“A Credo”: Margaret Fuller and the Transcendentalists

MARGARET Fuller's essay-letter to William Henry Channing in the summer of 1842, "A Credo," is her most forthright expression of radical Transcendentalism, affirming an evolutionary process of nature and spirit in both metaphysical principle and Biblical symbolism. Fuller directs her well-established understanding of world religions to comparison with Christianity, and she at least implies the possibility of new roles for women in the world's future. In both respects "A Credo" anticipates her major work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century.1 More immediately, however, she offers her testimony at a moment when competing ideas of Jesus stand at the forefront of the Transcendentalist movement and its related network of Unitarian churches. Fuller's statement of natural religion finds private expression but speaks powerfully within a collective history.Though occasionally excerpted in collections of her writing and commented upon by scholars, "A Credo" has lacked a critical text to stand among her works. This documentary project aims to provide Fuller's complete statement as well as position it within the Transcendentalist movement. The manuscript of "A Credo" has been overlooked largely through circumstances of transmission. Channing included a selection in Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852), while also censoring its content. However, by 1883 he valued this statement enough to send it to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, then working on his biography of Fuller, as a central expression of her "Prophetic Spirituality however, he used it only to argue for Fuller as a disciple of the German Romantic writer, "not a Transcendentalist at all."3 With the recovery of Fuller's work since the 1960s, "A Credo" has been excerpted and commented upon several times, whether from manuscript or from Braun. Always its participation in Transcendentalist discourse is assumed. Most recently, a study of Fuller's religious skepticism in this essay has focused on the constraints preventing a woman writer from publishing such views in 1842.4 None of the recent scholarship, however, proposes publication of "A Credo" for current readers.Fuller's testimony is capacious in scale and perspective, open to examination in more than one way. It offers an important sign of Fuller's growing religious feminism by attributing cosmic origins to a "spirit" that is also "angel mother," later referred to again as "she." At the same time, Fuller speaks in primarily masculine terms, even while naming deities and prophets, as she addresses the Transcendentalists through Channing. The shifting narrative perspective of "A Credo" allows these concerns to emerge together. First, she tells in abstract terms of creation, its future unknown to "this being who now writes." As she envisions it, the human race has no binary separation from either nature or spirit, participating in one pantheistic entirety. Nor is gender a significant internal division; soon she speaks as "we," the collective humanity that, like the spirit, breaks through obstruction and achieves knowledge. But then an individual, intensely devotional but self-affirming "I" emerges in her account of Jesus: one who has "no objection to the miracles, except where they do not happen to please me," who finally believes in Christ "because I can do without him." Fuller implicitly acknowledges this first-person voice as a woman's when she specifies the Biblical text for a sermon "if I were to preach on this subject." She has no opportunity to preach, but "A Credo" is her laywoman's sermon by letter.All of the issues evoked in this statement—the miracles of Jesus, the status of the Bible, the power of nature and intuition—had defined the Transcendentalist controversy since 1838, when Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Divinity School Address" characterized the church's "noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus" as "Monster" rather than "Miracle." In response, conservative Unitarian Andrews Norton blasted Emerson's words as the "latest form of infidelity," going on to argue for the Bible's verifiable history of Jesus as the only ground for faith. Emerson made no direct response, but colleagues sprang to his defense by affirming truth as perceived by the individual mind. In "A Credo" Fuller was offering her own perspective on the miracles controversy. Earlier she had reported to Emerson on Norton's latest publications as well as describing the "paper-pellet" aimed by a younger critic at "that peculiarly nervous sect styled Transcendentalists."5 Now, as she wrote to Channing, she composed "A Credo" because a friend had asked specifically for her views of Jesus.6 Fuller's own "infidelity" joined with Emerson and his allies, even as she went beyond them in directly presenting her cosmology of past and future.A long process of self-expression and interchange with others led to her testimony, extending from years before Emerson's manifesto to the moment of writing in 1842. Fuller held a position of quasi-clerical authority among Transcendentalists by this time. The third season of her Conversations with women had just concluded: since 1839 she had been leading path-breaking discussions of the truths suggested by Greek mythology and the fine arts, with frequent cross-reference to the Bible. She had described her first session's theme as a "genealogy of heaven and earth."7 In the same period that such ruminations on divinity and humanity grew, furthermore, Fuller was serving as editor of the movement's Dial magazine, soliciting and judging work on religious and