

Also in the Journal, Thoreau notes that he would much rather hold a
bird in his affections than in his hand.7 Although the passage shows
his strong opposition to the positivism of modern science, it is of
interest above all as an act of self-examination. Thoreau’s words
engage emphatically with his personal perspective, his own
intellectual and spiritual disposition, and not with any acquired set of
ideas or doctrines of natural philosophy which have to be defended.
Here, as everywhere else, Thoreau is speaking about himself, about
his “life without principle”, so radically opposed to the too common
life with principles ingrained from the outside. The passage constitutes
Thoreau’s own self-recognition as a Transcendentalist. He does not
partially identify himself with the formulations of a given
philosophical mindset under the name of Transcendentalism. On the
contrary, he enacts an existential and deeply personal self-
determination. The personification of the term “Transcendentalist”
reaches with Thoreau its most profound transformation: only a few
years after Emerson’s lecture, the American Transcendentalist speaks
for himself in the first person and is no longer simply spoken of. What
is more, the pronoun I does not refer to a fictional character with a
fictional autobiography, but to a real person whose lived
autobiography is being recorded in a journal.
One of the principal differences between Emerson and Thoreau,
which would only widen with time, can be found in their respective
definitions of “the Transcendentalist”: the personification in Emerson
remains an ideal, a supernal construct, whereas for Thoreau, who was
influenced more by Emerson’s character than by his theories,
personification meant complete self-identification. Thoreau’s
Transcendentalist gave shape and body to the notion by means of his
own life. “No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of
being forever on the alert”, reads one of the most representatively
Transcendental parts of Walden:

What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how

6
Thoreau, The Journal, V, 4-5.
7
Ibid., VI, 253.
 The New England Identity of the Term 7

well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life,
compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?
Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see
what is before you, and walk on into futurity .... A man must find his
occasions in himself.8

And indeed Thoreau found in himself his “occasions” for being a

Transcendentalist.
Thoreau’s act of self-examination is revelatory in yet another
sense. The notions of “a transcendentalist” and “a mystic” are used as
synonymous in the passage. Given the extreme carefulness with which
Thoreau treats individual existential premises, it is unlikely that he is
referring only to the pietistic mysticism characteristic of American
Protestantism from its very beginning. Just as Emerson defines
“Transcendentalist” and “Idealist” as interchangeable terms, Thoreau
uses “transcendentalist” and “mystic” as synonyms, and both words
carry the connotations of something ambiguous, abstract and
irrational. Other contemporary sources also suggest that the term
“transcendentalism”, as initially used in New England, implied
“haziness” – even, rather pejoratively, “outlandishness”.9 There is no
doubt that the New England Transcendentalists constituted a
heterogeneous group and never established a set of shared objectives.
James Freeman Clarke, a member himself, rightly dubs the group “the
Club of the likeminded”, adding, “I suppose because no two of us
think alike”. 10 It would be, therefore, inappropriate to consider
Boston’s intellectual elite from the first half of the nineteenth century
in the terms of an organized school of thought with doctrines of its
own.11 George Ripley, for instance, takes “transcendentalism” to be
the belief in “the supremacy of mind over matter”, while James
Freeman Clarke calls himself Transcendentalist simply because he
does not “believe that man’s senses tell him all that he knows”; 12
Jonathan Saxton is convinced that “every Man is a
8
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. Walter Harding, The Variorum Walden, New
York: Washington Square Press, 1963, 83-84.
9
Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American
Renaissance, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1973, 2.
10
John Wesley Thomas, James Freeman Clarke: Apostle of German Culture to
America, Boston: Luce, 1949, 130.
11
Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 3.
12
Thomas, James Freeman Clarke, 131.
8 Visibility Beyond the Visible

transcendentalist”, 13 while Emerson denies the existence of a “pure

Transcendentalist”, but believes the Buddhist to be a Transcendental-
ist. In Jonathan Saxton's understanding, Transcendentalism is “the
recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of
attaining a scientific knowledge of an order of existence transcending
the reach of the senses, and of which we can have no sensible
experience”. 14 Finally, Orestes Brownson asserts that “Protestantism
ends in Transcendentalism”.15 The divergences between the Transcen-
dentalists appear stronger than the possible similarities between them.
It is obvious that they differ widely on the subject, to the extent that
the definition of “transcendentalism” itself seems to separate them
rather than bind the group into a cohesive whole. In this sense, the
personification of the notion – much more current at the time than the
notion itself, and in many ways more relevant to Emerson’s aesthetic-
religious construct of the Poet-Priest – came to compensate for what
was lacking in the abstract term.
“The word Transcendentalism, as used in the present day”, Noah
Porter wrote in 1842, “has two applications”:

One of which is popular and indefinite, the other, philosophical and

precise. In the former sense it describes man, rather than opinions,
since it is freely extended to those who hold opinions, not only diverse
from each other, but directly opposed.16

Porter’s distinction is significant not because we learn, on good

authority, something about Boston’s intellectual life at the time, but
because, beyond its ambiguous common usage, there existed a precise
and stable understanding of the term. Numerous other sources confirm
the veracity of Porter’s observation: in its New England context,
“transcendentalism” carried associative meanings which no one
questioned and which stemmed from the radical dissatisfaction among
members of the Unitarian clergy with the rational epistemology of
13
Jonathan A. Saxton, “Prophesy – Transcendentalism – Progress”, The Dial, 2, 1841,
87, quoted in Henry David Gray, Emerson: A Statement of New England
Transcendentalism as Expressed in the Philosophy of Its Chief Exponent, New York:
Ungar Pub. Co., 1958, 27.
14
Ibid., 90.
15
Orestes Brownson, The Works of Orestes Brownson, ed. Henry F. Brownson, 20
vols, Detroit: Nourse, 1882-1906, I, 209.
16
Quoted in Gray, Emerson, 29.
 The New England Identity of the Term 9

John Locke, until then strongly tied to Unitarianism.

During the 1830s, under the influence of post-Kantian thought and
its interpretations in Goethe, Carlyle, Wordsworth and especially
Coleridge, the younger Unitarians of New England began to
distinguish, on a par with rational or empirically based judgment, the
existence of a higher intellectual faculty giving man access to spiritual
truth through intuition: thus the concepts of Higher Reason, “Spirit”,
“Mind”, “Soul”, etc. gradually formed the core of the spiritual
awakening later to receive the name American Transcendentalism. In
other words, despite their wildly varying spiritual and intellectual
predispositions, the members of the New England “Club of the
likeminded” all commonly refused the idea of trusting only the
knowledge which came from sensory experience. As early as 1876,
one of the first critics of Transcendentalism remarked:

Practically it [Transcendentalism] was an assertion of the inalienable

worth of man; theoretically it was an assertion of the immanence of
divinity in instinct, the transference of supernatural attributes to the
natural constitution of mankind .... Transcendentalism is usually
spoken of as philosophy. It is more justly regarded as a gospel ....
Transcendentalism was an enthusiasm, a wave of sentiment, a breadth
of mind.17

