Back to the Future

Neo-Transcendenalis

m and the Prospects forLiberal Religion

Dr. Brent A. Smith

A paper presented to the Prairie GroupTopic: Neo-Transcendentalism

Copyright November 2003

I. Introduction

It seemed innocuous enough for those of us who routinely enter pulpits and engage in conversations with religious communities that intentionally employ it. In early 2003 Unitarian Universalist Association President Rev. William Sinkford invited Unitarian Universalists “to find a language of reverence, a language that can acknowledge the presence of the holy in our lives.”1 In my twenty years in ministry I have heard many such calls, but for some reason this invitation elicited an excited response from the faithful. Some have rallied behind it as an echo of their own call to the religious life, while others feared either the appearance of an implicit creed or, worse still, the rewriting of the Purposes and Principles. The degree of the response caught my eye. That a man called to the religious life as head of a religious institution would allude to a personal religious experience, so as to issue a call back to the importance of religious language in acknowledging the presence of a sacredness in existence, seemed routine to me. But, that a religious leader who headed a religious institution would see a need to call religious

1 “The Language of Faith,” Rev. William G. Sinkford, preached at First Jefferson Unitarian Universalist Church, January 12, 2003.

2

leaders and member communities to considering religious language is itself slightly unsettling.

Rev. Sinkford was voicing what many of us have suspected: That life in our churches has something to do with religion, and that we have lost the capacity to talk about it amongst ourselves and with a culture for whom we represent a distinctive tradition of interpretation and discourse. We can talk about what goes on or should go on amongst us politically, demographically, psychologically, even generationally. But, have we arrived at a place where we can no longer wield religious or theological language in community and, hence, to a culture? In the past, the call for finding or creating a “new religious language” seemed to originate in the recognition that the world of experience outside the sanctuary had far surpassed the capacity of all religion to engage it meaningfully. I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. Instead, I think it is our inability to use the capacities of the sanctuary, the tools of religion, to interpret profoundly the world of experience. We do not need “to find a language of reverence,” but to confess we don’t know how to wield in community the language our tradition has bequeathed to us. How can we communicate the deepest experiences we have with one another and the world in ways that help elicit meaning from those events, without a common language? Is Sinkford’s call an admission of the limits of “human-centered biases of perception”2 echoed in the caution of E. O. Wilson: “No intellectual vice is more crippling than defiantly self-indulgent anthropocentrism.”3 I wonder.

In other words, have we become a movement that can only hear the call of a religious leader to return to the religious task, as a declaration of inclusion and exclusion in a body politic? Have we lost the capacity to exercise the religious imagination in community together and within a tradition? Or, even more incomprehensible and dangerous, does Sinkford’s analysis that we need this particular call at this time mean we’ve lost a perspective on God, human nature, and the world that formed the religious tradition we inherited and for which we are responsible to the future?

The thesis of this paper is simple: We represent a religious movement in American history that is at a crossroads in terms of its religious identity in part because of the extent of its embrace of the religion derived from Transcendentalism. Over a 175 year time span the influence of American Transcendentalism, in conjunction with other factors in our development, has brought us to this juncture where we do not possess the capacity as a community and tradition to reflect upon human religious experience together because we lack the one cultural tool needed to converse about human experience: language. Language is a public tool because it ties people to one another, and to employ it in conversation involves implicit agreements amongst the conversationalists. If religious experience originates in the inner life of the individual as the liberal theological tradition has maintained since Friedrich Schleiermacher, “any expression of religion necessarily involves communication… the indispensable basis of community.”4 “The influence of

2 The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of the American Culture, Lawrence Buell, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1995, p 428.3 Quoted in IBID, p 5.4 “Schleiermacher and the Transcendentalists” by Robert D. Richardson, Jr., in Transient and Permanent

3

Christ… consists solely in the human communication of the Word… If there is religion at all it must be social, for that is the nature of man, and it is quite peculiarly the nature of religion.”5 Is it that we don’t have a language of reverence largely because we don’t have ties that bind congregations or individuals to one another in religious community? I wonder again.

Our inabilities to engage in the public event of religious conversation are a microcosm of our society’s inabilities to do the same. Both are to some extent the product of Transcendentalism and American Romanticism as they have shaped both our religious movement and the larger culture. The first part of this paper will circumscribe what is meant by Transcendentalism, with particular attention to describing it in its historical context as a break from traditional, revealed Christianity, rooted in revelation as protected and promoted by certain institutional means like creed, doctrine, and theologies derived from them, and towards a religion of immediate inspiration to the individual, what Theodore Parker called “Absolute Religion.” The second part of this paper will look at the influence of Transcendentalism on literature in the 20th century by taking three literary texts and examining the ways each is expressive of and can be contrasted to Transcendentalism’s literary and religious perspective, giving us clues to the modern form of a religion of inspiration. And the third part of the paper will return to the central thesis to analyze what this might mean for Unitarian Universalism as a religious movement and institution in the 21st century.

II. Circumscribing an Unintelligible, Original, and Inspirational Topic

I was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be certainty Transcendental. -Charles Dickens

In chapter two of his book, Hard Times, aptly titled, “Murdering the Innocents,” Charles Dickens introduced his imaginative portrait of “the sadistic relationship of machine to man”6 through the relationship between Professor Gradgrind and his students in the School of Hard Knocks:

Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities. A man of fact and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over… With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to…

[Thomas Gradgrind stands before his students]

The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts, edited by Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, 1999, p 128.5 On Religion, Frederich Schleiermacher, as quoted in Richardson, IBID.6 Ruskin’s Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, Paul L. Sawyer, Cornell University, 1985, web address http://scholars.nus.edu.sg/landow/victorian/authors/ruskin/sawyer/contents.html.

4

… who were to be filled so full of facts.

Indeed… he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away.

