[8/28/05] Closet Unitarians of the Nineteenth Century

By Judy b. LaLonde

Good morning everyone. Here we are! A new church year--second Sunday! And here at the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Palouse, it's traditional to take the first few Sundays to remind ourselves what Unitarian Universalism is all about? To reflect on why we choose to make a connection with this church. To think about what we get and what we can give.

Many of you, I'm sure, listen to NPR. You probably are familiar with the yearly (or is it twice yearly) joke session on Prairie Home Companion. It ALWAYS includes a section of UU jokes. For example:

What do you get if you cross a Seventh-Day Adventist and a Unitarian? Someone who knocks on your door and has no idea why.

"The Simpsons" regularly satarize Unitarians. In one episode, Lisa buys a cone of "Unitarian flavored" ice cream. "But it doesn't taste like anything," she complains. "Exactly," replies Pastor Lovejoy, righteously.

I'm a fan of the HBO series Six Feet Under, and recently watched an old episode which two youngish couples were relaxing in the evening over a campfire and had this exchange:

"UU stands for Unitarian Universalist. But it's about as not religious as a religion can get."

"That's nice--not a place that preaches but a place where we could be with other people like us."

"Right--no big God thing. No crosses or dripping blood or shit, exactly. Just people gettin' together."

"How often does Jesus come up?"

"Not often—-pretty rarely. But when he does, they always remind us that he was black."

"Right, as opposed to the Brad Pitt Jesus America tries to sell us."

Protesting: "Jesus wasn't black."

"Yes he was; everyone was black."

So much at least for some of the public perceptions of Unitarian Universalism. Last year, there was an opportunity for members of the church to develop their own "elevator speeches"—-what would you say if, in a short elevator ride, a stranger asked you to explain your religion?

Anyway, I was invited to speak because, in my early days here at UUCP, I once acted the part of Transcendentalist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, beard and all. Certain folks, like (past minister) Joan Montagnes, knew I was enthusiastic about the 19th century . In fact, I moved here from Pennsylvania (a semi-practicing Catholic at the time) to work on a PhD at WSU in early 19th century LITERATURE.

Let that be my first disclaimer today! I did not study theology or philosophy or history.

But I delved rather deeply into the writers of the period—-and of course, the writing of any period is reflective of the period's history, culture and beliefs. My dissertation at first was going to be an edition of Margaret Fuller's poems—-with the appropriate academic criticism, etc. surrounding it. Three months before my oral defense, an edition of her poetry was published!

So, I moved on to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Only those who have spent some time around me will probably be familiar with him—-he wrote no "great" works of literature, but he was Emily Dickinson's mentor. He mentored other female authors—-at least one of which some of you closer to my age might remember—-Helen Hunt Jackson. I know Ramona was often required reading in high schools. He also held special classes for female workers in the factories in Lowell, Massachusetts, teaching them about Shakespeare and other literature.

He lived into the 20th century and besides being a strong abolitionist and supporter of women's rights, was involved in the early labor movement.

But anyone who studies early 19th century literature gets to be on speaking terms with Thoreau and Emerson, Melville and Hawthorne. And through them, the Transcendental Movement.

Ok, my second disclaimer of the day. When Roger Wallins (Sunday Service Chairperson) and I named this talk, I fully intended to talk about the Transcendentalists who were "closet" Unitarians. However, preparing to talk today, I re-approached the material and came to realize that the Transcendentalists were NOT closet Unitarians—-most of them WERE Unitarians.

At the UI library a couple of weekends ago, I opened a reference book—a biographical dictionary of Transcendentalism. There were pages and pages of biographies of men who were Unitarian ministers—-at least to start. So disclaimer two. Most of those of whom I'll talk today were at least initially Unitarian, not closet Unitarians.

BUT!! And here's the key—-the Unitarianism of the late 18th and early 19th century is not the Unitarian-Universalism of the 21st century. I believe that the transcendentalist movement, however, had a great influence on what UUs are today.

So, I hope you will be interested in hearing about some of these great thinkers, these seekers of truth, and their ideas.

Most of theTranscendentalists lived in New England, in the area surrounding Boston, or visited there often. They were admired; they were hated. They were labeled heretics, mystic fools; unbelievers; infidels, atheists, radicals. Some writers of the period (including Melville and Hawthorne) satirized the movement.