This early evaluation reveals the secret power exercised both by the
written word and the lifestyle of the Transcendentalists, at the same
time as it evokes an unmistakable impression of perfection, of
spiritual elevation and intellectual daring: for if considered as
philosophers, the Transcendentalists were too eclectic and the lack of
an orderly conceptual framework could – and did – make them subject
to serious criticisms. But it is no less obvious that, being fully aware
of their eclecticism, they never perceived it as a problem, nor thought
of it as a disadvantage. On the contrary, they believed any
accomplished system of thought to be spiritually limiting and
embraced eclecticism with “enthusiasm and a wave of sentiment”, as
“a breadth of mind”.
In the same lecture, “The Transcendentalist”, Emerson exclaimed,
“Shall we say then that Transcendentalism is the Saturnalia or excess
17
O.B. Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England (1876), rpt. New York:
Harper, 1959, 134.
10 Visibility Beyond the Visible

of Faith; the presentiment of a faith proper to man in his integrity,

excessive only when his imperfect obedience hinders the satisfaction
of his wish?” 18 Thoreau also refused to regard eclecticism as
detrimental disorientation of the mind. Quite to the contrary, for
Thoreau, the variety of elements pulling thought in opposite directions
and making his statements quite often appear contradictory, not only
never undermined the inherent dignity of thinking, but – since it lifted
the mind towards “visibility beyond the visible”, in his own words –
could only enhance concentration and one’s spiritual mobility. The
center in Thoreau was always held by the “self”, and since that
reflected his own choice, no contradiction could exist. If thought
sprang from one’s “self”, as far as it was inherent to one’s “self”, it
could not contain contradiction and was by definition coherent and
complete. That was why Thoreau called for “simplicity”, for
“simplifying”: inner concentration and self-improvement could be
attained only by drawing everything to one’s own person. This was
the only way to accomplish the individual moral transformation which
Thoreau believed to be so important. And just as with Emerson, in the
final analysis, the question of Transcendentalism with Thoreau
became the question of the Transcendentalist.
The group of intellectuals gravitating around Ralph Waldo
Emerson consisted mostly of spiritual leaders, people of exception,
who, in their calling, felt themselves deeply connected to the great
Puritan tradition of spiritual leadership. Hence many critics consider
them primarily as religious figures. 19 Another early critic of the
brilliant New Englanders asserts, for instance, that
“Transcendentalism was a blending of Platonic metaphysics and the
Puritan spirit, of a philosophy and a character”. 20 Something is
missing, however, in this otherwise incisive observation. No mention
is made of “art”; yet, among all other things, the Transcendentalism of
New England is extraordinarily poetic. The literary accomplishment
of the Transcendentalists is indisputable. Poetry for them was “second
only to religion”.21 In fact, they believed poetry and religion to be one
18
Emerson, The Complete Works, I, 320.
19
See Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil
War, New York: Harcourt, 1965.
20
H.C. Goddard, Studies in New England Transcendentalism (1908), rpt. New York:
Humanities Press, 1969, 9.
21
Cyrus Bartol, “Poetry and Imagination,” Christian Examiner, 42 (1847), 251,
quoted in Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 13.
 The New England Identity of the Term 11

and experienced the two as inseparable from each other. For the
Transcendentalists, religious and poetic revelation, both attainable
only through creative inspiration, partook of the same nature. Within
this unique blending of religion, poetry, philosophy, preaching and
style of living, which constituted American Transcendentalism,
irrationality was not simply the spirit of rejection, merely the
crystallized antithesis to an already renounced Lockean philosophy: it
was the multi-faceted experience of delight – the delight of artistic
creation in the broadest sense of the words. Their eclecticism, then,
can be seen as a form of irrationality justified on yet another level for
the Transcendentalists. It seems perfectly logical that the inspired
exhortations to observe “higher laws” (Thoreau), the glorification of
intuition and the desire for an enlightened poetic-religious wholeness
(Emerson, Thoreau, Channing), displeased the most conservative
among the New England clergy, who believed the Transcendentalists
to be awakening “the spirit of darkness” and, more significantly,
accused them of “German atheism”.22
It can be concluded, then, that in the context of New England the
term “transcendentalism”, given the importance of its personifications
and its intense relation to the Puritan tradition, affirmed its
irrationality – both with relative clarity, by opposition to certain
philosophic-religious formulations; as well as rather more obscurely,
through a multiplicity of individual, and individualistic, poetic-
religious interpretations. “I was given to understand”, Charles Dickens
wrote in American Notes, “that whatever was unintelligible would be
certainly Transcendental”. Nevertheless, the Romantic in Dickens, no
doubt fascinated by the poetic gift of his contemporaries and their
soaring spiritual aspirations, was compelled to add: “If I were a
Bostonian, I think I would be a Transcendentalist.”23

22
Princeton Review, XII, 71, quoted in Gray, Emerson, 31.
23
Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, London and New York:
Penguin Books, 2000, 127-31.
12 Visibility Beyond the Visible
 CHAPTER TWO

PURITANISM AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM

The eyes of all people are upon us ....1

The city of Boston is located, both physically and spiritually, in close

proximity to the oldest European settlement to endure in New England
– Plymouth was founded in 1620 by the English pilgrims on the ship
Mayflower. The town of Concord was founded only a few years later,
in 1635. These facts have more than purely historical significance.
They are at the basis of the profound sense of continuity nourished
(almost as an existential necessity) by the Transcendentalists, all
descended from families settled in America before 1700. The
awareness of being the heirs of a great deed, unique in its kind in the
entire history of the human race, was especially productive for them: it
bestowed a special feeling of grandeur to their calling as spiritual
leaders, preachers and poets. “Our forefathers” was among the
Transcendentalists’ favorite phrases and the words expressed
emphatically, fostering at the same time, their aspirations towards
such nobility of spirit which might correspond to the soaring
achievement of the pilgrims’ messianic devotion. Their sense of
belonging, both as human beings and as artists and creators, to what
was essentially American, even the historical act of founding the
American nation – an act of temporal proximity to them which was
unimaginable for the Europeans – inspired immeasurable pride in the
Transcendentalists and augmented to an extraordinary degree their
sense of vocation. For, to ordain themselves spiritual leaders, to
elevate the active creation of beauty and spirituality into a cult, could
not have been merely the manifestation of individualistic, personal
cultivation, but issued forth from the consciousness of national
history, proudly perceived as admirable and unique, as properly
American. It comes as no surprise that in his essays Thoreau saw
1
John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity”, in The Norton Anthology of
American Literature, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1989, I, 477.
14 Visibility Beyond the Visible

humanity as moving Westward, that is in a direction opposite to the

East, to the Old World.
This antinomy of East vs. West, Old World vs. New World,
foreign to the thinking of the European Romantics of the same period,
became for the Transcendentalists a source of confidence, creativity
and poetic inspiration, a way to revisit young America’s history in an
individualistic (in the Romantic sense), entirely positive way. To an
extent, precisely this awareness of a great heritage gave the
Transcendentalists license to criticize their contemporaries (Emerson,
Thoreau), and to preach and moralize (Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott,
Fuller). In its very essence, Transcendentalism had its roots in the not
so distant American past, inexhaustibly drawing life-giving sap from
its soil. The past bore the testimony that America was indeed unique
and new in the history of humanity, but, more importantly, it
transmitted its living memory as a certain kind of spirituality. And this
rootedness itself was also unique, as far as it was perceived and
continuously emphasized as such. When Thoreau moved to Walden to
live in a house made with his own hands, his desire was partly to
experience what the first settlers had experienced. Similarly,
Emerson’s Poet-Priest was meant to be the equal, in his messianic
inspiration, to the Puritan pastors who descended from Mayflower and
Arbella. The Transcendentalist disposition towards preaching had its
prototype in the old English pilgrims. Finally, the combination of pure
spirituality with a desire to shape existence, to make one’s life
according to will, had its origins in the very first experience of the
settlers on the East Coast: the Concord of the Transcendentalists was
the direct descendant of the Plymouth and Concord of the first
pilgrims. Particularly revealing is the fact that by the middle of the
nineteenth century, as a number of critical studies point out, the words
“New Englander” and “son of the forefathers” had become almost
synonymous.2
The Transcendentalists often deliberately tried to bypass the
American eighteenth century, although the mentality of their times
succeeded closely in its steps. They preferred to direct their gaze
further backward, to that first century in the history of New England,
the seventeenth century, which seemed to exhibit a stronger
combination of religious devoutness and worldly pragmatism, only
2
Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution Through
Renaissance, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 197.
 Puritanism and Eighteenth-Century Rationalism 15