'Girl number twenty,' said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger, 'Give me your definition of a horse.' [No response]

'Bitzer,' said Thomas Gradgrind. 'Your definition of a horse.'

'Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.' Thus (and much more) Bitzer.

'Now girl number twenty,' said Mr. Gradgrind. 'You know what a horse is.'7

How accurate, unimaginative, and puny Bitzer’s definition appears when applied to the natural miracle of those magnificently complex creatures, especially as experienced firsthand in the exhilaration of a trip to the horse race track!

Yet, how timely was the fictional scene and Dickens’ critique. By the time the book had been published in 1854, and dedicated to Thomas Carlyle, England was choking from the “Satanic Mills” of the Industrial Revolution, leaving the human imagination gasping for creative air. Authors like Dickens used art to rage against the machine:

… the "mechanical apparatus" of Gradgrind's jaw and the "elephant" of mills are alike emblems of mechanical oppression, while the empty jars in the classroom connect with the abandoned coal pits and other instances of hollowness into a general image of Nature undermined -- the green fields made hungry as the grave. The Idol Reason, finally, blends into the Moloch machine of Coketown to form a single, horrific image devouring both child and workman alike. But weakness, not power, is the prevalent theme of this book. The factory is a "melancholy, monotonous elephant," and its opponent, a very frail thing, is the robber Fancy, which becomes for Dickens the guardian of morality and, finally, a synecdoche of the whole life of the Spirit.8

It was the life of the Spirit for which many like Dickens searched. It was not a search or a situation confined to Europe, but one that stretched over “the pond” to engage a

7 Hard Times, Charles Dickens, quoted at http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/hardtime.htm 8 Sawyer, IBID.

5

young and burgeoning United States. Although “discovered” and “imagined” by Europeans to be a 17th century Biblical Eden or a wilderness fit for the strenuousness of spiritual exercise, by the middle 19th century there were evidences that these religious metaphors had been uprooted. The wilderness was civilized and the garden overgrown. For our spiritual ancestors the environs of Boston had changed dramatically. Settled in the 17th century, two centuries later “Unitarian” had become a self-proclaimed title, and by the year of the publication of Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden and Dickens’ Hard Times Beantown was the country’s third largest city with a population of 137,000.

In his groundbreaking book The Machine in the Garden historian Leo Marx suggested how the juxtaposition of machine and Nature, the ostensibly opposing forces of technology and the pastoral ambiguously played itself out in a “New World.” Nature and the cosmos possessed an exquisite regularity that exhibited the positive connotations of “machine-like,” only to be later superseded by the poetic ideal that a “retreat” to Nature was necessary to discover something divinely elemental in a world choked by machinery. The Transcendentalists tossed in an additional ingredient in this cultural stone soup. The “organizing design” of Thoreau’s Walden was “the hero’s withdrawal from society in the direction of nature” as a “method of redemption.”9 But, unlike the poet’s ideal of the pastoral prevalent in his time period, Thoreau himself actually went on his sojourn of the spirit. He traveled the empiricist’s path and pioneered the “break down in common-sense distinctions between art and life.”10

Although the tension between the Industrial Revolution and the pastoral ideal is one characteristic of the historical context within which Transcendentalism arose, and I think the most important, there were others as well:

Puritan and Revolutionary idealism, the birth of an American culture, the tradition of religious revivalism, the contemporary surge of antinomian reform movements, the rise of European Romantic literature and philosophy, the discovery of Asian literature, the spread of American democracy, the repression of the spiritual in rationalistic liberal Protestantism, the ‘modern’ longing for an organic culture…11

It could be asserted that the loss of a sense of immediate connectedness to the origins of human being in Nature, more than all other factors, contributed to the summons the Transcendentalists heard to create “an original relation with the universe.”12 Dickens was sympathetic to the aim of Transcendentalism as it arose in the American context of confronting industrialization. “If I were a Bostonian, I think I would be a Transcendentalist,” he wrote in his American Notes. But he also hinted at the reigning

9 The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, Leo Marx, Oxford University Press, New York, 1964, p. 243.10 IBID, p. 244.11 “’A Little Beyond’ The Problem of the Transcendentalist Movement in American History,” Charles Capper, in Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright, IBID, 1999, p. 412 “Introduction,” from Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson, http://www.rwe.org/works

6

confusion as to what that declaration actually meant: “I was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be certainty Transcendental.”13

Whatever were the social, cultural, and historical conditions within which Transcendentalism arose, this was for certain. Transcendentalists wanted the immediacy of inspiration. They yearned to be enfolded by the refulgent spirit and touched by genius. They wanted new bread where their churches, preachers, and culture gave them degenerating, hardened, moldy, soot encrusted, European stone. And they wanted their Unitarianism to fulfill spiritually the promise of a piety liberated from the restrictions of a Calvinist view of human nature, free to pursue and cultivate “self-culture.”14

Transcendentalism was a “religious demonstration”15 arising out of the context of a Unitarianism still wet behind the ears from surfacing out of the Calvinist deep of inherent depravity, but it was also a rebellion against religion too narrowly understood and a spiritually too narrowly sought. “In its deepest reaches Transcendentalism was a quest for authentic religious experience. It rejected forms, creeds, rites, and verbal explanations and sought to penetrate to the heart of things by a direct, immediate encounter with reality.”16

It steered Unitarianism out of a Christianity content with past revelation and towards the free faith frontier of an individual’s immediate and creative inspiration. It fashioned out of the Puritan piety arising within a covenanted community, a religion of the creative genius of selfhood aimed at its unfettered unfolding within a world of spirit. It was not a repudiation of Unitarianism.17 Welcomed by many in the pews, Transcendentalism was a response “on the part of rational religious liberalism to the emotional enthusiasm of the Evangelical movement.”18 The primary impetus came from within the Transcendentalists’ own faith tradition, as they engaged Nature, the religious wisdom from a diversity of perspectives, and aimed their spiritual life towards a broader receptivity to things of the Spirit. Transcendentalists sought “Absolute Religion.”

