Transcendence and Transcendentalism

by

Rev. Joy Atkinson

Presented to the Unitarian

Society of Santa Barbara

February 17, 2008

Ralph Waldo Emerson

©2008 by Rev. Joy Atkinson

Santa Barbara, California

Transcendence and Transcendentalism

“I like the silent church before the service begins…” This quote was inscribed on the back of a pew in the church I attended many years ago in New York City: the Community Unitarian Universalist Church. The words are those of a special hero of mine: Ralph Waldo Emerson. I often heeded the gentle reminder to sit for a while and enjoy the silence. What I didn’t know at the time was the rest of the quote, which was, I’m sure deliberately, left out. The entire sentence is: “I like the silent church before the service begins… better than any preaching.” Although Emerson himself started out as a preacher, a Unitarian minister in a long line of ministers, he gave up his pulpit after only two years, to pursue the career he became famous for—as a writer, lecturer, essayist, and a prime shaper of a uniquely American culture.

About 25 years ago, on a visit to Harvard University, I stood in the very room in which Ralph Waldo Emerson gave his most well-known lecture: the Divinity School Address, given to the graduating class of new ministers in 1838. As I stood there in that surprisingly small and ordinary-looking classroom, I had a profound sense of awe. The Divinity School Address is famous because Emerson was widely condemned for what he said in it, both by the orthodox Trinitarians and by the establishment Unitarians. They were especially upset because Emerson called into question the notion that Jesus performed supernatural miracles: changing water to wine, curing blindness, causing the dead to rise up, multiplying loaves and fishes, and so on. The highly rationalistic older Unitarians of the day were shocked. One of them, Professor Andrews Norton, wrote a rebuttal titled “On the Latest form of Infidelity.” The old guard Unitarians like Norton still believed in the authority of scripture. They just interpreted scripture differently from the orthodox Trinitarians, believing that scripture supports the idea that God is one, not a trinity, and that Jesus was a human prophet. But Emerson dared to suggest that the bible was in error, that the real miracle is in the human heart and soul, and in the world of nature, in the “the blowing clover and the falling rain,” as he put it, and not in the magical feats reported in scripture.

In that famous address, Emerson also alluded to the new, lively philosophical movement that he and others were part of, known as Transcendentalism. This too did not sit well with the proper, rationalistic Unitarians of the time, because Transcendentalism dealt with other, less orderly aspects of human experience—the emotional, the ecstatic, the intuitive.

Today, I’d like to explore the Transcendentalist movement, and especially, the experience of transcendence that the Transcendentalists spoke about and recorded in their prolific journals. I do this because the Transcendentalist movement, with its emphasis on self-reliance, on the primacy of the individual over institutions, helped to shape the American character, profoundly influenced American literature, and had a major impact on our Unitarian Universalist identity as well. It was Emerson who composed the famous line, often quoted in illustration of our rugged American individualism: “whoso would be a man, must be a non-conformist.” Emerson urged American writers to break out of the mold of following European culture and style, and create a distinctly American voice.

I personally credit the Transcendentalists with bringing me to Unitarian Universalism. Back in 1965, in a Freshman English literature class, we were studying the American Transcendentalists, and I was enchanted by their writings and ideas. A student happened to ask the professor whether the Transcendentalists were part of any organized religion. The professor said that most of them were Unitarian. It was the first time I heard that word. Serendipitously, I saw a sign on campus that said “Unitarian Society meets here next Monday.” I went to check it out, and my life was forever changed.

American Transcendentalism was a brief movement of 1830s and 40s, centered mostly around Boston and Concord, Massachusetts. The most well known figures are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Some of the other, lesser-known transcendentalists lights were Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, Orestes Brownson, William Henry Channing, Elizabeth Peabody and Bronson Alcott. Included on the periphery were some well-known writers such as Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman. The Transcendentalists formed little discussion salons and a philosophical club, and for a while they published a journal, The Dial. They wrote for many journals, some lectured widely, some taught, and some of them were social justice activists, working against slavery and for women’s equality, setting up schools for children, advocating for labor reform. Some even participated in experiments in communal living. Many were Unitarians, as I mentioned earlier. They were the sons and daughters of the Boston Brahmans—the Unitarians who formed an elite Boston society.

