TRANSCEND / TRANSCENDENCE
228Christianity that included a creed of
nonviolence. Tolstoy approached Chris-
tian faith as the answer to a fundamental
question: What is the meaning of life?
His personal life led him to think his
own choice was finding meaning in
Christ or meaninglessness. Tolstoy was a
stern opponent of patriotism, which he
saw as the root of much European violence.
He held that a mark of excellence in
works of art include the moral concert of
the works themselves; a work of art that
promoted unjust cruelty as part of its
content is bad as a work of art. In addition
to his major novels such as War and Peace
(1869), Tolstoy wrote multiple short sto-
ries involving angels and the miraculous.
His works include A Confession (1879–
1882), What I Believe (1882–1884), What
Then Must We Do? (1882–1886), The
Kingdom of God Is Within You (1890–
1893), The Christian Teaching (1894–
1896), and What Is Art? (1897–1898).
TRANSCEND / TRANSCENDENCE.
To transcend is to go beyond or to be
beyond. In theism, God is ascribed with
transcendence insofar as God is not iden-
tical to (and is thus beyond) the cosmos.
TRANSCENDENTALISM. Transcen-
dentalism was a nineteenth-century
American movement reacting to materi-
alist and mechanistic philosophies of
the Enlightenment including the sensa-
tionalist psychology of Locke, the physics
of Newton, and mechanistic philosophies
like that of de la Mettrie. Inspired by
European Romanticism and by the writ-
ings of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Carlyle,
Swedenborg, and Cousin, transcendental-
ists urged self-culture and self-reliance,
personal liberty and social transforma-
tion, and an original and personal
relationship with the divine, sometimes
including mysticism. Some transcenden-
talists, encouraged by Charles Fourier’s
social philosophy, engaged in utopian
social experiments like the Fruitlands and
Brook Farm. Others engaged in polemics
against social ills like war, slavery, and the
mistreatment of Native Americans.
Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed that
the name “transcendentalism” was taken
from Kant, though it is plain that
Emerson and Kant use the word quite
differently. Whereas Kant was referring
to the attempt to establish an a priori
basis for reason (hence “transcending”
experience), Emerson used it in a way
reminiscent of the Neoplatonist drive to
transcend nature in order to perceive the
spiritual unity that lies behind all nature.
From its earliest days, transcendental-
ism has been criticized as not sufficiently
rigorous to count as philosophy. Tran-
scendentalist writings are often impas-
sioned and lyrical, freely mixing the
language of poetry, philosophy, and
religion. The transcendentalists coun-
tered that they had no need to write or
live according to the traditions of those
who preceded them. While they drew
broadly on the Western philosophical