Transcendentalism Yesterday and Today: A Collection of Addresses and Sermons on Trancendentalist Themes

By Barry M. Andrews

Transcendentalism isn’t just a phase in Unitarian Universalist history, it is an on-going source of inspiration for Unitarian Universalists today. Drawing upon ancient wisdom and modern knowledge, Transcendentalist spirituality is at once timeless and timely. The Transcendentalists sought to cultivate the soul through such practices as walks in nature, contemplation, solitude, reading, simple living, religious cosmopolitanism, and action from principle. Unitarian Universalists today will find these practices congenial to their own spiritual growth. The Transcendentalists show us that by concerted effort we can become receptive to insights that will elevate our spirit and motivate us in our efforts to make society more just and to protect the natural world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664150133

Barry M. Andrews

BARRY M. ANDREWS is the Minister Emeritus of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Shelter Rock on Long Island. He is the author and editor of numerous books on Transcendentalist authors, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. His most recent titles are Transcendentalism and the Cultivation of the Soul and American Sage: The Spiritual Teachings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (forthcoming), both published by the University of Massachusetts Press. He and his wife, Linda are currently living on Bainbridge Island in Washington State.

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Rev. date: 02/01/2021

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And so in groups where debate is earnest, and especially on high questions, the company become aware that the thought rises to an equal level in all bosoms, that all have become a spiritual property in what was said. They all become wiser than they were.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

This book is dedicated to all those who participated

in conversations with me over the years "on high

questions" raised by the Transcendentalists,

thus becoming wiser than we were.

CONTENTS

Introduction

ADDRESSES

Transcendentalism Yesterday And Today

Transcendentalism: The New Unitarian Universalist Spirituality

Pilgrims Of The Infinite: Unitarian Universalists And Mysticism

The Spirituality Of Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Spirituality Of Henry David Thoreau

SERMONS

Emerson’s Stroke Of Insight

Walden At 150

Extraordinary Generous Seeking

The Moral Arc Of The Universe

Walt Whitman: Poet Of The Soul

Surely Joy Is The Condition Of Life

Nothing Secure But Life, Transition, The Energizing Spirit

Looking For Happiness In All The Wrong Places

Intimations Of Immortality

Heaven Beneath Our Feet

Beyond The Fates

A Secret Vice

Not Possessions But Enjoyment

Saved By Reading

God And The What Of Unitarian Universalism

The Soul Only Avails: Teaching As A Spiritual Act

What Does Humanism Mean Today?

INTRODUCTION

A colleague of mine once said that ministers have only one sermon that they reprise in different ways. Looking back on the sermons I have delivered over the years, I find that many of mine reflect a Transcendentalist viewpoint. Christian ministers frequently cite passages from the Bible as themes of their sermons. As a Unitarian Universalist (UU) minister, I am inclined to draw on the writings of the Transcendentalists rather than the Jewish and Christian scriptures. As you probably know, Transcendentalism has its roots in nineteenth-century Unitarianism. Most of the Transcendentalists were Unitarians, many of them ministers or former ministers. The Transcendentalist movement has been and continues to be an important part of our Unitarian Universalist history and heritage.

No one has expressed this connection better than historian David Robinson, who once said the following:

Like a pauper who searches for the next meal, never knowing of the relatives whose will would make him rich, American Unitarians lament their vague religious identity, standing upon the richest spiritual legacy of any American denomination. Possessed of a deep and sustaining history of spiritual achievement and philosophical speculation, religious liberals have been, ironically, dispossessed of that heritage.

He observes that Unitarian Universalists suffer from a disturbing malaise. On the one hand, we seem troubled by a vague sense of our religious identity and our marginal place among the established American faiths. On the other hand, he notes that Unitarian Universalists—like many other Americans—are searching for a greater sense of spirituality in their lives and churches. Both of these conditions are linked, in Robinson’s mind, with a collective amnesia or ignorance concerning our own very rich and compelling spiritual heritage.