such a combination being able to guarantee the first settlers’ spiritual,

but also purely physical, survival. Of Plymouth Plantation, the first
historical document created on New England soil by the Mayflower
Puritan pastor William Bradford, constitutes perhaps the best
metaphor for the all-encompassing nature of that life-forming
Transcendentalist passion for practical sensory experience (Thoreau)
and the messianic spiritual creativity of the “thinkers and prophets”
(Thoreau, Emerson, Channing) which had the power to transform that
experience. Bradford’s descriptions of the communal life of the
settlers, who, by virtue of their Puritan faith and the guidance of their
spiritual leaders, surmounted all hardships, was to a great extent the
model for Brook Farm, the commune founded near Concord in the
1840s under the inspired leadership of the radical Transcendentalist
George Ripley. Plymouth was the first settlement, Plymouth
Plantation was the first accomplished work of the Puritan newcomers,
and Of Plymouth Plantation, glorifying this accomplishment for all
generations to come, was the first literary work of the American
heritage: the text, inevitably saturated with the rhetoric of oral
preaching, established once and for all the singularly American
prototype for an insoluble unity between actions and words, life and
literature. The experience of the first settlers held its particular
attraction for the Transcendentalists not only because it was
foundational and passionately spiritual, but also because they
distinguished in it a particular poetic quality. The fact of being the
successors of such forefathers determined the Transcendentalists’
proud exceptionality, their uniqueness as Americans – the
consciousness of which converged in a singular way with the spiritual,
aesthetic and artistic currents of the times.
The first inhabitants of the coast of New England seemed to offer
the Transcendentalists a ready model of life – the truthful life in
Nature they most highly esteemed. Moreover, this was a model
invented and perfected on native American soil. In the Old World
such life would have been impossible – nature there was already too
domesticated, too tame, studied and dissected, and therefore was
evoking extreme attitudes: either the desire to conquer it and subject it
entirely to the human will and intellect (Classicism, the
Enlightenment), or the immeasurable admiration which made one
prostrate before its beauty (Sentimentalism, Romanticism). Both of
these attitudes came from the outside: they belonged to man weaned
16 Visibility Beyond the Visible

from nature, to man with an existence already taking shape

independently, who could then only turn back to nature as a conqueror
or a panegyrist; hence the popularity of the theme of “going back to
nature” so characteristic of European literature in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. By comparison, the settlers in America
had had much less time to attempt the emancipation of human life
from its complete dependence on natural processes. From its very
inception, the New World had to rely for its survival on the co-
existence of man with nature, while stressing, furthermore, the value
of such a full life. Precisely this Puritan model of co-existence turned
out to be the New England tradition so crucial for the
Transcendentalists. Against its background emerged the Transcenden-
talist notion of a truthful simplicity, of a life both spiritual and
beautiful, in the blessed abundance of nature. The Romantic gaze of
the Transcendentalists saw in the correspondences between man and
nature the possibility for individual fulfillment – for both spiritual and
artistic, that is poetic in the broad sense, accomplishment.
This became a central theme in Emerson, evident in his earliest big
work with the indicative title Nature, and a dominant motif in
everything which Thoreau wrote and lived as self-appointed destiny.
At a time when America was, in fact, undergoing intense
industrialization, threatening to destroy human co-existence with
nature, the Transcendentalists were emphasizing the first settlers’
experience, the genuinely American mode of life as a metaphor of
resistance, and truthful living as a form of art. “Else to what end does
the world go on, and why was America discovered?” Thoreau
exclaims in “Walking”.3 What was perceived as essentially American
– embodied moreover as it was in fascinating imagery – came to show
the “right” direction “to the West”, which could lead humanity into
the future (“Walking”). That is why “nature” for the
Transcendentalists did not refer to nature in general, but to American
wild nature. Thoreau’s titles – A Week on the Concord and Merrimack
Rivers, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, etc. – demonstrate as
much. Equally revealing is his interest in pre-Columbian America, in
the life of the North American Indians, who exemplified perfect
harmony with that same wilderness. Thoreau, however, just like his
fellow Transcendentalists, always preferred the settler, the farmer to
3
Henry David Thoreau, The Essays of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Richard Dillman,
Albany, NY: NCUP, 1990, 128.
 Puritanism and Eighteenth-Century Rationalism 17

the aboriginal inhabitant – “because he [the farmer] redeem[ed] the

meadow, and so [made] himself stronger and in some respects more
natural”.4
The period of the first settlement provided a two-century tradition
for the intellectual and prophetic aspirations of the Transcendentalists;
it offered them the prototype for a full and fruitful life in nature, a rich
set of native metaphors for artistic fulfillment, the consciousness of a
great, proud heritage as chosen people, and, most importantly, the
welcomed combination of existential sensibility and elevated
spirituality, which on the coast of New England – in the encounter
with the new territory’s hostile foreignness – was transformed into a
condition for survival. The unavoidable encounter with an inimical,
alien nature was from the very beginning perceived as the test of
righteousness for Puritan faith, a test of its ability to inspire courage in
the face of difficulties. The greater the difficulties, the greater proved
the strength and the resilience of the Puritans (William Bradford’s Of
Plymouth Plantation, John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity,
Anne Bradstreet’s poetry, the entire literature of the period
unambiguously testifies to such a perception). Hence the singular
confidence of the pilgrims of Mayflower and Arbella – confidence
proudly taken over by the Transcendentalists – that they had been
chosen by God to survive and uphold the true faith in the face of
severe hardships.
The sense of spiritual mission, of high calling as God’s chosen
people, was what set the pilgrims on the path leading from the Old
World to the New World. At the end of that path stood the fulfillment
of God’s predestination. For, Puritanism, this particular form of
English Protestantism, based on the ambition to purify Christianity of
all the pompous show and ceremony of Catholicism, was not simply
the religion which the Mayflower travelers and their followers brought
to the New World. It was first of all the faith which sent them on the
long, one-way journey across the Atlantic, so that they could leave
behind the “imperfect human institutions” of the Old World5 and build
on pristine, pure grounds, a new country, the New Jerusalem. At the
basis of Puritanism lies the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, the
belief that human salvation was appointed by God for eternity. This
4
Thoreau, The Essays, 132.
5
Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self, New Haven, CN and
London: Yale University Press, 1975, 138.
18 Visibility Beyond the Visible

was precisely how the New England settlers saw themselves,

conceiving, at the same time, “the American paradise as the
fulfillment of scripture prophecy”. From the very beginning “the
Puritans … regarded the country as theirs”,6 preordained for them by
God’s will; as early as then began the writing of the “auto-American
biography”, to use the felicitous phrase of Sacvan Bercovitch. 7 If
every surmounted hardship only confirmed that they were God’s
chosen people, the possibility of failure was unacceptable for the
American Puritans. Naturally, not all of them survived. Many died
during the first cold winters, but their unwavering faith that God’s
grace was everywhere, that one could attain grace by oneself, without
intermediaries, continued to give them courage and inner force. In the
struggle for survival, the Puritan pastors played an extremely
important role – not as intermediaries between God and man,
endowed with special power, but as true spiritual leaders.
Unquestionably, Puritanism represented a productive force and was a
source of creativity in the early days of New England’s history.8 In the
centuries that followed, it therefore acquired an unrivalled significance
as a spiritual tradition, from which the Transcendentalists could draw
their profound sense of vocation and of heritage, their spiritual stature
and poetic inspiration.
Puritanism itself, however, also contained tenets which reconciled
it quite easily with the rationalism of the period after the first
settlements. This was especially true in America, where by the sheer
necessity to survive, the belief in a just but severe God who required
constant devotion from His servants, went hand in hand with the
practical sense and inventiveness developed in the continuous struggle
to resolve new problems. The blending of religious faith and
utilitarianism was already a given in the history of Puritan New
England when the religious and philosophical ideas of the eighteenth
century started being assimilated. Consequently, the Calvinist doctrine
of predestination here almost naturally merged with the much more
cheerful and optimistic outlook of the Enlightenment. The easy
manner in which this happened seems to be directly related to the
American experience in the new territory, to the mode of life in close
dependence with nature. If the first settlers’ confidence came
6
Ibid., 137.
7
Ibid., 136.
8
See Winthrop S. Hudson, Religion in America, New York: Scribner, 1965, 158-203.
 Puritanism and Eighteenth-Century Rationalism 19

