Conway, Very, Channing, The Utopians

1.         Moncure Conway (1832–1907) was one of the few southerners whose life was transformed by his encounter with Transcendentalism. Conway’s life unfolded in ways that proved indicative of the history of Transcendentalism. His life also reveals why Transcendentalism was primarily a northern movement. Conway was a Virginian, born to a wealthy family near Fredericksburg.  His father and brothers were slaveholders and southern sympathizers, but his mother was more liberal in her thinking as Conway also became.  He was first exposed to the ideals of Emerson at Dickinson (1847).  At this time, the South was suspicious of Transcendentalism and especially of Emerson because his egalitarian ideas were a direct threat to an aristocratic, slave-holding society. Conway wrote to Emerson claiming to be “a Natural Radical—to whose soul Radicalism is as air to a bird,” and he lamented his upbringing among conservative southerners.

            It was while studying at Harvard Divinity School that he met Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott.  Conway became an avid abolitionist under the influence of Theodore Parker and William Lloyd Garrison, among others much to the astonishment of his aristocratic southern family.

            Conway became a Methodist minister after graduating from Harvard Divinity School in 1854, but his own religious doubts caused him to become a Unitarian within a year.  He became minister of First Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C., but he was soon dismissed for preaching that slavery was immoral. When he took his new wife to Virginia she scandalized the family when she embraced and then kissed a young female slave.  Conway visited the White House in an effort to convince Lincoln to free all slaves, but although he failed at the time, he led his own family’s escaped slaves to freedom in Ohio.

            Unable to retain the consistent optimism he attributed to Emerson, he eventually abandoned the organized church altogether.       His abandonment of religion was spurred in part by the death of his young son, named Emerson, as Darwin’s disillusionment was also brought about by his 10-year-old daughter’s death.  Conway, like Emerson before him, eventually left organized religion altogether in favor of a secular and scientific version of spirituality.  As he wrote after giving up on the idea of a personal God: “Eyes turned from phantom gods have caught glimpses of a divine life in the evolution of nature, and the mystical movement at the heart of man” (Christianity, 1876).

            Dissatisfied with life in America during this time, Conway moved to England after the Civil War ended.   In London, Conway continued his career as a social activist and public speaker, and soon came to know a wide range of England’s most influential people such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Darwin.  Conway was able to continue his free thinking ideals (abolition, women’s suffrage, complete religious freedom or freedom from religion) in the more conducive and accepting climate in England. To this day, Conway Hall in London’s Red Lion Square stands as a memorial to his influence.

            Conway traveled back and forth between England and America, never feeling quite at home in either place.  After the Civil War ended he ended up in Paris, where he died in 1907.

Like Emerson and Fuller, Conway contributed to the internationalization of Transcendentalist ideas by traveling overseas and publishing works that were widely read throughout Europe: Testimonies Concerning Slavery (1864), The Sacred Anthology: A Book of Ethical Scriptures (1874), and an autobiography that appeared three years before his death.

           

2.         Prophet, poet and madman, Jones Very was, to say the very least, unique among the men of his time. His childhood was unconventional, his college career exemplary, and his religious enthusiasm literate and profound. He in essence went where others feared to tread.[1]   Jones Very was a curious but impassioned zealot, and some, especially Very himself, said that he was chosen by God, while others thought he was just plain insane.  However, what cannot be doubted is that Very produced poems and other writings that helped to solidify a link between independent or artistic thinking and eccentric behavior. 

            Jones Very (1813–1880), was one of those divinely inspired religious madmen who appear at certain points in history and produce a powerful effect on people around them.  It is said that Very moved early in life into the circle of New England intellectuals of the period.  He was born in Salem to first cousins who never married, and his mother was an outspoken atheist.  Very went to Harvard where he won the Bowdoin Prize two years in a row and drew praise for his work as a classicist and for his essays on poetry and religious topics.  Very was influenced by European Romantic writers and by Shakespeare and, soon after his first reading of Nature, by Emerson.  Emerson’s Divinity School Address set forth ideas Very took to heart: “The man who renounces himself, comes to himself,” and the poet should make himself into “a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost,—cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.”  This kind of direct witness and mystical nonconformity became Very’s goal.     

            In 1838, Very underwent his powerful spiritual rebirth: “In my senior year in college I experienced what is commonly called a change of heart, which tells us that all we have belongs to God and that we ought to have no will of our own.”   His crisis and resulting move toward an otherworldly mysticism was so extreme that he was committed for a month to the McLean Asylum for the mentally ill. He said that he had been personally chosen by God.

            After graduation Very stayed at Harvard as a divinity student and tutor of Greek, but by the autumn of 1838, he was encouraging his students that they should “Flee to the mountains, for the end of all things is at hand.”  His writings indicate that at times he clearly saw himself as a

sort of second coming of a Christ-like divinity:

                        I saw on earth another light

                        Than that which lit my eye

                        Come forth as from my soul within,

                        And from a higher sky  (“The Light from Within”)

Very published a book of essays and poems with the encouragement and editorial guidance of Emerson who supported Very’s literary talent.  Emerson personally reviewed Very’s poems and essays in 1841 in The Dial.