Transcendentalism was both a response to given historical and cultural circumstances and the form a maturing Unitarianism took as it emerged out of New England Calvinism 13 American Notes, Charles Dickens, as quoted in the materials sent to Prairie Group participants.14 see “Self-Culture,” The Works of William E. Channing, D.D., AUA, Boston, 1891, pp 12-36.15 The Transcendentalists: An Anthology, Perry Miller, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1950, p. 8.16 American Transcendentalism, Paul Boller, Jr., G.P. Putnam’s Sons, NY, 1974, p. 1.17 Reaction to the “radical” message of Emerson’s Divinity School Address among many in the laity was that the ideas were self-evident. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote: “The Reverend Dean Palfrey said that ‘what in it was not folly was impiety!’ Oh! After all, it was only a stout humanitarian discourse; in which Christ and Goethe were mentioned as great Philosophers.” Literary scholar Lawrence Buell called Longfellow “a more or less conventional Unitarian.” (Literary Transcendentalism, p32.) Historian David Robinson notes that among scholars there exists “a consensus that the Transcendentalists can be understood as extenders of Unitarian premises rather than rebels against them.” (“A Religious Demonstration,” David Robinson, in Capper and Wright, IBID.) It is interesting to observe that this scholarly consensus has yet to purge us of our romantic, revolutionary, and inaccurate view of American Romanticism as a rebellion against orthodoxy and convention, especially our rebellion against ourselves! 18 “My Nonsense is Only Their Own Thought in Motley:” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Ware, Jr., and the ‘Nature” of “Christian Character,” Timothy Ward Jensen, masters thesis submitted to Oregon State University, 1995, from the Abstract.

7

into a distinctive faith perspective. But even in its own time it proved elusive to categorize. Bitzer, your definition of Transcendentalism! Okay, then, of Neo-Transcendentalism! Bitzer’s response would have driven the precise Professor Gradgrind insane, much to the delight of Dickens, Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller! So, how would one describe or define a return to, or a “neo” form of something that eluded definition in its own day? The world’s foremost Transcendentalist literary scholar, Harvard’s Lawrence Buell, shared his bafflement at our choice of topic, writing: “I confess that the term ‘Neo-Transcendentalism’ is new to me.”19 Alas, such are the hazards of living inside a faith tradition shaped so deeply by Transcendentalist influences and more than its share of a rampant romantic idealism “persuaded of the importance of private judgment.”20 Scholarly opinion be damned! Let’s study something someone somewhere identified as Neo-Transcendentalism!

The principal trait of the Transcendentalists was that they were theological, philosophical, and metaphysical conversationalists. They belonged to the same covenant group.21 They maintained a continuous, intentional dialogue that was shared in person or through the written and spoken word. “Conversation had a special mystique for the Transcendentalists because of its spontaneous nature.”22 They placed themselves voluntarily under the discipline of creative persuasion and discourse. In order to do so during their time required the proximity of place and, hence, a definite regional bias shades their conversations.23 But the willingness to engage in dialogue and to remain within the commitment of this form of community was evidence of an implicit covenant that is easily overlooked and almost always underestimated! Reflecting on Transcendentalism with a nostalgic and opaque eye that ignored the public, communal quality of conversation Emerson would write in later life: “The key to the period appeared to be that the mind had become aware of itself… It [was] the age of severance, of dissociation, of freedom, of analysis, of detachment.”24 Religious conversation simply could not have been possible without at least an implicit covenant amongst the participants, even among romantic idealists blind to its importance!

The implicit covenant that gave a definite shape to Transcendentalism was twofold. First, they all saw, knew, and felt the shortcomings of a traditional Christianity understood as revealed. The world of experience outside the sanctuary had increasingly surpassed the capacity of the religion of their day to engage it with originality and vigor. The religion of their day held the person of Jesus in a too-holy reverence and maintained that divine inspiration was a possession of the past. This gave them common cause. And, secondly, they supplanted this revealed religion of tradition with a religious 19 Lawrence Buell email correspondence to Brent Smith, dated August 13, 2003.20 Capper and Wright, IBID, p. ix.21 NOTE: The prototype and theological justification for the group structure of the ROOTS and BRANCHES program I developed at All Souls in Tulsa and continue at All Souls in Grand Rapids, was the Transcendental Club and Margaret Fuller’s conversations with women. Buell wrote in Literary Transcendentalism, p. 77: “Transcendentalism can almost be said to have begun and ended as a discussion group.”22 Literary Transcendentalism, Lawrence Buell, Cornell University Press, Ithaca & London, 1973, p. 79.23 See the correspondence between New Englanders James Freeman Clarke and Margaret Fuller, attesting to his struggles during his spiritual excursion in the frontier pulpit of the Louisville church.24 quoting Emerson from his “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,” in Capper, IBID, p. 5.

8

demonstration of immediate inspiration. A “new view” of religion was the aim that bound them to one another in a common struggle, destiny, and fellowship.

They shared a “Belief in the immanence of the divine. Religious faith for the Transcendentalists was personal and immediate…”25 Thus, they held to the authority of individual spiritual intuition and the capacity of an individual to draw first-hand and immediate inspiration from a “Higher Reason,” “Spirit,” or “Soul” or “Oversoul,” although they differed as to “the claims they made for it. For some Transcendentalists it was simply an inner light or conscience; for others is was the voice of God; for still others it was literally God himself immanent in man.”26 The quintessential form of the religious life was as a travelogue of spiritual discovery, investing “the prevailing taste of [their] age…[for travel with the] overtones of a spiritual quest as the speaker proceeds... True travel is spiritual travel, an exploration of one’s own higher latitudes.”27 They gave a new view to the old Puritan ideal of the spiritual life as a walk with others.

