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The Legacy of Channing: Culture as a Religious Category in New England Thought*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

David Robinson
David Robinson
Affiliation:
Oregon State University
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Extract

In assessing the importance of William Ellery Channing to his generation, Ralph Waldo Emerson pronounced him “our Bishop” and put in sharp focus what was for him an intellectual problem, and what has remained for us a historical one. It is not the word “bishop” that is problematic, for almost no one disputed the leadership of Channing in the first decades of the nineteenth century, that crucially formative period for our culture. His first biographer, nephew William Henry Channing, noted that he “was everywhere recognized as the most eloquent and effective preacher in Boston,” and after his death Emerson remarked that he “left no successor in the pulpit” (JMN, 1. 470). New Englanders generally recognized him as the key spokesman for the liberal or Unitarian theology, and social reformers of all stripes looked to him with hope to support their endeavors. On the basis of a handful of literary essays and religious polemics, he became, in Sydney Ahlstrom's phrase, “the most influential American religious thinker being heard abroad,” and Robert Spiller noted that in the critical world, he was “among the first American writers to win British critical consideration.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 74 , Issue 2 , April 1981 , pp. 221 - 239
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1981

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References

1 W, 10. 576. These abbreviations will be used for citing the works of Emerson: CW = The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Spiller, Robert E. et al. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1971–)Google Scholar; JMN = The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Gilman, William H. et al. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1960–)Google Scholar; W — The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Emerson, Edward Waldo (The Centenary Edition; Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–4).Google Scholar

2 Channing, William Henry, The Life of William Ellery Channing, D.D. (The Centenary Memorial Edition; Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1887) 300.Google Scholar Further citations from this volume will be abbreviated as Life. Quotations from Channing's works will be taken from The Works of William E. Channing, D.D. (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1875)Google Scholar, and will be abbreviated as Works.

3 Ahlstrom, Sydney, “The Interpretation of Channing,” New England Quarterly 30 (1957) 99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Spiller, Robert E., “A Case for William Ellery Channing,” New England Quarterly 3 (1930) 56.Google Scholar

4 Chadwick, John White, William Ellery Channing: Minister of Religion (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1903) 434.Google Scholar Thomas Wentworth Higginson's remark is also worth noting here: “Channing was for a long time regarded as a pillar of conservatism against Parker, and to be a ‘Channing Unitarian’ was viewed as a stronghold in many a pulpit” (“Two New England Heretics: Channing and Parker,” Independent 54 [22 May 1902] 1234Google Scholar).

5 Ahlstrom, “Interpretation of Channing,” 99.

6 Frothingham, Octavius Brooks, Boston Unitarianism, 1820–1850: A Study of the Life and Work of Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham (New York/London: Putnam's Sons, 1890) 7.Google Scholar

7 Wright, Conrad, The Liberal Christians: Essays on American Unitarian History (Boston: Beacon, 1970) 22–40.Google Scholar See also Ladu, Arthur I., “Channing and Transcendentalism,” American Literature 11 (1939) 129–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a discussion of Channing's differences with transcendentalism. Higginson has noted that Channing was apparently adopting more liberal attitudes regarding Christology near the end of his life, reproducing a letter from his son recounting a late conversation with him. See Higginson, “Channing and Parker,” 1234–36.

8 On Unitarian historiography, see Wright, Liberal Christians, 38–40, and my review essay, “Unitarian Historiography and the American Renaissance,” ESQ 23 (1977) 130–37.Google Scholar

9 This approach to Channing is an outgrowth of an earlier study of Emerson's idea of self-culture, and its Unitarian background. Apostle of Culture: Emerson as Preacher and Lecturer, now in manuscript.

10 Channing later underwent an experience that he labeled at the time a conversion, while tutoring in Virginia after college. But in later life he wrote that “my life may be called, as it truly has been, a process of conversion” (Life, 74–75).

11 William Henry Channing does not specify what text of Hutcheson his uncle was reading at the time, but it is safe to assume that it was An Inquiry Concerning the Originals of Our Ideas of Virtue and Moral Good (1725), hereafter cited as An Inquiry, where Hutcheson introduces the idea of the moral sense, and separates it from the notions of self-love. For an informative discussion of Hutcheson's moral philosophy and its influence see Frankena, William, “Hutcheson's Moral Sense Theory,” Journal of the History of Ideas 16 (1955) 356–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Important selections from his early writings can be found in British Moralists, 1650–1800 (ed. Raphael, D. D.; 2 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon, 1969) 1. 259–321.Google Scholar

12 Hutcheson, An Inquiry, in Raphael, British Moralists, 1. 278.

13 Ibid., 1. 289.

14 Ibid., I. 299.

15 Hopkins, Samuel, The System of Doctrines, Contained in Divine Revelation, Explained and Defended (Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1793) 1. 545.Google Scholar

16 Buell, Lawrence, “Calvinism Romanticized: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Samuel Hopkins, and The Minister's Wooing,” ESQ 24 (1978) 123.Google Scholar

17 Chadwick, John White, Channing's Life and Work. A Sermon (New York: Miller, 1880) 133.Google Scholar

18 For discussions of the Unitarian controversy and Channing's place in it see Chadwick, Channing's Life, 115–48, and Mendelsohn, Jack, Channing: The Reluctant Radical (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971) 132–71.Google Scholar

19 See Cawelti's, John G. discussion in Apostles of the Self-Made Man: Changing Concepts of Success in America (Chicago/London: University of Chicago, 1965).Google Scholar

20 Lasch, Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978) 8–12.Google Scholar

21 Patterson, Robert Leet, The Philosophy of William Ellery Charming (New York: Bookman, 1952) 263.Google Scholar

22 Patterson suggests that A. E. Taylor's concept of “progress in fruition” helps to solve the dilemma (ibid., 266), and his discussion of that concept makes it seem close to the idea of mental perfection as progress that I find in Channing's thought.

23 See Douglas, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977)Google Scholar for an enlightening discussion of popular nineteenth-century views of the afterlife.

24 Mark Twain's Speeches (New York/London: Harper and Brothers, 1910) 117.Google Scholar

25 Twain, Mark, The Washoe Giani in San Francisco (ed. Walker, Franklin; San Francisco: Fields, 1938) 116.Google Scholar Twain's comments are paralleled, in a much different tone, by Ernest Renan, commenting directly on Channing: “It would be a virtuous and orderly people, made up of good, contented individuals; it would not be a great people. … The least objection to Channing's world would be that we should perish of ennui; genius would be unprofitable in it, and great art impossible.” Berthoff, Warner, “Renan on W. E. Channing and American Unitarianism,” New England Quarterly 35 (1962) 87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 Howe, Daniel Walker, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861 (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1970).Google Scholar

27 I have discussed this point at greater length in “Emerson and the Challenge of the Future: The Paradox of the Unachieved in ‘Circles,’” Philological Quarterly 57 (1978) 243–53.Google Scholar J. A. Ward's discussion of the changing nature of Emerson's concept of the conversion experience is also relevant to these issues. See “Emerson and ‘The Educated Will’: Notes on the Process of Conversion,” ELH 34 (1967) 495–517.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 See in particular Whicher, Stephen E., Freedom and Fale: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1953)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Porte, Joel, Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time (New York: Oxford University, 1979).Google Scholar