Some of the leading Transcendentalists were Unitarian ministers—like Emerson, Theodore Parker, Frederick Henry Hedge, and William Henry Channing, nephew of William Ellery Channing, who is often called the founder of American Unitarianism. The young Transcendentalists found the Boston Unitarianism they were reared in to be cold and overly rationalistic. They called its intellectual center, Harvard Divinity School, an “ice house,” and Emerson pronounced that Boston Unitarianism was “corpse cold.” The younger generation of Unitarians took the religious freedom that their parents and forebears fought so hard for, and ran further with it than the older generation was comfortable with. They sought a more emotionally fulfilling, less formal and Bible-oriented religion. Emerson, who was weary of what to him was the empty ritual of serving communion, resigned his ministry after two years because the congregation insisted on the communion rite. Those who remained ministers made significant reforms in their churches; they did away with pew rentals, eliminated the distinction between minister and congregant, often held conversations instead of giving formal sermons. William Henry Channing even got rid of the traditional, massive, high New England pulpit, and came down into the pews for his conversations.

The root word of that six-syllable mouthful, Transcendentalism, is "transcendence." The Transcendentalists believed in an inherent sense of morality in the human soul, and in a reality behind the ordinary world. Emerson called it “the Oversoul.” This reality, they said, occasionally breaks into our awareness, and we experience transcendence. They believed that we can each experience first-hand this reality, which is deeper, wider, and more essential than our ordinary day-to-day lives. Through this awareness we can feel, not just understand intellectually, but feel and know, that we are one with all that is. The experience of transcendence for the Transcendentalists took precedence over formal creeds, religious rituals, traditions, scriptures and ecclesiastical authority. As Emerson put it in the Divinity School Address, “It is an intuition, it cannot be received at second hand.” Because of this focus on self-reliance and against tradition and received authority, the Transcendentalists came under heavy criticism, even from the Unitarians of their day, although eventually their ideas quietly seeped into mainstream Unitarianism. Transcendentalists also brought to Unitarianism, and to American culture, the ideas of Eastern religious traditions, like Buddhism and Hinduism, which emphasize cultivating this first-hand religious experience.

The focus on religious experience over tradition and scripture was called heresy and infidelity in the Transcendentalists’ day, but it is accepted today among Unitarian Universalists. It is in fact named as the first source of inspiration in our Unitarian Universalist statement of principles. As that statement says, we draw inspiration from "Direct experience of that mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life."

The experience of transcendence, as the word implies, lifts us beyond our small selves. Transcendence connects us to something larger than our individual, personal concerns. It renews us; it restores balance and a sense of awe and wonder in our lives. It is the best antidote that I know of to the cynicism, and the emotional and spiritual fatigue that we are prone to in the modern world.

In the 1950s, psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote a book on the transcendent experience, titled Religions, Values and Peak Experiences. Maslow preferred to call it a “peak” rather than a “religious” experience, which he felt was a way to make it more accessible to a modern understanding. Maslow said that some people are peakers, and others are not. Although I would agree with much of what Maslow says about peak experiences, to the notion that some are peakers and some are non-peakers I say “hogwash!” We are all peakers, or at least potential peakers! Most of us have had transcendent, religious, peak experiences—whatever we choose to call them—though we may not necessarily recognize them as such. In the Building Your Own Theology class that I frequently teach, there is often a mixture of theological points of view: atheists, theists, agnostics, pagans, humanists, liberal Christians and Jews, UUS practicing Buddhism, and so on, and through the sharing of peak experiences in that class, I have found that all of us can find within our lives such transcendent moments, however fleeting. Such experiences often have many of the following characteristics, described by Maslow and others: an ineffable quality—the experience is hard to express in words, a feeling of timelessness, a sense of a loss of ego boundaries, of a deep connectedness with one’s surroundings. The experience is also fleeting, and has what some have called a noetic quality—you have a sense that you have seen a glimpse of truth, of what reality really is.

