Not the main character in the American Transcendentalist Movement, Theodore Parker (1810-1860) was among its most controversial exponents. In his “A Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity,” he upset many of his Unitarian contemporaries in New England. His ideas were an avenue to becoming, as Emerson called him, the Transcendentalists’ Savonarola. Parker was a bright guy, having passed his courses at Harvard without attending classes (couldn’t afford them) and having learned on his own enough of 22 languages to read in all of them. His ideas made Parker an outcast. Do they hold a personal ethical lesson for us more than a century and a half after his death?
The Transcendentalists were part of a general movement away from authoritarian control. Their rise coincided with the literary rise of Romanticism as represented across the Atlantic by poets like Wordsworth. For whatever reasons that serve as a context of both the philosophy and art of the times, there seems to be one that unifies both: An emphasis on Nature very much like that of the Force in Star Wars. Nature was the pervasive divinity. Against the rise of urbanization and industrialization of nineteenth century Western Civilization, movements like Transcendentalism and Romanticism proclaimed the significance of the individual and his direct relationship with such Divinity. That didn’t sit well with the embedded religious thought of nineteenth-century England and America. Even the Unitarians, who themselves were out of the mainstream Christian traditions, became upset by the thoughts of Parker and his like-minded contemporaries.
In that “Transient and Permanent” discourse, Parker addresses two elements as the title suggests. Since he recognized a history of different forms of Christianity, he noted that rituals and forms have changed with sects, but the underlying “essence” of the faith remained. As he writes, “It must be confessed, though with sorrow, that transient things form a great part of what is commonly taught as religion.” He then goes on to say that such transient forms (specific rituals, for example) “are only the accident of Christianity, not its substance. They are the robe, not the angel, who may take another robe quite as becoming and useful. One sect has many forms; another, none. Yet both may be equally Christian.” You can imagine the turmoil such thinking caused in the nineteenth century.
From this let’s glean a point of departure for our own thinking. Going back to Aristotle through Aquinas till now, people have argued over “substance” (or accident) and “essence.” Seems that many of us believe that there is something that underlies what we experience. We want to think that beneath the transient forms there lies something permanent, something of greater consequence, maybe something that, to borrow a line from Dylan Thomas, is a “force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”
Yet, we don’t apply the concept of essence in our daily dealings with one another. It’s the “accident,” the transient that we use when we judge others. We know that members of our species come in many forms, but while we speak of essence, we judge by accident. We ascribe identity to appearance. In short, we see the robes around us, and not the angels they cover.
The Transcendentalists were part of a general movement away from authoritarian control. Their rise coincided with the literary rise of Romanticism as represented across the Atlantic by poets like Wordsworth. For whatever reasons that serve as a context of both the philosophy and art of the times, there seems to be one that unifies both: An emphasis on Nature very much like that of the Force in Star Wars. Nature was the pervasive divinity. Against the rise of urbanization and industrialization of nineteenth century Western Civilization, movements like Transcendentalism and Romanticism proclaimed the significance of the individual and his direct relationship with such Divinity. That didn’t sit well with the embedded religious thought of nineteenth-century England and America. Even the Unitarians, who themselves were out of the mainstream Christian traditions, became upset by the thoughts of Parker and his like-minded contemporaries.
In that “Transient and Permanent” discourse, Parker addresses two elements as the title suggests. Since he recognized a history of different forms of Christianity, he noted that rituals and forms have changed with sects, but the underlying “essence” of the faith remained. As he writes, “It must be confessed, though with sorrow, that transient things form a great part of what is commonly taught as religion.” He then goes on to say that such transient forms (specific rituals, for example) “are only the accident of Christianity, not its substance. They are the robe, not the angel, who may take another robe quite as becoming and useful. One sect has many forms; another, none. Yet both may be equally Christian.” You can imagine the turmoil such thinking caused in the nineteenth century.
From this let’s glean a point of departure for our own thinking. Going back to Aristotle through Aquinas till now, people have argued over “substance” (or accident) and “essence.” Seems that many of us believe that there is something that underlies what we experience. We want to think that beneath the transient forms there lies something permanent, something of greater consequence, maybe something that, to borrow a line from Dylan Thomas, is a “force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”
Yet, we don’t apply the concept of essence in our daily dealings with one another. It’s the “accident,” the transient that we use when we judge others. We know that members of our species come in many forms, but while we speak of essence, we judge by accident. We ascribe identity to appearance. In short, we see the robes around us, and not the angels they cover.
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