Emerson and Thoreau’s Fanatical Freedom – The New Republic

The Transcendentalists of the title are, specifically, Emerson and his disciple and protg Thoreau. Thoreau was five years old in 1823, when his father, John Thoreau, moved the family to Concord, to take over his brother-in-laws floundering pencil manufacturing business. Emerson would settle in 1834, after a peripatetic youth in Boston and Cambridge. His father had died when he was eight, and his mother supported her large family by running a boardinghouse, ferrying the children between rentals in Boston. Emerson entered Harvard at 14 on a scholarship, was ordained as minister of Bostons Second Church and married at 26, widowed at 27, and famously resigned from the ministry at 29. He was 31 when he moved back to Concord, where his grandfather, the Reverend William Emerson, had been the town minister.

By the time Thoreau and Emerson struck up their friend/mentor relationship in the fall of 1837, Concord was in the throes of an unprecedented transformation. The town had long been a bastion of tradition, where everyone attended the same church. When Emersons grandfather died in 1778, his successor, Ezra Ripley, both took on the leadership of the First Parish Church and married the elder Emersons widow. At the helm of the church for 63 years, Ripley fashioned himself a liberal, who favored calm deliberation. He presided over what Gross describes as a sort of paradox in terms, a rational, orderly awakening, in the early 1810s, as the rest of the country experienced passionate, fiery full-fledged revivals. Life in Concord at that time often tended toward the complacent. As Gross puts it, between 1796 and 1825, whenever Concordians were offered the chance to change, they largely stuck with familiar ways.

But churchgoing changed radically between 1825 and 1850. In 1826, a group of parishionersfeaturing Thoreaus aunts Elizabeth, Jane, and Mariasplit off with a group of others to establish the more conservative, orthodox Trinitarian Congregational Church. The dissenters were not merely after stricter principles. Rather, what they wanteddesired, we might even say, with a hot sensuality hard to come by in Concordwas emotional intensity. Ripley couldnt bring himself to understand this desire: He had a confidence in free inquiry and believed that Concord was enjoying the forward march of intellect and the higher cultivation of moral powers that he had always anticipated from the progress of liberal principles. Ripleys loosening grip, Gross establishes, is a story of liberalisms insufficiency, its tendencydespite its claims to clear-sighted rationalityto remain blinkered regarding values and desires it wrongly assumes everyone else shares.

A similar longing for emotional intensity became a generative force of Transcendentalisma dissatisfied desire for somethingmore. In The American Scholar, a Phi Beta Kappa address Emerson delivered in 1837, he expressed his longing to live in an age of Revolution in which a man might plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide. In the 1842 lecture The Transcendentalist, Emerson aligns the movement with a kind of religious dissent, The Transcendentalist believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy. Thoreau himself sought out extreme emotional experience, and some vivid veins of dissent coursed through his family, especially its women. Thoreau treasured being disliked and cultivated the feeling of frisson it created: Writing in his journal, he notes that there is some advantage in being the humblest, cheapest, least dignified man in the village, so that the very stable boys shall damn you. Methinks I enjoy that advantage to an unusual extent. Church, or at least First Parish, was not the place where a person in Concord could find this kind of frisson.

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Emerson and Thoreau's Fanatical Freedom - The New Republic