A Faithful Skeptic: Margaret Fuller’s Transcendentalist “Credo”

In 1842 Margaret Fuller sent her mentor the Reverend William Ellery Channing a letter. It was “A Credo,” her attempt to formulate her faith. 

It was published posthumously together with other writings as Memoirs in 1852, by her friends and admirers Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. H. Channing, and J. F. Clark.

Memoirs came out ten years after she composed her credo and two years after her tragic death along with her son and husband in a shipwreck in sight of Fire Island.

She was a leading light among the Transcendentalists. While for much of America Transcendentalism was a literary explosion, in fact it was a religious revolution. Birthed within Boston and the immediate surrounding areas among Unitarians, clergy and laypeople, Transcendentalism’s influences have continued to this day.

I am one of the lucky inheritors of that tradition.

Fuller’s untimely death along with our native sexisms have left her lesser known. Which is particularly unfortunate as she was a generative figure along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Parker, and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (another woman too often slighted in the record) offering important strands of this emergent spirituality.

She deserves more attention. And this is not a bad place to start.

JIF

***

A Credo

Margaret Fuller

There 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 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 angelchild. This is the uninterrupted generation, or publication, of spirit taking upon itself congenial forms. Second, conquering 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 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.

God, we say, is Love. If we believe this we must trust Him. 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 discern 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 the other forms of nature only intimate.

Wherever man remains imbedded in nature, whether from sensuality 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 bound so closely 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 obstructions attendant on the existence of mankind.

Then, through all the realms of thought 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.

I 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 bodies suggest already modes of being higher than his and which fulfill 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 interprets those 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, etc. The trunk gives the history of the human race. It has grown up higher into the heavens, but its several acorns, though each expressed the all, did not ripen beyond certain contours and a certain size.

In the history of matter, however, laws have been more and more clearly discerned and so in the history of spirit many features of the God-man have put forth; several limbs, disengaged themselves. One is what men call revelation, different from other kinds only in being made through the acts and words of men. Its law is identical whether displaying itself as genius or piety, but its modes of expression are distinct dialects though of similar structure.

The way it is done is this. As the Oak desires to plant its acorns so do souls become the fathers of souls. Some do this through the body, others through the intellect. The first class are citizens; the second artists, philosophers, lawgivers, poets, saints. All these are anointed, all Immanuel, 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 telescope and microscope express the high and searching desires of man; and the organ [of the heart a symbol of] 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 strivings. 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 Michael Angelo, or Luther. It has made Gods, it has developed men. Seeking, making it produce ideals of the developments of which humanity is capable, and one of the highest, nay in some respects the very highest it has yet known was the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

I suppose few are so much believers in his history as myself. I believe (in my own way) in the long preparation of ages and the truth of the 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 at the due crisis, voluntarily the sacrifice Abraham would have made of the child of his old age, a lamb of God, taking away the sins of the world. I believe Jesus came when the time was ripe, that he was peculiarly a messenger and son of God. I have nothing to say in denial 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 develop 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 would 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.

But 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 illustrations 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.

Yet you also see that I believe in the history of the Jewish nation and its denouement in Christ, as presenting one great type of spiritual existence. It is very dear to me and occupies a large portion of my thoughts. I have no trouble, so far from the sacrifice required of Abraham, for instance, striking me as it does Mr Parker, I it as prefiguring a thought to be fully expressed by the death of Christ (yet forget not that they who passed their children through the fire to Moloch were pious also and not more superstitious than an exclusive devotion to Christ has made many of his followers). Do you not place Christ then in a higher place than Socrates, for instance, or Michael Angelo? Yes! Because if his life not truer, it was deeper, and he is a representative of ages. But then I consider the Greek Apollo as one also!

Have men erred in following Christ as a leader? Perhaps rarely. So great a soul must make its mark for many centuries. Yet only when men are freed from him and interpret him by the freedom of their own souls open to visits of the Great Spirit from every side can be known as he is.

“With your view, do you not think He placed undue emphasis on his own position?”