            As a writer, Very had what many saw as the audacity to assume God’s voice or point of view. He wrote hundreds of poems in total, many surrounding his intense conversion or “new birth” but also many after he received permission to preach as a Unitarian in 1843.  The general mood of Transcendentalist inquiry often produced this type of intensely personal questioning or transformation of belief.  Very immersed himself in the theology of the Unitarian creed, intending for himself a career as a minister and poet. This can be viewed as an active rebellion against his mother's tenacious defense of atheism. 

            In Very, Emerson saw someone that had gone too far; in Emerson, Very saw someone who was unwilling to go far enough. They were fascinated by each other's company, though their relationship was never entirely placid. Emerson would subsequently refer to Very as his "brave saint.’

            Having learned to avoid those likely to be strongly opposed to his message, Very concentrated on converting those who already had one foot in his camp. However, no one Channing, Emerson, Alcott, Hawthorne, Sophia Peabody or Elizabeth Peabody or in fact anyone was willing to give up all in order to follow him. He was to remain without disciples. He repeatedly returned to the theme of a spiritual life guided by the complete submergence of the individual will into the nature of God. Such a conception of "will-less existence," which has much in common with both mysticism and with other traditional Christian forms of quietist moralism, accounts for what readers have noted as the burning intensity of Very's better poems, and his unusual technique of assuming the voice of God or the Spirit in some of them.   

            Very's poetic reputation had grown to an extent with the increasing importance of the Transcendentalist movement even though he was in many ways closer to earlier Christian and Unitarian thinking than Transcendentalism. He made a much needed contribution to Transcendentalism--a number of poems of stylistic excellence and technical polish which embodied a unique and forceful religious vision.

           

            William “Ellery” Channing (1817–1901) was undisciplined from childhood, and he dropped out of Harvard and then failed once again as a law student.  From an early age, however, he pointed out each flower, bird, or insect that he observed in the natural world around him.

Everyone from Thoreau to the elder Henry James commented on the precise care and attentiveness of his observations. He examined objects with an almost childlike intensity.

He was unable to provide, financially or emotionally, for his wife (the sister of Margaret Fuller) or their five children. She left him and sent the children to relatives at a time when such

a marital separation was almost unheard of among members of polite society.

            Channing sent many of his curious poems to Emerson to publish in The Dial, and Emerson did so while consistently defending Channing’s strange poetry against the criticism of others.   Thoreau called the lyric poems “sublime-slipshod,” by which he seems to have meant vaguely abstract and technically careless.  Edgar Allan Poe was even harsher in his review: “His book contains about sixty-three things, which he calls poems, and which he no doubt seriously supposes them to be. They are full of all kinds of mistakes, of which the most important is

that of their having been printed at all.”

            In 1839, Channing traveled to Illinois, where he lived in a tiny dirt-floored hut and farmed a small plot with his own hands. This effort to get back to the land would later inspire his more famous friend.  Ten years after this time as a hermit, Thoreau and Channing took a trip to Cape Cod, the first of a number of such trips.  Channing was probably Thoreau’s best friend, and in fact, Channing later wrote a letter to Thoreau in which he said: “I see nothing for you on this earth but that field which I once christened ‘Briars’; go out upon that, build yourself a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no alternative, no other hope for you.”

            Channing was not widely known for his poetry, then or now, but he was significantly the first person to write a book-length biography of Thoreau; Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist (1873) which became his most important and widely read work and inspired interest in, and subsequent writing about, his more famous eccentric friend.  Channing lived on until 1901, like Conway, bringing the direct influence of New England Transcendentalism into the dawn of the 20th century.

3.         Transcendentalism was not simply about those major and minor figures who developed and promulgated its doctrines, but it was also about a series of attempts at new ways of living that had a powerful impact on 19th-century thinking. Social instability, as well as the gradual move from agrarian to urban life, led numerous individuals to consider alternative modes of family and social organization. Brook Farm, perhaps the most well-known of these experiments, was founded by George Ripley. Bronson Alcott founded Fruitlands and the Temple School which was a sort of idealized educational plan for living, and then there was Walden Pond; a new version of a kind of utopia.  But, the social experiments of the period also included religious communities and loose linkages of like-minded individuals. The goal was often to find smaller social groupings within the wider society that could produce better methods for sharing property, educating the young, and producing a unified vision of social life.   The idea of utopia goes back to Thomas More and Plato, but 19th-century America contributed its own Transcendentalist versions.