They held to a “correspondence” between Nature and Spirit such that to engage the natural world was to experience the organic universe and the divine forces that drive existence. “Nature always wears the colors of the Spirit.”28 They saw evolution at work in Nature as the spiritual expression of progress, and translated that into the social realm. Social customs constrained the “spiritual transmutation” involved as the individual unfolds into selfhood. “They believed that all too often common customs and practices constrained the individual… [M]ost pursued reforms intended to liberate individual human potential.”29

It was their “new views,” a religious demonstration of immediate inspiration that was the bond that unleashed the Transcendentalists’ common devotion.

III. The Tonic of Wildness

We need the tonic of wildness. -Henry David Thoreau

The Transcendentalists’ religion of immediate inspiration needed a demonstrative form that would complement a personal, direct, and original relation with the Spirit. The paradigm for this in the Western Christian tradition is the Pentecost, and the form is glossalalia. While the Transcendentalists were raised within a tradition where speaking and words, more than rites or rituals, were the central form of religious expression, they were the children of “Boston Brahmins” whose demonstrations were from pulpit and through text; the spoken word of the sermon, and the written word from religious, philosophical, and literary sources. But, new views of an “Absolute Religion” needed newly conceived forms of expression and demonstration. Transcendentalism transformed

25 Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts, edited by Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright, from the Preface by Wright, x, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, 1999.26 Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance, Lawrence Buell, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1973, p. 5.27 IBID, p. 188 and 197.28 Emerson, IBID, chapter 1.29 Capper and Wright, IBID.

9

the aim of the sermon from imposing doctrine to prompting inspiration; an artful discourse delivered by a “poet-priest,” a romantic intention that largely continues to this day.30 And poem, essay, journal writing, and travelogue became like written scripture, romantic and idealistic in style and content, and the demonstrative forms most conducive to the immediate and personal connection of the soul to the Oversoul.

As heirs of the Puritan tradition the Transcendentalists were familiar with the importance of the experience of conversion to one’s religious life. The emotionally charged and original experience of an individual’s direct apprehension of God was part of their tradition’s understanding of piety. So was the old Puritan idea of the walk as a central metaphor for describing the spiritual life. The metaphor of the walk was combined with the experience of the organic unity of the natural world in the Transcendentalist idea of the spiritual excursion. The autobiographical walk or sojourn, although fully executed only by Henry David Thoreau at Walden, became a paradigmatic demonstration befitting immediate inspiration, through “tak[ing] on overtones of a spiritual quest as the speaker proceeds.”31 Thoreau lived at Walden, wrote down observations, edited the text, and produced a literary classic that shaped American literature and spiritual life in a highly complex way. Thoreau’s “covenant group,” whose epistemological-theological conversations centered upon individual inspiration and genius, and whose literary-historical effect would be as the seminal group of writers shaping a nation’s literary history, yielded, “a more elastic notion of the scope of the literary canon than prevails in British literary studies… [Thus in American literature] blurred genres [have] been the principal rhetorical scene.”32 Is Thoreau’s Walden “autobiographical discourse or protagonist-centered narrative… a descriptive or ethnographic engagement with the physical environment,”33 or both/and? The demonstration of a religion of immediate inspiration blurred the distinctions between the subject’s imaginative processes and Nature’s facticity!

Walden gave fuller breadth to the Transcendentalists’ “new views” of religion. It exuded a sense of discovery and an optimism born of wonder. “Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought”34 It helped establish that “’innocence’ was a core ingredient of the American cultural self-definition,”35 and was a witness to the organic unity of individual, God, and Nature. Thoreau reinvented the Homeric hero as one whose self-reliant living in the natural world bears the mark of the “born protestant”36 who resists social conformity and defies religious convention to arrive at his natural Ithaca. His “gift for referring ‘every

30 “During the nineteenth century the idea of the sermon as a means of expounding and enforcing doctrine tended to give way to the idea of the sermon as an inspirational oration. Much more was made of imagination and creativity in preaching than had been the case before,” from Buell, IBID, p. 105. For a discussion and list of other sources on the change in American sermons see Buell. Due to influences initiated by the Transcendentalists, from the l8th century to today the role of the preacher in sermonic discourse has changed from being primarily doctrinal-priest and theology-mediator, to poet-priest.31 Buell, IBID, p. 188.32 “Transcendentalist Literary Legacies,” Lawrence Buell, Capper and Wright, IBID, p. 611.33 IBID, p. 612-613.34 Walden, Henry David Thoreau, http://eserver.org/thoreau/walden02.html ; Chapter 18, section 2.35 IBID.36 Ralph Waldo Emerson as quoted in Literary Transcendentalism, Buell, p. 298.

10

minute fact to cosmical laws’”37 transformed experience into theological declaration: “There is a solid bottom everywhere… The universe is wider than our views of it.”38

Because Walden (along with Emerson’s Nature and Margaret Fuller’s conversations) is Transcendentalism’s quintessential demonstrative form and a formative work in the American literary canon, there are similar literary works in the 20 th century from which we can estimate how a religion of immediate inspiration has fared. We will look at three such texts: Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (1968), and Sabriye Tenberken’s My Path Leads to Tibet (2000).

It is as fashionable to quote Annie Dillard from Unitarian Universalist pulpits as it is to consider every encounter with Nature to be Transcendentalist in spirit. Walden’s religious ideas, as well as its historical context, are 19th century romantic, idealistic Transcendentalism. Dillard’s are not. To Thoreau the spiritual excursion is one of discovery: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach… and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”39 Dillard’s spiritual excursion is a mystifying trial. “We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence… ‘Seems like we’re just set down here,’ a woman said to me recently, ‘and don’t nobody know why.’”40 Both are “born protestants” in their peculiar resistances and particular historical contexts. But whereas Thoreau relishes resistance Dillard seems resigned to it.

