# Our Celestial Railroads John Kaag revisits Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story "The Celestial Railroad" to explore how Transcendentalism’s soaring ideals could drift into comfortable illusions—and how figures like Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and a changed Ralph Waldo Emerson stepped off the train to confront the world’s hard truths. November 19, 2025 [ John Kaag ](/people/john-kaag) By [John Kaag](https://www.uml.edu/fahss/philosophy/faculty/kaag-john.aspx), Guest Contributor. Edited by Russell C. Powell November in Concord, Massachusetts, is a special kind of madness. I live three miles from the Old Manse, and on a crisp Saturday morning, the tour buses start rolling down Monument Street before the mist has fully burned off the Great Meadows. They idle in long, rumbling lines, their diesel breath mingling with the scent of decaying leaves. From their windows, passengers look out at a landscape curated for consumption, a series of historical stations on a pre-approved route: the Old North Bridge, Emerson’s house, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Later, I’ll see the same crowds at Walden Pond, circling the water on the neatly groomed path, taking selfies by the replica of Thoreau’s cabin. The parking lot, of course, will be full. It is a pilgrimage made easy, a journey whose hardships have been engineered away. And every time I see it, I think of Nathaniel Hawthorne and his “Celestial Railroad.” ![The Old Manse, Concord, Massachusetts](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/2025-11/Old%20Manse_Etching.jpg) The Old Manse, Concord, MassachusettsFrom the windows of the Old Manse, where he lived with his new bride, Sophia, from 1842 to 1845, Hawthorne looked out on much the same landscape, minus the asphalt and the buses. He also watched pilgrims of a different sort: the earnest, wide-eyed disciples who flocked to Concord to sit at the feet of his neighbor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. He saw the intellectual fervor, the talk of Over-Souls and self-reliance, and in it, he sensed a danger. In 1843, he sharpened his pen and gave that danger a form in his satire, “The Celestial Railroad.” The story is a direct, almost surgical, parody of John Bunyan’s *The Pilgrim’s Progress*. Bunyan’s Christian, the titular pilgrim, has to walk, his feet bloodied, his back bent under the literal burden of his sin, from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. Along that walk, he faces tangible perils: he flounders in the Slough of Despond, battles the demon Apollyon, is imprisoned by the Giant Despair in Doubting Castle, and navigates the treacherous Vanity Fair. Every step of his salvation is earned through painful struggle, personal fortitude, and unwavering faith. Hawthorne’s narrator, by contrast, chooses a thoroughly modern mode of transport. The Celestial Railroad is a marvel of convenience—a comfortable, efficient train that bypasses the hardships of the original pilgrimage. This central metaphor—the train—is Hawthorne’s brilliant encapsulation of his critique. The railroad represents a streamlined, modernized, and ultimately effortless spirituality. The Slough of Despond can now be crossed with a convenient bridge, the foundations of which were made by “throwing into the slough some editions of books of morality, volumes of French philosophy and German rationalism,” a clear jab at the imported Kantian idealism underpinning Transcendental thought.\[1\] The burden of sin, which Christian carries so painfully on his back, is now neatly checked in the baggage car. The journey is no longer a trial but a tour, shepherded by the amiable and ever-reassuring Mr. Smooth-it-away, the story’s guide. The train’s passengers can feel enlightened and assured of their destination without ever having to set foot in the muck of the real world's moral valleys. Hawthorne makes his target explicit when the train passes the cave of Pope and Pagan, former threats to pilgrims, who have now been supplanted by a new, more nebulous giant: “He is a German by birth, and is called Giant Transcendentalist; but as to his form, his features, his substance, and his nature generally, it is the chief peculiarity of this huge miscreant that neither he for himself, nor anybody for him, has ever been able to describe them.”\[2\] Indefinable because it was all too ideal. For Hawthorne, this was the danger of Emerson's idealism in 1843: it was a philosophy of expansive ideas that, in their very loftiness, could become detached from the hard, ugly realities of human sin and societal injustice. To understand the force of Hawthorne’s satire, one must consider the specific character of Emerson's philosophy at that moment. The author of such essays as "Self-Reliance" and "The Over-Soul," Emerson’s primary focus in the late 1830s and early 1840s was on the radical sovereignty of the individual. The path to truth was inward. "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string," he famously wrote.