I have often drawn on this legacy not only in the course of my preaching and teaching but also in my own spiritual development or, as the Transcendentalists would call it, my self-culture. Like ancient schools of philosophy in the East as well as the West, the Transcendentalists offered both theory and practice; that is, a vision of wholeness and a means of achieving it. For the students of these schools, philosophy is not a form of discourse but a way of life. It was for the Transcendentalists as well. As Henry David Thoreau remarked in Walden, To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts … but to so love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.

I have found their teaching both timely and timeless. In their writing and their everyday lives, they dealt with many of the same problems we do today—racism, injustice, sexism, materialism, and the disparity of wealth. At the same time, their teaching is a form of perennial wisdom akin to Sufism, Zen, Taoism, and that of mystics East and West. As Emerson put it in his well-known Divinity School Address, This thought dwelled always deepest in the minds of men in the devout and contemplative East; not alone in Palestine, where it reached its purest expression, but in Egypt, in Persia, in China. My life has been enriched by their wisdom and their example.

I was introduced to Emerson and Thoreau as a high school student in the 1960s. I first read Thoreau’s essay Civil Disobedience for an English class. Apparently, I took such an interest that my teacher, Mr. Black, suggested I read another of Thoreau’s essays, Life without Principle. I have been hooked on Thoreau ever since. It was during this time that I began attending the Unitarian Church in Spokane, Washington. I deeply admired the church’s minister, Rev. Rudy Gilbert, who spoke of Emerson so reverently that I started reading Emerson’s essays, including Self-Reliance and The Over-Soul. Coming of age in the Civil Rights era, the writings of Thoreau and Emerson were a kind of countercultural literature, stressing the importance of thinking for myself and acting in accord with ethical principles.

It wasn’t until I was a student at Meadville Theological School that I realized the close connection between Emerson and Thoreau, their involvement in the Transcendentalist movement, and the important role the movement played in Unitarian history and theology. I began to delve more deeply, learning about other members of the so-called Transcendental Club. I began collecting their writings, including journals and letters. I read books by writers such as Coleridge, Plotinus, Montaigne, Wordsworth, Marcus Aurelius, and Carlyle who influenced their thinking. I also studied texts of other spiritual traditions mentioned in their writings, among them the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Confucian classics, and the Enchiridion.

My growing interest in the Transcendentalists coincided with renewed scholarly attention to what has been called the American Renaissance. Major biographies of Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, Alcott, and Peabody were published in the 1980s and 1990s. Serious literary studies were devoted to the movement, some of them written by scholars such as David Robinson, Robert Richardson, Joan Goodwin, Phyllis Cole, and Lawrence Buell, who also happened to be Unitarian Universalists. Several important books were written on the social activism of the Transcendentalists and the role they played in bringing attention to Eastern religions and philosophies.

As a newly fledged minister and religious educator, I began teaching classes and offering workshops on Transcendentalism and the Transcendentalists, especially Emerson and Thoreau. During a year of interim ministry at the Community Church of New York in 1987, I attended a class at All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church taught by Richard Geldard, author of several books on Emerson, called Emerson as Spiritual Guide. As a result, my approach to Emerson and the Transcendentalists shifted. Not only were they important historically but they also were valuable guides for us today in our own religious journey. Just as other traditions offered wisdom and spiritual practices, so too did the Transcendentalists.

I sought to express this in my own writing, first in a paper titled Roots of Unitarian Universalist Spirituality in New England Transcendentalism and soon after that Thoreau as Spiritual Guide, published by Skinner House. A companion volume, Emerson as Spiritual Guide, followed in 2003, the year of the Emerson bicentennial celebration at the General Assembly in Boston. John Buehrens, then the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) President, invited me to chair the Emerson Bicentennial Committee, which included noted scholars like Robinson, Richardson, Goodwin, and Simmons, among others. The committee produced worship and educational materials for adults and children and a museum exhibit and guidebook, commissioned an anthem for church choirs, offered a series of lectures that were reprinted in the Journal of the UU Historical Society, and presented a program at the annual General Assembly attended by over one thousand people.