exclusively from their belief that God had preordained their path as
the chosen people (“The eyes of all people are upon us”9), and even if
that predetermined role was in essence quite passive (“[we must] walk
humbly with our God”), the objective circumstances imposed an
opposing tendency – the settlers had to be active and rely on their own
resources in order to overcome the hardships presented by their new
life. Thus, the ideas of the Enlightenment came to affirm and elevate
the existential value of what had become already a matter of necessity
in America.
At its basis, the European Enlightenment conceived of man
precisely as actively present in the world. Thanks to the great
scientific discoveries of the preceding century, the eighteenth-century
European saw in his ability to understand and apply universal laws the
proof of the power of Reason. In other words, man came to be
perceived as God’s equal••• •0 Once within the reach of human
understanding, the world became “the best of all possible worlds”
(Leibniz), and having discovered the same supreme laws which
govern the world in the inner workings of his own being, man became
capable of governing life, including his own life, to an unprecedented
degree. The extraordinary potential of Reason, the awareness of which
was clearer than ever, placed the human being in relation to the world
in the same position as that occupied by God in relation to His
creation or the universe. It followed logically that the Enlightenment
would put great value on perfecting morals: a perfect moral order
would be analogous to the ideal order of the universe. The greater part
of the novels of the epoch treat either mature, practical, skillful
characters, whose harmonious inner nature helps them overcome any
hardships life may present (Robinson Crusoe); or characters in the
process of maturing, who suffer the consequences of their many
mistakes only to be richly rewarded when, consciously learning from
their experience, they develop the capacity to evaluate and resolve
existential dilemmas (Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones). The human
intellect, seen as the main attribute of an “inherently good human
nature”, became for the Enlightenment the guarantee of confidence
and optimism. At the same time, individual growth, the process of
adapting to existing conditions, ensured the extremely valued practical
9
Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity”, I, 41.
10
See The Eighteenth Century: The Context of English Literature, ed. Pat Rogers,
London: Holmes and Meier, 1978.
20 Visibility Beyond the Visible

ability to deal with life. Humanity began to participate actively in the

shaping of its own reality.
This rational utilitarian mindset, which justified the domination of
Reason over the tangible world, was in its essence compatible with the
spirit of Protestantism. Free from all vainglory and ostentation in
professing a communion with God regardless of place and without any
intermediaries, while promoting healthy, orderly and pious everyday
life, Protestantism, in fact, discouraged passivity in favor of mental
clarity and expediency. In the case of its extreme forms, such as
American Puritanism, the pragmatism of the Enlightenment proved
even more adequate, because it gave new shape to the particular
blending, already created by the experience of the first settlers, of an
extremely simplified worldly existence in the name of God and the
purely practical necessity of overcoming a foreign and hostile reality.
The great New England Robinsonian adventure avant la lettre had
indeed prepared Americans for the ideas arriving from Europe in the
eighteenth century – these ideas proved to be not only apt and useful,
but also extraordinarily productive in the New World, not least of all
because they underlined anew and with even greater force the merits
of the Puritan past. “Unlike nations of the Old World, rooted in
shadow and mystery, in historic cultures and traditions, the United
States had been rooted in the ideas of the Enlightenment”, as Tindall
and Shi assert and as most American cultural historians would concur:

Those ideas, most vividly set forth in Jefferson's Declaration, had in

turn a universal application. In the eyes of many if not most citizens,
the “first new nation” had a mission to stand as an example to the
world, much as John Winthrop's “city upon a hill” had once stood as
an example to erring humanity. The concept of mission in fact still
carried spiritual overtones, for the religious fervor quickened in the
Great Awakening had reinforced the idea of national purpose. In turn
the sense of high calling infused the national character with an
element of perfectionism – and an element of impatience when reality
fell short of expectations. The combination brought major reforms and
advances in human rights.11

The continuity between the late eighteenth century and the early
Puritan period was essentially spiritual in the New World. The road
11
George Brown Tindall with David E. Shi, America: A Narrative History, New
York: W.W. Norton, 1992, I, 477.
 Puritanism and Eighteenth-Century Rationalism 21

from the ship Mayflower to 4 July 1779 was indeed quite short – one
sense of calling metamorphosed into another, not only to finally
become a fact of cultural identity, but also to lead to a state-founding
historical act with the creation of the United States of America. This
was the American “appeal to self-evidence”.12
The Enlightenment notion of active human presence in the world
took on a new significance in America. The question for the
Americans was not merely to actively live in the world in general (as
the idea was commonly interpreted in Europe), but to work actively on
the American land already actively redeemed by their ancestors, the
land of their own, later to become their own American state – hence
with the proud consciousness of belonging to the emerging American
nation. America’s Age of Reason drew on the ideas of the European
Enlightenment in order to enrich its rather short pre-history, on the
basis of which, while preserving the pilgrims’ sense of national
purpose, to create new history. For, doubtless, as a French traveler at
the time observed: “There [was] no country in the world where the
Christian religion retain[ed] a greater influence over the souls of men
than in America.” 13 Unsurprisingly, the secularism of the
Enlightenment never affected the foundations of Puritan spirituality,
and was in fact quickly counterbalanced by an incredible religious
fervor, which spread all over America from 1800 onwards.
At the same time, the leaders of the revolution, Thomas Jefferson
and Benjamin Franklin, were deists. The most famous document in the
history of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, was
written entirely in the rationalist spirit of the Enlightenment. The very
act of founding the American state at the end of the eighteenth century
was also (among many other things) an essentially rational act.
Motivated by a logic of cause and effect, the act addressed in a
rational and analytical way the necessities of American life and put a
logical end to British domination. The rationalism of the
Enlightenment, then, had a positive influence on American thought: it
compelled the Americans to re-evaluate more precisely their history
and experience (Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason); to focus on
accounts of personal history and experience (the autobiographies of
Franklin and Jefferson); and, most importantly, to construct and
12
See Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience, New York:
Vintage Books, 1958, 152-58.
13
Tindall with Shi, America, 479.
22 Visibility Beyond the Visible

