"The Transcendentalists"

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Transcendentalism was a Unitarian movement that began in the 1830s and lasted until just prior to the Civil War in 1860 or so. But, before we explore Transcendentalism, we have to understand the rise of the Unitarian movement.

To do this we have to go back to the early part of the 18^th century. The 1740s in America was a time historians call “The Great Awakening.” Itinerant ministers around the country, and particularly in New England, began traveling around the colonies preaching hellfire and brimstone. In the past, I have mentioned the most famous sermon of the period, given by the Reverend Jonathan Edwards. It was entitled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” which pretty much describes what the sermon was about. During the nearly hour-long sermon people could be seen crying out and writhing in the aisles. The noise in the church was so loud that Edwards had to stop several times during the sermon.

Over the next several decades some New England congregations grew tired of this message. They looked around at their world and realized – “hey my life isn’t too bad considering how people in Europe were living during the last few centuries which is why my ancestors came here.”

And so – gradually the Unitarian and the Universalist movements were born. The Unitarian movement specifically grew out of Congregational churches (now called UCC - which gradually became more liberal than its Puritan origins). Early Unitarians were still Christian They accepted that Jesus was the son of God – but according to them, Jesus was not God – hence the world “Unitarian” as opposed to “Trinitarian.” Demographically, Unitarians in the late 18^th century and into the 19^th tended to be city dwellers with Boston as a primary central focus. They tended to be well educated, intellectual, and affluent. Harvard Divinity School became largely a Unitarian school.

The Universalists started from a very different background. Universalists were totally Trinitarian – believing in the father, son and holy spirit. Early Universalists tended to be rural farmers, not well educated and not affluent. Although the Universalists considered themselves entirely Christian – there was a major difference. Universalists did not believe in hell. They believed that God was a loving being who would never condemn his children to hell – there was, they said, “universal salvation” hence their name became “Universalists.”

So – in the early 19^th century, both the Unitarians and the Universalists came from very different theological and demographic backgrounds. Universalism was officially organized in 1793 and the American Unitarian Association was established in 1825.

Both denominations gradually became very involved in social action and social justice issues. This included the anti-slavery, abolitionist movement and later the women’s movement of the 19^th century. The first woman ordained in the United States was Olympia Brown in 1863. She was a Universalist. This was followed by Celia Burleigh in 1871 who was a Unitarian. Both Unitarians and Universalists were heavily involved in establishing charities in the later part of the 19^th century. Clara Barton, for example, was a Universalist who helped establish the Red Cross in 1881. This is but a sampling of the hundreds of Unitarians and Universalists who became very involved in many social action and social justice issues.

The Unitarians and the Universalists continued to evolve and develop their religious philosophy through the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Both denominations began exploring the world’s religions in the early part of the 19^th century. Along with this, personal freedom of thought, reason and rationalism became a hallmark of both.

In the 20^th century, both denominations promoted beliefs in the inherent dignity of all humans, a belief in individual search for truth and meaning, and an emphasis in social action and social justice. Saying the same things, both denominations merged in 1961 into Unitarian Universalism.

There were many intellectuals in Boston responsible for the creation of the Transcendental movement. Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the key people.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Emerson was ordained as a Unitarian minister in 1829 at the age of 25. He became a junior minister at Boston’s Second Church. It didn’t last. He resigned from the church only three years later. There were several reasons for this. The death of his young wife caused him to reconsider his theological beliefs which led him to aspire to a personal spiritual freedom. He felt the church was constrained by the rigidity of even liberal Christian beliefs. These beliefs, he said, kept him from establishing “a personal experience of God.”

Emerson went through a few years of soul searching and traveled through Europe. In 1836, he published a book length essay entitled “Nature.” In this work Emerson reflected on the beauty and power of nature. He emphasized the interconnectedness of all things.

In his words, “Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection.”

Emerson often referred to nature as “the Universal Being.” In other words, Emerson thought nature was God.

In 1836, in Boston, Emerson and several other Unitarian ministers formed what would be called “The Transcendental Club.” Soon dozens of other prominent men and women joined the Club. The Club initially did not call themselves The Transcendental Club. As with other religions such as the Quakers, this name was given to them by critics. It stuck.

