Transcendentalism

(BAAL, pp. 610-611)

Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature (1836) was a kind of "manifesto" for the transcendentalists.

The transcendentalists were a loosely connected group of writers and intellectuals in and around Boston and Concord (Massachusetts).

Transcendentalism was an off-shoot of Unitarianism, which by the 1820s became the dominant religion of eastern Massachusetts.

The Unitarians rejected as "irrational" the doctrine of the Trinity -- the union in one God of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -- as well as such Puritan doctrines as predestination and the innate depravity of human beings.

Instead, the Unitarians emphasized the individual's freedom of choice and capacity for good -- the human potential to achieve "likeness to God."

That conception of human capacity strongly influenced the "transcendentalists," a term that was sometimes used in derision of their belief in the power of human intuition, or "inward beholding," to apprehend a "transcendent" reality that was essentially mental or spiritual in nature.

Although many of them were trained as Unitarian ministers, the transcendentalists revolted against what they viewed as the cold rationality and materialism of Unitarianism. Some of them remained Unitarian ministers, seeking to infuse the church with a new spirit and to transform it into a vehicle for social reform. Others abandoned the ministry, including Emerson.

Emerson continued to lecture, however, preaching the gospel of "self-culture," the full development of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual nature of each individual.

Emerson's belief that the reformation of society would ultimately be achieved only through the spiritual transformation of its individual members was shared by his young friend Henry David Thoreau.

Like Emerson, Thoreau spoke out strongly against injustices like slavery and the Mexican War, notably in his famous essay "Resistance to Civil Government," now better known as "Civil Disobedience."

But Thoreau rejected the associations and methods of organized reformers, suggesting that their focus on social ills blinded them to the rich resources of nature and the self.

In fact, Thoreau's masterpiece, Walden (1854), may at least in part be understood as a kind of "manual of self-reform" and a "challenge" to those who sought to change the world through different means.

Thoreau and Emerson were consequently often at odds with some of the other transcendentalists, who insisted that individual moral reform must go hand-in-hand with organized efforts to reform society.