The Faith of Emerson: American Transcendentalism, Kantian Epistemology, and Vedantic Thought 9781666926187, 9781666926194, 1666926183

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The Faith of Emerson

The Faith of Emerson American Transcendentalism, Kantian Epistemology, and Vedantic Thought Daniel A. Campana

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Campana, Daniel, author. Title: The faith of Emerson : American transcendentalism, Kantian epistemology, and Vedantic thought / Daniel A. Campana. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023031600 (print) | LCCN 2023031601 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666926187 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666926194 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882--Religion. | Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882--Philosophy. | Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882--Knowledge and learning. Classification: LCC PS1642.R4 C365 2023  (print) | LCC PS1642.R4  (ebook) | DDC 814/.3--dc23/eng/20230727 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023031600 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023031601 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To Susie My always loving and ever supportive wife

Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii List of Abbreviations

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PART 1: EMERSON’S EARLY PHASE KEEPING THE FAITH—1803–1821

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Chapter 1: The Intellectual Context: In America

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Chapter 2: The Intellectual Context: Family and School



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PART 2: EMERSON’S REVOLUTIONARY PHASE: REJECTING THE FAITH—1821–1832

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Chapter 3: Building Materials for an Alternative Faith

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Chapter 4: The Breaking Point





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PART 3: EMERSON’S MATURE PHASE: FAITH RECOVERED—1832–1882

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Chapter 5: Did Emerson Lose His Faith?

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Chapter 6: Faith as Interpretive Act





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Chapter 7: Seeing Emerson’s Faith in His Works: Nature and Early Addresses 101 Chapter 8: Seeing Emerson’s Faith in His Works: Oversoul and Self-Reliance 115 Chapter 9: Seeing Emerson’s Faith in His Life: Brook Farm and Emerson’s Alternative Vision vii

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Contents

Chapter 10: Seeing Emerson’s Faith in His Life: The Slavery Issue

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Chapter 11: Seeing Emerson’s Faith in His Life: The Problem of California 145 Epilogue

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Bibliography Index

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167

About the Author



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Preface

Ralph Waldo Emerson / Born in Boston May 25, 1803 / Died in Concord April 27, 1882 / “The passive Master lent His hand to the vast Soul that o'er Him planned.” Source: Photo taken by Daniel A. Campana.

Thus reads a tombstone in Sleepy Hollow graveyard in Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson’s lifetime spanned the Jeffersonian administration through the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. His era gave witness to the miracles of the invention of the steam engine, the telegraph, and the completion of the transcontinental railway. The pace of growth was exciting but tumultuous. The sheer size of the New World led to what Emerson would call a “wild-eyed expansionism,” luring entrepreneurs, gold miners, utopian sects, and bandits westward. Andrew Jackson’s expansionist policies added fuel to the fire by removing Indians from their ix

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lands and supporting free land for settlers. The completion of the transcontinental railway signaled an attempt to rein in the Wild West but also made it more available. Emerson would note in 1835, “Steam & rails have turned the country into our neighborhoods.”1 The threat that the lasciviousness of the West might undermine the civility of New England grew stronger. The nation was struggling to define itself in the context of its new independence. As Emerson made his entrance into the scene in 1803, the new nation was also redefining its relationship to global economic powers. Trade agreements were being established, including the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of the country, as well as contracts for the importation of slaves from Africa. In Emerson’s lifetime the United States’ participation in this trade would increase dramatically. By 1825 37 percent2 of all slaves imported into the Western hemisphere were headed to a handful of American states, leading to the greatest social issue of his time and its culmination in civil war. As the nation struggled to find its footing in global markets, it also faced the task of defining its cultural identity. Intellectually, the US was as Emerson described it, “an infant in a family of elders.” An essential aspect of Emerson’s life-setting was the tension between intellectual independence from and dependence on Europe and Great Britain. His ambivalence was expressed early in his Journals as he described meeting with Britain’s luminaries on his first trip abroad in 1832. Having conversed with Landor, Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wadsworth, Emerson found them well-read, earnest, and deficient—treating them with condescension because of their reputation. Reflecting on the experiences, he wrote: “I believe in my heart that it is better to admire too rashly, as I do, than to be admired too rashly as the great men of this day are.”3 Yet despite his disparaging comments, Coleridge’s work exercised a great influence on his thought, and he developed a lifelong friendship with Carlyle. In general, Emerson’s comments jotted down during his travels reveal a continual clash between degrading stereotyping—the French “are a vain nation”;4 Naples was “swarming with a faithless robber population”5 — and a sense of awe at the history and architecture surrounding him. Comparing the churches in Europe with those in America, he called the latter “many grand granite piles erected there.”6 Upon leaving England to return home, Emerson concluded: “I am thankful that I am an American as I am thankful that I am a man.”7 This tension between cultural dependence and independence felt by Emerson, and expressed by the intellectuals, artists, and poets of his time, was experienced most intimately in individual religious life. In one form or another, Protestant Christianity defined every aspect of life and society for the citizens of the new nation and provided them with a sense of being grounded in the past amidst the uncertainties of the present. On the one hand, Puritanism represented a rejection of mainstream European and British

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Christianity and was therefore a sign of independence, but its Calvinist theology entailed a deep connection to European sources after all. On the other hand, liberal Unitarianism jettisoned the Calvinist theology but was also fundamentally indebted to its European intellectual heritage. Conservative and liberal Protestants alike sought to redefine their religious foundations in American terms. Though theologically distinct from one another, these two dominant versions of Christianity offered a similar metaphysical picture that transcended geopolitical and social realities. That picture included traditional Christian doctrines regarding the nature of God, the expression of his love in the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection, and the responsibility of individuals to respond to that love for their salvation. This picture was agreed to be the unique and exclusive truth of God’s revelation to humans, delivered in the very words of the Bible and attested to by the miracles therein. Committing oneself to the truth of these doctrines and living within the reality they described was what was meant by keeping the faith. This picture was used to validate the newly minted American identity as God’s people while maintaining the link to tradition. America was a version of the promised land, and its new inhabitants were on a divine mission to create a society that conformed to the doctrines that comprised their faith. Not only would Emerson observe and participate in the explosive development of the new nation, but he would also emerge as the century’s leading definer of its intellectual and religious identity. It is my contention that Emerson rejected the Christian faith as it was understood in his day but remained grounded throughout his life in a religious faith that would be recognized by Christian theologians and philosophers of religion today. This contemporary notion of faith as a way of living could be described in broadly general terms as a synthesis of Immanuel Kant’s constructivist epistemology with Vedantic philosophy: from Kant is taken the claim that humans construct meaningfulness by transcending each conscious moment with uniquely human cognitive structures; from Vedantic philosophy comes the idea that the One is the ultimate which transcends all reality. Faith, then, is experiencing each moment as the result of the One transcending the individual in their act of transcendence; the religious life is life lived at the center point of being transcended and transcending. This is a phenomenological account of religious faith that encompasses the religious experience of peoples from all religious traditions. I argue that Emerson was a century ahead of his time in articulating this view of faith. I emphasize that the Kantian and Vedantic seeds of this view were planted very early in Emerson’s intellectual development and that recognizing this makes his earliest works (Nature, the Divinity School Address, and the American Scholar Address) more intelligible. Further, seeing Emerson as a man of faith refocuses his later works in which he has often been interpreted as the ultimate egoist, even deifying the self. In my reading

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the self is always penultimate for Emerson; it is the Divine, or Oversoul, that is ultimate. The self is the vehicle of divine creativity. In rejecting the faith, as that word was understood to mean, Emerson severed the connection between American identity and the doctrines of Christianity; however, he provided a new foundation for American identity in the individual self as the active and passive center of transcendence. In this reading of Emerson, “the passive master len[ding] his hand to the vast soul that o’er him planned” is an apt, though misunderstood, even ignored description of the faith that remained at the center of his being throughout the span of his lifetime. THE OUTLINE In the first section of this work, I present the intellectual milieu that Ralph Waldo Emerson entered in 1803. Specifically, I articulate the nature of religious faith as it was understood throughout New England Christianity. The emphases here are on Emerson’s conformity to the mainstream assumptions of that milieu and his early exposure to philosophies from India and Germany that would coalesce into his own version of living faith. Section two traces Emerson through his rejection of the mainstream assumptions to which he had willingly conformed in his youth. In these chapters Emerson finds his own voice, casts off the church, and, in so doing, leaves the faith, as it was conceived of by his contemporaries. Section three begins with a critical assessment of interpretations of Emerson that present him in his mature years as having lost his faith and turned away from metaphysics. I then offer an alternative view in which Emerson never lost his faith; rather, he maintained a life of faith that was grounded in metaphysics. The last chapters of this section illustrate how this understanding of Emerson, as a man of faith, provides a better insight into his literary and oratory works, as well as his personal life decisions. NOTES 1. JMN 5:120. 2. Stanley Engerman and Robert Fogel, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1974), 28. 3. JMN 4:78–9. 4. JMN 4:200. 5. JMN 4:143. 6. JMN 4:117. 7. JMN 4:81.

Acknowledgments

I want to express my gratitude to those whose foundational works make projects like this one possible: the editors of The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson on Harvard University Press, the editors of The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as Nancy Craig Simmons for her work on Mary Moody Emerson’s letters; Emerson’s biographers: Ralph L. Rusk and Robert D. Richardson whose comprehensive, personal portraits of Emerson were essential for contextualizing his intellectual journey; and to Kenneth Walter Cameron whose labors in mining the depths of archival material shedding light on the sources of Emerson’s intellectual development were invaluable as well. Many thanks to the following institutions for the parts they played in making this project possible: the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California for its resources as well as its provision of a research environment wherein most of this manuscript took form; the Harvard Houghton library for access on several occasions to their archives of original textual and ephemeral materials from the Emerson family; the Concord Museum and the Concord Free Public Library for their permissions to reproduce the images of R.W. Emerson, his Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and his first wife Ellen Tucker Emerson; the University of La Verne which, during my sojourn with Emerson, has afforded me two sabbatical leaves. For the intellectual inspiration leading to this project, I thank John Hick, my professor, mentor and friend, whose compassion and intellectual integrity have provided me a high standard toward which to aspire. I also owe much to the Nineteenth Century Studies Association which over the years has encouraged me to expand my focus on Emerson into new directions. I am also grateful to those who made the publication of this manuscript possible: to Rebecca Ashburn who, besides being my daughter, is an accomplished writing consultant and proofreader, and donated many hours to

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reading earlier drafts of this project; and to Jana Hodges-Kluck of Lexington Books who remained enthusiastic and supportive throughout the delays caused by the COVID pandemic and lockdowns.

List of Abbreviations

JMN  The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by William H. Gilman, et al. 16 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960–1982. J Journals (earlier ed.) Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909–1914. CW  The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Alfred R. Ferguson, et al. 10 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971–2013. W The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Edward Waldo Emerson. 12 vols. Boston: The Riverside Press, 1906. MME-L  The Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson. Edited by Nancy Craig Simmons. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1993. L  The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Ralph Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton. 10 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939, 1990–1995.

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PART 1

Emerson’s Early Phase: Keeping the Faith—1803–1821

Mary Moody Emerson (1774–1863), sister of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s father. Ralph’s Aunt Mary was his intellectual mentor throughout his early years. Courtesy of Concord Free Public Library.

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The poles of conservative and liberal Protestant Christianity defined the parameters of the young Ralph Emerson’s world. Though he was exposed to ideas that would later enable him to redefine himself and his religious faith, this stage of his life was characterized primarily by conformity. Ralph’s early acquired drive to succeed, coupled with his social awkwardness, resulted in a sense of insecurity, the response to which was his conforming to expectations in order to be accepted and rewarded. He graduated from Harvard College as an unexceptional student holding to the conventional views of Harvard Unitarianism.

Chapter 1

The Intellectual Context In America

The New England Christianity into which Emerson was born was reeling under the effects of the Great Awakening, on the one hand, and Hume’s skepticism on the other. The former was the result of Calvinist theology fueled by Puritan fervor; the latter, the logical outcome of the Lockean empiricism that had dominated American colleges. Attempts at finding equilibrium by appealing to the solid, objective footing of biblical revelation were further confounded by the newly imported German higher criticism of the Bible. As American intellectuals faced these challenges, alternatives to their entire worldview were appearing from the East. The young Emerson was nurtured into this milieu by a family that was at once religious and intellectual, traditional and liberal, and his Harvard College education took place at the heart of the debates. In preparing the stage for Emerson’s entrance into the American intellectual scene, I do not pretend to a comprehensive social history of early New England, or an analysis so focused as that of Perry Miller’s on American Puritanism, or F. O. Matthiessen’s analysis of artistic expression in New England. Though these classic works, and others like them, are invaluable to any scholar of the period, I choose a middle course, aiming to examine the religious experience of early New Englanders across sectarian boundaries from Puritan Calvinism to Unitarianism. To the contemporary eye, this scope may appear arbitrarily narrow; though this continuum may describe the extreme ends of the Protestant Christian theology of the day, surely there were other types of religious experience that could be taken into account. But the guiding principle of selection is the concern that this be Emerson’s stage. With this in mind, it is the spectrum of Protestant Christian theologies, from conservative to liberal, that is the most relevant to understanding Emerson’s context, a context that was in fact homogeneous to an extent incomprehensible in our postmodern, religiously pluralist America. 3

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Homogeneity was precisely the goal of the Puritans of the earliest days of colonial America. Winthrop’s sermon on the voyage from Europe had clearly articulated the mission that lay ahead. The goal was to create in America the theocracy that characterized the biblical account of God’s relationship to his own people. Attempts at bringing this about on English soil had been crushed by the organized church which wielded both ecclesiastical and political power. With the course toward theocracy blocked in England, the only way forward was across the ocean. The sources of authority in the theocracy created in the early colonies emulated those sources of authority recognized by the earliest people of God, called out of the wilderness and into the Promised Land. The ultimate authority for truth and wisdom, then, was God himself and his revelation to man. For the Israelites, this had meant communication by direct encounter between God and his chosen prophets. For the colonists, this meant the Bible taken as a faithful account of those revelations. This written account of prophetic revelation was seen as constituting a closed set of teachings: the faith once delivered. The colonists were creating what Perry Miller has dubbed a Bible Commonwealth. However, whether the will of God comes to the people through prophetic voice or written word, it must be interpreted in order to have meaning and relevance. In the earlier theocracy, it was the prophets and priestly class that interpreted the will of God to the people. With the rejection of theocracy and the adoption of monarchy, a split developed between the affairs of governing and those of the spiritual life, and therefore between the monarch as the authority in one sphere and the prophet/priest as authority in the other. The biblical history of the monarchy in Israel featured a back-and-forth struggle between the monarchs, characterized as failing in their allegiance to God, and the prophets calling them to repentance. The struggle was not so much one of the personalities involved but one of the ultimate source of authority itself. The monarchs’ failure lay in the mistaken notion that their own political power was equal to, or independent from, the will of God and therefore immune to the criticisms of the prophets. The end result was the catastrophic end of the period of the monarchy and the exile of God’s people from the land. The prophets had been right, and God had brought down his judgment on the monarchs. Later historical analysis of such accounts would reveal that the biblical stories were not so much historical accounts of events but theological apologia for the loss of the promised land; the prophets and priests were finally vindicated because it was they who wrote the stories to that end. But such analysis was not in the purview of the colonists. What they saw in the biblical stories taken at face value was their own story: it was their prophetic voice that spoke up against the powers of their European homeland, it was they who

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were ignored or silenced, and it was they who would be vindicated by history when the “city on a hill” was erected. The prophets of God were then those who were true to the revelation of God’s will and interpreted it to the community. The theocracy of Israel had been founded upon God’s will which was interpreted to the people by his representatives. So, the colonists’ Bible Commonwealth was to be grounded in God’s will, now in written form, and interpreted by his representatives. A subtle but all-important shift had occurred in the logic of the theocracy at this point: the ultimate authority for the community was now the interpretation given to the Bible, and, thanks to the Protestant nature of Puritanism, there was no single authority for that interpretation. The enormity of the task of interpreting the biblical teachings was simplified to some extent by certain shared assumptions, assumptions so synonymous with the identity of the Puritan community that they could not be questioned. The three most fundamental of these assumptions were that 1) John Calvin’s systematic exposition of Christian theology provided a basic structure for understanding what God was doing throughout human history from its creation, 2) the true meaning of the Bible could be discerned by reading it through this lens, and 3) understanding the Bible in this way provided one with universal truths from which one could deduce God’s will for the community and the conduct of one’s personal life. These assumptions were not without problems. In their quest to found the community on the clear truths of God’s revelation, the Puritans found themselves in a tangle of interpretations. Besides the problems inherent in biblical interpretation, Calvin’s own teaching needed to be interpreted in a new way. His doctrines of predestination and the total otherness of God easily led to fatalism.1 As a corrective, Puritans had turned to covenant theology. Here, God voluntarily steps out of mystery inasmuch as he deals with man, binding himself to act in a way that man’s logic and ethical sensitivities can grasp. Though from the perspective of God’s own mysterious will, we are predestined for salvation or not, by the covenant God gives us a way to demonstrate our chosen-ness by obedience. So also the fate of the community of God’s people is known by God but worked out from the human perspective in terms of covenant relation. As Winthrop had put it in his voyage sermon of 1630, Thus stands the cause between God and us. We are entered into Covenant with Him for this work. We have taken out a commission. . . . Now if the Lord shall please to hear us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath he ratified this covenant and sealed our Commission, and will expect a strict performance of the articles contained in it; but if we shall neglect the observation of these articles . . . the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us; be

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revenged of such a [sinful] people and make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant.2

In 1642 prominent New England theologian William Ames would write The Marrow of Sacred Divinity which would articulate this covenant theology and secure its centrality in Puritan thought.3 Such a reinterpretation of Calvinism was necessary to provide motivation for moral action on the one hand and assurance of salvation on the other, but it required a compromise on Calvin’s doctrine of total depravity wherein man, as a result of the Fall, can no longer count on his intellect for logic, let alone ethical sensitivities.4 As Miller observes, “The spectacle of these men struggling in the coils of their doctrine, desperately striving on the one hand to maintain the subordination of humanity to God without unduly abusing human values, and on the other hand to vaunt the powers of the human intellect without losing the sense of divine transcendence, vividly recreates what might be called the central problem of the seventeenth century as it was confronted by the Puritan mind.”5 Leadership of the community was then entrusted to men whose character demonstrated their commitment to their covenant relation to God expressed by their obedience to God’s will as it was known in the Bible: pillars of the community must first be pillars of the church. As Ahlstrom puts it, “And they believed that the church should consist only of ‘visible saints’ and their children, with a knowledgeable profession of faith and commitment to God-fearing behavior as the test of visibility.”6 Therefore, leaders in the community were elected from the people based on recognition of their qualifications, and once in power, since they represented the will of God, their decisions were absolute. What kept the Puritan ideal from being a reduplication of the European medieval monarchy the colonists had left behind was the assumption that the covenant relationship with God began with the individual and was expressed in community. Where the monarchies of Europe were dealing with a more secularized populace, the colonists were envisioning a sacred community, a holy commonwealth. As Bellah puts it, it was a convergence of Puritan covenant emphasizing individual conversion, and therefore commitment to the covenant community, and Republicanism where social life is based on individual virtue, and therefore without the necessity of external coercion.7 The ideal entailed a single church, an electorate composed of church members and leaders—“good men”—whose charge was to interpret the will of God to the community, the will of God being found in the Bible. The internal self-governance of the community is illustrated vividly in the words of A Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline by Thomas Hooker, the seminal work on church discipline in 1648:

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But he {Christ} hath laid in Purgatives as well as Restoratives; and out of his infinite wisdoms, who knows, to how many corrupt distempers, as so many hurtful and noisesome diseases the Saints are subject to; he hath appointed Church-censures as good Physik, to purge out what is evil, as well as Word and Sacrament, which, like good diet, are sufficient to nourish the soul to eternal life. And his earning compassion hath made him here so careful, that he hath appointed each particular Brother, as a skillful Apothecary, to help forward the spiritual health of all in confederacy with him. Hence all the members are made (as we have heard) watchmen over the welfare of their Brethren, and by virtue of their consociation and combination, have power over each other, and a judicial way of process against each other in case of any sinful aberration, to proceed legally and judicially against them, according to rules and orders of Christ provided for that end.8

Each citizen of the community was then responsible, not only for his own behavior, but for his neighbors’ as well. The idea that each step, from the will of God itself, to the stories in the Bible, to Calvin’s theological superstructure, to the principles for acceptable behavior deduced from this, entailed subjective leaps of interpretation was not a concern. Without acknowledging these subjective leaps, the entire system appeared to be a logical deduction from objective truth. So, Hooker confidently described the process: “There must be a right understanding of the meaning of the words, and so a grammatical analysis of the phrase, where the promises or commands are expressed, before either our faith can believe the one, or a gracious humble heart make choice aright of the other, and obey it.”9 To be a Christian was thus to have faith, defined as belief in certain propositions—promises or commands—and obedience to those propositions. The propositions were seen as the clear and absolute expressions of God’s will having been given directly by God himself. Perry Miller summed up the mentality: The Puritans were assured that they alone knew the exact truth, as it was contained in the written word of God, and they were fighting to enthrone it in England and to extirpate utterly and mercilessly all other pretended versions of Christianity. When they could not succeed at home, they came to America, where they could establish a society in which the one and only truth should reign. . . . Of course, the whole Puritan philosophy of church and state rested upon the assumption that the Word of God was clear and explicit, that the divines had interpreted it correctly, and that no one who was not either a knave or a fool could deny their demonstrations.10

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THE GREAT AWAKENINGS: REVIVALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS It was not the Puritan form of Calvinism, nor the struggle to create the ideal society on American soil, that would have the most direct influence on Emerson: it was the expression of this thinking in the Revivalist movements whose highest moments were marked as Awakenings. The first of these came in 1740 with the preaching and writings of Jonathan Edwards, the second came just three years before Emerson’s birth and centered upon Charles Grandison Finney, and the third occurred in 1857–1858. The latter two brought contextual variations but were essentially one in spirit with the first. Revivalism was first and foremost a reaction against the intellectualism that characterized not only Puritan Calvinism but every form of Christianity; it was an interdenominational condemnation. Intellectualism had robbed God of his transcendence by reducing him to the limitations of human reason— even the Calvinist notion that God was still inscrutable in himself had been compromised by covenant theology to the extent that his inscrutability was irrelevant. By conforming God to human reason, religious experience itself had been reduced to intellectual assent to doctrines and the moral life deduced from them. Revivalism’s antidote to intellectualism was not to reject the basic propositional nature of faith but to emphasize emotion as the demonstration of one’s giving of oneself wholly to that faith. Critics from the intellectual community referred to these demonstrations with the denigrating appellation enthusiasm. As Miller notes, “For Harvard faculty, the Great Awakening was a crisis threatening culture, religion, and common decency. They referred to the emotional nature of it as ‘enthusiasm’ which for them was ‘the utmost contempt.’”11 It is easy to jump from the anti-intellectualism of the revivalists, and their stress on emotional, even ecstatic, experiences, to the conclusion that they were rejecting the domain of reason and escaping to mysticism. Matthiessen, for example, argues that Edwards brought logic together with mysticism and then goes on to argue that Emerson separated them again.12 This is, I think, a misapplication of mysticism to Edwards’s view and, by extension, a misapplication to Emerson’s view as well. To our modern ears, mysticism may seem the obvious alternative to the scientific, the latter being the sphere of objective reason and logic, the former being apprehended through the subjective faculty of emotion. Since the objective realm of reason is precisely the realm of intellectualism, then anti-intellectualism amounts to denying the preeminence of this realm and replacing it with the subjective. By this, mysticism provides an alternate view of reality, meaning, and truth. However, to place the subjective above, or even on a par with, the objective implies the

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possibility that what is known via the subjective has just as much, or more, claim to truth than that known by logic and reason. Though many revivalists embraced this notion, it would not have been acceptable to Edwards. The Truth, for Edwards, could be grounded only in the objective claims of reform doctrine. Edwards maintained the view of Christian faith as belief in propositions. He did not conjoin the two domains of mysticism and logic; rather, he addressed two aspects of the human response to the Truth: emotion and logic. Edwards simply saw human experience more holistically than contemporaneous framers of Christian theology. He saw human knowledge not only in Lockean mechanistic terms of sense experience but also in terms of emotional response. The truth of one’s experience is both rational and emotional. Thus, true experience of the claims of religion cannot be had by one without the other. Emotion does not provide an alternate avenue to truth; it completes the human response to the truth.13 Recognizing this unity of emotion and logic in Edwardss view of religious understanding dissolves what Ahlstrom describes as a conundrum: Edwards is “an apologist for [Old Light] strict reform doctrine and New Light experientialism, yet embracing much of the new thought of the day including Locke.”14 The unity in Edwards’s view of Old Light emphasis on reason and New Light emphasis on emotion would, however, be lost in the next manifestation of revivalism. It was the Second Great Awakening, begun in 1800, that would provide the most immediate backdrop to Emerson’s arrival on the stage. Charles Grandison Finney was the dominant figure of the movement. The key to Finney’s thought was the separation of intellect and heart/feeling and the superiority of the latter in religious matters. “Finney’s basic theorem was that everybody can agree upon intellectual propositions; the difference is that some grasp them with the heart, others with only the mind.”15 This second wave of revivalism continued in the anti-intellectual tradition of the first but emphasized the role of emotionalism in demonstrating one’s sincerity of faith. The upshot was a divide between Old Light and New Light Calvinists, the former confining emotion within the limits of revealed truth, the latter elevating intuitionism above reason. Ecstatic moments of revivalist fervor came and went. Ahlstrom observes, “The conversion experience as defined by the revivalists was a single soul-shaking experience; when assurance came, it brought release, and the emotion subsided. Without an infinitely large reservoir of susceptible sinners, the enthusiasm simply had to wane.”16 An important legacy of revivalism that would impact Emerson most was its exaggeration of the role of intuition in extending one’s understanding beyond the limits of reason. This, and the reaction of the intellectual community against it, provided two poles of a dualism that would pervade Emerson’s early development.

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The most scathing attack upon the revivalist movement had appeared in Charles Chauncy’s Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England in 1743. In it Chauncy had cataloged the “dangerous tendencies” that characterized the Revivalist movement, tendencies dangerous because they spawned “disorder and irregularity” among and in the churches. Itinerant preaching had brought about a general chaos in society by undermining the stable congregations of the churches and leaving a vacuum of leadership in their wake; ecstatic experiences of terror, or light and joy, were mistaken for the essence of Christian spirituality; Christian charity was replaced with “rash and censorious judgement,” and worst of all was “that Regard to Impulses and Impressions, which has prevail’d among too many; their aptness to take the Motion of their own Minds for something divinely extraordinary.”17 Such experiences threatened to introduce a new extrabiblical authority into the community. Chauncy went on to describe the danger: “’Twould be no Wonder, if their Imaginations soon brought them into some Kind of Equality, with the Prophets and Apostles of old, and they should be carried away with the conceit of God’s revealing himself to them, in a Manner not altogether unlike that of Inspiration.”18 By emphasizing intuition over reason, they had undermined the authority of the Bible and church doctrine to provide an objective standard for Christian belief and life. The assumption common to all sectarian versions of Christianity was that proper Christian life amounted to faith—belief in the truth of certain propositions—and obedience to those propositions. The propositions were the promises and commands given in the Bible and understood through the doctrines of the Church. The doctrines formed a logically coherent system of theology from which decisions about daily life could be deduced. Faced with the objective truth of God’s command, the believer was responsible for the subjective response of obedience or disobedience. It was the task of intellectuals to fine-tune the logic of the theological system where needed. To contaminate the objectivity of the theological system with subjective intuition was to invalidate the conclusions drawn from it and thus undermine the foundation of Christianity itself. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the intellectual responses to revivalism and intuitionism spanned the conservative to liberal spectrum. Conservative denominations were often split, some of their churches embracing revivalism in form but for the most part holding to traditional Christian theology in substance. It was the liberal Unitarians who were the real enemy of revivalism.19 The Harvard College Emerson was to enter had become the beacon of liberal Unitarianism and Ellery Channing its most eloquent spokesman.

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AMERICA AND THE WORLD—A NATION UNDER ONE GOD From its Puritan roots, America had been a nation under one conception of God, and this conception remained a given for the framers of the Constitution. From revivalist to intellectual, conservative to liberal, believer to nonbeliever, there was only one God in America. Religious tolerance meant limited political intervention but was extended only to those religious expressions which were deemed civilized. Civilized religions were either versions of Protestant Christianity itself or misguided attempts at understanding the God of Protestant Christianity. Religions were then recognized on the basis of their proximity to the one conception of God. The authority of this conception was the Bible as it was interpreted in the doctrines of Protestant Christianity. Since, according to this interpretation, there was only one God who gave only one revelation of himself (the Bible), there could be, it was reasoned, only one truth. The various forms of Protestant Christianity comprised the innermost orbit around this truth—each seeing itself as the closest to the center. Roman Catholicism was outside of this inner orbit, and Judaism was even further out in the periphery. Religions of non-European peoples, because they did not recognize the one God, were not seen as orbiting the truth at all. Such religions were seen as a part of an uncivilized world and therefore did not even merit the name religions; the beliefs of the indigenous Americans and the mythologies from the East and China were dismissed as barbaric superstitions. Part of the uniqueness of the American experiment was the freedom of the citizens to choose their own religious affiliation, but the range of choice was limited indeed. Miller refers to this religious freedom as the voluntary principle and argues that it is essential to understanding the American mind in this time; leaving people free to choose their church went against the history of Christianity in the Europe they had left behind.20 But the underlying assumption to this freedom was that people were choosing between churches, that is, the choice would be made within Christian alternatives. Rhode Island, for example, was the first to separate church and state and declare religious toleration (1663). This toleration, however, extended only to the various forms of Protestant Christianity present there: Separatists, Baptists, and Quakers.21 A century later policies of religious tolerance in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York opened the door for Roman Catholicism to be a viable choice,22 and the First Amendment right to freedom of religion adopted in 1791 solidified national support for a more inclusive voluntary principle. However, as Martin Marty notes, by the nineteenth century, “Americans . . . mostly remained conventional Protestants. . . . Pleased

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with their nation, they wanted it to be somehow homogeneous—a land of shared values and world views encouraging public virtue in the context of a believable moral system.”23 A nation under one God whose nature would guarantee the unity and civility of its people. GLOBAL INFLUENCES America was not to be just any city on a hill but an example to all the world: a sociopolitical instantiation of Christianity. However, America’s theological skirmishes over the nature of that Christianity did not take place in isolation atop a hill but on the intellectual battlegrounds shared by the rest of the world. While American intellectuals were despairing over the in-roads of revivalism’s enthusiasm, developments on the British intellectual front threatened to replace the entire Christian view of the world with a mechanistic universe that did not need a god to create or sustain it. At the same time, intellectuals in Germany were applying scientific methods to the Bible and undermining claims to its divine origin. On the Eastern front, missionary incursions into Asia and India were having the reverse effect of raising Western awareness of religions based on entirely different scriptures and traditions. The impact of British empiricism in America was first felt in the colleges. Since the basic premise of empiricism is that all knowledge comes from sense experience, the new philosophy was often referred to as sensationism. It was Locke’s version of this sensationist philosophy that took hold in America and dominated American education.24 This view had the advantage of being scientific while at the same time religiously innocuous. Locke’s view of the universe and human experience was mechanistic and logical. As such, it validated the kind of ordered society sought by American intellectuals and, to the delight of Unitarians, eliminated intuitionism as a vehicle of knowledge. Instead of considering the mechanism of the universe as autonomous and without need of God, Locke had in fact applied the logic of empiricism to the issue of belief in the Christian God and published On the Reasonableness of Christianity in 1695. The challenge to this happy marriage of empiricism and American intellectualism came in the form of David Hume’s devastating critique. Taking the basic premise of empiricism to its logical conclusion, Hume had shown that human knowledge could not exceed the limits of human sense experience. The upshot was that claims about ethical principles, aesthetics, theology, induction, and even causation had no basis in human knowledge; since there were no corresponding sense experiences to such claims, they must therefore be relegated to either fancies of the imagination or useful fictions. As a corollary to Locke’s defense of Christianity, Hume wrote Dialogues Concerning

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Natural Religion in which he applied the empirical method to demonstrate the failure of each of the traditional arguments for the existence of God. The importance of Hume’s skepticism was proportional to the pervasiveness of Locke’s sensationist philosophy. If such attacks from without Christianity were not enough, German scholars were bringing scientific methods to the examination of the foundation of Christianity itself: the Bible. By laying aside all presuppositions of divine authorship and treating the texts of the Bible as one would any other ancient text, scholars were finding that the Bible was in fact not unique; it was simply a collection of historically and culturally conditioned religious expressions that arose from various communities in the ancient world. This was a particularly acute problem for American intellectuals because theological systems were seen as derived from, and their authority grounded in, the very words of the Bible. At the same time that the foundations of philosophy and theology were being shaken, new alternatives were filtering into the American intellectual scene from the East. British missionary efforts in India increased communication between the cultures. An outstanding product of this interchange was Rammohun Roy, a Hindu whose contact with Christian missionaries led him to a syncretism of Eastern and Western religious thought. His works found an uneasy home among American intellectuals: Unitarians tended to welcome them, but others feared that such syncretism compromised the doctrines of Christianity and threatened the unique authority of their revelation in the Bible. Further interaction with the Indian world was facilitated by the work of Sir William Jones, who translated both the Sanskrit language and the worldview of Hinduism for Westerners, as well as the reports from other British colonizers living and working in India. At the time of Emerson’s entrance into the intellectual dialogue of New England, the homogeneous Protestant Christian society envisioned by the colonists was being re-envisioned. Internal strife between theologians paled in comparison to the threats being posed by philosophical currents from abroad. In addition, the world of these European-bred pioneers was getting larger—encounters with the indigenous peoples of America, and growing awareness and knowledge of Eastern culture and religions, implied a decentering of their own place in the universe. A natural reaction was to turn inward toward that which unified the community. In spite of theological disparity, there was fundamental agreement about the nature of God, his revelation in the Bible, and the nature of the Christian life which consisted in belief in Christian doctrines and obedience to them. America was to be a unique manifestation of these principles into a sociopolitical reality. Turning inward also implied a certain attitude toward those who are other. American intellectuals

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of Emerson’s time tended to be anti-Catholic,25 suspicious of European ideas, and denigrating to all non-European peoples. NOTES 1. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing, 1989), 202–11. 2. Robert C. Winthrop, Life and Letters of John Winthrop (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867), 2:18. 3. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New York: Image Books, 1975), 1:181. 4. Calvin, Institutes, 248–64. 5. Perry Miller, Errand into The Wilderness (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1976), 74. 6. Ahlstrom, A Religious History, 1:193. 7. Robert Bellah, The Broken Covenant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 76. 8. Thomas Hooker, A Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline, Wherein the Way of the Churches of New England as Warranted Out of The Word (London: Abraham Miller, 1648), 3:3:33–34. 9. Hooker, “Part I, Chapter 1,” in A Survey, 1:1:9–10. 10. Miller, Errand, 144–45. 11. Miller, Errand, 154. 12. F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 56. 13. Miller, Errand, 181. 14. Ahlstrom, A Religious History, 1:383. 15. Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), 25. 16. Ahlstrom, A Religious History, 1:354. 17. Charles Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion (Boston: Rogers and Fowls, 1743), 1:178. 18. Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts, 1:219. 19. Miller, Mind, 14–18. 20. Miller, Mind, 41–43. 21. Ahlstrom, A Religious History, 1:235. 22. Ahlstrom, A Religious History, 1:404. 23. Martin E. Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own Land (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984), 227. 24. Cameron Thompson, “John Locke and New England Transcendentalism,” in American Transcendentalism: An Anthology of Criticism, ed. Brian M. Barbour (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973), 86–87. 25. Marty, Pilgrims, 285.

