| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 696 words from this article are provided below; about 456 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Dean Grodzins. American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2002. Pp. xiii, 631. $39.95.
Theodore Parker, the great Unitarian preacher and abolitionist, was fond of telling a story about himself. Four years old and alone in the woods, Parker came upon a spotted tortoise. He had seen other boys kill them for sport, and he was about to do the same, when something inside him told him: "It is wrong!" His mother later explained that he had just heard his conscience, through which God had spoken to him, and that his life "depends on heeding this little voice." Parker would recollect that "no other event in my life has made so deep and lasting an impression on me." Such tales told about or by public figures are, of course, suspect. After reading Dean Grodzins's fine biography, however, no one should doubt this story or how from then on Parker was guided by that little voice. Indeed, a main source of Parker's genius and, simultaneously, anguish is that often it was the only voice he heard.	1
The first full-scale biography since Henry Steele Commager's Yankee Crusader (1936), this study covers Parker's life to 1846 (volume two will include his abolitionist years). A young minister who unrelentingly tried to make other Unitarians confront the logical conclusions of their theological speculations, Parker was perhaps the most complex of all the Transcendentalists. Today, we might say he had an anger management problem. While discussing a play with a college classmate, Parker abruptly ordered his friend out of his room. Parker then burst into tears, fearing that he had given offense. This was a pattern repeated throughout his life: a sudden explosion of unbridled belligerence followed by insecurity and deep remorse. Parker wore his heart on his sleeve.	2
Well, not entirely. One of Grodzins's many great services is his extensive transcription from Parker's private journal, a work immensely difficulty to decipher (the handwriting would do a physician proud, to which add Parker's occasional use of code). Full of thoughts he dared not reveal, among his many anguished expressions about his domestic life the journal contains this, written in Greek letters but with English values: "Go where I may, this fact stares me in the face. [My wife is a] DEVIL. I. HAVE. NO. HOPE. in. LIFE." The phrase in square brackets is what Parker crossed out to prevent his wife, the heiress Lydia Dodge Cabot, from reading it in case she broke the code. Although marrying well (if only in one sense), Parker struggled for everything he got. Qualifying for Harvard but then too poor to matriculate, on his own he completed the entire college reading list in a single year. When he later entered the Harvard Divinity School, Parker established himself as the most erudite of the newly forming group of Transcendentalist geniuses. A prodigiously autodidactic scholar, he read dozens of languages and, within a few years of graduation, wrote hundreds of articles and pamphlets. Yet his friend John Sullivan Dwight called him out for "converting insensibly what is originally pure thirst for truth into a greedy, avaricious, jealous striving not merely to know, but to get all there is to know." Dwight was on target: publishing polemical sermons with three hundred footnotes, Parker could be an intellectual bully.	3
Parker happened to be in that very small audience of students in 1838 that heard Ralph Waldo Emerson deliver his infamous Divinity School Address. Its power blew ecclesiastical Boston apart and set Parker, who bought six copies of the speech, along the same path of denying the divinity, and eventually even the infallibility, of Jesus. The centerpiece of Parker's attack was his 1841 address, Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity. Acknowledging the thoroughly human qualities of Jesus, Parker, like other Transcendentalists, argued that Jesus's words, rather than his miracles or the subsequent Christian institutions, are the essential, permanent qualities of the religion. In situating Parker's theological beliefs, Grodzins is particularly good at clarifying the contemporary competing theologies that swirled around Europe and the United States.	. . .

There are about 456 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.