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4.
Transcendentalism and Asian Religion
That the spiritual awakening of the
1960s belonged to a long series of religious revivals in America
was argued by William G. McLoughlin in his splendid 1978 book, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform. McLoughlin's point was taken up
again by Robert S. Ellwood in The Sixties Spiritual Awakening
(1994), but general discussion of the sixties remains unchanged.
The resistance of received opinion is too strong: the Right refuses
to acknowledge anything positive in the sixties legacy, while the
Left rejects religion wholesale.
In the Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth-century,
the Congregational minister Jonathan Edwards lit up the Connecticut Valley with his call for a renewal of Calvinist
belief. Edwards viewed the ease and slackness of contemporary religious
practice as a falling off from the disciplined vigor of New England's Puritan forefathers. His terrifying 1741
"Fire Sermon" ("Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God") stressed
man's contemptible weakness. But the 1960s spiritual awakening,
as a program of rebellious liberalization, more resembled Transcendentalism
(1835-60), which was influenced by British Romanticism and German
idealism. Its leading figure, Ralph Waldo Emerson, had been a Unitarian
minister (descended from a line of clerics) but resigned his post
because he could not accept the doctrine of transubstantiation in
the Eucharist. More generally, Emerson was repelled by the passionlessness
and rote formulas of genteel churchgoing. His suave father, a Boston minister, had had the social success that
Emerson spurned.
Emerson was reserved and austere, not
unlike the Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, who had a similar
reverence for nature. Emerson transferred his family's religious
vocation to the Romantic cult of nature, a pagan pantheism. His
holistic vision of nature, like that of his friend Henry David Thoreau,
prefigures 1960s ecology: indeed, Thoreau's Walden (1854), a journal of his experiment
in monastic living in the woods near Boston, became a canonical text for the sixties
counterculture.
The most intriguing of the parallels
between New England Transcendentalism and 1960s thought is Emerson's
interest in Asian literature-mainly Hindu sacred texts (the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads)
and Confucius' maxims. India's religious literature had been unknown
to the West until the first European translation of the Bhagavad Gita appeared in 1785, when Sanskrit studies had just begun.
The titles Emerson gave to his poems
"Brahma" and "Maya" were inexplicable to most readers at the time.
(Brahma is the Hindu creator god; Maya is the veil of illusion.)
"Brahma," first published in 1857, was the butt of so many satirical
lampoons that Emerson's publisher begged him, to no avail, to drop
it from the 1876 edition of his selected poems. In his seminal essays
(1836-41), Emerson refers to God as the "Over-Soul," a translation
of the Sanskrit word, atman, meaning "supreme and universal soul." Emerson's "Over-Soul"
would be reinterpreted by Friedrich Nietzsche as the Übermensch, which translators often misleadingly render in English
as "Superman."
Emerson's study of Hindu literature,
which intensified after his first wife's death, was documented by
Arthur Christy, a professor at Columbia University, in his 1932 book, The Orient in American Transcendentalism. Christy inspected borrowing
records at the Boston Athenaeum and Harvard College Library, as
well as Emerson's journals and marginalia, to trace his considerable
reading history of Asian texts. By contrast, Harvard Library records
showed no sign that the undergraduate Thoreau ever withdrew books
on Eastern religion. His transforming knowledge of it came entirely
from his casual reading in Emerson's personal library, through which
he was guided by Emerson's second wife. Among the other Transcendentalists,
Bronson Alcott was most interested in Hindu philosophy, which he
had explored while working as a Philadelphia schoolteacher in the 1830s.
Emerson the sage was the main draw
in the Transcendentalist circle. Harvard students and other young
people flocked to hear him speak or made pilgrimages to his home
in Concord. His warm rapport with and encouragement
of the young came from his own conflicts with authority, from which
evolved his doctrine of American individualism and self-reliance.
Emerson's charismatic appeal as an anti-establishment mentor could
be compared to that of the early Timothy Leary, who warned, "Don't
trust anyone over thirty." (As a college student
in 1966, I witnessed the mob scene around Leary when I traveled
with other students from Binghamton to Cornell University to hear
him speak about LSD and
his new League for Spiritual Discovery.)
In Leaves of Grass (1855), Walt Whitman absorbed British Romantic poetry
as well as Emerson's poems and essays, with their disparate Asian
influences. Whitman's sprawling, pagan epic (expanded over succeeding
decades) openly challenged Judeo-Christianity. After William Blake's
allegorical long poems, Leaves
of Grass is Western literature's closest approximation to the
dynamic form and visionary style of Hindu sacred literature, with
its cosmic scale. Whitman's poem would have tremendous influence
on the 1960s via fifties Beat poetry, in
particular Allen Ginsberg's prophetic protest poem, Howl (1956), which imitates Whitman's long,
incantatory lines. Ginsberg regularly paid homage to Whitman, as
in his amusing 1955 poem, "A Supermarket in California," which addresses Whitman by name.
The limitations in Emersonian Transcendentalism
are suggested by the reservations expressed by both Emerson and
Thoreau to the sexual material in Leaves
of Grass, which, despite their great admiration for the poem,
they felt to be crude flaws. Emerson, who had always disliked the
bawdiness in Shakespeare's plays, actually advised Whitman to purge
sexual references from later editions of Leaves
of Grass. In this respect, the Romantic nature cult of Emerson
and Thoreau betrays their Puritan lineage. They see nature in clean,
rigorous terms but cannot tolerate or encompass nature's stormier
energies-the theme of Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851). Significantly, though he enjoyed choosing hymns
for Sunday services, Emerson did not much care for music. Despite
the call for ecstasy in his poem "Bacchus," he was evidently made
uncomfortable by music's heady rhythms and emotional stimulation.
It was the American 1960s that would complete Transcendentalism-through
the new, barbaric medium of rock.
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