philosophical subjects from both men and women. All of those to be named in this essay had contributed to it. As editor, she reached out widely to the community of progressive belief. In "A Credo" she quoted a sentiment without identifying its author: "The soul must do its own immortal work." Such words might have been Emerson's, but instead they were from a poem by Eliza Thayer Clapp, a woman outside Fuller's immediate circle, as published in the Dial a year before.8"A Credo" epitomizes Fuller's vision during this time of double cultural leadership; moreover, it embodies the personal transformation that she claimed amidst such work. At the opening of the second season of Conversations, in autumn 1840, Fuller wrote to Channing that she had found a warm reception from the group after telling of her "great changes," recent experiences of mystical identification with the divine. In the same letter she also reported on her own writing experiments, "The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain" and "Yuca Filamentosa," which would soon be published anonymously, with her as editor, in the Dial. Along with "Leila," a third piece of experimental fiction, these appeared throughout the months between Fuller's "great changes" and the beginning of 1842, the year of "A Credo." In them she affirmed the power of female forms in the natural and spiritual worlds: woman-identified flowers bursting into bloom under the moon's influence; a grand tree, "Queen of the South," singing to herself in solitary power; the goddess "Leila," her wild hair blowing in the wind, who embodied the Holy Ghost's descent into matter. And the personal immersion in divine nature that Fuller expressed in such work was confirmed by a contemporary journal entry remembering her earlier self-consecration, when after exiting from church she had found illumination in the sun's glory and vowed to sow "new and immortal plants in the garden of God."9 The revelations of 1840 and their expression in fictional and autobiographical form offer a direct prelude to her apparently spontaneous essay-letter of 1842.Significantly, Fuller wrote her creedal statement as a letter rather than in published form, even though the Dial had already offered her the possibilities of anonymous authorship. Any statement that directly claimed kinship with divinity apart from Christ and the church was a scandal, all the more, as Caitlin Smith notes, from a woman.10 But in addition, Fuller was prompted to write "A Credo" by particular friends, both the person who initially asked about Jesus and the letter's recipient, Channing, amidst an ongoing dialogue with him. Letters underlay all of the Transcendentalist movement, as texts with a life of their own. Later writing tearfully from Rome, Fuller told Caroline Sturgis of her need to continue "friendships I had paid for with so much heart's blood," admitting that without letters from her and from Channing, "so many thoughts in the long past seemed to flee from me."11 "A Credo" lies within that body of thought and feeling. Here I will suggest how four epistolary exchanges anticipate its voice and theological ideas: first those with James Freeman Clarke and Emerson, then those with her even more memorable partners, Sturgis and Channing.From the early 1830s, James Freeman Clarke supported her growth in new German learning, later a strong foundation for "A Credo." With him she waxed eloquent about Goethe and asked, of this friend trained to the ministry, about the philosophers who informed the poet. An extended history lay behind his creative output: "Tell me exactly what is meant by Transcendental," and how Reinhold, Schelling, and Fichte had modified Kant. Meanwhile Fuller also reported to Clarke and Frederick Henry Hedge on her year-long immersion in Biblical studies under the guidance of German Higher Critic Johann Gottfried Eichhorn. She thought of creating fictions from its narratives, expressed deep interest in Old Testament history, and found pleasure in "creating a new world" to replace former misconceptions.12 Both her Germanic exchanges and her Biblical immersion are directly felt in "A Credo." Fuller's affirmation of a universe in motion, as both Capper and Steele have commented, derives in particular from Friedrich Schelling, who had argued for the evolution of nature and humanity out of "Absolute Spirit."13 Biblical references, furthermore, contribute vitally to "A Credo," even as she, like Eichhorn, puts in doubt the literal truth of scripture.Fuller's alliance with Emerson was both deepened and resisted through their long correspondence. In 1840 she acknowledged the power of his great work Nature. Having first heard him read it aloud in manuscript, four years later she studied it from the printed page: "I was pleased to feel how much more truly I understood it now than at first. Then I caught the melody now I recognize the harmony. The years do not pass in vain." If "A Credo" was Germanic in its affirmation of nature's divinity, it was also Emersonian. Understanding did not mean agreeing fully with him, however, and especially after the "great changes" later in 1840, she resisted his coolness toward her claims of mystical influence: "All things have I given up to the central power, myself, you also." If she needed to hide her thoughts, she wrote bluntly, "then you are not the friend I seek."14 Early the same year that she composed "A Credo," in his lecture "The Transcendentalist," Emerson famously called the movement around him "Idealism as it appears in 1842." Whether or not she wrote in conscious response to him, her essay found a significantly different position by insisting on the vitality of material forms, not