HC3310

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HC3310

• The Liberal Tradition in America

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Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
(1987) 163

• The reports from the state of nature mixed bad
  news and good news. Perhaps the most important
  discovery was that there was no Garden of Eden
  the Eldorado of the spirit turned out to be both
  desert and jungle. Man was not provided for at
  the beginning, and his current state is not a
  result of his sin, but of natures miserliness.
  He is his own. God neither looks after him nor
  punishes him. Natures indifference to justice is
  a terrible bereavement for man. He must care for
  himself without the hope that all good men have
  always had that there is a price to be paid for
  crime, that the wicked will suffer. But it is
  also a great liberationfrom Gods tutelage, from
  the claims of kings, nobles and priests, and from
  guilt or bad conscience. The greatest hopes are
  dashed, but some of the worst terrors and inner
  enslavements are dispellled.

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O, vast Rondure, swimming in space!  Coverd all
over with visible power and beauty!  Alternate
light and day, and the teeming, spiritual
darkness  Unspeakable, high processions of sun
and moon, and countless stars, above  Below, the
manifold grass and waters, animals, mountains,
trees With inscrutable purposesome hidden,
prophetic intention  Now, first, it seems, my
thought begins to span thee.    Down from the
gardens of Asia, descending, radiating,  Adam and
Eve appear, then their myriad progeny after
them,   Wandering, yearning, curiouswith
restless explorations,  With questionings,
baffled, formless, feverishwith never-happy
hearts,  With that sad, incessant refrain,
Wherefore, unsatisfied Soul? and Whither, O
mocking Life? Ah, who shall soothe these
feverish children?  Who justify these restless
explorations?   Who speak the secret of impassive
Earth?
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O Thou transcendent!  Namelessthe fibre and the
breath!  Light of the lightshedding forth
universesthou centre of them!  Thou mightier
centre of the true, the good, the loving!  Thou
moral, spiritual fountain! affections source!
thou reservoir!  (O pensive soul of me! O thirst
unsatisfied! waitest not there?  Waitest not
haply for us, somewhere there, the Comrade
perfect?)  Thou pulse! thou motive of the stars,
suns, systems,  That, circling, move in order,
safe, harmonious,  Athwart the shapeless
vastnesses of space!    Swiftly I shrivel at the
thought of God,  At Nature and its wonders, Time
and Space and Death,  But that I, turning, call
to thee, O soul, thou actual Me,  And lo! thou
gently masterest the orbs,  Thou matest Time,
smilest content at Death,  And fillest, swellest
full, the vastnesses of Space
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Away, O soul! hoist instantly the anchor!  Cut
the hawsershaul outshake out every sail!  Have
we not stood here like trees in the ground long
enough?  Have we not grovelld here long enough,
eating and drinking like mere brutes?  Have we
not darkend and dazed ourselves with books long
enough?    Sail forth! steer for the deep waters
only!  Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee,
and thou with me  For we are bound where mariner
has not yet dared to go, And we will risk the
ship, ourselves and all.    O my brave soul! O
farther, farther sail!  O daring joy, but safe!
Are they not all the seas of God?  O farther,
farther, farther sail!  Walt Whitman, Passage
to India
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Unitarian Controversy 1805-1825

• Henry Ware 1764-1845
• Andover Seminary
• William Ellery Channing 1780-1842
• Unitarian Christianity 1819
• Jedidiah Morse (1761-1826

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• Michael Servetus 1511-1553
• Lelius Socinus 1525-1604
• Fautus Socinus 1539-1604
• Joseph Priestly 1733-1804
• Hosea Ballou 1771-1852

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Socinianism

• Scripture interpreted rationally
• Jesus not deity but performed miracles and had
  virgin birth
• Christ designated a portion of divine power
  after resurrection
• Against doctrine of Atonement
• Repentance plus good works leads to forgiveness
• Against original sin
• Against predestination
• Against resurrection of the body
• Lords Supper a memorial

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Unitarian Christianity Scripture

• Our leading principle in interpreting Scripture
  is this, that the Bible is a book written for
  men, in the language of men, and that its meaning
  is to be sought in the same manner as that of
  other books. We believe that God, when he speaks
  to the human race, conforms, if we may so say, to
  the established rules of speaking and writing.
  How else would the Scriptures avail us more, than
  if communicated in an unknown tongue?
• Now all books, and all conversation, require in
  the reader or hearer the constant exercise of
  reason or their true import is only to be
  obtained by continual comparison and inference.
  Human language, you well know, admits various
  interpretations and every word and every
  sentence must be modified and explained according
  to the subject which is discussed, according to
  the purposes, feelings, circumstances, and
  principles of the writer, and according to the
  genius and idioms of the language which he uses.