Chapter 2

The Intellectual Context Family and School

Emerson’s family was the quintessential embodiment of the New England intellectual scene at the turn of the nineteenth century. They were poor, dogged by tragedy, and through it all profoundly religious. Theirs was a typical story for the day: the Industrial Revolution that would transform Massachusetts’s economy was yet to come, tuberculosis was rampant and incurable, and the great majority of New England households were Christian, most of them subscribing to one form of Protestantism or another. Ralph Waldo had four brothers and two sisters. His father, William Emerson, was a pastor of Boston’s First Church, a Unitarian Church which paid him twenty-five hundred dollars per year and thirty cords of wood and provided him the parish house. Tragedy struck the Emerson household early in Ralph’s life in the form of tuberculosis that took their first child, Phebe, a sister Ralph would never know, and Ralph’s brother John when Ralph was four. When Ralph was only eight years old, his father died of a stomach tumor; when he was eleven, he lost his only remaining sister, Mary. On the passing of his father, William Emerson, the family lived on the cusp of poverty. Ralph’s mother, Ruth, received a five-hundred-dollar-peryear stipend from First Church for seven years to support the family, and they allowed her to stay in the parish house for what turned out to be nearly three years. She sold much of William’s library and would eventually take in boarders to keep the family from destitution. Ruth asked William’s sister, Mary Moody Emerson, to come and help with raising the children and maintaining the household. Though she would oblige at times, Mary would not commit for the long term. Her influence was, however, strong even when she was not present: records of her correspondence in the ten years after Ralph’s birth show that she and Ruth were in consistent communication, and letters between her and the boys began when Ralph was seven years old. 15

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Ralph’s family also reflected the division within the Protestant churches. His father had been a liberal Unitarian and his mother a strict Puritan. Through tragic losses, and the ongoing struggle with poverty, Ralph’s mother became even more overbearing and conservative in her religious views. Evelyn Barish makes the case that Ruth’s failure to cope with the loss of her husband cast a shadow over the family that had a deep effect on Ralph in particular. She argues that Ralph’s response to his father’s death, the inescapable poverty that followed, and the general dysfunction of his family was to turn inward to a world of fantasy and depression. Such withdrawal led to social awkwardness and a failure to develop close connections with his peers. His Aunt Mary would eventually fill in the gap, playing both a maternal and collegial role in his life. Ralph’s Aunt Mary was difficult to categorize. In her letters Mary is clearly orthodox in her Christianity and often warns her readers to hold fast to the gospel as revealed in the words of the Bible. Yet in one account of herself, she was a “deistic-pietist.”1 The fact that, in this description of herself, she unapologetically left out Christian adjectives points to the breadth of her thinking. As Van Wyck Brooks notes, “She knew Plotinus and Coleridge as well as she knew her Milton; and Wordsworth and Madame de Stael.”2 In addition, she was influenced by Channing, Swedenborg, Rammohun Roy, and others. Ralph Rusk describes her as “a bundle of contradictions . . . both a fiery Calvinist and a daughter of the Enlightenment.”3 Ralph Waldo described her in an early journal entry as the “weird woman of her religion.”4 Incoherent as it sometimes appeared, Mary held the tension between defending the Bible and Christianity on the one hand and embracing religious and philosophical views that went far beyond them on the other.5 Perhaps Barish puts it best: Mary was a mystic/romantic who was “doctrinally conservative and spiritually liberal.”6 Mary Moody Emerson was not only unique in her theological outlook but also exceptional as a woman of her time. As Barish points out, she had no use for the prevailing notion of the “passivity of women” and believed that proper education would rid women of “softness” and men of “passion.”7 She read broadly and welcomed new ideas but had little tolerance for views that she did not judge worthy of listening to; she was both liberal-minded and dogmatic at the same time. She sought out opportunities for lively discussion on philosophical, religious, and political topics. In such conversations she would often out-distance others, and she had no qualms about pointing out the deficiencies in their thinking. Emerson wrote of her: “She tramples on the common humanities all day, and they rise as ghosts and torment her at night.” And she said of herself: “I love to be a vessel of cumbersomeness to society.” As Cabot adds, “Yet her genuine and habitual elevation of view, her

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really superior mind, and her keen sensibility to every kind of merit made her a commanding influence.”8 Though her idiosyncrasies made her a social pariah, Mary brought some stability to the Emerson family. She did care very much for Ruth and each of the boys. Though she occasionally stayed in their home, her interaction with the family was largely through letters. While the boys were very young, the majority of Mary’s letters were to their mother, Ruth. When the boys entered college, and were thus worthy conversers in intellectual matters, her attention shifted to them. Of the one hundred and seventy-six letters she wrote between 1820 and 1830, one hundred and twenty-five were written to the four brothers.9 It was his Aunt Mary that would become Ralph’s mentor through the earliest stages of his intellectual development and remain his most important interlocutor through the maturing of his thought. RALPH’S EDUCATION—THE EARLIEST YEARS Ralph’s immediate family nurtured him into the young man who would enter Harvard College at fourteen years of age and go on to be one of the most important thinkers of his time. This nurturing emphasized character formation and intellectual rigor. His Puritan mother ensured a strict upbringing along conservative Christian lines, and his father and Aunt Mary supplied ample sources of intellectual stimulation. In general, Ralph’s early formation was unremarkable; Puritan morality was socially mainstream, and much of his education at this stage was derived from popular classics in Latin and Greek philosophy and poetry, as well as the Arabian Nights, and popular morality stories for young people. What is often overlooked is the pervasive presence of Indian thought and culture in Ralph’s boyhood world. This presence was felt through his father’s immersion in the most recent literature and reports from India and his Aunt Mary’s encouragement to explore these ideas for himself. Though his father’s death came early in Ralph’s life, William Emerson’s impression on Ralph was important for three reasons. First, William modeled a life of passionate commitment to personal intellectual growth and public leadership in both the political and intellectual developments of the day. He was a member of New England aristocracy, though at the time this did not carry with it the implication of wealth. He moved fluidly in political circles, even serving as the chaplain of the State Senate in the year Ralph was born. He was on the cutting edge of intellectual current events as well. One of the most interesting of these was the burgeoning interest in the culture and beliefs of India. Through British colonization and Christian missionizing, this foreign world was brought closer to Western intellectuals. Thanks largely to

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the works and translations by Sir William Jones in Calcutta, the literature of India was arriving in New England by the 1790s. In 1795 Jones was made a corresponding member by the Massachusetts Historical Society, of which William Emerson became a member four years later. The year after Ralph’s birth, William founded the Anthology Club and became editor of the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review, later to become the North American Review. The literature and articles of both of these organizations demonstrate significant involvement in the popular dialogue over the Orient.10 In the first year of William’s editorship, articles on Indian culture and literature appeared, including a translation by Sir William Jones of the first act of a Hindu play which Kenneth Cameron notes was likely the first work translated from the Sanskrit to appear in the United States.11 A February 1808 article listing several new acquisitions of the Harvard Library in the areas of Arabic, Persian, and Oriental languages ended with a recommendation to the “youth who are fond of oriental literature” to read from a list of six popular works including The Asiatik Miscellany, The Institutes (Laws) of Menu, and “above all, The Works of Sir William Jones.”12 As broad-minded as it may appear, Western interest in India was decidedly Western interest. Even the most sympathetic treatments were patronizing at best. Indeed, India was a curiosity because of its primitive society and its belief system that included a pantheon of barbarian gods. Transforming the former was the goal of colonization, and transforming the latter was the goal of Christian missions. In order to accomplish these goals, it was important to understand the worldview of these people, and developing such understanding, no matter how condescending it may have been, was the role of intellectuals. If the bizarre stories of the Hindu gods were to have any value in themselves, it would have to reside in their relationship to the Bible. Thus, a central motivation for studying Hinduism, aside from understanding the mindset of the people of India in order to convert them to Christianity, was to verify claims made in the Bible. The Bible taught, for example, that there was a universal deluge from which Noah saved the animals and mankind. Confirming that other ancient peoples were witnesses to the event would help demonstrate that the story was true. So, as Sir William Jones set out for India with the intention of not only serving his post on the supreme court in Calcutta but deeply exploring the beliefs and language of the Hindu people, he wrote out a memo to himself during his voyage. The title was Objects of Enquiry during my residence in Asia. The first four Objects of Enquiry were “1. The Laws of the Hindus and Mohammedans. 2. The History of the Ancient World. 3. Proofs and Illustrations of Scripture. 4. Traditions concerning the Deluge, &c.”13 Jones founded the Asiatic Society in India, and the publications that flowed through it and his own pen met an enthusiastic audience among New England intellectuals.

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Ralph’s childhood was spent in this intellectual milieu. Besides family conversation, Ralph would hear his father in the pulpit each Sunday, after which he was expected to recite his summary of the morning’s teaching to the family. It was also a common habit to invite the more elite intellectuals of the community to come home with them for a meal and conversation. Ralph’s Aunt Mary would sometimes come to their home on these occasions, driven by her “desire to hear the men talk.”14 The second aspect of his father’s influence on Ralph came indirectly in his own habits of study, particularly illustrated by the breadth and depth of his library. Though financial necessity forced Ralph’s mother to sell much of his father’s library, its contents shed light on the climate of family reading and conversation. Besides the usual collections of sermons and biblical commentaries one would expect from any pastor’s library, and the historical and philosophical works basic to members of the educated class of the day, William’s library included several works on the culture and religion of India.15 Given his involvement with the Anthology Club and the editing of its journal, it is clear that much of his passion lay along these lines. Among others, his collection included the Life of Sir William Jones, The Lusiad: or The Discovery of India with its “Enquiry Into The Religious Tenets and Philosophy of the Brahmins,” Southey’s Curse of Kehema which also included a detailed account of Vedantic Hinduism, a file of the Monthly Anthology, numerous periodicals with references to the Orient, and several books by Joseph Priestly, including A Comparison of the Institutions of Moses With Those of the Hindoos.16 This text is particularly illustrative because in it Priestly gives a detailed analysis of Hindu religion while simultaneously perpetuating the ethnocentrism of the day. In his preface to the work, he assures the reader, “The religion of the most enlightened of the heathens was always most absurd and despicable, while that of revelation was from the beginning truly rational and respectable, and as favourable to every virtue, as the other was to various kinds of vice.”17 This Emerson family library set the tone for family reading and conversation. Beside reading “improving books,” such as Whelpley’s Historical Compend or Jebb’s Sermons,18 as Cameron points out, William’s copies of the two-volume work Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah was likely the kind of reading shared at the hearth in the Emerson home.19 The library would also be the earliest source for Ralph’s reading outside of his school work until he began borrowing books from others and making use of the Boston Library Society through his mother’s account in 1817, the year he entered Harvard. It is important to note that the New England intellectuals that comprised the circle of friends around the Emerson family at this time were aware of both the philosophical, Vedantic aspect of Hinduism and the popular, polytheistic aspect. Only the latter was emphasized which made Hinduism an easy target of ridicule for Enlightenment elites.

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A third aspect of William’s influence on Ralph was his intentional parenting. That is, William and Ruth took the intellectual and moral formation of their children to be their highest parental responsibility. Cabot describes, “Ralph’s schooldays began before he was three years old; not an unusual thing at that time, when the school-room took the place of the nursery. His mother wrote on March 9, 1806: William and Ralph now go again to Mrs. Whitwell’s school, in Summer Street, near the parsonage. May 17th of the same year, his father wrote: Ralph does not read very well yet.”20 Both of these comments were recorded before Ralph had turned three years old. Cabot notes, “Their father, in the midst of his various activities, never neglected their lessons. During a short absence from home he wrote to his wife: ‘William [aged five] will recite to you as he does to me, if you have leisure to hear him, a sentence of English grammar before breakfast,—though I think, if only one can be attended to, Ralph [aged three] should be that one.’”21 At age ten Ralph entered Latin school, and in that year he wrote the earliest extant letter to his Aunt Mary describing his typical day: After breakfast and an hour of playing or reading, he went to school, where they were studying Virgil. After Latin school he went to a private school for reading and math, then a midday meal, and back to Latin school to study grammar. Finally, he would return home, do errands, play, and eat dinner, and then the family would say their hymns and read together. William’s comment voiced to Ralph’s older brother, William Jr., seems indicative of his utmost concern as a parent: “It will grieve me excessively to have you a blockhead; but it will excessively delight me to have you a bright scholar.”22 This expectation remained the defining characteristic of the Emerson family milieu beyond William Sr.’s death in 1811. Ralph did not turn out a blockhead, but of the brothers he was not the most likely to live up to the hope of being a bright scholar either. It was his younger brother Edward who showed the most promise for fulfilling their father’s expectations. Later in life Ralph would write of him: “Edward and I as boys were thrown much together in our studies, for he stood always at the top of his (a younger class), and I low in mine.”23 The other adult influence on Ralph in his immediate family was his Aunt Mary. Her presence in Ralph’s earliest years is seen mostly in her ambivalent relationships with his parents. She denounced William’s liberalism but joined in intellectual conversation with him and others and wrote occasionally for his Monthly Anthology and Boston Review. She provided much moral support for Ruth, but even after William’s death, she would not commit to moving in with the family as Ruth would often implore her to do. There is little said of her early interactions with Ralph. Given her intellectual acuity, one would expect that she might have been partial to Edward, whose potential along those lines was evident early on. It seemed that Mary’s favorite of the children, however, was Ralph’s younger brother Charles.24 From reading her

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letters to Ruth, it appears that Charles would even go alone to stay with his aunt at times.25 Indeed, Ralph did not stand out among the Emerson brothers, and this, exacerbated by the ubiquitous high expectations for achievement, led to a sense of inadequacy and a determination for success that would nag him through his college years. In addition to the adult sources of Ralph’s early education, there was the intimate comradery of his brothers. Enduring poverty, illnesses, and so many deaths of immediate family members brought the brothers close together. They formed a supportive community for one another wherein Ralph seemed most able to be comfortable with himself. Nowhere were Ralph’s self-doubts more on display than in his correspondence with his brothers shortly before entering Harvard. His letters were often filled with tongue-in-cheek attempts at prose, interspersed with self-deprecating comments and apologies for the nonsense with which he was harassing his reader, and ending with a petition that the letter be burned immediately. The letters were most often addressed to his older brother, William, and his brother Edward, two years his junior. The letters illustrate Ralph’s dream of one day succeeding as a poet, along with his fear that he never would. They also constituted a rather pitiful cry for affirmation. Had he treated his prose attempts as genuine efforts, they could be seen as genuine failures, and he would be the proper object of ridicule. Instead, he couched all of his efforts in self-effacing humor: laughing along with a jester is to be expected; laughing at a would-be poet is devastating. The letters were written to the brothers he admired: William because he was the oldest and already a successful student at Harvard; Edward because, though younger, he was the most academically capable of the Emerson clan. Ralph needed to hear a patronizing word of encouragement, but it did not come. As Ralph left his home for Harvard College in 1817, all of his familial relationships were in transition. William had already left home for Harvard, Edward had just left home within the last year for Phillips Academy at Andover, and, since Ralph was taking the first step toward becoming a scholar, his Aunt Mary began taking an active interest in him. Throughout his years at Harvard College and at Harvard Divinity School, his Aunt Mary would continue to hover in the background of his formal education. She was a model for Ralph of intellectual rigor which intensified his need to prove himself, but due to her own idiosyncrasies, she failed to provide him a model of healthy social life. Intentional or not, Mary was creating Ralph in her own image.

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THE HARVARD YEARS Ralph’s formal education took place at the epicenter of intellectual debates. Andover, the stronghold of Calvinism, and Harvard, the home of Unitarianism, represented the conservative and liberal poles of Protestant Christianity. Beyond theological disputes both ends of the spectrum were dealing with the threats of Hume’s skepticism, German higher criticism of the Bible, and the increasing prevalence of alternative worldviews arriving from India. Ralph’s early views on these issues, and his notion of the Christian faith, would be formed through his participation in these clashes. As Ralph entered Harvard in 1817, the college was just settling into its role as the bastion of Protestant liberalism. Since the turn of the century, tensions between conservative and liberal versions of Congregationalism had simmered to the boiling point when in 1805 Henry Ware, a liberal Unitarian, was awarded the Hollis Chair of Divinity. With this selection the college signaled a shift away from its Congregational roots, a shift that proved too much for some of its faculty and trustees. The split along theological lines reverberated through the churches of Massachusetts. Those leaving Harvard sought to found a theological seminary that would remain true to Calvinist theology while training students for ministry in conservative Congregational churches. The way toward forming a seminary for theological training into ministry met with two inherent obstacles: seminary and theology. The idea of a seminary was novel; it was to be a graduate school, but it was not necessary to go to, much less graduate from college, in order to be admitted. Typically, graduate schools in law, medicine, theology, etc., assumed graduation from college prior to admittance. This led to suspicions about the academic integrity of the seminary degree on the one hand and doubts about the necessity of the degree for ministry on the other. The problem of theology was, however, the most daunting obstacle from the outset. True to Protestant history in general, Calvinism was sectarian: there were, and always had been, many ways to interpret what constituted true Calvinism. The founders of the new seminary had to first agree on which orthodoxy they were trying to defend and perpetuate. The leading contenders were Old Calvinism and the revivalist Calvinism of people like Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Hopkins. Despite subtle differences there was substantial agreement on fundamental issues. Henry Rowe describes, “The two orthodox parties agreed against the Liberals that the Scripture was a fixed deposit of truth rather than a progressive revelation, and that reason had no right to contradict; that man is handicapped from the start and is saved only by the grace of God, mediated through the Cross; that Christ died to satisfy divine justice, and that He was very God Himself.”26

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On this foundation Andover Theological Seminary was built. There would remain room for disagreement, but for the most part, the Calvinism of Edwards and his disciple, Hopkins, prevailed. Samuel Hopkins had been a close friend of Edwards and had expanded on his work after the latter’s death. Where differences occurred in their versions of Calvinism, Andover chose Hopkins’s.27 Thus, the standard of orthodoxy at Andover was considered to be Hopkinsian Calvinism, also known as New Divinity.28 To assure that orthodoxy would be defended and passed on to succeeding generations of students, every faculty member had to “on the day of his inauguration publicly make and subscribe a solemn declaration of his faith ‘in divine revelation and in fundamental and distinguishing doctrines of the Gospel’ as expressed in the Creed.”29 Every five years faculty members were required to publicly confirm their allegiance to the following: I do solemnly promise that I will open and explain the Scriptures to my pupils with integrity and faithfulness; that I will maintain and inculcate the Christian faith as expressed in the Creed by me now repeated, together with all other doctrines and duties of our holy religion . . . and in opposition to . . . [then follows a long list of “heresies” including Unitarianism and Universalism, all of which are] opposed to the gospel of Christ.30

This requirement of repeating the exercise every five years remained in place until 1900.31 The curriculum for the three-year degree from Andover began with one year of learning the languages and literature of the Bible, followed by one year of studying theology, and finally one year of practicing preaching skills, that is, homiletics. The structure of the curriculum mirrored the logic of the seminary’s theological orientation: the authority for orthodoxy, right-teaching, is the Bible; the doctrines of theology are deduced from the Bible; and to live in Christian faith is to draw the practical application of theology to the issues of the day. On some level every individual is responsible for doing this, but it is the role of the preacher to help instruct along the way. Thus, the seminary graduate must be proficient in Greek and Hebrew and have extensive knowledge of the biblical text, as well as master the Calvinist systematization of Christian doctrines that illuminate the meaning of the text, and he must hone the skills necessary to instruct and inspire his parishioners. Leonard Woods, professor of theology and the first professor to be hired at the new seminary, gave voice to the core identity of Andover: “For if the Scriptures were written by men divinely inspired,—by those who enjoyed the infallible guidance of the Holy Spirit; then they are truly the Word of God, and a perfect standard of faith and practice. The doctrines and laws which they contain, are settled by the highest authority in the universe; and

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our business is, not to sit in judgement upon these doctrines and laws, and determine whether they are right or wrong, but to understand, believe, and obey them.”32 The Andover-Harvard split was the latest chapter in a story begun sixty-two years before with the publication of Charles Chauncy’s Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion, written nine years prior to his becoming Harvard’s second president. In it Chauncy had denounced the excesses of the revivalists and the disruptions they had created within established Christian communities. The excesses of the revivalists were grounded in the conviction that their ecstatic experiences of the Spirit raised them above the teaching of the Bible and doctrines of the church or, at the least, enabled them an elevated understanding of them. The result was a new sense of the Christian life as a chaotic ride from one emotional high to another and a feeling of entitlement that empowered them to, in Chauncy’s words, “that Spirit of rash, censorious and uncharitable Judging.”33 Against this, Chauncy had affirmed the priority of rational commitment to the Bible and church doctrine but as a means to the end of a tranquil Christian life characterized by good works and the fruits of the Spirit. It was this latter emphasis on the moral life that came to differentiate the Harvard Unitarians. The most articulate spokesperson for Harvard Unitarianism was William Ellery Channing. Like the Andover theologians, Channing held to a rather traditional view of the truth of the Gospels and the miracles that verified that truth.34 However, Channing, in proper Unitarian fashion, rejected Trinitarianism on biblical grounds and Calvinism because it had lost all sight of the teaching and person of Jesus by its teaching of a depraved and powerless humanity. He affirmed the goodness of humans, the view of Jesus as one to be emulated/copied in ourselves, and that this is accomplished in the development of our highest powers: mind and our moral nature. Of Christ and human nature, Channing put it this way: He (Christ) saw in man the impress and image of the Divinity, and therefore thirsted for his redemption, and took the tenderest interest in him, whatever might be the rank. . . . He saw through man’s sin to his soul and there . . . he recognized a spiritual and immortal nature, and the germs of power and perfection which might be unfolded forever. . . . Still more, he felt that there was nothing in himself to which men might not ascend . . . he saw in his own greatness the model of what men might become.”35

This moral influence theory of the atonement was in stark contrast to the substitutionary theory of atonement held by conservatives. For Channing and the Unitarians, the meaning of the gospel was that Jesus was sent by God to call humans to fulfill that goodness which lies at the center of their moral nature;

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for conservative Protestant Christianity, represented by the Andover theologians, the meaning of the gospel was that God sent Jesus to die as a sacrifice in substitution for the death of each believing Christian, a death that was necessary because the depraved nature of all humans has turned them against God. Simply put, the liberal view, by emphasizing the transformation of human moral nature, addressed humans’ relationships with one another. The conservative view, by emphasizing the rupture between God and humans, addressed the relationship of humans to God. For liberals, God is found in horizontal relationships between humans as those relationships embody the love and grace of God; for conservatives, God is found in the vertical relationship between sinful humans and a gracious God. The founding of Andover Seminary took place ten years before Ralph Waldo entered Harvard College. It was ostensibly predicated on the need for more trained ministers in Congregational pulpits but was in truth established as a theological corrective to Harvard’s liberal Unitarianism. At the time of Andover’s inception, Harvard had no theology school. Students were admitted at an average age of sixteen for a four-year education. The first two years included learned languages, mathematics, natural philosophy, metaphysics, moral philosophy, rhetoric and elocution, the evidences of religion (both natural and revealed), political economy, and modern languages, as well as lectures in Chemistry, History, Anatomy, Mineralogy, Botany, Astronomy, applied science to the useful arts, and health. The second two years furthered these. Instruction was carried out by seven professors and four tutors, plus adjunct faculty for foreign languages.36 Graduate students interested in theology received instruction from either the President or the faculty member who held the distinguished Hollis Chair in Religion until 1816, when a society was formed for “promoting theological education at Harvard College.”37 The Harvard Theology (Divinity) School was formed just as Ralph Waldo was entering the undergraduate college in 1817. Theological disputes between the Calvinists of Andover and the Unitarians of Harvard were still hot as Ralph began his college years. The disputes had split not only the Harvard faculty but the churches of Massachusetts as well. Parishioners voted with their feet, and their vote was for the liberal Unitarian views of the inherent goodness of humans versus the Calvinist disparagement of human nature as powerless and depraved. By 1800, of the three hundred and fifty Congregationalist churches, one hundred withdrew from Trinitarian/ evangelical ranks. There were only two left in Boston: Old South Church and Park Street Church.38 Though such battles appear all-encompassing up close, from a broader perspective, these two poles of Protestant Christianity had much in common, and these commonalities became clearer when the entire Christian edifice came under attack from without. Such external threats would cause both

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conservatives and liberals to rally around a common commitment to the Bible as the authority for doctrines and belief in those doctrines as constituting the Christian faith. It was further agreed that the moral life derived from these doctrines evidenced the sincerity of one’s belief in them, but the faith necessary for salvation was not an act of will; it was the act of reason in assenting to the truth of God’s revelation, known only in the Bible and Christian doctrine. Whatever forces threatened the security of this foundation would bring both conservative and liberal poles of New England Christianity together against the common enemy. THE EMERSONS AT HARVARD All of the Emerson boys who attended college went to Harvard for undergraduate preparation, with the family expectation of continuing through Harvard Divinity School and into the ministry. Even Edward who, due to his academic prowess in Latin school, had been awarded the opportunity to study for two years at the Phillips Academy of Andover, harbored no doubts about entering Harvard for his college education. Though the Phillips Academy and Andover Theological Seminary were most aligned with Ruth Emerson’s own theological orientation, even she united herself with the weight of the Emerson family tradition when it came to Harvard. What direct influence Aunt Mary had on the boys’ decisions at this point is difficult to discern. She certainly valued the broad-mindedness of the Harvard curriculum, but it is clear from her letters that she was fundamentally committed to the gospel as it was interpreted in conservative Christian tradition. Her letters often betray her fear that her favorite of the boys had strayed away from Christianity entirely. On a Sunday in August of 1818, she couched this fear in a mini-sermon written to Charles: “Jesus Christ who descended from God went to Heaven in the view of a great many. And to confirm his ascension sent down such astonishing power on his followers, that no good men can disbelieve the present existence of Jesus Christ in Heaven. At some happy period, I humbly trust, you and I, my dearest object of anxiety, may see Him, and unite in the delightful employments of eternity, because He hath so loved our unhappy race as to die for their good.”39 (Emphases are hers.) Her sermonizing expresses her commitment to a Trinitarian version of Christianity and a substitutionary view of atonement, both of which were at odds with Harvard Unitarianism. Ralph’s own decision to follow in his brother William’s footsteps to Harvard came without hesitation. The move to Cambridge promised both intellectual challenge and social adventure. The latter must have appeared ominous to the timid incoming freshman. William had written home with vivid descriptions of college life. His letter to his mother, Oct. 1, 1814, described his first day

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at Harvard and the sophomore pranks played on the freshmen: ten panes of windows smashed, buckets of water thrown through the broken windows, and people kicking at his door at intervals throughout the night so that he could not sleep.40 Harvard historian Samuel Morison put it this way: “Indeed the half century from 1807 to 1857 is studded with explosions in lecture-rooms, bonfires in the Yard, smashing tutors’ windows, breaking up chapel services, and rebellions. There was even a traditional Rebellion Tree opposite the south entry of Hollis, where they started.”41 Morison suggests that such raucous behavior was likely a result of the pressure put on students to conform to unreasonable standards of moral behavior: standards designed to counter public accusations that Harvard was irreligious.42 As certain as it was that Ralph would follow in the family tradition, there were small considerations to overcome. There were, for example, more conservative influences within the family, such as his Aunt Betsy, who had attended Brown in Providence. In the week of his leaving for college, Ralph wrote to his younger brother Edward expressing his enthusiasm for a Harvard education while discounting the doubts of his aunt on the subject: “Next Friday, you know my College life begins ‘Deo volante,’ and I hope and trust will begin with determined and ardent pursuit of real knowledge that will raise me high in the Class while in College and qualify me well for stations of future usefulness—Aunt Betsy is very much grieved she says that I go to Cambridge instead of Providence. . . . I hope going to Cambridge will not prevent some future time my being as good a minister as if I came all Andovered from Providence.”43 There were also the accounts of the wild social scene at Harvard. These must have appeared daunting to the socially awkward Ralph. Seventy years later Ralph’s son, Edward, reminiscing on his father’s comments at a college reunion, quoted him: “I drank a good deal of wine (for me) with this wish to raise my spirits to the pitch of good fellowship, but wine produced its old effect, I grew graver with every glass. . . . My doom [is] to be solitary.” Edward went on to say of his father, “Neither in horse-play nor social gatherings did he find his natural recreation, but in omnivorous reading outside the curriculum, and constant writing.”44 Ralph’s drive to excel and “rise high in the class” would carry him through his academic career. That ambition together with persistent self-doubt would determine the way he would navigate the divisive issues that lay ahead as well. LOCKE AND HUME AT ANDOVER AND HARVARD John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding provided New England colleges a common meeting point: a template for philosophy that

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appealed to common sense, was neither Catholic nor German in its origin, and included a defense of Christianity. Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity was a defense of the coherence of the essential teachings of Protestant Christianity and clearly articulated the propositional view of faith that lay at the center of both conservative Andover and liberal Harvard theologies. Of which propositions are necessary for faith, Locke wrote: “What those are, we have seen by what Our Savior and his apostles proposed to and required in those whom they converted to the faith. Those are fundamentals, which ‘tis not enough to disbelieve, everyone is required actually to assent to them.”45 On the other hand, of the non-salvific affirmations in the Bible, Locke added, “But any other proposition contained in the Scripture, which God has not thus made a necessary part of the law of faith (without an actual assent to which he will not allow any one to be a believer) a man may be ignorant of, without hazarding his salvation by a defect in his faith.”46 Locke as both philosopher and theologian embodied the notion central to New England intellectualism, that all aspects of the natural world participate in an ordered scheme, created by the Christian God, and that the truths of both the natural world and of divine revelation cohere in a grand design. Harvard’s curriculum immersed students in the study of Locke’s empiricism in the sophomore year, followed by further study of Locke in the Junior year.47 Though the conservative and liberal poles of New England Protestantism could unite around Locke and around most of the essential doctrines that constituted orthodox Christian faith, they differed on the centrality ascribed to those propositions. For conservatives, it was the philosophical/ theological defenses and clarifications that defined the Christian; the moral life derived from these propositions was a logical but secondary outcome. For Harvard Unitarians, the orthodox teachings were essential to Christianity, but it was the human moral sense that gave life to them. Humanity’s moral sense was the primary gift of God; the revelation had its impact because it gave witness to that inner sense. It stands to reason then that David Hume’s devastating criticism of Locke’s empiricism would be perceived as a threat to the philosophical/theological foundations of both Andover and Harvard. As symbols of the spectrum of Protestant Christian theology, these two held as their deepest commonality a propositional view of faith. That is, the core of Christian identity lay in the assent to the truth of certain propositions whose authority was guaranteed by the Bible, understood to be the revelation of God himself, and verified by the miracles recorded therein. Hume argued that if the fundamental premise of Lockean empiricism—that all knowledge comes from sense experience— was taken seriously, then truth-claims about the sensible world that are not based in sense experience must be rejected. The theoretical claims of pure mathematics, logic, and so on qualify as truth-claims but yield no information

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about the facts of our sensible world; they are purely theoretical. The claims of metaphysics, on the other hand, are claims about the sensible world that cannot be apprehended by our sense experience. A claim such as “There is a God to whom the Bible bears witness” does not correlate with any sense experience and is therefore no objective truth-claim at all. Such claims Hume relegated to the category of subjective expressions of the imagination. The recorded miracles that were appealed to as evidence for the truth of biblical claims were discounted by Hume on the same grounds. In short, Hume reasoned that a miracle is, by definition, a violation of the laws of nature; such laws hold because they describe the entire corpus of human experience of nature; thus, the evidence for the claim that a particular miracle has occurred must be weighed against the entire corpus of human experience. The likelihood of the biblical authors when reporting miraculous events were mistaken, or that they were intentionally deceiving their audience, may be small, but not nearly as small as the likelihood that a miracle, in fact, took place. Indeed, the only miracle Hume acknowledged was the “miracle of theism”; that is, it is a miracle anyone would believe in it! He ended his famous treatment of miracles with this satirical observation: “So that, on the whole, we may conclude that the Christian Religion not only was first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.”48 Hume’s skepticism did not end with the rejection of the metaphysical claims essential to Christianity. His methodology of demanding that all claims regarding the physical world be demonstrable by sense experience extended to the notion of causation itself. A foundational assumption of Locke’s view was that the world is an intricately designed nexus of causal relations. Hume argued that, though one may experience specific events, the relation of the events to one another is the creation of the observer; while the events/objects are a matter of sense experience, causation is not. Thus, Hume’s skepticism pulled the epistemological rug out from under Locke’s entire philosophical and theological framework. Leonard Woods of Andover epitomized the response of that institution: Christians must dig in and hold their ground. In his lectures on the inspiration of the Bible, he ignored the Humean skepticism that was sweeping intellectual circles, proposing that “the argument on which the doctrine of inspiration should be made chiefly to rest, is the testimony of the sacred writers themselves. . . . Miracles furnish us an obvious and satisfactory proof of all this. . . . With this manner of proceeding, every Christian must be satisfied.”49 Of course, not every Christian was satisfied, but for conservative Protestantism, faith was called upon to pick up where reason could no longer carry the burden. Keeping the faith meant holding fast to the propositions fundamental to the Christian tradition in the face of all opposition.

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An important source for the liberal Unitarianism of Harvard was Edinburgh’s Dugald Stewart, whose Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind was required reading in the Harvard curriculum. In it Stewart championed the Scottish Common-Sense philosophy of Thomas Reid, agreeing with Reid, against the skeptical conclusions of Hume, that humans must simply accept their God-given limitations: Dr. Reid was the first person to have courage to lay completely aside all the common hypothetical language concerning perception, and to exhibit the difficulty in all its magnitude, by a plain statement of the fact. To what then, it may be asked, does this statement amount? Merely to this; that the mind is so formed, that certain impressions produced on our organs of sense by external objects are followed by correspondent sensations; and that these sensations (which have no more resemblance to the qualities of matter, than the words of a language have to the things they denote) are followed by a perception of the existence and qualities of the bodies by which the impressions are made; that all the steps of this process are equally incomprehensible; and that, for any thing that we can prove to the contrary, the connection between the impression and the sensation, may be both arbitrary . . . the result of which is that sensations, as attributes of the mind, can throw no light on the manner in which we acquire our knowledge of the existence and qualities of body.50

In attempting to unravel the mysteries of the nature of external objects in-themselves, and the manner by which they affect our senses, we deceive ourselves into believing that we can transgress the boundary of our humanity. Of that boundary Stewart says: “It forms the separation between that field which falls under the survey of the physical enquirer, and the unknown region, of which, though it was necessary that we should be assured of the existence, in order to lay a foundation for the doctrines of natural theology, it has not pleased the Author of the universe to reveal to us the wonders, in this infant state of our being.”51 As the more charming spokesperson of the Harvard faculty, William Ellery Channing took this amalgam of Common-Sense philosophy and metaphysical commitment to be the foundation of the Christian faith. For Channing, faith was then the combination of mental assent (to propositions) and moral disposition. He referred to it as a “virtuous principle.” Faith and its opposite, unbelief, are both “joint products of the understanding of the mind and heart.”52 Channing accepted miracles and the truth of the four Gospels in quite traditional terms, rejecting the objections of skepticism and Deism.53 The miracles of Christianity, he argued, show that there is a mind greater than nature and, therefore, death is not the end and that in Christianity (its miracles and doctrines), our mind can rise above Nature.54 In rising above nature, our minds must also rise above the skeptical arguments of David Hume.

