The New Transcendentalism: Some Roots And Branches

The New Transcendentalism

In Nature, Emerson introduces us to his experiences of "ordinary ecstasy":

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God....

For the New Transcendentalist, the significance of such moments lies in the way in which they augment an individual's consciousness--endowing it with various degrees of capaciousness. "Transcendence" is not an escape from mortal existence; it is, instead, an expansion and intensification of it.

The revelation Thoreau achieved on Mount Katahdin, a revelation he clearly believed was one of life's "essential facts," stemmed from his acute sense of the inherent strangeness, the fundamental "otherworldliness" of matter. A seemingly paradoxical sentence in Walden precisely explains his experience on the mountain: "Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations"...Thoreau felt the prophetic impulse very keenly...But in Wild Fruits his brand of prophecy manifests itself in a unique manner: by bringing wildness out of the wilderness; or, more properly, by locating wildness within civilization, in "little oases," as he terms them in the book's "European Cranberry" section. In these holy places, these natural temples, each of us is able to implement the Transcendentalist's Imperative [articulated by Emerson in Nature's threshold question: "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?"] by learning life's great lessons ourselves, becoming our own prophet, and not having to rely on the mediated testimony of prophets from preceding generations. [from Bradley P. Dean's "Introduction" to Thoreau's Wild Fruits].

The somewhat casual and imprecise use of the term "prophet" in Transcendentalist writings goes back to the founding generation's reliance upon Christian as opposed to Islamic literature. By contrast, the majoritarian interpretation of the inherited dogma of Muhammad as the "seal" of prophecy obliged Muslim intellectuals and pietists to think much more creatively (if not accurately) about the definition of this term--perhaps none so creatively as Muhyi ad-Din Ibn 'Arabi.

Consequently, the New Transcendentalist is steeped in Islamic literature.

Here is a pair of books a New Transcendentalist would read in tandem:

The Transcendental Club

A brief history.

Thoreauvian Radicalism: A Continuation Of The Prophetic Tradition In The American Grain

H. D. Thoreau is rightly considered to be a "proto-ecologist" or environmentalist. And yet, the fairly recent "discovery" of this aspect of the multi-dimensional HDT makes me wince. Not because it is not true; not because it is not valuable; certainly not because it is not timely--it is that.

I wince because I fear that Thoreau the proto-ecologist is yet another way of domesticating or taming Thoreau the political radical. What? How could an exploration of an early 19th century Naturalist be a mode of domestication? Is this not a discovery of his dedication to the wild?

It is, indeed. But it is also a way to lump Henry in with a motley crew of tree huggers and animal rights activists whose voices are politically marginalized in our anemic democracy. Which is not to say that Thoreau does not belong in that motley crew--I would suggest that he does. Nor is it to suggest that those voices are rightly marginalized--I think they are wrongly marginalized. Moreover, pushed to the margins, I think that, for the most part, they are de-clawed.

I witnessed a de-clawed HDT in High School English class: an irascible eccentric who engaged in a little Romantic experiment of primitive living by the side of a lake, not far from town so he could take his shirts home on the weekends to be laundered. A queer sort with a flair for the English language. An icon of American individualism.

Again, I do not deny the appropriateness of any of these descriptions. I fear their soporific effect.

Thoreau was all of those things, yes, but he was also this:

Because he was this:

Which is why he threatens people like Kathryn Schulz who want to see him forgotten. Mis-remembered and forgotten.

But though he is gone, he is not forgotten and will never be forgotten by those of us who read him and love him and see in him a continuation of the Prophetic Tradition in the American grain.

In the Prophetic Tradition, the Resurrection is not for the conformists, the Goody-Two-Shoes among us who go along to get along. In the Prophetic Tradition, the Resurrection is for those who have the courage to Rise Up!

Days Of Awe

I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,--that my body might,--but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!--Think of our life in nature,--daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,--rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

~ Henry David Thoreau upon beholding Mt. Ktaadn, Maine.

Plutarch The Historian

As a historian he has been drastically criticized for his romantic turn of mind; indeed, he is usually dismissed with a smile from the historians' domain as a mere storyteller. That is to do him an injustice. He was a first-rate storyteller, but his aim was not to please but to tell the truth, and he had a real power of critical judgment. In his lives of semi-mythical heroes...he is perfectly aware that his sources are "full of suspicion and doubt, being only poets and inventors of fables," and he asks his readers to "receive with indulgence the stories of antiquity." "So very difficult is it," he says, "to find out the truth of anything."