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Against the Trinity

• We also think, that the doctrine of the Trinity
  injures devotion, not only by joining to the
  Father other objects of worship, but by taking
  from the Father the supreme affection, which is
  his due, and transferring it to the Son. This is
  a most important view. That Jesus Christ, if
  exalted into the infinite Divinity, should be
  more interesting than the Father, is precisely
  what might be expected from history, and from the
  principles of human nature. Men want an object of
  worship like themselves, and the great secret of
  idolatry lies in this propensity. A God, clothed
  in our form, and feeling our wants and sorrows,
  speaks to our weak nature more strongly, than a
  Father in heaven, a pure spirit, invisible and
  unapproachable, save by the reflecting and
  purified mind.

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The goodness of God

• It is not because he is our Creator merely, but
  because he created us for good and holy purposes
  it is not because his will is irresistible, but
  because his will is the perfection of virtue,
  that we pay him allegiance. We cannot bow before
  a being, however great and powerful, who governs
  tyrannically. We respect nothing but excellence,
  whether on earth or in heaven. We venerate not
  the loftiness of God's throne, but the equity and
  goodness in which it is established.
• We believe that God is infinitely good, kind,
  benevolent, in the proper sense of these words
  good in disposition, as well as in act good, not
  to a few, but to all good to every individual,
  as well as to the general system.

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Against Election

• According to its old and genuine form, it
  teaches, that God brings us into life wholly
  depraved, so that under the innocent features of
  our childhood is hidden a nature averse to all
  good and propense to all evil, a nature which
  exposes us to God's displeasure and wrath, even
  before we have acquired power to understand our
  duties, or to reflect upon our actions. According
  to a more modern exposition, it teaches, that we
  came from the hands of our Maker with such a
  constitution, and are placed under such
  influences and circumstances, as to render
  certain and infallible the total depravity of
  every human being, from the first moment of his
  moral agency and it also teaches, that the
  offence of the child, who brings into life this
  ceaseless tendency to unmingled crime, exposes
  him to the sentence of everlasting damnation.
  Now, according to the plainest principles of
  morality, we maintain, that a natural
  constitution of the mind, unfailingly disposing
  it to evil and to evil alone, would absolve it
  from guilt that to give existence under this
  condition would argue unspeakable cruelty and
  that to punish the sin of this unhappily
  constituted child with endless ruin, would be a
  wrong unparalleled by the most merciless
  despotism.
• This system also teaches, that God selects from
  this corrupt mass a number to be saved, and
  plucks them, by a special influence, from the
  common ruin

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Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882

• Emerson is the mind of our climate he is the
  principle source of the American difference in
  poetry and criticism and pragmatic
  postphilosophy. . .He is the inescapable theorist
  of virtually all subsequent American writing.
  From his moment to ours, Americans either are in
  his tradition, or else in a countertradition
  originating in opposition to him.
• Harold Bloom Mr. America NYRB, Nov. 22, 1984,
  19.

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• Sin, error, time, history, a God external to
  the self, the visiting of the crimes of the
  fathers upon the sons these are landmarks in the
  literary cosmos of Eliot and his Southern
  followers, and these were precisely of no
  interest whatsoever to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
• Bloom, Ibid.

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Henry Ware/Second Unitarian
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Experience

• People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is
  not half so bad with them as they say. There are
  moods in which we court suffering, in the hope
  that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp
  peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be
  scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing
  grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it
  is. That, like all the rest, plays about the
  surface, and never introduces me into the
  reality, for contact with which, we would even
  pay the costly price of sons and lovers. . .

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• . . .An innavigable sea washes with silent waves
  between us and the things we aim at and converse
  with. Grief too will make us idealists. In the
  death of my son, now more than two years ago, I
  seem to have lost a beautiful estate, -- no more.
  I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I
  should be informed of the bankruptcy of my
  principal debtors, the loss of my property would
  be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many
  years but it would leave me as it found me, --
  neither better nor worse. So is it with this
  calamity it does not touch me some thing which
  I fancied was a part of me, which could not be
  torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged
  without enriching me, falls off from me, and
  leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that
  grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step
  into real nature. The Indian who was laid under a
  curse, that the wind should not blow on him, nor
  water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type
  of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain,
  and we the Para coats that shed every drop.
  Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that
  with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least
  is reality that will not dodge us.