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The common commitment to the notion that the propositions of Christian doctrine grounded in the Bible constitute the authority and definition of Christian faith brought the conservative and liberal poles of Protestantism in New England together against a common threat. The truth of the biblical accounts, attested to by the miracles recorded therein, must be an article of belief upon which the moral life can be built. An emphasis on the truth of the doctrines themselves was characteristic of the conservative response to Hume, where the emphasis on the moral life illustrated in those doctrines typified the liberal response. For each, however, an important shift in the notion of faith had occurred. Prior to Hume faith referred to trusting in the propositions found in the Bible and systematized by theologians; after Hume faith came to mean, first, trusting that these propositions were the unique revelation of God, then trusting in them. Keeping the faith now carried the double meaning of faithfulness and taking an epistemic leap. There was, however, another response to Hume’s skepticism that, though rejected by both the conservative and liberal poles of New England Christianity, would be formative for Emerson’s later thought. That response came in the form of Immanuel Kant’s groundbreaking Critique of Pure Reason. What is understated by most biographers of Emerson is his exposure to and understanding of the currents of German philosophy swirling around Kant’s Critique. Hume’s demonstration that Locke’s view, taken to its logical conclusion, failed to account for human knowledge of either metaphysical or physical truth claims was an epistemological catastrophe. Kant, however, refuted Hume’s skepticism in a way that could not be embraced by New England intellectuals of either the conservative or liberal stripes; he abandoned Locke’s empiricism. In the Critique he argued against Locke that human understanding is not the result of passive human senses being impacted by physical matter. Instead of seeing humans as blank slates on which ideas are written through sense experience, Kant argued that humans are furnished with cognitive equipment a priori, by which they construct meaningful experience from sensations. This cognitive equipment Kant referred to as the categories of the understanding and included time/space, causation, and induction among them. Truth-claims about the physical world are not, on Kant’s account, objective reports of sensations; they are subjective constructions that arise from the meeting of the individual’s cognitive apparatus with the object of the senses. All conscious experience, then, is interpretive experience. Since nothing can be known of the objective world apart from this interpretive act of cognition, Kant designated it the noumenon; the meaningful world in which humans live he called the phenomenon. Kant’s technical name for the interpretive act of cognition was transcendence; that is, in every moment of meaningful

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experience, the individual is transcending the noumenon with the categories of the understanding to create the phenomenon. By classing time/space, causation, and induction with the a priori categories of the understanding, Kant had answered Hume’s objection that such ideas could not be derived from sense experience of the external world. It was important for Kant that a) the categories of the understanding are common to all humans and b) the noumenon, though we can know nothing of it in-itself, an sich, is the objective occasion of our experiencing. By holding fast to these claims, he avoided epistemological relativism and philosophical idealism. Many who followed after Kant rejected these and emphasized the subjective nature of human knowledge. These were often referred to as intuitionists, and the most well known of these in New England circles were Schelling and Fichte. Most of Emerson’s biographers and commentators dismiss the influence of Kant’s epistemology on his thinking prior to 1834, when he articulated the specifics of Kant’s system in a letter to his brother Edward,55 but there is good reason to believe that the influence began earlier. Evidence from his reading, Journal notes, and letter writing show an acquaintance with and understanding of Kant at least ten years earlier. On the other hand, there were factors at work in Emerson’s personal and academic context that prevented him from embracing this revolutionary German philosophy. Cameron notes that Harvard had perhaps the best library of Kant’s works in the United States, but Emerson’s lack of facility with the German language prohibited him from reading Kant in the original works or entering into the discussions popular among his colleagues. Emerson’s first introduction to Kant in the Harvard curriculum came in or about November 1820, through William Drummond’s Academical Questions, in which Kant was confused with those that came after him, dismissed as an intuitionist, and Reid’s Scottish Common-Sense philosophy emerged victorious.56 Emerson’s more serious acquaintance with Kantian epistemology came in the same year at Harvard in the midst of his personal struggle with Hume’s skepticism. This acquaintance came through Baroness de Stael Holstein and was facilitated by Ralph’s Aunt Mary. Ralph and his family had long been admirers of de Stael’s works. Records of books borrowed from the library on Ruth’s account show that de Stael’s works on Passions, Rousseau, Delphine, and Corine of Italy were periodically checked out from 1815 onward. Letters from Mary indicate that she was quite familiar with de Stael’s works, recommended them, and engaged others in discussing them.57 Mary’s interest in de Stael’s Germany began nearly as soon as it was published, and it became one of her favorites.58 Germany was published in 1813. By October of that year, a review of it appeared in the Edinburgh Review, and on October 12 Mary wrote to Ann

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Brewer, saying, “Ask Mr Cushman to buy ‘Germany’ it will delight him if he has taste & you may borrow it.”59 It was in 1820, his senior year, that his Aunt Mary introduced Ralph to the text. From this introduction forward, it is clear that Ralph had a great deal of interest in this work. In his Journal of that year (“Wide World 2”), Emerson’s reading list included de Stael’s Germany, and according to his Journals, he continued to borrow this text from the library through his mother’s account through 1824, at which time a footnote in one Journal account indicates he was familiar with the review of the work in the Edinburgh Review as well.60 By the time he was preparing sermons from 1826–1829, he was copying out sections from Germany into his Journals as source material. In Germany de Stael described the entire philosophical climate of Germany in 1813 as the product of Kant’s epistemology, published as A Critique of Pure Reason. Of it, she said, “it produced such a sensation in Germany, that almost all that has been accomplished since, in literature as well as in philosophy, has flowed from the impulse given by this performance.”61 She described in detail Kant’s notion of the a priori categories of the understanding by which humans transcend their sense experience of the noumenon, giving it structure and meaning, and so creating the phenomenon. De Stael presented Kant’s work as a refutation of Hume’s skepticism regarding knowledge of our world, but she also pointed out that Kant, like Hume, leaves us short of knowing about metaphysical claims: Far from rejecting experience, Kant considers the business of life as nothing but the action of our innate faculties upon the several sorts of knowledge which come to us from without. He believed that experience would be nothing but a chaos without the laws of the understanding; but that the laws of the understanding have no other objects than the elements of thought afforded it by experience. It follows, that metaphysics themselves can teach us nothing beyond these limits; and that it is to sentiment that we ought to attribute the foreknowledge and the conviction of everything that transcends the bounds of the visible world.”62

In her analysis of Kant’s work on ethics and aesthetics, de Stael sought a Kantian path back to religion through sentiments, but sentiments do not provide the kind of solid footing for metaphysics that nineteenth-century New England Christians desired. Mary’s response to Germany was typically inconsistent. She delighted in the work as a whole but rejected the Kantian epistemological revolution that lay at the center of it. Given her commitment to conservative Christianity, it is not surprising that she could not tolerate Kant’s dismissal of metaphysics. She referred to such reasoning as the “Kantian mania” that is “destructive of theism.”63

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The time was not ripe for Ralph to experience a Kantian conversion either. The two sources of his intellectual formation at the time agreed that Kant’s approach to repudiating Hume’s skepticism was unacceptable. Emerson’s Aunt Mary opposed it because it failed to provide metaphysics with an adequate epistemological foundation, and the Harvard faculty objected that it took as its starting point the victory of Hume’s skepticism over Locke’s empiricism; each saw Kant as giving up too much ground to Hume’s skepticism. Harvard faculty had turned to the Scottish Common-Sense philosophy of Thomas Reid as an updated version of Locke’s empiricism that provided a way around Hume. Their version of this view, most clearly articulated by Dugald Stewart and Andrews Norton, included two avenues to truth: sense experience of the world and revelation found in the Scriptures.64 By including the latter source of knowledge, a way was left open to escape the rigors of empirical reasoning demanded by Hume while holding on to a basically Lockean view of the world. In the same year Emerson was borrowing de Stael’s Germany from the library, he finished reading Dugald Stewart’s second Dissertation.65 In it Stewart gave a review of Kant’s philosophy that would cohere with the outlook of the Harvard faculty, beginning with a footnote at the bottom of the first page of the review that read, “My ignorance of German would have prevented me saying anything of the philosophy of Kant, if the extraordinary pretentions with which it was first brought forward in this island, contrasted with the total oblivion into which it soon after very suddenly fell, had not seemed to demand some attention to so wonderful a phenomenon in the literary history of the eighteenth century.”66 Stewart did go on to begrudgingly admit that Kant had found some audience in America because of de Stael’s “matchless powers,” then followed the compliment with the quip: “Of this (matchless power) no stronger proof can be given than the lively interest she inspires, even when discussing such systems as those of Kant and Fichte.”67 Emerson conformed to the views and expectations of his teachers, and his loyalty was rewarded publicly when he won the prestigious Bowdoin Prize for his essay Dissertation on the Present State of Ethical Philosophy in 1821. In it he rejected the philosophies coming from Germany and upheld the choice for Scottish Common-Sense philosophy to combat both Hume and Kant.68 Emerson’s rejection of Kant at this point was not entirely pro forma; he really had internalized the mood of his Aunt Mary and the Harvard faculty. In a November 1822 Journal entry, he created a fantasy Land of Not, and in his imaginary travel there, he found volumes of the fanciful and, by then, debunked Sketches of America by the British author Henry Fearon and some “Folios called Kant’s philosophy.”69 The jab at Kant is hard to miss.

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GERMAN HIGHER CRITICISM AT ANDOVER AND HARVARD Biblical criticism was not new to the theologians of Andover or Harvard. It was well known that the Bible on which their faith was based came to them as a result of painstaking historical analysis of thousands of ancient fragments of texts. The process of analysis was the same as that used for determining the most reliable reading of any ancient text. Reliability was determined by how likely it was that a particular reading reflected the original intent of the author; this, in turn, could be established only by a careful reconstruction of the socio-historical setting of both the author and his intended audience. This reconstruction of the setting, and the choice for the best reading based on it, were admittedly human determinations. This human element introduced into the delivery of the divinely inspired revelation of God was unsettling. With every new edition of the Bible came the renewed suspicion that someone was tinkering with the Holy Writ, whose nature was defined by the current edition. In Emerson’s time it was the arrival of Giesbach’s edition of the New Testament text in 1808 that raised the furor. As with former editions, Giesbach’s text was based not only on the fragments known by authors of previous editions but on newly discovered fragments and on updated understandings of their contexts. The assumption shared by all of the scholars in the project was that the many fragments accumulated would result in a single harmonious revelation of God’s words to man. Thus, Giesbach’s defenders assured the readership of the Monthly Anthology, “These various readings, though very numerous, do not in any degree affect the general credit and integrity of the text: the general uniformity of which, in so many copies, scattered through almost all countries in the known world, and in so great a variety of languages, is truly astonishing, and demonstrates both the veneration in which the Scriptures were held, and the great care which was taken in transcribing them.”70 That Giesbach performed his rigorous historical analysis within the assumptions shared by orthodox Christians was also defended in the same article: “Upon these principles Professor Giesbach undertook, and notwithstanding the loud clamours and malignant opposition of many, he persevered in, and completed, his great work of publishing a corrected Text of the New Testament, with the various readings and authorities subjoined, for which he is entitled to the warmest thanks of the whole Christian world.”71 The real problems for orthodox Christian theologians were not confined to the controversies that arose each time a new edition of the Old or New Testament appeared: it was the increasing convergence of the historical method necessary for reconstructing the biblical text with Enlightenment

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thinking that replaced the assumptions of theology with the primacy of reason and evidence. Up to this time, conservative and liberal theologians were cautiously enthusiastic about scholarly approaches to the Bible; they were so certain of the divine origin of the text that they assumed that such research could only enhance their understanding of God’s revelation. The shift began in Göttingen with Johann David Michaelis and his student, Johan Gottfried Eichhorn. Their work extended historical-critical method beyond matters of textual analysis to larger issues of authorship and the source material behind the texts. Because of their notoriety, several American scholars had sojourned to Göttingen to learn more. Joseph Buckminster was the first to bring the methodology back to New England and popularize it. Being the editor of the Monthly Anthology, he used this vehicle of communication to publish a series of articles on Eichhorn’s “higher criticism” of the Bible in 1808. Buckminster was on the liberal side of the theological spectrum and would eventually become Harvard’s first Dexter Lecturer on Biblical Criticism. As a liberal he was not concerned to defend the notion that the words of the Bible were inspired, only that they were written by authors who were. For liberals, the text was the human expression of God’s activity in history and in individuals. The Bible contained the unique and salvific revelation of God, but it was not itself the revelation. The response of conservatives to the shift in biblical studies was ambivalent. On the one hand, serious analysis of the text was a pious endeavor, and the findings of higher criticism were difficult to ignore. On the other hand, conservatives were committed to the idea that it is the words of the Bible that are inspired by God and delivered without intervention through human writers. Moses Stuart became Andover’s answer to the liberals. In preparation for his post as Chair of Sacred Literature at Andover, he read voraciously through works by Eichhorn, Herder, and all of the luminaries of German higher criticism that he could find. Stuart’s attraction to, and employment of, the method unnerved his conservative colleagues, but he managed to remain within the conservative fold. As Jerry Wayne Brown notes, “Stuart set strict limitations upon his willingness to study Scripture as simply another ancient book.”72 The limitations were supplied by the conservative theological assumptions Stuart was working within. When the basic axiom of higher criticism, that the Bible be treated like any other ancient text, led to a conclusion incompatible with Andover’s conservativism, Stuart chose the latter. Put simply, Stuart practiced higher criticism of the Bible within the boundaries of conservative theology. The mechanism Stuart used to protect conservative theological assumptions was “inspiration.” A good example is given in Stuart’s defense of Mosaic authorship of the first five books of the Old Testament. It had been the conclusion of German higher criticism that, although the Bible claims that

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Moses wrote this collection, it was, in fact, the product of several authors over a long period of time that extended well beyond the life of Moses himself. Stuart’s response provides an example of how he went about solving such problems: “It is enough for the credibility & authenticity of the books, that he [Moses] was moved by the Holy Spirit to write them; that he was divinely illuminated as to things unattainable by the exercise of his mental powers; & that as to historical facts, his narration was preserved, by power that aided him, free from all error.”73 Thus, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit supplied Moses with the insights to make no errors in his records of fact, as well as describing without error events that would happen after his death. Thus, for the Andover theologians, German higher criticism was acceptable only as a tool for clarifying and confirming previously held beliefs. The liberal climate at Harvard offered a warmer home for German higher criticism of the Bible. Andrews Norton, Edward Everett, and George Bancroft, all from Harvard, spent time in Göttingen to learn about the method from the masters. Andrews Norton had just been appointed to the newly created Dexter Professorship of Sacred Literature when he made the trip, and Edward Everett, upon his return from Göttingen, took up the post of Professor of Greek. Although Norton had publicized a scathing critique of the use conservatives at Andover had put higher criticism to, Harvard faculty had their own misgivings about the method. The liberal hope had been that higher criticism of the Bible would undermine the conservative claims about the inspiration of the text and, simultaneously, provide a solid, rational, and historical footing for their own understanding of God’s revelation of himself. The threat, however, was becoming clear: higher criticism of the Bible might undermine both conservative and liberal versions of Christianity. The threat was such that when George Bancroft, aspiring to a future faculty position at Harvard, left to study under Eichhorn, he felt it necessary to meet with Norton, Everett, and Kirkland (Harvard’s president) to assure them that his studies would not alter his Christian commitment. Ralph Waldo did not show an interest in higher criticism of the Bible in his undergraduate years, though he must have been aware of it. His Aunt Mary had a fleeting knowledge of it and seemed to consider it safe enough if used by pious scholars.74 His older brother, William, two years ahead of him in his studies, was so taken by his classes under Everett that he left for Göttingen to study under Eichhorn himself. It was in his correspondence with William in Germany that Ralph showed an interest in the subject. Even then, as Barbara Packer points out, “Most of the obvious effects of Emerson’s crash course in the higher criticism are short-lived and nugatory.”75 His only real experiment with it would come ten years later, in his sermon on the Last Supper, where he used

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it in his revolt against the sacrament and the church. At Harvard, however, Ralph was not in the revolting mood. NEWS FROM THE EAST AT HARVARD The interest in India and its Hindu “superstition” that was being expressed in New England journals and pulpits was alive at Harvard as well. The faculty were anxious to be on the cutting edge of scholarship being done regarding this new frontier of knowledge. One course on general history included a textbook written by Sir Woodhouselee that featured one section on Indian religion, and Dugald Stewart included Hinduism in his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, a text required for all undergraduate students.76 On the graduate level, there was much interest in Cousin’s History of Philosophy which included an extensive section on the Bhagavad Gita.77 Ralph Waldo found himself caught up in this wave of interest in Hinduism toward the end of his senior year, by way of a poetry contest. Though his successful Bowdoin essay had actually been his second attempt at the prize, his first having failed, and though he ultimately graduated only slightly above the middle of his class in 1821, he did manage one more academic triumph by winning a ten-dollar faculty award for his poem Indian Superstition. This was his one serious bid for fame as a poet in college.78 Cameron describes it as “a significant, but in no sense a successful poem.”79 It is important, however, for two reasons. First, it provides an insight into the extent to which Emerson read and understood both popular and Vedantic Hinduism by the time he was leaving Harvard College in 1821, and second, it demonstrates again how conformed he was to the social and academic assumptions and expectations that surrounded him. As with the case of Kant’s philosophy, commentators on Emerson’s life commonly claim that Emerson had little exposure to Hinduism and that it had little influence on his thinking until the late 1830s, some fifteen years after he left Harvard College. Frederick Ives Carpenter, for example, remarks that between 1824 and 1837 Emerson made no mention of any important idea from Eastern thought and concludes: “The formative years of his life were spent in comparative ignorance of Oriental thought.”80 Carpenter locates the beginning of the influence of Indian thought on Emerson after 1837. Hedi Hildebrand sees Emerson’s interest in Indian philosophy as first appearing with his reading in Degerando’s Comparative History of Philosophical Systems in 1830,81 and Shanta Acharya places the influence even later, arguing that even the transcendentalism of the 1837–1842 years was not “in any significant way shaped by Indian thought.” She suggests, “The relevance of Indian thought to Emerson becomes increasingly discernable after the second

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crisis in his life” which was the death of his son in 1842.82 Emerson’s poem, and the events of his life leading up to it, indicate otherwise. Emerson’s Indian Superstition, presented at the Harvard College Exhibition on April 24, 1821, came, in fact, at the end of a long history of his exposure to and interest in both the stories of popular Hinduism and the teachings of Vedantic Hinduism. In addition to the family readings and discussions during his early childhood, Emerson was surrounded throughout his early life by an intellectual community infatuated with the reports coming out of India. The major periodicals of the day, The Christian Examiner, The North American Review, The Christian Observer, The Christian Register, and those most faithfully read by Emerson himself, The Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, consistently featured articles on such topics as Hinduism, politics and social life in India, reprints of Jones’s and others’ translations of Hindu literature, and the personal stories of Westerners living in India. In addition to periodical entries, books on the same topics were being published, circulated, and acquired by local libraries, including the Boston Athenaeum and Harvard’s own library. Demonstrating a knowledge of the new craze became a part of sermons in churches. As Emerson progressed through the required readings in the Harvard College curriculum, he encountered Dugald Stewart’s Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind. It is of particular interest because both Ralph and his Aunt Mary were well acquainted with it. In the notes at the end of the second volume, Stewart not only described the details of Vedantic philosophy but also criticized Sir William Jones’s confusion of Hindu idealism with the idealism of George Berkeley. After quoting Jones at length, Stewart corrected him: “According to both systems, it may undoubtedly be said that the material universe has no existence independent of mind; but, it ought not to be overlooked that in the one, this word refers to the Creator, and to the other, to the created percipient.”83 Stewart then went on to quote a letter he received from a friend occupying the post of recorder in Bombay, describing an encounter with a young Brahmin. The Brahmin described the essence of Vedantic teaching of the supreme Brim [Brahma], the finite human experience of the physical world as Maia [Maya], and the ultimate reunion of the soul with Brahman from which it came, as well as the degeneration of this teaching into the popular polytheism of the ignorant. Having heard the explanation of the Brahmin, Stewart’s unnamed friend remarked: “I intend to investigate a little the history of these opinions, for I am not altogether without apprehension, that we may be all the while mistaking the hyperbolical effusions of mystical piety, for the technical language of a philosophical system.”84 This shows an element within Harvard’s intellectual community that was not content to stop at caricaturing Hinduism in terms of superstition but recognized its philosophical expression in Vedantic thought.

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In addition to his prior exposure to Hindu thought, Emerson’s specific preparation for writing Indian Superstition demonstrates further his knowledge of the stories and Vedantic teaching of this ancient tradition at this early stage. The topic and title of the poem were not his to choose; they were assigned to him. It is a testimony to the prevalence of interest amongst Harvard intellectuals in India, and specifically Hinduism, as well as to the characteristic bias of that same group, that the competition for the Harvard College Exhibition would be to write “A Poem. Indian Superstition.—100 Lines.”85 Cameron cataloged Emerson’s reading list for the writing of Indian Superstition: it included three books featuring translations of several Hindu poems with extensive explanatory commentaries; five books on India’s history, religion, and politics; and two books of memoirs of British intellectuals who lived and worked in India (including Teigemouth’s two-volume Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Correspondence of Sir William Jones). Cameron also indicates that, though specific borrowing records for the Harvard College are missing for this period, Emerson had consistently borrowed the Encyclopedia Britannica which included articles on India, Indian Philosophy, Hindostan, and Hindu Mythology. In addition to books, Emerson consulted twenty articles from six different periodicals dealing with the following topics: attempts to convert Hindus to Christianity; personal journals of traveling and living in India; Hindu religion, philosophy, and literature; translations of Hindu poetry; and the customs and character of Hindu people.86 Two articles are worthy of special consideration because they form a connection with Emerson’s mentor and muse, his Aunt Mary. The two articles appeared in 1817 editions of the North American Review and the Christian Disciple and dealt with Rammohun Roy. They were The Theology of the Hindoos As Taught by Ram Mohun Roy and A Remarkable Hindoo Reformer, respectively. In a letter written May 24, 1822, the year after Ralph had presented his Indian Superstition at the Exhibition, Mary described her meeting with Rammohun Roy: “And I have been fortunate this week to find a Visitor here from India, well versed in its literature & theology. . . . He studied much in the [Vedas]—found that in ancient times his religion was purer than now—. . . I wish that you would let me share news of him.”87 Emerson’s response came in his letter to her on June 7: “I am curious to read your Hindu mythologies. . . . I know not any more about your Hindoo convert that I have seen in the Christian Register.”88 This is often quoted as the beginning of Emerson’s interest in Hinduism, but this is clearly not the case. By 1822 he was well acquainted with India and its literature, and, given his preparatory reading for Indian Superstition, he was familiar with Rammohun Roy and the details of his teaching. The articles he referred to in his letter were in the most recent Christian Register editions and did little more than refer to Roy in a way that suggested that his story was common knowledge in New England.89

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The teaching of Rammohun Roy and his popularity in New England are important for understanding the scope of Emerson’s acquaintance with Hinduism by the end of his senior year at Harvard College. Roy clearly articulated the difference between the polytheistic, popular Hinduism that was considered primitive and barbaric by Westerners and the monistic, Vedantic philosophy that he argued was the heart of true Hinduism. The Brahmin leaders in India had used the Hindu mythologies to control the superstitious populace and thus perpetuated popular Hinduism for their advantage. Vedantic Hinduism, on the other hand, undermined this exploitive system and provided a link to Christianity through its concept of the One: the Supreme Brahman. In his Translation of Several Principal Books, Passages, and Texts of the Veds [Vedas], Roy explains to his English-speaking readers his intention to demonstrate that the idolatries of the uneducated Hindu are based on a failure to understand the metaphorical nature of the Vedas when speaking of the attributes of the One God; “that allegorical language or description was very frequently employed to represent the attributes of the Creator, which were sometimes designated as independent existences; and that, however suitable this method might be to the refined understandings of men of learning, it had the most mischievous effect when literature and philosophy decayed.” The result of this mischievous effect on the uneducated populace was that it produced “all those absurdities and idolatrous notions which have checked, or rather destroyed, every mark of reason, and darkened every beam of understanding.”90 According to Roy, true Hinduism worships the “Supreme Divinity”; popular Hinduism has become an idolatrous polytheism, mistaking the gods of the Vedas that were representations for actual divine beings and then worshiping them. In his translation of the Moonduk-opunishud, he argues, “The Vedas tolerate idolatry as the last provision for those who are totally incapable of raising their minds to the contemplation of the invisible God of nature.”91 Roy then presents a Vedantic description of the Supreme Divinity: “A wise man knowing God as perspicuously residing in all creatures, forsakes all idea of duality; being convinced that there is only one real existence, which is God.”92 (Emphasis is his.) Though this impersonal monism goes beyond the personal God of theism, Unitarians tended to celebrate Rammohun Roy as an example of the success of Christian missions in India. He not only proclaimed the title of Christian but treated the Trinitarian notion of God with the same disdain as he did the popular Hinduism; weak minds could not see the gods of the Vedas as allegories written to condescend to minds that could not grasp the notion of the Supreme. In an 1816 article, A Defense of Hindoo Theism In Reply to the Attack of an Advocate for Idolatry at Midras, Roy took on an objector that argued that worship of the gods is not merely allegorical but taught by the Vedas as an avenue for contemplating the Supreme God, as well as that the Christian

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Trinity is not allegorical but also a way of speaking of the one Supreme God. Roy’s response was to reiterate his argument: “Hindoos of the present day . . . so far from considering these objects of worship as mere instruments by which they may arrive at the power of contemplating the God of nature, regard them in the light of independent Gods, to each of whom, however absurdly, they attribute almighty power, and a claim to worship, solely on his own account.”93 His implication that this logic held for Trinitarian teaching as well made Roy the darling of Unitarians. In an article in the February 1822 edition of the Christian Monitor, the Unitarian author quoted Roy’s conversion experience as evidence that the Trinity is one more abstruse doctrine that muddles the proclamation of the gospel to the people of India: “In regard to the doctrine of the trinity in particular, he (Roy) declared, after mature examination, that if this were essential to Christianity, the whole scheme would be to him insurmountable. It resembled so much the polytheism of the Hindu religion, which he had labored to disprove.”94 The conclusion the author of the article drew was that if Christian missionaries were to succeed in converting Hindus to Christianity, they must avoid Trinitarian teachings. Roy’s Vedantic Christian teaching was a good fit with Unitarianism, and his conversion experience confirmed it. At the same time Emerson’s Aunt Mary was introducing him to Rammohun Roy, his Journals indicate that he was preoccupied with trying to make sense of the Christian notion of the omnipotence of God, particularly in light of human freedom, the efficacy of prayer, and the existence of evil. Vedantic Hinduism offered a solution to this problem by denying all dualisms and replacing a personal theism with an impersonal monism, but Emerson could not yet bring himself to accept it. Doing so would take him beyond the limits of conformity in which he could safely operate and by which he could gain recognition. EMERSON THE GRADUATE At the culmination of his undergraduate career at Harvard College, Emerson had not lived up to his own hopes of “rising high in my class,” nor had he lived up to the hopes of his family that he might be a “bright scholar.” In his Journals of the time, he often expressed his own disappointment in himself. Less than a year after graduation, and just before turning nineteen, he brooded over his lack of accomplishment, complaining that his “approaching maturity is attended with a goading sense of emptiness & wasted capacity. . . . I must be satisfied with beholding with an envious eye the laborious journey & final success of my fellows, remaining stationary myself, until my inferiors and juniors have reached & outgone me.”95

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He had learned to survive socially by losing himself in his reading and academically by conforming. Not only had he dutifully upheld the philosophical and theological orientations of the Harvard faculty, but his Journals and letters expose his uncritical acceptance of the prejudices of Protestant New England society at large. For Emerson, such prejudices emanated outward from the purity of his immediate Unitarian world through successive levels of differentiation, each meriting more intense judgment: the more alien, the more condemnation. The result was that he joined in anti-Catholic and anti-Calvinist sentiments and shared his colleagues’ suspicion of European intellectualism. The further one ventured from these mere variations in Western culture and history, the more visceral the reactions. His Journals showed a remarkable disdain for the Chinese that was reiterated and sustained for several years, and the idea that all non-Western religions are barbarous superstitions went unquestioned. Even after his extensive exposure to both popular and Vedantic Hinduism, he fell in line with the prevailing habit of caricaturing all of Hinduism in terms of the popular polytheism that made it appear most absurd to educated Westerners. In a Journal entry written just two months before presenting his poem Indian Superstition, Emerson echoed the very bias the assignment had embodied, referring to the “cruel, barbarous superstitions of India.”96 Conformity had been the key to Emerson’s personal life as well. As a good Protestant Christian, he accepted without question the common notion that keeping the faith meant assenting to certain theological propositions and obeying the moral teaching derived from them. His Aunt Mary had emerged as the most important friend and mentor in his life, and her commitment to the faith, thus understood, was a powerful and coercive influence. In this relationship too, Emerson learned to acquiesce, even taking on his aunt’s favorite name for him: Waldo. Not long after graduating, Waldo and his brother William signed the Declaration of Faith of the First Church of Christ in Boston. The Declaration affirmed the gospel of Jesus’s death and resurrection, the miracle of his resurrection as validation of this gospel, and the life of eternity with him after death.97 In the next ten years, Emerson would take on the roles of teacher, graduate student, pastor, and husband; he would experience love, tragedy, and travel; and by the end of that time, he would come to reject, or radically alter, every instance of conformity that had characterized him upon graduation from Harvard College.

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NOTES 1. Robert D Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 25. 2. Van Wyck Brooks, The Life of Emerson (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1932), 10. 3. Ralph L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Charles Scribner’s & Sons, 1949), 25. 4. JMN 1:49. 5. See especially Phyllis Cole, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 6. Evelyn Barish, Emerson: The Roots of Prophecy (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989), 45. 7. Barish, Emerson: The Roots, 48. 8. James Elliot Cabot, “A Glimpse of Emerson’s Boyhood,” The Atlantic 59 (May 1887): 662–663, https:​//​www​.theatlantic​.com​/magazine​/archive​/1887​/05​/a​-glimpse​ -of​-emersons​-boyhood​/376176​/. 9. Nancy Craig Simmons, ed., The Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1993), 125. 10. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Indian Superstition, With a Dissertation on Emerson’s Orientalism at Harvard, by Kenneth Walter Cameron, ed. Kenneth Walter Cameron (Friends of the Dartmouth Library: New Hampshire, 1954), 14. 11. Cameron, Indian Superstition, 39. 12. “Bibliographical Notices of Harvard College Library,” Monthly Anthology & Boston Review 5, no. 2 (February 1808): 82–88, https:​//​search​-ebscohost​-com​ .laverne​.idm​.oclc​.org​/login​.aspx​?direct​=true​&db​=h9h​&AN​=34975451​&site​=ehost​ -live​&scope​=site. 13. John Shore Teignmouth, Memoirs of the Life of Sir William Jones (Philadelphia: W.M. Poyntell and Co., 1805), 234. 14. Cabot, A Glimpse, 662–63. 15. Kenneth Walter Cameron, Emerson the Essayist (North Carolina: The Thistle Press, 1945), 2:135–7. 16. Cameron, The Essayist, 2:135–7; and Cameron, Indian Superstition, 15. 17. Joseph Priestley, A Comparison of the Institutions of Moses with Those of The Hindoos (Northumberland: A. Kennedy, 1799), 9. 18. Cabot, A Glimpse, no pagination. 19. Cameron, Indian Superstition, 15. 20. Cabot, A Glimpse, no pagination. 21. Cabot, A Glimpse, no pagination. 22. Rusk, Life, 26. 23. Edward Waldo Emerson, Emerson in Concord: A Memoir (New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1888), 51. 24. Cole, Origins, 149. 25. MME-L 71.

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26. Henry K. Rowe, History of Andover Theological Seminary (Massachusetts: Newton, 1933), 17. 27. “ART. 38. The Constitution and Associate Statutes of the Theological Seminary in Andover; with a Sketch of Its Rise and Progress. Published by Order of the Trustees,” Monthly Anthology & Boston Review 5 no. 11 (November 1808): 602, https:​ //‌‌‌​search​-ebscohost​-com​.laverne​.idm​.oclc​.org​/login​.aspx​?direct​=true​&db​=h9h​&AN​ =34837115​&site​=ehost​-live​&scope​=site. 28. Joseph A. Conforti, “Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity: Theology, Ethics and Social Reform in Eighteenth-Century New England,” William and Mary Quarterly 34, no. 4 (October 1977): 572–89. 29. “ART. 38. The Constitution and Associate Statutes,” 607. “Creed” refers to a modified version of the Westminster Shorter Catechism. 30. “ART. 38. The Constitution and Associate Statutes,” 606. 31. Rowe, History, 171. 32. Leonard Woods, Lectures on the Inspiration of the Scriptures (Andover: M. Newman, 1829), v. 33. Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts, 1:140. 34. William Ellery Channing, The Works of William E. Channing, D.D. (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1891), 211. 35. Channing, Works, 309–10. 36. Samuel A. Eliot, A Sketch of the History of Harvard College (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1848), 112–13. 37. Eliot, A Sketch, 123–24. 38. Rowe, History, 86. 39. MME-L 114. 40. L 1:48–49. 41. Samuel A. Morrison, “The History of Harvard,” in The History and Traditions of Harvard College (Massachusetts: Crimson Printing Co., 1936), 20. 42. Morison, History, 20. 43. L 1:47. 44. Edward Emerson, Emerson in Concord, 24–25. 45. John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, ed. I.T. Ramsey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 75. 46. Locke, The Reasonableness, 75. 47. Rusk, Life, 75–76. 48. David Hume, Treatise on Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 131. 49. Woods, Lectures, 18–19. 50. Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (Albany: E. Hosford, 1822), 1:51. 51. Stewart, Elements, 1:50. 52. Channing, Works, 190. 53. Channing, Works, 211. 54. Channing, Works, 1002. 55. This letter is the background of the image on the cover of this book.