~ Edith Hamilton, Plutarch, Classics Club (1951), xiv.

How Plutarch Sobers A Romantic And Prepares Her For Life

Plutarch, especially, became my favorite author. The pleasure I took in reading him over and over again cured me a little of my taste for romance, and I soon preferred Agesilaus, Brutus, and Aristides to Orondates, Artamenes, and Juba. This interesting reading, and the conversations between my father and myself to which it gave rise, formed in me the free and republican spirit, the proud and indomitable character unable to endure slavery or servitude, which has tormented me throughout my life in situations the least fitted to afford it scope.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, Modern Library Edition, 7.

Plutarchian Piety

He said of himself that his neighbors often laughed at him when they saw him watching, for instance, while stone and mortar were measured out, but he would only say, "This is not done for myself, but for my country." That was the way he spent his life, "centered in the sphere of little things," but never despising them and never pitying himself. There is something here, some feeling, some ideal, which was not in Periclean Athens. Suffering may teach a profound lesson, and the mighty Greek spirit which had suffered so much had not lost its power to learn and to perceive new forms of excellence. When Plutarch declared that he who is faithful in that which is least may be fulfilling life's highest demands, he was Greece's far-sighted spokesman for a change that was beginning in the moral atmosphere of the world...

That was what turned Plutarch into a writer. He could not be an Aristides to lift Greece up by great statesmanship, or an Alexander to make her the mistress of the world. The time was long since over when a Greek could lead states or armies. But the time was never over for trying to help men to a loftier view of what it means to be a man...

The deep seriousness which he brought to his work was founded on his religion, or, as he would have put it, on his philosophy. His profoundest conviction was that we needs must love the highest when we see it--but who can see it if there are none to show it, first, of course, in their lives, but, second only to that, in their words? The one he raised to a pedestal was the man who made it easy for people to believe in goodness and greatness, in heroic courage and warm generosity and lofty magnanimity. In humble virtues, too, patience that never wearies; readiness to forgive; kindness to an erring servant, to an animal...

He stood at the beginning of a new era in religion and he felt that it was so and that he was part of it, but he did not let go of the old, of what he calls, "the ancient and hereditary faith." The different gods were merely different views of the one God, perfect in goodness, or perhaps they were different ways of trying to find Him. The myths he said were "to be tenderly treated," interpreted in "a spirit at once pious and philosophic." They are, he writes, the reflection of truth like "the rainbow which the mathematicians tell us is nothing else but an image of the sun, a reflection of his beams upon the clouds." Nevertheless he knew that the framework which always encloses religion was falling apart and a new frame had to be constructed...

A man who thought like this could not be superstitious. Plutarch had no tolerance for that particular form of human weakness. To him a superstition was not a mistaken belief, a kind of religious stupidity; it was an unmitigated evil, far worse than absolute disbelief. Atheism, he says, denies God, but superstition wrongs Him...

His religious creed was not complicated. A contemporary of his, the younger Pliny, wrote, "For man to help man is God," and to Plutarch that was certainly a clause in the definition. The life according to God was accepting an unconditional obligation to make things better for others wherever one was. But there was more than that. In an essay he wrote upon the delay of God in punishing the wicked he faced with candor and with courage the basic problem of religion, the problem of evil. He did not propose a solution...

The Greek was instinctively Socratic. He must reason and try to understand, always remembering that every conclusion was forever open to question and re-examination. Plutarch wanted men, he said, "to borrow reason from philosophy and make it the guide to religion."

The Greek trinity was goodness, truth, beauty...[The Romans, by comparison] gave little thought to the [first] two, but beauty in especial was unimportant, a mere decoration to the very serious and difficult business of life. To Plutarch it was a revelation of God...

He really was that rare person, a man of perfect tolerance with deep religious convictions...The terrible odium theologicum which for hundreds and hundreds of years would distract and disgrace Christendom had not yet been born [in his day], but it would never find a home in Greece, and it would have been unimaginable to Plutarch.

What would it not have meant to the religion of Christ if Christians could have been learners as well as teachers of Greece! There would have been another criterion of truth, not only creeds and ipse dixits, authoritatively promulgated and obediently accepted, but Plutarch's criterion--If we live here as we ought, we shall see things as they are, the Greek version of, The pure in heart shall see God.

