Phyllis Cole
MARGARET Fuller's essay-letter to William Henry Channing in the summer of 1842, “A Credo,” is her most forthright expression of radical Transcendentalism, affirming an evolutionary process of nature and spirit in both metaphysical principle and Biblical symbolism. Fuller directs her well-established understanding of world religions to comparison with Christianity, and she at least implies the possibility of new roles for women in the world's future. In both respects “A Credo” anticipates her major work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century.1 More immediately, however, she offers her testimony at a moment when competing ideas of Jesus stand at the forefront of the Transcendentalist movement and its related network of Unitarian churches. Fuller's statement of natural religion finds private expression but speaks powerfully within a collective history.Though occasionally excerpted in collections of her writing and commented upon by scholars, “A Credo” has lacked a critical text to stand among her works. This documentary project aims to provide Fuller's complete statement as well as position it within the Transcendentalist movement. The manuscript of “A Credo” has been overlooked largely through circumstances of transmission. Channing included a selection in Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852), while also censoring its content. However, by 1883 he valued this statement enough to send it to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, then working on his biography of Fuller, as a central expression of her “Prophetic Spirituality & Conscious Communion with the Divine Influent Life.”2 Higginson's more secular study found no place for “A Credo,” though he preserved it among the Fuller papers he eventually donated to the Boston Public Library. Soon a scholar of German Romanticism, Frederick Augustus Braun, transcribed the text as an appendix to his book on Fuller and Goethe; however, he used it only to argue for Fuller as a disciple of the German Romantic writer, “not a Transcendentalist at all.”3 With the recovery of Fuller's work since the 1960s, “A Credo” has been excerpted and commented upon several times, whether from manuscript or from Braun. Always its participation in Transcendentalist discourse is assumed. Most recently, a study of Fuller's religious skepticism in this essay has focused on the constraints preventing a woman writer from publishing such views in 1842.4 None of the recent scholarship, however, proposes publication of “A Credo” for current readers.Fuller's testimony is capacious in scale and perspective, open to examination in more than one way. It offers an important sign of Fuller's growing religious feminism by attributing cosmic origins to a “spirit” that is also “angel mother,” later referred to again as “she.” At the same time, Fuller speaks in primarily masculine terms, even while naming deities and prophets, as she addresses the Transcendentalists through Channing. The shifting narrative perspective of “A Credo” allows these concerns to emerge together. First, she tells in abstract terms of creation, its future unknown to “this being who now writes.” As she envisions it, the human race has no binary separation from either nature or spirit, participating in one pantheistic entirety. Nor is gender a significant internal division; soon she speaks as “we,” the collective humanity that, like the spirit, breaks through obstruction and achieves knowledge. But then an individual, intensely devotional but self-affirming “I” emerges in her account of Jesus: one who has “no objection to the miracles, except where they do not happen to please me,” who finally believes in Christ “because I can do without him.” Fuller implicitly acknowledges this first-person voice as a woman's when she specifies the Biblical text for a sermon “[i]f I were to preach on this subject.” She has no opportunity to preach, but “A Credo” is her laywoman's sermon by letter.All of the issues evoked in this statement—the miracles of Jesus, the status of the Bible, the power of nature and intuition—had defined the Transcendentalist controversy since 1838, when Ralph Waldo Emerson's “Divinity School Address” characterized the church's “noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus” as “Monster” rather than “Miracle.” In response, conservative Unitarian Andrews Norton blasted Emerson's words as the “latest form of infidelity,” going on to argue for the Bible's verifiable history of Jesus as the only ground for faith. Emerson made no direct response, but colleagues sprang to his defense by affirming truth as perceived by the individual mind. In “A Credo” Fuller was offering her own perspective on the miracles controversy. Earlier she had reported to Emerson on Norton's latest publications as well as describing the “paper-pellet” aimed by a younger critic at “that peculiarly nervous sect styled Transcendentalists.”5 Now, as she wrote to Channing, she composed “A Credo” because a friend had asked specifically for her views of Jesus.6 Fuller's own “infidelity” joined with Emerson and his