their opposition to the ideal. And where Emerson characterized the Transcendentalist as one who withdrew from the world, waiting for it to offer work worthy of response, Fuller saw both nature and humanity in present and unavoidable engagement. As she had previously written to Caroline Sturgis, she admired "the Realist" rather than the "mere Idealist," who seemed " never to have lived."15 She embraced mystic influence, but also activism.Sturgis, originally Fuller's student, became a friend with whom she could share both kinds of affirmation. From the beginning Fuller's letters expressed an eclectic romanticism, expanding upon Greek and Asian mythology even while agreeing as well about the value of Jesus as a friend and "Man of Sorrows." She quoted Goethe's "Prometheus" about the hero turning his eye directly to the sun rather than the gods who demanded worship: "I honor Thee, Zeus!—Why?" She was a "Realist" in these letters by assuming the need for struggle and conflict, whether with Zeus or with nature, "its sounding cataract, its lava rush, its whirlwind, its rivers generating the lotus and the crocodile." Human growth would likewise progress only amid setback, she declared: "We do not soar up direct like the lark! But our advance is always in the undulating line." Fuller chose this friend as the first to hear of her "great changes" in September, 1840: "I live, I am—The carbuncle is found . And at present the mere sight of my talisman is enough. . . . There can be no 'stern holding back' but all the pure in heart must be seeing God."16 Instead of silence from Emerson, she found confirmation with Sturgis. In both their metaphysics and their expression of religious vocation, Fuller's letters to her directly anticipate the affirmations of "A Credo," where she begins by characterizing "accomplishment" as an overcoming of "obstruction" within the creative spirit and concludes by addressing the spirit's future.Sturgis's partner in hearing Fuller's thoughts, however, was the friend who directly received "A Credo." Her correspondence with William Henry Channing grew out of Dial business, when Fuller solicited contributions from the young clergyman: "I want to know what part you propose to take in the grand symphony," she wrote. "At Newport you prophecied sic a new literature; shall it dawn on 1840 ?" But their relationship deepened as Channing's contribution to the magazine failed after only two issues; grand visions, their letters conceded, were difficult to fulfill. Fuller lamented her own lack of genius and reluctance to publish in the Dial, before sharing with Channing both the composition of her fictions and the "great changes" in her life. Having first claimed her "position as a woman" as an impediment to deep thinking, she burst out in frustration after comparing her personal limitations with the follies of male peers: "I wish I were a man, and then there would be one. I weary in this play-ground of boys. . . . Divine Spirit, I pray thee, grow out into our age before I leave it. I pray, I prophesy, I trust, yet I pine."17 More was at stake for her than finding a way to authority as a woman, as she merged that question with hope for the earth's fulfillment.With particular urgency, her prayer to Divine Spirit anticipated the language and millennial prediction that she would soon advance more systematically in "A Credo." With an emphasis quite different from her romantic prose to Sturgis, she grounded her own prospects and those of Channing in the present state of the Unitarian church. Having listened to a sermon that reduced the new liberalism to an exercise of reason and will, Fuller defended the evangelicals' spirit-based beliefs instead as fuel for vision—and proposed herself to speak for it: "I would now preach the Holy Ghost as zealously as the Unitarians have been preaching Man, and faith instead of the understanding and mysticism instead 19 thereafter he and Fuller shared mutual respect but not close confidentiality. And Channing, up to this moment (in his biographer O. B. Frothingham's words) an "extreme unbeliever," newly focused on the intense love of humanity manifest in Christ's miraculous deeds. Declaring Christ "the perfect man," he claimed a free humanistic religion that would inspire social transformation. "Yes, this is the Christian era," he wrote to his colleague Clarke.20Meanwhile another preacher of Transcendentalist affiliation, Theodore Parker, emerged on the Boston scene that year to further energize the conversation about Jesus. He and Fuller had shared no probing correspondence; indeed, as Caroline Dall later commented, an "intense subtle antagonism" ran between them.21 Nonetheless, Fuller told Channing in April 1841 how much she admired Parker's "grand" sermon "Idolatries," which "wound up with the Idolatry of Jesus." Soon Parker expanded such ideas in "A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity," which amounted to a theological manifesto and resulted in his exclusion from the Unitarian circuit of pulpit exchange. Paring away the institutional and scriptural authority claimed by Christian churches, Parker called merely "transient" their insistence on Jesus' miracles as proof of his divinity. But he celebrated as "permanent" the "absolute, pure morality" of Jesus' teachings, his simple doctrines of love and forgiveness.22 Neither Clarke nor Channing joined in the condemnation of Parker; Fuller, while certainly sharing their toleration of his views in the new chapter of controversy, also held reservations of her own."A Credo" might be considered Fuller's statement of belief to Channing in light of Parker, whose "permanent" Christ had seemed at first a possible resource