Preacher, Prophet, Exile, Sainthood of Theodore Parker

                             

                                                   Rev. Theodore Parker in 1855.

Theodore Parker was born on August 24, 1810 in Lexington, Massachusetts.  His large family had deep roots in New England.  His grandfather was the Captain Parker who commanded the militia on Lexington Green in the opening skirmish of the American Revolution.

He was scholarly and devout but lost both parents and his seven of his nine siblings by the time he was 27, mostly to that scourge of the era, consumption (tuberculosis.)  The losses confirmed his rejection of Calvinist orthodoxy.

As a youth he was unable to afford tuition at Harvard, so he read the entire curriculum on his own.  He dallied as a school master and toyed with the idea of becoming a lawyer before he settled on becoming a minister.  After mastering Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, theology, church history, and biblical studies on his own, Harvard Divinity School admitted him even without an undergraduate degree in 1834.

After graduating, Parker married and was ordained by the small West Roxbury congregation.  The light duty of a small congregation allowed Parker time to study more on his own.  With his introduction to German historical Biblical criticism, his views began to evolve away from the generally accepted Unitarian theology.

                                    Young Parker while he still had hair.

First, he began to question the historical validity of miracles in the Old Testament.  That lead to questions about Christ’s miracles and a new view that Jesus was simply more divinely inspired than most men—although divine inspiration was open to all—and that his teachings were great not because they came from God, but because their authority was based on truth.  By the end of the decade his written speculations along these lines were beginning to cause ripples.

Parker naturally fell in with the emerging Transcendentalists.  He attended early meetings of the Club and was soon contributing to their seminal journal The Dial.  Like others in the group, he was influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  After the scandal of Emerson’s Divinity School Address, which he heard in person, he was drawn into the controversy that arose after Unitarian traditionalist Andrews Norton launched his furious assault on Emerson’s infidelity.  He soon published his own defense of Transcendental liberalism in the guise of commentary by a “member in the pews”.  The pamphlet, The Previous Question, cemented Parkers reputation as a leading voice of a new movement.

                           

                                         Parker was drawn into the orbit of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists.

On May 19, 1841 Parker summed up his evolving views in an ordination sermon for Charles C. Shackford at the Hawes Place Church in South Boston, much as a generation earlier William Ellery Channing had launched Unitarianism as a distinct religious movement in the United States at the ordination of Jared Sparks in Baltimore. A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity is now considered a foundational document of the evolving Unitarian faith.  But at the time it caused a scandal. 

Most Boston area preachers believed Parker had abandoned Christianity altogether. He became the target an informal boycott of pulpit exchanges. While his Roxbury parish loyally stood by him, Parker went on the offensive with well attended lectures in Boson, which he collected and published as A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion in the spring of 1842. Soon the informal boycott of pulpit exchanges led to an 1843 attempt to force Parker to resign from the Boston Association of Congregational Ministers, whose members were all Unitarians.   He steadfastly refused to do so and accused his colleagues of trying to impose a creed.

Later in 1843 Parker and his wife briefly escaped the growing controversy by making a European tour, during which time he began to mull social inequality and the nature of Democracy.  When he returned, he began to infuse his sermons with topics of social reform as well as theological radicalism.  Whether the topic was temperance, the rights of workers, or the evils of slavery this new rabble rousing only increased hostility against him by his peers.

In 1844 John Sargeant, employed by the Beneficial Fraternity to preach at a missionary chapel for immigrants, exchanged pulpits with Parker and was reprimanded by the Ben Frat board.  He resigned in protest.  Less than a month later, in December, it was Parkers turn by rotation among all of the members to preach the weekly Thursday Lecture sponsored by the Ministerial association at First Church.  Parker delivered a blunt rebuke of Unitarian orthodoxy, The Relation of Jesus to His Age and the Ages.  The association transferred management of the lecture series to First Church so that Parker would never again be called to speak by rotation.

In January of 1845 James Freeman Clarke, one of the most esteemed Boston ministers and a theological opponent of Parker, decided that his fellows had gone too far in trying to impose conformity and invited Parker to exchange.  Fourteen of the leading families of The Church of the Redeemer resigned in protest, putting Clarke’s ministry in peril.  It would be the last time any Boston minister extended an invitation to exchange.

But Parker’s radicalism did have supporters in the pews in Boston.  They rented the Melodeon Theater to house weekly worship services in 1845.  The rest of the year he preached in the Theater on Sunday morning and in Roxbury that afternoon.  By December the group decided to form an independent congregation and call Parker.

Theodore Parker filled the seats of the Boston Music Hall, second venue for his 28th Congregational Society.

