Day 17. October 11, 2006
Movement 2. Solus Jesus
Lecture 8. Unitarians, Transcendentalists, the Shakers, and Jesus (Part 2)
Unitarians believed Jesus uniquely and completely integrated in his character all that is best in humanity, providing a perfect if ahistorical and acultural model of what it is to be human: humility, simplicity, reason, and love. They sometimes dismissed other Christians as Quadratarians: Father-God, Spirit-God, Jesus-Man, and Jesus-God. In the 1830s and 1840s elitist and chilly Unitarianism spawned in its sons and daughters Transcendentalism, encapsulated in the thought and figure of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Transcendentalism posed intuition as the vehicle through which, in communing with nature, a person comes to know what is real, true, and good. Emerson's Jesus was the first man to estimate the greatness of and divinity in man. His preaching and life were meant to stir awareness in others so they too could search for the divine in themselves, others, and nature. In another counterpoint to Romanticism and Transcendentalism, the Shakers emerged from English Quakerism in the late 18th century, organizing around Mother Ann Lee. Dualities dominated Shaker beliefs about the Christ: male and female, flesh and spirit. Shakers formed rule-governed communities that, like cloistered monastic communities, sought to model true spiritual life for the world from which they had withdrawn.