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REMEMBERING
THE eMERSON WHO SOUGHT GOD
by
Richard Higgins
Richard Higgins (MTS '97) is a writer and book editor who lives in Concord, Massachusetts. He is working on a book about Thoreau, which Beacon Press is to publish.
It is hard to overcome strong first impressions. This helps explain why, when it comes to religion, Ralph Waldo Emerson is often seen as a borderline atheist, a pantheist, a mystic who waltzed in the spiritual ether or, as Harold Bloom has argued, an American
gnostic. The first view is just wrong, and the rest can be pressed only on flimsy, evanescent evidence. The bicentennial of
Emerson's birth offers an opportunity to consider why they miss the mark and to look at the religious legacy of the man John Dewey called
America's Plato.
The strong impression I refer to is the
"Divinity School Address" of 1838, in which Emerson pronounced Christianity, as it was then taught and preached, a shriveled husk. (In 1850 he went further, scolding Christian leaders who sanctioned the Fugitive Slave Law:
"If this be Christianity, it is a religion of dead dogs.") You have to credit—or commit, for his sake—a man who will tell the Faculty of Divinity to their faces, and in a smallish room, that they are preaching a theological carcass. Audacious hardly describes it. Emerson challenged the uniqueness and necessity of Jesus, dismissed received
doctrine—any doctrine—as thin, secondhand gruel and argued against the idea of a personal God. But
Emerson's main mission on July 15, 1838, was to vivify religion, to inject life energy into it, not to destroy it. As a whole, the address is less an attack than a passionate, sometimes arrogant, confession of faith.
Emerson's real audience in Divinity Hall was the six graduating students. He wanted them to live the life of the spirit, in closer relation to God, and to share the fruits of that relationship with others. He urged them not to exit the church but to enter the true sanctuary, that of the
"moral sentiment," a universal religious impulse beyond argument and proof. Invoking Jonathan Edwards, he prayed that people would see that
"the gift of God to the soul is not a vaunting, overpowering, excluding sanctity, but a sweet, natural goodness, a goodness like thine and mine, and that so invites thine and mine to be and to
grow." He concluded with praise for the "advantages" of Christianity: the Sabbath,
"whose light dawns" in the scholar's study, prison cell and "garret of
toil," and the "holy office" of preaching. "And now," he urged the students,
"let us do what we can to rekindle the smoldering, nigh quenched, fire on the
altar."
The sermon was the third major statement of Emerson in his early, iconic phase, the prophetic
"Man Thinking" of the 1830s. First was Nature, with its themes of direct experience as the root of knowledge and insight and of nature as a set of natural facts that express universal, spiritual facts. It was not a pantheist manifesto. Pantheism views—the cycles of day and night, ocean and desert, the force that pushes bud to bloom—it sees this
as God. Emerson believed in a dynamic moral principle that flowed through—but was not contained
by—nature. He called this the Over Soul, the Divine Mind, and he often called it God.
"The best moments of life," Emerson wrote in Chapter Six of Nature,
"are these delicious awakenings of the higher powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature before its
God." For Emerson, nature was, as Frederick Turner recently wrote, "the body of
God's soul." For all its poetic and metaphysical discourse (Emerson himself called it a
"new metaphysics") Nature is at root a theology of incarnation.
"As a plant rests upon the earth," Emerson wrote in it, "so a man rests upon the bosom of
God."
The second statement was his 1837 address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society,
"The American Scholar." This also generated a misleading impression: that Emerson was advocating cultural nationalism. Oliver Wendell Holmes set the critical tone when he called it
"our intellectual Declaration of Independence." He did so because Emerson urged American scholars to find their own voice, to cease imitating Europe. (He also pleaded with scholars to
live what they know.) As Lawrence Buell of Harvard notes in his new book,
Emerson, complaints that American letters were too imitative of Europe were already old hat by 1837. Emerson offered poetic variations on this lament, as to be expected, but, in general, he refused to fly the flag that day. The European salons of thought that Americans emulated must be overthrown—but only because they were models not grounded in the American experience. Emerson is a paradox in that he is an American icon, the founder of American literary culture and
the prophet of that quintessential American quality, individualism. Yet Emerson read Goethe, Hegel, Kant, Dante, Sanskrit and Persian poets, and the
Bhagavad-Gita. And he was not afraid to criticize America for failing to develop its spiritual powers as it was flexing its economic and military might.
The third statement was his address that Sunday evening in Divinity Hall in 1838. It built on the injunction in the first two to let the past die. Emerson chiseled that point with his advice to
"refuse the good models, even those that are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or
veil." (This anti-historicism, together with his individualism, led Bloom to call Emerson the founder of an American gnostic religion. Bloom said Emerson saw soul as a spark of the gnostic
pneuma and fulfilled "the primary teaching of any Gnosis," which is
"to deny that human existence is a historical existence." But
Emerson's self-reliance did not end in the self; it merely started a journey to common moral laws and community. By the mid- 1840s, Emerson had rejected anti-historicism and immersed himself in the fight against slavery and other social issues of his day, as scholars have recently shown. His radical spiritual inclusivity also undercuts
Bloom's viewpoint.)
Buell picks up on another misreading. He writes that William James was correct to view Emerson as a privatizer of religion into
"the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men." But he says James largely ignored
Emerson's "monism," his belief in a divine principle that relates all people and compels them to act ethically toward each other. James
"missed the subtleties of Emersonian religious psychology," Buell writes.
Emerson mulled the address during the spring of 1838, a low point in his relationship with the church. The lifeless droning of his minister in Concord symbolized to Emerson the
"wasting unbelief" of excessive rationalism in religion. German criticism had confirmed his doubts about scriptural authority. The stark reality of the death of his beloved first wife, Ellen Tucker, had cast a harsh light on the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. In
Nature, he had developed what amounted to a new theological vision that pushed him further outside the church. Moreover he had quit parish ministry only six years earlier and found a new vocation as a writer, so there may have been a period of justifying an enormous and risky life move. Freed from having to battle his doubts about his first vocation and that of six Puritan ancestors, going back to 1638, he saw freshly all that was wrong with it.
One critic has called Divinity College, as it was then known, the scene of the
"near wreck" of Emerson's life. This overstatement contains a kernel of truth. Emerson had graduated from Harvard College in 1821, tried school teaching and, after much angst, entered Divinity College in February 1825 as a
secondyear student. The school was six years old. Andrews Norton, Dexter Professor of Sacred Literature, dominated its tiny faculty. Although the orthodox party regarded Norton as anathema, Emerson thought him formalistic and overbearing, describing him as a
"tyrant" in his journal. Emerson, moreover, was entering the profession of his father, whose death he had never mourned. Evelyn
Barish, in
Emerson: the Roots of Prophecy, describes Emerson in 1825 as depressed and anxious, worried that he had made a mistake.
Within weeks, Emerson began to lose his eyesight and developed pre-tubercular joint pain and pulmonary stress. His studies were interrupted by frequent temporary leaves on this account. Emerson was licensed to preach in October 1826, but his health degenerated again and in late 1826 he spent a month in South Carolina and Florida. He did not graduate, but he spent 1827 as a supply-side preacher. He joined Second Church in Boston as associate minister in 1828 and became its pastor the next year. In 1832, as he grappled with the loss of his wife, Emerson accepted internally that he had chosen the wrong profession. In a forced dispute over a liturgical issue, he resigned his post as pastor.
Given this background, and given that Emerson loved young people, he may have wished to warm the students of the obstacles they would encounter and to point them toward what he saw as the true north of the soul. After contrasting the sterility of the New England Church with the plentitude and fertility of nature, Emerson stated his objections to the
"noxious exaggeration about the person" Jesus. The soul, he said, knows no persons. He implicitly rejected the idea of God as a father, a personal being enmeshed in the events of history. These were fighting words, and Emerson knew it. His attack on the personality of God infuriated Norton, who in an unsigned article in a Boston newspaper called the address
"the latest form of infidelity." Interestingly, one reason the liberals criticized Emerson so harshly was that he had made them look foolish.
Emerson never recanted these views, which are described in detail by David Robinson and others, but the ruckus they stirred obscured a larger point that I want to make: For Emerson, the theological demotion of Jesus and the rejection of the personal being-ness of God, did not make God less but
more. It opened God up. His new angle of vision made it more possible to see the truth of
Emerson's favorite biblical passage, from John 17: "The Kingdom of God is within
you." For someone who criticized the anthropomorphic theism of his day, Emerson remained all his life an unusually God-drenched and God-centered person.
"I count it the great object of my life," he wrote in his journal, "to explore the nature of
God." William James summed up Emerson's message as: "So nigh is grandeur to our dust, so near is God to
man." According to Robinson, Emerson experimented with names for God so that God would seem fresh and vital.
"Cleave to God even against the name of God," Emerson wrote in his journal.
Emerson did not relent on the church as a formal institution, or church as
"mythus." But Emerson never lost his affection for church as community, as tradition, as locus for the highest aspirations of a gathered people. In the 1860s, Emerson returned to First Parish in Concord. Worship was a means for Emerson to remain in touch with the radical Puritan piety of Edwards, a piety conducted to him via the evangelical Calvinist roots of his mother and his Aunt Mary. In 1832,
after his decision to leave his pulpit, Emerson wrote an ordination hymn for his successor. It was,
"We Love the Venerable House Our Fathers Built to God." Referring to worshipers, it says:
From humble tenements around
Came up the pensive train,
And in the church a blessing found,
That filled their homes again.
For faith and peace and mighty love,
That from the Godhead flow,
Showed them the life of Heav'n above,
Doth spring from life below.
Any account of Emerson's influence as a religious thinker falls short if it considers only theological ideas. Emerson was mainly a preacher who sought to empower people, to share the good news that we have inside what we need to know, that God is
there—"Oh my brothers, God exists!"—that we are each an outlet of the Universal Mind.
Jack Mendelsohn, an author and Unitarian Universalist minister
(STB
'45), expressed this legacy of Emerson in a recent newsletter article.
"I preach about Emerson because I want to be cured" of despair, he wrote. But desire is not enough. One must, with Emerson, accept that we must primarily cure ourselves, he said. On some days, Mendelsohn wrote, the awareness of his failings and the daily global grind of human folly and savagery is almost too much. Then, he continues, he remembers
Emerson's valiant struggle against ill health and almost unbearable personal grief, and he lifts his head.
"The point about Emerson was that the upbeat still broke forth. No one really knows how he did it. He was not delivered by logic or by sudden conversion. He came to himself over the long haul, in a steady relentless project, in a curriculum of a lifetime. He believed that life could be an endless renewal, a constant becoming, and he made it just
that."
One reason the Unitarians broke with orthodox Christians was because they
didn't want to reduce Jesus to a mere instrument for saving individual souls. Christianity was about much more than that, they protested. How ironic that their
movement's greatest prophet continues to salve, and perhaps to save, so many souls today.
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