~ Edith Hamilton, 1951.

Look Homeward, Angel: A Story Of The Buried Life

A stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces. Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth. Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart?

Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone? O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

~ Thomas Wolfe, 1929.

In My Religion

We read from a Transcendentalist canon and cross ourselves in the name of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman.

Blessed Are The Strangers

Photo (c) Peter Sanders.

A film about British Muslim identity.

The Meaning Of The Moussem

Shaykh Mortada Elboumashouli is head of the Shadhiliyya Darqawiyya Order.

His Moussem is usually held on the last weekend of every May, in Kalaat M'Gouna, Morocco.

Saidian Humanism

"I came to understand Saidian humanism as a new foundation of the discipline of comparative literature; one that emphasizes exilic consciousness; the ethics of the human; textual filiation; worldliness; the critique of embedded epistemologies of Orientalism; and what I would call negative philology--a play on negative theology that uses the syntax of negation to designate what is no longer there."

~ Emily Apter, Against World Literature (2013), 219.

Hermeneutics A Necessity, Not An Option

The world of dreams and what we commonly call the waking world are equally in need of hermeneutics.




~ Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination, tr. Ralph Manheim (1969), 208.

The Heartbeat Of The Prophetic

Marc H. Ellis's "Prophet doxology":

The people Israel gave the prophetic to the world.




It is the greatest gift in the history of the world.

Without the prophetic there is no meaning in the world.

There may be no meaning in the world.

The prophet embodies the possibility of meaning in the world.

Exile and the Prophetic, vol. 1 (2015), p. 119.

Once Again: Walter Pater

His way of conceiving religion came then to be in effect what it ever afterwards remained--a sacred history indeed, but still more a sacred ideal, a transcendent version or representation, under intenser and more expressive light and shade, of human life and its familiar or exceptional incidents, birth, death, marriage, youth, age, tears, joy, rest, sleep, waking--a mirror, towards which men might turn away their eyes from vanity and dullness, and see themselves therein as angels, with their daily meat and drink, even, become a kind of sacred transaction--a complementary strain or burden, applied to our everyday existence, whereby the stray snatches of music in it re-set themselves, and fall into the scheme of some higher and more consistent harmony...

A description of the character Florian Deleal in Pater's tale "A Child In The House," found in Miscellaneous Studies, p. 193.

A Message For The Strangers

According to 'Amr bin 'Auf, the Messenger once remarked that the Way began as a stranger and shall return as a stranger; so, good fortune to the strangers! For they are the ones who shall repair the damage done to my example by the people who came after me.

--A prophetic statement found in Tirmidhi's collection, tr. by Le Marabout Errant.

Emily Apter's Against World Literature

Baudelaire As Critic

How, Baudelaire asks, can we learn to see the beauty of products whose aesthetic codes are completely unknown to us? His answer is significant, in light of his own creative writing as well as for what it reveals about his refusal to be bound by conventions and prejudices. We need, he tells us, to transform ourselves by a phenomenon of will acting on the imagination, in order to be able to step into the milieu that has given birth to this "strange flowering" as he puts it (OC, II, p. 576). He acknowledges that few people possess this wonderful gift of cosmopolitanism, but suggests that we can all acquire it by setting preconceptions aside and letting ourselves be penetrated by new and different forms of beauty.

--Rosemary Lloyd, Charles Baudelaire (2008), pp. 100-101.

Shaykh's Pir

God's Unruly Friends

The classical expression of the Islamic tradition took approximately 500 years to be worked out and articulated. The Summa Theologica et Practica of this development is Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali's encyclopedic Ihya 'Ulum ad-Din (c. 1100 CE). Ghazali's work did not create the classical expression of the Islamic tradition; rather, it was emblematic of a consensus that had been building throughout Islamdom since at least the 9th century.

In the middle of the 13th century, disaster struck in the form of the Mongol invasions. Muslim majority societies, heretofore prosperous and confident, received a shock for which no one could have prepared them: the brutality of the Mongols, their contempt for the settled ways of the inhabitants of the territories they invaded, was unprecedented. By the same token, however, the rustic and militaristic Mongols were unprepared to govern populations as multifarious and urbane as those of Islamdom. To put it bluntly, they had little idea what they were getting themselves into when, in 1258, they took Baghdad by storm and summarily executed the last 'Abbasid caliph.