On January 4, 1846, Theodore Parker was installed as the minister of the 28th Congregational Society of Boston, a congregation created for the sole purpose of providing a platform for the maverick, outcast Unitarian and fiery abolitionist in the heart of the Hub of the Universe.  The distinguished Unitarian ministers of Boston were outraged.  Probably even more so when they learned that he broke with precedent and preached his own instillation sermon, The True Idea of a Christian Church—which could only be interpreted as an in-your-face challenge to their moral authority.

Although the core group of three hundred or so supporters who underwrote the new congregation was largely Unitarians, the new congregation was not considered a Unitarian Church, but a Free Church open to all and unbound by any dogma.   Soon upward of 1000 people were regularly attending Parker’s Sunday sermons and Wednesday evening lectures on social, political, and scientific issues.  When that venue became too crowded, services were moved to the Boston Music Hall and attendance doubled. 

Parker could be considered the first pastor of a mega church.  And like the leaders of modern mega churches, he used every medium at his disposal to spread his radical gospel.  Although banned from the Unitarian press, he published articles regularly in both Boston and national periodicals and edited his own journal, the Massachusetts Quarterly Review.  His sermons were collected and published in popular collections and he regularly churned out books on theological, moral, and reform issues.  When he was not speaking from his own pulpit, he lectured widely.  By the 1850’s he was one of the most famous men in America, adored by his followers and cordially hated by his enemies.

Parker on the lecture stump in New York City.  He was one of the most in demand speakers in the U.S.

If the local Unitarian worthies thought that Parker was trouble before, his prominent new pulpit only provided him with opportunities to go even further, particularly on social justice issues.  Parker espoused a new American industrial democracy which he proclaimed was “of all the people, by all the people, for all the people”—a phrase latter borrowed by Abraham Lincoln who read several collections of Parker’s sermons.  To this end he advocated numerous social reforms including free public education, penal reform, and support for the emerging Women’s Rights movement.  But his greatest attention was turned to the mortal flaw that kept industrial democracy form truly flourishing—slavery.

He had already denounced the Mexican War as an attempt to expand slavery and led Boston opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.  He was a minister at large to the Black community for the Abolitionists and as chair of their Vigilance Committee arranged for support and abetted the escape of fugitives.  He personally harbored at least two in his own home.  In 1855 he was indicted by a Federal Grand Jury for conspiracy to violate the Fugitive Slave Act.  Although his popular support in Boston led to the eventual dismissal of the charges, he was branded an enemy of the South and worked with a pistol on his desk to defend himself from constant threats on his life.

Parker was one of the secret 16 abolitionists who funded John Brown in Kansas and one of the very few to publicly defend him after the Harper's Ferry Raid.

Parker was now in league with the fieriest of abolitionists including William Lloyd Garrison.  With the outbreak of guerilla warfare between pro-slavery and Free Soil partisans in Kansas, Parker raised money to buy weapons for the Free State militias, including arming a firebrand named John Brown.  When Brown came to Boston to plead for support for a plan to foment a slave rebellion he was one of the secret committee that helped finance and arm Brown’s failed Harper’s Ferry Raid in October 1859.  Parker was one of the few to publicly support Brown, penning John Brown's Expedition Reviewed a public letter defending Brown’s actions and the right of slaves to kill their masters.

By that time Parker was exhausted.  His always fragile health had began to deteriorate two years earlier.  The strain of his tireless abolitionist efforts and a packed schedule of preaching and lecturing took a toll.  The tuberculosis that had killed so many in his family was wracking his body.  He had to give up preaching in January 1859. 

He and his wife sought relief with a cruise to the Caribbean during which time he wrote a long autobiographical letter and final confession of faith to his former congregation which was published as Theodore Parker’s Experience as a Minister.

The old establishment was not prepared to forgive or forget.  Knowing Parker was critically ill and likely dying, the 1859 annual meeting of the Harvard Divinity School Alumni Association rejected a motion to extend personal sympathy for his suffering.  

Parker and his wife continued on their journey to Europe.  On May 10, 1860 Parker died in Florence, Italy.  He was buried in the Strangers Cemetery, the final resting place of stranded, exiled, or expatriate Protestants.  The Boston Ministerial Association declined to send condolences to the widow.

As much as Parker was despised by the old guard, he was already lionized by a whole younger generation of ministers who would go on to lead Unitarianism in the later 19th Century.  His theology broadly trumped a more conventional Christianity and he was held to be the model of prophetic ministry.

A rare, late picture of a bearded Parker illustrates a profile in a popular magazine shortly before illness forced his retirement.