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• I have always been, from my very incapacity of
  methodical writing, a chartered libertine, free
  to worship and free to rail lucky when I could
  make myself understood, but never esteemed near
  enough to the institutions and mind of society to
  deserve the notice of the masters of literature
  and religion. . .I could not give an account of
  myself, if challenged. I could not possibly give
  you one of the arguments you cruelly hint at,
  on which any doctrine of mine stands. For I do
  not know what arguments mean in reference to any
  expression of a thought. I delight in telling
  what I think, but if you ask me how I dare say
  so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of
  mortal men.
• Letter to Henry Ware, 8 October 1838

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Perry Miller, From Edwards to Emerson, Errand
into the Wilderness (1956) 185

• What is persistent, from the covenant theology
  (and from the heretics against the covenant) to
  Edwards and Emerson is the Puritans effort to
  confront, face to face, the image of a blinding
  divinity in the physical universe, and to look
  upon that universe without the intermediacy of
  ritual, of ceremony, of the Mass and the
  confessional.

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The Lords Supper 9 September 1832

• Text Romans 1417 17 For the kingdom of God
  is not meat and drink but righteousness, and
  peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.
• Luke 2219 19 And he took bread, and gave
  thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying,
  This is my body which is given for you this do
  in remembrance of me.

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Christ against Institution

• but I cannot bring myself to believe that in the
  use of such an expression he looked beyond the
  living generation, beyond the abolition of the
  festival he was celebrating, and the scattering
  of the nation, and meant to impose a memorial
  feast upon the whole world.

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Truth is Freedom

• Forms are as essential as bodies but to exalt
  particular forms, to adhere to one form a moment
  after it is out-grown, is unreasonable, and it is
  alien to the spirit of Christ. If I understand
  the distinction of Christianity, the reason why
  it is to be preferred over all other systems and
  is divine is this, that it is a moral system
  that it presents men with truths which are their
  own reason, and enjoins practices that are their
  own justification that if miracles may be said
  to have been its evidence to the first
  Christians, they are not its evidence to us, but
  the doctrines themselves that every practice is
  Christian which praises itself, and every
  practice unchristian which condemns itself. I am
  not engaged to Christianity by decent forms, or
  saving ordinances it is not usage, it is not
  what I do not understand, that binds me to it --
  let these be the sandy foundations of falsehoods.
  What I revere and obey in it is its reality, its
  boundless charity, its deep interior life, the
  rest it gives to my mind, the echo it returns to
  my thoughts, the perfect accord it makes with my
  reason through all its representation of God and
  His Providence and the persuasion and courage
  that come out thence to lead me upward and
  onward. Freedom is the essence of this faith.

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Against Institution

• That for which Paul lived and died so gloriously
  that for which Jesus gave himself to be
  crucified the end that animated the thousand
  martyrs and heroes who have followed his steps,
  was to redeem us from a formal religion, and
  teach us to seek our well-being in the formation
  of the soul. The whole world was full of idols
  and ordinances. The Jewish was a religion of
  forms. The Pagan was a religion of forms it was
  all body -- it had no life -- and the Almighty
  God was pleased to qualify and send forth a man
  to teach men that they must serve him with the
  heart that only that life was religious which
  was thoroughly good that sacrifice was smoke,
  and forms were shadows.

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St. Pauls Apocalypticism

• But there is a material circumstance which
  diminishes our confidence in the correctness of
  the Apostle's view and that is, the observation
  that his mind had not escaped the prevalent error
  of the primitive church, the belief, namely, that
  the second coming of Christ would shortly occur,
  until which time, he tells them, this feast was
  to be kept. Elsewhere he tells them, that, at
  that time the world would be burnt up with fire,
  and a new government established, in which the
  Saints would sit on thrones. . .In this manner we
  may see clearly enough how this ancient ordinance
  got its footing among the early Christians, and
  this single expectation of a speedy reappearance
  of a temporal Messiah, which kept its influence
  even over so spiritual a man as St. Paul, would
  naturally tend to preserve the use of the rite
  when once established.

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American anti-sacramentalism

• Passing other objections, I come to this, that
  the use of the elements, however suitable to the
  people and the modes of thought in the East,
  where it originated, is foreign and unsuited to
  affect us. Whatever long usage and strong
  association may have done in some individuals to
  deaden this repulsion, I apprehend that their use
  is rather tolerated than loved by any of us. We
  are not accustomed to express our thoughts or
  emotions by symbolical actions. Most men find the
  bread and wine no aid to devotion and to some, it
  is a painful impediment. To eat bread is one
  thing to love the precepts of Christ and resolve
  to obey them is quite another.