In the years that followed, I edited anthologies of the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, published by Skinner House, in addition to offering classes and workshops at my congregation on Long Island and elsewhere. In 2010, I served on the Margaret Fuller Bicentennial Committee, which honored Fuller with a program at the General Assembly that year. After my retirement from the ministry in 2011, I taught an online course for the Starr King School for Ministry on Transcendentalist spirituality, which led to the publication of Transcendentalism and the Cultivation of the Soul by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2017. Most recently, I have written American Sage: The Spiritual Teachings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, soon to be published by the same press.

My most recent books were addressed to a general audience of spiritual seekers. Readers are aware that I am a Unitarian Universalist minister and that Transcendentalism was an offshoot of nineteenth-century Unitarianism, but I was not explicit about its relevance to contemporary Unitarian Universalism. This book offers a selection of addresses and sermons I have given in recent decades dealing with Transcendentalism and Transcendentalist themes. As with all my writing on the Transcendentalists, I have tried to make their ideas understandable and relevant to educated readers and congregants who might be unfamiliar with their terminology, literary allusions, and historical background. In this book, I am addressing Unitarian Universalists more directly.

As you will see, I have given most attention to three members of the movement—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. Emerson and Thoreau are popular today for several reasons, including the depth of their wisdom, the quality of their writing, and the widespread availability of their books, journals, and letters. Margaret Fuller, for a long time ignored, has been gaining recognition as a foundational feminist, public intellectual, cultural critic, and political activist. All her writings—her books, letters, and newspaper columns—reflect the same Transcendental idealism that motivated Emerson, Thoreau, and others in the Transcendentalist movement.

The addresses in this volume are taken from conferences, workshops, and classes I have led. There is necessarily some repetition in covering the same ground. But in each case, I have approached the subject of Transcendentalism and the teachings of Emerson and Thoreau from a slightly different angle of vision. As for my sermons, some are biographical in nature; others explore Transcendentalist themes, such as living more simply, the importance of nature, the value of solitude and contemplation in today’s world, the need for social action, and the nature of Transcendentalist spiritual practice.

The lives and teachings of the Transcendentalists do not appeal to everyone. They will be the first to say that people must find and follow their own spiritual path. Some Unitarian Universalists today criticize Emerson and Thoreau for their emphasis on self-reliance based, I will argue, on a misunderstanding of what they mean by the term. Others believe them to be relics of the past, elitists who offer few answers to contemporary problems. And there are some who find inspiration and insight in other spiritual traditions. I encourage them in their religious seeking. At the same time, I strongly feel that Transcendentalist spirituality—while it shares many of the goals and practices of other traditions—is nevertheless uniquely Unitarian Universalist in its origins and aims. It has much to offer those today who are seeking an ever-richer, deeper spiritual life.

As I point out in one of the addresses in this volume, the Transcendentalists laid the foundations of a liberal spirituality. Contemporary philosopher Ken Wilber insists that the most pressing political issue of the day, both in America and abroad, is a way to integrate the tradition of liberalism with a genuine spirituality. He points out that liberalism, a product of the European Enlightenment, came into being as a critique of traditional religion. Giving rise as it did to secularism, this development left religion largely in the hands of the conservatives.

Thus, on the one hand, we have liberals who champion civil liberties and human rights, often to the exclusion of religion. On the other hand, we have conservatives who embrace communal standards based on religious tenets that are restrictive and exclusive. Can we not find a spiritual liberalism? Wilber asks. [A] spiritual humanism? an orientation that sets the rights of the individual in deeper spiritual contexts that do not deny those rights but ground them? Can a new conception of God, of Spirit, find resonance with the noblest aims of liberalism? Can these two modern enemies—God and liberalism—in any way find common ground? Conservative spirituality will continue to divide and fragment the world because people will only be unified if they are willing to convert. What we need, in Wilber’s view, is a liberal spirituality that affirms individual differences and the right of private judgment in religious matters. The living legacy of Transcendentalism offers us just this kind of liberal spirituality.