Someone wrote about Transcendentalism: "Nobody knew what is was, but it was dreamy, mystical, crazy, and infideletrous to religion." However, Charles Dickens, after visiting America, wrote, "if I were a Bostonian, I think I would be a Transcendentalist."

In The Bostonians, Henry James described the movement as "the age of plain living and high thinking, of pure ideals and earnest effort, of moral passion and noble experiment."

Joel Meyerson, a contemporary critic, writes in the "Introduction" to his Transcendental Reader that "the longer one studies Transcendentalism, the more one realizes that the looser the definition, the more appropriate it is."

The Transcendentalist did not name themselves. James Freeman Clark, a Unitarian Minister and member of the Transcendental Club, a lightly organized discussion group in which many of the Transcendentalists belonged, called the group "the club of the like-minded" because "no two of us thought alike."

Doesn't that sound like us? There was no transcendentalist creed.

One of the differences among themselves was a chicken-egg type problem—-what comes first? What comes first: good laws or good individuals? Many, (Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller) believed that it was necessary to reform the individual to have good laws. Others, such as George Ripley, founder of Brooke Farm, and Bronson Alcott, founder of Fruitland, (two experiments in Utopian communities) believed that if you reformed society, individuals will see that better world and strive to become part of it.

The Transcendentalists were essentially syncretic; they borrowed whatever they needed from a variety of sources—-from German Romanticists like Goethe, from Plato, from the Quakers, from various Eastern religions, from Kant, Carlyle, Wordsworth, Coleridge. And they admired the new biblical criticism from Germany and elsewhere.

They took what they felt was appropriate to their developing beliefs and forged them together in a uniquely American way, emphasizing the importance of the common man and the responsibility of the individual.

Philosophically, they were united in their belief that truth could be perceived instinctually, not sensually (Kant vs. Locke). They were pantheistic in that they thought that the visible world was a manifestation of an ideal spiritual reality and that the goal of the individual was to realize this reality-- a key theme was the attempt of the individual to have a greater awareness of spiritual presence. This perception of the ideal was what they were most often criticized for. But as practitioners, they sought spiritual truths in the inspiration they received from the world around them.

Transcendentalism was a blend of Christianity and rationalism--a dual faith in rational judgment and the moral sense; religion was a PROCESS of character building and self-culture.

Transcendentalism was liberating, inspiring political reform and a belief in the innate divinity of the individual—-championing man over God. [Emerson: "We can become God if we follow our highest instincts."]

Transcendentalism was a reaction against science and materialism, against corrupt tradition, against a perceived lack of religion of the spirit

As I previously admitted, a great many of the people identified as Transcendentalists were involved with Unitarianism, and many of them as ministers. But they felt that Unitarianism had not lived up to its pledge to remove the limiting structure of Puritanism.

William Ellery Channing was the spiritual and intellectual leader of the Unitarian movement, which had split from the Puritan Congregationalist Church. As we know, the Unitarians rejected the trinity, embraced Arminianism, and rejected Calvinism. In its early years, Unitarianism was an honest attempt to meld the church with contemporary life. Unitarian Christianity was considered to have a liberal, rational, outlook on religious matters.

There WAS an enormous difference between the predestined universe of the Puritans, in which man was corrupted by original sin, lived in a hostile and unknowable world, and whose potential salvation had been determined by chance before birth.

The Unitarians of the late 18th and early 19th century believed in an ordered universe in which one could advance through good works while living in a benevolent environment. The quality of the life one lived would be taken into consideration on judgment day.

Still, once the Unitarians gained the upper hand, they seemed to retreat from their earlier promise that humankind possessed divine attributes. The result, according to the Transcendentalists, was a remote, orthodox, arid church—-"corpse-cold," according to Emerson.

[Channing did have an influence on transcendental thought. He spoke of the process of conversion and preached that the process of spiritual development was never complete.]

In retrospect, Henry Adams in 1907 described the intellectual and religious surroundings of the time:

"Nothing quieted doubt so completely as the mental calm of the Unitarian clergy. In uniform excellence of life and character, moral and intellectual, the score of Unitarian clergymen about Boston, who controlled society and Harvard College, were never excelled . . . For them, difficulties might be ignored; doubts were a waste of thought; nothing exacted solution. Boston had solved the universe; or had offered and realized the best solution yet tried. The problem was worked out."

So, these "new thinkers," theTranscendentalists, were frustrated when they realized that not-yet asked questions were going to be met with already-prepared answers.