\[3\] Salvation and moral truth were not to be found in social crusades, but in the private, intuitive communion between the self and the cosmos. That was all fine and good for those who live in extremely peaceful corners of the cosmos: Hawthorne perceived its potential for solipsism. If the ultimate reality is the correspondence of one's own soul with the Over-Soul, then the miseries of the external world—the suffering of an enslaved person in the South (or in the North, for that matter), for example—could be viewed as mere shadows, phenomena of a lower reality that would be resolved in the spiritual realm. The train car in "The Celestial Railroad" is the perfect embodiment of the self-reliant soul: it is self-contained, comfortable, and provides a window through which to observe the struggles of others without any obligation to intervene. Perhaps we should note that Hawthorne’s critique does not capture the entirety of Transcendentalism. Indeed, it probably understates Emerson’s own transformation in his reform lectures and essays of the 1840s. But beyond Emerson, the movement contained within it the very seeds of the active resistance Hawthorne found lacking. Henry David Thoreau, Emerson's friend and neighbor, represents a different trajectory. His later actions—his refusal to pay a poll tax in protest of the Mexican-American War and slavery, his night in jail which spawned the essay "Resistance to Civil Government" (which has later come to be popularly known as “Civil Disobedience”), and his passionate defense of the radical abolitionist John Brown—demonstrate a form of Transcendentalism rooted in direct, personal, and often confrontational moral action. Thoreau, in essence, refused the comfortable passage. He chose to get off the train and walk the difficult path, to personally confront the injustices of the state. His example highlights that the "quietism" Hawthorne satirized was a potential danger of the philosophy, not its inevitable outcome. ![Nathaniel Hawthorne](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/2025-11/Hawthorne_Nathaniel.jpg) Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), Digital Public Library of AmericaThis tension between potential and practice played out within Emerson’s own circle, particularly in the figures of Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. While Emerson served as that circle’s philosophical center of gravity, both Fuller and Thoreau pushed the axioms of individualism into the contentious realms of social and political action. Fuller, a formidable intellect and the first editor of the Transcendentalist periodical *The Dial*, did not treat Transcendentalism as a purely abstract doctrine. Her seminal 1845 work, *Woman in the Nineteenth Century*, was a direct application of its principles to the systemic injustices of patriarchy, demanding not just spiritual but social and political liberation for women. For Fuller, the reform of the self was inextricably linked to the reform of a society that constrained it. This was no mere intellectual exercise; her principles carried her across the Atlantic to Italy, where she threw her support behind Giuseppe Mazzini’s rebellion and the short-lived Roman Republic of 1849. While the French army besieged the city, she ran a hospital, tending to wounded revolutionaries. Fuller could have remained safely “at home,” but she didn’t—a fact that ultimately led to her untimely death. In 1850, on her return voyage to America, she, her Italian husband, and their young son all perished in a shipwreck just off the coast of Fire Island, New York. Thoreau’s activism was of a different, more solitary, but no less confrontational, nature. His refusal to pay a poll tax was not just a gesture but a visceral confrontation with a state that sanctioned slavery and waged what he saw as an imperialist war. For both Fuller and Thoreau, moral integrity demanded engagement with the world’s specific sins. Emerson, during this same period, remained more circumspect, famously questioning organized reform movements by asking, "Are they my poor?"\[4\] His was a belief that true change began at the level of individual consciousness, a conviction that kept him, for a time, at a philosophical distance from the immediate, messy work of political struggle that his friends were beginning to embrace. What makes Hawthorne’s critique so pointed is not that it was a final judgment on his neighbors, but that it was a timely one. The Emerson of 1843 was not the Emerson of 1851. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 served as a moral shock, an event so egregious that it forced Emerson from his philosophical perch. He could no longer afford the luxury of a purely internal spirituality. "This filthy enactment," he wrote, "I will not obey."\[5\] His subsequent turn toward active, public abolitionism was decisive. He began to lecture forcefully against slavery, his earlier idealism now tempered by a pragmatic and urgent sense of justice. He, too, eventually stepped off the Celestial Railroad. But in 1843, from his window at the Old Manse, Hawthorne saw a train full of passengers gliding smoothly toward a destination they felt they had already earned, and he couldn't help but wonder what, and who, they were leaving behind. **John Kaag** is Professor of Philosophy at UMass Lowell and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He recently completed a new edition of Thoreau’s *Walden; Or, Life in the Woods* with interactive commentary from Rebind Publishing. --- \[1\] Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Celestial Railroad” (1843), The Literature Network, accessed November 1, 2025, . \[2\] Ibid. \[3\] Ralph Waldo Emerson, *Essays & Lectures*, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 260. \[4\] Ibid., 262. \[5\] Ralph Waldo Emerson, *The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson*, *1820-1872*, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes, vol. 8 (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1912), 236. See also:- [ Religion ](/media-topic/religion) - [ Religion and culture ](/topic-tags/religion-and-culture) - [ Religion and literature ](/topic-tags/religion-and-literature) - [ Religion and Society ](/topic-tags/religion-and-society) - [ Transcendentalism Initiative ](/programming-threads/transcendentalism-initiative)