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56. Kenneth Walter Cameron, Young Emerson’s Transcendental Vision (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1971), 382. 57. MME-L 87. Letter to Sarah Alden Bradford 1814. She asks Sarah’s interpretation of de Stael on Genius; then in a letter to Sarah Alden Bradford 1/13/1818 she mentions Corina from de Stael’s Corina of Italy, MME-L 108. In a letter to Sarah Alden Bradford 5/22/1818, she mentions Rousseau, which is perhaps alluding to de Stael’s work by that name, MME-L 111. In a letter to Ruth 10/18/1818, Mary requests books to be sent to her, including de Stael on “effects of literature,” MME-L 117. 58. MME-L editor’s note, 89. 59. MME-L 84. 60. Books borrowed by Ruth through William’s account: 3/21/1822 and again in 1823 included de Stael’s Germany. Emerson’s Journal of December 1823—January 1824 (“Wide World 12”) ended with a reading list including Germany. In his Journal from February of 1824—August of that year (“Wide World 13”), Emerson refers in a footnote to a review of de Stael’s Germany in The Edinburg Review. 61. De Stael Holstein, Germany (New York: Eastburn, Kirk, and Co., 1814), 2:150. 62. De Stael Holstein, Germany, 155. 63. Rusk, Life, 144. 64. Thompson, John Locke, 86–87. 65. This was in 1824. See Rusk, Life, 92. 66. Dugald Stewart, Dissertation: Exhibiting the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy, Since the Revival of Letters in Europe, ed. Sir William Hamilton (London: Bart Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1854), 389, footnote 1. 67. Stewart, Dissertation, 395, footnote 1. 68. Rusk, Life, 83. 69. JMN 2:31–32. 70. “Abstract of Interesting Facts Relating to the New Testament,” Monthly Anthology & Boston Review 5, no. 12 (December 1808): 637. https:​//​search​-ebscohost​-com​ .laverne​.idm​.oclc​.org​/login​.aspx​?direct​=true​&db​=h9h​&AN​=34837121​&site​=ehost​ -live​&scope​=site. 71. “Abstract of Interesting Facts,” 640. 72. Jerry Wayne Brown, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America—1800–1870 (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), 52. 73. Brown, The Rise, 56. This quote is from Stuart’s Lecture VIII on the Old Testament and Hermeneutics, delivered at Andover. 74. MME-L 208. In a letter from Mary to Ralph on April 27, 1826, she discussed Eichhorn and Michaelis, approving of the latter because he “proves the divinity of all of the Gospels” but accused Eichhorn of atheism. 75. Barbara Packer, “Origin and Authority: Emerson and the Higher Criticism,” in Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 82. 76. Cameron, Indian Superstition, 17. 77. Richardson, Mind on Fire, 114. 78. Rusk, Life, 83. 79. Cameron, Indian Superstition, 34.

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80. Frederick Ives Carpenter, Emerson and Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930), 9–10. 81. Hedi Hildebrand, Die Americanische Stellung Zur Geschichte Und Zu Europa in Emersons Gedankensystem (Bonn: Peter Hanstein Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1936). 82. Shanta Acharya, The Influence of Indian Thought on Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), 7–11. 83. Dugald Stewart, Mind, 2:252. 84. Dugald Stewart, Mind, 2:253. 85. Cameron, Indian Superstition, 17. 86. Cameron, Indian Superstition, Appendix C. 87. MME-L 152. 88. L 1:116–117. 89. The Christian Register articles referred to are Nov. 23, 1821, and May 17 and June 7 of 1822. The articles told the story of Roy’s anti-Trinitarianism and defended it against Trinitarian objectors. 90. Rajah Rammohun Roy, Translation of Several Principal Books, Passages, and Texts of the Veds. (London: Parbury, Allen, & Co., 1832), 44–45. 91. Roy, Translation, 25. 92. Roy, Translation, 37. 93. Rajah Rammohun Roy, A Defense of Hindoo Theism in Reply to the Attack of an Advocate for Idolatry at Midras (Calcutta: Printer Unknown, 1817), 29. 94. “Religious Controversy in India,” in The Unitarian Miscellany and Christian Monitor 14, no. 2 (February, 1822): 206. 95. JMN 1:133. 96. JMN 1:50. 97. Rusk, Life, 100.

PART 2

Emerson’s Revolutionary Phase: Rejecting the Faith—1821–1832

Ellen Louisa Tucker Emerson (1811–1831) Ralph Waldo Emerson’s first love and first wife. “Portrait of Ellen Tucker Emerson” by Sarah Goodridge about 1830. Concord Museum Collection, Gift of Dr. Augusta G. Williams; Pi806.

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Most biographers describe Emerson’s years from leaving Harvard College (1821) to leaving Second Church (1832) as a succession of trials culminating in not only a vocational shipwreck but also an existential crisis of faith. I separate out this period as a revolutionary phase because it marks the crisis of the old propositional faith and the victory of the new faith emerging from the dissonance that fermented throughout Emerson’s early intellectual life. The dissonance began with his earliest readings in Plato as a child, through his encounter with Eastern philosophy and Kantian epistemology, to his relationship with post-Kantian thinkers such as Channing and Coleridge. When he accepted the post as minister of Boston’s Second Church, this dissonance reached the boiling point: Emerson’s personal doubts and frustrations with the doctrines of traditional Christianity were now in direct conflict with his chosen profession. His resignation from ministry in 1832 precipitated a revisioning of his religious faith.

Chapter 3

Building Materials for an Alternative Faith

The adults of Emerson’s immediate family provided him and his siblings with a nurturing home, but one that embodied the incongruities typical of Christians navigating the currents of a nascent New England intellectualism, an intellectualism that sought uniqueness from its European counterparts but craved legitimacy in their eyes. This legitimacy would need to come from demonstrating a mastery of the same foundation in the classics of Greek and Roman philosophy, literature, and the arts common to European education, as well as exhibiting the ability to keep up with contemporary European trends in the same fields. Uniqueness would come by building on this foundation rather than conforming to it. The response of conservative Christian theologians to the challenge of creating an American intellectual identity was measured. The revealed truths of God found in the Bible and Christian doctrine were sufficient. As Moses Stuart expressed it in his address upon the dedication of the School of Theology building at Andover Theological Seminary, “As Christians, our Founders believed that the Christian Revelation contains something which is peculiar to itself. . . . They believed, too, in the divine inspiration and the supreme authority of the Scriptures, and, in the true spirit of Protestants, regarded them as the sufficient and only rule of faith and practice.”1 In a not-so-subtle aside to his theological rivals at Harvard, he added, “We do not wish to be understood, as in any way possessing, or as inclined to contemplate with approbation, or even with any degree of indifference, that liberality, so named which can make it a matter of no consequence, at least of no hazard, whether a man receives or rejects these truths. Christianity, in our view, stands or falls with them.”2 The uniqueness and authority of the Scriptures as interpreted in the true spirit of Protestantism entailed the rejection of non-Western religions as well as the other Western religious traditions that appealed to the biblical teachings for their identity, i.e., Judaism 51

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and Islam. Even Roman Catholicism failed the test. In fact, as Martin Marty points out, “Through most of the nineteenth century anti-Jewishness in America was mild compared to anti-Catholicism, perhaps because there were so few Jews.”3 Ipso facto, Classical Greek, and Roman philosophies, though containing some coincidental similarities to Christian morality, were considered pagan philosophies of no inherent value. In addition, from the perspective of these conservative theologians, the significance of current trends in European intellectualism was strictly dependent on their utility in clarifying human understanding of divinely revealed truth. Locke’s empirical method based on inductive reasoning, for example, could be used to demonstrate the internal coherence of the doctrines comprising that conservative theological tradition. Such contributions from contemporary philosophy were welcome, provided that such reasoning would not lead to undermining or changing the tradition. Any modern ideas deviating from the time-honored conservative theological tradition were looked upon with contempt. Charles Hodge, for instance, boasted that “during his long tenure there, from 1820–1878, not one new idea crept into or originated at Princeton.”4 Even the German historical-critical method applied to the Bible could be used to sort through the thousands of textual fragments offered up by archeologists to ascertain the best reconstruction of the original writing. The problem for conservative theologians was how and where to apply the brakes; the same scholarship that was producing the best reading of holy writ was dismantling the uniqueness, and therefore the authoritative status, of the text. Thus, for the conservative Christian theologians of Emerson’s time, the merit of classical philosophy, or that of current trends in contemporary philosophy, was determined by their correspondence with or clarification of what was taken a priori as the meaning of the propositions recorded in the Bible. The meaning of these propositions was then determined by their own theological system which they brought to bear upon it. Thus, those teachings within other philosophical traditions which coincided with their own were tolerated, even extolled; those that did not were rejected. This deductive reasoning conserved their theological tradition while providing a façade of openness to dialogue with other worldviews, but it was only a façade. Liberal Christianity was a great deal more open to the development of an American intellectualism that could truly take part in the international conversation. Since this form of Christianity saw the Bible as a divinely inspired expression of the immortality and the moral nature of the human soul, it could be open to evidence of these expressions in other religious and philosophical traditions; such evidence served to strengthen the case for the claims of liberal Christians. As Channing put it, since the spirit of God was in Jesus, “of consequence, to love Christ is to love the perfection of virtue, of righteousness, of benevolence; and the great excellence of this love is that, by

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cherishing it, we imbibe, we strengthen in our own souls, the most illustrious virtue, and through Jesus become like to God.”5 For Channing and the liberal Unitarians of Emerson’s time, the value of the classics and of contemporary trends in philosophy lay not in the correspondence of their teachings with the doctrines of a theological system but in their witness to the moral and immortal nature of the human soul. In this light the uniqueness of Jesus was not that his blood was the single sacrifice acceptable by God for the atonement of the sins of humanity; rather, in Channing’s words, “Do not imagine that any faith or love towards Jesus can avail you but that which quickens you to conform yourselves to his spotless purity and unconquerable rectitude. Settle it as an immovable truth, that neither in this world nor in the next can you be happy but in proportion to the sanctity and elevation of your characters. . . . Expect no good from Jesus any further than you clothe yourselves with excellence.”6 Since Jesus’s uniqueness lay in his exceptional demonstration of the unity of the individual soul with God through the realization of its own divine/moral nature, the truths of Christianity did not exclude the truths of other philosophical or religious traditions, be they ancient or contemporary. Liberal Unitarians could embrace these other traditions in as much as they attested to, or embellished on, the eternal, moral nature of the human soul. Common themes throughout the works of the ancient Western philosophers and poets were the nature and origin of Good, Truth, and the Virtues, as well as metaphysical speculations regarding the soul and its relation to the infinite. The novel appearance of Eastern and Chinese philosophies onto the nineteenth-century New England scene witnessed to the fact that these ancient traditions grappled with the same issues. Liberal Unitarianism was poised to be the host to a new American intellectualism. By scrapping the sacrificial atonement theory of the uniqueness of Jesus and by playing down the uniqueness of the revealed truths of the Bible, the ground was made clear for genuine dialogue with other worldviews: the kind of dialogue only possible when there is respect for the inherent value of other views. The problem was that there were limits to the liberality of liberal Unitarians. If the uniqueness of the Christian tradition did not rest in the atoning blood of Jesus or the divine nature of biblical revelation, it did rest in the fact that its story of Jesus is the definitive example of the consciousness each individual must have of the eternal, moral nature of their soul and its relation to God. Only by conforming oneself to this example could one come into right relation to God. Channing, for example, accepted the Gospel narratives along with their miraculous stories, but as for miracles in other religions, he described them as “miracles of superstition . . . many of them are absurd, childish, or extravagant, and betray a weak intellect or diseased imagination.”7

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The conclusion to be drawn from all of this is that as Emerson entered the arena, both conservative and liberal theologians were coping with the challenge to create an American intellectual identity. What they had in common was a commitment to the uniqueness and superiority of Christianity and a need for intellectual legitimacy and respect, independent from Europe. Both accepted that, in one way or another, Christianity offered the only way to salvation. What separated them was that for conservatives, humans are innately evil and salvageable only by atonement; for liberals, humans are innately good and salvageable by following the example set by Jesus. The need for respectability in the global intellectual context meant, for conservatives, finding those elements of ancient and contemporary philosophical traditions that coincided with the doctrinal system to which they were committed and applauding them, while denigrating the aspects of the same systems that were incommensurable with their own. For liberal Unitarians, the process was much the same with the exception that the litmus test was not coincidence with a doctrinal system based on a theological interpretation of the Bible, but the resemblance of the narratives of the traditions in their witness to the moral nature and divinity of the human soul. In both cases the Christian narrative expressed in the Bible was taken without question to be definitive. To be a person of faith, and thus properly aligned to God, was to accept the propositions of this text. For conservatives, emphasis was placed on the intellectual assent to the truth of the revelation which would then result in conviction, confession, and obedience to moral requirements; for liberals, emphasis was on the moral nature of humans which would respond to the revelation of Jesus as the moral example necessary for salvation. In both cases the Christian who keeps the faith is the one who holds to the truth and superiority of the truths of God expressed in the Bible and confirmed by the miracles it records. The study of the classics and currency with global philosophical developments were seen as necessary requirements for the Christian intellectual of uppercrust New England society: however, for conservatives, this meant using this study to bolster a theological system taken a priori; for liberals, this meant a rather condescending acceptance of such study in as much as it contributed to the biblical narrative. These conflicting responses to the birth of an American intellectual identity came into Emerson’s home in the persons of his mother, the conservative Calvinist; his father, the liberal Unitarian minister; and his aunt Mary, the puzzling combination of both. Though unwavering in her own conservative piety, Ruth’s role as wife of a prominent Unitarian minister placed her in the midst of Boston’s intellectual milieu. Both she and William were devoted to raising their children to be successful, even exceptional members of that society. Thus, while Ruth maintained a strict Puritan home, when it came to the education of the children, it was William’s liberalism that defined the agenda.

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It is no surprise that William’s study of Christian theology, his commitment to the importance of the classics, and his pioneering efforts to understand and disseminate the newest discoveries from India formed the environment of Waldo’s earliest years. With the intention of grooming their boys to be leading members of New England’s intellectual elite, Ruth and William had seen to it that their formal education would begin early in life. In Waldo’s case by age nine he entered Latin school where through reading the poets, he developed an interest in philosophy and mythology. At age eleven he had requested to borrow from the library an anthology of the Greek writers.8 In general, family conversations, though they certainly involved a share of frivolity, spanned the gambit from theology to Greek and Latin philosophy and from poetry to Hindu folklore. With the death of his father when Waldo was eight years old and the emergence of his Aunt Mary as a surrogate parent and eventual mentor, Waldo’s interest in the classics continued. Mary had never agreed with William’s liberalism, but despite her conservative views on the Bible and Christian theology, Mary’s pietistic spirituality enabled her to embrace the classical Greek philosophy of Plato and participate in the philosophical and theological debates of the day. Throughout his undergraduate career at Harvard, Emerson was deeply influenced by Mary’s syncretistic approach to theological and philosophical issues. Like her, he rejected wholesale commitment to any one system, choosing rather to move fluidly amongst the commonalities found within various systems. Mary’s syncretism was, however, grounded in a courageous effort to tease out of each system the Truth that she was certain God had intended her to find. Waldo’s syncretism was motivated by the less courageous need to conform and fit in, in order to win acknowledgment from his peers and teachers. METAPHYSICAL DISSONANCE AND INTERNAL CHALLENGE By validating the importance of the classics for the education of the cultured intellectual, the liberal Christianity surrounding Emerson in his formative years provided to him two incommensurable metaphysical schemes: the Christianity into which he was born and the classical Greek philosophy he encountered in his education. The bridge between the two was broadly advertised amongst Unitarians as the common teaching of the immortality and moral nature of the human soul, but this teaching in classical Greek thought was grounded in a metaphysic that was utterly foreign to that of liberal Christian monotheism.

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Greek metaphysical dualism took on many forms, and at different stages of his life, Emerson was influenced by one or another of these. Pre-Socratics such as Pythagoras gave early voice to it, but it was Plato who codified the central tenets. Plotinus popularized a revision, and Plutarch provided an example of a Stoic interpretation based on both Plato and Plotinus.9 Because Emerson rejected the project of constructing a philosophical system and scorned those who did, he read philosophers as he would poets: for inspiration. As Rusk points out, “Few great literary men have cared less than Emerson did for systematic philosophers. . . . The mature Emerson read for lusters, for gleams of insight. A systematic, logical structure of thought seemed mainly a waste of energy.”10 The various forms of Greek dualism provided Emerson with lusters that shared family resemblances, some of the most important of which for him were that the material world is an inferior reflection of the immaterial, that the truths of the material world apprehended through the senses of our material bodies are inferior to the truths of the immaterial world of which we have some glimpse through exercise of pure reason, that therefore our reasoning capacity is evidence that an immaterial soul resides within us, and finally, that all truth is unified in the immaterial world in one source of reason. This source was variously conceived of as personal or impersonal. These family resemblances are found also in Vedantic Hinduism which Emerson learned to see as the source of early Greek metaphysics. In 1799 Sir William Jones had offered a point-by-point comparison of Hindu and classical Greek metaphysics, and Dugald Stewart, whose works were also well known to Emerson and revered by his Aunt Mary, claimed: “The metaphysical and ethical remains of the Indian sages are, in a particular degree, interesting and instructive; inasmuch as they seem to have furnished the germs of the chief systems taught in the Grecian schools.”11 De Stael had articulated this view in Germany, and Emerson’s Aunt Mary had repeated it in a letter to him in January of the year he completed his undergraduate work at Harvard. Specifically, Mary quoted de Stael on speculating that at an early time, man was in closer connection with nature, and therefore “the religion of Egypt, emanations of the Hindoo, Persian adoration of the elements, and the harmony of the Pythagorean numbers—these we know from the agency of God . . . which we seek with moral affinities and intellectual attraction.”12 Emerson copied a nearly exact quote of this in his Journals in the first year that he began keeping them and seemed to have already assumed the view himself.13 In the ethnocentric fashion of the day, in a January 1820 entry, he described this influence as “the ostentatious rituals of Egypt and India which worshipped God by outraging nature though softened as it proceeded west.”14 He went on to note that “man’s search for or feeling of intimacy with Nature was expressed in the religions of Egypt, India, Persia, and Pythagoras.”15 By April of that year, speaking of going back beyond the literature of Greece,

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and apparently quoting from an Everett lecture that day, he wrote, “All tends to the mysterious east.”16 Like some Greek versions of metaphysical dualism, Vedantic metaphysical dualism dissolves into monism, often interpreted as pantheism. In the language of Hinduism, the material world is an illusion (Maya) which is the result of ignorance (Avidya). Humans are souls (atman) living in ignorance until they reach enlightenment (Bodhi), at which time they realize their unity with Atman or Brahman and no longer participate in the illusion of materiality. All truth is unified in Atman/Brahman. This ultimate unity may be seen as personal (Saguna Brahman) for those needing anthropomorphic language or impersonal (Nirguna Brahman) for those more philosophically astute. Emerson always had a special interest in the history of the development of the human intellect, but other than seeing Eastern philosophy as a precursor to the Greeks, he collapsed Eastern and Greek metaphysical systems into one another and never found the need to draw distinctions. Christy notes: “Platonism and Neo-Platonism were for him an introduction and corroboration of the Hindus. His essay on Plato is the best evidence of the fact. Indeed, the essay is almost as much on the fundamentals of Hindu thought as it is on the Greek philosopher.”17 Thus, from his earliest years, Emerson was immersed in two different metaphysical realities: liberal Christian monotheism and Eastern/Greek monism. Christian intellectuals resolved this dissonance by cherry-picking through the latter to promote the former. Dugald Stewart’s Dissertation: Exhibiting the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy, Since the Revival of Letters in Europe was an important example of this reasoning and particularly relevant since he was so deeply regarded by Emerson and his Aunt Mary, who referred often to his writings. Emerson’s Aunt Mary was herself a practitioner of this art. Her selective use of Platonic themes to articulate her Christianity was on full display in a letter to Elizabeth Hoar: “That there is a pure domain of reason is our shield of faith in God & that he has given a spark of it to all—but that it is bewildered in physicks—in mathematics is a grand result to show the inefficacy of science—and of late of transcendentalism—that it is an holier inspiration— intuition itself which places the mind in communion with Reason which may be said ‘to be identical with God.’”18 In an 1824 Journal entry, Emerson summed up his own approach: Plato reasons well, but Christ and his apostles reason infinitely better because of their inspiration. “Men are now furnished with creeds, animated by all the motives a gospel offers & they look back with pity on the proud attainments of the pagan Plato & his emulous successors, & around upon the living pagan nations of the East & West.”19 But he adds that Christianity has “rather outstripped than contradicted” Plato’s speculation on the Gods and Virtue.

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Then, “I hold reason to be a prior Revelation & that they do not contradict each other.”20 In his early years, the incommensurability of the two metaphysical systems did not create a dissonance for Emerson that he could not resolve in the same way as his teachers and mentors did. In an 1823 Journal entry, he remarked: “In matters of religious Faith the Bible is such an ultimate standard. All over Christendom its authority is acknowledged, and all doctrines stand or fall according to their conformity or disagreement with this book. In religious faith, what is not repugnant to any part of Holy writ, albeit not anywhere specially enjoined, may be neither criminal nor false.”21 The superiority of Christian metaphysics went unquestioned, and with it the inevitable result that all other views must be subordinated to and filtered through it. Only when the superiority of the Christian view came into question did this dissonance become significant. The threats to Christianity’s superiority came, for Emerson, on both internal and external fronts. Emerson’s Journal entries and correspondence with his Aunt Mary from 1822 to 1826 indicate an obsession with the internal coherence of the fundamental Christian notion of God. Specifically, he was wrestling with the problem of the existence of evil, the efficacy of prayer, and the possibility of human free agency in a world created and governed by an omnipotent, personal God. In a Journal entry of February 1822, Emerson stated the problem of evil in traditional terms: “No elaborate argument can remove the fact which strikes the senses, and which is the first & chief difficulty in the way of belief of an omnipotent good Principle, namely, [the great proportion] ‌‌‌existence of evil in the world, and next, the great share it has in the texture of human life, and its successful opposition to virtue and happiness.”22 In succeeding entries throughout that spring, he turned to an ontological argument invoking the Neo-Platonic dualism of flesh pursuing “gross but fascinating pleasure” vs. spirit urged by the “image of Truth” in order to account for evil,23 then extended this dualism to the Universe as composed of Perfection vs. Imperfection.24 By June of that year, he turned to a teleological explanation emphasizing the purpose for evil’s existence; the Christian notion of God was incorporated into the argument as the Creator, source of human moral character, judge of human moral actions, and author of a redemptive plan.25 In a November entry, Emerson included the logical deduction from God’s omnipotence that all events, including human choices, are determined. He concluded on a note reminiscent of Calvin himself, referring to humans’ efforts as those of an “over-proud worm” and finally recommending, “Creep into thy grave, for the Universe hath no need of thee; Omnipotence is planted for its preservation.”26 The next month he reverted to a traditional compatibilist defense for the problem of evil, adopting the view that God’s grand Order

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includes the freedom of humans to pursue their ends, and therefore, “the great & primeval Necessity makes impossible an Universe without evil, and perhaps founds happiness everywhere, as here, upon the contrast of suffering.”27 In an entry three months later, he extrapolated this approach to answer the question of how it is that prayer could affect the actions of an omnipotent God within a determined universe: prayer cannot change the course of events but coincides with it.28 In the coming years, Emerson would continue to seek solace in one or another theological or philosophical formulation that could demonstrate the internal coherence of propositions essential to Christianity. The problems of how a personal God who is the source of human moral consciousness could create a world that contained evil, and how this God’s sovereignty could leave room for free human agency or for the efficacy of prayer, lingered without sufficient resolution. In an 1825 Journal entry, he acknowledged that the greatest threat to the unity of God is the origin of evil, then resorted to a cosmic justice defense in which evil is always counterbalanced with good in the grand design.29 Like Calvin, Emerson sided with the omnipotence of God over free human agency, but Emerson’s liberal Unitarian view of the innate goodness of the human soul was incompatible with the Calvinistic attempts to lay the blame for evil on fallen human nature. As long as God was seen as a personal God who was accountable for the morality of his own actions, it seemed necessary to hold that evil was first introduced into creation by the act of human choice. This exonerated God but indicted humanity. Neo-Platonic and Vedantic views, on the other hand, offered a view that maintained the ultimacy of the Divine without denigrating the human soul: the One is beyond all distinctions. The option was there, but Emerson was not at a place in his life where he saw this as a live option. EPISTEMOLOGICAL DISSONANCE AND EXTERNAL CHALLENGE On the external front, Emerson was struggling unsuccessfully to deal with Hume’s skepticism. Emerson’s Journal entries, reading lists, and letters document how seriously he took the threat Hume’s skepticism posed to Christianity. While in his Journals he struggled to reconcile Christianity’s omnipotent God with the existence of evil and the possibility of human freedom, it was Hume’s skepticism that suggested the only way to philosophical coherence was at the cost of jettisoning theism altogether. In his College Theme Book of 1819–1822, Emerson listed under the heading Considerata “How to combat Hume’s Epicureanism” along with “Is liberal Christianity true?”30 In a rather tortured letter to his Aunt Mary in October of 1823, five

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months after signing the Declaration of Faith, he poured out his frustrations over each of these issues, ending with references to Hume as the “Scottish Goliath” who had “an adroiter wit than all his forefathers in philosophy” and has not been refuted by those after him. As to the attempts to protect the grounds of belief by shifting them from reason to subjective feelings or sentiments, as de Stael had done in Germany, Emerson scoffed: “Now though everyone is daily referred to his own feelings as a triumphant confutation of the glozed lies of this Deceiver [Hume], yet, it assuredly would make us feel safer & prouder, to have our victorious answer set down in impregnable propositions.”31 He then appealed to his aunt for a hint to solving at least one of his problems. His Aunt Mary’s reply was written only eight days later but offered little help. She essentially repeated the popular mantra “But all we have to do with revelation is its miracles as they are the foundation of our faith” and offered no more than an ad hominem argument regarding Hume: “Of that old [Scotsman] you [surely] feign respect. He has been [robbed] of his necromancy as a miracle [enemy], & of late found shallow in metaphysics, so that curiosity to read him is blunted.”32 Emerson’s interest in reading the old Scotsman, however, was not blunted. His Journals indicate a long association with Hume’s work from his early reading of Hume’s History of England through his extensive struggle with Hume’s epistemology in Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and his critique of natural theology in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Emerson’s battle to defend Christianity and reconcile its internal doctrines with one another consumed much of his energy and contributed to the poor health that drove him, in November of 1826, to drop everything and travel to Florida in order to clear his mind and regain strength. The trip south was of some physical benefit, but his Journal entries indicate that it did little to alleviate the growing dissonance he was experiencing with traditional Christianity. Early in his voyage, Emerson sketched out sermon notes in which he rehearsed a very traditional view of crucifixion and original sin. Two weeks later, on January 15, 1827, he was entertaining the idea that since our proofs of God are not perfect, perhaps we do not know the nature of God at all. The next day he took delight in exposing the hypocrisy of the Christianity he encountered in Florida by giving an account of his attendance at a meeting of the Bible Society that took place next door to a slave auction: “One ear therefore heard the tidings of great joy whilst the other was regaled with ‘Going gentlemen, Going!’ And almost without changing our position we might aid in sending the scriptures into Africa or bid for four children without the mother who had been kidnapped therefrom.”33 By the end of that month, his Journal reflections included an expression of a very traditional view of the Bible and the Sabbath. Yet later in his voyage, he described his

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new friendship with his cabinmate who was a devout atheist.34 The cabinmate was Achille Murat, nephew of Napoleon, and a very capable interlocutor. The two spent hours in conversation. Though neither convinced the other to alter their position, eleven days after meeting his new friend, Emerson allowed himself to speculate on the need of God at all: “But what matter if this Being [God] be acknowledged or denied, if the faith cannot impose any more effective constraint on vice & passion, than morals unsupported by this foundation?”35 At the same time, in a letter home to his Aunt Mary, Emerson wrote lines that foreshadow the direction his struggles would take him. The problem of God’s omniscience was leading him toward the conclusion that all being and all action must in some sense be unified in God. “The chaff on the wind, the atom swimming in the sewer, fill a place in the system of matter as essential as the sun in heaven. And how, then, can man be low? If, on the one side, his feet are in the dust, on the other there is nothing between his head and the infinite heavens.”36 He went on in the letter to refer to prayer as “awkward abutments to the work of Omniscience” that are less pleasing to God than our actions in living out the moral law. In general, Emerson’s notes during this trip express the depth of his struggle with Hume. He continually vacillated between devotion to traditional Christian doctrines and cynicism about their relevance and veracity. The same issues that precipitated his trip south dogged him through his travels and awaited him on his arrival home. As with the metaphysical challenge to his faith, Emerson had at hand a possible resolution of the epistemological challenge provided by Hume, but he was not ready to accept it. If Hume was the Scottish Goliath, then Immanuel Kant was Europe’s version of David. Kant’s refutation of Hume’s skepticism entailed a radical reorientation of humans in the universe. On his account humans were no longer seen as passive receptors of sensations in a world created by God; they were creators of their own experience of that world. Because so many after Kant went beyond him by denying the ontological objectivity of the world in itself as the occasion of human experience, Kant’s own teaching was often lost or confused with idealism, subjectivity, or intuitionism. What was important, however, was that Kant had acknowledged Hume’s victory over common sense empiricism and had offered a new way forward. Emerson had been aware of Kant’s philosophy and that it provided a refutation of Hume’s skepticism as early as 1813 with the publication of Madame de Stael’s Germany and the review of it in the October issue of the Edinburg Review of that year. Emerson’s family, particularly his Aunt Mary and himself, were avid fans of de Stael’s work and of the Edinburg Review. The Review noted Holstein’s articulation of Kant’s philosophy in the third section of Germany: “Those who are best acquainted with the philosophical

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revolutions of Germany, will be most astonished at the general correctness of this short, clear, and agreeable exposition. . . . The contest between Skepticism and Dogmatism has a close connection with one of the most interesting parts of this philosophical and eloquent work. The system of Kant was one of the efforts of philosophy to expel the poison of skepticism which Hume had infused into it.”37 Kant’s philosophy had also been included in Emerson’s Harvard College curriculum through at least the works of Dugald Stewart. At this point Waldo could not let go of his hold on the anthropomorphic monotheism of traditional Christianity or the Lockean empiricism that pervaded his environment. He held to the same answer to Hume’s skepticism that sufficed for the majority of the Harvard faculty and his Aunt Mary: Reid’s Scottish Common-Sense philosophy. Even the author of the glowing comments in the Edinburg Review on the third section of de Stael’s Germany had not been able to resist importing Reid’s Common-Sense philosophy into the discussion as a foil to Kant; then, in language reminiscent of Dugald Stewart, he concluded: “The extensive technical language of Kant, and the unfortunate term Common-Sense, adopted by Reid, both denote the same ultimate laws of thought which mark the boundaries of reasoning, and against which all disputation is a vain mockery.”38 Clearly, Reid was presented here, as in Stewart’s work, as offering the more prudent path of accepting those boundaries, where Kant chose the more precarious path of attempting to transgress them. In a Journal entry in 1823, Emerson had compared the outlook of those who reject the faith, “apostate” (including Hume), with those “whose hearts cleaved to the divine revelations as the pledge of their resurrection to eternity” and concluded: “I believe nothing is more ungrounded than the assertion, that, skepticism is, in any manner, the natural fruit of a superior understanding.”39 By 1826 his view was unchanged; he upheld the truth of traditional Christian doctrines as the essence of faith, but his hold was becoming more desperate as his battle with the problems associated with God’s omnipotence did not abate and as Hume’s arguments appeared to him more and more persuasive. At the end of 1830, Emerson was still arguing with Hume in his Journals.40 His inability to justify the Christian doctrine of a personal, omnipotent God with the presence of evil or with the reality of human free agency, along with his conclusion that no one had answered Hume’s skepticism, meant that his entire metaphysical and epistemological paradigm was headed toward crisis. Since religious faith was seen in terms of intellectual commitment to the truth claims of traditional Christianity, this would be a crisis of faith. On the other hand, Emerson had before him an alternative metaphysical view that would eliminate the theological problem engendered by the notion of a personal God and an epistemological view that would answer Hume’s skepticism. What remained was a catalyst to move him forward. Sadly, it was

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not only intellectual inspiration that would provide that catalyst but existential crises as well. NOTES 1. Moses Stuart, Sermon Occasioned by the Completion of The New College Edifice for the Use of the Theological Seminary at Andover, Sept. 13, 1821 (Massachusetts: Flagg and Gould, 1821), 23. 2. Stuart, Sermon, 25. 3. Marty, Pilgrims, 285. 4. Marty, Pilgrims, 303. 5. Channing, Works, 318. 6. Channing, Works, 316. 7. Channing, The Works, 216. 8. Rusk, Life, 51. 9. Edmund G. Berry, Emerson’s Plutarch (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 15. 10. L 1:liii. 11. Stewart, Dissertation, 425. 12. MME-L 139. 13. JMN 1:334. 14. JMN 1:210. 15. JMN 1:334. 16. JMN 1:12. 17. Arthur Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism: A Study of Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 50–51 18. MME-L 384. 19. JMN 2:247. 20. JMN 2:248–50. 21. JMN 2:190. 22. JMN 1:92–93. 23. JMN 1:139. 24. JMN 1:144. 25. JMN 1:153. 26. JMN 2:34–38. 27. JMN 2:65. 28. JMN 2:86. 29. JMN 2:419. 30. JMN 1:192–93. 31. L 138. At this same time, Emerson was writing out reflections on Channing’s lectures, acknowledging Hume on causation but arguing for the moral sense in each of us and the need for revelation to elevate us beyond nature (JMN 1:160). 32. MME-L 177. 33. JMN 3:117.

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34. L 194. In his letter to his brother William, Emerson enthusiastically described this new friend, adding, “He is a philosopher, a scholar, a man of the world very sceptical but very candid & an ardent lover of truth. I blessed my stars for my fine companion & we talked incessantly.” 35. JMN 3:78 36. J 2:173. 37. “Art 43 De L’Allemagne. Par Madame la Baronne de Stael-Holstein,” in The Edinburgh Review 22, no. 10 (October 1813): 235, https:​//​archive​.org​/details​/sim​ _edinburgh​-review​-critical​-journal​_1813​-10​_22​_43 38. “Art 43 De L’Allemagne,” 237. 39. JMN 2:108–9. 40. JMN 3:214–15.