The form of Dillard’s spiritual quest is Transcendentalist in that it involves the individual’s unfolding into self-reliance in the midst of existence encountered in its bare essentials. She assumes, as does the Transcendentalist, that nature wears the colors of the spirit, and so every encounter with nature in its particularity yields a larger truth. The “all” of universality is contained in the “each” “the scandal of particularity… the only world that I, in particular, know… We’re all up to our necks in this particular scandal.”41 For the Transcendentalists, though, the hurdle to seeing this “all in each” is the diminution of the self, the individual who is not conscious of what he or she truly is. To Dillard it is self-consciousness, the self aware of itself, which blocks the floodgates of spirit. Emptying the self of its self-awareness yields grace. Whereas the Transcendentalist seeks the “innocence” of an original relation to the universe, the foundation of a religion of immediate inspiration rather than of historical tradition, Dillard seeks a second innocence: “When we lose our innocence – when we start feeling the weight of the atmosphere and learn that there’s death in the pot – we take leave of our senses… Only children keep their eyes open.”42 This difference is the distance between a modern Romanticism overwhelmed by the realities of death yet still longing

37 IBID, p. 304.38 Thoreau, IBID, Chapter 18, sections 14 and 1.39 Thoreau, IBID, Chapter 2, section 16.40 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard, Bantam Books, New York, 1974, p. 241 IBID, p. 81.42 IBID, p. 92.

11

for a state when that reality will be transcended, and a 19th century Romanticism searching for a first naiveté.

Whereas to the Transcendentalist it is the clamor of the machine, the smog of the smokestack, and the hubbub of society that conspires against the creative genius of the individual to unfold towards its originality, to Dillard it is the weight of accumulated experience that smothers the spirit. “I explore the neighborhood. An infant who has just learned to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment… In a couple of years, what he will have learned instead is how to fake it.”43 Whereas the Transcendentalist needs the view through a transparent eyeball piercing the heart of the Spirit at the center of Nature, Dillard, and perhaps all moderns, would settle for seeing something not seen before. Telling of one blind girl who, through cataract operations, was given the gift of sight, Dillard writes:

When the doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw ‘the tree with the lights in it.’ It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years.44

Grace appears when the self is emptied of the anxiety of accumulated fakery, and the old world yields a new view. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it.45

Dillard walks into the woods, sees her own mortality and demise, and seeks lessons and meanings from the past. She ponders what it would be like to be the first human being to discern the recurrence of the seasons, and what it would take to be the first. Pondering the unusual and unspeakable beauty of the sycamore transports her to ancient Persia and Xerxes’ inexplicable botanical homage. She seeks to unravel the inscrutabilities of a loss and grief secreted away in the shadowy recesses of humanity’s creation. In certain ways she is more a Greek Homeric hero from The Iliad than is Thoreau, visiting the battlegrounds where the individual confronted fate: “Today I sit on dry grass at the end of the island by the slower side of the creek. I’m drawn to this spot. I come to it as to an oracle; I return to it as a man years later will seek out the battlefield where he lost a leg or an arm.”46 But, this is a decidedly different Romantic Idealistic, Homeric hero than was Thoreau.

To this pilgrim, life is what happens between winters. Her Tinker Creek account begins in January and ends with the winter solstice, an example of a Psalm-like “wintry form of spirituality.”47 Whereas Thoreau, amid the suffocating odor of the dawn of industrialization, sought to reveal to his age “the grandeur of [human] nature… which recognizes its own reality and greatness,”48 Dillard embraces the modern mystic’s

43 IBID, p. 12.44 IBID, p. 35.45 IBID.46 IBID, p. 547 A Cry of Absence: Reflections for the Winter of the Heart, Martin Marty, HarperCollins, January 1983.48 William Ellery Channing as quoted in Hymns for the Celebration of Life, UUA, Boston, 1964.

12

daunting task of seeing the spirit’s survival through the terrible beauty of a January day that could conceivably be in the midst of a nuclear winter. Whereas the Romanticism of Thoreau and the Transcendentalists is more aligned with birth as befitted their age, Dillard’s may be more aligned with death, as fitted to ours. Shortsighted man, seeking “cosmical law” drawn predominantly from Nature, will envisage mostly one or the other, more telling, perhaps, of the era or temperament of the man than of the nature of God!49

“Yesterday I set out to catch the new season, and instead I found an old snakeskin.”50

Perhaps what separates the Transcendentalists and Thoreau from modern forms of Romanticism can be summed up this way: On the third day Annie Dillard rose to seek the day’s novelty only to find herself in the dark tomb, recovering the discarded shell of Christ’s body devoid of the spirit. Thoreau sat outside looking the other way and eagerly recording the thoughts and feelings the dawn’s fresh light had wrought.

It is the barren landscape that is Edward Abbey’s temporary abode. In Desert Solitaire,51 Abbey takes his sojourn at Arches National Park as a ranger in the 1960’s, a Thoreauvian “anti-hero.” In southern Utah, Arches was then inaccessible and innocent of human interference. Irritated by the critical attention given to a book that by his estimate was clearly inferior to his others, Abbey denied the role literary critics would give him:

I am not a naturalist… I'm not even sure what a naturalist is except that I'm not one. [I refuse] the mantle and britches of Thoreau and Muir. Let Annie Dillard wear them now.52

Abbey is the archetypal “born protestant,” resisting categories and genres, and comparisons to Thoreau, whom Abbey calls the “’village crank’ who became ‘a world figure.’”53 But his resistance has deeper origins still, more akin to the reluctances and urgencies a minister feels at midnight Saturday, standing in the Transcendentalist legacy of a religion of immediate inspiration and facing the persistent blank page:

Since you cannot get the desert into a book any more than a fisherman can haul up the sea with his nets, I have tried to create a world of words in which the desert figures more as medium than material. Not imitation but evocation has been the goal.54

One cannot represent nature adequately, or even approximately, through words. It is our condition that the human, cultural medium of communication, language, never duplicates the objects or environments it is attached to. Language adds a dimension to

49 The reader is invited to a more extensive conversation on the relationship of Romanticism and death in The Rebel by Albert Camus and Terrorism and Liberalism by Paul Berman.50 Dillard, IBID, p. 73.51 For this section the author’s gratitude is extended to Dr. Roger Gilles of Grand Valley State University52 The Legacy of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, Karla Armbruster, Spintech: June 12, 2000, http://www.spintechmag.com/0006/ka0600.htm , from a lecture delivered on April 4, 1998.53 The Environmental Imagination, Lawrence Buell, Belknap Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1995, p. 374.54 Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, Edward Abbey, Ballantine Books, NY, 1968, x.

