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American Transcendentalism & Ralph Waldo Emerson

American Transcendentalism & Ralph Waldo Emerson. American Transcendentalism. Idealistic philosophy, spiritual position, and literary movement that advocates reliance on romantic intuition and moral human conscience

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American Transcendentalism & Ralph Waldo Emerson

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  1. American Transcendentalism & Ralph Waldo Emerson

  2. American Transcendentalism • Idealistic philosophy, spiritual position, and literary movement that advocates reliance on romantic intuition and moral human conscience • Belief that humans can intuitively transcend the limits of the senses and of logic to a plane of 'higher truths' • Value spirituality (direct access to benevolent God, not organized religion or ritual), divinity of humanity, nature, intellectual pursuits, social justice • Roughly 1830s-1850s

  3. Rises out of two key intellectual and spiritual traditions: • European Romanticism • American Unitarianism Image: Second Church of Boston, where Emerson held first ministerial position

  4. Nature & Romanticism • Nature the key to self-awareness • Open self to nature & you may receive its gifts: a deeper, more mystical experience of life • Nature offers a kind of 'grace'—'salvation' from mundane evil of everyday life • External world of nature actually reflects invisible, spiritual reality • Seek the truth in immediate perceptions of the world Then one can reconcile body and soul (which is part of 'Universal Soul' or 'Oversoul,' source of all life)

  5. The Sublime • Heightened psychological state • Overwhelming experience of awe, reverence, comprehension • Achieved when soul is immersed in grandeur of nature • Sense of transcendence from everyday world “Distant View of Niagra Falls” Thomas Cole Oil on canvas

  6. Roots in American Unitarianism • Emerson a Unitarian minister • Unitarianism - Christian denomination • Broke from strict New England Congregationalism • Reject total depravity of humanity • Believe in perfectibility of humanity • Reject idea of 'angry God'—focus on benevolent God • UNITY of God rather than TRINITY of Father, Son, Holy Spirit

  7. Emerson’s Break from Unitarianism • Too intellectualized, too removed from direct experience of God • Extend and radicalize Unitarian beliefs in benevolent God, closeness of God and humanity • Bring these spiritual ideas to life

  8. William Henry Channing • Transcendentalism is “a pilgrimage from the idolatrous world of creeds and rituals to the temple of the Living God in the soul. It is a putting to silence of tradition and formulas, that the Sacred Oracle might be heard through intuitions of the singled-eyed and pure-hearted.”

  9. Charles Mayo Ellis, “An Essay on Transcendentalism,” 1842 • 'That belief we term Transcendentalism . . . maintains that man has ideas, that come not through the five senses of the powers of reasoning, but are either the result of direct revelations from God, his immediate inspiration, or his immanent presence in the spiritual world.'

  10. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836 • “Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed in the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

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