My personal life has been enriched by the teachings of the Transcendentalists. Many people who have attended my workshops and classes over the years have felt the same way. Quite a number of them have formed study circles to continue to search for keys to well-being and enlightenment in the Transcendentalists’ writings. If I have been a catalyst for them in their spiritual practice, I am humbly grateful for having had the opportunity to perform that role.

ADDRESSES

TRANSCENDENTALISM

YESTERDAY AND TODAY

For the past thirty years, I have been preaching, writing, and teaching classes on topics relating to Transcendentalism and its major figures, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Transcendentalism is a part of my spiritual inheritance inasmuch as the Transcendentalist movement was an outgrowth of Unitarianism in the early years of its formation and continued to be a major influence in its subsequent development. It has been a vital part of my ministry to make contemporary Unitarian Universalists not only aware of the importance of Transcendentalism historically but also consider the ways in which the teachings of Emerson, Thoreau, and other Transcendentalists might continue to enrich the spiritual lives of Unitarian Universalists today.

In my view, Transcendentalism is not a fly in amber, a relic of the past, but more akin to the bug in the table that Thoreau described in the closing pages of Walden, hatching from an egg deposited in the living tree many years previously. Who knows, Thoreau wrote, what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree … may unexpectedly come forth amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

Transcendentalism hasn’t been buried quite so deep in the American psyche as the bug in Thoreau’s table. People have been aware of the Transcendentalists—Emerson and Thoreau in particular—for a very long time. Their works are still widely read and taught in our high schools and colleges. But it’s my impression that people don’t take them as seriously as they might. When Thoreau celebrated the possibility of personal transformation as he did in the passage I just cited, he was not just being rhetorical or poetic; he actually meant what he said, namely, that awakening to a more spiritual life is possible for us—for you and me—even in the most unexpected ways and mundane of circumstances.

Many writers, from their day to ours, have sought to date the demise of the Transcendentalist movement. Caroline Healey Dall, a second-generation Transcendentalist, thought it ended with the death of Margaret Fuller in 1850. But Transcendentalism was more than a literary and social movement that petered out in the years leading up to the Civil War. It was and continues to be at the core of what religious historian Leigh Eric Schmidt calls the spiritual left in America, a development predicated on the distinction made between religion and spirituality, a distinction drawn in large part by the Transcendentalists in dissociating themselves from Protestant Christianity. In differentiating between the two, the Transcendentalists came down on the side of spirituality as opposed to religion. In doing so, they gave rise and credence to the uniquely American phenomenon of seeker spirituality.

I’m aware that it makes some scholars nervous to talk about the spirituality of the Transcendentalists. Many, I suspect, will prefer to restrict discussion of the Transcendentalists to their literary and historical context. But if we consider Transcendentalism to be a viable spiritual tradition as I do, then we should no more limit discussion of the teachings of Emerson and Thoreau to the religious and social milieu in America before the Civil War than we will the teachings of the Buddha, Lao-tzu, or Epictetus to the historical conditions of their own times.

Transcendentalism never was nor aspired to be a school in the manner of the Stoa of Zeno, the Academy of Plato, or the Garden of Epicurus. The Concord School of Philosophy, which flourished between 1879 and 1888, was as close as it ever came to being one. Emerson eschewed disciples and admonished his would-be followers to find their own spiritual path. Yet the Transcendentalists continue to exert a powerful influence as Schmidt attests in his book Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality. It’s not my intention to trace this history, only to suggest that just as Emerson and Thoreau were considered to be spiritual guides to readers and audiences in their own day, we might think of them in the same way today.

I think we will all agree that Transcendentalism is easier to describe than to define. Emerson himself described it as well as anyone. In an article for the Dial magazine, he wrote:

This spirit of the time is felt by every individual with some difference … to one, coming in the shape of special reforms in the state; to another, in modifications of the various callings of men, and the customs of business; to a third, opening a new scope for literature and art; to a fourth, in philosophical insight; to a fifth, in the vast solitudes of prayer.