record America’s national history and experience (the Declaration of

Independence). On the other hand, rationalism’s negative perception,
the strong reaction it provoked among Puritans, became the cause of
the widespread religious fervor which to a great extent predetermined
the emergence of Transcendentalism. In both cases, it must be
underlined, the ideas imported from the other side of the Atlantic were
adapted to local intellectual needs. The American Enlightenment’s
main goal was to build a consciousness of national history and a clear
sense of national identity.
In accordance with the tradition of the Puritan settlers, American
history was comprehended through individual experience and personal
exemplarity. Hardly anyone’s life and work showed stronger
faithfulness to this genuine American tradition than those of Benjamin
Franklin. A true polymath – a scientist, statesman, politician,
diplomat, editor, journalist and writer, all in one – Franklin was the
American embodiment of the European encyclopedism of the
eighteenth century. His vast erudition and his public activity’s
astonishing width and variety also bore the stamp of the self-made
man, whose intellectual and life achievement was the work of
personal determination. The secularism and utilitarianism of the Old
Continent, inflected by Franklin’s own thought and by his own
particular experience in climbing up the social ladder, seemed to reach
in his figure an even more extreme form of worldliness. Combining
the deism of the Enlightenment with the practical spirit of the first
American settlers, Franklin’s biography gave the formula for authentic
success in life – through his life story, which was both a cause and an
effect, American history was being made. The attitudes towards
Franklin’s formula for success would vary in generations to follow
from the positive (most often) to the negative (more rarely), but in any
case his impact remained productive: the United States were born out
of and grew up with the ideas of the Enlightenment.
Although another America existed in the eighteenth century, the
America of Jonathan Edwards, who kept till the end his faith in
Calvinism (and who, curiously enough, used the great scientific
discoveries of the time to defend Calvinism), in the final analysis, the
worldly rationalism of the Enlightenment left a profound mark on
American Protestantism, which in itself was surprisingly receptive to
its influence. Especially welcoming to the strict logic of the
Enlightenment proved to be the old Puritan churches around Boston,
 Puritanism and Eighteenth-Century Rationalism 23

which began to preach rationalist interpretations of the Holy

Scriptures, while the remarkable prosperity of Boston “persuaded
many rising families that they were anything but sinners in the hands
of an angry God”.14 These developments weakened considerably the
positions of Calvinism. The Enlightenment’s power of impact on the
New World became particularly visible in New England, where the
descendants of the oldest settlers on the East Coast, the descendants of
those Puritan pilgrims who arrived with a holy mission as the chosen
people, succeeded in assimilating the Enlightenment emphasis on
reason and expediency, and combined it productively with their
pragmatism and existential adaptability, both proven for generations.
The New England Puritan church inscribed itself so well within the
worldview of the Age of Reason, that its leader, William Ellery
Channing of Boston’s Federal Street Church, would remark, “I am
surer that my rational nature is from God, than that any book is an
expression of his will”.15
At the very heart of New England – in Boston and its surrounding
towns – the end of the eighteenth century saw the definitive arrival of
the current in American religious thought to become known as
Unitarianism. Professing the oneness of God, the inherent goodness of
human nature and the prevalence of reason over all established
doctrines and beliefs, Unitarianism, with optimism typical for the
Enlightenment, maintained that human beings possessed an infinite
capacity to do good and that everyone had an equal chance of
salvation. Thus, Unitarianism rationally and unambiguously rejected
the main tenets of Calvinism. Massachusetts, the New England state
with the deepest Puritan roots, emerged in the first decades of the
nineteenth century as the center of American religious thought most
profoundly marked by the ideas of the mature Enlightenment. Here
the continuity between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries
followed a natural line of development, while slightly delaying
America in its encounter with European Romanticism and its
explosive burst of negations. This continuity, according to the tested
and proven American model, was first and foremost spiritual.
Massachusetts was the cradle of old settler traditions and beliefs, of
Puritan perfectionism and proud sense of heritage, of high native
spirituality and time-proven practicality – the wave of Enlightenment
14
Ibid., 478.
15
Quoted in ibid., 479.
24 Visibility Beyond the Visible

rationalism met a sense, unique for American history, for a long

established way of life which was nevertheless ready to adapt to the
new times. Indeed, precisely in Massachusetts the unity of Puritanism
and Enlightenment rationalism could crystallize into Unitarianism.
And precisely Boston’s Unitarians, all graduates of the then entirely
Unitarian Harvard College, constituted America’s intellectual elite of
the period. Finally, precisely here, where the unity of religion and
rationality was most clearly and convincingly defined, flourished the
equally bright and distinctive form of negation to which that same
unity had given birth – American Transcendentalism.
 CHAPTER THREE

UNITARIANISM AND TRANSCENDENTALISM

All the literary men of Massachusetts

were Unitarian .…1

A descendant of an old settler family and quite close in outlook to the

Transcendentalists, in whose circle he remained for many years,
Nathaniel Hawthorne lamented in the Preface to The Marble Faun
“the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no
shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong
.... Romance and poverty, ivy, lichens, and wall-flowers, need ruin to
make them grow.”2 Hawthorne saw in the brevity of his country’s
history mostly the oppressive impossibility of poetic escape to the
enigmas and quiet solitude which a literary antiquity such as Europe’s
could offer. Although the Transcendentalists fully shared Hawthorne’s
negative attitude towards their contemporaries’ rational and pragmatic
mentality, they did not see the country’s short history as a
disadvantage. On the contrary, for the Transcendentalists America’s
youth was the source of vital force and inspiration. The fact that their
origins were in New England gave them a particular advantage – the
place’s almost palpable relationship with the devout Puritan
forefathers determined the Transcendentalist perception of its exalted,
natively American spirit: this spirit did not need ruins to build
romances on; lit by missionary fervor, its gaze could wander over the
limitless expanse of America’s wilderness and drink its exhilarating
vitality. That was also why Emerson’s Nature, from its very
publication in 1836, along with “The American Scholar” of 1837, was

1
Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher on moving to Boston in 1826. Quoted in
Tindall with Shi, America, 479.
2
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, New York: Dover Publications, 2004, iv.
26 Visibility Beyond the Visible

accepted by the intellectual elite at the time as America’s spiritual

Declaration of Independence.
Affirming America’s independence in such new, purely spiritual
terms was tightly related to the history of New England’s native
spiritual tradition. Profoundly religious in its conception,
unimaginable without the Puritan heritage evident in everything it
ever created, the New England Transcendentalism often leaned
towards radical spiritual liberalism, which at times, as has already
been mentioned, brought upon its members serious accusations,
including the accusation of atheism. The Transcendentalists
distinguished themselves from the religious doctrines inherited by
their contemporaries from the preceding century first of all by
maintaining that any coherently rational doctrine was unsatisfactory.
In its essence, this was a rejection of the supremacy of reason, seen as
severely limiting in as far as human nature’s capacities and faculties
far exceeded rationality. The Transcendentalist resistance to
rationalism, however, remained clothed in strictly religious terms. The
New England Transcendentalists never abandoned the religious
premises of their convictions, even if their professed attachment to
such premises varied considerably. But they overcame the rather
obsolete rationalism of the epoch by pursuing their spiritual quest in
an entirely unexplored (and unthought-of) direction: poetry.
In the new Transcendentalist consciousness, poetry and religion
became commensurable, so although predominantly a religious
movement, Transcendentalism, as its very first historian observed,
was “essentially poetical and put its thoughts naturally into song”.3 As
far as any correlation between faith and notions of beauty existed in
New England at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Transcend-
entalism transformed this correlation to include a comprehensive
poetic quality which retained its essentially religious character, but at
the same time distanced itself from the ideas of the dominant religious
trend – Unitarianism. New England’s Unitarianism provided the
larger intellectual context within which Transcendentalism emerged
both as a rebellion against some of its formulations and, to an extent,
as an extreme affirmation of tendencies already present in its
development. So Transcendentalism rejected energetically, but also
radicalized, core elements of Unitarianism, by repudiating everything