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Emersons Unitarian Creed

• I am so much a Unitarian as this that I believe
  the human mind cannot admit but one God, and that
  every effort to pay religious homage to more than
  one being, goes to take away all right ideas. I
  appeal, brethren, to your individual experience.
  In the moment when you make the least petition to
  God, though it be but a silent wish that he may
  approve you, or add one moment to your life, --
  do you not, in the very act, necessarily exclude
  all other beings from your thought? In that act,
  the soul stands alone with God, and Jesus is no
  more present to the mind than your brother or
  your child.

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Self Reliance Principle

• No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.
  Good and bad are but names very readily
  transferable to that or this the only right is
  what is after my constitution, the only wrong
  what is against it.

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Charity

• Your goodness must have some edge to it, else
  it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be
  preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of
  love when that pules and whines. I shun father
  and mother and wife and brother, when my genius
  calls me. I would write on the lintels of the
  door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better
  than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in
  explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I
  seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do
  not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my
  obligation to put all poor men in good
  situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou
  foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar,
  the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not
  belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There
  is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual
  affinity I am bought and sold for them I will go
  to prison, if need be but your miscellaneous
  popular charities the education at college of
  fools the building of meeting-houses to the vain
  end to which many now stand alms to sots and
  the thousandfold Relief Societies though I
  confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give
  the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by
  I shall have the manhood to withhold.

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Confidence

• What pretty oracles nature yields us on this
  text, in the face and behaviour of children,
  babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel
  mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our
  arithmetic has computed the strength and means
  opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their
  mind being whole, their eye is as yet
  unconquered, and when we look in their faces, we
  are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody all
  conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes
  four or five out of the adults who prattle and
  play to it. So God has armed youth and puberty
  and manhood no less with its own piquancy and
  charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its
  claims not to be put by, if it will stand by
  itself. Do not think the youth has no force,
  because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in
  the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and
  emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his
  contemporaries. Bashful or bold, then, he will
  know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.
• The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner,
  and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say
  aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude
  of human nature.

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The Fugitive Slave Law 1854

• I conceive that thus to detach a man and make
  him feel that he is to owe all to himself, is the
  way to make him strong and rich and here the
  optimist must find, if anywhere, the benefit of
  Slavery. We have many teachers we are in this
  world for culture to be instructed in realities,
  in the laws of moral and intelligent nature and
  our education is not conducted by toys and
  luxuries, but by austere and rugged masters, by
  poverty, solitude, passions. War, Slavery to
  know that Paradise is under the shadow of swords
  that divine sentiments which are always
  soliciting us are breathed into us from on high,
  and are an offset to a Universe of suffering and
  crime that self-reliance, the height and
  perfection of man, is reliance on God. The
  insight of the religious sentiment will disclose
  to him unexpected aids in the nature of things.
  The Persian Saadi said, Beware of hurting the
  orphan. When the orphan sets a-crying, the throne
  of the Almighty is rocked from side to side.

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Lincoln Meditation on the Divine
WillWashington, D.C.September, 1862

• The will of God prevails. In great contests each
  party claims to act in accordance with the will
  of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God
  cannot be for and against the same thing at the
  same time. In the present civil war it is quite
  possible that God's purpose is something
  different from the purpose of either party -- and
  yet the human instrumentalities, working just as
  they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His
  purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is
  probably true -- that God wills this contest, and
  wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere
  great power, on the minds of the now contestants,
  He could have either saved or destroyed the Union
  without a human contest. Yet the contest began.
  And, having begun He could give the final victory
  to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.

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Divinity School AddressAmerica as Eden

• In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to
  draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the
  buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and
  gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of
  birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the
  balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no
  gloom to the heart with its welcome shade.
  Through the transparent darkness the stars pour
  their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems
  a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool
  night bathes the world as with a river, and
  prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn. The
  mystery of nature was never displayed more
  happily. The corn and the wine have been freely
  dealt to all creatures, and the never-broken
  silence with which the old bounty goes forward,
  has not yielded yet one word of explanation. One
  is constrained to respect the perfection of this
  world, in which our senses converse. How wide
  how rich what invitation from every property it
  gives to every faculty of man!

