The Transcendental Club – Sept. 1, 2013 by David Green

When I first started doing some guest speaking here about four years ago, I have to admit I was a little scared. This

Fellowship had a reputation for being highly intellectual, and I’ve never really thought of myself that way. I’m sure a lot of you’d probably agree that’s still an accurate assessment.

The word on the street was, the UUs were an elite group of very smart freethinkers who liked to debate complex philosophical ideas. The kind of folks who only watched foreign films with subtitles. And who expected you to know which regions of France produce the best Merlot, and the difference between Picasso’s “Blue Period” and his Cubism.

That you threw around words like existential, and postmodern, and knew full well that Schubert’s unfinished symphony is composed in B-minor and not A-flat.

In other words, I thought this was some kind of exclusive club for brainiacs. What I discovered instead was this: the smart part was right, but no one ever turned out to be a mister or miss smarty-pants; one of those obnoxiously smart people who bore other people to death by reminding them of how smart they are. I discovered this

Fellowship was smart, but my fears were ungrounded. Because along with the brains I also found an equal measure of kindness and grace, generosity and hard work, tolerance and a lot of love.

So, I decided this would be a really good place to hang around. Not an elite club at all, but a very solid, thoughtful and welcoming bunch of folks, who believed in the value and goodness and interconnectedness of everyone and everything.

We may not realize it, but that makes us the heirs of a unique movement in American history. And, one whose leaders actually did form a club. It was a short-lived club, but the people who made it up continue to have a huge influence on the way we think and feel. The Transcendental Club.

To get back to the beginning, we need to define what “transcendental” means. The root is transcend, a ten-dollar word that simply means to exceed or outdo or rise above or go beyond.

So, what exactly does a Transcendentalist want to go beyond? Two of our favorite topics, the things our mothers told us never to discuss in polite company: religion and politics.

Back in the 1820s and 30s, Transcendentalism got its start among members and ministers in Unitarian

Congregationalist churches in New England. It was a time in history when a lot of people were being exposed to a variety of new religious and philosophical concepts from places like India, for example.

Their minds were being opened to go beyond the ideas that were assumed to be right, and that were being taught as just the way things are. Religious doctrines like predestination. The puffed-up intellectualism and rationalism that ruled the day at schools like Harvard. The faculty at Harvard apparently didn’t have a lot of tolerance for questioning their authority of how the world works. I’m sure things are different, now.

But back then, apparently, they had a rather cold and pessimistic, fatalistic, dog-eat-dog view of human nature.

Humanity was basically flawed and corrupt. At Harvard Divinity School – the country’s leading training-ground for ministers – the message was: humans are naturally bad, and only God can save us. And even then, only a select few who God picks out in advance will be saved. In the meantime, go out and work hard and have yourself a nice life of being resigned to your fate, whatever that might be.

The people who would become known as Transcendentalists thought that all sounded a bit depressing. It seemed to diminish humans to puppets with no real choice in their destiny or happiness. It denied the freedom of the individual to choose what path they took. And, it felt restrictive to claim there was only one true way to view human nature or what the nature of God might be.

So, Transcendentalists fought back, in places like Harvard and in their local churches. They insisted that people were inherently valuable and good, not naturally evil. They claimed that there was no real way to prove any one religious faith or doctrine was superior to another.

They also believed people are at their best when they’re truly self-reliant and independent: free from overbearing doctrines that represented conventional wisdom. And they argued that institutions – like organized religion and political parties – corrupted the purity of the individual.

There were quite a few of these prominent free thinkers, smart folks who wanted to go beyond traditional ways of thinking, and in his or her own right, each one is worth discussing.

But I thought we’d focus today on the one Transcendentalist whose name most rings a bell, and whose life and work sums up the whole movement: Ralph Waldo Emerson.

He was born in 1803 in Boston, the son of a Unitarian minister. We have to understand that when we use the word,

“Unitarian,” it had a different meaning in the early 1800s than today. Unitarians at the time – for the most part – fell in line with the more rigid beliefs being taught at places like Harvard Divinity School. Although, at the same time, transcendentalism arose from within Unitarian congregations.

Emerson started at Harvard when he was 14 years old, graduated at 18, and worked as a schoolmaster for a few years before going back to Harvard Divinity School to be trained as a Unitarian Minister. In 1829 he was ordained and hired by the Second Congregational Church in Boston.

While serving that congregation, his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker Emerson, died of tuberculosis. That was 1831, and he began to doubt his own beliefs.

He disagreed with the church’s traditional doctrines and felt that he no longer had the freedom to express his personal ideas.

In 1832, he wrote in his private journal, “I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers.” He resigned later that year in a dispute about the church’s restrictions on who could receive communion. He said, “This mode of commemorating Christ is not suitable to me. That is reason enough why I should abandon it.”

By leaving, he was free instead to pursue the life of a writer, lecturer and teacher who wasn’t confined by the institutional straightjacket of the church.