3
Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England, 134.
 Unitarianism and Transcendentalism 27

that could limit the individual in his spiritual and personal aspirations,
and by channeling its poetically inspired spirituality into early Puritan
(that is, pre-rationalist) revelations, characteristically native New
England creativity and verbal craftsmanship of the highest order.
A combination of New England Protestantism and Enlightenment
rationalism, Unitarianism upheld the oneness of God, rejected the
Trinity and the divinity of Christ, and placed reason at the basis of
faith and religious practice. These characteristics, Daniel Howe
reminds us, inspired the myth that Unitarianism was “corpse-cold”,
and was considered as such by its historians for a long time.4 The fact
was, however, in the words of a contemporary source from the 1820s,
that “all the literary men of Massachusetts were Unitarian; all the
trustees and professors of Harvard College were Unitarian; all the elite
of wealth and fashion crowded the Unitarian churches”.5 This source
does not merely testify to the great popularity of Unitarianism in the
first decades of the nineteenth century; it is also one among numerous
documents confirming that Harvard College at the time was entirely
Unitarian in spirit. As a result, the intellectual elite of the epoch
consisted exclusively of Unitarian ministers and leaders, which gave
New England’s intellectual flourishing of the period – a flourishing
engendered by the Enlightenment cult of knowledge, but nevertheless
only possible in a religious milieu – its idiosyncratic character.
Unitarianism’s departure from orthodox Puritan doctrines, inherent in
its very premises, issued from precisely this idiosyncrasy – having
unreservedly absorbed the utilitarian rationalism of the Enlightenment
and that part of its secularism which was compatible with the
profession of faith, Unitarianism began to appear as a liberal trend
within Puritanism. Hence also its extraordinary attraction for
intellectuals.
Owing to its confidence in the all-powerful nature of reason, the
liberalism of New England’s Unitarians succeeded, at the end of the
eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, in liberating
religious philosophy from the inhibiting doctrines of Calvinism.6
Consequently, Unitarian clergymen rarely exhibited perfect

4
See Daniel Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-
1861, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970, 153.
5
Tindall with Shi, America, 479.
6
See Jerry Wayne Brown, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 1800-1870: The
New England Scholars, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1969.
28 Visibility Beyond the Visible

theological coherence, but neither was this their main objective or

their main force. As one Unitarian minister-historian admitted:

It is difficult to say, out of hand, just what the Unitarian opinion is on

any given matter, or what it is that Unitarians believe in …. I am a
little impatient that they should ever be judged by their theology,
which was so small a fraction of either their religion or their life!7

Apparently, there were other criteria according to which Unitarian

ministers judged themselves and according to which they wished to be
judged by others.
Although the Unitarian movement’s central point of reference was
the rejection of the Trinity, the true object of its repudiations was the
Calvinist view of human nature.8 Under the influence of the rationalist
optimism of the epoch, New England’s Unitarianism accepted the
Enlightenment idea of human nature as inherently good and capable
of positive change through the rational elimination of false beliefs.
That was why Unitarians placed such emphasis on the perfecting of
morals. In adopting the anti-Calvinist position on human nature, they
claimed that religion’s great task was to encourage the building of
character. Even if the Enlightenment tendency to teach practical,
worldly morality was less pronounced in New England, education
being firmly established within a religious framework, Unitarianism’s
departure from the Calvinist canon was explicit and unambiguous.
From this perspective, the rationalism of the Enlightenment had a
positive effect on American Protestantism. Through the Unitarians it
liberalized New England’s theological thought: the very possibility of
achieving clear, rational understanding of the laws governing the
universe became incompatible with blind faith in the canon’s validity
and thus opened new vistas for religious thinking.9 Theological
systems erected for the sake of being systematic began to appear out-
dated in comparison with the clear, hence convincing, Enlightenment
notion of a scientifically verifiable, orderly universe and by extension
orderly, explicable human nature. Unsurprisingly, theology was of
small concern for the Unitarians and they gradually and unobtrusively

7
Quoted in Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 24.
8
Hutchison, The Transcendentalist, 4.
9
See The Shaping of American Religion, eds James Ward Smith and A. Laland
Jameson, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961, 232-321.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
suorastaan pienenä hirviönä. Jumala lasta auttakoon! Jos hän tällä
tavoin jatkaa, joutuu hän tuskin koskaan naimisiin.

Mutta jos me näin olemme kaikki koolla ja kaikki lapset ja

lastenlapset voivat hyvin ja kaikki on kunnossa eikä ole mitään
huolestuttavaa eikä painostavaa, mutta rullatuoli pienen pöydän
ääressä salin keskimäisen ikkunan alla on tyhjänä, niin ei synny
oikeata tunnelmaa meidän piiriimme.

Huoneustomme on nyt suuri, koko yksitoista huonetta, ja me

olemme vilkas perhe ja Jönsin ja tyttöjen lapset pitävät kauheata
elämää kun sattuvat yhteen, mutta kun he lähestyvät sinistä
kamaria, silloin hiljenee pienten jalkojen vauhti itsestään, äänet
laskeutuvat ja rakkaita katseita luodaan kamarin oveen.

Jos meille jotain tapahtuu, iloa tai surua, tai kirje saapuu lapsilta tai
olemme saaneet kuulla jotain uutta kaupungilta, ystävistä ja tutuista,
niin aina joku nopeasti nousee piiristä, katsoo onko rullatuoli tyhjä ja
kiiruhtaa siinä tapauksessa siniseen kamariin, mistä ääni aina kuuluu
hiljennettynä.

Siellä lepää valkoisilla tyynyillä, tavallisesti puolihämärässä, kasvot

kuin kauniin naisen, vartalo kuin raajarikon, suuruudelta lapsen
kokoinen.

Se on meidän Eevamme, kolmas tyttömme järjestyksessä, hän

jonka kovat kärsimykset ovat kuluttaneet ja sulkeneet kaikesta
elämän ilosta, hän, joka määrättiin meidän murhelapseksemme,
mutta joka enemmän kuin kukaan muu voi kääntää katseemme
sinne, missä on ikuinen ilo!
 Lääkärit sanovat… niin, samantekeväähän se on mitä he sanovat;
auttaa häntä he eivät kaikissa tapauksissa voi, kaikkea on koetettu.
Lapsen iloa ja nuoruuden riemua ei hän ole saanut maistaa, paljo
ulkoelämästä, luonnosta ja ihmisistä on hänelle tuntematonta, ja
toisinaan vääristää tuska kauniit kasvonpiirteet päässä, jonka hän,
ikäänkuin julmalla ivalla, on saanut pitää terveenä ja täyteläisenä,
ruusuja poskilla ja loistoa silmissä, kun muu ruumis on suhdaton
luuranko.

Tunteeko ja ajatteleeko hän meidän tavallamme, vaikk'ei voi toivoa

eikä odottaa niinkuin me? Emme sitä tiedä. Emme ole koskaan
huomanneet, että ne tuulahdukset elämästä, jotka ovat voineet
hänen pieneen leposijaansa tunkeutua, olisivat aikaan saaneet
hänessä kaipausta tai alakuloisuutta. Pojat ovat uskoneet hänelle
tulevaisuuden tuumansa, tytöt ovat aikasemmin kuin äidille hänelle
ilmaisseet sydänsalaisuutensa, rakkautensa ja riemunsa, ja hänen
kauniit silmänsä ovat loistaneet hellyyttä, hän on kuunnellut osaa
ottavana, hän on koettanut hyväillä pienellä kuihtuneella kädellään;
mutta kuuluviin ei ole päässyt pieninkään tuskan ilmaus siitä että itse
on auttamattomasti sulettu kaikesta siitä, mitä elämä muuten tarjoo.