Chapter 4

The Breaking Point

Despite the internal turmoil, Emerson’s social life was flourishing by the end of the 1820s. On Christmas Day of 1827, he met Ellen Louisa Tucker, who would become the love of his life. Shortly after their first encounter, he waxed eloquently: All that thy virgin soul can ask be thine, Beautiful Ellen. Let this prayer be mine. The first devotion that my soul has paid To mortal grace, it pays to thee, fair maid. I am enamored of thy loveliness, Lovesick with thy sweet beauty which shall bless With its glad light my path of life around Which now is joyless where thou are not found.1

A year later, on December 17, 1828, they were engaged. Four days after that, Emerson entered a prayer in his Journal to God who “made us for each other” that he “will be pleased to strengthen & purify & prosper & eternize our affection!”2 Then on Christmas Eve he paused to write a short letter to his brother William, in which he sounded much like a giddy schoolboy describing his first sweetheart: “She is 17-years old, & very beautiful by universal consent. Her feelings are exceedingly delicate & noble—and I only want you to see her.”3 If Emerson’s romance with Ellen was not cause enough for joy in the Emerson family, in the months between their engagement and marriage, Emerson was offered the full-time position of Senior Minister of Boston’s Second Church. Emerson would take his place in the long line of Emerson preachers that extended back four generations. He would be replacing the well-respected Henry Ware as the latter accepted a post on the Harvard Faculty. There had been three names put forward for the position at Second Church, and Emerson was chosen by an overwhelming majority of voters: seventy-four out of seventy-seven. Emerson was ordained to ministry at 65

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Second Church on March 15, 1829. In his letter of acceptance, Emerson humbly expressed his hesitations about his abilities to live up to the expectations of the post but declared his steadfast commitment to do so. A month later he was becoming aware of just what that commitment entailed. In a letter to his grandfather, Ezra Ripley, he wrote: “I have made somewhat more than fifty pastoral visits and am yet but in the ends & frontiers of my society. This day I have preached at home all day & married a couple & baptized a child & assisted in the administration of the supper. I fear nothing now except the preparation of sermons. The prospect of one each week, for an indefinite time to come is almost terrifick.”4 Emerson’s Aunt Mary was cautiously relieved at all of this. She welcomed Ellen and encouraged her to “be yourself a ministering angel to him [Waldo] and society.”5 But her letters in the months surrounding Waldo’s engagement and ordination indicate that she was more enthusiastic about the latter than the former. She had always felt the responsibility of keeping her nephews safely in the Christian fold and nurturing them into the ministry. She had failed on the last account with Edward and failed on both accounts with Charles and William. Edward was studying law with such fervor that he suffered a mental breakdown in the middle of the year before, Charles had chosen the business world, and William was practicing law in New York. Waldo appeared now to be the only remaining hope of continuing the Emerson heritage forward, though even this hope was tainted for Mary by her suspicions that Waldo’s theology might in fact disqualify him from becoming an effective prophet of her brand of Christianity. In spite of Mary’s disappointment with the Emerson boys on the spiritual level, the year 1829 had begun auspiciously for them. Waldo had summed up the general good fortune in which they found themselves in a letter to her: “William has begun to live by the law, Edward has recovered his reason and his health. Bulkeley was never more comfortable in his life.6 Charles is prospering in all ways. Waldo [himself] is comparatively well and comparatively successful—far more so than his friends, out of his family, anticipated.”7 Waldo and Ellen were married on September 30, 1829. The romance between Ellen and Waldo spilled over from their personal expressions to public perceptions. William attested to it while ruefully remembering his own part in the days leading up to the ceremony: “Waldo and the fair Ellen were whispering honied words above stairs, & I was turned over to the compulsory attentions of the stranger folk. These lovers are blind—pure blind these lovers be—I forgive them freely.”8 Though the decade was ending on a high note, there were ominous signs of what lay ahead for the happy couple. In spite of her beauty and noble feelings, Ellen’s health was known to be frail. Her brother had died of tuberculosis, and Ellen was showing symptoms that she too was in its clutches. For his part

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Emerson had entered full-time ministry with great approval from his family and friends but with equally great inner unrest. His letter of acceptance to Second Church was written from the side of Ellen’s sickbed as she lay suffering from one of what would be many episodes. Rusk notes that Emerson’s use of the language in that letter, “I come to you in weakness, and not in strength. In a short life, I have yet had abundant experience of the uncertainty of human hopes,” surely referred to his experiences with Ellen in the moment. Besides existential portents of problems to come, there were the intellectual ones; before he had entered Divinity School, Emerson had committed himself to a future as minister in the Church, but he had seen that commitment as a compromise; his choice for ministry was made only because he “did not have the mental ability for poetry or philosophy.”9 Compromise or not, Emerson threw himself into fulfilling the duties and expectations of a pastor of the well-respected and second-oldest church in Boston. Also, during this first year of professional ministry, Emerson embarked on an ambitious reading program. Lists of works he either bought or borrowed from local libraries indicate that his reading included classics in philosophy and literature, but the most important development was his newfound interest in the works and thinking of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. During the fall of 1829, Emerson was reading Coleridge’s The Friend, The Statesman’s Manual, and Biographia Literaria. Of these, The Friend seems to have been a favorite. He wrote to his Aunt Mary on December 10th with great enthusiasm over this work: “I am reading Coleridge’s Friend with great interest. You don’t speak of it with respect. He has a tone a little lower than greatness—but what a living soul, what a universal knowledge!”10 Apparently, after this letter and prior to the letter Emerson wrote to his brothers William and Edward on January 4, 1830, he had read James Marsh’s edition of Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection. In that letter he remarked on the books he had recently read, “Coleridge’s Friend—with great interest; Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection with yet deeper; Degerando Hist. Comparee des Systemes de Philosophie.”11 So taken was Emerson by Coleridge’s thinking that he had, three days previous, obtained a copy of the Sibylline Leaves which contained nearly all of Coleridge’s poetic works. Cameron details the use to which Emerson put Coleridge’s thought in sermons throughout 1830 and 1831 and makes the important observation that “an examination of the pages which he cites and the context indicates that he had found his way to the very heart of the Aids, had been squarely confronted by the distinction between the Understanding and the Reason, and was quarrying in Marsh’s extensive Appendices.”12 This and Degerando’s Historie would set Emerson on the road toward resolving the metaphysical and epistemological tensions that still haunted him.

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Marsh’s fifty-eight-page “Introduction” to Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection served to focus the reader’s attention on those aspects of Kant’s philosophy that Coleridge was using and how he was interpreting those aspects. Most important of these was the distinction between Reason and Understanding. For Kant, pure Reason is the source of the a priori fundamental structures for meaningful experience; turning these structures in upon themselves results in analytic knowledge, or truths that are logically necessary. Understanding gives us the humanly constructed knowledge resulting from the structures of Reason applied to sense experience; this is synthetic knowledge, or truths relative to human experience, qua human. Coleridge was using Kant’s distinctions within the context of a Christian apologia. His argument ran parallel to the philosophical argument between Kant and Lockean empiricism. Hume had demonstrated that the latter could not account for the most basic requirements for human knowledge: causation, induction, time, space, etc. In essence, Kant had answered by arguing that empiricism was working with only half of the picture; human experience is not passive reception but active interpretation as the structures of Reason transcend sensations to create meaningful experience. Coleridge put this argument to use in defending Christianity by associating the outward forms of Christianity with the Understanding and true Christianity with Reason. By this the doctrines, rituals, and even words of the Bible were seen as socially embedded products of the Understanding and therefore of only relative truth. Coleridge then gave a radical Platonic reinterpretation of Kant’s notion of Reason. On Coleridge’s account Reason is the soul in its relation to God. Truth can therefore be found only in Reflection, looking inward toward Reason. Popular Christianity had wed itself to Locke’s philosophy and therefore was left with a false religion that has no access to the Truth. True Christianity is not the product of the Understanding’s assimilation of facts: it is the dynamic activity of living life in the intuitive presence of God. Coleridge’s adaptation of Kant provided Emerson with keys to dealing with both the internal and external threats to Christianity. By placing the problem of the internal coherence of Christian truth claims into the category of relative truths of the Understanding, Coleridge had diminished their significance; in fact, he made them irrelevant to true Christianity. And, by adopting an, albeit twisted, version of Kant’s epistemology, he had answered Hume’s skepticism. Emerson had been aware of Kant and his refutation of Hume but was never able to embrace him. Now a more mature and self-assured Emerson was intrigued by Marsh and Coleridge; their language expressed Kant’s ideas in a way that seemed to liberate one from being the passive receptor of experience and empower one as the active agent in that experience, all the while defending, rather than undermining, Christianity. All of this was leading

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Emerson to a new sense of faith. Faith was no more a matter of receiving certain propositions with approbation that knowledge was the product of received sensations. The third book Emerson referred to with enthusiasm in his letter to his brothers in January of 1830 was Degerando’s Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie, relativement aux principesdes connaissances humaines (Comparative History of Philosophical Systems, Considered in Relation to the Principles of Human Knowledge), first published in 1804. The title is descriptive of the two sections that comprise the work. In the first Degerando surveys the philosophical systems that have appeared throughout human history; in the second he critiques them in terms of their adequacy to explain human knowledge. His method in the first section is taken from the natural sciences; rather than chronologically tracing the development of one idea to another, or fixing the ideas geographically, Degerando sets about to classify the different systems in terms of six classifications: rationalism, empiricism, idealism, materialism, dogmatism, and skepticism. The second section is titled “Critical Analysis of the Systems of Philosophy on the Generation of Human Knowledge.” In this section Degerando demonstrates the epistemological failure of each system. The section comes to a climax with the development of a seventh system which does not fit into the other six classifications: Kantianism. Degerando gives a detailed analysis of Kant’s epistemology followed by a scathing attack on it. He argues that Kant brought nothing new to the discussion: “Kant took from Plato the idea of pure reason and from Aristotle his logic. Kant maintained that ‘we can know only the simple appearance of things,’ and this accorded with idealism. He cast doubt on the faculties of the human mind as well as external entities, and this accorded with skepticism.”13 Ultimately, Degerando concludes that Kant was guilty of a skepticism regarding any knowledge of the world itself and that he had therefore become an idealist at base.14 Degerando then offers his own version of a middle way between the passive reception of sensations advocated by empiricism and the active interpretive view of Kant. He argues for a modification of Locke that would sidestep Hume’s critique by the introduction of speculative truths which are produced by the speculative function of reason. These truths, or laws, are inferred from sense experience and are then used to inform sense experience. Degerando’s view is thus a modification of Kant as well; that is, the truths of speculative reason perform a similar function to that of Kant’s categories with the difference being that speculative truths are not a priori but derived from the consistency of human experience. Causation, for example, is a speculative truth inferred by the consistency of our experiences; such consistency is evidence that there is a metaphysical truth behind this speculative truth, and the speculative truth is usable for interpreting future experiences. As Sylvia

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Manzo describes it, “By this move, he seems to mean that the transformation done by speculative truths is not a psychological imposition of the mind (or of the mind’s habits) on factual reality. Neither is it a condition established by a transcendental subject. To the contrary, the epistemic ‘usefulness’ of speculative truths has a metaphysical basis which warrants the truth-value of the discoveries gained by it: causal connection between facts.”15 As Manzo also points out, the circularity in Degerando’s argument is rather obvious: the epistemic basis of speculative truths is inferred from the same sense experience as the sensations they are supposed to inform; suggesting that a metaphysical foundation accounts for the consistency of human experience simply begs the question. What was important for Emerson was that Degerando had treated the various philosophical traditions of both the East and the West as equal participants in the development of human intellectual history and that Degerando had explained Kant’s system as a refutation of Hume’s skepticism. Emerson had been confronted with all of this in his undergraduate career at Harvard through the works of Dugald Stewart. Stewart had been influenced by Degerando and followed him in his broadening of the scope of the conversation to include Eastern views, as well as in rejecting Kant in favor of a more empirical option. In Stewart’s case it was the Scottish Common-Sense school; in Degerando’s work it was his own modification of Locke. Stewart’s efforts did not satisfactorily answer Hume’s criticisms, and Degerando’s ended in circularity. When Emerson had encountered Stewart, he was an insecure youth, anxious to please. During his time at Harvard College, he conformed to the expectations of the faculty and his Aunt Mary. His drive to fit in and be acknowledged extended into his general ethnocentric view of other cultures and religious/philosophical views. Through Degerando he was revisiting these prejudices as a more mature, accomplished adult. As his biographer, Robert Richardson, describes Emerson’s encounter with Degerando’s work, “Emerson took careful notes on these observations, coming for the first time to the realization that the Hindu, Chinese, and Persian thought was on a philosophical par with Hebrew, Greek, and Christian.”16 In the coming year, the lusters gleaned from Coleridge and Degerando would come together for Emerson in his confrontation with Victor Cousin’s work, and he would finally be empowered to cope with the threats of the internal inconsistency of traditional Christianity and the external critique of its truth claims. In addition to his ambitious reading program and fulfillment of the responsibilities of the Pastorate, Emerson spent much of his time in community service and in taking care of Ellen. He had been elected chaplain of the state senate in the summer of 1829, and in December of that year, he had been chosen to be the representative of two local schools to the Boston school

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committee. The latter commitment embroiled Emerson in a chaos of local politics that demanded much of his time and energy.17 Between accomplishing his various vocational and social duties, Emerson spent as much of his remaining time as possible with his ailing wife. In the autumn Emerson’s brother Edward was taken so badly with tuberculosis that he felt it necessary to leave the Boston climate for the West Indies. Ellen was faced with a similar decision but chose to remain in Boston through another winter; it would be her last. The year 1831 began with another important step forward in Emerson’s intellectual development, but this step was overshadowed by the tragedy that came at the same time in his personal life. The first book he read that year was Victor Cousin’s Cours de l’Histoireie la Philosophie which had been written in 1827. Cousin’s work was all the rage in France since his first lectures in 1815 at the age of twenty-three.18 His name was just becoming popular in America in 1829 when the first journal article devoted to him appeared in the North American.19 Cousin’s view included an interpretation of Kant not unlike Coleridge’s, but he placed it within the broader context of a theological and philosophical eclecticism. In an 1829 article in the Edinburgh Review, Sir William Hamilton noted, “The development of his [Cousin’s] system, in all its points, betrays the influence of the German philosophy on his opinions.” Then Hamilton went on to describe Cousin’s use of Kant’s distinction between Reason and Understanding: “Reason, or intelligence . . . is not individual, is not ours, is not even human; it is absolute, it is divine. What is personal to us, is our free and voluntary activity. . . . In every act of consciousness, we distinguish a self or ego, and something different from self, a non-ego; each limited and modified by the other. These, together, constitute the finite element.”20 Then Hamilton describes Cousin’s departure from Kant: “But at the same instant that we are conscious . . . of a superior unity in which they are contained, and by which they are explained;—a unity absolute as they are conditioned, substantive as they are phenomenal, and an infinite cause as they are finite causes. This unity is God.”21 Like Degerando before him, Cousin approached the history of philosophy in terms of classification; however, he also saw these classifications as emerging cyclically and chronologically. As Richardson summarizes Cousin’s work, “He finds four archetypal ‘systems’—sensationism, idealism, skepticism, and mysticism—which reoccur again in every later age and country and always in the same order.”22 Cousin took as the beginning point the Vedantic thought of Hinduism. Put in the light of Cousin’s overall project to weave together the various strands of thought comprising human intellectual history into a single fabric, Emerson saw Hinduism in a new light. His introduction to the Bhagavad Gita in the first volume of Cousin’s Cours de l’Philosophie changed his life. No longer could he speak of “Indian superstition”; Vedantic

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monism was now a viable option to the traditional Christian monotheism to which he had clung. Coleridge had loosened the idea of faith from the traditional notion that it consisted in assent to, and adherence to, theological propositions and offered an alternative vision of faith as living life in an intuitive relation to God made possible by Reason—the individual’s channel to God. But Coleridge’s view was confined within a Platonized version of the Christian God. Vedantism offered the next step from Coleridge to a monistic view of the Ultimate, the One. Here was the omnipotence and ground of morals, a ground that transcended the moral categories themselves, that Emerson had been seeking. As these ideas were coalescing into new possibilities for radically re-envisioning his faith, it was to be existential crises that would push these possibilities into reality. Ellen’s health was fast deteriorating, and Emerson’s misgivings about his profession and the traditional Christian theology on which it was based had deepened and become exacerbated by his responsibility as church minister to propagate this theology from the pulpit and perform the rituals that celebrated it. On February 8, 1831, Emerson wrote to his Aunt Mary: “My angel has gone to heaven this morning & I am alone in the world.”23 Ellen had lost the battle with tuberculosis. Though Ellen’s death did not come as a surprise, Emerson was devastated. Ellen had shown more strength in her last days than he, and her last wishes were that he be comforted by those around him. Aunt Mary, for her part, expressed in a letter to Waldo her sense of loss in a rhapsodic account of a vision she had of Ellen’s ascent into heaven and encounter with the Messiah.24 In the Journal he was keeping at that time, Waldo also often resorted to poetic flights in an effort to console himself.25 Such literary outlets continued in his Journals through the next year. Emerson never got over the loss of his first love. Rusk records that he was known to walk each morning to her tomb long after her death.26 In a Journal entry of March 29, 1832, a year after her death, he mentioned, with no further commentary, that he opened Ellen’s coffin that day.27 Two years later his Journal entries still contained references to her, and by the end of the year 1834, Emerson recorded his “longing to be with her again in eternity.”28 Though he married again in September of 1835, one year later he wrote a note in his Journal about Ellen on what would have been their anniversary.29 At the same time that Emerson was reeling from the loss of Ellen, he was feeling more and more detached from the Christianity he was professing. Ellen’s death had brought an existential gravity to his thinking that he had

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never before experienced. In his first Journal response, he evinced a kind of spiritual panic as he reverted the language of his youth: “God be merciful to me a sinner & repair this miserable debility in which her death has left my soul.” He then appealed to Ellen as an intercessor: “Pray for me Ellen & raise the friend you truly loved, to be what you thought him.”30 Another kind of response was seen in the lectures he had committed himself to deliver on the Synoptic Gospels. He began them within a month of Ellen’s death, and unlike the sermons he was preaching at the same time, the lectures were an exercise in academic distancing. Emerson embraced and practiced the historical-critical method of German biblical criticism as he worked through the problems of the authorship, sources, and development of each of the Gospels. The lectures were an outward sign of Emerson’s inner struggle with the forms of Christianity, forms that did not speak to the deep spiritual emptiness created by the loss of Ellen. The most significant of Emerson’s responses to Ellen’s death is seen in his Journals as he turned away from the language of traditional Christianity and toward the more inclusive language of Eastern and Neo-Platonic monism. Only ten days after his appeal to God for mercy and to Ellen to pray for him, Emerson was quoting Plotinus in his Journals: “‘Of the Unity of God, Nothing can be predicated, neither being, nor essence, nor life, for it is above all these.’ Grand it is to recognize the truth of this and every one of that first class of truths which are necessary.”31 It was two months later that Emerson underwent his life-changing encounter with Cousin’s account of the conversation between Arjuna and Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita — the classic expression of Vedantic thought. In July, five months after Ellen’s death, Emerson expressed this turn in a poem: Gnothi Seauton (Know Thyself). The poem is comprised of eleven stanzas and begins: If thou canst bear Strong meat of simple truth If thou durst my words compare With what thou thinkest in the soul’s free youth Then take this fact unto thy soul — God dwells in thee — It is no metaphor or parable It is unknown to thousands & to thee Yet there is God He is thy world But thy world knows him not He is the mighty Heart From which life’s varied pulses part

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Clouded and shrouded there doth sit The Infinite Embosomed in a man.32

The seventh stanza reads: Therefore, oh happy youth, Happy if thou dost know & love this truth Thou art unto thyself a law And since the Soul of things in thee Thou needest nothing out of thee.

The law, the gospel & the Providence, Heaven, Hell, the Judgement, and the stores Immeasurable of Truth & Good All these thou must find Within thy single mind Or never find.33

As Cameron puts it, “Herein lies the heart of his [Emerson’s] religious philosophy, which the months and years were not greatly to alter, but rather to make more explicit.”34 The poem was a declaration of intellectual independence, but Emerson could not actualize it. His vocation was to promulgate the traditional Christian teaching that the “law, the gospel, and the immeasurable of truth and good” were not found “within thy single mind” but in the unique and definitive biblical text which is the self-revelation of a personal God. The tension between his intellectual inclinations and the requirements of his office in the church characterized the rest of this and the following year. From July to the end of 1831, Emerson was working out his new theology in light of the problems of the old theology that had gnawed at him for so many years. He had never been able to exorcise Calvin’s notion that the sovereignty of God entailed the lack of human freedom, nor could it account for the efficacy of prayer. As long as the relation of humans to God was seen in terms of subject and object, the omnipotence of the object seemed to nullify the freedom of the subject. So also with the world itself: if the world is the object of God’s creative act, then how does one account for the presence of evil? Calvin’s answer, that human nature is corrupted by its own fault, was intolerable to Emerson; such an answer would undermine humanity’s moral nature which Emerson and his fellow Unitarians took to be the true impress of God upon humans. Plotinus and Vedantic thought removed the subject/ object relationship of God to the world and, simultaneously, offered a notion of God that truly respected both the implications of omnipotence and the dignity of humans.

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In an October Journal entry, Emerson summed up his disgust with both Calvinist and Unitarian versions of the institutionalized church: “Calvinism stands, fear I, by pride & ignorance & Unitarianism as a sect, stands by the opposition to Calvinism.” He then reflected on his own developing alternative: “Every man contains within him this mighty tribunal by which truth is affirmed & wrong condemned. . . . And this is the omnipresence of God. How gloriously hath he provided for the vindication of his government by putting the governor into every soul that he hath made.”35 These words could have been uttered by William Ellery Channing as a spokesperson for Unitarianism; however, it is clear by the context that Emerson had now broken loose the notion of omnipotence from Christianity and its personal God. The Vedantic turn in Emerson’s thought meant a re-envisioning of the idea of compensation that he had long been attracted to. In his early years, this idea had rested on a tacit assumption that at least part of what Calvin taught was true: surely the sovereignty of God is entailed in the notion of God itself. Compensation, in that context, meant the law-like order of the cosmos God had created to operate both materially and morally according to his divine reason. What Arjuna learns from Krishna in the opening scenes of the Bhagavad Gita is that God was not a transcendent being who creates but the eminent creative source of both the material and moral spheres; the law-like structure of this universe is the impersonal dharma which transcends morality; that which governs the entire cosmic drama is Karma. Krishna then reveals himself as the incarnation of the One that is the source and unity of all. This conversation began with Arjuna the warrior rejecting war on several moral grounds. What Arjuna now learns is that humans live in this world of materiality, and their proper response to it is to live according to their duties defined by dharma: warriors are dutybound to be good warriors. Most significant, however, is Krishna’s revelation that in living out this life, humans are living out a cosmic drama: if all distinctions are denied in the One, then human action is the creative activity of the One. This does not relieve humans of their duties to the moral laws of the material sphere any more than it relieves bodies from functioning according to the physical laws of the universe; instead, it recognizes that such laws are the expressions of the divine force in which they are participating. Compensation was now Emerson’s language for this recognition. Not only did this view expand the notion of God’s omnipotence beyond the limits of good and evil, but it also solved the problem of prayer. Emerson wrote in November of that year: “In connection with the great doctrines of Compensation or Reaction, we get the best insight into the theory of Prayer. It teaches that Prayer does not at all consist in the words but wholly is a state of mind. . . . And when he is wholly godly or the unfolding God within him

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has subdued all to himself, then he asks what God wills & nothing else & all his prayers are answered.”36 What can be seen in all of these forays into a new theology is Emerson attempting to hold on to Christian language while infusing it with new meaning. His sermons throughout this time period bear witness to his efforts to shroud the ideas fermenting in his Journals and correspondence from appearing too offensive to his audience, but the metaphysical battle between Christian and Vedantic worldviews taking place in his mind was approaching a climax. At the same time that he was trying to balance the responsibilities of his public life with his private struggles, Emerson was dealt another blow: his brother and confidant Charles suffered a physical breakdown so severe that he was sent to join Edward in the West Indies in hopes that the climate would help him recover. Emerson expressed his losses in a letter to William remarking, “I slept little last night with sad thots. . . . Who would have thought that Edward & Charles on whom we put so much fond pride should be the first to fail whilst Ellen, my rose, is gone.”37 Emerson did not begin the new year on an optimistic note. In reflecting on the ministry in early January, he remarked: “It is the best part of man, I sometimes think, that revolts most against his being the minister. His good revolts from official goodness.”38 Eighteen thirty-two would indeed be a year in which Emerson’s “good” would revolt from the “official goodness.” To add to the woes of the past year, and perhaps owing to them, Emerson’s relationship with his Aunt Mary became more strained. He had ended the last year with a letter on Christmas Day to her in which he made no reference to the significance of the date but gave a rambling critique of everyone from Wordsworth to Milton for failing to grasp the essence of religious life as he was beginning to see it, then put his own view in the form of a rhetorical question: “What from the interior Creation, if what is within be not the Creator.”39 Mary had had no difficulty in discerning the signs of Waldo’s growing distaste for his vocation and his theological inclinations. In February she wrote her response in a letter attacking him on both accounts. With regard to the former, she accused him of turning out to be a parasite on the noble institution that nurtured him from his infant mind into his present state of moral nature. As to the latter, she quoted his rhetorical question from the Christmas Day letter, then responded: “Now if this withering Lucifer doctrine of pantheism be true, what moral truth can you preach or by what authority should you feel it? Without a personal God you are on an ocean mast unrigged for any port or object.”40 From this point on, as his respect for the church and its theology waned, so also did his devotedness to the aunt who had been his mentor for so long. Apparently, Waldo intended to respond to her letter but did not get around

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to finishing his attempts. Toward the end of April, he wrote: “I have a letter or two addressed to you laid away in my drawer begun not finished for why should I pester you with all my doubts & darkness?”41 On June 2, 1832, Emerson made the following observation in his Journal: “I have sometimes thought that in order to be a good minister it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers. Were not a Socratic paganism better than an effete superannuated Christianity?”42 At approximately the same time, he wrote a letter to the “Second Church and Society” in which he indicated his reticence over administrating the sacrament of communion. The exact date and contents of the letter are apparently lost; however, the June 16th report of the committee on its response to the letter is known and stands as a testimony to Emerson’s success in separating his internal theological inclinations from offending his parishioners. Clearly, Emerson was objecting to the practice of the sacrament itself, as well as wishing to be relieved of administering it. Had the church the slightest inclination to be rid of Emerson, this would have been an opportune moment to do so, but instead of taking this request as cause for immediate dismissal, the committee sought first to pacify the situation by offering to explore alternative modes of administration. They did, however, hold to the necessity of continuing the practice in some form. The nature of the sacrament was not the reason but the occasion of Emerson’s decision to leave the ministry. In a Journal entry soon after his letter to the church, he wrote: “Religion in the mind is not credulity & in the practice is not form. It is a life. . . . It is not something else to be got, to be added, but is a new life of those faculties you have. It is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.”43 Communion was a symbol of that which he found most objectionable about the institutionalized church: in it, “we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers.”44 The sacrament was a celebration of the notion that the true center of Christianity lay in the events of the past and that true Christian faith amounts to commitment to the doctrines of the past. By making this the subject of his choice to resign, he encapsulated his real objections to traditional Christianity in a manner accessible to his lay audience. This he made clear from the pulpit September 9 of that year when he delivered what was possibly his most famous, and certainly the last, sermon of his professional career.45 The Lord’s Supper Sermon was a tightly reasoned argument based on a historical-critical approach to the Gospel accounts of the original event. The conclusion of his argument was essentially that Jesus had no intention of instituting a religious ritual to be perpetuated by coming generations; he was simply celebrating the Jewish Passover with his disciples and employing symbolic language to drive home the point that they should be faithful to his commandment. Such symbolic language was appropriate

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to his audience at the time but has subsequently been misinterpreted by later audiences not accustomed to expressing themselves in symbol and parable. He could not in good conscience perpetuate this misrepresentation of Jesus’s actions. Emerson’s intent was not to convince his audience to abandon the sacrament; that conversation had already taken place over the summer, and the church had made its position clear: it was not going to acquiesce to his wishes. As Susan Roberson puts it, “The purpose of the discourse, the real logic of it, is not to persuade his audience of the inappropriateness of the traditional Lord’s Supper celebration nor is it to showcase his exegetical expertise; rather, it is to declare and bring into being a new self, the self he had been shaping and fashioning for some time.”46 Two days later, on September 11, 1832, Emerson submitted his letter of resignation. The response of the parishioners of Second Church was described by his brother Charles in a letter to William: “If the Parish were to be polled probably three-fourths would be for keeping their minister on his own terms.”47 He then explained that this would not happen because, apparently, the other one-fourth included some “influential men.” Second Church did, indeed, accept Emerson’s resignation. In the following months, the stress of the past two years took its toll on Emerson’s health. Letters from Charles, who was now recovered and returned to Concord, and William in New York illustrate the severity of his illnesses which came and went from September 24th through December 3rd.48 Emerson had lost the love of his life; he had failed family, friends, and even himself by leaving the ministry; and his relationship with his Aunt Mary, on whom he counted for his deepest support, was irreparably ruptured. In all of this, he could not be comforted by turning to the teachings of his Christian faith nor find refuge in the community of believers. In the language of the tradition, he had lost the faith. NOTES 1. JMN 2:410–11. 2. JMN 3:148–9. 3. L 256. 4. L 267. 5. MME-L 251. 6. Bulkeley was a seldom spoken-of brother who had been born mentally challenged and was by this time in an institution. 7. J 2:259.‌‌‌ 8. L 285, editor’s note 89.

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9. JMN 2:237–42. 10. J 2:277. This was likely an allusion to Mary’s letter to him a month before in which she said: “I can’t get the ‘aids to reflection’ and the ‘Friend’ is an unconnected mass of [great]ness and little egoisms.” In another letter, written on the last day of 1829, she complained to Sarah Ripley that she had still not obtained a copy of Coleridge’s Aids. Selected Letters of MME, Simmons, 267, 270 11. L 291. 12. Cameron, Young Emerson, 166–69. 13. Peter K. J. Park, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 45–46. 14. Park, Africa, 47. 15. Sylvia Manzo, “Historiographical Approaches on Experience and Empiricism in the Early Nineteenth-Century: Degérando and Tennemann,” in Perspectives on Science 27, no. 5 (September–October 2019): 666. 16. Richardson, Mind on Fire, 104. 17. Rusk, Life, 152–53. 18. Alan Barrie Spitzer, The French Generation of 1820 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987), 71–96. See Spitzer’s analysis of the influence of Cousin on French philosophy during the Reconstruction period. 19. Georges Joyaux, “Victor Cousin and American Transcendentalis,” in American Transcendentalis: An Anthology of Criticism, ed. Brian M. Barbour (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973), 126. 20. “Art XI Cours de Philosophie. Par M.V. Cousin,” Edinburgh Review 99, no. 10 (October 1829): 198–200, https:​//​books​.google​.com​/books​?id​=FGMJAAAAQAAJ​ &printsec​=frontcover​&source​=gbs​_atb​#v​=onepage​&q​&f​=false. In a March 1830 letter, Charles excitedly recommended this article to William, describing it as “the key to the whole German system.” Quoted by Rusk in Letters, 322–23. 21. “Art XI Cours de Philosophie,” 200. 22. Richardson, Mind on Fire, 114. 23. L 1:318. 24. MME-L 305. 25. JMN 3, “Blotting Book PSI 1830–1831.” Such efforts continued through his next journal, “Blotting Book III, 1831–1832.” 26. Rusk, Life, 149. 27. JMN 4:7 .28. JMN 4:359. 29. JMN 5:216. 30. JMN 3:226. 31. JMN 3:235. 32. JMN 3:290–91. 33. JMN 3:292. 34. Cameron, Young, 175. 35. JMN 3:301. 36. JMN 3:307–8.

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37. L 336. 38. JMN 3:319. 39. L 7:200. 40. MME 314. 41. L 7:206. 42. JMN 3:27. 43. JMN 4:27. 44. JMN 4:27. 45. This was the last sermon Emerson preached as a minister, though he did continue to preach occasionally in local churches as a guest or fill-in. 46. Susan Roberson, Emerson in His Sermons (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995), 198. 47. L 1:357, Note 47. 48. L 1:357, Note 47.

PART 3

Emerson’s Mature Phase: Faith Recovered—1832–1882

Lydia Jackson Emerson (1802–1892) and their son Edward Waldo Emerson (1844–1930) Emerson’s second wife. Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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Traditional treatments of this phase of Emerson’s life have portrayed Emerson as having lost his faith, turned away from religion to the natural world, and become an egoist. Those that concede that the metaphysics of his younger years continued into this phase limit this to his divinizing the self, thus ascribing to him the highest form of egoism. Contemporary interpretations of Emerson from the ordinary language school of philosophy have given us an Emerson without metaphysics altogether. I argue in this section for a middle path: by beginning with contemporary ordinary language approaches to religious faith, I make the case that Emerson never lost his faith; his faith matured from propositional faith to faith as an interpretive act of the understanding. Emerson married Kantian constructivist epistemology to Vedantic philosophy in much the same way that contemporary philosophers of religion are doing today. Faith, then, is not assent to truth claims but a way of living: seeing oneself as both transcending each moment of experience (Kant) and being transcended in each moment by the Divine/God/Oversoul in its act of creation (Vedantic philosophy). In doing so, Emerson ventured beyond the limits of Kantian epistemology and has therefore been seen as, at best, misunderstanding Kant and, at worst, being philosophically incoherent. I argue that Emerson’s view is coherent if we understand the role faith played in his epistemology. For Emerson, the person of faith experiences every moment as the creative synthesis of divine and human transcendence. Seeing the faith of Emerson in this way enriches our understanding of the addresses and essays he produced during this period and gives us an insight into important life choices he made in response to the issues of his day.

Chapter 5

Did Emerson Lose His Faith?