            America has been a land of experimental communities, especially during the 19th century, and a bit of background will help make sense of the Transcendentalist versions of this phenomenon.  In England, in 1772, “Mother” Ann Lee was told by God that “a place had been prepared” for her followers in America. Nine believers broke with the Quakers and founded the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, linking such utopian movements historically with the founding of America itself as a new “promised” land.  Mother Ann and her followers built the original Shaker community in America in the rugged wilds of New York State, in which ecstatic visions led to religious ceremonies of “shaking.” Shakers believed in a universal equality that included non-Christians, African-Americans, and Native Americans, some of whom joined these communities. The Shakers would go on to become one of the most durable communal sects in America, establishing almost 20 communities that included nearly 4,000 members by 1850. Up to 20,000 Americans may have lived in Shaker communities for some period of time.

            Another community, Oneida, founded by John H. Noyes, was another of the most well known utopian communes in American history. Noyes and his followers shared land and property for approximately three decades, and they lived in a single group marriage that included up to 200 individuals, variously called “free love” or “complex marriage.”  Resistant to turning former city dwellers into successful agrarian farmers, they established a number of business concerns, the most famous of which evolved eventually into the Oneida flatware company.

            New Harmony, in both Indiana and Pennsylvania, became another widely influential communal experiment.  The community was founded as early as 1804 by George Rapp and later sold to Robert Owen.  Owen was a visionary Welsh reformer who thought that society might be perfected on the basis of free public education and the abolition of social classes and personal

wealth; the community eventually introduced kindergartens and vocational education.  Its members included a wide range of scientists (especially geologists), artists, authors, and teachers. Noted theologian Paul Tillich is buried there.

            The Nashoba community was perhaps the most directly socialist model for subsequent Transcendentalist experiments at Brook Farm and Fruitlands.  Frances Wright came from a prosperous Scots family and became well known for her essays on social ethics.  While at New Harmony, Wright conceived of a community that might address the wrongs of the slave system, and imagined an environment in which former slaves could become self-reliant through education and so-called “schools of industry” designed to produce funds that could buy freedom and return those who wished to Africa, as Marcus Garvey would advocate later.  In 1826, Wright founded Nashoba, which lasted for four years, in Tennessee, with a handful of whites and 15 free blacks.  The community failed in part because whites remained in control through a system of overseers. Reality did not always live up to such ideals.

            George Ripley’s Brook Farm and Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands became the two most successful Transcendentalist attempts at communal living.  Brook Farm was established by former Unitarian minister George Ripley in 1841 in an effort to create a classless society. The goal was to reduce physical labor through shared activity and thereby advance intellectual and spiritual growth.  Although it began with only 20 members in 1841 it had close to 200 followers by the time it collapsed.  The community succeeded well for a time based on a rational sharing of labor as well as a link between manual and mental labor.  Members worked in return for food and lodging on the farm; additional income was derived from the well-respected school on site.

            Charles Dana, a Brook Farm resident who later became famous as a newspaper editor and secretary of war during the Civil War, said, “In the first place we have abolished domestic servitude. In the second place we have secured thorough education for all, and in the third place we have established justice to the laborer.”  Brook Farm, more than any other utopian experiment in American history, made an impression on social thinkers and intellectuals.              As Transcendentalists, Ripley and his followers believed deeply in the power of each individual to contribute to creating a better world.  Brook Farm, unlike many such communes, preserved a belief in private ownership that did not threaten earlier American ideas about property, the nuclear family, and church or state authority.

            Fruitlands was Bronson Alcott’s idea, an outgrowth of his Temple School.  Like Brook Farm, Fruitlands sought a rural retreat that would challenge industrial capitalism, but this dream lasted less than a year, from 1843–1844.  Fruitlands turned out to be even less practical than Ripley’s experiment: no animal food or animal labor, only the Alcott and Lane families and a handful of eccentrics (a nudist, a cracker-eater), as Louisa May later recorded in her punning

essay, “Transcendental Wild Oats.”  When the impractical male idealists would travel to spread the word about their utopian dreams, only the women and children were left behind to work. “They look well in July,” Emerson himself said after a visit there: “We shall see them in

December.”

            Thoreau’s Walden was also a version of a utopian community even if it was a community of one.  There is a sense in which all utopian communities are experiments, not intended to last forever but, rather, to explore new possibilities for interactions among humans.  The sense of a life of limitless possibilities is strong in all these people. When Thoreau said, in Walden, “I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear,” he was expanding on an idea put forth earlier by Emerson.  These reflections on Walden is a reminder of why so many Americans have been drawn to the ideal of utopian communities, which may not last but have a powerful impact nonetheless. 

            Charles and Myrtle Fillmore envisioned a place where Unity workers and students could go to pray, work and recreate themselves physically and spiritually, so it was natural for the Fillmores to find a place suitable for their “Unity family.”[2]  Hence Unity Village was born.  Home to Unity Institute and Seminary, and Silent Unity among others, Unity Village could be described as an experiment in utopian society.

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[1] http://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/very

[2] James Dillet Freeman, The Story of Unity.