The Transcendentalists emphasized personal individualism and freedom. They had a belief that organized religions and politics, for that matter, corrupt an individual’s thoughts and beliefs. They also thought there is an inherent goodness in people and in nature. The divine is in all people and in nature, they said. Everything is interconnected as one.

Transcendentalists objected to the major focus on reason and rationalism which was promoted by Enlightenment ideas and by Unitarians. They believed both reason and rationalism, while important, were limiting. A total focus on reason and rationalism, they argued, prevented the inherent abilities of human intuition to discover spiritual truths.

Although Transcendentalism incorporated several European philosophies, Immanuel Kant was particularly influential. I spoke about him briefly in my last sermon. Kant suggested that humans use their senses to describe reality, but this limits an understanding of true reality because human senses are highly limited. The true world was unknowable according to Kant, because the human mind filters reality according to how our brains are structured which are influenced by our physical attributes, our environment and life experiences.

Another strong influence on Transcendentalism was Hinduism. The British East India company received a royal charter in 1600 and soon established trading posts all around India. The company possessed a strong military to enforce its trading policies. In a major battle in 1757, the East India Company defeated Indian forces. From that point on the East India Company dominated political and economic affairs in India. Along with this began a fascination in Britian with the Indian culture. By the early 1800s, Hindu Sanskrit scriptures were being translated into English. These translated texts found their way to America and were highly influential with American intellectuals including the Transcendentalists. These texts included the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads.

On a side note, John Adams, the second president of the United States and Thomas Jefferson were among those who studied Hindu texts. In a series of back-and-forth letters to each other over several years, Adams and Jefferson exchanged ideas found in Hindu scripture and found them to hold many truths which they agreed with. Jefferson also promoted the Unitarian movement which Adams, likewise, agreed with. In fact, Jefferson said the only reason he wasn’t a Unitarian was there were no Unitarian churches in Virginia, and if one was established, he would join it. In an 1822 letter, Jefferson stated that he was certain the younger generation then alive would all die as Unitarians.

Emerson, along with the Transcendentalists also embraced many Hindu ideas. In particular, Emerson believed in one force that was embedded in all things. This is the Hindu notion of Brahman which Hindus describe as the one cosmic reality. Everything in the universe, including humans is Brahman. Humans have an individual soul which Hindus call Atman. Our soul is merely a piece of Brahman. Because of the illusions created in the human mind, it is difficult and mostly impossible for human beings to realize this. (Namaste).

Emerson call Brahman “the Over-Soul.” He also found truth in the Hindu notion of karma where every human action of inaction creates an eventual reward or punishment. Accordingly, Emerson believed in reincarnation, which was also called the transmigration of the soul. Each lifetime, according to Hindus and Emerson was an opportunity for the soul to evolve on its journey to realizing it is merely one with Brahman.

Nearly all of the prominent Transcendentalists fully embraced the Hindu ideas promoted by Emerson. These included major figures such as Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Margaret Fuller, and dozens more.

The Transcendental movement is often referred to as a literary movement, and it became so, but it was also a parallel – not separate movement to Unitarianism. The Club stopped regular meetings a few years after they first met, but they continued their thoughts and ideas through prolific writing.

To find a way to transmit their ideas to the public, the Transcendentalists established “The Dial” magazine in 1840. It remained intermittently in print as a quarterly magazine until 1929. Margaret Fuller was the first editor. More about her in a moment. The magazine included essays, reviews, poems and philosophical writings from many of the Transcendentalists.

To be sure, mainstream Christian journals were horrified with The Dial. In fact, Transcendentalists first tried to get articles published in the “North American Review” and the “Christian Examiner,” but these publications refused to print anything submitted by the Transcendentalists. It was partly for this reason that The Dial was established.

One review of Emerson’s poetry by one of the Christian journals stated: “His poems are not sacred chants; they are hymns to the devil. Not God but Satan do they praise, and they can only be relished by devil-worshippers.”

The writings in The Dial were diverse. Emerson published some 75 articles of varying types including such titles as “The Transcendentalist” and “The Young American” which called for American society to move past European culture and promote a democratic society based on self-reliance and peace. He also wrote a piece on “The Sayings of Confucius.”