Mary Moody Emerson’s answer to this question was an emphatic “Yes!” She had made it clear to Waldo and anyone who would listen that she was disgusted with his “pantheistic leanings” and his distaste for the church. The deteriorating relationship with his Aunt Mary was only one of the stress factors weakening Emerson’s body in the fall of 1832. Two years in the ministry and the catastrophic end of his career had left him in poor health. He was still experiencing bouts of illness when he made the spontaneous decision in December to board a ship for Malta. It is difficult to imagine why someone suffering from chronic nausea would think that a transatlantic trip aboard a freighter would improve their health, but such was the hope he expressed to his brother William just before the ship was to set off: “My malady has proved so obstinate & comes back as often as it goes away, that I am now bent on . . . seeing if I cannot prevent these ruinous relapses by a sea voyage.”1 Emerson’s nine-month European trip did have the salvific effects of improving his health and of broadening his world, but he returned home with much of the provincial attitude he had set off with. After meeting with Wordsworth and Carlyle, he wrote: “My own feeling was that I had met with men of far less power who had yet greater insight into religious truth.”2 He described his meeting with Coleridge as “rather a spectacle than a conversation” and Coleridge himself as too old and preoccupied to carry on a meaningful conversation.3 Perhaps the most important experience of the trip was his visit to the Garden of Plants in Paris. Emerson had always been attracted to the natural surroundings that lay beyond Concord’s limits and made a habit of taking long walks to immerse himself in nature. When these immersion experiences were not enough, he would retreat to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. At the Garden of Plants, he was overwhelmed: “Not a form so grotesque, so savage, nor so beautiful but is an expression of some thing in man the observer. An occult relation between the very scorpions & man. I am moved by strange sympathies. I say continually, ‘I will be a naturalist.’”4 83

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The final revision of Emerson’s first published book would appear in 1836 with the title Nature. Eighteen thirty-three was the pivotal year in the intellectual development that would culminate in that work. In March, while Emerson was still in Europe, Frederic Hedge wrote an article for the Christian Examiner. This article was ostensibly a critique of Coleridge’s literary character, but en route Hedge took a long detour through a detailed description of the philosophy of “Kant and his followers”—Fichte and Schelling.5 This detour was precisely what impacted Emerson when he read the article later that year. Writing to his brother Edward, he described the article as one of the best to have appeared in the Examiner, a “leaping logos,” and referred to Hedge as “an unfolding man,” adding “& he may help me.”6 Hedge awakened the voices in Emerson that had been so important to him the year before: Coleridge and Cousin. As Richardson put it, “If there is a single moment after which American transcendentalism can be said to exist, it is when Emerson read Hedge’s manifesto.”7 Hedge’s clear articulation of Kant’s epistemology and his juxtaposition of Fichte’s, Schelling’s, and Coleridge’s unique deviations from Kant brought post-Kantian idealism alive for Emerson. He had been particularly taken by Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection the year before, but in this article Hedge gave Aids a blistering review, focusing on Coleridge’s misrepresentation of the Bible and Christianity. Now that Emerson had broken with the church, Hedge’s critical remarks did little to diminish the contribution Coleridge made to his thinking. Emerson could use Coleridge’s ideas and leave the language of traditional Christianity behind. Victor Cousin had paved the way to an alternative mode of expressing these ideas by turning East to Vedantic philosophy. Through Cousin Emerson had begun a love affair with the Bhagavad Gita that would last throughout his life. In this definitive year, West and East came together for Emerson. Kantian epistemology described the human experience of understanding; post-Kantian idealism placed that act into the larger metaphysical context. By replacing the conceptual schema of traditional Christianity with Vedantic philosophy, Emerson could account for the deep sense of unity that nature stirred in him: a feeling he described at the Garden of Plants as “an occult relation between the very scorpions & man. I am moved by strange sympathies.” The human act of transcendence in the Kantian sense is itself transcended by the One acting through the individual. Humans participate in the creative process as actors while being acted on; this was a post-Kantian version of Krishna’s message to Arjuna, and it was the essence of the religious faith that Emerson never lost but matured into. Since this emerging sense of living in the presence of the Divine was incompatible with traditional Christian doctrine, the language of Christianity

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was made superfluous. Emerson himself would have agreed that, in the sense in which he and his peers understood it, he had indeed lost the faith. Losing his faith resulted in losing his Aunt Mary as well. While Waldo was in Europe, she wrote to his brother Charles, “It is far sadder than the translation of the soul by death of the body to lose Waldo, as I have lost him. And now that he is far far away I can complain. I do believe he has no fixed faith in a personal God.”8 The relationship between Mary and Waldo cooled considerably. Waldo wrote her at least once from Europe in April, but by July she was complaining to Charles, “Tell Waldo that I did not think he would altogether neglect me.”9 When Waldo became engaged to Lydia Jackson in January of 1835, neglect turned into awkward avoidance as Mary maintained an active and affectionate correspondence with her, but Waldo did not participate. In March of that year, Waldo and Mary had a confrontation that ended in a complete breakdown of their relationship. A year later Mary wrote a conciliatory letter to Waldo in which she did not offer to change her opinions but did express sadness over their quarrel and hope that they might resume a positive relationship. Waldo, however, had outgrown his mentor and her opinions. To make things worse, the trend in Mary’s thinking had been moving in an inverse proportion to Waldo’s; the more Waldo turned away from traditional Christian doctrines, the more Mary turned back toward them; the two would never be close as they once were. As Emerson became clearer about his own mind, he became bolder in publicly expressing it. With the publication of Nature and the formation of the Transcendental Club, Emerson had taken his stand and adopted a support group of like-minded colleagues. He was no longer the insecure Harvard undergrad or even the popular preacher condescending to a Christian audience; he was a confident author and lecturer. His final declaration of independence from traditional Christianity came in the form of an address delivered to the 1838 graduating class at Harvard Divinity School. In it Emerson not only gave voice to his transcendental faith but openly attacked traditional Christianity. Though some of his close friends had traveled the road with him away from the tradition, others of his Unitarian brethren reacted severely. Andrews Norton’s response was the most famous and scathing of the many public criticisms. It came in the form of an address to the “association of the alumni of Cambridge Theological School,” and its title says it all: Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity. The outcry against Emerson among the Christian intellectuals of Boston was so great that he was no longer welcome on the Harvard campus. Emerson had formally severed the ties with the church and was, in its eyes, no longer a man of faith. With few exceptions today’s critics and biographers of Emerson still operate with the same notion of faith as the intellectuals of nineteenth-century New England. Though not invested in defending traditional Christianity, they

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still see Emerson as having betrayed it and left religious faith altogether, or as having substituted it with a transcendental faith that many hold he despaired of in later life. Harold Bloom, for example, sees Emerson as the prophet of American religion. Leaving out Kantian epistemology and Eastern thought altogether, Bloom reads Emerson in terms of Gnosticism and individualism. However, Emerson’s Gnosticism, he argues, is not truly Greek Gnosticism: rather, it was Emerson’s “non-philosophic way of knowing” and the root of Emerson’s effort “to deny that human existence is historical existence.” Bloom sees this independence of the individual from history as the key to Emersonian individualism. Bloom sums it up this way: “Emerson is not a philosopher, nor even a speculator with a philosophic theology. And though he stemmed from the mainstream Protestant tradition in America, Emerson is not a Christian, nor even a non-Christian theist in a philosophic sense.”10 Bloom presents us with a non-philosophical and non-religious Emerson who, precisely through his rejection of these traditions, embodied the quintessential American individualist. Those less prone to emphasize Emerson’s contribution to the notion of American individualism are often no more generous in their assessment of the relevance of Emerson’s religious faith for today. Most agree that Emerson himself began to see his faith as irrelevant. It is generally agreed that Emerson’s transcendental idealism underwent a modification or was abandoned entirely when his and Lydia’s son Waldo died in 1842. Stephen Whicher, for example, argues that Emerson’s early transcendentalism focused on the individual and was based on the notion that God is the soul in man. He thus refers to it as a “radical egoism.” Because Whicher relegates Eastern influence on Emerson to the later period, he can make no sense of Emerson’s concept of the Divine/human relation at this point, referring to it as “a baffling monistic dualism or dualistic monism”11 punctuated with ecstatic moments of mystical reverie. According to Whicher, through tragedy and old age, Emerson’s transcendental idealism morphed from the empowering individualism it had been into an acquiescence to fate: “Emerson moved from a subjective toward an objective idealism.”12 In the former, nature is the creation of man; in the latter the roles are reversed, and humans play their role in a universe governed by transcendental law, or fate. Of this move from power residing in the individual to power residing in the universe, Whicher concludes: “It makes his earlier individualism and self-reliance meaningless.”13 Further, since Whicher sees Emerson’s faith as being expressed in ecstatic moments, he interprets the lack of these in Emerson’s later life as a sign of his diminishing faith. According to Whicher, with fewer ecstatic experiences, Emerson’s transcendentalism could lapse into illusion: knowledge of the unreality of this world without the presence of a greater reality. He thus sees

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Emerson as moving away from “his first radical egoism” to an “emerging humanism.”14 In the end, Whicher concludes that Emerson’s transcendental faith is useless for us today.15 Whicher seems to have appreciated the Kantian influence on Emerson’s thought in the early stage, but because he does not also see the Vedantic influence at this stage, he finds an incoherence in Emerson’s monism and a radical disjunct between his earlier and later thought. Emerson, however, had, at an early stage, learned the Vedantic message of the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu had incarnated as Krishna for the sake of helping Arjuna to understand the Truth, but the Truth was, as Arjuna came to see, that Krishna, Vishnu, and all of the gods of the pantheon were symbols pointing beyond themselves to the One, Nirguna Brahman, Brahman without attributes. The dualism, as humans experience it, is subsumed in monism. Emerson’s faith does not, then, diminish with tragedy and old age but matures from an emphasis on the individual’s role in the cosmic drama to an emphasis on the nature of the cosmic drama itself. The movement is parallel to the unfolding of Krishna’s revelation in the Gita: he begins with helping Arjuna to understand his role as fulfilling his dharma—duty to his station as a warrior—then overwhelms him with the greater cosmic picture in which this is taking place according to the Karma of the universe. Tragedy and old age deepened Emerson’s faith in a way similar to Arjuna’s experience; he was brought face to face with not only the importance of his role but the knowledge that, in spite of its infinite existential significance, his role was a small part in a far greater and more inclusive story. Donald Yannella sees the same movement in Emerson’s thought from divination of the self as God within, to an emphasis on fate and determinism that lay outside the individual, a movement brought on by tragedy and old age. However, Yannella’s analysis lends more weight to Coleridge’s influence on Emerson. He presents Emerson as adopting the distinction between the Understanding and Reason in much the same sense as Coleridge, equating the rational with Understanding and the non-rational with Reason. The latter is the only avenue by which man might transcend the mundane matters of the understanding. This accounts for Emerson’s notion that the true philosopher and the true poet are one: with the poet we are suspended from logic and “soar from the finite to the infinite in the space of a few words.”16 The poet gives voice to transcendentalism which Yannella describes as the “spontaneous, intuitive faculties of man.”17 Yannella makes no mention of either Kantian epistemology or Vedantic thought having an influence on Emerson. Thus, unlike Whicher, he does not describe the early Emerson as seeing nature as the creation of man, or, in Whicher’s language, the “exteriorization of the Self.”18 Instead, Yannella portrays Emerson’s view of nature simply as “organic rather than mechanical.”19

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Yannella’s notion of Emersonian transcendence is thus one-dimensional: humans do not transcend experience in the Kantian sense; rather, transcendence has to do only with the Divine in humans and is experienced as momentary flights from the finite to the infinite. Yannella also departs from Whicher in excluding reference to Vedantic influence, not only in the early stage but in the latter as well. Even in his analysis of poems such as Brahma and Oversoul, Yannella almost painfully avoids the clear influence of Eastern philosophy. Finally, like Whicher, Yannella describes Emerson’s later thought: “After all, the visionary, assertive prophet of self-reliance had recognized in the early period that the incursions of Reason into the individual soul were rare and holy events. As the Antebellum decade unfolded, his description of these moments of individual transcendence and, it seems, his concern with them, became even rarer.”20 Instead of characterizing this fading of Emerson’s transcendental faith as a move from radical egoism to humanism, Yanella describes it along Coleridgean lines: “Spontaneous, intuitive Reason seems to have receded as tough-minded objective analysis—earlier classified as the Understanding—has moved to the fore.”21 I argue that acknowledging the influence of Vedantic thought on Emerson’s early stage makes it clear that Emerson’s transcendentalism was neither one-dimensional nor comprised of momentary ecstatic experiences, nor did it fade with age and experience. For Emerson, the individual is always the object of divine transcendence while being the subject that transcends her/his own experience. By this the self, even the divine self, is always penultimate to the One, the Divine Unity acting through the self. Further, Emerson’s transcendentalism cannot be reduced to “rare and holy events.” Such events may occur, but they are celebratory, not constitutive, of Emerson’s view of living faith. In his presentation of Emerson through his literary works, Joel Porte describes Emerson’s transcendental faith as undergoing a change with age in a way similar to, but different from, Whicher and Yannella. Porte associates the various phases of Emerson’s life with the four seasons. Winter is appropriately chosen for the darker period in which Emerson’s life work of trying to understand nature moved from the early (Cartesian) dualism of World and Will to a later, more holistic view.22 Porte acknowledges the influence of Kant and Coleridge on Emerson’s thought but not of Vedantic philosophy. Like Yannella, even in his analysis of Oversoul, Porte goes out of his way not to refer to Eastern influence but instead describes the work as “difficult and unfortunate” and concludes that its purpose is to point the reader toward “the self-actuating power of the human spirit.”23 In fact, Porte sees the core of Emerson’s thought as “faith in the unlimited power of the individual soul” and the nature of life as the struggle between that soul and the limitations of

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matter.24 Though Porte, like Whicher and Yannella, does not see this “unlimited power of the human soul”25 as grounded in the Vedantic notion of the One, he does recognize that as age took its toll on Emerson, he never gave up the struggle. The limitations of matter would have the final say, but Porte does not leave us with a broken Emerson who betrayed himself. Robert Richardson and Ralph Rusk offer strictly biographical accounts of Emerson’s life which are not guided by a critical analysis of his general intellectual development or of his specific works. As such, they include the early influence of Kantian epistemology and Coleridge, as well as Vedantic thought and the Bhagavad Gita. They incorporate the tragedies and turning points in Emerson’s life into a descriptive narrative, but neither concludes that he deserted his faith. In the aftermath of his Divinity School manifesto, when so many of his contemporaries labeled him an infidel, Richardson remarks of him: “He remained a deeply religious man with a thoroughly spiritual view of human life and the world.”26 Of Emerson’s later years, Rusk notes, even in Emerson’s writings of 1870, Emerson had a “still firm Transcendental faith.”27 An entirely different approach to understanding Emerson’s life and works has emerged from what is broadly called the ordinary language school of philosophy and is championed most notably by Stanley Cavell and Richard Poirier. According to Cavell, language functions as a category of the human understanding much like the twelve categories that Kant had offered in the Critique of Pure Reason, but more so. That is, language provides the “condition of the possibility of there being a world of objects for us.”28 But, unlike a priori categories, language is ordinary, that is, it is “language which contains a culture [and] changes with the changes of that culture.”29 The fundamental category by which we interpret (transcend) reality is not, on this account, a priori but learned in cultural context. It is this fact that language is given to us in our culture that makes it alien to us, and yet, because it is the vehicle by which we meaningfully express ourselves, we are prisoners of it. Cavell has replaced Kant’s “transcendental logic” with Wittgenstein’s notion of “grammar,” and he sees in Emerson an example of this.30 Our struggle with language reflects our freedom in striving to resist it while being fated to it. Cavell argues that it is this struggle that is central to Emerson’s notion of character in works such as Self Reliance and Fate.31 Richard Poirier reframes this struggle of language against itself in terms of Emerson’s notion of genius. The nature of genius is to resist the cultural inheritance to which language belongs and thereby bring about cultural reformation.32 Reading Circles in this way, Poirier argues that the task of the genius is to make himself be comprehended in the Circle, mastering the language which confines him in this Circle, while resisting its limits and moving beyond it.33 Though no mention is made, it is difficult not to hear in this the voice of Thomas Kuhn describing the work of the scientist mastering

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the paradigm, then causing its shift.34 Both agree that mastering the technique of the language in which one is confined is to gain mastery over the form of life in which one finds oneself, and this is requisite for reformation or revolution.35 In Lectures and Conversations, Wittgenstein had applied this to religious language, describing it as a form of life in which words and their grammar have a particular technique; they, as it were, draw pictures whose meaning can be grasped by one who participates in that form of life. A participant sees the world as having an aspect that the non-participant does not see.36 For example, to believe in a Last Judgment is to see one’s life as taking place in the shadow of such an event. The nonbeliever who does not believe in a Last Judgment does not contradict the believer: she simply does not participate in the form of life that makes this and associated images meaningful.37 Emerson may be seen as one who participated in a religious form of life, one which he characterized as the popular faith, but desperately struggled with the constraints of that form, seeking to be comprehended by those in that form but striving in freedom. As Poirier puts it, “How could Emerson himself hope to survive his writing when, as he saw it, language already belongs to a cultural and literary inheritance which genius, by its very nature, wants to resist?”38 To see Emerson in terms of ordinary language philosophy relieves one from the Kantian constrictions of the a priori categories while respecting both the ambiguity of the world as it is in itself and the interpretive, or transcendental, nature of human experience of that world. In so doing, it also answers the objections of empirical skepticism, but, as far as it goes, it leaves metaphysics to the side: if metaphysical language consists of claims that attempt to correspond with the world outside of human interpretive experience, these claims are no more meaningful on Wittgenstein’s account than on Kant’s. By placing epistemology at the center of their analyses of Emerson, both Cavell and Poirier give us an Emerson without metaphysics. In Emerson’s Metaphysics: A Song of Laws and Causes, Joseph Urbas argues that such postmodern interpretations of Emerson are simply not true to him. Not only can one not understand Emerson without metaphysics, but, according to Urbas, metaphysics is primary for Emerson. Urbas builds his case on the role that causation plays throughout Emerson’s work. He argues that central to Emerson’s thought is a “causal monism.” All laws, material and moral, are grounded in this.39 According to Urbas, “Universal causation—‘the like cause’—is what makes the world ‘One’: it is the synthesizing, unifying principle that ties everything together. Emerson is—to use a term he seems to have invented—a causationist, that is, a firm believer in causality as the ‘strict connection between every pulse-beat’—every ‘trifle’—‘and the principle of being.’”40 Through this one also recognizes that Emerson considered the

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world to be ontologically objective. Thus, Urbas concludes, “Emerson is not a Kantian. For him, metaphysics is still the ‘first’ philosophy.”41 I argue for a middle way between Cavell’s and Urbas’s interpretation of Emerson. Put simply, I argue that Emerson was a Kantian and that metaphysics was primary for him. It is in fact because of this that he is so often maligned for holding to a fundamentally incoherent philosophical outlook. NOTES 1. L 359. 2. L 394. 3. CW 5:14. 4. JMN 4:406. 5. “Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character,” Christian Examiner 14, no. 25 (March 1833): 119. On page 127 of the article, Hedge admits, “We have wandered far from our critique.” 6. L 402. 7. Richardson, Mind on Fire, 166. 8. MME-L 330. 9. MME-L 340. 10. Harold Bloom, “Introduction & Chapter 1: Emerson: The American Religion,” in Figures of Capable Imagination (New York: The Seabury Press, 1976), 115. 11. Stephen Whicher, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953), 30–31. 12. Whicher, Freedom, 141. 13. Whicher, Freedom, 124. 14. Whicher, Freedom, 136, 140. 15. Whicher, Freedom, 170–72. 16. Donald Yannella, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), 29. 17. Yannella, Ralph, 19. 18. Whicher, Freedom, 141. 19. Yannella, Ralph, 11–12. 20. Yannella, Ralph, 104. 21. Yannella, Ralph, 122. 22. Joel Porte, Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 226–28. 23. Porte, Representative, 83. 24. Porte, Representative, 82, 295. 25. Porte, Representative, 82. 26. Richardson, Mind on Fire, 291. 27. Rusk, Life, 445. 28. Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (California: Stanford University Press, 2003), 206.

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29. Stanley Cavell, “Must We Mean What We Say?” Inquiry 1, no. 1 (California: University of California at Berkeley, 1958),‌‌‌ 206, http:​ //​‌‌‌ dx​ .doi​ .org​ /10​ .1080​ /00201745808601279. 30. Cavell had argued this with regard to the relationship between Kant and Wittgenstein in “Must We Mean What We Say?,” 197–98, but also applies this specifically to Emerson in Etudes, 70–73. 31. Cavell, Etudes, 70–73. 32. Richard Poirier, “The Question of Genius” in Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985), 168. 33. Poirier, “Genius,” 170–73. 34. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). 35. Thomas Kuhn, The Essential Tension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 235. 36. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: MacMillan, 1968), Section 2, xi. 37. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Letters & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 53–59. 38. Poirier, “Genius,” 168. 39. Joseph Urbas, Emerson’s Metaphysics: A Song of Laws and Causes (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2019), 190. 40. Joseph Urbas, “Bi-Polar Emerson: Nominalist and Realist,” in The Pluralist 8, no. 2 (2013): 85. His quotes of Emerson here are from CW 6:29. 41. Urbas, Emerson’s Metaphysics, 190.

‌‌C hapter 6

Faith as Interpretive Act1

If his critics are correct that, as Lawrence Buell summarizes it, the heart of Emerson’s Transcendentalism is a “Romantic fixation on fragmentary moments of insight”2 and that his attempts to explicate these experiences resulted in a muddled philosophy with which he attempted to supplant his Christian faith, then it is easy to see why Emerson’s transcendental faith would not stand the tests of tragedies and the challenges of old age. I argue to the contrary that by focusing on the issue of the philosophical coherence of Emerson’s Transcendentalism, we gain a deeper understanding of his Transcendentalism as a way of living faith. I have, so far, shown that the seeds for this faith were planted early in his life as he encountered Vedantic Hinduism and Kantian philosophy. As those seeds grew, Emerson found helpful expressions of Vedantic thought in Neo-Platonism and Kantian thought in the works of Samuel Coleridge. The Transcendentalism that resulted would be better described as a spiritual centeredness than a series of ecstatic experiences. This spiritual centeredness can be analyzed in philosophical terms and be defended as a coherent view of religious faith. Seen in this way, Transcendental Idealism was Emerson’s way of articulating his experience of living his faith: a religious faith that did not diminish but matured in his later years. The problem of epistemological coherence, put simply, is this: as David Van Leer has demonstrated, Emerson’s epistemology is fundamentally Kantian in the sense that humans are seen as active creators of their own phenomenal experience,3 but, for Emerson, this takes place within the parenthesis, so to speak, of his Vedantic metaphysic wherein the One—Oversoul, God—is creating that human phenomenal experience through the human transcendental act. There seems to be a basic incoherence in this when one asks about the epistemic status of this metaphysical claim which stands apparently outside of the parenthesis; for Kant, such claims must be meaningless. Critics of Emerson conclude that he did not understand Kant’s philosophy or Vedantic teaching and that he lacked systematic rigor. 93

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Following Cavell’s reading of Emerson along the lines of Wittgenstein’s ordinary language philosophy takes us toward a more charitable solution to this problem. I argue that this problem can be fully resolved if we understand religious faith as itself an interpretive process. This view of faith as a dynamic activity in everyday experience has been developed in the last century among philosophers of religion working within Wittgenstein’s ordinary language school of philosophy. I will further show that this phenomenological account of religious experience is consistent with, though not consciously articulated in, Emerson’s overall thought and that, conversely, Emerson’s example enriches this view of faith. THE PROBLEM The dramatic shift in Emerson’s earliest work, Nature, from realism in the first five chapters to idealism in the last three was at once his rejection of the purely empirical philosophy that had led to skepticism and an announcement of his allegiance with transcendental idealism. As Van Leer shows, of the various versions of philosophical idealism, Emerson gives his allegiance most consistently to Kant’s.4 Though this allegiance is foundational to all of Emerson’s thought, his description of his commitment to it is presented almost flippantly: “Whether nature enjoy a substantial existence without, or is only in the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful and venerable to me. Be it what it may, it is ideal to me, so long as I cannot try the accuracy of my senses.”5 However, it is clear that the ontological objectivity of nature is very important to Emerson, just as it was for Kant. Where Berkeley removed that ontological objectivity to ideality, and Kant was content to leave nature-in-itself as an unknowable but necessary other,6 Emerson stressed the intimacy of human experience with nature. For him, nature is not pure idea or unknowable. Nature is as we experience it, but it is as it is because we experience it. For Emerson, human experience of nature is transcendental in the Kantian sense but at the same time transcended in a theological, or Vedantic, sense: “The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious. But it differs from the body in one important respect. It is not, like that, now subjected to the human will. Its serene order is inviolable by us. It is, therefore, to us, the present expositor of the divine mind.”7 Throughout his works Emerson uses God, Supreme Being, Oversoul, Brahman, and so on to designate a divine reality whose logical nature provides the law-like structure of the human intellect as the vehicle through which nature is presented through us and to us. In describing the Vedantic view of the One/Brahman, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan puts it this way:



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The highest representation of absolute being through logical categories is Iśvara, the creator and governor of the universe: Brahma, cast through the molds of logic, is Iśvara or saguna Brahma (Brahma with qualities), determinate Brahman. Brahman, as the absolute nirguna Brahman (qualityless Brahman), is the basis of the phenominal world, presided over by Iśvara. In this empirical universe, we have God (Iśvara), selves, and the world. The individual self is the agent of activity. It is the universal Self or Atman limited or individuated by the object.8

Emerson expressed the same view: “Being does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us.”9 “The world is nothing; the man is all, in yourself is the law of nature . . . in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason.”10 This determinism provides the basis for the laws of nature as well as the laws of morality and thus lies at the root of Emerson’s familiar themes of compensation and fate, as well as his attraction to the Vedantic notion of cosmic law.11 Here Emerson has clearly taken leave of Kant. Kant rejected any claim to knowing anything beyond the a priori conditions of human experience as they are applied to the intuitions of the senses. According to Kant, the world-in-itself is a necessary condition of experience, but knowledge begins only when sensible intuitions from interaction with that world have been transcended by the categories of the understanding; attempting to make a claim outside of this process is futile.12 Further, Kant explicitly rejects metaphysical claims that attempt to get behind or beyond experience to offer knowledge about universal truths, causation, a divine being, etc. Such claims, according to Kant, are logical extensions of reason to ideas which fulfill deficiencies in reason itself, but as ideas they tell us nothing of the world-in-itself.13 Thomas Krusche describes Emerson’s modification of Kant’s epistemology as a mythical dualism based on a distinction between the small ego of everyday linear time and the eternal moment—a distinction that, he rightly points out, Kant would have found appalling.14 The inconsistency lies here: can one take only part of what Kant bequeathed to us about human knowledge, the part which conveniently answers the claims of empirical skepticism which both Kant and Emerson were anxious to refute, and yet reject the limitations on human knowledge that Kant’s system entails? Emerson takes this one step further by arguing that God uses human experience of nature to point humans back to himself: “The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It is the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it.”15 Emerson seems to offer a natural theology that is insulated from empirical skepticism by Kantian epistemology.

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A SOLUTION Some philosophers of religion in the past century have derived from Wittgenstein’s ordinary language philosophy a view of religious faith that, I propose, would solve the tension between Emerson’s Kantian epistemology and his metaphysical claims. I take John Hick to be the most original of this school and turn to him for re-reading Emerson. Borrowing from Kant, Hick argues that the world-in-itself is ambiguous in terms of meaningfulness to humans, and therefore all experience is interpreted experience.16 Borrowing from Wittgenstein, he describes this interpretive process in terms of language and one’s participation in a form of life.17 Hick’s unique contributions begin with his claim that the human interpretive act of meaning-creation takes place on three levels of what he calls cognitive freedom.18 The first of these, the physical level, is the level at which we have the least amount of cognitive freedom. On this level Hick argues that the world-in-itself, though ambiguous, forces itself upon us so that it cannot be interpreted in just any way. Whatever the world-in-itself is, it cannot be interpreted by humans as a place where people can fly by flapping their arms, human bodies can walk through solid walls, and so on. Such interpretations will simply fail to provide coherent meaning to human experience of the world. On the second level of the interpretive process, humans experience more cognitive freedom. This is the level at which we experience the world as having ethical and aesthetic value. The vast diversity of cultural norms of behavior throughout history and across continents provides ample empirical evidence that humans have and do interpret their social experience of the world differently. Unlike the physical level of interpretation, the world-in-itself does not force itself upon us nearly so quickly on this level of value interpretation. It is on the third level, that of interpreting the world as having religious significance, that humans have the greatest cognitive freedom. Hick argues that the various religious traditions of the world are examples of language and symbol systems by which humans have experienced the world as having a transcendent dimension.19 The three levels of interpretation interpenetrate one another, and with greater cognitive freedom on the ethical and religious levels comes a greater diversity of interpretations and the increased likelihood that one will simply not interpret one’s world as having this type of significance at all. Though it may be difficult to imagine a true nihilist functioning in society, it is conceivable that one might have a rather minimal view of ethics and values. In the case of religion, it is not unusual for someone to simply not experience the world as having this sort of significance. Faith, on the other hand, is the interpretive act of experiencing the world as having a transcendent dimension.20



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By way of illustration, one may imagine a scene from daily life: driving down a road in a car and seeing a car ahead, broken down in the same lane. According to Hick, your response will entail interpretive assessments on three levels. On the physical level, you will avoid hitting the car by stopping or changing lanes. On this level you have little freedom of interpretation; if you continue forward, you will crash. As you avoid hitting the car, you may also experience this event as having a moral component and therefore calculate the options by which you might help the person in the car. On this level there is much more freedom of interpretation: you may not see it as requiring any act on your part at all, or you may choose from a range of actions you could take to provide assistance. If you are a person of faith, you will see this event, and your response to it, as taking place within the larger context of the presence of someone or something that is metaphysically transcendent. If you stop to help the person in the car, your act, then, is not only a fulfillment of your moral obligation but also an expression of the compassion of the Buddha flowing through you, the love of God as expressed in the Bible, or the oneness of all Being, or perhaps you would express this in the language of another tradition. Since interpreting this event as having religious significance occurs on the level of our greatest cognitive freedom, you are free to see no such significance at all. The person of faith experiences every moment of life through all three levels of interpretation. The various religious traditions have emerged as human expressions of this experience and provide narratives by which one may choose to live and find meaning. Interesting also is that in illustrating this view of faith, Hick and other postmodern philosophers of religion have, like Emerson, found Vedantic Hinduism to be the clearest expression of this view. In speaking of God-in-itself versus God-as-experienced, that is, what Emerson saw as Oversoul in relation to Self, Hick puts it this way: “Perhaps its most explicit form is the Hindu distinction between nirguna Brahman, Brahman without attributes, beyond the scope of human language; and saguna Brahman, Brahman with attributes, known within human experience.”21 In any faith tradition, the person of faith may experience moments of heightened awareness of their relation to the Divine, but such ecstatic experiences do not constitute or define the person’s faith any more than a fourth of July celebration constitutes American independence. On the contrary, this is a living faith in which each moment of life is experienced as being in the presence of and participating in the creative act of the Divine. Read in this light, Emerson’s metaphysical claim that the Oversoul presents nature to us through our transcendental experience is a picture presented to us within a form of life in which Emerson participates and invites us to join. Denying the validity of these claims is simply to refuse the offer of participation; to accept the invitation is to live in faith. Where different religious

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traditions employ different vocabularies to express it, Emerson’s faith was his experiencing the world as transcended by the Oversoul through the human mind’s transcendental activity. CONCLUSION It is interesting that for all of the themes Emerson covered in his essays, addresses, and poems, he commits little to the topic of faith. Indeed, only one work bears the name, and that is a twelve-line Persian poem in translation submitted for an anti-slavery gift book sold at a fair.22 Where he does speak of faith, he refers to it primarily as propositional, as when at that pivotal point in Nature, chapter six, he contrasts the “popular faith” with the superiority of “the ideal view.”23 Because Emerson saw faith as referring to religious propositions, there is little wonder that he spoke so little of it; this faith entailed the doctrinal content of the dead Christianity that he rejected, most famously in the Divinity School Address but also throughout his work: “But men are better than this theology. Their daily life gives it the lie.”24 On the other hand, Emerson hints at times about what faith might refer to when one has gone beyond the “popular faith” and celebrates her/his participation in creation. For example, in The Conduct of Life, after spending several chapters extoling the cosmic law of the world, which includes the moral sentiment of man, he concludes: “And, so I look on those sentiments which make the glory of the human being, love, humility, faith, as being also the Divinity in the atoms, and, that, as soon as the man is right, assurances and previsions emanate from the interior of his body and his mind; as when flowers reach their ripeness, incense exhales from them, and, as a beautiful atmosphere is generated from the planet by the averaged emanations from all its rocks and soils.”25 So also in Oversoul he speaks of the man who has “found his home in God,” the “infallible index” of which is the “tone of his character.” This tone is struck when one has “found his centre, [and] the Deity will shine through him.”26 Coleridge sounded much the same when he spoke of faith “not derived from, but itself the ground and source of, experience.”27 Emerson does not explain this faith but speaks often of what it is not. Allowing the Deity to shine through involves a displacement of the ego; explaining faith would be to exercise the ego in containing faith and therefore would always be wanting.28 Perhaps this is why Emerson did not attempt to explain faith as it is practiced in the ideal view. Hick also speaks of faith as moving past ego: “In ‘finding God,’ the worshipper abdicates from the central position in his world, recognizing that this is God’s rightful place.”29 Faith, viewed this way, is a way of living life.



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I am not anachronistically suggesting that Emerson had Hick’s view of religious faith, any more than Cavell would argue that Emerson intentionally set out to articulate Wittgenstein’s view of the role of language in perception. I am suggesting that, just as an ordinary language analysis helps to elucidate Emerson’s themes, so a view of religious faith derived from that same approach helps to resolve this puzzle about the epistemic status of his Vedantic, metaphysical claims. On this account to see one’s interpretive act of experiencing the world, as itself, participation in a transcendent creative act is what religious faith is. Conversely, I would suggest that the rich prose of Emerson’s work elevates the often abstruse and barren language of analytic philosophical analysis of human religious experience to a more existentially satisfying level. In “The soul gives itself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks through it. Then it is glad, young, and nimble. It is not wise, but it sees through all things. It is not called religious, but it is innocent. . . . Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, the universal mind,”30 we recognize more than an epistemic exercise: we feel the human spirit experiencing itself as participating in something greater than itself. Far from being either incoherent or of no use today, Emerson’s transcendental life of faith was one hundred years ahead of its time. NOTES 1. Parts of this chapter have been reproduced with permission from my article, “The Coherence of Emerson’s Epistemology,” in The Southwest Philosophy Review, 35,1 (January 2019.), 199–205. 2. Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 107–14. 3. David Van Leer, Emerson’s Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 4. Van Leer, Emerson’s Epistemology, 26–36. 5. CW 1:29. 6. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic (New York: Liberal Arts, Press, 1950), 36. 7. CW 1:38–39. 8. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles A. Moore, eds., A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957), 507. 9. CW 1:38. 10. CW 1:69. 11. CW 6:117–18. 12. Kant, Prolegomena, 45. 13. Kant, Prolegomena, 80.

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14. Thomas Krusche, R.W. Emersons Naturauffassung und ihre philosophischen Ursprünge: eine Interpretation des Emersonschen Denkens aus dem Blickwinkel des deutschen Idealismus (Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1987), 127. 15. CW 1:37. 16. John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 134–42. 17. Hick, An Interpretation, 294–95. 18. Hick, An Interpretation, 140–58. 19. Hick, An Interpretation, 240. 20. Hick, An Interpretation, 158–62. 21. John Hick, God Has Many Names (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1982), 91. 22. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Faith,” in The Liberty Bell 11 (Boston: Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Bazaar, 1850): 79–80. 23. CW 1:36. 24. CW 2:56. 25. CW 6:123. 26. CW 2:169–70. 27. Cameron, The Essayist, 1:142. 28. CW 2:159–60. 29. John Hick, Faith and Knowledge (Great Britain: Fontana Books, 1988), 134. 30. CW 2:174–75.