As his description suggested, Transcendentalism was a diverse movement, and I do not have the time or the talent to do it justice here today. In my own writing and teaching, I have focused primarily on Emerson and Thoreau for the reason that they are the most widely recognized and influential of the Transcendentalist authors. A more complete picture will have to wait for a later time.

The defining characteristic of Transcendentalist spirituality is an intuitive epistemology that emphasizes the Reason, or intuition, as opposed to the Understanding, or knowledge derived through the senses. We are spiritual beings not because we have been persuaded by scriptures and creeds or convinced by miracles but because we have an innate capacity to perceive spiritual truths. George Ripley—a former Unitarian minister who, along with his wife, Sophia, founded the Brook Farm community—summed it up this way:

They are called Transcendentalists, because they believe in an order of truths which transcends the sphere of the external sense… . Hence they maintain that the truth of religion does not depend on tradition, nor historical facts, but has an unerring witness in the soul… . [T]here is a faculty in all … to perceive spiritual truth when distinctly presented; and the ultimate appeal on all moral questions is not to a jury of scholars, a hierarchy of divines, or the prescriptions of a creed, but to the common sense of the human race.

Transcendentalist spirituality is essentially mystical. It privileges moments of awakening and enlightenment over the monotony of everyday life. In that they are ecstatic and transcendent, such moments are characteristic of William James’s classic description of mystical experiences. They are insights into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect, in James’s words. They are authoritative yet defy expression in ordinary language. They come unbidden and cannot be sustained for long, but they seem to be glimpses into the realm of the eternal and the real as opposed to the actual, illusory existence we lead in the temporal world. Our faith comes in moments, Emerson wrote. [O]ur vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.

Thoreau offered us an example of such moments in this passage from his journals:

There comes into my mind such indescribable, infinite, all-absorbing, divine, heavenly pleasure, a sense of elevation and expansion and I have had naught to do with it. I perceive that I am dealt with by superior powers. This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence which I have not procured myself. I speak as a witness on the stand, and tell what I have perceived. The morning and the evening were sweet to me, and I led a life aloof from society of men. I wondered if a mortal ever knew what I knew. I looked in books for some recognition of a kindred experience, but, strange to say, I found none. Indeed, I was slow to discover that other men had this experience, for it had been possible to read books and to associate with men on other grounds.

The maker of me was improving me. When I detected this interference I was profoundly moved. For years I marched to a music in comparison with which the military music of the streets is noise and discord. I was daily intoxicated, and yet no man could call me intemperate. With all your science can you tell how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?

Such revelations are, in their view, naturally occurring and not supernatural events, universal in human experience, and therefore available to everyone. While the Transcendentalists continued to use religious language, they reinterpreted it to mean what Carlyle termed Natural Supernaturalism. For Emerson and Thoreau in particular, God is not a personal being but an impersonal force or law transcending all but imminent in each. The natural world is not so much created as manifested—produced as Emerson said—in the same way that a tree puts forth leaves. Thus, the nature of God could be intuited from the contemplation of the natural world without and the religious sentiment within, dispensing with a reliance on the Bible as the source of religious authority.

By way of contrast with Protestant Christianity—including first-generation Unitarianism—the Transcendentalists proclaimed what they called the New Views. But these views, they acknowledged, were neither unique nor original. As Emerson admitted in his lecture The Transcendentalist, "The first thing we have to say respecting what are called new views here in New England at the present time, is, that they are not new, but the very oldest of thoughts cast in the mould of these new times. Although they had adopted the term itself from the writings of Immanuel Kant, they viewed Transcendentalism as a version of what Emerson scholar Robert D. Richardson and others have called the Perennial Philosophy."

