Critique, Belief, and the Negative Tendencies of New England Transcendentalism

ESQ | V. 66 | 3RD QUARTER | 2020 In his early essay “Spiritual Laws” (1841), the Massachusettsborn Unitarian minister turned Transcendentalist agitator Ralph Waldo Emerson confronted nineteenth-century New England’s divided spiritual experience. On the one hand, Emerson was alive to what he called the “intellectual obstructions and doubts of his age.”1 Among these he counted the “theological problems” that he says beset the region’s “young people,” whom he describes as being preoccupied with “original sin, origin of evil, predestination, and the like.” On the other hand, the Yankee in Emerson remained connected to the “practical life” of his native Commonwealth state. This life, too, qualified as part of what he named our “spiritual estate” (CW, 2:84) Whether “we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the Abolition convention, or the Temperance meeting, or the Transcendental club,” Emerson wrote, and no matter if we were “farmers,” “poets,” “women,” “laborers,” or “children,” we must find that “a little consideration of what takes place around us every day would show us, that a higher law than that of our will regulates events.” “Belief and love” are ours, Emerson seems sure. “The whole course of things goes to teach us faith. We only need obey” (CW, 2:77–81, 84). This was a lesson the writer embraced inand Critique, Belief, and the Negative Tendencies of New England Transcendentalism