for change. In early June of 1842, Channing wrote to Parker supporting his proposal of an "Absolute Religion" for all humanity. At the same time, however, he favored a broader reinterpretation of Christianity, claiming Jesus as representative of the "accumulated river of life" in history. And though his postscript backed off from such enthusiasm, his letter first proposed a new "order of the Sons of God," stepping beyond Unitarianism so as to "send forth a spark which shall awake the sleepers, if not stir the dead." Fuller knew of this communication and soon asked Channing to "write how Mr. Parker answered to your proposition." At the same time she challenged him as directly as he had just challenged Parker. The previous Sunday she had been surprised to hear him speak "as if the extent of the Christian triumph proved its superiority."23 As "A Credo" would assert, the "accumulated river of life" that she affirmed had avatars beyond Jesus, both through the ages and toward the future.Her essay also addressed Parker both directly and indirectly. He was the one contemporary she actually named in it, responding to his argument in "Transient and Permanent" against taking figures from the Old Testament as "types" of the new. Parker had claimed that an "oriental story" like that of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son—a thought at which "the flesh creeps with horror"—epitomized the imperfection of ancient traditions.24 In "A Credo," Fuller reclaimed both Abraham and his "prefiguring" of Christ's death, emphasizing her reverence for Jewish history. But this point arose just after she had affirmed belief in the Bible even if it was "a poem," symbolic rather than literal. While Parker upheld the permanence of Jesus' morality, Fuller construed his life as part of a mythic legacy. She opposed Parker's placement of Jesus at the center of an "Absolute Religion" by naming Confucius, Moses, Brahma, Apollo, and Osiris before even considering the Christian messiah. Then finally, in seeking to be "freed" from Jesus and discover further prophets, her evolutionary argument admitted nothing as "Absolute." Each form was material for future manifestation. At the end of "A Credo," the sermon that she proposed to preach might have been addressed to both Channing and Parker, as she offered as its text Jesus' farewell to his disciples. "It is expedient for you that I go away," he assured them, so that the holy spirit could return newly.In her journal from the Emerson house that August, Fuller wrote in effect an epilogue to "A Credo." Walking with Emerson, rereading a summer's worth of letters from Channing, she defended herself to both friends: "I must take my own path. . . Thou, Oh Spirit, hast no regard to aught but the seeking heart. Waldo must not shake me in my worldliness, nor William in the fine motion that . . . has given me what I have of life."25 Unlike Channing, she insisted, she did not need the church. "What is done here at home in my heart is my religion, . . . to see, to think, a faithful sceptic, to reject nothing but accept nothing till it is affirmed in the order of mine own nature. . . . God and the soul and nature are all my creed. . . . I have my church where I am by turns priest and lay man."26 Fuller was drawing conclusions from the summer's earlier statement as it had articulated both the forms of revelation and her own role within it. In vision and dissent, "A Credo" is Fuller's most extended testimony about "God and the soul and nature," articulated by a "faithful sceptic" and self-ordained priest in response to exchanges within the Transcendentalist circle.A Credo27Margaret FullerThere is a spirit uncontainable and uncontained.—Within it all manifestation is contained, whether of good (accomplishment) or evil (obstruction). To itself its depths are unknown. By living it seeks to know itself. Thus evolving plants, animals, men, suns, stars, angels, and, it is to be presumed an infinity of forms not yet visible in the horizon of this being who now writes.Its modes of operation are twofold. First as genius inspires genius,—love love,—angel mother brings forth angel-child. This is the uninterrupted generation or publication of spirit taking upon itself congenial forms.—–SecondConquering obstruction, finding the like in the unlike. This is a secondary generation, a new dynasty, as virtue for simplicity, faith for oneness, charity for pure love.Then begins the genesis of Man, as through his consciousness he attests 2 the laws which regulated the divine genesis. The Father is justified in the Son.The mind of man asks "why was this second development?—Why seeks the divine to exchange best for better, bliss for hope, domesticity for knowledge?" We reject the plan in the universe which the Spirit permitted as the condition of conscious life.We reject it in the childhood of the soul's life.