The quality of Theodore Parker as a human being, therefore, is best expressed as the paradox of Theodore Parker. The paradox of Theodore Parker emerges in three dimensions: first, Parker as an individual; second, Parker in his relations to others; and, third, Parker’s courage that underlies his greatness.
First, the paradox of Theodore Parker is conspicuous in his individual intellectual and physical powers. Parker’s intellectual powers participate in the paradox. At an early age young Theodore distinguished himself as a scholar. Before he was eight Parker read Homer, Plutarch, and Rollin’s Ancient History; while he was nine the ambitious student read widely in Pope, Milton, Cowley, and Dryden; at ten he began to study Latin, translating Virgil and Cicero’s Select Orations; he tackled Greek at eleven and, as he casually announced, “I took to metaphysics about eleven or twelve” (Weiss 1864, I:43).
The record of such study is doubly impressive considering that Parker was for the most part self-educated. Languages and the classics particularly, Parker said, “I learned . . . almost wholly alone without help” (Weiss 1864, I:368). He continues, “Natural Philosophy, Astronomy, Chemistry and Rhetoric I studied by myself” (Weiss 1864, I:44). Such remarkable scholarship was possible because of Parker’s power of retention: he had a photographic memory. He remembered a poem of 500 to 1,000 lines after a single reading, memorized hymns in church while the minister read them through before singing, retained the table of contents of a book not seen in twenty years, and recited a comic song of more than a dozen verses after having heard it once thirty years earlier.
Into manhood Theodore Parker remained an accomplished scholar. He registered for work at Harvard but reported to the college only to take examinations. He mastered over twenty languages. His constantly growing library of over 11,000 volumes and 2,500 pamphlets caused Emerson to say of him, “It looked as if he was some president of council to whom a score of telegraphs were ever bringing in reports” (Emerson 1860, 14–15). Parker translated and added a definitive commentary to De Wette’s Introduction to the Books of the Old Testament. His Defence, written on the occasion of his indictment before the Grand Jury for aiding a fugitive slave, has been hailed as “the best account extant of judicial and legal tyranny from the reign of James I to the period of his own indictment” (Weiss 1864, II:150).
Parker belonged to the “true race of the giants of learning” (Higginson 1899, 38). Men that grow into giants, however, sometimes have faults in their organic development. In almost a compulsive way Parker seized upon everything there was to learn and know. Even his great mind could not possibly assimilate the endless deluge of material. The overflowing information in letters, sermons, and lectures reflects a want of discrimination. The pre-occupation with study and learning interfered with more imaginative applications.
It is a paradox that in rushing to quench his insatiable thirst at the fountain of knowledge, Parker bloated his mind full of information and thus was not always capable of complete assimilation, fine discrimination, and imagination, Such criticism, however, does not reduce but only qualifies the intellectual stature of Theodore Parker: “It is only the loftiest trees of which it occurs to us to remark that they do not touch the sky” (Higginson 1899, 57–58).
Parker’s physical, as well as intellectual, powers participate in the paradox. From his mother and from the spongy meadows of his farm home Parker inherited a basic source of weakness, consumption. Yet, paradoxically, he possessed great strength and endurance. As a young man Parker could carry a full barrel of cider in his arms. On the farm he had occasionally worked twenty hours a day for several days at a time.
As a man it was not uncommon for Parker to work from twelve to seventeen hours a day in his study. He once walked from New York to Boston, averaging thirty miles a day. When convalescing from a serious illness Parker drove about London with an old friend, Charles Sumner. After six hours of riding Parker decided to go about on foot for more exercise. Sumner went home to rest.
Yet, no man has so much strength that with the burden of hereditary disease he can continually tax himself without injury and eventual destruction. So, it is a further paradox that with all he had to offer the world intellectually, Parker virtually destroyed himself physically. He went too far. He sustained a voluminous correspondence, writing thousands of letters a year. During 1856 he consented to preach twice a week, riding to Watertown every Sunday afternoon regardless of the weather.
It was the lecturing, however, that most deeply taxed Parker’s endurance. Appointing himself a “home missionary for lectures,” Parker went about in every Northern state east of the Mississippi lecturing eighty or a hundred times a year (Weiss 1864, II:479). He took pride in signing himself as “Theodore Parker of everywhere, and no place in particular” (Frothingham 1874, 301). The lecture tour to central New York State was typical. On this trip Parker slept in the railroad cars or between the “damp sheets” of a tavern, had few meals except what fruit he carried in his wallet, and contracted a sharp pain in his side and the chills of an incipient fever. Parker continues to describe the tour:
I lectured, took the cars at 2 or 3 A.M. having waited for them three or four hours in the depot, and reached Albany in time for the 4 P.M. train, Friday, and got to Boston about 2 A.M. on Saturday, having had no reasonable meal since noon, Thursday. Sunday I preached at Boston and Watertown, as my custom was. The next week I was ill, but lectured four times; so the next, and the next, until in March I broke down utterly, and could do no more. Then I had a regular fever, which kept me long in the house; but soon as I could stand on my feet an hour, I began to preach. (Weiss 1864, II:246)
When Parker preached on this occasion, he tells of the effort: “I spread out my feet as far apart as I could . . . to make a wide basis, and kept my hand always on the desk, so that I need not fall over” (Frothingham 1874, 492). The strain of lecture tour and sermon resulted in pleurisy and an effusion of water on the lungs that lasted eight months. Parker had an operation, lost twenty pounds, admitted that it was all a nuisance, but said, “It did not much interfere with my work” (Commager 1936, 273).
How can such a man hope to recover? On Sunday, January 9, 1859, Parker wrote to his congregation, “I shall not speak to you to-day; for this morning, a little after four o’clock, I had a slight attack of bleeding in the lungs or throat” (Frothingham 1874, 504). The “slight attack of bleeding” proved to be a serious hemorrhage of the lungs. Parker scurried to the West Indies and Europe attempting to recover lost health, but it was too late, and on May 10, 1860, he expired in Italy.
Theodore Parker presents a paradox, then, as an individual in his intellectual and physical being. He also presents a paradox in his relations to others. John Weiss, one of Parker’s first biographers, identified the basis of this paradox: “For he would be loved by men, as well as love and worship truth” (Weiss 1864, I:51). It is one of the most tragic paradoxes of Theodore Parker that, although he desperately wanted the affection and approval of others, his relentless search for religious truth made him bitterly hated.
Theodore Parker was a man hungry for affection. Born on August 24, 1810, Theodore was the last of eleven children; the next youngest child was five years older. Thus, as the baby of the family young Theodore was the favorite; the little fellow in his brown home-spun petticoats would eagerly dash from one member of the family to another for a pat on the head and a word of approval. Young Parker received great care and love and hence learned to need great love. He later wrote, “I remember often to have heard neighbors say, ‘Why Miss Parker, you’re spilin’ your boy! He never can take care of himself when he grows up.’ To which she replied ‘she hoped not,’ and kissed my flaxen curls anew” (Weiss 1864, I:24).
Throughout his life, Parker was an extremely sensitive person. J. H. Morrison, who sat near him each time Parker preached, said:
More than half the time, in his prayer, I could see the tears run down his face before he was done. Two years, on attempting to read on Easter Sunday the story of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus, he could not get through, but, overcome by his emotions, had to sit down,