There was a desire to overturn what they perceived as strongholds of spiritual usurpation, of "human" creeds, of servile acceptance--to give way to honest and devout inquiry into the scriptures. They favored tolerance over partiality; liberalism over orthodoxy, rationalisms over revelation; the strict humanity of Christ over the divinity of Christ.

Jesus, they believed, was a divine presence who provided an example through his quest for perfection and commitment to mankind. He was not the Calvinist vision of the divine person who gained atonement for man through a blood sacrifice.

Instead of accepting the authority of the scriptures as final, they recognized that humans in different times and different styles wrote the scriptures. The scriptures contained examples rather than detailed, accurate histories.

A major source of controversy between the conservative Unitarians and the new thinkers was miracles. Conservative Unitarians held that the miracles of the New Testament had actually occurred. The miracles were supernatural, fundamental to Christian religion—-to deny them would be to deny the existence of God.

Liberals believed that miracles separated humankind from God. To support their ideas, they used comparative religion--showing how many themes and examples (such as a world-cleaning flood) were shared by the sacred texts of many cultures. Christianity, they said, doesn't need miracles to prove itself. It stands on its own merits—-the permanent teachings of Jesus were--are self-evidently true—-they don't depend upon Jesus' authority.

In a sense, the Transcendentalists were merely extending to an obvious conclusion the line of liberal theology that had been started by the Unitarians. They generally replaced an anthropomorphic God with a nonanthropomorphic force or spirit that was present in all things and that could be learned about by studying not just God, but people and nature as well. They removed the preacher as the necessary mediator for religious knowledge.

They opposed what they saw as an empirical and materialistic world in preference to one that was intuitive, moral and idealistic. This desire to bring about a different manner of viewing the world led to the involvement of many Transcendentalists in the great social reforms of the day. They were involved in educational and prison reform, the elevation of women; they were against capital punishment, slavery, and war and were troubled by the mistreatment of Native Americans.

And so, just let me take a few more minutes to introduce you to some of these "heretics"! I chose these few not only because they interest me and because I knew the most about them, but because they illustrate the variety of ways that transcendental beliefs became manifest.

Margaret Fuller I came to admire greatly. One of the things for which she is known is the Conversations. She gathered women together in Elizabeth Peabody's bookstore, to discuss questions of life. She encouraged women to think for themselves, to be independent. As the first editor of the Dial, the first all American journal, which was one of the outlets for the literary efforts of the Transcendentalist (the Atlantic Monthly was another), she wrote a piece called "The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women," a manifesto calling for equality of the sexes. The essay was lengthened three years later to become her book Women in the Nineteenth Century: "There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman."

She took a summer tour of the Great Lakes region with friends, after which she wrote "Summer on the Lakes," in which she describes the degradation of the native Indians buy missionaries and settlers.

To Harriet Martineau, Fuller was too "intellectual." Martineau, an English writer and Quaker, was an active abolitionist who brought her "mission" to America.

(Andrews Norton, the Unitarian apologist, characterized Martineau as a "foolish woman" seeking notoriety and excitement).

But like some others of the time, Martineau was frustrated by the lack of ACTION by some Transcendentalists. She criticized Fuller's Conversations for spending too much time on Goethe and the planets and not abolition. After Fuller's death, Martineau "forgave" Fuller—-citing Fuller's involvement in the Italian Revolution as her movement forward into reality.

But many Transcendentalists were leery of organized activity. They trusted more in the individual than complex social organizations. Many were criticized for not speaking out publicly against the evils of the day.

Emerson was one of the earliest of the Transcendentalists to actively express sympathy for the anti-slavery movement. He housed Martineau when she was attacked by a Boston mob and was a supporter of John Brown. Emerson's opposition to slavery, however, was never actively aggressive, like that of some others such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Theodore Parker, who might be considered second generation transcendentalists.

Higginson was a believer in nonsectarianisn. He was a strong abolitionist; had served as colonel of a black regiment in the Civil War. He was a champion of women's rights. He also felt there was a conflict between contemplation and action. He questioned the value of a spiritual life divorced from social responsibility.

Along with other Transcendentalist, he spoke out against the Fugitive Slave Law. While running as a Free Soil candidate for Congress, he insisted that those who were required to aid the enforcement of the law should DISOBEY IT—-good citizenship by taking the legal consequences (like not paying a poll tax and going to jail, like Thoreau and Bronson Alcott had).