—The cry of infancy is why should we seek God when he is always there, why seek what is ours as soul's through indefinite pilgrimages, and burdensome cultures.The intellect has no answer to this question, yet as we through faith and purity of deed enter into the nature of the Divine it is answered from our own experience. We understand though we cannot explain the mystery of something gained where all already is.3 God we say is Love, if we believe this we must trust him.28 Whatever has been permitted by the law of being must be for good and only in time not good. We do trust him and are led forward by experience. Sight gives experience of outward life, faith of inward. We then discover however faintly the necessary harmony of the two lives. The moment we have broken through an obstruction, not accidentally but by the aid of Faith we begin to realize why any was permitted. We begin to interpret the Universe and deeper depths are opened with each soul that is convinced. For it would seem that the Divine expressed his meaning to himself more distinctly in man than in the other forms of our sphere, and through him uttered distinctly the Hallelujah which his other forms of nature only intimate.Wherever man remains imbedded in nature, whether from sensuality 4 or because he is not yet awakened to consciousness, the purpose of the whole remains unfulfilled, hence our displeasure when man is not, in a sense, above nature. Yet when he is not so closely bound with all other manifestations, as duly to express their spirit, we are also displeased. He must be at once the highest form of nature and conscious of the meaning she has been striving successively to unfold through those below him.Centuries pass,—whole races of men are expended in the effort to produce one that shall realize this idea and publish spirit in the human form. But here and there there is a degree of success. Life enough is lived through a man to justify the great difficulties and obstruction attendant on the existence of mankind.Then through all the realms of thought 5 vibrates the affirmation "This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased" and many souls encouraged and instructed offer themselves to the baptism, whether of water, whether of fire.29I do not mean to lay an undue stress upon the position and office of man, merely because I am of his race, and understand best the scope of his destiny. The history of the earth, the motions of the heavenly bodeis suggest already modes of being higher than his, and which fulfil more deeply this office of interpretation. But I do suppose his life to be the rivet in one series of links in the great chain, and that all these higher existences are analogous to his. Music suggests them, and when carried on these strong wings through realms which on the ground we discern but dimly, we foresee how the next step in the soul's upward course shall interpret man to the universe as he now 6 interprets these forms beneath himself. For there is ever evolving a consciousness of consciousness, and a soul of the soul. To know is to bring to light somewhat yet to be known. And as we elucidate the previous workings of spirit, we ourselves become a new material for its development.Man is himself one tree in the garden of the spirit. From his trunk grow many branches, social contracts, art literature, religion —the second artists, philosophers, law givers, poets, saints.—All these are Anointed, all Emmanuel, all Messiah, so far as they are true to the law of their incorruptible existence, brutes and devils so far as they are subjected to that of their corruptible existence.But yet further, as wherever there is a tendency, a form is gradually evolved as its type, as the rose represents the flower-world and is its queen, as the lion and eagle compress within themselves the noblest that is expressed in the animal kingdom, as the 8 telescope and microscope express the high and searching desires of man, and the organ and orrery his completeness, so has each tribe of thoughts and lives its law upon it to produce a king, a form which shall stand before it a visible representation of the aim of its striving. It gave laws with Confucius and Moses, it tried them with Brahma, it lived its life of eloquence in the Apollo, it wandered with Osiris. It lived one life as Plato, another as Michel Angelo or Luther. It has made gods, it has developed men. Seeking, making, it produced ideals of the developments of which humanity is capable, and one of the highest, nay in some respects 9 the very highest it has yet known was the life of Jesus of Nazareth.I suppose few are so much believer in his history as myself. I believe, (in my own way) in the long preparation of ages and the truth of prophecy. I see a necessity in the character of Jesus why Abraham should be the founder of his nation, Moses its lawgiver, and David its king and poet. I believe in the genesis, as given in the Old Testament. I believe in the prophets, and that they foreknew not only what their nation required, but what the development of universal man required, a Redeemer, an atoner, one to make voluntarily at the due crisis the sacrifice Abraham would have made of the child of his old age, a lamb of God taking away the sins of the world.30 I believe that Jesus came when the time was ripe, that he was peculiarly a messenger and son of God. I have nothing to say in denial 10 of the story of his birth, whatever the true circumstances were in time he was born of a virgin, and the tale expresses a truth of the soul. I have no objection to the miracles, except where they do not happen to please me, why should not a soul so consecrate and intent develope new laws, and make matter plastic. I can imagine him walking the waves and raising the dead without any violation of my usual habits of thought. He could not remain in the tomb, they say, surely not, death is impossible to such a being. He remained upon earth and all who have met him since on the way have felt their souls burn within them. He ascended to Heaven, surely, it could not be otherwise.31But when I say to you, also, that though I think all this really happened, it is of no consequence to me whether it did or not, that the ideal truth such illus11trations present to me, is enough, and that if the mind of St John, for instance, had conceived the whole and offered it to us as a poem, to me, as far as I know, it would be just as real, you see how wide the gulf that separates me from the Christian church.32Yet you also see t