allies, even as she went beyond them in directly presenting her cosmology of past and future.A long process of self-expression and interchange with others led to her testimony, extending from years before Emerson's manifesto to the moment of writing in 1842. Fuller held a position of quasi-clerical authority among Transcendentalists by this time. The third season of her Conversations with women had just concluded: since 1839 she had been leading path-breaking discussions of the truths suggested by Greek mythology and the fine arts, with frequent cross-reference to the Bible. She had described her first session's theme as a “genealogy of heaven and earth.”7 In the same period that such ruminations on divinity and humanity grew, furthermore, Fuller was serving as editor of the movement's Dial magazine, soliciting and judging work on religious and philosophical subjects from both men and women. All of those to be named in this essay had contributed to it. As editor, she reached out widely to the community of progressive belief. In “A Credo” she quoted a sentiment without identifying its author: “The soul must do its own immortal work.” Such words might have been Emerson's, but instead they were from a poem by Eliza Thayer Clapp, a woman outside Fuller's immediate circle, as published in the Dial a year before.8“A Credo” epitomizes Fuller's vision during this time of double cultural leadership; moreover, it embodies the personal transformation that she claimed amidst such work. At the opening of the second season of Conversations, in autumn 1840, Fuller wrote to Channing that she had found a warm reception from the group after telling of her “great changes,” recent experiences of mystical identification with the divine. In the same letter she also reported on her own writing experiments, “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain” and “Yuca Filamentosa,” which would soon be published anonymously, with her as editor, in the Dial. Along with “Leila,” a third piece of experimental fiction, these appeared throughout the months between Fuller's “great changes” and the beginning of 1842, the year of “A Credo.” In them she affirmed the power of female forms in the natural and spiritual worlds: woman-identified flowers bursting into bloom under the moon's influence; a grand tree, “Queen of the South,” singing to herself in solitary power; the goddess “Leila,” her wild hair blowing in the wind, who embodied the Holy Ghost's descent into matter. And the personal immersion in divine nature that Fuller expressed in such work was confirmed by a contemporary journal entry remembering her earlier self-consecration, when after exiting from church she had found illumination in the sun's glory and vowed to sow “new and immortal plants in the garden of God.”9 The revelations of 1840 and their expression in fictional and autobiographical form offer a direct prelude to her apparently spontaneous essay-letter of 1842.Significantly, Fuller wrote her creedal statement as a letter rather than in published form, even though the Dial had already offered her the possibilities of anonymous authorship. Any statement that directly claimed kinship with divinity apart from Christ and the church was a scandal, all the more, as Caitlin Smith notes, from a woman.10 But in addition, Fuller was prompted to write “A Credo” by particular friends, both the person who initially asked about Jesus and the letter's recipient, Channing, amidst an ongoing dialogue with him. Letters underlay all of the Transcendentalist movement, as texts with a life of their own. Later writing tearfully from Rome, Fuller told Caroline Sturgis of her need to continue “friendships I had paid for with so much heart's blood,” admitting that without letters from her and from Channing, “so many thoughts in the long past seemed to flee from me.”11 “A Credo” lies within that body of thought and feeling. Here I will suggest how four epistolary exchanges anticipate its voice and theological ideas: first those with James Freeman Clarke and Emerson, then those with her even more memorable partners, Sturgis and Channing.From the early 1830s, James Freeman Clarke supported her growth in new German learning, later a strong foundation for “A Credo.” With him she waxed about and of this friend to the about the who the history his by and how and had Fuller also reported to Clarke and Frederick Henry on her immersion in Biblical under the of German She thought of from its expressed in and found in a new to her exchanges and her Biblical immersion directly in “A Credo.” Fuller's of a in as both and have in particular from who had for the of nature and humanity out of Biblical furthermore, to “A Credo,” even as like in the truth of with Emerson was both and through their long In 1840 she the power of his work first him it in four years later she it from the was to how much more I it now than at I the now I the The years do not in “A Credo” was in its of it was also not with however, and after the “great changes” later in 1840, she his her of mystical have I to the central she to her she wrote not the friend I the same