But Higginson, James Freeman Clarke, Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott and others, took the law into their own hands at least once. Higginson led an attack on the Boston Courthouse. [A real attack! They stormed the door with a huge tree trunk/battering ram] A deputy was killed as Higginson and his followers sought to free a fugitive slave named Anthony Burns. It was an unsuccessful attempt. Higginson and three others were indicted, but because of technicalities, never came to trial.

Higginson and Parker were also members of "The Six," the secret group that raised money for John Brown, another man who claimed to be acting in accordance with the higher law.

Parker, like Higginson, was a popular agitator for women's rights. He was also a political theorist. He defined democracy as "a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people"—-words that supposedly inspired Abraham Lincoln.

When Bronson Alcott worked as a peddler in North Carolina, he absorbed many Quaker doctrines, especially the doctrine of the "inner light." After returning home, he served as a progressive schoolmaster in Connecticut and drew the attention of Unitarian Minister Samuel May who was another educational reformer.

Having moved away from the Calvinism in which he was reared, he was attracted to May's Unitarian Faith and probably just as much to Abigail, his daughter. The two—-Bronson and Abigail—-are, of course, Louisa May Alcott's parents.

Bronson however, grew away from the Unitarian church, finding it "too doctrinal, too little of practical thought." He found the preaching "too much an affair of another life—teaching men how to die rather than how to live."

Alcott is known for his Temple School. The Transcendentalists did not like the educational system of the period. Teaching was characterized by rote memorization—-a successful student was one who could best memorize the material. Original, creative and synthetic teaching was less important than imitation and repetition. Besides that, most schools were drab, poorly lit, and unventilated.

Educational reformers like Alcott and Elizabeth Peabody, the sister-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne, replaced these classrooms with teaching areas that were well-lighted, had open windows, and contained comfortable seats. They surrounded the students with books and works of art. They used a Socratic question-and-answer technique and had the students keep journals. Education, as they saw it, was a drawing out—-not an imposition of knowledge. The teacher's role was to bring out the abilities of the students.

Alcott's unusual methods, his frank discussions for the times on sexuality and religion, and finally the publication of his Conversations with Children on the Gospel brought about the ire of the Bostonians and the failure of the school. Another of Alcott's educational schools also failed--when he refused to deny entrance to a black student, other parents withdrew their children.

Abigail Alcott was an abolitionist, women's rights activist and pioneer social worker in her own right.

Peabody went on to become one of the founders of the kindergarten in America.

Caroline Dahl, another female Transcendentalist, was the wife of a Unitarian minister, who sadly abandoned her and their children to spend 11 years in Calcutta. She was active abolitionist, a leader in the woman's movement, and active in social reform of prisons, public health and education. A friend of Theodore Parker, she was one of the women who attended Margaret Fuller's Conversations.

So much for the Transcendentalists. You might be wondering: what were the Universalists doing during this period?

Throughout the 19th century, despite many similarities and shared interests, the Universalists and Unitarians kept their distance from each other. It was said that the Universalists thought the Unitarians "were insufficiently Christian," and the Unitarians thought the Universalists "made light of sin." There was another old joke about the difference: the Universalists believe God is too good to damn Mankind, while the Unitarians believe Mankind is too good to be damned. There were also differences in class feeling. The Unitarians were disliked for being associated with high-mindedness, lots of old money, and the superior air of the Boston Brahmin. The Universalists were looked down on for being raggedy, middle class at best, and anti-establishment.

But, what about transcendentalism is relevant today?

Well, some of their ideas led to the elective system of education—-started at Harvard---the setting aside of natural areas, national parks, concerns of environmentalists about green space.

What I believe is most relevant is their dissatisfaction with the world the way it was. Just as Transcendentalists asked those in the 19th century to revaluate their lives, I believe that Unitarian Universalism asks us to continue to reevaluate our lives—-to ask the same questions: are we happy with American culture as it is today? What can be done to improve it?

That's why I chose those three particular UU principles for the back of today's Order of Service. I believe those principles grew in part from the influence of the Transcendentalists.

In closing, let me use words of Christopher Cranch, 'We must be honest seekers; who look, hope, and labor for something better than now is; who believe in progress; who trust in future improvement and are willing to spend and be spent in bringing forward that better time.'