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Yosemite Valleyby Albert Bierstadt 1830-1902
34
Weakness of Christianity

• In this point of view we become very sensible of
  the first defect of historical Christianity.
  Historical Christianity has fallen into the error
  that corrupts all attempts to communicate
  religion. As it appears to us, and as it has
  appeared for ages, it is not the doctrine of the
  soul, but an exaggeration of the personal, the
  positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells,
  with noxious exaggeration about the person of
  Jesus. The soul knows no persons. It invites
  every man to expand to the full circle of the
  universe, and will have no preferences but those
  of spontaneous love

35
The Bad Preacher

• Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist,
  then is the worshipper defrauded and
  disconsolate. We shrink as soon as the prayers
  begin, which do not uplift, but smite and offend
  us. We are fain to wrap our cloaks about us, and
  secure, as best we can, a solitude that hears
  not. I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted
  me to say, I would go to church no more. Men go,
  thought I, where they are wont to go, else had no
  soul entered the temple in the afternoon. A snow
  storm was falling around us. The snow storm was
  real the preacher merely spectral and the eye
  felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then
  out of the window behind him, into the beautiful
  meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had
  no one word intimating that he had laughed or
  wept, was married or in love, had been commended,
  or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived
  and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The
  capital secret of his profession, namely, to
  convert life into truth, he had not learned. Not
  one fact in all his experience, had he yet
  imported into his doctrine. This man had
  ploughed, and planted, and talked, and bought,
  and sold he had read books he had eaten and
  drunken his head aches his heart throbs he
  smiles and suffers yet was there not a surmise,
  a hint, in all the discourse, that he had ever
  lived at all.

36
Fate

• Great men, great nations, have not been boasters
  and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of
  life, and have manned themselves to face it. The
  Spartan, embodying his religion in his country,
  dies before its majesty without a question. The
  Turk, who believes his doom is written on the
  iron leaf in the moment when he entered the
  world, rushes on the enemy's sabre with undivided
  will. . . The Hindoo, under the wheel, is as
  firm. Our Calvinists, in the last generation, had
  something of the same dignity. They felt that the
  weight of the Universe held them down to their
  place. What could they do? Wise men feel that
  there is something which cannot be talked or
  voted away, -- a strap or belt which girds the
  world.

37

• Savages cling to a local god of one tribe or
  town. The broad ethics of Jesus were quickly
  narrowed to village theologies, which preach an
  election or favoritism. And, now and then, an
  amiable parson. . .believes in a
  pistareen-Providence, which, whenever the good
  man wants a dinner, makes that somebody shall
  knock at his door, and leave a half-dollar. But
  Nature is no sentimentalist, -- does not cosset
  or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough
  and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a
  woman but swallows your ship like a grain of
  dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles
  your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like
  an apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune,
  gravity, lightning, respect no persons. The way
  of Providence is a little rude. The habit of
  snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other
  leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the
  bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda, --
  these are in the system, and our habits are like
  theirs. You have just dined, and, however
  scrupulously the slaughter-house is concealed in
  the graceful distance of miles, there is
  complicity, -- expensive races, -- race living at
  the expense of race.

38
Nature Novus Ordo Seclorum

• Our age is retrospective. It builds the
  sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies,
  histories, and criticism. The foregoing
  generations beheld God and nature face to face
  we, through their eyes. Why should not we also
  enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why
  should not we have a poetry and philosophy of
  insight and not of tradition, and a religion by
  revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?
  Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of
  life stream around and through us, and invite us
  by the powers they supply, to action proportioned
  to nature, why should we grope among the dry
  bones of the past, or put the living generation
  into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The
  sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and
  flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men,
  new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and
  laws and worship.

39
Letter to Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) 8 January
1843 written from Baltimore

• . . .This morning I went to the Cathedral to
  hear mass with much content. It is so dignified
  to come where the priest is nothing, and the
  people nothing, and an idea for once excludes
  these impertinences. The chanting priest, the
  pictured walls, the lighted altar, the surpliced
  boys, the swinging censer, every whiff I inhaled,
  brought all Rome again to mind. And Rome can
  smell so far! It is a dear old church, the Roman
  I mean, and today I detest the Unitarians and
  Martin Luther and all the parliament of
  Barebones. We understand so well the joyful
  adhesion of the Winckelmanns and Tiecks and
  Schlegels.

40
Emersons Theology

• Doctrinal indifferentism
• Suspicion of cult and ritual
• Third article anthropology humanity is divine
  spirit
• Jesus as pioneer
• God as Ground of Being