Ralph Waldo Emerson and American Transcendentalism

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Ralph Waldo Emerson and American Transcendentalism

• English 441
• Dr. Karen Roggenkamp

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American Transcendentalism

• Idealistic philosophy, spiritual position, and
  literary movement that advocates reliance on
  romantic intuition and moral human conscience
• Belief that humans can intuitively transcend the
  limits of the senses and of logic to a plane of
  higher truths
• Value spirituality (direct access to benevolent
  God, not organized religion or ritual), divinity
  of humanity, nature, intellectual pursuits,
  social justice
• Roughly 1830s-1850s

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Spirit of Revivalism

• Transcendentalism can be read as one of many
  spiritual revivals American culture fostered in
  antebellum years
• Image Religious Camp Meeting, J. Maze Burbank,
  c. 1839

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Rises out of two key intellectual and spiritual
traditions

• European Romanticism
• American Unitarianism
• Image Second Church of Boston, where Emerson
  held first ministerial position

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Roots in European Romanticism

• Begins Germany, late 18th century
• England 1798 1830s
• Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron,
  etc.
• America 1820s 1860s
• Irving, Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne,
  Melville, Poe, Whitman, etc.
• Image William Wordsworth

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Romanticism

• Reaction again overly-rational Enlightenment
  philosophy, art, religion, literature
• Poetry / art not a thing of logic, strict
  rhyming, strict meter, highest classes
• Art inspiration, spontaneity, naturalness
• In NATURE and CHILDHOOD we see universal,
  spiritual truths
• Image Grasmere Village, Hill Country,
  Great Britain

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Romanticism

• Nature the key to self-awareness
• Open self to nature you may receive its gifts
  a deeper, more mystical experience of life
• Nature offers a kind of gracesalvation from
  mundane evil of everyday life
• Image Mont Blanc

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Nature and Romanticism

• External world of nature actually reflects
  invisible, spiritual reality
• Self-reliance seek the truth in immediate
  perceptions of the world
• Then one can reconcile body and soul (which is
  part of Universal Soul or Oversoul, source of
  all life)
• Image Niagara Falls, Thomas Cole, 1829

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The Sublime

• Heightened psychological state
• Overwhelming experience of awe, reverence,
  comprehension
• Achieved when soul is immersed in grandeur of
  nature
• Sense of transcendence from everyday world
• Image Wanderer, Caspar David Friedrich

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Romanticism in America

• Arrives in America 1820s
• Center around Concord, Massachusettskind of
  artists colony
• Transcendentalist Club 1836writing, reading,
  reform projects
• Utopian communitiesgroups to escape American
  materialism

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Concord, Massachusetts, 1850s
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Emerson, Hawthorne, Alcott HomesConcord,
Massachusetts, 1850s
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Rises out of two key intellectual and spiritual
traditions

• European Romanticism
• American Unitarianism
• Image Second Church of Boston, where Emerson
  held first ministerial position

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Roots in American Unitarianism

• Emerson a Unitarian minister
• Unitarianism (Christian denomination) rises in
  late 1700s formalized by William Ellery
  Channing, early 1800s
• Liberal churchbroken from strict New England
  Congregationalism
• Reject total depravity of humanity
• Believe in perfectibility of humanity
• Reject idea of angry Godfocus on benevolent
  God
• UNITY of God rather than TRINITY of Father, Son,
  Holy Spirit

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Emersons Break from Unitarianism

• Too intellectualized, too removed from direct
  experience of God
• Extend and radicalize Unitarian beliefs in
  benevolent God, closeness of God and humanity
• Bring these spiritual ideas to life
• If Unitarians believe that truth comes only
  through empirical study and rationality . . .
• Transcendentalists take that idea add in
  romanticized mysticismhumankind capable of
  direct experience of the holy (Laurence Buell)

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Transcendentalism as Spiritual Revival

• Ironic refiguring of Puritanism, without the
  theological dogma
• Transcendentalists lonely explorers (pilgrims)
  outside society and convention
• Trying to form new society based on metaphysical
  awareness
• Trying to purify society by purifying hearts and
  minds
• Nature a spiritual manifesto
• Image Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Spiritual Revival

• Transcendentalism is a pilgrimage from the
  idolatrous world of creeds and rituals to the
  temple of the Living God in the soul. Is is a
  putting to silence of tradition and formulas,
  that the Sacred Oracle might be heard through
  intuitions of the singled-eyed and pure-hearted.
  
• (William Henry Channing)

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Spiritual Revival

• That belief we term Transcendentalism . . .
  maintains that man has ideas, that come not
  through the five senses of the powers of
  reasoning, but are either the result of direct
  revelations from God, his immediate inspiration,
  or his immanent presence in the spiritual world.
  
• (Charles Mayo Ellis, An Essay on
  Transcendentalism, 1842)

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Spiritual Revival

• Standing on the bare ground,my head bathed
  in the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite
  space,all mean egotism vanishes. I become a
  transparent eye-ball I am nothing I see all
  the currents of the Universal Being circulate
  through me I am part or particle of God.
• (Ralph Waldo Emerson,
  Nature, 1836)

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The Transparent Eyeball

• Image Christopher Pearse Cranch, parody of
  lines from Nature, 1838

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Reading Nature

• Easier to see Emerson clearly from a distance,
  but everything gets foggy if you get too close
• Emerson Do not give me facts in the order of
  cause and effect, but drop one or two links in
  the chain, and give me with a cause, an effect
  two or three times removed.

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Reading Nature

• Goal Reclaim/redefine culturebring it back to
  life
• Prose poemread both for what it says literally
  and what it suggests about what cannot be said
  clearly
• Three underlying assumptions
• Primacy of the soul
• Sufficiency of nature
• Immediacy of God