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A Descendant of an Old Settler Family and Quite Close in Outlook To

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A Descendant of an Old Settler Family and Quite Close in Outlook To 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. .
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