Atmosphere and Religious Experience in American Transcendentalism

I propose a new intellectual history of how the aesthetic obtains religious value in the American literary tradition. According to the account that prevails from Perry Miller to Tracy Fessenden, the Transcendentalists collapse scripture and literature into a single secular category. I argue instead that the Transcendentalists redraw the distinction along aesthetic criteria. A text’s sacred status has little to do with who wrote it when, and everything to do with a particular aesthetic quality expressive of divine inspiration. Scholarship has neglected two concepts instrumental to this development: the religious sentiment and atmosphere. Unitarian and Calvinist norms held all religious practice to the test of scripture and empirical reason. The Transcendentalists found scripture too polyvocal, reason too limited, to ground religion. They championed an alternative standard: the religious sentiment, an intrinsic spiritual impulse. Like other impulses, the religious sentiment compels expression and satisfaction, both of which proceed not only from devotional practices, but from divinely inspired literature as well. The second concept, atmosphere, develops primarily through Emerson’s essays and lectures to explain how the religious sentiment manifests in aesthetic form. Inspired literature is intensely atmospheric. And only intensely atmospheric literature can satisfy the religious sentiment. Ultimately, I hope to lay the methodological foundations necessary for a robust scholarly inquiry into atmospheric form among such twentieth-century poets as Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery, all of whom continue to associate atmosphere with a heightened clarity of mind and depth of experience