year that she composed “A Credo,” in his “The Emerson the movement him as it in or not she wrote in to her essay found a position by on the of not their to the And where Emerson characterized the Transcendentalist as one who from the for it to offer work of response, Fuller both nature and humanity in and As she had to Caroline she rather than the who seemed to have She but also Fuller's a friend with she both of the beginning Fuller's letters expressed an upon Greek and mythology even while as well about the of Jesus as a friend and of She quoted about the his directly to the rather than the who She was a in these letters by the need for and whether with or with its its its the and the growth would only she do not direct like the But is in the Fuller this friend as the first to of her “great changes” in I is found And at the of is can be no but all the in must be of from Emerson, she found with In both their and their expression of religious Fuller's letters to her directly anticipate the of “A Credo,” where she by as an of within the spirit and by the in Fuller's however, was the friend who directly “A Credo.” with William Henry Channing out of Dial when Fuller from the to to in the grand she a new it on 1840 But their as to the after only grand their letters were to Fuller her own of and to in the before with Channing both the of her and the “great changes” in her first claimed her as a as an to she out in after her personal with the of I were a and then would be I in this of Divine I out into before I it. I I I I More was at for her than a to authority as a as she that with for the particular her to Divine the and that she would soon more in “A Credo.” With an from her to she her own and those of Channing in the of the Unitarian to a sermon that the new to an of and Fuller the instead as for herself to for would now preach the Holy as as have been and instead of the understanding and instead Fuller was her own religious apart from church or of however, not Fuller's for such a among the claimed to the Unitarian than she had James Clarke a for the of the he and Fuller but not And Channing, to this moment his an focused on the of humanity in Christ he claimed a religion that would this is the he wrote to his of Transcendentalist on the Boston that year to the about and Fuller had no as Caroline later an between Fuller told Channing in how much she sermon which with the of Soon such ideas in “A on the and in which to a theological manifesto and in his from the Unitarian of the and authority claimed by their on miracles as of his But he as the of his of and Clarke Channing joined in the of Fuller, while their of his views in the new of also held of her Credo” might be Fuller's statement of to Channing in of Christ had seemed at first a for In early of 1842, Channing wrote to his of an for all At the same time, however, he a of Christianity, Jesus as of the of in And though his from such his letter first a new of the of beyond so as to a which the not the Fuller of this and soon asked Channing to how to At the same time she him as directly as he had just The she had been to him the of the its As “A Credo” would the of that she affirmed had beyond Jesus, both through the and the essay also both directly and was the one contemporary she named in it, to his in and from the as of the had claimed that an like that of to his thought at which with the of In “A Credo,” Fuller both and his of her for But this just after she had affirmed in the even it was rather than the of Fuller his life as of a She of Jesus at the of an by naming and before even the in to be from Jesus and prophets, her evolutionary as form was for future At the of “A Credo,” the sermon that she to preach might have been to both Channing and as she offered as its text to his is for that I he so that the spirit her journal from the Emerson that Fuller wrote in an to “A Credo.” with Emerson, a of letters from Channing, she herself to both must own no to but the Waldo must not in William in the fine that has I have of Channing, she she not need the is at in is to to a to but it is affirmed in the of own and the soul and nature all I have church where I by and Fuller was from the earlier statement as it had both the forms of and her own within it. In vision and “A Credo” is Fuller's most testimony about and the soul and by a and in to exchanges within the Transcendentalist is a spirit and it all is whether of or its it to it is to be an of forms not in the of this being who now of as This is the or publication of spirit upon the like in the This is a a new as for for for the of as through his he the which the divine The is in the of was this second the divine to for for for the in the which the as the of it in the of the of is when he is is as through and has no to this as through and of into the nature of the Divine it is from own though the of where all already is this must has been by the of being must be for and only in time not do him and led by of of then the of the The moment have through an not but by the of to was to the and with soul that is it would that the Divine expressed