In the modern Unitarian Universalist Association, with its heavy emphasis on social justice, he has become an even more canonical figure. 

Earlier in the 21st Century, a minority movement emerged that wished to tone down “political” action and emphasize congregational autonomy and enriched spiritual content, criticized Parker for his disruptive, un-collegial behavior, his willingness to defy the law and endorse violence, and surprisingly for one of Unitarianism’s deepest theological pioneers, for a lack of spirituality. 

                            

                                        Parker's grave in the Stranger's Cemetery in Florence, Italy.

Those biting gnats did no serious damage to the reputation of the man who inspired Martin Luther King with his words, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”

Emerson's Rhetorical Bomb at Harvard Divinity Became Foundational to U.S. Culture With Murfin Verse

 

A centennial edition of the speech that threw down a gauntlet.

It was a fine Summer Sunday afternoon on July 15, 1838 when fewer than 100 people jammed into a small second floor Divinity Hall chapel at Harvard.  The occasion was the commencement ceremony for the latest crop of Harvard Divinity School graduates.  There were seven that year, six of whom were in attendance.  That was more than enough young men to meet the needs of Unitarian congregations that were clustered mostly in New England.  The class selected the main speaker for the day—a youngish former Unitarian minister now making a name for himself as a lecturer, essayist, and poet.  His heterodox views were well known, but Harvard authorities probably hoped that he would mute them in deference to his old alma mater and prevailing Unitarian sensibilities.

That Ralph Waldo Emerson did not do.

Instead, he read an indictment of Unitarian worship and preaching, which he charged was disconnected from life and drained of spirituality. He went on to a critique of Christianity in general as practiced.  He discounted the miracles of the Bible, and rejected the divinity of Christ, mocking the attention to the person of Jesus as a distraction from his message.  He offered novel alternatives to the authority of the Church—the direct experience of the divine.  It was a clarion call for what might be called post-Christian religion.  There would soon be a name for it—a name Emerson did not particularly like—Transcendentalism.

The young graduates may have been inspired by the challenge Emerson laid before them.  Their professors, the worthies of Harvard, the parents of the graduates, the learned clergy of Boston, and both the denominational and public press were united in outrage, especially when Emerson’s Divinity School Address was published.  Despite his soaring reputation as America’s most significant intellectual and most original philosopher Emerson would be banned from speaking again at Harvard for more than 30 years.

The leading Unitarian journal, The Christian Examiner dismissed Emerson’s comments as, “…so far as they are intelligible, are utterly distasteful to the instructors of the school, and to Unitarian ministers generally, by whom they are esteemed to be neither good divinity nor good sense.”

                                    Harvard professor and historian of American Unitarianism Andrews Norton led the conservative charge against Emerson's perceived apostasy.

Andrews Norton, a professor at Harvard, the recent author of the definitive history of Unitarian thought, and with William Ellery Channing a leading figure in the denomination, led the charge against Emerson and his heresy.  The so-called “Unitarian Pope” responded to Emerson in an address the following year to the alumni of the Divinity School at their Commencement reunion.  His lecture, the Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity, indicted the European philosophers Spinoza, Schleiermacher, Strauss, and Hegel, on whom he blamed transcendental error and refuted Emerson by indirection, without mentioning him or taking explicit issue with his views.

When Emerson’s friend and ally George Ripley answered and refuted Norton in a pamphlet of his own, the controversy erupted on a more personal note and Norton, a daring liberal thinker in his youth, spent most of the rest of his life as a neo-orthodox reactionary to the new theological thinking, and in the process muddied his own reputation.

If the establishment rallied against Emerson and his new-fangled ideas, he had his supporters.  Along with Ripley other ministers offered support including Frederic Henry Hedge, who first convened the meeting of what would become known as the Transcendentalist Club, and rising star Theodore Parker who would come to fame as the preacher of his own proto-mega church and as a fiery abolitionist who was also shunned by the closed club of Unitarian ministers.  Channing, who occasionally attended Transcendentalist Club meetings, while disagreeing with Emerson on some points, refrained from joining the attack on him. 

Emerson also enjoyed the support of the growing salon of intellectuals he gathered around him and who became collectively one of the most significant, if not the most significant, philosophical movements in American history.  These included Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May), the Peabody Sisters, Orestes Brownson, James Freeman Clarke, William Henry Channing (not to be confused with his near-namesake cousin), Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller among others.  Together they would amplify Emerson’s philosophy and imbed it deeply into American culture.

The young ministers who invited Emerson that day and the generations that followed them would themselves become, more or less, Transcendentalist.  Within a generation they supplanted the old establishment and bring Unitarianism itself into conformation with the new ideas.  Which is why Emerson later in life could comfortably return to his old faith home and why Harvard, at long last, forgave their most illustrious son and not only invited him back to speak but elected him to the Board of Overseers.