While the Transcendentalists identified to some extent with certain Christian mystics, they found greater affinities with Greek and Roman philosophy—the Neoplatonists and Stoics in particular—the Orphic and Hermetic traditions, pagan religion, and later on Sufism and the teachings of the Hindu Upanishads. As examples of the Perennial Philosophy, all these traditions testify to the universal nature of spiritual truths, to a collective experience of humanity that has everywhere come to similar conclusions about the human condition and about our access to the Divine, the Mind, or as Emerson puts it that ethereal sea, which ebbs and flows, which surges and washes hither and thither, carrying its whole virtue into every creek and inlet which it bathes.

It would be a mistake to suggest that the Transcendentalists merely cobbled together a form of spirituality from bits and pieces of their reading of these and other traditions, along with a smattering of Romantic literature and Kantian philosophy. Their spirituality—as much as that of other mystics and sages—was based on conclusions drawn from their own experience. In their reading, they found confirmation of their views and evidence that, indeed, theirs were not new, but the very oldest of thoughts.

In 1835, Emerson devoted a section of his journal to what he called the First Philosophy, the fundamental principles of the spiritual life. He came to the following conclusion:

We walk about in a sleep. A few moments in the year, in or lifetime, we truly live; we are at the top of our being; we are pervaded, yea, dissolved by the Mind; but we fall back again presently. Those who are styled Practical Men are not awake, for they do not exercise the Reason; yet their sleep is restless. The most active lives have so much routine as to preclude progress almost equally with the most inactive… .

We have an obscure consciousness of our attributes. We stand on the edge of all that is great yet are restrained in inactivity and unconscious of our powers… . We are always on the brink of an ocean of thought into which we do not yet swim… . Much preparation, little fruit. But suddenly in any place, in the street, in the chamber, will the heavens open, and the regions of wisdom be uncovered, as if to show how thin the veil, how null the circumstances. As quickly, a Lethean stream washes through us and bereaves us of ourselves… .

What a benefit if a rule could be given whereby the mind, dreaming amid the gross fogs of matter, could at any moment East itself and find the sun. But the common life is an endless succession of phantasms; and long after we have deemed ourselves recovered and sound, light breaks in upon us and we find that we have yet had no sane hour. Another morn rises on mid-noon.

Given that we experience, from time to time, moments of awakening, when the heavens open and the regions of wisdom are revealed, we are faced with two important questions concerning the spiritual life. First, how do we summon and sustain these moments of awakening? And second, how do we live during the times in between? Emerson was hardly alone in posing this problem.

Many people have had experiences similar to what Emerson has described. I venture to say that many of us here in this room have had moments saturated with meaning, times when we have felt especially alive and aware and at one with nature and the universe. Such experiences may come at any time and in any place—in the street, in the chamber as Emerson said. They may come unexpectedly or at the end of a long period of preparation. They may come as flashing insights into the nature of reality or subtle inklings and intuitions of something beyond, something larger than ourselves.

When we have experiences such as these, it seems as though we’ve been aroused from a deep lethargy, and now we feel alive again and strangely powerful. Who wouldn’t want to live life on such a level? These moments do, after all, represent the high points of our lives, times when we have lived with greater intensity and passion, when we have felt deeply connected with others and with the forces that govern the universe. They are intuitions into the nature of things, glimpses of unlimited possibilities, and visions of a beautiful and winged life.

The mundane tasks of everyday existence seem to stand in sharp contrast to such moments as these. The realities of life include grocery shopping, committee meetings, rebellious teenagers, martial problems, and periods of depression, as well as those all-too-infrequent times of ecstasy and bliss. It also seems that much of contemporary culture is inimical to living life on a higher plane. Ours is, after all, a very materialistic society based, in Emerson’s phrase, on the lucrative standard. The distractions of everyday life, the demands of work, and the responsibilities that go with the roles we assume as parents and breadwinners always seem to trump the siren song of the spirit.

In his lecture on The Transcendentalist, Emerson posed this dilemma as the problem of Double Consciousness:

The two lives, of the understanding and