his to more in than in the forms of and through him the which his forms of nature only in whether from or because he is not to the of the when is in a when he is not so with all as to their spirit, also must be at the form of nature and of the she has been to through those of men in the to one that this and spirit in the human But and is a of enough is through a to the and obstruction on the of through all the of thought the is in I well and many and offer to the whether of whether of do not to an upon the position and of because I of his and the of his The history of the the of the suggest already of being than and which more this of But I do his life to be the in one of in the and that all these to and when on these strong through which on the ground but how the in the to the as he now these forms is a of and a soul of the is to to to be And as the of spirit, a new for its is one in the garden of the his many religion The the history of the human it has into the but its several though expressed the not beyond and a the history of however, have been more and more and so in the history of of the have several is men from only in being made through the and words of is whether as or but its of expression though of it is is As the to its so do to the of do this through the others through the The first second these all all so as they to the of their and so as they to that of their as is a a form is as its as the the and is its as the and within the that is expressed in the as the and the and of and the and his so has of thoughts and its upon it to a a form which stand before it a of the of its It with and it them with it its life of in the it with It one life as as or It has made it has it of the of which humanity is and one of the in respects the it has was the life of Jesus of so much in his history as I own in the long of and the truth of I a in the of Jesus be the of his its and its and I in the as in the I in the prophets, and that they not only their but the of a an one to at the the would have made of the of his a of the of the I that Jesus when the time was that he was peculiarly a and of I have to in the of his the circumstances were in time he was of a and the a truth of the I have no objection to the miracles, except where they do not happen to please not a soul so and new and I can him the and the without of of not in the they is to such a upon and all who have him since on the have their within to it not be when I to that though I all this it is of no to whether it or that the truth such to is and that the of for had the and offered it to as a to as as I it would be just as how the that from the also that I in the history of the and its in as presenting one of spiritual It is to and a of I have no from the of for as it I it as a thought to be expressed by the of not that they who their through the to were and not more than an to Christ has made many of his not place Christ then in a place than for or because his life was not it was and he is a of the But then I the Greek as one men in Christ as a a soul must its for many only when men from and him by the of their own open to of the from can he be as he do not he on his own expression he but this is not in I like to of this in he was not and where men so was and is and where he them to the they not they with him and do not I in Christ because I can do without because the truth he I because it is in the nature of own But I do not to do without him. is and I will not and on him. he to I will when I to by I I do not the church men who can with in it. I I more widely than body of men I And as I than in the apart for that will not to do The the than at a of again that to be and I will they to But that time is not I & in and I with I as to religion in It would be a of But for the I will how it is with as to I as where spirit in It the of it it it But so the and a and the It is only one of the same Jesus breaks through the of the world's like through the & I its I it. But it is a of the is about it, but its will not though I in them one I most men in need of them their their them be them in the of past But of I in these and in as they more, they beyond I would from them to I no from the past to own soul or not to the of Jesus of will of that that was in the it is not but and it must future will like to the and the but to But as an for a & a for a so Christ for a life more complete and than that of have had the to and have a to out all the forms of human life with the and of a Greek with the of a with the & of have not with how the of the in Jesus for a But this as the by to his be of in a letter or essay on the process of in have not of his life as a so that his words all & they to with all the and of the of a divine It is the same with and in a with have not of men to from the same that them so on a or of the of In him the the But this is in as will must do its own immortal friends, from only to when can do without But when can and from to do without them they will no I were to preach on this I would for a text the words of Jesus, I the is for that I for I the will not but I I will send him