All is forgiven now at Harvard.  The cramped Chapel where Emerson delivered his address is now named for him and the speech is annually celebrated.

But if the Divinity School Address was simply a revolution in the minor American sect of Unitarianism, it would be, at best, a footnote to history.  But its implications reverberated across American culture and resonate today.  In fact, they resonate with even more urgency and reflect the values of a growing generation that has defined itself as “spiritual but not religious.”  Emerson sounds almost as if he were speaking for them.

So what, exactly, did he say?  Here are some samples. 

In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed more happily. The corn and the wine have been freely dealt to all creatures, and the never-broken silence with which the old bounty goes forward, has not yielded yet one word of explanation. One is constrained to respect the perfection of this world, in which our senses converse. How wide; how rich; what invitation from every property it gives to every faculty of man! In its fruitful soils; in its navigable sea; in its mountains of metal and stone; in its forests of all woods; in its animals; in its chemical ingredients; in the powers and path of light, heat, attraction, and life, it is well worth the pith and heart of great men to subdue and enjoy it. The planters, the mechanics, the inventors, the astronomers, the builders of cities, and the captains, history delights to honor.

But when the mind opens, and reveals the laws which traverse the universe, and make things what they are, then shrinks the great world at once into a mere illustration and fable of this mind. What am I? and What is? asks the human spirit with a curiosity new-kindled, but never to be quenched. Behold these outrunning laws, which our imperfect apprehension can see tend this way and that, but not come full circle. Behold these infinite relations, so like, so unlike; many, yet one. I would study, I would know, I would admire forever. These works of thought have been the entertainments of the human spirit in all ages…

… The perception of this law of laws awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of the world. It is myrrh and storax, and chlorine and rosemary. It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it. By it, is the universe made safe and habitable, not by science or power. Thought may work cold and intransitive in things, and find no end or unity; but the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart, gives and is the assurance that Law is sovereign over all natures; and the worlds, time, space, eternity, do seem to break out into joy.

This sentiment is divine and deifying. It is the beatitude of man. It makes him illimitable. Through it, the soul first knows itself. It corrects the capital mistake of the infant man, who seeks to be great by following the great, and hopes to derive advantages from another, — by showing the fountain of all good to be in himself, and that he, equally with every man, is an inlet into the deeps of Reason. When he says, “I ought;” when love warms him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then, deep melodies wander through his soul from Supreme Wisdom. Then he can worship, and be enlarged by his worship; for he can never go behind this sentiment. In the sublimest flights of the soul, rectitude is never surmounted, love is never outgrown….

… Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, “I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.” But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, “This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man.” The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain…

… Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. As it appears to us, and as it has appeared for ages, it is not the doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love. But by this eastern monarchy of a Christianity, which indolence and fear have built, the friend of man is made the injurer of man. The manner in which his name is surrounded with expressions, which were once sallies of admiration and love, but are now petrified into official titles, kills all generous sympathy and liking. All who hear me, feel, that the language that describes Christ to Europe and America, is not the style of friendship and enthusiasm to a good and noble heart, but is appropriated and formal, — paints a demigod, as the Orientals or the Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo. Accept the injurious impositions of our early catachetical instruction, and even honesty and self-denial were but splendid sins, if they did not wear the Christian name. One would rather be “A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,” than to be defrauded of his manly right in coming into nature, and finding not names and places, not land and professions, but even virtue and truth foreclosed and monopolized. You shall not be a man even. You shall not own the world; you shall not dare, and live after the infinite Law that is in you, and in company with the infinite Beauty which heaven and earth reflect to you in all lovely forms; but you must subordinate your nature to Christ's nature; you must accept our interpretations; and take his portrait as the vulgar draw it…

… Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper defrauded and disconsolate. We shrink as soon as the prayers begin, which do not uplift, but smite and offend us. We are fain to wrap our cloaks about us, and secure, as best we can, a solitude that hears not. I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say, I would go to church no more. Men go, thought I, where they are wont to go, else had no soul entered the temple in the afternoon. A snow storm was falling around us. The snow storm was real; the preacher merely spectral; and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital secret of his profession, namely, to convert life into truth, he had not learned. Not one fact in all his experience, had he yet imported into his doctrine. This man had ploughed, and planted, and talked, and bought, and sold; he had read books; he had eaten and drunken; his head aches; his heart throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet was there not a surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he had ever lived at all. Not a line did he draw out of real history. The true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life, — life passed through the fire of thought. But of the bad preacher, it could not be told from his sermon, what age of the world he fell in; whether he had a father or a child; whether he was a freeholder or a pauper; whether he was a citizen or a countryman; or any other fact of his biography. It seemed strange that the people should come to church. It seemed as if their houses were very unentertaining, that they should prefer this thoughtless clamor. It shows that there is a commanding attraction in the moral sentiment, that can lend a faint tint of light to dullness and ignorance, coming in its name and place. The good hearer is sure he has been touched sometimes; is sure there is somewhat to be reached, and some word that can reach it. When he listens to these vain words, he comforts himself by their relation to his remembrance of better hours, and so they clatter and echo unchallenged…

… Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. Friends enough you shall find who will hold up to your emulation Wesleys and Oberlins, Saints and Prophets. Thank God for these good men, but say, “I also am a man.” Imitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man’s.

Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, — cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Look to it first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and money, are nothing to you, — are not bandages over your eyes, that you cannot see, — but live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind. Not too anxious to visit periodically all families and each family in your parish connection, — when you meet one of these men or women, be to them a divine man; be to them thought and virtue; let their timid aspirations find in you a friend; let their trampled instincts be genially tempted out in your atmosphere; let their doubts know that you have doubted, and their wonder feel that you have wondered. By trusting your own heart, you shall gain more confidence in other men. For all our penny-wisdom, for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted, that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up into the vision of principles. We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had, in the dreary years of routine and of sin, with souls that made our souls wiser; that spoke what we thought; that told us what we knew; that gave us leave to be what we only were. Discharge to men the priestly office, and, present or absent, you shall be followed with their love as by an angel…

… I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty, which ravished the souls of those eastern men, and chiefly of those Hebrews, and through their lips spoke oracles to all time, shall speak in the West also. The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures contain immortal sentences, that have been bread of life to millions. But they have no epical integrity; are fragmentary; are not shown in their order to the intellect. I look for the new Teacher, that shall follow so far those shining laws, that he shall see them come full circle; shall see their rounding complete grace; shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart; and shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy.

 

                           

                                    Emerson about the time of the Divinity School Address.

In reflecting on all of this one lazy Sunday afternoon some years ago, I set down my own thoughts.

Here’s to You, Ralph Waldo

 

You have reached across time

and found me dozing on an afternoon,

reached your hand down

and shaken me by the toe

until I stir bewildered.

 

Wake up! you cry,

the world is waiting to be noticed,

the very autumn air vibrant with miracles,

the incessant sun prying into every dark space

for you, if you will see it,

if you will be it!

 

The deadest of white males,

you have climbed long-limbered

from the pages of a book

splayed open on my desk,

swept your arm wide around the random piles,

            half-read volumes,

half-completed projects,

half-lived life that is my study

and demanded I seize my life,

clear my head of every derivation,

even that from the dust of your own mouth,

and speak at last my own revelation.

 

So, here’s to you Ralph Waldo,

Dreamer,

Darer,

Doer.

 

—Patrick  Murfin

 

From We Build Temple in the Heart, Skinner House Books, Boston, 2004.

A Pencil Maker’s Screed is Still a Manual for Shaking Empires and Bringing Down Tyrants

 

 

On May 14, 1849 an essay called Resistance to Civil Government was published in an anthology called Æsthetic Papers.  It would be a gross overstatement to claim that it immediately shook the world, or even that it attracted much attention at all beyond a narrow audience of New England intellectuals known collectively as the Transcendentalists.  The author was a dreamy and obscure 32 year old sometime handy man for his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and the operator of a small pencil factory. 

The works that would bring Henry David Thoreau a measure of fame and notoriety as a hermit philosopher and naturalist lay in the future.  But despite such an unpromising  beginning the little essay, which would later variously published under the titles  Civil Disobedience, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, and On Civil Disobedience would influence generations yet unborn and helped inspire movements which changed history.

Thoreau was an intellectually curious, somewhat socially inept, son of a local pencil maker of French descent and a mother of established New England stock.  He was born in Concord, Massachusetts on July 12, 1817and was reared in the historic Concord Unitarian church served by Rev. Ezra Ripley until 1841.  When the beloved and liberal Ripley died that year and the pulpit was assumed by a new minister who he considered insufficiently in touch with the divine and over concerned with doctrine, Thoreau resigned his membership and never returned, except for funerals and rites of family and friends.  He remained, however, within the broader intellectual life that encompassed many Unitarian ministers and lay people, and which was the hatching ground for the Transcendentalist movement.