Chapter 7

Seeing Emerson’s Faith in His Works Nature and Early Addresses

Emerson’s most creative period was between his return from Europe in 1833 and the death of his son in 1842. This was a time of reinventing himself both socially and intellectually. Until this time Emerson’s social identity and intellectual life had been defined by his relationship to the church and traditional Christianity. Though he had left church ministry, his love/hate relationship with it haunted him through 1838 until which time he had been offering his services for pulpit supply in local churches when needed. He resolved the vocational issue by joining the lecture circuit, trading the pulpit for a podium and the church for the lyceum. His decision to commit himself to writing and speaking was enabled by the money he received from the settlement of his first wife’s, Ellen’s, estate. Porte makes the insightful, if cynical, remark that Emerson’s idealism was thus made possible by materialism!1 Be that as it may, financial stability freed Emerson to risk a career move that came with no guarantees of a dependable income. In addition to the new sense of calling and the financial stability, Emerson also found support in his social life through a network of like-minded intellectuals in and around Boston. The group first came together at Henry Hedge’s invitation in September of 1836. Though Emerson referred to the group as “Hedge’s Club,” it soon became known as the Transcendental Club. Not only was the Club a source of intellectual stimulation for its members, but it also provided a platform for inviting others to join in the conversations. In 1840 the Club founded the Dial newspaper in order to provide a more expansive stage for discussion of their views. Another important factor in Emerson’s social reinvention of himself during this time was his marriage to Lydia Jackson in September of 1835. Comparing his relationship with Lydia to that which he shared with his first 101

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wife, Ellen Tucker, provides an important insight into Emerson’s character at this stage of his life. Emerson’s love for Ellen was youthful and passionate. He filled pages with poems expressing his feelings for her and spoke of her with family and friends as though she were a goddess. In the case of Lydia, nothing appears in his Journals until September 14, 1835, when he wrote: “14 September 1835. I was married to Lydia Jackson.”2 After that entry there is no mention of her for some time, and the first endearing comment regarding her does not appear until March of 1837. It does not follow, however, that he did not have a deep love for her. Emerson had matured through his leaving the church, distancing himself from his Aunt Mary, and settling into Boston society. With Lydia he would begin a family and take on the responsibilities of participating in local institutions and political causes. The love they shared was a mature love. He referred to her as his Asia, a symbol of the appealing depth and mystery that the East held for him. Emerson’s faith also matured during these years, from the excitement of theological battles over doctrines within the closed arena of traditional Christianity, to a living faith by which he experienced the divine in each moment. Emerson and Lydia began a family in 1837 with the birth of their first child, Waldo. Sadly, Waldo would live only five years before scarlatina took him. This tragedy marked the end of Emerson’s most innovative and provocative years; after this he became more reflective, devoting himself to writing essays which allowed him space to develop his thoughts more fully. As his social life was taking on a new form, Emerson found himself free from the expectations of church parishioners and from Christian theology in general. Just before he left the church ministry and traveled to Europe, the Bhagavad Gita with its Vedantic monism and idealism, along with Coleridge’s use, or misuse, of Kant’s epistemology, had been a great inspiration to him. These converged in Europe with his visit to the Garden of Plants where he had a life-changing experience of unity with nature. Upon his arrival home, he was confronted with Hedge’s article on Coleridge which reignited his passion and cemented his new concept of a transcendental and living faith. NATURE The most significant products of this prophetic period in Emerson’s life were his book, Nature, published in September of 1836, and two addresses: one to the Phi Beta Kappa club at Harvard in August of 1837 and the other to the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School in July of 1838. At only ninety-five pages in length, Nature stands as the most famous and quintessential statement of Emerson’s Transcendental Idealism. Emerson was so proud of the book that he bankrolled the publication of the first

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five hundred copies himself and sent copies to forty friends and associates. The finished product was the result of four years of intellectual fermentation. The drafts of various sections of the work can be seen, and have been cataloged, through his Journals, letters, and lectures.3 The original title of the work was Nature and Spirit, and it appears that Emerson continued to consider this to have been the more descriptive of his project. In the “Introduction” he set forth the outline of the book with the comment, “Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul.”4 In a letter to his brother William one month after the book was published, Emerson still referred to the book as “Nature & Spirit.”5 Most interpreters of Nature agree that Emerson’s aim in the text was to demonstrate the unity of the two; many conclude that he failed to do so. Barbara Packer suggests that in fact, this dualism is the key to the message of Nature. On her analysis Nature was Emerson’s attempt at a theory of nature that would explain all phenomena in terms of matter (objective) and spirit (subjective), leading her to conclude that Emerson’s choice to leave out the dualism of the first title was based on his concern that the chapters on Spirit were subversive of the dualism itself.6 Packer then argues that Emerson saw the unity of nature and spirit only in apocalyptic moments. This leaves her with the question, is it possible for man to overcome the alterations between visionary moments and everyday perception?7 I agree with Packer that the last three chapters on Spirit subvert the dualism of the first five chapters, but I argue that this is precisely because the apex of Emerson’s progressive argument throughout the text is the supplanting of the dualism of popular philosophy and Christianity with the monism expressed in Vedantic/Neo-Platonic philosophy and prefigured in Xenophanes’s notion of en kai pan—all-in-each. Emerson’s journal entries during the time of his writing Nature reveal a preoccupation with Xenophanes’s idea. One such entry occurred in the month he was finishing the last draft of Nature: “To that one thing which a man has in his head all nature seems an illustration[,] all men martyrs. En kai pan[.]”8 It is essential to Emerson’s project in Nature to set forth the “popular view” in terms of its nature/spirit dualism in order to contrast it with the “ideal view” which denies this dualism. The result is reflective of Emerson’s own spiritual journey, moving beyond what he came to see as the limitations of the Christian notion of a personal God to whom the individual and nature are related, to a Vedantic/Neo-Platonic monism in which distinctions are overcome and the life of faith becomes the everyday perception of one’s participation in the creative activity of God/the Universal Soul. Bringing the individual to this revelation is nature’s highest and last purpose; thus, Nature is the appropriate title for the work.

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The organization of the text thus begins with the dualism of the original title. The first five chapters describe nature’s utility to humans; chapters 6 through 8 turn to idealism and spirit. Since the first chapters emphasized the inter-relationship of humans and nature and spoke of God in language that was tolerable to liberal Christians, they were met with approval by more of Emerson’s contemporaries; many of these same contemporaries were, however, confused and/or appalled by the idealism of the latter chapters. For example, Samuel Osgood, writing for The Washington Messenger, praised the first five chapters of Nature, then commented, “Coming to the chapter on Idealism, many will be tempted to shut the book in disgust, and lament, that so sensible a man as the writer has before shewn himself to be, should shew such folly.”9 In a review that appeared in the Christian Examiner in the same month as Osgood’s review, Francis Bowen described the work as a self-contradiction. According to Bowen, Emerson’s idealism in the last chapters not only undermined the value he had shown for nature in the first chapters but was itself unintelligible: “On the subject of ‘Spirit’ and ‘Prospects,’ with which the work concludes, we prefer not to attempt giving an account, until we can understand the meaning.”10 In the first chapter of Nature, Emerson foreshadows the trajectory of the work. He describes the unique sense of transcendence which one experiences when alone in, and authentically open to, nature. “In the woods, we return to reason and faith . . . — all mean egotism vanishes . . . the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”11 In the next chapters, Emerson moves the reader through a progression of levels on which nature serves humans, from the mundane to the highest experience of spiritual awareness. At this level one sees what has been there all along: that which had so deeply moved Emerson at the Garden of Plants in France, that nature and spirit are one. The sequence of levels begins in chapter 2, “Commodity,” with the most commonplace sense in which nature serves humanity: by providing an environment suited to his subsistence. This provision is, however, guided by a purpose: humans are to play their part in furthering the physical world through creativity and work. Nature, even at this level, is not an inert object to be used by humans; it is indued with purposefulness. Chapter 3 on “Beauty” mirrors the progression of the larger outline, moving from the delight one finds in “the simple perception of natural forms”; to the beauty of nature as it is seen in the virtues, described as the expression of nature’s beauty in concert with human will; and finally, to the highest beauty which nature supplies to humans: “the absolute order of things as they stand in the mind of God.”12 Even as Emerson concludes the chapter with these rapturous words, he promises that “beauty in nature is not yet the highest expression of the final cause in nature.”

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In the next chapter, Emerson fixes upon Language as the product of nature that links humans to the divine. On the most basic level, language is derived from material existence. Emerson refers to pictographic stages of language development to support the notion that moving from words as pictures to words as signs was a move from sensible to spiritual nature, that is, to see natural facts as symbols of spiritual facts. “Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.”13 Emerson uses “spiritual fact” and “state of mind” interchangeably here because he sees the latter as a state of the soul and therefore spiritual. Language is where nature and spirit, in this sense, come together. In this meeting Emerson claims: “Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life. . . . This universal soul he calls Reason: it is not mine or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its property and men.”14 This metaphysical sense of Reason as “behind and beyond the individual” is seen, by Emerson, as being related to the individual intellect and to nature. In its relation to the former, we call it Reason: in its relation to the latter, we call it Spirit. Because both the individual intellect and the natural world are products of Reason (in its metaphysical sense) and ultimately united in it, “appearances in nature” correspond to “states of mind.” Of this Emerson adds: “This relation between mind and matter is not fancied by some poet, but stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known by all men.”15 The highest level at which this correspondence is seen is in the correlation of moral with physical laws, a correlation that Emerson had been taken with since his earliest encounters with the writings of de Stael’s Germany as an undergrad at Harvard. In a near quote from that work, he writes here, “The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter face to face in a glass. The visible world and the relation of its parts is the dial plate of the invisible. The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics.”16 In the last chapter in this section on the utility of nature for humans, Emerson emphasizes the use of nature for Discipline of the intellect. Having introduced the nature of Reason in the last chapter, he now speaks of the Understanding as the empirical operation of the mind within the natural world itself. From this, nature teaches us the limitedness of our knowledge of it, the power of human Will and Reason over it, and, ultimately, the unity of all: “So intimate is this Unity, that, it is easily seen, it lies under the undermost garment of nature, and betrays its source in Universal Spirit.”17 The progression of the first five chapters has now led the reader to the unity of Nature and Spirit. Emerson has argued that the uses of nature for humans reach their culmination in this recognition. In the last three chapters, he clarifies what he means by Reason in its metaphysical sense, Reason as human intellect, and the relationship of these to the natural world that humans

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explore with their Understanding. These chapters once again form a progression, each building upon the former. Chapter 6, “Idealism,” begins with a bald statement of the question to which the earlier chapters have brought the reader: “whether nature outwardly exists”; that is, does the relationship between Reason and human intellect consist in the idea “that God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent sensations, which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade”?18 Emerson then argues that our sense experience is impotent in confirming or denying the idealist claim and that our belief that nature does exist outside of our sensible experience is based only in the habits of culture. He then develops an argument for the superiority of the “ideal theory.” The argument takes the now familiar form of progression from the lower, common view held by the sensual man; to the higher, more insightful view expressed by the poet/philosopher; to the highest view: that of the ideal theory. The common view, maintained by the sensual man, sees nature as an object external to himself. The poet, on the other hand, subsumes nature to himself. “The one esteems nature as rooted and fast; the other as fluid and impresses his being thereon . . . he invests dusts and stones with humanity, and makes them the words of the Reason.”19 By use of imagination, the poet raises Reason above nature for the purpose of beauty. The philosopher employs the same method but sees her task as the pursuit of truth. Thus, “the true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.”20 The development of poetic and philosophical thought has led “invariably [to] a doubt of the existence of matter” which points toward religion and ethics wherein the highest level of insight could be expressed. But, alas, the popular version of both has failed to do so. Instead of elucidating and celebrating the unity of nature and spirit in God/the Universal Soul, they have fallen victim to dualism and “put nature under foot,” denigrating the temporal and opposing it to the eternal. Emerson concludes with the superiority of the ideal theory and does so in language that suggests the imagery of the Bhagavad Gita: “Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.”21 In chapter 7, “Spirit,” Emerson spells out his view of the relationship between Spirit/Reason, human intellect, and nature. His explanation is both Neo-Platonic/Vedantic and post-Kantian. He begins with the unity of all in Spirit: “the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and by which they are.” He continues with the Vedantic notion of creation

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within unity, that is, of a dualism subsumed within a monism—the message of Krishna to Arjuna. In Emerson’s words, then, “spirit creates; [that] behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; one and not compound, it does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves.” Finally, Emerson describes our participation in this creativity of spirit in the language of post-Kantian idealism: “Therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us.” The human intellect is thus the conduit of the creative act of the Spirit in bringing about nature. Nature for its part is the phenomenon approachable by the understanding but constructed by the ideas of the human intellect. God/the Universal Spirit is, at the same time, the transcendent source and the unity of creation. The eighth and last chapter of the book features a poetic expression and summary of the conclusions arrived at in the two previous chapters. Again, the structure of the chapter is progressive, from the experience of the sensual person who experiences the world through the understanding, to the poet/ philosopher who sees beyond the surface, to the person of wisdom and spirit. Of the first, Emerson remarks that he is “a god in ruins . . . [he] applies to nature but half his force. He works on the world with his understanding alone.”22 The plight of the sensual man, Emerson claims, can be solved only by a “redemption of the soul,” but until then his apprehension of nature is flawed; because understanding and reason are disunited in the person, the unity of nature cannot be appreciated. The poet sees that “Nature is not fixed but fluid. . . . The immobility or bruteness of nature, is the absence of spirit; to pure spirit it is fluid, it is volatile, it is obedient.”23 Thus the poet goes beyond the sensual experience of nature in seeing the unity of human spirit in and with nature. It was post-Kantians that gave particularly insightful poetic expression to this relation. In a Journal note written just after the publication of Nature, Emerson referred to Kant and those after him, including Schiller, Fichte, and their poets, remarking, “Above all Goethe. He is the high priest of the age. He is the truest of all writers.”24 However, for Emerson, this unity of human spirit and nature must be grounded in the source of both: God / the Universal Soul. Here, Emerson arrives at the highest use of nature for humans: it is the occasion of living faith. Emerson cites several historical examples of miracles, healings, and prophetic insights and concludes: “These are examples of Reason’s momentary grasp of the scepter; the exertions of a power which exists not in time or space, but in an instantaneous in-streaming causing power.”25 Reason is used here in its metaphysical sense as the source of unity of human intellect and nature, but these fleeting glimpses do not constitute living faith. Emerson continues: “But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal relations, and see it in the light of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest

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affections, then will God go forth anew into creation. It will not need, when the mind is prepared for study, to search for objects. The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”26 The “faithful thinker” represents Emerson’s mature notion of living faith, that is, experiencing each moment as creator and conduit of creation. THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR ADDRESS In the year following the publication of Nature, Emerson had received nearly twelve thousand dollars in stocks from the settlement of Ellen’s estate. The sizable sum financed his new career as an independent lecturer and emboldened him as an independent thinker. With the windfall, however, came the responsibilities of managing money. To make matters worse, this year saw a short-term financial crisis that affected both the United States and Europe. This directly affected Emerson’s stocks, and most of his letters during this time were filled with the details of paying off old loans and making new investments. On the other hand, meetings of the Transcendental Club were well underway, and Emerson launched into the lecture circuit. He continued to keep a journal, and since his journals of this time make little reference to the mundane activities of financial affairs, they were likely as much an escape as a depository of resources for future lectures. In June of 1837, Emerson was invited to bring the annual address to the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa society, to take place on August 31. The topic was to be the American Scholar. By the time of his preparation for the address, a reoccurring theme in his Journals continued to be his infatuation with Xenophanes’s notion of en kai pan—all in each. As early as October of 1836, he was expanding this notion to all in man. “The All is in Man. . . . That is, as there is no screen or ceiling between our heads & the infinity of space/heavens, so there is no bar or wall in the Soul where man the effect ceases & God the cause begins.”27 This shift in emphasis from all in each to all in man will underlie Emerson’s application of the Vedantic/Neo-Platonic monism spelled out in Nature to the new project of writing the American Scholar Address. In Nature Emerson had used Reason in the metaphysical sense as a name for both God/the Universal Soul and for “reason” as human intellect; the former makes possible the human participation in the ongoing divine act of creation through the latter. In the American Scholar Address, he uses Man in a similar fashion; Man Thinking is the name given for the metaphysical notion of All in Man, but “man thinking” also describes the role of the scholar. In Nature the emphasis was on the human participation in divine creativity; in this context the same Vedantic/Neo-Platonic metaphysical monism is assumed, but the image has changed from Man as Creator to Man as Scholar. Reason is also

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used, again, in its metaphysical sense of the Universal Soul but is now incarnated as Universal Man/Man Thinking: the origin and source of the unity of all knowledge. The American Scholar Address has a similar structure to Nature: instead of the uses of nature being described in a progression from the mundane to the spiritual, Emerson focuses on the mundane versus the spiritual uses that can be made of three influences upon the scholar: nature, the past known through books, and action. Regarding the influence of nature on the scholar, Emerson begins with nature as studied and classified by the scholars of each scientific discipline. In this study the scholar in the field is made acutely aware of the order in nature. Emerson describes this level of insight in Kantian terms: “But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary motion.”28 At this point, however, the scholar has not yet moved beyond the mundane use of nature; he is only a “school-boy under the bending dome of day.” The move to the highest use of nature is accomplished when the scholar recognizes the unity of nature and intellect in “the soul of his soul.” This recognition is not a principle or a dogma but the dynamic activity of experiencing nature while participating in its creation, experiencing nature as transcended by soul through the laws of the mind. Emerson articulates this dynamic more clearly when he considers the influence that the past, as conveyed through books, has on the scholar. In essence, Emerson argues in this section that books are to spirit what nature is to spirit; one can experience either as lifeless. In the case of books, he warns: “The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book . . . Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking. . . . Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm.”29 Books, like nature, attest to the spirit that inspired them, but they are not that spirit. To discover that spirit requires recognition of the unity of truth in which they participate. As with the misuse of nature, the curative is to approach books with an active soul. As nature leads us to see the transcending creativity of the human reason, and thereby points to the ultimate unity of creation in the God/the Universal Soul, books contain Truth inasmuch as the reader recognizes the unity of their message with the unity of truth in the Universal Soul. The active soul is thus one who participates in Man Thinking. As Emerson had argued in Nature, that nature is not built up atom by atom, but put for/through us by God/the Universal Soul, so here with Truth; it is not built up in history or in books proposition by proposition but is encountered

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when the active soul conjoins with a truth found in the book and thus is one with Man Thinking. In order for this unity to take place, it is important that neither the book itself nor its author gets in the way; it is the truth contained in the book that matters, not the container. By this Emerson reveals, or justifies, the grounds for his own aversion to philosophical systems and his syncretistic method of reading. He concludes: “The discerning will read in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part—only the authentic utterances of the oracle—all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato’s and Shakespeare’s.”30 Emerson concludes the address with the influence that the scholar’s own activity in the affairs of everyday life has upon him: “Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth.”31 The scholar must be a person of action because this is where life is lived; in this the individual becomes part of the ebb and flow of nature and history. This aspect of human experience corresponds with matter in the spirit/matter dualism of Nature, with Understanding in the Reason/Understanding dualism of Coleridge, and with dharma in the Vedantic Karma/dharma dualism of the Bhagavad Gita. But, in Emerson’s view, as with Vedantic thought, the dualism is always resolved in monism. He arrives at this resolution through a consideration of the virtues of the scholar. He quickly summarizes: “In self-trust, all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the scholar be—free and brave.”32 This declaration is often taken to be the essence of Emerson’s thought as well as his most important contribution to American identity. I argue that to take Emerson in this way is like arguing that the whole point of the Bhagavad Gita is to teach that warriors should be good warriors. As true as that claim is on one level, it misses the whole point of the story. Arjuna should fulfill his duty as a warrior because it is his dharma, but this is true only because his activity is viewed from the perspective of this world which is the product of the illusion of distinctions. The point of the story is that this world which Emerson denotes as matter/understanding has reality, meaning, and value only because it is grounded in God/the Universal Soul, or, in this case, Man Thinking. The highest virtue that the scholar can achieve with regard to the mundane world is self-trust because, in this penultimate quest, the scholar takes her/his place in the transcendental activity of God/the Universal Soul/Man Thinking. Thus, Emerson ends the argument of his address: “It is one light that beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul that animates all men.”33

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THE DIVINITY SCHOOL ADDRESS On Sunday morning, March 18, 1838, Emerson was reflecting on the sermon he had just heard preached and on the preacher who had delivered it: “If he had ever lived & acted we were none the wiser or chagrined. If he had ever lived & acted we were none the wiser for it.”34 He then considered the possibility of one day writing a piece directed to the American clergy describing the “ugliness & unprofitableness of theology & churches at this day.”35 On Wednesday of the same week, he received an invitation on behalf of the students of the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School to bring the commencement address. Within a week Emerson accepted the invitation in writing, though it must have been with great reservations. Soon after his acceptance letter was received, some of the divinity school students asked him to come and speak to them on the topic of theism. Even for this informal setting, Emerson was conflicted, noting in his journal that he agreed to the opportunity with a heavy heart because he knew that his views, when first heard, often offended or shocked his listeners. His apprehension was greater yet in proportion to the significance of the Divinity School Address itself. Afterward he would confide to both Elizabeth Peabody and Henry Ware that he had feared the occasion of the address was inappropriate for expressing his views, and he knew it would be difficult to give the address without offending some present, but he had to be true to his own views which were by that time well known. He had condescended to the request because it had come from the students themselves.36 Emerson’s ambivalence must have increased significantly when he entered the room on July 15th to find that the six graduating students were accompanied by a standing-room-only crowd of a few hundred people. By the time of his address, Emerson had clearly left behind the “popular faith” of Christianity, a faith embodied in doctrines and propositions, and he had embraced a notion of living faith grounded in the existential mindfulness of one’s role in the ongoing divine act of creation, an awareness of unity with God / the Universal Soul. In accepting the invitation, he took on the challenge of remaining true to his convictions while faithfully fulfilling the charge to inspire the seminary graduates to enthusiastically embrace their role as preachers and leaders of local Christian churches. Emerson’s goal in this confrontation between incommensurable views of true faith and true religion was to demonstrate the failure of traditional Christianity in its present form; the superiority of his own view of faith and religion; and the necessity, for the sake of the church and society, of revitalizing Christianity with his view. Emerson began the address with an observation that would serve as both a common ground with his audience and a cornerstone of his own view:

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appreciating the grandeur of nature in a simple outdoor stroll. For the astute observer, this experience turns one to consider the relation of her/his mind to that which is observed. On a note that would ring true for his Unitarian brethren, he concluded from this that the laws of the universe cause awareness of the origin of all laws natural and moral in the divine. Thus far, he had affirmed nothing more than what William Ellery Channing had been preaching, even as he had been working to help found the Divinity School itself. However, in the next breath, Emerson turned toward the East, suggesting that the origin of these divine laws, both natural and moral, lies not in a personal God but penultimately in the individual soul—“The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul”37—and ultimately in the One, conceived of impersonally: “These facts have always suggested to man the sublime creed, that the world is not the product of manifold power, but of one will, of one mind; that one mind is everywhere active.”38 Recognition of this awakens in man a “sentiment which we call religious sentiment. . . . This sentiment is divine and deifying. It is the beatitude of man. It makes him illimitable. . . . This thought dwelled always deepest in the minds of men in the devout and contemplative East; not alone in Palestine where it reached its purest expression, but in Egypt, in Persia, in India, in China, Europe has always owed to oriental genius its divine impulses.”39 In a conciliatory gesture to his audience, Emerson allows that this insight reached its purest expression in Palestine in the person of Jesus. Of him Emerson claims, “Having seen that the law in us is commanding, he would not suffer it to be commanded . . . he declared it was God. Thus, is he, as I think, the only soul in history who has appreciated the worth of man.”40 Jesus lived in faith inspired by the indwelling of the Supreme Spirit, but the church has since extinguished this faith. “And because this indwelling Supreme Spirit cannot wholly be got rid of, the doctrine of it suffers this perversion, that the divine nature is attributed to one or two persons, and denied to all the rest, and denied with fury. The doctrine of inspiration is lost; the base doctrine of the majority of voices, usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul.”41 From this Emerson describes two mistakes the Christian Church has made: first, focusing upon Jesus as the unique and past when he should be seen as the exemplary for each of us, inspiring us in the present and in the future to experience for ourselves the divinity of the soul within us. Jesus was great because “He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his creation.”42 From this follows the second mistake: seeing revelation as over and past when revelation is going on now when we experience ourselves as divinely transcended by Spirit. The result of these two failures is formalism in the pulpit: people preaching without living the life that could bring Truth to their words; a church that is dead in the present because it is mired in its revelation

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once received; and a Christianity losing its social significance. “The soul is not preached. The Church seems to totter to its fall, almost all life extinct.”43 Emerson did not end his address with a recommendation that the newly minted Divinity School graduates abandon the church or that they found a new one: “Rather, let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing.” This he saw possible because “faith makes us and not we it, and faith makes its own forms.”44 On this optimistic note, he suggested two examples of existing forms that could be transformed from their current restrictive characters into opportunities for a truly living faith. First, the Sabbath that reminds everyone of the “dignity of spiritual being” and can provide the occasion for rekindling “new love, new faith [and] new sight.” Second, the practice of preaching that affords the chance to “speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it.”45 Emerson thus fulfilled his obligation to inspire and charge the graduate class to go forth into the churches and preach; however, the charge would have been better received had he not encouraged them to pursue their vocation with the kind of prophetic voice that would re-envision Christian theology entirely and resuscitate the nearly deceased church. The address was met by some as a breath of fresh air. Theodore Parker, for example, found the address profoundly inspiring, and Samuel Ripley, Emerson’s uncle, offered him his own pulpit if he wanted to clarify or defend the address to the public. However, the overwhelming majority of mainstream Christian intellectuals were highly critical. Where Nature had received eight public reviews, the Divinity School Address received eleven. Andrews Norton’s Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity was the most famous and scathing of them. Emerson’s Aunt Mary was predictably horrified, and even his brother William referred to it as heresy. After the Divinity School Address, he was not invited back to Harvard until after the Civil War, and never to Yale. Emerson himself was dismayed and shocked at the vehemence of the critiques. The address stood as the formal end of his ties with traditional Christianity, and he gave up filling in for local pulpits. NOTES 1. Porte, Representative, 62–63. 2. JMN 5:87. 3. See especially Kenneth Walter Cameron, The Young Emerson’s Transcendentalism (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1971), and Merton Sealts and Alfred Ferguson, Emerson’s Nature (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc., 1969). 4. CW 1:8. 5. L 2:42.

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6. Barbara Packer, Emerson’s Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major Essays (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1982), 22–23, 29. 7. Packer, Fall, 83–84. 8. JMN 5:185. 9. Sealts and Ferguson, Emerson’s Nature, 79. 10. Sealts and Ferguson, Emerson’s Nature, 82. 11. CW 1:10. 12. CW 1:16. 13. CW 1:18. 14. CW 1:18. 15. CW 1:22. 16. CW 1:21. 17. CW 1:27–28. 18. CW 1:29. 19. CW 1:31. 20. CW 1:34. 21. CW 1:36. 22. CW 1:42. 23. CW 1:44. 24. JMN 5:202. 25. CW 1:43 26. CW 1:44. 27. JMN 5:229–30. 28. CW 1:54. 29. CW 1:56. 30. CW 1:58. 31. CW 1:59. 32. CW 1:63. 33. CW 1:66. 34. JMN 5:463. 35. JMN 5:463–65. 36. L 2:149. July 28, 1838, Letter to Henry Ware. 151 August 2, 1838 Letter to Elizabeth Peabody. 37. CW 1:77. 38. CW 1:78. 39. CW 1:79–80. 40. CW 1:81–82. 41. CW 1:80. 42. CW 1:81. 43. CW 1:84. 44. CW 1:92. 45. CW 1:92.

Chapter 8

Seeing Emerson’s Faith in His Works Oversoul and Self-Reliance

In the summer of 1839, Emerson began focusing his efforts on a book of essays. He was sidetracked with the lecture circuit but returned to the project in late spring of 1840. From then to the end of that year, he went about fervently writing and assembling pieces of former lectures and journal entries into essay form with the goal of publishing something by the New Year. In order to meet the goal, he had to divide the project into two books. Essays, The First Series was sent to the publisher on January 1, 1841. By this time the Transcendental Club had been meeting regularly for three years. Through the activities of its members and the publication of their newspaper, The Dial, Transcendentalism was becoming a recognizable movement. As the leading prophet of the movement, it fell to Emerson to articulate its nature to the public. On one level this Transcendental Idealism was much like other post-Kantian idealisms that had made their way to New England. The works of Fichte, Schelling, and Coleridge were well known. The origin of these in Kant’s epistemology was also common knowledge among intellectuals. For that reason Emerson typically assumed Kant’s constructivist epistemology without need of explanation. When he did explain it, he put it this way: “It is well known to most of my audience, that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name of Transcendental, from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant.”1 He then went on to describe how Kant refuted the skepticism that Locke’s empiricism had led to “by showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that those were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms.” Emerson concluded his allusion to Kant by extolling the profundity of his thought and the pervasive influence it has had on Europe and America.2 What Emerson spent the greatest amount of his energy on, then, was not explaining Kant or 115

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defending the uses post-Kantian idealists had put his epistemology to but, rather, in clarifying what distinguished his view from other versions of idealism, specifically his notion that this human, epistemic activity of transcending sense-experience with the “intuitions of the mind” takes place within the transcendental creative act of God/the Universal Soul/the Oversoul which “puts nature forth through us.” Living each moment of life in the awareness and appreciation of this double transcendence was the “living faith” that Emerson embraced in place of the “dead forms” of Christianity. Emerson’s intent in the Essays was to use this genre to develop the themes and implications of transcendental idealism more fully. A running refrain throughout the essays is the contrast between matter: the mundane physical world apprehended by the understanding, taken as ultimate by the sensual man, and soul, the metaphysical reality of the all in each experienced by the person of living faith. The most famous, and arguably most important, essays of the first series are Oversoul and Self-Reliance. The two form an interdependent pair which, taken together, describe the double transcendence at the heart of Emerson’s transcendental idealism. In Oversoul Emerson sets forth this transcendence from the perspective of the creative activity of the One; in Self-Reliance the view is from the human individual’s role in that activity. OVERSOUL Though pieces of what became Self-Reliance can be seen to have originated from as far back as 1833, it was actually the last of the essays in this series to achieve final form. Oversoul, on the other hand, was the first.3 At the same time Emerson was writing Oversoul in April of 1840, he was giving poetic expression to the same ideas in his poem The Sphynx. Emerson evidently considered the latter to be the best of his poetic efforts, placing it first in each of his published collections of poetry. In both its form and content, one sees the essential Emerson. The Sphinx is a Greek myth which Emerson repurposes to tell a story that is fundamentally Vedantic. The last stanzas of The Sphynx read like the Bhagavad Gita, and the Sphynx seems to be a figure of Krishna, complete with her exiting the final scene in a cloud of purple smoke—the traditional color of Krishna in Hindu art. The poem is a conversation between a poet and the stone Sphinx who, according to the Greek myth, knows the secret of human history. In Emerson’s version the secret to be discovered is The fate of the man-child The meaning of man Known fruit of the unknown Daedalian plan.4

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It is the poet who eventually comes into the scene and, believing he knows the secret, offers his answer. Beyond all the alternations that comprise the universe and life Love works at the centre Heart heaving away.

Thinking he has solved the riddle, he goes on to mock the Sphinx. The answer, however, does not lie in love but lies in the unity of the One. As Krishna had revealed to Arjuna, now the Sphinx reveals to the poet: I am thy spirit yoke-fellow Of thine eye I am eyebeam,

and like Krishna she transforms before the poet’s eyes into her cosmic splendor as the unity of all: the One. In Oversoul Emerson uses these Vedantic themes interchangeably with Neo-Platonic ones. An uncharitable account of Emerson’s tendency to do this would be that he was not sufficiently grounded in either Vedantism or NeoPlatonism to know their subtle differences. It seems, however, that Rusk’s view that Emerson’s aversion to systematic philosophies and his habit of reading for lusters provides a better explanation, an explanation that is consistent with Emerson’s own view of the task and methodology of the scholar. Indeed, if one expects to find in Emerson a thoroughgoing Kantian, Vedantic, or Neo-Platonic philosopher, or one who uses Channing’s “moral sentiments” and Coleridge’s “Reason/Understanding distinction” in ways faithful to Channing and Coleridge, then disappointment is inevitable: Emerson was not concerned with such things. Oversoul is a summary of the metaphysics of Transcendental Idealism from the perspective of one who is telling the greater narrative. Because of this greater narrative, the role of the human individual described in Self-Reliance is possible and can be made sense of. Taken together, the two essays are an expansion of the message of The Sphinx. In Emerson and Vedanta, Swami Paramananda writes: “What is the Atman or Self? In the Kena-Upanishad, it is defined as ‘the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, the speech of the speech, the life of the life, the eye of the eye. That which cannot be thought by mind, but by which mind is able to think; that which is not seen by the eye, but by which the eye is able to see; that which cannot be heard by the ear, but by which the ear is able to hear.’” Paramananda notes: “Emerson draws almost the same picture.”5 Swami Paramananda concludes his analysis of Emerson’s essay on Oversoul with “Emerson undoubtedly drew his inspiration from the Vedas. . . . The title

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itself indicates it, for ‘Oversoul’ is almost a literal translation of the Sanskrit word Param-Atman (Supreme Self). The very expression, as well as the thought contained in the essay, are all akin to those found in the Indo-Aryan Scriptures.”6 Some have, however, emphasized the differences between Emerson’s view expressed in the Oversoul and a purely Vedantic one. Most importantly, it is argued that the One, Nirguna Brahma, of Vedantic philosophy is beyond even moral distinctions, and, therefore, the cosmic law also operates beyond moral categories. Arthur Christy, for example, writes: “The chief difference between Emerson’s Over-Soul and the Hindu Brahma was that there was a Christian flavor in the former that was not in the latter, a beatitude accessible to all in earnest active moral endeavor, sufficing and perfect in every hour.”7 Carl T. Jackson also argues that Emerson’s Oversoul is more theistic than the Vedantic Atman and cosmic law less binding.8 Though moral distinctions are applicable to the personal God of Christianity or the Vedantic Saguna Brahma—Brahma with attributes—Emerson’s long and deeply held conviction that moral law and natural law were two sides of the same Law led him to see both as unified in the One/Oversoul rather than nullified in it. But the criticism holds: if Emerson were truer to Vedantism, he would have seen that moral categories apply to the duties of the individual to their dharma—place in the cosmic scheme—and not to the One/Oversoul in itself. On the other hand, Emerson presents himself not as a Vedantic philosopher but rather as one who has found truth in Vedantism, and that truth provided, in Paramananda’s words, the inspiration for this essay. Emerson’s Oversoul is structurally a point-by-point compare/contrast essay. The points contrasted are materialism versus idealism, the popular notion of revelation versus true revelation, the character/tone of one who lives from without versus one who lives from within, and faith based on authority versus living faith. Thus, the argument moves from the nature of reality to our knowledge of that nature; to the character developed because of that awareness; to how that character appears to others; to, finally, the individual experience of living one’s role in this greater narrative. Emerson begins by arguing that the sensual life by which we experience the world, human history, and the self in material terms inevitably leaves us feeling unsatisfied; without accounting for the soul, our philosophies will always leave us wanting more. The sensual man takes the world of succession and division as ultimate, but the very desire for more, Emerson claims, demonstrates to us that we are seeing only partially; while the world around us can be interpreted in such a way, he says, “Meantime within man is the soul of the whole, the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.”9 The wise person recognizes

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this and sees that an account of his experience without reference to the soul’s transcendence by the One is empty. Thus, one can attain a full understanding of truth, morals, and love only through recognition of their source in soul as transcended by the One: “When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love.”10 The failure to recognize this leaves the sensual person with a distortion of each. The world-in-itself is then ambiguous enough that it can be experienced on the level of the mundane, without reference to the human soul, or the One, which transcends it; the common person, holding to the popular view, lives this way. However, Emerson argues that only by opening oneself to the ideal view, that each moment of conscious experience is the product of a double transcendental act, can one fully know the truth. By the former we can know facts, but these are dead and passing away: “The wind shall blow them we know not whither.” By the ideal view, on the other hand, we live in the creative act of the One: “The soul looketh steadily forwards, creating a world before her, leaving worlds behind her.”11 The view of the transcendental idealist is not the private property of intellectuals; it is available to all people. The popular view sees education as taking place in a linear fashion; those claiming to have a higher truth or superior insight thus claim a more advanced place along the spectrum. This leads to the notion that the more educated one is, the more legitimacy their truthclaims carry. For Emerson, however, the soul advances not in a linear fashion but by ascension into the consciousness of the unity in which it participates. Since others are the product of the incarnation of the same spirit, we share a sub-stratum of Truth, a third party to our conversations. This is true of all people, educated or not, adult or not.12 When we encounter truth, we “see how the thing stands in God, we know the particular thing, and every thing, and every man. For the Maker of all things and all persons stands behind us, and casts his dread omniscience through us over things.”13 Ecstatic moments of these encounters are called revelations. Emerson introduces this in order to distinguish the popular notion of a revelation from true revelation, the popular faith versus the ideal theory. “The popular notion of a revelation” he describes as the understanding seeking answers to sensual questions such as the length of man’s life, what one should do, etc. These Emerson refers to as the “low curiosities.” Emerson’s answer as to why humans turn to these low curiosities betrays both a Christian and Vedantic influence. On the one hand, he couches the problem in the Christian language of the fall of humanity; on the other hand, the answer he offers is a Vedantic one. “These questions which we lust to ask about the future are a confession of our sin. God has no answer for them. No answer in words can reply to a

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question of things. It is not in an arbitrary ‘decree of God,’ but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts down the facts of tomorrow; for the soul will not have us read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. By this veil, which curtains events, it instructs the children of men to live in today.”14 In Christian language humans have fallen into the sinful condition that has resulted in their seeking the answers to their deepest needs in words and doctrines. The answer Emerson offers is that, properly understood, the condition of humans is that we live in an illusion instead of truth — the Vedantic notion of maya. The proper response to this condition can be found not in words but in us embracing our place in the larger narrative to, in his words, “work and live, work and live.” This was precisely the message of Krishna to Arjuna: the message of Vedantism, that our working and living is the occasion of revelation itself. As Emerson had put it in the Divinity School Address, “The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”15 This is the living faith of the idealist. The character of the one who lives with only the materialist vision and thus seeks the answers to “low curiosities,” as opposed to the idealist who sees the transcendental nature of her/his situation, gives rise to certain types of tone to their personalities. The tone of the former is that of one seeking, grasping for something outside of her/himself; the answers they settle for are external to themselves as well. The tone of the latter, on the other hand, is that of one who has; she/he lives from the inner unity of the soul/One outward. Emerson cites the poets as those who give expression to this tone in their works. Some poets speak from without, as spectators, and their works are ends in themselves, but others speak from within and thereby speak to the unity in truth that we feel in ourselves. “The great poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then we think less of his compositions.”16 Herein, Emerson is giving existential expression to the general contrast between Lockean and post-Kantian epistemology; by the former, humans are passive receivers of truth that comes from without, and this view results in a certain class of poetry that produces artistic spectacles; by the latter, humans are active participants in the construction of truth, and the poetry that arises from this awareness comes from within and points away from itself, speaking to the inward experience of others. The parallel continues as Emerson here, as elsewhere, identifies popular Christianity with the former and transcendental idealism with the latter. This leads Emerson to his final point of contrast in the essay: grounding one’s character in faith that is based in authority which speaks from outside the individual, versus the character that is grounded in a living faith which speaks out from within. The former is the propositional faith of popular Christianity; the latter is the double transcendentalism of Emerson’s living faith. “When we have broken our god of tradition, and ceased from our god

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of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with his presence.”17 Of the one who has this kind of living faith, Emerson says, “He will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live with a divine unity. . . . He will calmly affront the morrow in the negligency of that trust which carries God with it, and so hath already the whole future in the bottom of the heart.”18 Living with the divine unity describes the person whose experience Emerson expounds in his essay Self-Reliance. The self-trust of the individual is made possible by the larger narrative in which the individual participates; self-reliance is grounded in reliance on the cosmic structure, in the Oversoul: “In the presence of law to his mind, he is overflowed with a reliance so universal, that it sweeps away all cherished hopes and the most stable projects of mortal condition in its flood.” Only in this reliance does self-reliance make sense. SELF-RELIANCE As in Oversoul, where Emerson contrasted the materialist with the idealist views of the metaphysical narrative in which humans find themselves, so in Self-Reliance he contrasts the corresponding modes of life which these views result in. Since materialists see truth as existing in a world outside of them, they live their lives in conformity to whatever structures they believe will aid their efforts to attain it; they live, in the words of the Oversoul, from without. The idealist sees the truth as residing in, and expressed through, the unity of the One in which the individual participates. Thus, the idealist lives from within, in self-trust. Conformity versus self-trust comprise the two poles of contrast throughout the essay. Again, like with Oversoul, Emerson begins this essay with an experience common to us all but points beyond itself toward idealism, and, again, the popular view sees only the gesture but not the referent. In this case the experience is recognizing genius in art. The one sees the beauty of the art in terms of the conventions appropriate to appraising the particular work: as the work conforms to these conventions, so too does the appraisal of it. On the other hand, the one who lives from within sees that the genius of the art lies in its corresponding to truth in her/himself. Thus, Emerson says of this perspective, “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”19 Emerson immediately points out, however, that even those who recognize this are conditioned by society to ignore it. Emerson identifies two fears that hinder us from self-trust. The first is fear of rejection from others. This fear, he argues, is grounded only in the

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conformity in which the others are entangled and therefore provides no basis for fear in the one who rejects the web of conformity altogether. The second is fear of personal inconsistency. This fear is a form of the first; in this case it is remaining in conformity with one’s own past that limits the individual from recognizing truth in the moment. Forcing the systemization of one’s thoughts is to import the expectations of the one who lives from without into the thinking of the one who lives from within. It is in this context that his famous line “A foolish consistency is the hob goblin of little minds” occurs.20 Against this conformity Emerson argues for self-reliance grounded in the individual’s participation in the Universal Soul / Oversoul. In making his case, he appeals to another variation on his theme of all in each. Where in Nature this monistic notion took on the name “All in Man,” then in the American Scholar Address “Man Thinking,” now Emerson uses it as the great “Thinker and Actor”: “the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the center of things. . . . Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design; — and posterity [seems] to follow his steps as a train of clients.”21 He goes on to describe this source of our self-reliance as the common source of soul and nature: “We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. . . . We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity.”22 Emerson then links the victory in society of conformity over self-reliance to the source of the present state of religion, education, and society. Of each he gives only an example or two to illustrate the contrast between its present state and its possibilities if individuals within each of these institutions acted with self-reliance. With regard to religion, he focuses on prayer. In popular religion prayer amounts to the individual begging for favors, but for the one whose self-reliance is grounded in God/the Oversoul, “it [true prayer] is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. . . . As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action.”23 Regarding education, his example is the tendency to look to the past, as is so often demonstrated in the desire to travel around the world to places of historical significance. This is to turn outward for truth rather than inward to the Spirit of truth, which is the source of selfreliance. As for society itself, Emerson disparages that it is only a thin veil over history, each manifestation of it believing itself to be new but taking us nowhere.

