Transcendentalists continued to think of themselves as Christians

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> An allusion to _Walden_ is a possibility too I guess, but it seems oblique,
> and an interpretive case would need to be made.

Indeed. I don't know if P wants me to run and get my Walden or if it's
only my own reflection in the text. However, let's say for arguments
sake (since we are at the crossroads here) that he intends us to think
about this passage in Walden. 

Thoreau, Henry David. 1817-1862. American writer. A seminal figure in
the history of American thought, he spent much of his life in Concord,
Massachusetts, where he became associated with the New England
transcendentalists and lived for two years on the shore of Walden Pond
(1845-1847). His works include “Civil Disobedience” (1849) and Walden
(1854). And we are advised to read his essay, "Walking" 

He was a student of Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1803-1882. American writer,
philosopher, and central figure of American transcendentalism. His
poems, orations, and especially his essays, such as Nature (1836), are
regarded as landmarks in the development of American thought and
literary expression. 


Now, if we have what I think we have (and this idea is not mine at all,
but is stolen from S~Z-- see the archives for some wonderful posts from
Kieth McMullen on this chapter--and countless others), that is an
Eastern/Western and Above Below, a Christian Indian and Indian tangle,
Thoreau is logical allusion. 

Suppose that Revd WC and/or Pynchon is still looking at christianity and
its many splits and movements as they tangle up and untangle. 

The emergence of the Transcendentalists as an identifiable movement took
place during the late 1820s and 1830s, but the roots of their religious
philosophy extended much farther back into American religious history.
Transcendentalism and evangelical
Protestantism followed separate evolutionary branches from American
Puritanism, taking as their common ancestor the Calvinism of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In exploring their respective
departures from Calvinism we can begin to map out the common ground the
two movements shared.

Transcendentalism cannot be properly understood outside the context of
Unitarianism, the dominant religion in Boston during
the early nineteenth century.

 It would be misleading, however, to say that Transcendentalism entailed
a rejection of Unitarianism; rather, it evolved almost as an organic
consequence of its parent religion. By opening the door wide to the
exercise of the intellect and free conscience, and encouraging the
individual in his quest for divine meaning, Unitarians had unwittingly
sowed the seeds of the Transcendentalist "revolt."

The Transcendentalists felt that something was lacking in Unitarianism.
Sobriety, mildness and calm rationalism failed to satisfy that side of
the Transcendentalists which yearned for a more intense spiritual
experience. 

Perry Miller has argued persuasively that the Transcendentalists still
retained in their characters certain vestiges of New England Puritanism,
and that in their reaction against the "pale negations" of Unitarianism,
they tapped into the grittier
pietistic side of Calvinism in which New England culture had been
steeped. The Calvinists, after all, conceived of their religion in part
as man's quest to discover his place in the divine scheme and the
possibility of spiritual regeneration, and though their view of humanity
was pessimistic to a high degree, their pietism could give rise to such
early, heretical expressions of inner spirituality as those of the
Quakers and Anne Hutchinson. Miller saw that the Unitarians acted as
crucial intermediaries
between the Calvinists and the Transcendentalists by abandoning the
notion of original sin and human imperfectability:

he ecstasy and the vision which Calvinists knew only in the moment of
vocation, the passing of which left them agonizingly aware of depravity
and sin, could become the permanent joy of those who had put aside the
conception of depravity, and the moments between could be filled no
longer with self-accusation but with praise and wonder.



For the Transcendentalists, then, the critical realization, or
conviction, was that finding God depended on neither orthodox creedalism
nor the Unitarians' sensible exercise of virtue, but on one's inner
striving toward spiritual communion with the
divine spirit. From this wellspring of belief would flow all the rest of
their religious philosophy.





Transcendentalism was not a purely native movement, however. The
Transcendentalists received inspiration from overseas in the form of
English and German romanticism, particularly the literature of
Coleridge, Wordsworth and Goethe, and in the
post-Kantian idealism of Thomas Carlyle and Victor Cousin. Under the
influence of these writers (which was not a determinative influence, but
rather an introduction to the cutting edge of Continental philosophy),
the Transcendentalists
developed their ideas of human "Reason," or what we today would call
intuition. For the Transcendentalists, as for the Romantics, subjective
intuition was at least as reliable a source of truth as empirical
investigation, which underlay both deism
and the natural theology of the Unitarians. Kant had written skeptically
of the ability of scientific methods to discover the true nature of the
universe; now the rebels at Harvard college (the very institution which
had exposed them to such modern
notions!) would turn the ammuntion against their elders. In an 1833
article in The Christian Examiner entitled simply "Coleridge," Frederic
Henry Hedge, once professor of logic at Harvard and now minister in West
Cambridge, explained and
defended the Romantic/Kantian philosophy, positing a correspondence
between internal human reality and external spiritual reality. He wrote:

      The method [of Kantian philosophy] is synthetical, proceeding from
a given point, the lowest that can be found in our consciousness, and
deducing from that point 'the whole world of intelligences, with the
whole  system of their representations' .... The last step in the
process, the keystone of the fabric, is the deduction of time, space,
and variety, or, in other words (as time, space, and variety include the
elements of all empiric  knowledge), the establishing of a coincidence
between the facts of ordinary experience and those which we have
discovered within ourselves ....

The religion of which they speak, therefore, exists merely, if it exists
at all, in undefined and unintelligible feelings, having reference
perhaps to certain imaginations, the result of impressions communicated
in childhood, or produced by the visible signs of religious belief
existing around us, or awakened by the beautiful
and magnificent spectacles which nature presents.



Despite its dismissive intent and tone, Norton's blast against
Transcendentalism is an excellent recapitulation of their religious
philosophy. The crucial difference consisted in the respect accorded to
"undefined and unintelligible feelings."

The heresy of the Transcendentalists (for which the early Puritans had
hanged people) was to countenance mysticism and pantheism, or the
beliefs in the potential of the human mind to commune with God and in a
God who is present in all of nature, rather than unequivocally distinct
from it. Nevertheless, the Transcendentalists continued to think of
themselves as Christians and to articulate their philosophy within a
Christian theological framework, although some eventually moved past
Christianity (as Emerson did in evolving his idea of an "oversoul") or
abandoned organized religion altogether.

 On the names, I spell yours Jbore, Jbor, Jay Bore, JBaw, whatever. 

http://www.calaverasredskins.org/CrawfordOrig.html

But those names could be stage names. I mean there seems to be times
when the characters, like Mason and Dixon, but also the kids or the
family adults, get up on stage and fill in the narrative as the RC fades
away, perhaps he's asleep or dreaming or drunk or senile or mad or being
haunted by Mason or whatever, but could those names be ones that the
actors have taken, are all the kids in bed?