He was quite successful. For a lot of people fed up with traditional religion and ways of thinking about human nature,

Emerson stuck a strong chord that had been just waiting to be plucked.

In 1836, he published an essay called Nature, and it was a sensation.

As the title suggests, Nature is about our relationship to the natural world, both in a literal and a spiritual sense.

According to Emerson, we need to pull ourselves away from the things that distract us – flawed institutions like the church and politics – and discover the sense of wholeness nature has to offer. Society can destroy our spirits, but nature can restore it. Nature and humans have a reciprocal and spiritual relationship. He wrote that when we understand this spirit of nature, we discover what he called the Universal Being. And that Universal Being encompasses everything and everyone.

You could call the Universal Being “God” if you want, but it was a completely new way of understanding God. Not as some kind of distant, rigid, judgmental old man with a long white beard on a throne up in the heavens, but as a spirit that unites us. And, a spirit that can’t be confined to our traditional ways of thinking about religion. A spirit that goes beyond, that transcends.

Not only that, this universal spirit of nature lives and breathes through you and me. So, everything and everyone must be inherently spiritual and moral and good.

In September of 1836, just before Nature was published, Emerson organized a meeting of like-minded people.

Frederic Henry Hedge was a Divinity school classmate of Emerson’s, a fellow Transcendentalist, and the minister of a

Unitarian church in Bangor, Maine. To give you an idea of how people like Hedge and Emerson eventually influenced things, by 1859, Hedge had become president of the American Unitarian Association.

Another friend of Emerson’s was George Ripley. Ripley was also a Unitarian minister, but resigned from his church to start an experimental commune based on Transcendentalist ideas. He called it Brook Farm.

Along with a few others, this was the beginning of the Transcendental Club, and it became the intellectual core of the whole movement. By the next year, women were invited to join this club, including Margaret Fuller.

Fuller was way ahead of her time, breaking down lots of barriers. By the time she was in her mid-30s, she had the reputation for being the best-read person, male or female, in all of New England. She was the first woman allowed to use the library at Harvard, and, working for the New York Tribune, the first female American newspaper correspondent ever sent to Europe.

She was an advocate for women’s education and the right to employment. And, she encouraged prison reform and the emancipation of slaves, among other things. The club grew to include about 15 regulars at the most, and was described as a changing body of liberal thinkers who met occasionally, and who agreed in nothing but their liberality. It was also known by the nickname “the brotherhood of the Like-Minded.”

Mostly, it provided common ground. It was a meeting-place for young thinkers and it gave them an outlet to express their idealistic frustration with the state of American culture. As individuals and as a group they wrote and submitted articles to well-known magazines, like the Christian Examiner, but their work was usually refused. So, in 1839 they decided to publish their own journal, The Dial, with Margaret Fuller as it first editor.

Some of the contributors included the poets Ellery Channing and Henry David Thoreau. The Dial sought to promote

Transcendentalist ideas, while critiquing traditional religion and other institutions that were seen as taking advantage of individuals.

For instance, the financial crisis known as the Panic of 1837 touched off a major recession that lasted until the mid-

1840s. Profits, prices and wages went down, banks collapsed, businesses failed, while unemployment went up as high as 25% in some places. There were many causes, including speculative lending. But it gave rise to great pessimism about the nature of capitalism and the greed of banks and stock traders.

Transcendentalism was not inherently an anti-capitalist movement. There was nothing wrong with making a fair profit, as long as no one is used and abused in the process.

When The Dial stopped publication in 1844, Horace Greely, who was the editor of the New York Tribune, reported it as the end of the “most original and thoughtful periodical ever published in this country.”

The Transcendental Club – as it was – pretty much ceased to function as a coherent group about that same time, with its members going their separate ways, following their own paths.

Ralph Waldo Emerson continued to be a huge influence on American life, publishing books and lecturing on average

80 times a year, both in the US and abroad. He never abandoned his position as a champion for freedom of conscience. His idealism that humanity could achieve almost anything never waivered.

His affirmation of the relationship between the individual and the surrounding world still resonates: the idea of a

Universal spirit weaving all of us and all of nature together, and making all things holy.

It only takes a quick review of the seven Unitarian Universalist principles – and they’re printed right in our bulletin – to see that you and I are direct descendants of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendental Club.

And it only takes a quick review of the news to know that so many of the issues that gave rise to Transcendentalism

175 years ago are still alive today. Religious doctrines that seek to exclude and divide. Public policies and business practices that do terrible harm, socially, economically, and environmentally. A world-view that assumes certain people are naturally bad, that human nature itself is evil, that the planet is more fractured than ever before along cultural and religious lines and that’s just the way things are. But you and I stand on the front lines against all of that. We believe in the unifying spirit of all people and all of nature. We believe that people are inherently good and worthy. We are optimistic. We are welcoming, accepting, and loving.

We believe in going beyond. Transcending.

If that makes us modern Transcendentalists, then I’m okay with that. And I’d like to invite everyone to join the club.