I would like to try to describe one such experience of mine. Back in 1970, when I was in graduate school at Hunter College in the Bronx, I maintained an apartment with several friends. The apartment was in a gray brick building, wedged in between other brick buildings and flanked on one side by the elevated subway. Late one evening, in this less-than-romantic setting, I was sitting in the kitchen sipping coffee, idly stringing small beads into a necklace, and conversing with a close friend, Mitch, who was back visiting New York from his first year at Starr King seminary in Berkeley—the school I was about to enter that fall. He and I were discussing rather intently some theological questions. We had been carrying on this intellectual exploration for some hours. It was getting quite late. After a while, Mitch rose and walked into another room. I resumed stringing beads quietly.

Suddenly, I noticed that the beads seemed to be shining peculiarly, and that they looked more colorful than before. I blinked, looked up, and moved my eyes around the room. The entire kitchen scene, which I thought I knew so well, looked aglow with a vividness and intensity I had never noticed. As I looked at the ordinary objects in the kitchen that I normally took for granted, seeing them in an indescribably new way, my eyes came to rest on Mitch, who had somehow appeared in the doorway. Mitch especially looked aglow, radiant, (here’s where words fail and poetry, metaphor has to take over) radiant with a kind of inner light or energy that I then realized is always part of the being that Mitch is. I felt a merging, a oneness with Mitch and with everything around me. There really was no “me” in the usual sense. I was acutely aware of being one with the universe. This was not an intellectual conclusion; it was a felt reality.

I felt as if an unseen presence, for want of better words, an energy or radiance which is locked up in everything and is usually blocked from our perceptions, was revealing itself to me. I had the distinct sense that this truth, this reality, is always there, but with all our deadlines, dates and details in our day-to-day lives, we miss it! And indeed, the great religions of the world proclaim that the truth is around us but we usually overlook it. “To seek it,” said a Zen Buddhist master, “is like looking for an ox when you are riding on one.”

Moments of transcendence like this seem to just come to us, unbidden, but I believe we can create an increased potential for them to occur. By clearing the decks in our lives, taking time to just be, instead of always rushing around accomplishing things, we may invite a transcendent moment, a deepened awareness. Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nat Hanh says you also need to empty yourself of the expectation that something special will happen, since it can get in the way of being fully present in the moment. This is particularly hard for us impatient modern westerners to do—letting go of our expectations.

You can go into nature, up a hill, a mountain, by a lake or the ocean, or to a simple garden, a park, a little grove, or even seek a quiet corner indoors. Once there, all you need do is just BE. Take in the sights, sounds, and scents, be open and receptive, breathe deeply. As they say in the Soto Zen Buddhist school of practice, "you only need to sit." This is not a couch potato type of sitting; it is a sitting that is alert and aware. Thich Nat Hanh says that you can also adopt this open and receptive frame of mind while lying down, walking, washing the dishes, even running, though it takes practice.

“Perhaps/ the truth depends on a walk around a lake,” writes the poet Wallace Stevens of the transcendent, creative experience, in his poem Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. “Perhaps,” he continues, “there are times of inherent excellence.”

Speaking of a walk around a lake, and to return briefly to the Transcendentalists before I close: a few summers ago, I had the chance to walk around Walden pond in Concord, the lake made famous by Henry David Thoreau, who went to live simply and intentionally on its shores for two years, and wrote about his experience in his most famous book. It was another time in my life filled with a sense of awe and reverence, as I visited the site of Thoreau’s cabin, went to pay my respects at the gravesites of Emerson and Thoreau, and went to the old house, now a museum, where Emerson and his family lived, not far from Walden pond. I stood at these sacred sites, and contemplated the contributions of the Transcendentalists—that little group of thinkers and writers who in a few short years made a big contribution to American literature, philosophy, and culture, and to the religious movement we call our own.

I close with a quote from Henry David Thoreau, who in this journal entry spoke of the lasting value of the transcendent experience:

Our ecstatic states, which appear to yield so little fruit, have this value at least: though in seasons when our genius reigns we may be powerless for expression, yet, in calmer seasons, when our talent is active, the memory of those rarer moods comes to color our picture and is the permanent paint-pot, as it were, into which we dip our brush…Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them: for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them. Their truth subsides, and on cooler moments we can use them as paint to guild and adorn our prose.

Benediction

Two quotes of Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Go out into a garden and examine a seed; examine the same plant in the bud and in the fruit, and you must confess the whole process a miracle, a perpetual miracle.

The Transcendentalist…believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; [The Transcendentalist] believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy.