CHANNING: "DAMN THE INEVITABLE!"
Feinstein, Herbert C.
WRITERS and WRITING THE NEW LEADER LITERARY SECTION CHAINING: Damn the Inevitable!" Reviewede By HERBERT C. FEINSTEIH CHANN1NG DAY BY DAY. Edited by Jose Chapiro. Boston: The Beacon Press. 446...
...One volunteered to bring the beer, one the delicatessen, one the dessert, etc...
...Chapiro baldly states that Channing was no philoso"pher because he lacked a rigid system...
...Channing teaches that love is the "business" of man...
...But I ought not be too harsh with Mr...
...Aside from his European sources of love of the ideal and immersion in nature — Coleridge was his friend and admirer — Channing presents the special American contribution of applying the transcendent spirit to politics and society...
...CHANNING represents the very fountainhead of American transcendentalism...
...Americans havo always encouraged and cheered on the old campaigner, the "has been,'' who comes through...
...We need what the Italians call Sympatia: more understanding kindness and less patronizing tolsrsnce, more compassion and forgiveness...
...All the Earth is Love's affianced...
...Joseph Chapiro, who has cut the essay and sermons into shreds and snippets that we are supposed to take one-a-day like vitamin tablets...
...He had put the ¦ hell, brimstone, and wrath of Jonathan Edwards behind him...
...Our responsibility must become emotional end exceed even the bounds of our intelligence...
...For the evil carried beyond the grave to hell is "the evil within us, moral evil, guilt, crime, ungoverned passion, the depraved mind, the memory of a wasted or ill-spent life...
...and that we are in fact our brother's keepers...
...Is it too much to atk now that everyone love everybody else — although this would be the most practical solution to the world's ills...
...Channing emphasized the God-in-Man, the finite soul which forms part of and reaches into the infinite Oversoul...
...In/polities we need but mention Mr...
...And it is sin which causes the world's sufferings...
...SIN IS for Channing something done In consciousness and against conscience: it is not a theological subtlety but the willful choosing and acting in opposition to man's sense of right and known obligation...
...We should recall the Biblical injunction that "Judgment is Mine...
...For emotional independence ist a lie, as one's responsibility is to everyone else...
...Thoreau, a great economist himself, once said /that goodness is the only investment that never fails...
...Both men kept their coin in musical banks of the spirit which could never be overdrawn...
...he also suffers from the neurosis of the oppressed, easily recognizable minority...
...That is why war is morally evil...
...Time and space cannot contain Love's story...
...His Great Awakening exceeded that of Edwards for it was one of the human heart...
...It is as if ths author had said: "Now a little Freud— the hero was frightened by hearing hit parents making love, then he wai seduced by an older woman...
...In reading Walk in Darknest, one is forcibly reminded of the old jibe at thf race-patronizing fellow-travelers who decided to have a picnic...
...Channing wrote: "There is at least •qual scope for courage and magnaminity in blessing as in destroying mankind...
...symbolising, it would iftm...
...Finally and only as a last resort, rather than as an alternative, could.Channing condone war...
...One man cannot treat anotjher as if he were less than human without becoming leas than human himself...
...Harry Truman...
...Now I must siiow the moral bankruptcy of the Germans, the sadism of Southern white soldiers toward their Negro brothers, the reversion of the post-war *»-»gro soldier to his pre-war status of second-clam citizen...
...not ths power of speech 1m foreign sad unknown language*, but that of eddrestinff the whole human brotherhood in the heart'i native language...
...Reinhold Niebuhr, has said, "disobedience to God," but even worse, disobedience to man himself—the doing of violence to man's own God-like qualities...
...as little better than the brutes, they will continue to treat one another brutally...
...WAR AROUSES the false courage of despair—the morality of the condemned city...
...He had as teacher Channing who was somewhat of a tycoon too...
...For at a time when we have begun to talk about the impossible inevitability of another war, we, have much to learn from a man who helped to found the Massachusetts Peace Society in 1815, the year of the Congress of Vienna and who later wrote: "It is one sign of the tendency of human nature to goodness, that it grows good under a thousand bad influences," For aside from his quarrel with' Absolute...
...it destroys the evil which if not countered by man would destroy him in this world too...
...And even to ignore what would flower if its resources were- set to positive ends, war as a waster of blood and tears, as a fcringer of broken bodies and misspent lives is the world's single great force for evil...
...Chapiro as he deserves accolades for reintroducing Channing...
...National subjugation it a greater evil than a war of defense...
...It should be remembered that virtue and virility both derive from the same item meaning strength...
...Channing shed real tears for human sufferings, wai involved In his fellow men, and best of all spoke with the wisdom of love...
...He was an early Unitarian who had evolved from the intellectual, rather than the evangelical, aspects of Puritanism...
...446 pages...
...Price $5.00...
...If we cannot hope to legislate affection then we should not legislate hate and distrust in its stead...
...By Hans Habe...
...Masquerade WALK IN DARKNESS...
...Perhaps the real reason for the failure of the book Is that it is too easy for one to analyze what Mr...
...New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons...
...Love is the Way, the only way, that .we may rescue ourselves from the shackles of human bondage...
...He scratched his head, then suddenly had an inspiration — "I'll bring the Negro...
...We have become so Independent that as one is responsible for anyone else and that is perhaps our patheAic...
...Bonnet C. Kcsslee...
...fallacy...
...A life of virtue is more than a moral strength test by which man aspires for heaven...
...it is in a real sense the product of our own free-will wherein we become the slave of Inevitabilities...
...War is morally degrading...
...that it imposed a self-tyrannizing majority which could be far more thorough than any single despot...