He was educated at Harvard but did not settle into one of the expected respectable careers of law, medicine, ministry or business.  Instead he became a school teacher and tutor—the occupation of a gentleman without other prospects.  After a brief stint at a public school in Concord, from which he resigned because he would not administer required corporal punishment, he and his beloved older brother John began their own Concord Academy in 1838.  The school shocked folks by taking students out of the classroom for frequent walks through the meadows and woods to explore nature and visits to local shops and businesses like the blacksmith where middle class students were shown how things were actually made.  The school ended when John died in his brother’s arms of tetanus in 1842. 

 

                                     Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau's friend, mentor, some-time employer, and landlord at Walden Pond.

Thoreau fell in with Emerson’s circle when the Sage of Concord returned to his ancestral home after his unsuccessful turn at a Boston pulpit.  He became one of the first members of the group that regularly congregated at the philosopher’s home.  Emerson enticed his friends to join him in Concord, and many did.  Others frequently made the short trip from Boston and Cambridge.  Among those regularly in this circle were Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May), the poet Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller (editor of The Dial), Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife Sophia, and Sophia’s accomplished sisters Elizabeth and Mary Peabody. 

Although only a few years older than Thoreau, Emerson became a friend and surrogate father.  He encouraged Thoreau to publish his first work in The Dial and instructed him to start a personal journal.  From 1841-44 he actually lived most of the time in Emerson’s home functioning as a tutor to his children, an editorial assistant for the busy writer, and a handyman. 

Later, he would enter the family pencil business, working side by side with his employees.  He continued this, with the notable exception of his two years at Walden, for most of the rest of his life.  He was on one hand alienated by the distractions of day-to-day business, and on the other quite diligent.  He adopted new methods of pencil manufacture which mixed clay as a binder with graphite for improved stability and longer life, and in his last years pioneered the use of graphite to ink typesetting machines. 

He often spoke of establishing a small subsistence farm to get away from business and concentrate on his writing.  His move to Emerson’s woodlot in April of 1845 was sort of an experimental half-step to that dream.  Emerson agreed to allow Thoreau to build his cabin and cultivate a small garden in exchange for clearing part of the woodlot and continuing to do other chores for the Emerson family.

During the 26 months Thoreau spent mostly at Walden, he worked on the manuscript of an account of an 1839 hiking trip with his brother John while keeping a notebook, as Emerson had suggested, about his experiences and musings.  During his time there he was hardly the recluse of later myth.  He regularly made the short walk into town. 

 A medal commemorating the night he spent in jail issued by the Thoreau  Society.

On one trip into the village in July of 1846, Thoreau had a chance encounter with the local tax collector, who demanded payments for six years in arrears Poll Taxes.  He refused to pay in protest to the Mexican War and the Fugitive Slave Law and was arrested.  He was released the next day when, against his will, his mother paid his arrearage.  He later used this experience as the basis for a lecture at the Concord Lyceum in 1848, The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government, which he amended into the essay published by Elizabeth Peabody in the Æsthetic Papers.

The essay came at a time when members of his circle were becoming increasingly agitated over slavery and particularly its extension into additional territories.  The inevitability that the War with Mexico following the annexation of Texas would bring more slave states into the Union had fueled fierce and vocal opposition from Emerson and most of his friends.  But beyond making speeches and publishing blistering articles, they had not put together any effective opposition to the war or impeded its execution in the slightest.

The Lyceum lecture, delivered as the war still raged, was effectively a gauntlet hurled down at the feet of his closest friends charging them with hypocrisy and complicity in not only the war but the continued existence of slavery itself by not acting positively and personally regardless of the consequences and costs. 

Culturally even the most radical of the Transcendentalists were inheritors of Federalism—the conservative political doctrine that because humanity was inherently wicked it required the constraint of government to uphold public morality and promote common good.  That government was best when conducted by sober, educated, and “disinterested” individuals—a natural aristocracy of virtue to which all sensible men owed allegiance.  By its nature it posited a common, over-riding morality.

Thoreau would have none of it.  It many ways he was the inheritor of the despised democrat Thomas Jefferson.  He distrusted government—all government—and held that by its very nature it was coercive and the agency of more harm than good.  It was Thoreau, not Jefferson as commonly supposed who wrote in the published version of the lecture that:

I heartily accept the motto,—“That government is best which governs least;” and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.  Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe,—“That government is best which governs not at all;” and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.  Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

In this Thoreau went far beyond Jeffersonian agrarian democracy.  Jefferson had believed that the democratic voice of the people was the antidote to tyranny and aristocracy and that from time to time the democratic people would have to “water the Tree of Liberty with blood” to restore a government that respected their rights.  Thoreau had little confidence in democracy which simply by virtue of being ruled by majorities does not also gain the virtues of wisdom and justice. Instead, he placed his faith in individual conscience to oppose tyranny and corruption in whatever guise.

