The Voltairean Streak

Transgressive Transcendentalism has a pronounced Voltairean streak. Hear Emerson:

There is a certain secular progress of opinion, which, in civil countries, reaches everybody. One service which this age has rendered is, to make the life and wisdom of every past man accessible and available to all. Socrates and Marcus Aurelius are allowed to be saints; Mahomet is no longer accursed; Voltaire is no longer a scarecrow; Spinoza has come to be revered. "The time will come," says Varnhagen von Ense, "when we shall treat the jokes and sallies against the myths and church-rituals of Christianity--say the sarcasms of Voltaire, Frederic the Great, and D'Alembert--good-naturedly and without offence: since, at bottom, those men mean honestly, their polemics proceed out of religious striving, and what Christ meant and willed is in essence more with them than with their opponents, who only wear and misrepresent the name of Christ...Voltaire was an apostle of Christian ideas; only the names were hostile to him, and he never knew it otherwise. He was like the son of the vine-dresser in the Gospel, who said No, and went; the other said Yea, and went not. These men preached the true God,--Him whom men serve by justice and uprightness; but they called themselves atheists."

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Character.

The Voltairean streak in Transgressive Transcendentalism is, likewise, a Malamatiyyan mode.