American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism.

• Author: Conley, Donovan
• Position: Book Review

By Dean Grodzins. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002; pp ix + 631. $39.95.

American Heretic is a biography about "the first phase" of Theodore Parker's career (to 1846); it is therefore about the American Renaissance, Unitarianism, Transcendentalism, New England public life, and Antebellum theological conflict. It is also peripherally about German idealism, slavery, temperance, Brook Farm, the two party system, westward expansion, and popular education. Since Grodzins' story emerges predominantly through Parker's private journal writings and personal letters, the prospective reader might be interested to learn that it is also about five hundred pages in length. This voluminousness bears witness to both the intricacy of the story Grodzins wishes to tell and the deep devotion he brings to the historical record in telling it. Having declared part of his intention to "look behind the public Parker" to the man of private letters and personal reflections, Grodzins nevertheless manages to "expose"--as from a picture's negative--many of the period's key intellectual, social and political developments. American Heretic is thus not only a remarkable specimen of historical scholarship but a compelling narrative of the role that theological disputes played in the shaping of Antebellum culture more generally.

American Heretic begins and ends with the same organizing statement. Grodzins writes, "In the first phase of Parker's career, up to 1846, when he was deeply involved in the Transcendentalist movement, he challenged how people thought about religious truth. In the second phase, when he was deeply involved in events leading to the civil war, he challenged how people thought about American democracy" (x, 498). The book retells this story of Parker's movement from theological radicalism to political activism. It concurrently tells a story about the Unitarians' internal strife, and how Parker's theological innovations helped contribute to Transcendentalism's status as a distinct philosophical movement within that larger context. This concurrent story is every bit as fascinating as the first, for it carries with it the assertion that the American Renaissance was not only a literary and cultural phenomenon but a vitally religious and theological one as well. Indeed, as Grodzins observes, "for Parker, Transcendentalism was as least as much a new Reformation as a new Renaissance" (xii). Quietly embedded in this historical tale, then, is a...