13

what the word denotes, even the “what in its bare essentials”; a symbolic dimension with a foundation both of hard rock and shifting sand:

I am here not only to evade for awhile the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it's possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities. . . . I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.55

Paradox and bedrock is the cornerstone of a religion of immediate inspiration. Language is only approximately adequate to describing or eliciting the inspiring moment!

And Abbey feels keenly the failure, the shadowy world of language between “the idea and the reality.”56 We project onto nature what we want or envision. Or, we don’t understand the language that nature speaks. Or, we don’t deserve to understand nature’s way or, worse still to our sensibilities, find that nature doesn’t especially pay attention to us! He is the Existential Transcendentalist, if ever there could be such a creature, whose mind moves through its hermeneutics of suspicion as naturally as Havasu Creek flows to Mooney Falls, and tumbles towards its destiny:

I climbed through the caves that led down to the foot of Mooney Falls, 200 feet high. What did I do? There was nothing that had to be done. I listened to the voices, the many voices, vague, distant but astonishingly human, of Havasu Creek.57

There is a paradoxical prize at the end of the modern spiritual excursion into the natural world where human and natural voices blend into one and mean one another. The price of the prize is high: the evasion and refutation of culture, society, the sociability of human nature and the resistances to what that social nature implies. Having paid the exact amount, one expects to purchase something different from the currency used to pay for it. But, Abbey finds that nature and culture imply one another because they are inseparable:

All men are brothers, we like to say, half-wishing sometimes in secret it were not true. But perhaps it is true. And is the evolutionary line from protozoan to Spinoza any less certain? That also may be true. We are obliged, therefore, to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be for some to hear, that all living things on earth are kindred.58

55 IBID, p. 6.56 “The Hollow Men,” T. S. Eliot, http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~evans/hollow.html , V.57 Abbey, IBID, p. 225.58 IBID, p. 24.

14

And the personal cost of finding this truth in nature can be no different than what the Transcendentalist claimed was the cost of culture: the loss of individuality, the loss of self. Nature’s mystical allure can rob us of the self. Here, too, the paradox and the bedrock exist in the same place. The same desert that beckons the soul to see all the world in a grain of sand is characterized by distinct life forms and vistas:

… it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.59

Edward Abbey is less the Homeric hero and more the trickster Coyote: “Like Coyote who brings fire, Abbey offers us invaluable gifts that we need to survive -- in his case, insight and beauty. Like Coyote, who brings death into the world, Abbey sometimes gives us equally important gifts that we don't want.”60 The modern spiritual life as lived through the cosmical calendar yields demise and no spring, no Easter; like that of Arches itself whose wilderness will be overrun by tourists like the Smiths who will come thirty years hence:

… most of what I write about in this book is already gone or going under fast. This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands.61

The final literary piece, My Path Leads to Tibet, is, like Transcendentalist literary expressions, a firsthand account of an individual’s engagement with the natural world. Sabriye Tenberken is an unsighted woman determined to travel to Tibet to gather a school for blind children, a prospect and place that is the object of her romantic and idealistic notions. She has no experience starting a school. She has never traveled to Tibet. The book is a travelogue with hidden spiritual overtones. Her interest in helping blind children originates from her personal story, which includes both the fact of her early gradual blindness and her remarkable capacity for imaging:

My parents noticed I had eye problems when I was very little. But in those days, I could still see. Until I was twelve I could make out faces and see landscapes… I could also see colors, and I painted quite a lot.62

59 IBID, p. 29.60 Armbruster, IBID.61 Abbey, IBID, xii.62 My Path Leads to Tibet, Sabriye Tenberken, Arcade Publishing, New York, 2000, p 20.

15

As a young adult she gives her readers a glimpse of the gulf in experience between the sighted and unsighted, and the boundaries of the worlds drawn by each through their senses.

Does a blind person see only darkness? is a question I am often asked. I find it illogical. Though officially blind, I never had the feeling of being in darkness… I’m aware that not all blind people have visual imaginations or the ability to project images…

To descriptions heard by others, I add in many instances of my own imagination.

“So, in effect what you describe is not real” is their answer.

What’s the definition of real?… Are images captured by the eye more “real” than those transmitted through the ear, nose, tongue, or even skin?63

How does an unsighted individual explore a new land? She comes to know nature through a deep and conscious recognition of the interplay between the senses and the imagination, devoid, of course, of images cast by light! To add both irony and breadth to Emerson’s image of a “transparent eyeball,”64 Tenberken tells of how it is that one without sight can “see” images derived from an engagement with the natural world.

In my experience, the images I have of the world are not all that different from those of people who can see. My description of landscapes often appear convincing to sighted people. The principal difference, in my opinion, lies in processing the image…

Whenever I enter a new space, no inner picture is immediately conjured up. I need to start exploring, touch the objects along the way… All the other sensory perceptions – of the ear, nose, finger, and tongue – contribute to form a total impression that informs me of the room’s general dimension, as well as its atmosphere.

