THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XXVII., No. 159.—JUNE, 1878.
THOREAU AND NEW ENGLAND TRANSCENDENTALISM.[[72]]
There is a story told of an illiterate cobbler who was wont to attend the theological discussions in an Italian university, and who, despite his ignorance of Latin and the points discussed, always discovered the disputant that was worsted. To a friend who expressed surprise at his acuteness he explained that he had noticed that the arguer who first lost his temper was the one who also lost the victory.
The cobbler’s test admits of wide application. The consciousness of truth begets serenity. What chronic ill-temper was there amongst the first Protestant Reformers! And even to-day a Protestant controversial author writes as though he were aflame with rage. The doughty Luther, warmed, possibly, as much with the wine whose praises he so lustily sang as with polemical zeal, hurls such names as sot, devil, and ass at his opponents. He has declined and conjugated the word “devil” in all cases, moods, tenses, numbers, and persons. We can imagine his broad face purple with rage, and his bovine neck throbbing apoplectically, as he pours out the vials of his wrath upon that “besatanized, insatanized, and supersatanized royal ass,” Henry VIII., whose accredited book won for the monarchs of England that most glorious, though now, alas! inappropriate, title, “defender of the Faith.” The meek Melanchthon had the tongue of a termagant; and Bucer must have suggested to Shakspere some of the characteristics of Sir John Falstaff, so far as a command of billingsgate goes; for the wordy combats of that Reformer (Bucer, we mean) recall the conversational victories of the knight of sack.
Morbid irritability and unwholesome sensitiveness were the characteristics of the movement known, rather vaguely, as “New England Transcendentalism,” which, forty years ago, promised America a new life in religion, literature, and art. This ill-temper was a forecast of defeat. It brought the movement under the suspicion of weakness and error. It was a voice crying in the wilderness; it had not, however, the trumpet-tones of strength and conviction, but was rather the puny wail of complaint and despair. We were just ceasing to be provincial and were opening to world-wide influences. Our national boastfulness was hugely developed, and we flattered ourselves that no pent-up Utica contracted our powers. De Tocqueville says of us that we are a nation without neighbors; and this, of course, means that we are without standards or comparisons of excellence, and so, like the Buddhist devotee, we aim after perfection by self-contemplation. New England was filled with schoolmasters who had read Carlyle and translations of the Encyclopædists, and who in consequence began to have doubts about what not even Pyrrho would have considered a doubt, so far as it had any existence in their minds—religion. The stern-eyed old Calvinism which watched them like a detective became inexpressibly odious to them, and they hated “Romanism,” too, with all that contradictoriness that baffles explanation. It was soon discovered that Scotch Puritanism was unfitted for the latitude of New England, though it must be said that the mechanical virtues and the staid habits of the people owed much to that strange fanaticism which, whether happily or unhappily for them, has passed away for ever.
How to throttle Puritanism, and yet preserve its corpse from putrefaction as a convenient effigy to appeal to, became a problem for which no solution presented itself. The American masses even to this day venerate the Pilgrim Fathers, and no amount of historical evidence will shake their veneration for those fierce and ignorant fanatics, whose memory should long ago have been buried in charitable oblivion. It is only the Catholic historian and philosopher that can to-day respect the inkling of truth which they held, and which St. Augustine says is to be found in every heresy and doctrinal vagary. They attempted to make the Bible a practical working code of laws—an idea which to-day would be greeted with laughter by their children, who have long since unlearned veneration for the Scriptures. There is something quite noble, though irresistibly ridiculous, in the old Puritan notions about the Bible. One wonders that they did not revive the rite of circumcision. Protestants are beginning to acknowledge the wisdom of the church in not making the Scriptures as common as the almanac or the newspaper. The whole atmosphere of New England became Judaic. Biblical names of towns abounded. Scriptural names were given to children, with a disregard for length and pronunciation that in after-years provoked the ire of the bearers. The Mosaic law was ludicrously incorporated with the legal enactments of the civil law. The old Levitical ordinances were carried out as far as practicable, and the minister of the town just barely refrained from donning the garments of the high-priest and decorating himself with the Urim and Thummim. This anomalous society survived even the great social changes which were wrought by the Revolution.