At the same time, however, Mongol society had a vigor and vitality that, while often violent and unsettling, endowed Muslim majority societies with a new kind of nervous energy. Some of this nervous energy found expression in the projects of re-construction that followed, of necessity, the "scorched earth" policies of the Mongol war lords. On the other hand, some of this nervous energy was put to other, less conventional, uses.

Even before the Mongols arrived on the scene, there had been Muslims who dissented from the emerging shape of classical Islamic civilization on a wide variety of grounds--many of them pietistic in nature. For just as Kierkegaard would complain in the 19th century that the establishment of a Christian Europe spelled the practical demise of Christianity among Europeans ("The Christianity of the New Testament rests upon the assumption that the Christian is in a relationship of opposition" to the established ways of the world, he wrote) so Muslims, nearly 1,000 years earlier, had ranged themselves in opposition to the established ways of Afro-Eurasian Islam. [See, S. Kierkegaard, Attack Upon "Christendom", tr. Walter Lowrie, PUP, 149]. Among these Muslim dissenters were some that Professor Ahmet T. Karamustafa would term "socially deviant renunciants" or, more memorably, "God's unruly friends." [See Karamustafa, God's Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Middle Period 1200-1550, Oneworld, 2006].

Prior to Karamustafa's study, it was often assumed that Muslim pietists of this persuasion were disgruntled members of the underclass, but Karamustafa offers compelling evidence to support his claim that "these movements frequently recruited from the middle and high social strata...Most telling in this connection is the fact that the cultural elite that consisted of the literati in the widest sense of the term lost some of its members, either temporarily or permanently, to the dervish cause. To judge by the presence of poets, scholars, and writers of a certain proficiency among their numbers, the anarchist dervishes were not always the illiterate crowd their detractors reported them to be. [Ed. note: They seldom are]. Instead, socially deviant renunciation exercised a strong attraction on the hearts and minds of many Muslim intellectuals." [GUF, 10].

It is not my intention to suggest that the deep anxieties that the Mongol invasions induced in Muslim majority societies were the proximate cause of "socially deviant renunciation" among Middle Period Muslims. I wish to suggest, instead, that the political, social, and cultural upheavals that followed in the wake of the Mongol catastrophe gave fresh impetus to tendencies that were already present in Islamdom when the Mongols arrived--just as they are always already present in every civilization [see, e.g., S. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents].

The phenomenon that Max Weber named the "routinization of charisma" is inherently unstable and therefore predictably produces social reactions such as those of the dervishes and other social and cultural critics. If it failed to do so, charisma would not be charisma and routine would not be routine.

Soul Stirrers - I'm A Pilgrim

Creative Prayer

The Three Ages Of Man

Birth to Age 20 years: The childhood of the mind and the religion of self-delusion (Disneyanity).

Age 20 to 60 years: Disillusion and its many bewilderments.

Age 60 years to Death: Creative prayer.

"For prayer is not a request for something: it is the expression of a mode of being, a means of existing and of causing to exist, that is, a means of causing the God who reveals Himself to appear, of "seeing" Him, not to be sure in His essence, but in the form which precisely He reveals by revealing Himself by and to that form. This view of Prayer takes the ground from under the feet of those who, utterly ignorant of the nature of the theophanic Imagination as Creation, argue that a God who is the "creation" of our Imagination can only be "unreal" and there can be no purpose in praying to such a God. For it is precisely because He is a creation of the imagination that we pray to him, and that He exists. Prayer is the highest form, the supreme act of the Creative Imagination. By virtue of the sharing of roles, the divine Compassion, as theophany and existentiation of the universe of beings, is the Prayer of God aspiring to issue forth from His unknownness and to be known, whereas the Prayer of man accomplishes this theophany because in it and through it the "Form of God" (surat al-Haqq) becomes visible to the heart, to the Active Imagination which projects before it, in its Qibla, the image, whose receptacle, (epiphanic form, mazhar) is the worshipper's being in the measure of its capacity. God prays for us (yusalli 'alayna), which means that He epiphanizes himself insofar as He is the God whom and for whom we pray (that is, the God who epiphanizes Himself for us and by us). We do not pray to the Divine Essence in its hiddenness; each faithful ('abd) prays to his Lord (Rabb), the Lord who is in the form of his faith."

--Henry Corbin, Alone With The Alone, p. 248.