Jefferson was often a theoretical revolutionist.  Thoreau was frank in supporting an immediate upturning of all oppressive government.   It is “not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.”  He acknowledged that revolutions have dire consequences of suffering and expense.  But in the face of an evil as monumental as slavery, any sacrifice and travail was worth it. “This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.”

While he did not appeal for an armed insurrection, he never ruled one out—something his later pacifist admirers overlook or ignore. He did not even seem to recommend collective action of any kind.  Instead he advocated action by each moral individual to refuse to cooperate in any meaningful way with the state which by its very existence fosters slavery and other ills.  He dismissed ordinary political action to achieve change while obeying the law until it is changed as cowardly.  An unjust law, he argued, has no validity and a citizen owed no allegiance to a Constitution that enshrined and enabled slavery.

Thoreau’s refusal to pay the poll tax was an example of that individual action done regardless of personal consequences.  The poll tax supported the machinery of the government of Massachusetts which out of concern for profits and business was complicit in Southern slavery.  He exhorted abolitionists to do the same regardless of the consequences.  In fact, he argued, under such circumstances prison would be the only just home.  He also argued that refusal to pay taxes was a way in which a moral minority might effectively make revolution:

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.… where the State places those who are not with her, but against her,– the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.… Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

In citing his own experience, which cost him only one famous night in jail he complained that, “Someone interfered and paid that tax,” a pointed jab at his friend/benefactor Emerson.

In the end, Thoreau acknowledged that the government in the United States was not as bad as many systems and even had some admirable qualities.  But he insisted it was possible to do better and that there was no reason for blind loyalty to the current system simply because others were worse. 

The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual.… Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government?  Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man?  There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.

 

Thoreau was not the pacifist sometime pained by his modern admirers.  He supported and spoke out in favor of John Brown.

By the time the lecture was transformed to the printed page, the War with Mexico was over.  But the issue of the expansion of slavery that it caused was about to boil over.  The Compromise of 1850 which included the Fugitive Slave Act was about to bring the issue of compliance with unjust laws front and center.  In Massachusetts and elsewhere Abolitionists set out to defy the law in all of its particulars and to shelter runaway slaves, even to rescue them from proper and legal authority.  This was often done with violence.  Thoreau approved of and supported that.  For him it was Civil Disobedience in action, as was the attempt to lead a slave rebellion by John Brown a few years later. 

The dreamy Thoreau was not a pacifist like the Universalist Adin Ballou who expressed similar ideas in Christian non-Resistance in 1846 and broke with former Abolitionist associates like William Lloyd Garrison over support of Brown and violence to end slavery.  Thoreau’s essay gained influence, especially after the publication of Walden in 1852 made him a better known figure.

  

Thoreau's contemporary Universalist pacifist Adin Balou developed the concept of Christian Non-Resistance which later thinkers including Tolstoy and Gandhi would combine with his.

Thoreau’s reputation grew posthumously, especially after his journals and other private writings were published in the late 19th Century.  Walden became required reading in many high school English classes and influenced the emerging counter-culture of the 1960s. 

When the Post Office, at the height of the Hippy movement in 1967 issued a Thoreau commemorative showing his misshapen face and scraggly appearance, it set off a firestorm of invective from the right.  Henry David would have been proud.

The influence of On Civil Disobedience since the writer’s death has been profound and widespread.  The great Russian writer Count Leo Tolstoy, who held the cause of freeing the serfs as dear as Thoreau felt Abolitionism, was an early admirer.  He had also read Adin Ballou.  He was the first to graft Ballou’s pacifism onto Thoreau’s individual revolutionary resistance.

 Via Tolstoy Mahandas Gandhi developed the ideas of Thoreau and Ballou and applied them to a mass movement.

Tolstoy in turn was the gateway through which Mohandas Gandhi was introduced to Thoreau.  He discovered the American while organizing exploited and oppressed Indian workers in South Africa and explicitly acknowledged him for inspiring his first campaigns of passive resistance in his book For Passive Resisters in 1907.  Later as a nationalist out to win independence for his people, Gandhi was not much interested in either Tolstoy’s outright anarchism or Thoreau’s extreme skepticism of government.  It was always his aim to establish a parliamentary democracy on the English model he had long admired.  His interpretation of Thoreau was, however, overlaid with Tolstoy’s pacifism with more than a dollop of Ballou. 