In expression he did so, but this is not in my way either, I should like to treat of this separately in another letter.

Where he was human, not humanly divine, and where men so received him there was failure, and is mist and sect,—but never where he brought them to the Father. But they knew not what they did with him then and do not now.

For myself, I believe in Christ because I can do without him; because the truth he announces I see elsewhere intimated, because it is foreshadowed in the very nature of my own being. But I do not wish to do without him. He is constantly aiding and answering me. Only I will not lay any undue and exclusive emphasis on him. When he comes to me, I will receive him; when I feel inclined to go by myself, I will. I do not reject the church either. Let men who can with sincerity live in it. I would not—for I believe far more widely than any body of men I know. And as nowhere I worship less than in the places set apart for that purpose, I will not seem to do so. The blue sky seen above the opposite roof preaches better than any brother, because at present, a freer, simpler medium of religion. When great souls arise again that dare to be entirely free, yet are humble, gentle, and patient, I will listen, if they wish to speak. But that time is not nigh; these I see around me here, and in Europe, are mostly weak and young.

Would I could myself say with some depth what I feel as to religion in my very soul. It would be a clear note of calm security. But for the present I think you will see how it is with me as to Christ.

I am grateful here, as everywhere, where spirit bears fruit in fulness. It attests the justice of my desires; it kindles my faith; it rebukes my sloth; it enlightens my resolve. But so does the Apollo, and the beautiful infant, and the summer’s earliest rose. It is only one modification of the same harmony. Jesus breaks through the soil of the world’s life like some great river through the else inaccessible plains and valleys. I bless its course. I follow it. But it is a part of the All. There is nothing peculiar about it but its form.

For myself, I believe in Christ because I can do without him; because the truth he announces I see elsewhere intimated, because it is foreshadowed in the very nature of my own being. But I do not wish to do without him. He is constantly aiding and answering me. Only I will not lay any undue and exclusive emphasis on him. When he comes to me, I will receive him; when I feel inclined to go by myself, I will. I do not reject the church either. Let men who can with sincerity live in it. I would not—for I believe far more widely than any body of men I know. And as nowhere I worship less than in the places set apart for that purpose, I will not seem to do so. The blue sky seen above the opposite roof preaches better than any brother, because at present, a freer, simpler medium of religion. When great souls arise again that dare to be entirely free, yet are humble, gentle, and patient, I will listen, if they wish to speak. But that time is not nigh; these I see around me here, and in Europe, are mostly weak and young.

Would I could myself say with some depth what I feel as to religion in my very soul. It would be a clear note of calm security. But for the present I think you will see how it is with me as to Christ.

I am grateful here, as everywhere, where spirit bears fruit in fulness. It attests the justice of my desires; it kindles my faith; it rebukes my sloth; it enlightens my resolve. But so does the Apollo, and the beautiful infant, and the summer’s earliest rose. It is only one modification of the same harmony. Jesus breaks through the soil of the world’s life like some great river through the else inaccessible plains and valleys. I bless its course. I follow it. But it is a part of the All. There is nothing peculiar about it but its form.

I have not shown my deep feeling of his life as a genuine growth, so that his words are all living and they come exactly to memory with all the tone and gesture of the moment, true runes of a divine oracle. It is the same with Shakespeare, and in a less degree, with Dante. I have not spoken of men clinging to him from the same weakness that makes them so dependent on a priesthood, or makes idols of the objects of affection. In him, hearts seek the Friend, minds the Guide. But this is weakness, in religion as elsewhere. No prop will do. ‘The soul must do its own immortal work,’ and books, lovers, friends, meditations fly from us only to return when we can do without them. But when we can use and learn from them, yet feel able to do without them, they will depart no more. If I were to preach on this subject, I would take for a text the words of Jesus: ‘Nevertheless I tell you the truth It is expedient for you that I go away, for if I go not, the Comforter will not come unto you, but if I depart I will send him unto you.’

*Illegible in manuscript.