Puritanism repressed all individual eccentricities of religious opinion. The boasted independence of Protestantism scarcely ever did exist, except in name. Let a man to-day dissent from the opinions of the sect in which he has been brought up, and he may as well become a Catholic, though that is the crowning evidence of being given over to a reprobate sense. What liberty did Luther give the Sacramentarians? What divergence of opinion did Calvin allow in Geneva? He punished heresy with death. What toleration was there in the Church of England for Dissenters? And there is a quiet but effective persecution kept up in the English church to-day against all “Romanistic tendencies.” There is not a greater delusion prevalent than the lauded Protestant freedom of investigation and liberty of conscience. The Catholic Church, even as judged by her enemies, was never so intolerant as that obscurest of Protestant sects, the Puritans of New England. The harshest charges that have been falsely made against a merely local tribunal, the Spanish Inquisition, are historically proved against the full ecclesiastico-civil tribunals of Massachusetts in the punishment, not of turbulent and contumacious heretics, but of wretched and harmless old women accused of witchcraft. Every Protestant church is a complexus of social and business influences, all of which are cruelly and unfairly brought to bear against any member who uses the Protestant right of private judgment. If he will disjoin himself from church communion, though his interpretation of the Scriptures may assure him that the Father is worshipped in spirit, he is looked upon as an infidel and blasphemer. The petty persecution of the Protestant church is a subject admissive of infinite illustration.
Cramped and crippled by a fierce Scotch Covenantism, what were the aspiring minds of New England to do? A natural idea struck them. Some of the fathers of the Revolution were infidels. That great and glorious light of American history, Benjamin Franklin, who was held up as a model to every New England boy, was a sort of deist. The influence of that man’s example and writings has been one of the most baleful in our country’s history. The fathomless depths of his pride, the cool assurance of his “virtue,” the intensely worldly spirit of his maxims, and his Pharisaical reward of wealth and honors in this world have been imitated by thousands of American youth. That nauseating schedule of “virtues” which he drew up; such hideous maxims as “Rarely use venery” and “Imitate Jesus and Socrates,” which seem to us infinitely more shocking in their cold calculation than a wild debauch or a hot-headed oath; his constant prating about integrity as the high-road to health and wealth; and, in short, the whole wretched man, body and soul, furnished the worst yet widest-copied example of American virtue and success. Add to such influences the schoolboy beliefs in liberty and independence, the solemn Fourth-of-July glorification of individual freedom, the vision of the Presidency open to the humblest youth in the district school, and the gradual weakening of faith in the Bible, brought about by the rapid multiplication of the poor, deistical histories and scientific miscellanies of fifty years ago, and the end of Puritanism was soon predicted. The heavy hand of the clergy was shaken off. The curiosity deeply planted in the Yankee nature looked around for a new religion. At once all the vagaries of undisciplined thought, so long held in silence by Protestantism, burst out in Babel speech. Chaos was come again. If Puritanism had dared, it would have sent the “Apostles of the Newness,” as they were called, to the scaffold or the pillory, or, at the very least, it would have pierced their tongues and branded them with symbolic letters.
And what a revelation! We laugh at the wild rhapsodies of George Fox, and Mr. Lecky, in his late book, England in the Eighteenth Century, has rather cruelly, we think, dragged up Wesley’s and Whitefield’s eccentricities for the laughter of a world which should rather be in tears over the vanishing of such earnestness as both those deluded men had; but the laughter which New England Transcendentalism evokes is hearty and sincere, from whatever side we view it.
In the first place, there is no meaning in the name. The logician knows what transcendental ideas are—the ens, verum, bonum, etc.; and what philosophy calls the transcendental is really the most familiar, as connected with universal ideas. But Transcendentalism in New England was understood to mean a high, dreamy, supersensuous, and altogether unintelligible and unexplainable state, condition, life, or religion that escaped in the very attempt to define it. Dr. Brownson complains that he had much difficulty in convincing a philosopher that nothing is nothing; and we feel much in the same mental condition as that philosopher, for we cannot see how Transcendentalism (a polysyllable with a capital T) is nothing. It is infinitely suggestive. It is any number of things, all beginning with capitals. It is Soul, Universe, the Force, the Eternities, the Infinities, the βία καὶ κράτος. It is Any Number of Greek and Latin Nouns. It is, in fact, a Great Humbug (in the largest kind of caps). Mr. Barnum’s “What-is-it?” is nothing to the Protean forms of Transcendentalism. A fair definition might be, Puritanism run mad. There was a certain method in it, and it would be false to say that the absurdity ever went so far in America as Fichtism or even Hegelism in Germany. The old Puritan leaven was too strong for that; and the Yankee common sense, which not even the wildest flights of Transcendentalism could wholly carry from earth, instinctively rejected the German theories. Not even Comte’s Positivism, which has quite a following in England and an influential organ in the Westminster Review, ever gained ground amongst us. We do not believe in Cosmic Emotion or Aggregate Immortality, ponderous and unmeaning words, to which, listening, a Yankee asks, Heow?