Minä luulen, että hänen sydänjuurensa näin vähitellen irtaantuvat

maasta aina sitä mukaa kuin hänen mielensä kääntyy siihen, mikä
ylhäällä on. Oikeastaan on nyt enää vain yksi side pitämässä häntä
jälellä: rakkaus meihin kaikkiin. Kuinka kauan voi se sitoa hänen
siipensä? Kuinka pian on hän kohoova kurjuudesta ihanuuteen? On
julmaa ja itsekästä rukouksillamme tahtoa viivyttää sitä hetkeä,
mutta emme muuta voi; murheen lapsi on tullut kodin
auringonsäteeksi, ramman tyttären pieni käsi on vahvempi kuin
kenenkään meidän tukemaan ja nostamaan, ja kun tuo heikko liekki
sammuu, tulee se koskemaan meitä melkein kovemmin, kuin jos
joku meistä kutsuttaisiin pois terveyden ja voiman päivinään.

Eeva tietää, mitä minä olen askaroinnut näinä päivinä. Eilen sanoi
hän:

"Isä, joko sitte vieraatkin saavat nähdä sinun pikku teoksesi tahi
jos se vaan jää rakkaaksi testamentiksi äidille ja meille, niin
puhutaan siinä kai oikein paljo Jumalan ihmeellisestä hyvyydestä ja
armosta?"

Minä painoin pääni alas, ja vanhat poskeni punastuivat häpeästä.

"Sen pahempi, ei paljoa, lapsukaiseni…"

Lempeiden, hellien piirteiden yli kulki musta varjo ja hän oli hetken
hiljaa. Sitte kirkastuivat kasvot taas ja hän hymyili:

"Samahan se onkin, isäni. Hänen työnsä häntä ylistävät eikä

kukaan ihminen voi kirjottaa, mitä hänelle todella on tapahtunut,
kirjottamatta ylistyslaulua Hänen kunniakseen!"

Ja näin lausuu hän, jota on lyöty niin kovasti!

Kas niin, kello on jo kuusi illalla ja kahdenkymmenen minuutin

päästä tulee äiti laivalla Tukholmasta viettämään
kuusikymmenvuotispäivää huomenna. Hänen mukanaan tulevat
Albert ja hänen maalariryökkinänsä. Jumala häntä siunatkoon, mutta
jos hän öljyväreillään rupee tuhrimaan keltaisessa salissa,
parhaassa vierashuoneessamme, niin ei siitä koskaan hyvää seuraa.

Äiti tulee! Ei auta, että on mäkituvassa syntynyt ja tullut

kuudenkymmenen vuotiaaksi ja kumaraksi ja harmaaksi. Hän, jolla
on sydämeni ollut aina nuoruuden keväästä alkaen, voi yhä vieläkin
saada sen kielet väräjämään yhtä hellästi, nyt kun pellot ovat korjatut
ja syystuuli hivelee ryppyisiä poskia!
IX.

Suuri päivä.

Kaikki nukkuvat; oli hyvä että oli lauantai eilen, minun

kuusikymmenvuotispäivänäni, tuona suurena juhlapäivänä, niin että
liikkeenkin väki saa hieman levätä. Mutta itselläni ei minulla ole
mitään lepoa, ennenkuin olen saanut sanoa sinulle hyvästi, rakas
lukija, ja sen vuoksi olen minä hiipinyt ylös tuntia ennen Hannaa.

Että meillä eilen piti olla päivälliset lapsille ja ystäville, se nyt oli
selvää, ja niin pitkälle olin minäkin mukana. Mutta muuten minä
tietysti en ollut tietävinäni, että odotin jotain erityistä juhlallisuutta.
Koetin olla näkemättä suuria, jo valmiita kukkakoreja, köynnöksiä
nurkissa ja kahta mankelikorillista värillisiä lyhtyjä puutarhaan
ripustettaviksi. Meillä on nyt syyskuu, ja ensimäiseksi kun tirkistin
ulos sänkykamarin ikkunasta, katseli aurinko minua, kauniina ja
kirkkaana. Jöns oli vetänyt ylös liput, sekä kotimaiset että perulaisen,
ja miniäni, maalari, oli jo ulkona ruusupensaiden luona sakset
kädessä.

"Jumala siunatkoon sinua!", sanoi Hanna, mutta hänen silmissään

oli kokonainen pitkä juhlapuhe.
 "Tarram, tarram, tarram tam ta!" kajahti alhaalla Rantakadulla, ja
salin ikkunoiden alle asettui Nålköpingin työväenyhdistys
soittokuntineen ja lippuineen. Minä olen istunut johtokunnassa
kuusitoista vuotta ja annoin heille kerran tuhannen kruunua, ja sitte
ovat he saaneet joukon kirjoja lapsilta.

Kaksi soittokappaletta ja korea puhe, niin korea, että jos vieras

olisi sen kuullut, olisi hän vähintäin luullut minua Nålköpingin
kuninkaaksi. Mutta se minä en ole, sillä se kunnia kuuluu tehtailija
Grönbergille. Puheen piti kaupungin parturi, ja se oli hirmuisen
ystävällinen ja vapaamielinen ja sisälsi myöskin koko joukon yleistä
äänioikeutta, sillä työväenyhdistykset ovat aina valtiollisia
luonteeltaan, ja valtiomiehen vikaa tavallisesti on partureissakin.

Minä kiipesin ulos parvekkeelle ja vastasin ylimalkaan seuraavaan

tapaan, jonka ohessa on huomattavaa, että kaikki ihmiset torilla
pysähtyivät ja Isontalon maitopiika ajoi aivan soittokunnan viereen,
pani kädet kupeilleen ja katseli minua kuin olisin ollut jokin ihme-
elävä:

"Ystävät!

"Tiedoin tahdoin te ette minun kanssani kujeile, sen tiedän, mutta

tiedän myöskin etten minä missään suhteessa kestä vertailua sen
kuvan kanssa, joka tässä on esitetty muka minun kuvanani. Kuvan
virheellisyys riippuu varmaankin siitä, että teidän lämpimistä
sydämistänne noussut sumu on saanut peittää kaikki vähemmän
kauniit piirteet. Mutta tätä virhettä en minä mistään hinnasta tahdo
korjata vaan pyydän teitä sydämestäni edelleenkin antamaan
tuollaisen sumun nousta.
 "Yksi on totta: että minä pidän teistä ja kunnioitan teitä kaikkia,
kaikkia, ja että kukaan ei osaa suuremmassa arvossa pitää
kunniallista työtä kaikilla aloilla. Toisellaiset mielipiteet olisivatkin
kummalliset miehellä, joka on alkanut köyhempänä kuin köyhin
teistä.

"Mitä yleiseen äänioikeuteen tulee, niin en minä itse asiassa sitä

voi edistää enkä pidättää. Sen asian hoitavat Jumala, kuningas ja
valtiopäivät, jossa Nålköpingin edustajana on pormestari Trybom.
Mutta nykyisen perustuslain rajojen sisällä olen minä tehnyt kaikki
mitä olen voinut äänioikeusasian hyväksi: kaikilla kirjanpitäjilläni on
äänioikeus ja puotimiehenikin olisivat viime vaalissa
kahdeksansadan kruunun taksotuksen perusteella voineet äänestää,
mutta nähkääs, he eivät tahtoneet.

"Kiitos! Jumala teitä siunatkoon!"

Jo oli yhdistys kääntynyt lähteäkseen, liike torilla saanut tavallisen

kulkunsa ja Isontalon maitopiika, joka nähtävästi suureksi huvikseen
oli ollut tapauksessa mukana lähtenyt pois, kun Albertini, tohtori,
kiipee ulos parvekkeelle, päättäväinen piirre rakkailla kasvoillaan.

Minä oikein huolestuin. Ajatteles jos häneen, joka asuu

Tukholmassa, ovat tarttuneet nuo uudet aatteet ja tuon kauhean
"Tukholman penkin" hirmuinen radikalismi, ja jos hän nyt pitää oikein
tuollaisen vapaamielisen puheen. Ja me, jotka olemme niin hyviä
ystäviä Trybomin kanssa, joka on niin kauhean vanhoillinen!

