Theodore Parker and the Problem of Criticism

“Criticism is the easiest of all arts, or the most difficult of all.”

—Theodore Parker’s Experience as a Minister (1859)

The Transcendentalists still seem to evaporate into “a heap of fog and duskiness” whenever their impact is weighed.¹ Consider this special issue’s animus: the jury is still out on whether the Transcendentalists’ worth is, in fact, transcendental. Perhaps it’s because we too rarely reckon with their “burly image-breaker,” Theodore Parker.² “Next only to Emerson—and in the world of action even above Emerson,” Perry Miller concluded, Parker “was to give shape and meaning to the Transcendental movement in America.”³ Within this world of action, Parker was not at all foggy but volcanic, a rumbling pulpit that made waves in nearly every major issue of the day. Thousands bought his books in America and Europe; 3,000 attended his sermons weekly at the largest free church in the nation; 50,000 attended his lectures annually from Maine to Illinois. Leading reformers counted him as an important ally: William Lloyd Garrison regularly attended his services, Senator Charles Sumner and Horace Mann sought his advice often, and Wendell Phillips nearly became his cellmate after attempting to rescue Anthony Burns from slavery. Frederick Douglass’s first stop in Florence was Parker’s tomb. Susan B. Anthony, Francis Power Cobbe, Caroline Healey Dall, Fredrika Bremer, and Selma Lagerlöf all noted his impact; Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Julia Ward Howe frequented his congregation; and Ednah Dow Cheney declared that “it is impossible to tell all that Theodore Parker was to me.”⁴ Beyond were the thousands of ordinary Americans who found Parker’s work meaningful; one Quaker from the West wrote to tell Parker that “we have just returned from the funeral of our child, and our hearts turn to thee first for sympathy and help.”⁵ Perhaps Parker’s greatest influence came by way of William Herndon, an Illinois lawyer whose Parker-philia influenced his colleague, Abraham Lincoln, to adapt Parker’s definition of democracy: government of, by, and for the people.⁶

But Parker’s legacy would soon cool and sink. While the 1910 centennial of his birth was celebrated for a week in six Chicago venues and toasted by reformers like Jane Addams, Reverend Jenkin Lloyd Jones, and Rabbi Charles Fleischer, the centennial of his death in 1960 consisted of a short play staged in cozy Faneuil Hall, more a denominational than a national celebration.⁷

Beyond biographies by Dean Grodzins (2002) and Paul E. Teed (2012), attention to Parker today remains modest.⁸ Joel Myerson’s Transcendentalism: A Reader (2001), Lawrence Buell’s The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings (2006), and (judged by the index) The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism (2010) all feature roughly four times as much Emerson as Parker, while Richard Geldard’s mystically-minded trade anthology The Essential Transcendentalists (2005) features no Parker at all. (Nor, more surprisingly, does an important study of “the Abolitionist imagination” despite Parker’s centrality therein.⁹) More recently, a 2018 international conference on “Transcendentalist Intersections” in Heidelberg, Germany featured twenty-five papers on Emerson, twelve on Fuller, and two on Parker. Much of this imbalance is due to women like Fuller belatedly receiving their due. On the other hand, Emerson’s reign has always been supreme. By 1984, Gary L. Collison wondered why “Parker was paid so little attention when other major Transcendentalists were being analyzed to a hair.”¹⁰

So why has Parker fallen from his first estate? The answer lies with what Henry Steele Commager called “the dilemma of Theodore Parker.” If Parker’s critical work was indeed influential in the “world of action,” it remains harder to pin down in the world of thought, where it wobbled between empiricism and intuition, towed left by Parker’s skeptical head and tossed right by his sincere heart.¹¹ These poles have long shaped debate over the man. Some deem him a dogged Enlightenment iconoclast, “the ultimate skeptic,” in the words of Prentiss Clark.¹² Others insist he’s at heart nothing but heart, a romantic rooted in Schleiermachian intuitions...