What both contemporary Christians and rational secularists have failed to understand is that justice is the heart of Western spirituality. Not the messiah, not the personage of a wrathful God, not the Commandments, not the Cult of the Virgin, and not the mysteries of the Knights Templar. The bottom line, if you will excuse me that expression, and what leftism of whatever stripe ignores at its own peril, is that this notion of justice on which every critique of authoritarianism depends is not demonstrable through any form of rational procedure. The left's critique always presupposes what can only be called an intuitive understanding of the Good. [...] The tragedy is that in the present context the secular left believes that its advocacy of justice is independent of the spirit, and the Christian right believes its spirituality is functional in the absence of justice. The truth is that there is no spirit in the absence of justice and no justice that is not first spiritual. (17)As he makes evident in this quote and elsewhere, White is interested in connecting what are seen as two irreconcilable camps of Americans—those who believe in the spiritual, and those who trust the rational; those who live through their hearts, and those who live through their heads; those whose ideal society is religious, and those whose ideal society is secular. In contemporary American cultural and political life, White asserts, we have a false dichotomy of reason vs. intuition. He also claims that the tension between reason and intuition—or the rational and the spiritual—is one that is as old as our country.
While White doesn't provide much evidence to support this claim, I've been working through another text that clearly buoys it. Philip Gura's recent work, American Transcendentalism, is a history of our country's transcendental movement that is notable for focusing not on the movement's most remembered and widely-read members—he doesn't beat us to death with Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, that is—but on the more overt social reformers of the group. David Robinson, who reviewed Gura's text in the 2007 edition of American Literary Scholarship, writes, "Gura's narrative of emergence, division, and decline is accompanied by an interpretive emphasis that decenters Emerson and Thoreau and elevates such socially committed Transcendentalists as George Ripley, Orestes Brownson, and Theodore Parker" (5). Gura gives considerable attention to Ripley, Brownson, and Parker, because he traces the intellectual genealogy of the Transcendentalists by focusing primarily on its connection to Unitarianism—Ripley, Brownson, and Parker were all Unitarian ministers, though Brownson converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1840's. (Emerson, of course, began his career as a Unitarian minister, though he rather quickly gave up his post and broke with the church.)
White, who is primarily interested in Thoreau, notes that he was the "inheritor through Ralph Waldo Emerson of European romanticism" (19). This isn't exactly news, of course—most of us learn in high school that American Transcendentalism was heavily influenced by European romanticism. Gura's emphasis, though, is on how that romantic influence made its way to New England in the first place, and so he focuses on early-American religious disputes and the 19th-century popularity among New Englanders—and particularly among Unitarians—of German biblical scholarship. What is notable here—and what connects Gura's text to White's—is that the central religious dispute Gura highlights is nearly the same spirit vs. reason dispute lamented by White. He writes,
The intellectual genealogy of Transcendentalism began in early-nineteenth-century New England among clergymen caught up in unresolved theological battles initiated more than half a century earlier, specifically between "New Light" supporters of the wide-spread religious revivals known as the Great Awakening and their "Old Light" opponents. The pro-revivalists, epitomized by the great theologian Jonathan Edwards, stressed the necessity of an emotional conversion experience, a change of heart that realigned one's priorities from selfishness to selflessness. The anti-revivalists, led by Boston clergyman Charles Chauncy, argued for the primacy of reason in religion and found the New Lights' emphasis on emotional religious experience—a "New Birth"—an insult to human intelligence. To Chauncy and his supporters, religion was a matter of the head and not of the heart. (23)Here, we clearly see that White is justified in claiming that the tension between the "rationalists" and the "spiritualists" is as old as our country itself. This claim appears in his text's introduction, and what I find disappointing about the remainder of his book, is that he doesn't develop in any clear sense his apparent desire to reconcile those Americans who trust in reason with those Americans who trust in faith. Instead, he spends most of the book discussing how difficult it is for Americans to "get outside of," so to speak, consumer culture, and thus keep from being implicated in its injustices, while at the same time remaking American culture in love, and what White refers to as, "Imagination." I can see why White ultimately chose to focus on actions "disobedient" Americans can take to work against consumer culture, but, it seems to me, he could have written a greater book—and ultimately a more useful book—by focusing on what Americans can do to marry spirit and reason and create anew "the world in love," to borrow, as White characterizes it, Hegel's "strange and suggestive phrase" (18).