For us blind, images of places or people don’t necessarily coincide with what most people call reality. When I talk about a place both sighted people and I have visited, there are those who wonder whether we are actually referring to the same place…

For me, colors play such an important role in describing a landscape that I often have the feeling I am actually seeing it.65

63 Tenberken, IBID, pp 41-43.64 Emerson, Nature, IBID65 Tenberken, IBID, pp 43-46.

16

She possesses an immediate inspiration and a faith shared by the Transcendentalists; that, as William James portrayed it, the universe is “for all its darkness and calamity, an eminently hospitable home for the human spirit.”66 Or, in the more rudimentary ejaculation by Margaret Fuller, “I accept the universe!”67 This is inextricable from Tenberken’s personality, the “risks” she is willing to take, the covenants she establishes with strangers she meets, the rewards of perception she gains, and the practical improvements the world gains through her.

Yet, it is not without paradox!

In a remarkably complementary passage in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard relates historical accounts of the unsighted who suddenly, through cataract surgery, are given the “gift” of sight. It is not a blessing for those whose conception of this “hospitable home” has little capacity for an added room!

The mental effort involved in [adjusting to living in a world now seen] proves overwhelming for many patients. It oppresses them to realize, if they ever do at all, the tremendous size of the world, which they had previously conceived of as something touchingly manageable… A disheartening number of them refuse to use their new vision.68

Tenberken witnesses to the inspiration originating in a romantic kind of immediate perceptual connection to existence, and unknowingly hints at its tragedy as well. She relates her vivid description when viewing Lake Namtso, an age-old Tibetan Lake, whose beauty and mystery has generated the legends and fables only a sacred scene can. Pressing her face against the car window she “sees” its beach of crystallized salt shimmering like snow, its pools melt[ing] into the horizon, with a few nomads… watching their yaks grazing.69 Her companion taps her on the shoulder.

“Do forgive me,” he said in an amused tone. “I don’t wish to sound patronizing, but if you want to see Namtso, you’d better look the other way, the lake’s on the other side. What you’ve been staring at are rocks and a gray landscape.”70

The collections of images inspired by her immediate experience are not somehow “false.” But her account of her experience exhibits a characteristic of Transcendentalism and Romantic Idealism: The immense distance between the school of hard knocks and the imaginative life of the spirit, which creates a longing, a deep and passionate yearning, an ache to bridge that separation. This is Romanticism’s ache that can lead to the world’s repudiation when it does not so easy bend to our imaginings! In a devotion to the imagination as the means to the immediate experience of and original relation to the divine, over against historical tradition or human relationships, a subjective idolatry can 66 American Religious Thought, William Clebsch, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1973, p. 7.67 Women’s Voices: Quotations by Women, Jone Johnson Lewis, http://womenshistory.about.com/library68 Dillard, IBID, p. --69 Tenberken, IBID, p. 44.70 IBID.

17

aim one’s allegiance towards the certainty that the chasm has been crossed and one has landed on the shores of the “Really Real,” one is looking at Lake Namtso when one is actually viewing barren rock:

Besides, why wouldn’t a world informed and described by one’s imagination be better than reality? For what it’s worth, the landscapes I describe in this book are based on my very personal perception of reality. All the images I depict herein are the fruit of my imagination. Forewarned is forearmed.71

She is a world citizen, a symbol of the world as the individual’s universal place, unhampered as she is by the hold particular Waldens have on us because of sight. But she embodies the irony of our time, too. In her ties to a universal place, to a universe imagined as a hospitable home, she blurs the genres of fiction and non-fiction, and the distinctions between art and life. The world is not quite as any of us imagines. Her life begs the question and risk of faith: With my peculiar blindnesses, to what “reality” do I devote my ultimate allegiance?

IV. They Are Inseparable

THE SOUL IS GREATER THAN THE CHURCH. -Theodore Parker

Our Transcendentalist Romantic heritage is the single most pervasive influence in our movement today, and has, in the years since the mid-1800’s, shaped Unitarianism and Unitarian Universalism more than any other single influence. It has shaped Unitarian Universalism into a religion of inspiration over tradition, and of “Absolute Religion” over particular tradition. Laying claim to the designation of “Neo-Transcendentalist” within our movement is a little like a group within Lutheranism claiming a differentiating defiance by asserting they are “Neo-Paulists.”

However, religions of tradition must take history seriously, while religions of immediate inspiration do not necessarily have to. For us history has not been that of doctrinal revelation, but of revelation through the social history of covenanted religious communities. It was the focus of James Luther Adams’ theological work. Yet, history, particularly the wisdom revealed by the study of the religious dimension of humanity’s social being, remains a largely neglected part of our religiosity. In our current historical context who with a sense of history doesn’t cringe at Emerson’s declaration: “We come down with free thinking into the dear institutions and at once make carnage among them.”72 Those who forget historical context are doomed to misinterpret it.

As evidence of ultimate things, we seek the inspiration of the natural world more than looking to the social relationships of individuals covenanted in religious communities. Colleague Dean Grodzins unknowingly summed up the Transcendentalists’ spiritual legacy as it has embedded itself in us. He notes Theodore Parker’s “interest in church

71 IBID.72 Ralph Waldo Emerson as quoted in Boller, IBID, xxi.

18

reform” although Parker is the charismatic preacher at a church “weak by intention” with laity that “did not believe in building up a strong church… Parker himself was leery of such institutions... For Parker, the best church (like the best national constitution) was a disposable one, easily discarded when no longer helpful.”73 One wonders whether he still suffers from myopic idealism today, now that both he and the 28 th Congregational Society are dead, apparently no longer helpful!? When the lessons of the spirit are claimed to be learned at Walden, Tinker Creek, Arches, and Tibet, over disposable covenanted communities, in what way do we sell the birthright of the religious origins of liberty and the ultimate source of freedom for the pottage of an idealistic view of unspoiled landscape and untarnished inspiration? “Do forgive me,” he said in an amused tone. “I don’t wish to sound patronizing, but if you want to see Namtso, you’d better look the other way, the lake’s on the other side. What you’ve been staring at are rocks and a gray landscape.”74 Do we love individual inspiration so much as to make of it an idol that destroys the revelations our tradition carries concerning an individual’s social proclivities, needs, and inclinations, liberally interpreted? Are our concepts of inspiration and the freedom of the spirit so narrow that in the 21st century they contribute to the destruction of human culture and the breakdown of relationships, where once they built up self-reliance and self-culture? Ralph Waldo Emerson declared, “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.”75 Is a religion of immediate inspiration destined to have great and large churches built by inspirational individuals, only to have them atrophy and wither because of a lack of light when it comes from only one source? What, then, was its real source?

