Margaret Fuller, Faithful Female Sceptic: The Politics of (Not) Publishing the 1842 "A Credo"

Abstract

Margaret Fuller, Faithful Female Sceptic:The Politics of (Not) Publishing the 1842 "A Credo" Caitlin Smith (bio) In 1842, Margaret Fuller sent William Channing a text nine years in the making: her personal formulation of belief, "A Credo."1 Building on Fuller's investigation of biblical authority during her 1833–34 Groton retreat, as well as her 1840–41 intensive reading period in Romantic religion, "A Credo" articulates Fuller's own religious beliefs. Fuller explains how she arrived at the "I believe" statements that structure "A Credo." She defines what she is not (a Christian, an irreligious infidel), and embraces an idiomatic definition of religion shaped by Romantic idealism. "A Credo" concludes by staking out a new religious identity for its author. Margaret Fuller would henceforth be a "faithful skeptic."2 But Fuller never publicized either her rejection of institutional Christianity, her self-created Romantic religion (which anticipates the cosmology of American spiritualism), or her new identity as a "faithful sceptic."3 Religious skepticism had been a blurrily defined but much-invoked bugbear in early American political rhetoric since the 1780s.4 Public concern over religious skepticism only increased in the 1810s–40s. Early nineteenth-century print culture documents a consistent anxiety about a vast amount of ambient infidelity. If not properly managed by religious [End Page 383] authorities, this imagined reservoir of doubt could erode shared religious values, thereby destroying the sociable bonds of trust between individual citizens and between citizens and institutions.5 In fact, religious institutions were undergoing significant reorganization in this period, as America's religious marketplace diversified and radically pluralized.6 And political distrust was on the rise, thanks to growing polarization over the morality of the South's "peculiar institution," visible tensions between state and federal orders of governance, and anxiety about economic volatility following the Panics of 1819–21 and 1837. For polemically minded ministers and partisan politicians alike, ambient infidelity provided a powerful rhetorical figure to focus and direct national anxieties. Discussions about skepticism and faith, unbelief and belief, went beyond baldly opportunistic attacks on imagined skepticism. They appeared in published journal debates between opponents termed Christians and Skeptics; theological treatises on the future of specific Christian traditions; new explorations of comparative religion; arguments between moderate, enlightened Deists and reform-minded atheists; and didactic fiction that staged dramatic conversions or deconversions to articulate what true religion meant.7 Transcendentalism emerged from and through these intellectual debates about religion and its future in American life. Though notoriously diverse in terms of philosophy and activism, American Transcendentalism was largely held together by an attempt to reconstitute essential religious sensibilities outside the calcified forms of outmoded creedal Christianity.8 Many of Fuller's male Transcendentalist peers argued that faith and skepticism (or belief and unbelief) were incorrectly construed as opposites and actually worked together to keep religion dynamic and alive. These arguments furnished ammunition to their critics, who (in)famously identified Transcendentalism as "the latest form of infidelity."9 Though Transcendentalist [End Page 384] thinkers disagreed considerably about what was meant by faith and by skepticism, and about the specifics of the merging process, they advanced structurally similar arguments about the nonoppositional nature of faith and skepticism. Given her male Transcendentalist peers' open advocacy of a faith-doubt synthesis, Fuller's decision to keep private her solution to the conflict is telling. "A Credo" embraces elements of the same German Romantic tradition that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker found attractive. Emerson saw skepticism as a temporary obstruction of both individual and universal-historical growth, and argued that overcoming doubt through action could help young men develop courage, valor, and conviction. Fuller's statement elevated obstructive skepticism to half of a mutually constitutive, dialectical dualism. And "A Credo" was not incidental to Fuller's developing thought. As she embraced and redefined gendered antiskepticism, she invented the figure of dynamic polar dualism that would later structure her idea of gender in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Finally, "A Credo" creates a feminine solution to obstructive skepticism. Fuller advocates an inward turn and mystical awakening over the heroic leap into world action advised by Goethe, Carlyle, and Emerson.10 Though Fuller's private writings record a consistent...