More Unitarians
Alcott, Amos Bronson Burleigh, Celia C. Channing, William Henry Cordner, John Dall, Caroline Wells Healey Furness, William Henry Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Hosmer, Frederick Lucian Johnson, Samuel Judd, Sylvester Latimer, Lewis Howard Lowell, James Russell • Ripley, George Savage, Minot Judson Sears, Edmund Hamilton Sullivan, William Laurence Taft, William Howard Walker, James Weiss, John Wendte, Charles William Wooley, Celia ParkerGeorge Ripley
(1802-1880)
 George Ripley |
A brilliant scholar, he is best known as the Transcendentalist who founded the utopian community at Brook Farm. He was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts on October 3, 1802. He was named for a brother who predeceased him. His parents Jerome and Sarah ran a tavern. Ralph Waldo Emerson was his cousin. Bookish from early in his life, and skilled at languages, Ripley went to Harvard College, and graduated first in his class in 1823. He was still orthodox at this point, and thought he might train at Andover, but he settled on Harvard Divinity School, and began to abandon his Calvinist rearing. After graduation he was immediately called to the newly organized Purchase Street Church in Boston, and ordained there on November 8, 1826. In 1825 he met Sophia Dana, and they were married on August 22, 1827. In 1832 he began to publish a series of essays in the Christian Examiner. Almost as soon as he had wholeheartedly embraced Unitarianism, he began to search among the European writers for a more pietistic strain of faith.
Ripley became one of the pioneers in introducing German idealism to America. He introduced the language and the literature of both French and German philosophy, and was instrumental in creating American translations. In 1834 Ripley delivered an important sermon at the installation of Orestes Brownson in Canton, Massachusetts. In “Jesus Christ, the Same Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” he said that the “Immutability of our Saviour consists in the Immutability of the religious truths which he taught. . . the great principles of religion to which Jesus Christ bore testimony are everlasting realities.” (Miller, ed. Transcendentalists, pg. 285-286)
Recognized as a founder of the Transcendental movement, he helped start the Transcendental Club, and he also worked on and contributed to the Dial. He was a central figure in the Miracles Controversy, as the author of the review article on James Martineau’s publication which outraged Andrews Norton. In replying to Norton in the Boston Daily Advertiser he defended the views that Norton called “injurious to the cause of religion.” He called Norton to task with respect to his scholarship, and defended the new philosophy.
In 1841 Ripley resigned from the parish where he was well loved to become co-founder with his wife Sophia of the utopian community at Brook Farm. This was a courageous act to give up his established career. He defined his faith in Transcendentalism in his farewell letter: “they maintain that the truth of religion does not depend upon tradition, nor historical facts, but has an unerring witness in the soul . . . These views I have always adopted.” (Miller, ed. Transcendentalists, pg. 255).
He put all of his financial resources into Brook Farm, and was left in complete despair when it failed in 1847. His mistake may have been trying to organize the community around Fourieristic principles. After the failure, he said it was like witnessing your own funeral. Ripley become a journalist in order to pay off his many debts from both Brook Farm, and his journal, The Harbinger, which he tried to continue in New York. His wife was so forlorn over their
failures, she converted to Roman Catholicism, and then died in 1861. In his later years Ripley wrote some important literary criticism for the New York Tribune. He was remarried to a young German widow, and was able to tour Europe. Most of his ties to his Unitarian and Transcendental past he let lapse.
He died on July 4, 1880.