Jumalan kiitos! Pojan esitys oli sekä isänmaallinen että

vanhoillinen.
 "Eivätkö parturi Lind ja soittokunta tahdo tehdä hyvin ja tulla ylös
juomaan lasin viiniä kanssamme!" sanoi hän lujalla,
kaunissointuisella, lämpimällä, vakaumusta hehkuvalla äänellä.

Kun minä käännyin ympäri seisoo Jenny siinä joukko laseja

tarjottimella, ja kaikki muutkin ovat tulleet sisään ja Eeva istuu
rullatuolissaan ja katsoo minuun suurilla lempeillä, lämpimillä
silmillään.

Minä menen hänen luokseen, ja kärsivän rakastettumme ja minun

ympärilleni kiertyy seppele ojennettuja käsivarsia, ja raikkaat suut
kuiskaavat korviini siunausta ja kiitollisuutta.

Samassa tulee Johanna palvelijatar, ja sanoo, että etehisessä on

lähetystö "Seitsemän tähden" veljesliitosta, jossa minä olen
rahastonhoitajana.

Niitä oli kuusi kappaletta, tavallisissa oloissa minun tuttavallisia

ystäviäni ja veljiäni, jotka eivät juuri ujostelleet paukuttaa minua
selkään ja sanoa: "Nyt sinä olet tyhmä, vanha Nikke." Mutta nyt he
olivat aivan hirmuisen jäykkiä ja hienoja, kommendöörinnauhat
päällystakkien alla, ja katselivat minua kuin olisin ollut intialainen
epäjumalankuva, tahi kuin olisivat tahtoneet pyytää: "Älä koske
meihin äläkä Jumalan nimessä sano mitään jokapäiväistä, niin että
kaikki juhlallisuutemme menee rikki!"

He heittivät päällystakit pois, asettivat kaulahuivit järjestykseen ja

asettuivat asentoon. Yliseremoniamestari lausui tunnussanan ja
aliseremoniamestari löi sauvallaan lattiaan, jonka jälkeen
puheenjohtaja-mestari, veli Lundström, piti suuren puheen ja pyysi
liiton puolesta saada jättää minulle hopeamaljan, oikean kilpa-
ajopokaalin. Ja kyllä se totta onkin, että minä usein olen ollut
juoksemaisillani hengen kurkustani tuon siunatun "Seitsemän
tähden" takia ja että minä omasta mielestäni juhlatilaisuuksissa istun
siellä narrina miekka vyöllä ja ritaripuvussa, mutta kun minä katselen
minun kilpa-ajopokaaliani on sentään lohduttavaa tietää, ettei sen
saamiseksi ole hevosraukkoja kiusattu. Jos ihminen tahtoo tehdä
itsensä naurettavaksi omalla ruumiillaan on se hänen
yksityisasiansa.

Minun vastauksessani puheenjohtaja-mestarin puheeseen ei ollut

ollenkaan mitään valtiollista sisällystä, jonka vuoksi jätän sen
mainitsematta.

Samppanjaa.

Koko aamupäivän oli talo täynnä väkeä, jotka tahtoivat onnitella,

niiden joukossa maaherra ja hänen vapaaherrattarensa, piispa ja
tuomiorovasti; ja sitte tuli päivällinen monine kauniine puheineen.
Kauneimman kaikista piti Albertini papalleen. Se ansaitsisi tulla
painetuksi, mutta sitä ei Albert millään ehdolla tahdo. Minä näin,
kuinka piispa, joka oli nähnyt varsin paljon vaivaa suuresta
ensimäisestä juhlapuheesta, kulki ympäri ja ikäänkuin häpesi vähän,
että Albert oli hänet niin "distanseerannut", kuten polkupyöräilijät
sanovat. Tuleva miniäni, maalari, oli tehnyt pieniä, oikein somia
värssyjä. On hyvin onnellista kun molemmat puolisot noin sopivat
yhteen luonnonlahjojen ja ajatuskannan puolesta. Minä en koskaan
ole kirjottanut yhtään värssyä eikä Hanna hioin.

Jöns luki kaikki sähkösanomat ja niitä oli koko joukko:

"Konsuli Jönsson,

Nålköping.
 Onnea kuuskymmenvuotiaalle! Edelleenkin menestystä, onnea ja
iloa!
Roslund."

"Tukkukauppias Jönsson,

Nålköping.

Onnea ja iloa,
Rauhaa, tyyntä lepoa
Asunnossa armahassa!

Mimmi ja Joonas!"

"Veli-Aarremestari,

Seitsemän tähteä, Nålköping.

Kirkkaana kuin seitsemän tähden loisto ylevänä kuin sen kulku

taivaan kannella saapuu Skulleby-veljien tervehdys
kuusikymmenvuotiaalle veljelle. Terve!

Puheenjohtaja-mestari!"

"Jönsson,

Nålköping.

Viimeksi tulleet rapsikakut kelvottomia. Emme välitä…"

"Ai h—i!" sanoi Jöns. "Vie tuo alas konttoriin, Viklund!" Ja sitte luki
hän taas edelleen.
 Niin, se oli oikein liikuttavaa ja juhlallista.

Mutta päivällistä syödessä tulivat tilanomistajat Östberg ja

Brädström ja sanoivat:

"Suo anteeksi, pikku Nikke! Mutta mitäs siinä seisoikaan niistä

kelvottomista rapsikakuista. Kai samaa lajia, mitä olet myynyt
meille?"

Mutta silloin minä suutuin ja sanoin:

"Ettekö te sitte ollenkaan ymmärrä tietää huutia, hyvät ystävät!

Tuletteko te ja panette minut hämilleni omassa talossani ja omana
syntymäpäivänäni! Maljanne joka tapauksessa!"

Sitten oli siellä juhlavalaistus puutarhassa ja viinibooli

huvihuoneessa ja imartelua puheessa ja hyvä tarkotus imartelussa,
ja sitte sytytti kirjanpitäjä Viklund ilotulituksen, mutta sekä äiti että
minä olisimme kernaasti suoneet, että hän olisi jättänyt sen
tekemättä, sillä kun ensimäinen raketti kihisten lensi ylös, seisoi
tohtori Person lyseosta kauempana syreenien luona käsivarsi
meidän Jennymme vartalon ympärillä, ja minä luulen, että useimmat
vieraat, ikävä kyllä, näkivät sen.

Noilla tytöillä on kiire. Pian on kai tarkotus että äiti ja minä

seisomme täällä aivan yksinämme, kuten pari vanhaa,
sammaltunutta, lehdetöntä puuta.

Huvimajassa laulettiin ja ilo kohosi korkealle ja vieraat hoitivat

erinomaisen hyvin itseään. Minä vetäydyin senvuoksi hetkiseksi pois
melusta ja menin ylös Eevan luo.
 Hän istui huoneessaan ikkunan ääressä ja katseli avatusta
ruudusta ylös valoisaa tähtitaivasta kohti.

"Ne loistavat niin kirkkaina, lapseni! En luule koskaan nähneeni

niitä niin lähellä kuin tänä iltana."

Hän nojasi päänsä poskeani vastaan ja kuiskasi:

"Niin se kai onkin, isä! Me tulemme niitä hiukan lähemmäksi päivä

päivältä, ja kun on kuudenkymmenen vuotias tai… tai murtunut
kuten minä, silloin on syytä katseellaan yhä useammin mitata sitä
välimatkaa, joka erottaa, yhä useammin lähettää ajatuksensa
rukouksen siivillä sinne ylös!"
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