Likewise, a religion of inspiration has left us adrift in a world of ethnic and racial diversity. When we study “the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part,” as the primary source of inspiration to the self do we unknowingly abandon the historical struggles of groups for justice? When Annie Dillard observes the helpless frog shrivel and Edward Abbey sees the cute mice disappear after introducing a snake into his home, they are not recording “injustice” but observing Nature being herself, “red in tooth and claw.”76 It betrays our white, European, Romantic narrowness to look to Transcendentalism’s religion of inspiration and its affirmations of the self over the ways human societies have fallen short of the Kingdom of God! I consulted literary scholars for a piece from a minority author influenced by Transcendentalism. There aren’t any. Transcendentalism is not influential in literary circles beyond middle and upper class American whites. Can a faith shaped so much by the Transcendentalist’s religion of immediate inspiration be influential in circles where its literary forms have not? I wonder. The echoes of Sabriye Tenberken’s declaration resound in my ear:

Besides, why wouldn’t a world informed and described by one’s imagination be better than reality? For what it’s worth, the landscapes I

73 all quotes from “Theodore Parker and the 28th Congregational Society,” Dean Grodzins, in Capper and Wright, IBID, pp 92-93.74 IBID.75 “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, http://www.rwe.org 76 “In Memoriam,” Alfred Lord Tennyson, http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem2141.html

19

describe in this book are based on my very personal perception of reality... Forewarned is forearmed.77

It may even be said that Transcendental Romanticism in its modern form has triumphed in the way we view the religious individual’s social duty. The “Absolute Religion” of immediate inspiration gave us access to the world’s religions, but at a local cost. I wonder if involvement in democracy’s civic structures isn’t waning among us more than in the early and middle part of the 20th century. If so, it can easily be traced to the concept of self and society drawn from universalizing Transcendentalism’s local and particular protest: “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.”78 Everywhere? While emerging Unitarianism embodied a healthy suspicion against the doctrinal leanings in religious fellowship, those Pre-Transcendentalists not only participated in the governance structures of the American Republic, they invented many of them. Historian Stanley Elkins argued that “Slavery had been a wrenching political problem because of the relative absence of the sort of mediating institutions, such as a state church and a strong central government, that had peacefully abolished slavery in Britain.”79 Elkins further explained:

By the 1830’s the closest thing to an intellectual community in the United States consisted of men with no concrete commitment to system at all. They were men who had no close commitment to any of society’s institutions. They were truly men without responsibility.80

They were the Transcendentalists. And lest we too quickly lift up Theodore Parker’s example, remember, his church was gone by the time of the struggle of women, Jews, immigrants, gays, and the Civil Rights movement of the 20 th century, let alone the modern clash between Islamists, and liberal democracy and religion. I wonder: Has Transcendentalism’s societal suspicions become, in our hands, after the Romanticism of the 1960’s, outright antagonism towards the American experiment in ordered liberty?

Friedriech Schleieracher declared that “If there is religion at all it must be social, for that is the nature of man, and it is quite peculiarly the nature of religion.”81 The Transcendentalists saw religion originating in the inner life of the individual, but they struggled unsuccessfully with its expression in communities other than ones they guided. Their incomplete understandings of the social dimension of human nature and their immature understandings of human groupings and societies have been bequeathed to us along with their genius for understanding the creative inspiration of the spirit as it moves through Nature and the individual.

I do not wonder that Channing articulated a distinctive theological perspective that is democratic, Unitarian, and mine. I do not wonder that Parker’s Transient and Permanent

77 Tenberken, IBID, p. 4778 Emerson, IBID, p-79 from Slavery, Stanley Elkins, quoted in Capper, Capper and Wright, IBID, p18.80 Stanley Elkins as quoted in IBID.81 quoted in “Schleiermacher and the Transcendentalists,” Robert Richardson, Capper and Wright, IBID, p. 128.

20

is of such enduring quality and truth that it could be preached today and deemed scandalous in most of our towns and cities. I do not wonder that Emerson deserves the title bestowed by Time magazine, “The Bishop of Our Possibilities.” And I know there was no more significant event for my family than our pilgrimage to Walden Pond, and our discussion as to what Thoreau really discovered there! Innumerable are the times I’ve looked to Annie Dillard for insight, and I read Desert Solitaire after a family vacation to the Canyon Circle to show our children Nature’s portrait of freedom. I prize my faith tradition which, I think, more than others, lends dignity to the individual man and woman as various, and yet, as incomprehensible as it may be to human reason, each made in the image of God. I love the community of the church, and freedom’s divine origin and the enduring presence of God in the liberty and justice born of relationships.

And, yet, I wonder. Has looking predominantly in one direction for over 150 years now crystallized a transparent eyeball and rendered us speechless concerning things religious and theological? Or can we, emulating the Transcendentalists in their time, envision “new views” from older images? Yet this I do not wonder, and offer not as original inspiration, but as a revelation from our tradition, older than Transcendentalism and a corrective to it: The soul is not greater than the church. They are inseparable.

21