In addition to being editor, Margaret Fuller wrote many articles as well. One powerful article was entitled “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Woman.” This article was later expanded into a book: “Woman in the Nineteenth Century.” In this article and book Margaret Fuller noted that every human being shares the same universal soul. We are all a piece of Brahman. Therefore, women are the same as men in their ability for spiritual enlightenment and in their capability to succeed. Margaret Fuller is recognized as the first great feminist writer.

In her writings Fuller saw no difference in the potential abilities of women and men. Fuller had been thoroughly educated in her youth by both her father and later schooling. Curiously, Fuller was the first woman allowed to use the library at Harvard. After her brief years as editor of The Dial, Margaret Fuller was hired by Horace Greely of The New York Post Tribune as a literary critic. She was later posted to Italy as the first female foreign correspondent. During her years overseas, she married and had a child. On a return voyage back to America in 1850 with her son and husband, the ship she was on grounded on a sandbar off Fire Island, New York – less than a hundred yards from shore. Fuller, her husband and child were lost. She was only forty years old.

Lost with her were many manuscripts she had written. Emerson was devastated. He and Fuller shared a powerful bond through their years with the other Transcendentalists. (For those of you interested, I encourage you to read “Finding Margaret Fuller” – My wife’s book club read it to great acclaim. If you want to know more, ask Virginia during our Crawl into Fall.)

It is impossible in a short sermon to acknowledge and list the accomplishments of all the Transcendentalists. There is no exact count but there were thirty in the Transcendental Club. Over half of these were Unitarian ministers. One in particular was Reverend Theodore Parker. Parker wrote an article in The Dial entitled: “The Permanent and the Transient in Christianity.” This was later delivered in a sermon attended by numerous Christian ministers. To their horror and disgust, Parker argued that “the eternal moral truths of Jesus are permanent while the dogmas and creeds about him will fade away.” He stated that if Jesus had never existed, Christianity would still be completely valid.

Prominent Transcendental writers also included Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Amos Bronson Alcott who was the father of Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Jones Very, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Orestes Brown, and others. Delving into some of the writings of these Transcendentalists can be a wild and fascinating experience. Some of what they said borders on the bizarre or perhaps cannot be easily understood. The Transcendentalists were deeply spiritual people who had access to education and the philosophies and religions of the world.

Although the Transcendental movement began as collective group of people dedicated to self-reliance and spiritual discovery, it transformed into a powerful force promoting social action and social justice issues. These included major efforts to abolish slavery, promote women’s rights, improve working conditions for America’s working class. They also spoke out loudly and criticized the wealth gap between rich and poor. Henry David Thoreau protested the Mexican-American War in the essay “Civil Disobediance” and he called for people to protest unjust laws.

The Transcendentalists influenced modern environmentalism by emphasizing that nature is a sacred, living entity rather than something to be exploited for personal gain. Henry David Thoreau saw Native Americans are good examples of how humans should live in harmony with nature as opposed to the rampant industrialization that was then occurring in America.

A number of Transcendentalists created utopian communities such as Brook Farm in Roxbury Massachusetts and Fruitlands near Harvard. These communities were short lived, but they did influence progressive education and labor equality.

The impact the Transcendental movement had on the Unitarians and eventually the Universalists was profound. It slowly moved the Unitarians away from rigid doctrines and creeds into becoming a religion focused on a personal search for religion truth. The Unitarians in Emerson’s words, “found that divine truth comes from direct and personal experience and inner conscience rather than through a biblical or creedal authority.”

Eventually Unitarians and Universalists expanded their views on acceptable beliefs. World religions, their beliefs and scriptures became sources of inspiration and reflection and a means for people to develop their own spiritual truths.

This is where we are today. UUs affirm that we draw our living tradition from the transcending mystery shared by all culture, words and deeds of prophetic men and women, wisdom from the world’s religions, Jewish and Christian teachings, humanist teachings and science and the spirituality of earth centered religions.

In other words, we draw from just about all the philosophies and religions humanity has developed and it is incumbent upon all individuals to develop their own beliefs and spirituality. This makes us the most open and inclusive religion in the world.

But I want to emphasize one important responsibility. Where other religions give people answers to life’s mysteries with established beliefs, creeds and dogmas, UUs must develop their own answers through study, reflection, meditation and prayer.

As Emerson said, Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight that is our own and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of the religion of others?

Reverend Christopher McMahon

September 20, 2026