page_1082 < previous page page_1082 next page > Page 1082 of romantic writers and reformers including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Amos Bronson Alcott, and others who flourished in New England between 1830 and 1850. More broadly, it is the name given to a religious and spiritual movement of protest and revival that, especially through Emerson's work, has influenced American literature and society ever since. Because the term originally denoted the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and F. W. Schelling, it was applied in New England to those writers  principally essayists and poets  whose affirmation of philosophical idealism was influenced by German thought, either directly or through the mediation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle. This group, of which Emerson quickly became the center, first emerged as a distinctive intellectual force by developing a romantic critique of the Unitarianism in which most of its members had been trained and educated. Unitarianism, which by 1825 had gained a secure ascendancy in eastern Massachusetts, represented a rationalist critique of Calvinist orthodoxy. Unitarians rejected as unscriptural such Puritan beliefs as innate depravity, predestination, and what they felt was the unreasonable mystery of a triune God. They offered in place of these dogmas a "rational" or "liberal" theology stressing self-culture and the human capacity for good. Yet a number of young men entering the ministry at this time, including Emerson, were deeply dissatisfied with this religion of the commercial class, so evidently accommodated to a diminished capacity for faith and so entirely predicated on the dry rationalism of John Locke's empiricism. For a time these young men would be mollified by the presence of the great Unitarian leader William Ellery Channing, who was receptive to European and romantic ideas, spoke of the human "likeness to God," admired the Catholic mysticism of Archbishop Fénelon, and resisted the drift of liberal religion into the formalism of a distinct sect. But it turned out that Channing had merely pointed the way to a confrontation between the younger generation and the conservative forces who defended the "corpse-cold Unitarianism of Brattle Street and Harvard College." Like their Puritan ancestors before them, the transcendentalists sought to replace a religion of forms and observances with a warmer, more intuitive life of the spirit. The besetting sin of the times, the transcendentalists felt, was that when they believed at all, most people believed in the wrong things and deferred their own power to powers outside themselves  that, for example, they made an idol of historical Christianity, when the proper object of faith was surely the truth it conveyed. Indeed, the insurgents held that truth is truth only as it transcends particular times, places, institutions, and persons, a perception that was to motivate the watershed "miracles controversy" of the 1830s. This dispute sharply divided the transcendentalists from mainline Unitarians, led by Andrews Norton, who held that the New Testament miracles were proof of the special divinity of Christ and were therefore the indispensable guarantor of the truth of the Christian gospel. The transcendentalists held that truth needs no external support; it is always its own best evidence. The conviction, for example, that precepts about loving one's neighbor are divine arises from an intuitive recognition of their truth and value, not from a sense that their "inventor" had supernatural authority to impose rules. That the doctrines of Christianity would command assent only as they kept within the bounds of truth seemed to the transcendentalists to imply that Truth is a prior and superior category, timeless, spiritual, and independent of the valuations issuing from human institutions. This argument, which W. H. Furness broached in his Remarks on the Four Gospels (1836), Emerson memorably set forth in his Divinity School address (1838), and Theodore Parker expounded in his Transient and Permanent in Christianity (1841), was thus at bottom an argument  democratic in spirit  about the nature of authority, and its implications extended well beyond the religious context. It followed, for example, that transcendentalists would encourage self-reliance as a means to authentic thought and action. The argument was also a calculated rebuke to what they regarded as a Unitarian idolatry, which by making so much of outward events eighteen hundred years be-  < previous page page_1082 next page >