...Chapiro is brazen about his editing and wishes he could do the same to other writeis...
...Channing, a great Milton scholar, must have recalled the lines . from Com us: Mortals that would follow me Love Virtue, the alone (t free...
...Tor the way to understand man is not to pass upon him in aloof extra-territorial condemnation but to be inside of, wrapped up, indeed, in love with him, We should evaluate rsther than Judge one another to find the V/erth, the value, what is most to be esteemed in our fellows...
...With the other New* England thinkers, Channing advocated the educational, social, and economic reforms of the day...
...It is no wonder therefore that a new William Ellery Channing, the Unitarian minister and pacifist, has been resurrected and we can only hope that along with his confreres Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville, he will enjoy a healthy revival...
...Although he embraced the principles of the French Revolution, Channing realized that political democracy did not always make for an unmitigated blessing...
...Moreover, Mr...
...I move that he be criminally enjoined...
...The editor cites Epictitus and Pascal as authors who have glowed through the medium of the nervous aphroism...
...But it is his special teachings of private goodness and public peace that form the most valuable nap* of his legacy to us now...
...Finally they asked one puzzled soul who had remained silent what he intended to bring...
...one Is reminded in reading him of those chosen disciples at Pentecost who, as Hswthorne tells us in The Scarlet Letter, tpoko: In ton pun of flame...
...As did other friendly critics like Tocqueyille, Cooper, and Melville, he feared that egalitarianism might conduce to the leveling of America's best men...
...that among men honesty is what matters: and that in human history—goodness is the only, thing that lasts...
...Melville later wrote in tortured Pierre: "Endless is the account of Love...
...Virtue, on the other Hand, is the fruit of exertion, but It brings strength and freedom...
...The four-letter words that later acquire a quaintness and charm at matinees are not make-believe in the living...
...It is to be hoped that some brave publisher will soon reprint in their entirety at least the discourses on war and a few of the famous sermons like "The Evil of Sin...
...horror, and filth of war ^impair man's* reverence for human nature and lower him to bestiality...
...3.00...
...Their lesson is the pragmatic, the tough, and the meaningful one of history...
...He was a friend to the Jews and advocated the peaceful abolition of slavery...
...specifically Channing repudiated the cruel Calvanist doctrine of pre-destination and made his appeal to inner conscience...
...It does not produce real manliness but a sham virility as if little boys were pretending to be men by pasting false hair on their chests...
...Love is this world's great Redeemer and Reformer...
...Furthermore, Mr...
...Edwards had lived on a cycle of chronic moral exaltation, anil had gone into paroxysms of passion with the Infinite on the banks of the Hudson River, but he had felt little compassion for hit own parishoneTS...
...Sin means not, as the letter day Calvanist, Mr...
...Habe hat failed to synthesize...
...The defeat of evil and the bitter curse of memory must fall.before love as did the black angel with whom Jacob wrestled all through the night...
...Thus the heritage of Channing to us is the power and the persistence of love...
...Now a little Negro anti-Semitism —¦ 111 demonstrate thai minorities are kept weak by being turned ugaiiift each other...
...But the belL...
...He saw that Americans in their passion for equality would sooner accept the equality of slavery than endure the inequality which liberty might bring...
...Ha be seems to have chosen a Negro for his protagonist because il seemed the thing to do, rather than out of any true understanding or insight into the character whom he hat attempted to create...
...If one speaks of ultimate ends, it is well to recall that perhaps the best way to evaluate any results is in terms of the conduct by which they are achieved...
...and a community seems to me to potsett an indisputable right to retort to such a war when all other means have /ailed /or the security of its existence or freedom...
...Chapiro's dictum, the man who can say: "Damn the Absolute...
...ONE of (he nicest of American traditions is the comeback...
...If a man lives like a four-letter word, he begins to feel like one and "as long as men regard one another as they do now...
...CHANNING'S METHOD for the abolition of war is the brotherhood of love...
...It would not, be as tragic if it were a natural evil, dictated by uncontrollable forces of if it were merely an intellectual wrong —mistakes only those whp claim omniscience dare not make...
...That Is not to say that he lacked passion...
...Literature, too/has its comebacks...
...That Channing somehow has survived the vivisection is miraculous, but as he was himself a believer in the Divine that must explain it...
...Of course, but this is because they have selected that genre themselves...
...Isn't it that we are corning to realize that it is the truly great philosopher who escapes the confines of a closed system—or, to quote William James, who personally violates Mr...
...314 pp...
...The shibboleth yet remains: If we do not love our brothers whom,we can see, how can" we pretend to loye God Whom we cannot see...
...If these were Channing's only contributions he would justly stand as a well-informed and courageous spirit in the vanguard of the Nineteenth Century gospel of humanitarianism...
...In 1830, seven years before Emerson's famous PBK1 address, Channing declared the intellectual independence of America from Europe...
...Every artist should have at least the privilege of being read in the form in which he writes...
...An unfettered press, free associations, and worker's combines were encouraged by him as the best safeguards of a democratic state...
...It is the amaranthine white magic of love which is Channing's own redeeming ode to joy: he has no need to make a comeback as he has never really disappeared...
...The condition of the human race offers inexhaustible objects for enterprise and fortitude and magnaminity...
...STRANGELY, my quarrel — and it is no small one —is with Channing's editor, Mr...
...This generation has seen the American transcendentalists come, Lazarus-like, rambling back from the dead...
...In the same way, and in equally bad taste, Mr...
...Channing might as well be said to be a proponent of: "Damn the Invitable...
Vol. 32 • January 1949 • No. 3