In incorporating Thoreau’s idea of civil disobedience into his philosophy of Satyagraha Gandhi effectively expanded the idea from individual action to a conscious and disciplined mass movement which changed it from being theoretically revolutionary, to being a highly practical strategy.  Not without great cost and sacrifice it ultimately drove the British out of India and gave birth to a nation.

Martin Luther King, Jr. famously encountered Thoreau as a seminarian in Boston.  He later described the experience in his autobiography:

During my student days I read Henry David Thoreau’s essay On Civil Disobedience for the first time. Here, in this courageous New Englander’s refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times.

I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before. Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau’s insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.

Actually, they are a fusion of Thoreau and Gandhi.  But echoes of Thoreau’s call to personal responsibility echo particularly in King’s Letter from the Birmingham Jail which like the New Englander’s Lyceum lecture boldly challenged “good people” to lay aside both fear and the complacent view that the situation will work itself out in the long run and make a personal commitment to moral action.  

 

                     The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized mass civil disobedience coupled with non-violence as a revolutionary strategy.

King emphasized Gandhian non-violence in his campaigns both out of sincere religious conviction and out of the practical conviction that armed violence or rebellion would so awaken the deep seated fears of White Americans rooted in the slave rebellions that they would crush such a rebellion with overwhelming force and wreck terrible collective punishment on his people.  Instead he hoped to use non-violent defiance of Jim Crow laws to provoke violence, over reaction, and mass arrests to gain the sympathy and support of the White Americans, particularly in the North, who would pressure Congress for basic change.  Despite his rhetoric of hoping to win over the hearts of his immediate oppressors, King held little hope for magically transforming hardened Southern attitudes.  As a strategy mass civil disobedience worked extremely well and led to the passage of a series of landmark Civil Rights bills.

Perhaps the most direct heirs of Thoreau’s individual conscious disobedience were the radical Catholic anti-nuclear, anti-Vietnam War, and anti-draft movements epitomized by the likes of the Berrigan Brothers and their raids on Draft Boards and nuclear missile sites.  Along with draft card burning, wide spread refusal of induction, and a movement to refuse to pay war taxes those actions represented just the kind of personal action and self-sacrifice Thoreau was talking about. 

Ironically today perhaps those who most encompass the whole of Thoreau’s message are elements of the far right who share his almost complete distrust of government and especially resonate with his refusal to pay taxes.  A lot of their quasi-libertarian rhetoric has a familiar ring.  Few of those employing it, however, recognize the source.  Of course, some of the movement’s “intellectuals” know about Thoreau and may consciously have internalized his methods, the rank and file has been taught to distrust him because his causes were abolitionism and anti-militarism and expansionism.  Moreover, he was a nature worshiping heathen who inspired the despised environmental movement.  And the religious right has long viewed the whole Transcendentalist movement as the beginning of the downfall of their supposed Christian American utopia and as a nest of Eastern elitist atheism.  So Thoreau will get no chops from them.

You can also see the roots of civil disobedience unhitched from the absolute pacifism of Gandhi and King in many of the world mass movements of the last decades including all of the color coded revolutions in Eastern Europe, the Arab Spring,  Western European anti-austerity movements, and the Occupy Movement and Black Lives Movement (BLM) in this country. 

Today it is being employed worldwide in support of the trapped and besieged people of Gaza and relentless Israeli bombardment and assault which has turned the overpopulated enclave into the world’s largest prison/concentration camp and now a wasteland of destruction.  In the USA that has played out in campus protests and occupations and disruption of graduation events.  These actions have been charged with anti-Semitism and intimidation of Jewish students and faculty.  Although genuine malice has sometimes been exhibited and decades old Palestinian calls for destruction of the Jewish state are heard, the great majority of the participants are moved by the humanitarian crisis, the power imbalance, and the seemingly intractable conflicts over land and safety.

The large pro Palestinian Gaza War protest encampment at Columbia university in New York City became a flash point.  Now the Trump administration is putting the screws to universities, canceling funding, threatening criminal prosecution of students, faculty, and administrators and snatching and deporting students who protested or spoke up in any way.

The protests were managed differently by university administrations and local authorities, but several encampments were forcibly removed and there have been scattered clashes with police but so far none of the more violent attacks on Vietnam era protestors, local Occupy movements, and BLM street confrontations.   But now Trump is turning the full ire and power his maladministration on protestors, universities, and media supporters alike.

Globally these manifestations encompass mass civil disobedience, but not necessarily passive resistance.  They are generally non-violent by preference but not ready to always peacefully accept oppressive attacks.  They share Thoreau’s general skepticism of government and the state but prefer resistance by mass solidarity to isolated individual action.

You have to hand it to him.  One way or another Henry David really started something.