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The antidote to the failures of our current social institutions is the self-reliance of the one whose living faith comes from her/his relation to the truth of their existence: “This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as they contain.”24 On this point Rusk makes an observation that holds true not just of this essay but of much of Emerson’s work in general: it is as if Emerson left his New England world and “got lost in conversation with a friendly circle of Neo-Platonists on the left bank of the ancient Tibor or were seated beside the Ganges with some swarthy yogi who had fortunately escaped from the deadly formalism and superstition of the Brahmans.”25 Indeed, Emerson has taken what he found to be truths from both traditions, as well as from post-Kantian idealism, to articulate his notion of a living faith. That living faith not only was the source of intellectual productions such as lectures, poetry, and essays but also provided the tone Emerson evinced in the decisions of everyday life. NOTES 1. CW 1:206. 2. CW 1:206–7. 3. CW 2:xxv. 4. CW 9:5. 5. Swami Paramananda, Emerson and Vedanta (Boston: The Vedanta Center, date unknown), 560–61. 6. Paramananda, Emerson and Vedanta, 65. 7. Christy, Orient in Transcendentalism, 79. 8. Carl T. Jackson, The Oriental Religions and American Thought: 19th Century Explorations (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1981), 53–55. 9. CW 2:160. 10. CW 2:161. 11. CW 2:163. 12. CW 2:164–65. 13. CW 2:166. 14. CW 2:168. 15. CW 1:44. 16. CW 2:171. 17. CW 2:173. 18. CW 2:175.

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19. CW 2:27. 20. CW 2:33. 21. CW 2:35. 22. CW 2:37. 23. CW 2:44. 24. CW 2:40. 25. Rusk, Life, 280.

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Chapter 9

Seeing Emerson’s Faith in His Life Brook Farm and Emerson’s Alternative Vision

The nineteenth-century Brook Farm community is well known as a short-lived utopian experiment. Emerson supported this adventure in spirit but never actually joined in it. Emerson’s refusal to participate in Brook Farm has been typically understood as the logical outcome of his individualism and rejection of conformity in general. I suggest that Emerson’s motivation ran deeper than this. His experience of a living faith in which the One/Oversoul is present in, and the source of, each moment of life could take place at Brook Farm as well as in Boston society; however, because of this notion of faith, Emerson was already living in a kind of utopian world. It could be said that Emerson’s Transcendental Idealism presents us with a form of philosophical utopian imagining that takes us beyond the limitations inherent in most social-experimental utopias. Such utopias inspire and fail us for the same reason: by rising out of a perceived lack in the present social reality, they inspire us toward a solution that denies the intransigency of the present condition by offering us a vision of a new social reality, incommensurable with the one we know. The vision inspires, but by its utopian nature, it inevitably fails us. THE STORY OF BROOK FARM In the 1840s the problem of social inequality in general, and slavery in particular, were the focal points of public conversation. The decade saw the founding of numerous utopian communities whose intentions were to experiment with new models of society that would solve the problems of inequality inherent in the old models. Brook Farm was one of four utopian 125

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communities begun in nineteenth-century Massachusetts and the first that was secular.1 It was founded by George Ripley and a few other members of the Transcendentalist Club. Ripley was a minister who had tired of the complacency of his congregation and the aloofness of intellectual debate. He wanted to see transcendental philosophy practically applied to the problems of social inequality. In October 1841 Ripley and the founding investors of Brook Farm purchased 190 acres in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Ripley’s description of the goals of the Brook Farm community was to insure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor than now exists; to combine the thinker and the worker, as far as possible, in the same individual; to guarantee the highest mental freedom, by providing all with labor adapted to their tastes and talents; and securing to them the fruits of their industry; to do away with the necessity of menial services by opening the benefits of education and the profits of labor to all; and thus to prepare a society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated persons, whose relations with each other would permit a more wholesome and simple life than can be led amidst the pressure of our competitive institutions.2

To make a rather short story shorter, Brook Farm’s open form of organization guaranteed maximal freedom for its members’ development, but it did not direct their labor enough to create a sustainable income. In January 1844 Ripley re-organized the community under the ideology of the French socialist Charles Fourier. The strict organizational structure would replace the original agrarian and educational emphases with industry, re-organizing the community into three primary departments: Agriculture, Domestic Industry, and Mechanic Arts.3 Central to Fourier’s physical plan for such a community was the construction of a large building complex which he called a phalanstère. Such a building symbolized the unity of industry and rural life. It was composed of a central section given to quiet activities such as reading and studying; a wing to one side dedicated to noisy activities such as carpentry, ironworking, and children’s playrooms; and a wing to the other side for large meetings and ballrooms. Construction of the Phalanstère was the largest and most expensive endeavor ever undertaken at Brook Farm. It strained the finances of the community to the limit, and before construction was complete, the building burned down.4 The struggling community was unable to survive the financial blow, and in 1847 the holdings of Brook Farm were sold at auction.

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EMERSON’S ROLE IN THE STORY Like Ripley, Emerson was frustrated by the inequalities of society around him and the inaction of himself and friends. He wrote to Caroline Sturgis: “When I see how false our life is, how oppressive our politics, that there is no room for a redeeming man appearing in the whole population, and myself and my friends so inactive and acquiescent in the man that our protest and the action of our character is quite insignificant, heroism seems our dream and our insight a delusion. I am daily getting ashamed of my life.”5 So, there were very good reasons for Emerson to be drawn toward utopian communalism, and the Brook Farm community in particular. He wanted to make a change in his life and was inclined toward bracketing out society and participating in an environment in which individuals could be committed to their own spiritual/ intellectual cultivation6 while interacting with a community of like-minded thinkers. While traveling in Europe in 1833, he had made the off-hand comment that the monastic life tempted him,7 and in August of 1840,8 he suggested creating a University in Concord that, though not communal, would bring like-minded intellectuals together, living and teaching in the same community. The flames of these desires were fanned by the prevailing zeitgeist which Emerson’s biographer describes as “utopian euphoria.”9 Emerson wrote to Carlyle: “We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new Community in his waistcoat pocket.”10 Not only did Brook Farm come as a timely opportunity, but it included several deep connections to Emerson himself. George Ripley had been a close friend since his college years, the site of the farm was in Roxbury where Emerson’s family had lived, and several of the members of the experiment were like-minded friends of Emerson. The fit was so perfect that George and Sophia Ripley assumed without question that Emerson would join them and take a leading role as he had in the other transcendental endeavors, such as the founding of the Transcendental Club and the publishing of the Dial. But in spite of several opportunities to do so, Emerson would not commit himself to the project. Finally, on November 9, 1840, Ripley wrote a formal letter of invitation to Emerson, apparently the only such formal invitation penned by him.11 Emerson’s response to the Ripleys was conflicted.12 He took uncharacteristically long in writing it, and its disconnected style evinced the consternation of its author. His journal entries as well as his correspondence with Margaret Fuller, Caroline Sturgis, and his brother William from October 1840 until his letter to George Ripley on December 15th are filled with admiration for Ripley’s project but doubts about its viability and mostly about his fit in it. In

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a journal entry in mid-October, he wrote reflecting upon a meeting with the Ripleys, Fuller, and Alcott, “Not once could I be inflamed—but sat aloof and thoughtless. . . . I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. I wish to break all prisons. . . . It seems to me that so to do were to dodge the problem I am set to solve, and to hide my impotency in the thick of a crowd.”13 On the other hand, in mid-November Emerson wrote to his wife Lydia asking her to return home (and not increase her vacation in Boston by sailing for England) because the “Community” question is “in full agitation betwixt Mr. Ripley, Mr. Alcott, and me,” and she should have a voice in it so that her “dangerous husband” would not sell the house out from under her!14 Two weeks later he wrote to Margaret Fuller: “For the Community, I have given it some earnest attention and much talk; and have not quite decided not to go. But I hate that the least weight should hang upon my decision. At the name of a society all my repulsions play, all my quills rise and sharpen. I shall very shortly go or send to G.R. my thoughts.”15 Emerson’s letter of rejection to Ripley was full of praise for the project but made it clear that it was not suited to him; he had all he desired in Concord. He vacillated throughout the letter between pros and cons, conceding that he was trying to make similar changes in his own life yet rejecting any role in the project; near the end he even suggested that if the school at Brook Farm worked out as planned, he might reconsider.16 One week later Emerson wrote to his brother about his rejection of Ripley and about the changes he wanted to make in his own household: “But I am quite intent on trying the experiment of manual labor to some considerable extent and of abolishing or ameliorating the domestic service in my household. Then I am grown a little impatient of seeing the inequalities all around me, am a little of an agrarian at heart, and wish at some times that I had a smaller house or else that it sheltered more persons.” Yet in the same letter, he referred to “this madness of G.R.’s [George Ripley’s] Socialism.”17 EMERSON’S UTOPIA Like many of his countrymen, Emerson wanted a utopia: a no-place where the failures of current social structures would be avoided. Ripley’s vision was revolutionary in the right senses: it sought freedom for individuals to develop themselves, it provided a community of like-minded people, and it eliminated competition and therefore the source of social inequalities. It was so enticing to Emerson that even after his tortured refusal to join, he planned to make changes in his own way of life that would emulate the life at Brook Farm. But ultimately, there was something about this utopia that did not ring true for Emerson, and it was not the question of its practical viability. The problem

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was his doubts about his personal fit within such a community. Emerson could not submit the freedom of his individuality to the conformity entailed in even a loosely organized utopian community. As Brook Farm evolved by economic necessity from Ripley’s original vision into embracing Fourier’s model, it became even easier for Emerson to reject it. Fourierism offered a rigid structure of society and the individual’s place within it. Social structure emanated from a metaphysical view of the laws that govern the universe. These laws were described as creating series, or the orders by which nature functions, out of which results the harmony of the universe. The role of humans is to subdue the world with labor. Disorganized labor would not fulfill this role, so labor must be organized to reflect the law of the series. Thanks also to the harmonious nature of the law of the series, every human being is suited to fulfilling her/his task in this work of labor and will therefore be attracted to that task. In Fourier’s utopia “the Series Distribute the Harmonies, and, under the Law communities will be drawn together by natural attraction. The Law assures harmonious relation and there will be no competitions, no grasping monopolies, no clashing of opposing forces. The welfare of each individual will be identified with the welfare of all. The community of Organized Laborers, living together and working together in Attractive Industries, will be a solid Phalanx of united interests.”18 After reading Fourier’s work (through his American interpreter: Brisbane), Emerson concluded that it was a marvelously coherent and comprehensive system, and he satirized it for the same reasons. Most importantly, Emerson’s response was an existential accusation that such a community lacked life itself: “What shall we say then? This only, that Fourier has skipped no fact but one, namely, Life.”19 Emerson’s rejection of the utopian community echoed his repulsion at the organized church of his day. The church too offered a metaphysical view of the universe as a static, lawlike system created by a God whose will was interpreted by the church. A person’s life was defined by the role designated to her in this system. The expectations for how people were supposed to play out their roles were also pre-defined. And, since the system was lawlike and rational, the criteria for playing the role well or badly could be deduced from the role definitions and expectations. The good mother/father, the good citizen, the good Christian, etc., was the one whose life was conformed to the system. Faith, as one’s subjective response to the Divine, was objectified. The person of faith was the person who affirmed the orthodox dogmas of the church. Thus, even in that most intimate sphere in which the individual experienced herself in the presence of the divine, her experience, and the appropriate response, were scripted for her from without. Before his break with the church in 1832, the church had supplied the parameters of Emerson’s intellectual world. He had ascended to leadership

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in that world only to find it unsatisfying. In his farewell speech to his church in Boston, he implied that the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was symbolic of the failure of the church in general. He argued that the essence of faith is freedom and that “its institutions, then, should be as flexible as the wants of men. That form out of which the life and suitableness have departed, should be as worthless in its eyes as the dead leaves that are falling around us.”20 Emerson, then, saw himself as standing between two poles: the dominant Christian society of colonial New England and the secular utopian society born out of reaction against the failures of the dominant society. Emerson rejected both poles for the same reason: they both offered a system by which the individual was defined from without. Successful participation in these systems required the individual to conform her/himself to the expectations of the system. Taking away the freedom of the individual to create her/himself is existential death, and Emerson was very clear that he saw both systems in just these terms, as lacking life altogether.21 It is Emerson’s notion of “life itself” that is key to his idea of an existential utopia. For Emerson, life must move from within the individual outward; it cannot be contained because it contains all; it cannot be defined from without because it defines all; and ultimately, it is grounded not in external institutions but in the free participation of the individual in the creativity of the Oversoul. Emerson’s existential utopia is a utopia in the strict sense of an ού τοπος: a non-place. It is not the construction of an eύ πολις: an alternate society with alternate institutions which, though different on the surface, yet rob the individual of life by their very nature as institutions. “Life itself,” in this existential utopia, is experiencing in each moment one’s presence at the center of the universe, as transcending and being transcended. Mainstream Christian society and utopian societies such as Brook Farm offered Emerson two versions of the same death. Both offered systems which define the individual from without and are therefore devoid of life itself. “Life itself” is fully participating in the creative activity of the Oversoul which is creating reality through our constructive human experiencing of every moment. Life is, by its nature, dynamic and free, and to be fully participating in it is to be fully present: “The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself. He is not to live to the future as it is described to him, but to live to the real future by living to the real present. The highest revelation is that God is in every man.”22 NOTES 1. Sterling F. Delano, Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 39.

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2. Lindsay Swift, Brook Farm: Its Members, Scholars, and Visitors (Massachusetts: Macmillan, 1900), 15–16. 3. Swift, Brook Farm, 279–80. 4. John Van Der Zee Sears, My Friends at Brook Farm (New York: Desmond FitzGerald, Inc., 1912), 170–71. 5. L 2:347. 6. Richardson, Mind on Fire, 172–73. Emerson was deeply influenced and motivated by Goethe’s notion of bildung as a primary goal of life. 7. Richardson, Mind on Fire, 132. 8. He describes his intent in his letter to Margaret Fuller, August 16, 1840. It would include Emerson, Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, George Ripley, Henry Hedge, John Bradford, and others. 9. Richardson, Mind on Fire, 341. 10. Richardson, Mind on Fire, 341. 11. Sears, My Friends, 34–35. 12. Rusk, Life, 289. I think Rusk’s dismissal of Emerson’s interest in Brook Farm does not do justice to the seriousness of the decision for Emerson: “But the bare suggestion of anything resembling communal scheme had chilled Emerson the individualist.” 13. JMN 7:408. 14. L 2:360. 15. L 2:364. 16. L 2:268–70. 17. L 2:371–72. 18. Sears, My Friends, 148–52. 19. JMN 8:208–10. 20. W 11:21. 21. Richardson, Mind on Fire, 429. Richardson agrees that the invitation to join Brook Farm was a serious temptation (429) but that Emerson came to believe that social reformation can be achieved only by personal transformation. Thus Man the Reformer was Emerson’s response to the invitation. 22. JMN 4:84.

Chapter 10

Seeing Emerson’s Faith in His Life The Slavery Issue

Emerson was no stranger to tragedy; however, when his son Waldo died in January of 1842 at the age of five, he was devastated. Most Emerson scholars take this event as the turning point in Emerson’s personal faith; his existential utopianism crumbled in the face of practical reality. Even his Aunt Mary capitalized on the moment in a rather brutal attempt to dissuade him from his transcendental faith and jar him from what she took to be his pantheism, or divinization of nature, back into the Christian fold: “And you do not like the little grave she [nature] has dug so blindly that you cannot drop your plummet into its sad chasm. Right glad am I! Abandon her! She has been covering the earth for ages with blood & war & prisons.” Mary then enjoins Emerson to repent and “swear by his Son, the medium of his tremendous and gracious influence . . . and the wide universal principles of his cross.”1 The appeal was as futile as it was ruthless: Emerson had long since moved beyond this kind of attempt to use the “wide universal principles of the cross” to deny the reality of life’s suffering. From here on, as Rusk puts it, Emerson was “on the road to an untranscendental sort of realism.”2 Typically, this interpretation of the post-Waldo Emerson emphasizes three stages along this road. First, as Martha Banta describes it in Gymnasts of Faith, Fate, and Hazard, Emerson now emphasizes the power of fate, that which is outside of man and limits him, as well as fate’s unity.3 Banta goes on to depict this new version of faith as embracing the polarity of freedom and necessity by trusting in, even worshiping, Necessity.4 At this stage, then, Emerson is interpreted as reversing the relation of the individual to nature that had been at the heart of his transcendental idealism. In Whicher’s analysis Emerson originally thought of the Soul as within the Self and of nature as the exteriorization of the Self (transcendentally, man’s creation); now Emerson sees Soul as within Nature and man as her supreme product: “Emerson moved from a subjective toward an objective idealism.”5 133

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The second stage along the road away from Emerson’s original transcendental position, it is argued, was his recognition of the failure of the power of the transformation of the individual to transform society. Emerson had always held that social reform would emerge from reformed individuals. As Len Gougeon puts it in Virtue’s Hero, “For Emerson, all social problems were really manifestations of individual moral deficiencies, and only individual moral reform could ameliorate social problems. . . . Reformers, Emerson felt, must rely upon moral suasion rather than agitation in order to precipitate the desired result.”6 This conviction was behind his rejection of the invitation to join the Brook Farm experiment, an attempt he saw as approaching moral problems by external social construction. Now this conviction was expressed vehemently in his disparaging assessment of social activists and philanthropists in general: “The abolitionists with their holy cause . . . the whole class of professed Philanthropists—it is strange & horrible to say—are an altogether odious set of people, whom one would be sure to shun as the worst of bores & canters.”7 But the seemingly intractable evil of slavery in American society provided a terrible blow to Emerson’s optimistic view that the transformation of individuals would result in the transformation of society. At the third stage, it is claimed, Emerson gave up on his transcendental faith and immersed himself in social affairs. Joel Porte sums up the argument this way: through the loss of Waldo and the increasing urgency of the slavery issue, Emerson’s transcendentalism became “obscured.”8 Whicher puts it more directly: “With time Emerson became sharply aware of the contrast between the transcendental Self and the actual insignificant individual adrift on the stream of time and circumstance. The Saturnalia of faith was offset by skepticism.”9 Emerson’s involvement in the slavery issue is seen then as both historically and conceptually at the center of his turn from transcendental faith to “untranscendental realist”; historically, because after Waldo’s death Emerson became increasingly preoccupied with this issue; conceptually, because it seems that in dealing with this issue, Emerson reversed himself on the relation of humans to nature, which lay at the center of his transcendental faith and on the relation of the intellectual, that is, the transformed individual, to society. The result is that the prophet of self-reliance lived now in acquiescence to his own powerlessness. Whicher concludes from this, “The logic of his [Emerson’s] faith forced him into a comprehensive acceptance that is more irritating than helpful in our disastrous times.”10 Against this interpretation I argue that throughout the period following Waldo’s death, Emerson’s transcendental faith deepened and that the themes on which his critics fasten in order to demonstrate the incongruity of his later thought with his earlier are themes that were essential in his earlier thought as well; further, it is precisely because of his transcendental faith that Emerson

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felt the severity of the slave issue and the passion to express his faith through social activism. On this latter point, I am in alignment with Albert J. von Frank when he remarks of Emerson’s anti-slavery addresses given as late as 1855: “Emerson was a force in antislavery because of his idealism, not in spite of it.”11 Those who interpret this period of Emerson’s life in the way I have outlined most often see his essay Experience, written two years after Waldo’s death, as the quintessential expression of Emerson’s despair and acquiescence. As Barbara Packer puts it in Emerson’s Fall, “In Experience what is taken as proof of the ‘ill-concealed Deity’ of the Self is neither its joy nor its zeal but simply its ruthlessness.”12 Experience is, indeed, written in a dark mood and emphasizes the human side of the double transcendentalism that constituted Emerson’s notion of living faith. In the first section of the essay, he describes human experience as a succession of illusions which appear to our limited perception as real. He then asks the rhetorical question of whether or not knowing that our illusory experiences were a small part of a greater whole would help us with tragedies in relationships of friendship and love. On the existential level, the implication is that it would not. Emerson ends this section of the essay with the observation, “Divinity is behind our failures and follies also. The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage.”13 Emerson continues this thought into the second part of the essay where he emphasizes the superficiality of human efforts and the “irresistible nature” that has put humans in their various roles in society—each role as trivial as the next. Each of these trivial roles is played out on the surface, that is, a one-dimensional space in which the players are inevitably ignorant of the past and the future; thus, for them, “life is a series of surprises.” Both the illusory nature of human experience and the irresistibility of nature that carries humans along are, in fact, aspects of Emerson’s Vedantic/Neo-Platonic monism. The nature of the human scenario points us to its origin. Thus, he writes: “Every man is an impossibility, until he is born; every thing impossible, until we see a success. The ardors of piety agree at last with the coldest skepticism—that nothing is of us or our works—that all is of God.”14 The climax of the essay is reached in Emerson’s notion that the “Fall of man” lies in his recognition of his own subjectivity, that is, recognizing that all she/he takes to be real and true is a product of her/his subjective experience. This includes the human perception of God in as much as this is an objectivized idea. On the other hand, Emerson argues, “The subject is the receiver of the Godhead and at every comparison must feel his being enhanced by that cryptic might. Though not in energy, yet by presence, this magazine of substance cannot be otherwise than felt: nor can any force of

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intellect attribute to the object the proper deity which sleeps or wakes forever in every subject.”15 Thus, though human intellect cannot capture the nature of God/Universal Soul in thought, it feels its presence in the act of thinking. Finally, because our knowledge is limited to human subjectivity, Emerson likens the successes and failures of our evolving human efforts to understand our world through science to a cat chasing its tail. However, instead of taking the human predicament of illusion and subjectivity to the conclusion of hopelessness and despair, Emerson takes the opposite tack: the limitedness of our powers to find Truth points us to the unity of ourselves with the Truth in God/Oversoul. The recognition of this provides us the grounds for self-trust. Picking up with his comments about science and the tail-chasing cat, Emerson continues: “And yet is the God the native of these rocks. That need makes in mortals the capital virtue of self-trust. We must hold hard to this poverty, however scandalous, and by more vigorous self-recoveries, after the sallies of action, possess our axis more firmly.”16 In a sense Experience is a re-telling of the story of Oversoul and Self-Reliance in the Essays: First Series. At that time the tone was naively optimistic; in this case that optimism is tempered with maturity, but Emerson’s transcendental idealism is unchanged, and however much we are scandalized by the poverty of our subjective knowledge, we must continue forward empowered by the fact that our self-trust is grounded in reliance on God/Oversoul. If one reads Self-Reliance as claiming that the self is the source of its own divinity, then it is easy to see how Experience could be read as a tragic expression of Emerson’s loss of faith. But for Emerson, the self is penultimate, and self-reliance is possible only because of the transcendence of the Oversoul in the individual self. Emerson’s transcendental idealism was a double transcendental act of the Oversoul putting nature forth through the transcendental act of human perception. Grief over the death of Waldo led Emerson to emphasize the role of the Oversoul in that transcendental creativity and the limitations of the human role. In Vedantic terms Emerson stresses in this essay the cosmic Karma in relation to human experience which takes place in maya—illusion. In this Karma resides both the necessity of events and the unity of the self with the Oversoul, both fate and hope. It is in this vein that Emerson turned more and more during this period to the language of Vedantic philosophy to articulate his transcendental faith. Emerson’s Journals and letters of this time are filled with references to Oriental thought. The early influence of Vedantic thought which he had found embedded in Neo-Platonism was now being enriched through the availability, to him, of more original sources from the East. Far from abandoning his faith, Emerson was using this medium to bring more extensive expression to that faith throughout his mature years. The most overtly Vedantic works of the post-Waldo Emerson span this period and are generally agreed to include

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Ethical Scriptures, which appeared in the Dial between 1842 and 1844; his poem Hamatreya, written in 1845; then, five years later, the essay on Plato, in Representative Men; seven years after that, the poem Brahma; and finally, in what is often considered his last great work, the Conduct of Life (1860), the last two chapters of which, Fate and Illusions, provide a Vedantic end to the volume. It was also during these decades of the 1840s and 50s that Emerson explored Persian philosophy and poetry as a further vehicle for illustrating his transcendental faith. Gougeon describes what was appealing to Emerson this way: “The Persian poets suggest how man might find unity in a diverse and seemingly contradictory world that is dominated by fatalistic forces and yet demands individual identity and action.”17 The message is parallel to the elements of Vedantic thought that had influenced Emerson but now arrived to him in another voice. As Emerson’s transcendental faith was broadening to include more expressions, it was also deepening. Ironically, Waldo’s death brought vitality to Emerson’s faith by causing him to live that faith into the mundane world. It was his transcendental faith that provided Emerson the passion to move from the solitude of his study and the abstractions of his lectures into the public square as an abolitionist. The move was, however, slow and incremental. Emerson’s first personal confrontation with social reform had been the decision forced on him to respond to the Brook Farm experiment. The Ripleys had instigated the experiment because they wanted to see transcendental idealism make a difference in the world; they wanted to see it do something. In rejecting the invitation, Emerson came to terms with his own inaction. From this he vowed to make some changes in the running of his household. His comment to his brother, “Then I am grown a little impatient of seeing the inequalities all around me, am a little of an agrarian at heart, and wish at some times that I had a smaller house or else that it sheltered more persons,”18 did indeed result in domestic changes, not the least of which was the entrance of Henry Thoreau into Emerson’s home and family.19 The real impetus for Emerson to move from tinkering with his household routine to a more robust engagement with “the inequalities all around” came from the women nearest him. Emerson’s Aunt Mary was an outspoken abolitionist, and his wife Lydia, as well as Thoreau’s mother and both of Thoreau’s sisters, were active members of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society. The leader of the group and most vocal female abolitionist in the Concord area was Mary Merrick Brooks, a close friend of Lydia’s and frequent visitor to the Emerson home. It was this cadre of activists that persuaded Emerson, in August of 1844, to go public and throw his weight behind the anti-slavery cause. The occasion was the Annual Celebration of the Emancipation of the

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Negroes in the British West Indies. The celebration was a thinly disguised excuse for campaigning for a similar emancipation of slaves in America. Emerson’s agreement to bring the address was hesitant. On the one hand, he had always been against the institution of slavery; as far back as his BowdoinPrize-winning essay as an undergrad at Harvard in 1821, he had described it as a “plague spot” on the country which “must be purged thoroughly,”20 and in a journal entry in November of the next year, he had sketched out an extended argument against it, referring to it as “the worst institution on earth.”21 Ten years prior to the 1844 address, Emerson had linked his anti-slavery stance to the heart of his transcendental faith: “Democracy/Freedom has its root in the sacred truth that every man hath in him the divine Reason. . . . That is the equality & the only equality of all men. To this truth we look when we say, ‘Reverence thyself. Be true to thyself.’ Because every man has within him somewhat really divine therefore is slavery the unpardonable outrage that it is.”22 But he had also held out the hope that the transformed individual that transcendental idealism aimed to cultivate would be the source of the moral suasion necessary to move American society away from the practice. Instead, what he saw was that the intellectuals and politicians of the North, who professed themselves to be opponents of slavery, were, in fact, enablers of the institution, motivated by the financial benefits they were reaping from it. As Gougeon puts it, “It must have seemed to Emerson in the summer of 1844 that his preferred method of reform, individual moral suasion, had clearly not been effective in ameliorating the appalling evil of American slavery. Indeed, that evil had become aggressively expansive.”23 On the other side, Emerson was just as disgusted with the abolitionists. Their single-issue focus was a distraction from the general reform of the individual that transcendental idealism sought. He feared that involving himself in the public debate would dilute his message. Worse, he feared being associated with the superficial egotists that comprised the leadership of the movement. His first personal encounter with a leading abolitionist, George Thompson, had come at the provocation of his Aunt Mary. The experience only confirmed what Emerson suspected: “Thompson the Abolitionist is incontrovertible: what you say or what might be said would make no impression on him. He belongs I fear to that great class of the Vanity-stricken.”24 It was, however, William Lloyd Garrison who came to embody everything that Emerson felt ambivalent about regarding the anti-slavery movement. Unlike his impression of Thompson, Emerson had great admiration for Garrison’s oral communication skills, clarity of thought, and the moral conviction from which he spoke, but he could not help but see Garrison as, if not a fraud, at least disingenuous in his appeal to religion. In the same journal entry in which Emerson praised Garrison’s eloquence, he remarked, “And yet the man teases me with his wearisome trick of quoting texts of scripture & his

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judaical Christianity & then by the continual eye to numbers[,] to societies. Himself is not enough for him.”25 T. Gregory Garvey makes the case that Emerson and Garrison were psychological mirrors of one another: he observes Garrison’s spiritual quest was “Transcendentalism turned inside out. Rather than working through self-reflection, Garrison’s spirituality gained its energy from extreme selfprojection.”26 I would add that it was not only self-projection that was the root of Emerson’s rejection, at first, of Garrison: it was that he saw that for Garrison, “himself is not enough for him.” That is, not only was Garrison’s method an external projection, but the ground of his moral sentiment was also external, outside of himself. Where, for Emerson, the moral outrage against slavery must be an expression of the self as the agent of the Oversoul, Garrison turned outward to popular religion for authority. Emerson was impressed enough by Garrison’s sincerity that he saw the presence of Truth in his words, but Garrison did not have the self-trust necessary to understand its origin; the pure power of his message was polluted by the religious medium he employed, as well as by his ambition to create a great society of followers. Both of these failures were on display in the founding document of Garrison’s Anti-Slavery Society: Declaration of the Anti-Slavery Convention: Assembled in Philadelphia, December 4, 1833, written by Garrison himself. The document would have been well known to Emerson because, one week after the convention, it was published in the Liberator, a periodical he was familiar with and which would, in the twenty years following his 1844 address, publish twenty-seven of his own articles.27 The Declaration featured, as a header, an artist’s drawing of a heroic figure subduing a dragon under his foot; the subtitle was Psalm 91:13, “Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet.” Surrounding the drawing were Bible verses from both Old and New Testaments, each summoned to bear witness to God’s opposition to slavery and oppression. Garrison invoked biblical imagery throughout the text of the Declaration, comparing the American slaves with those under the Pharoah (whom God liberated), declaring that slavery is “usurping the prerogative of Jehovah” by taking away the inalienable right of freedom; “that every American citizen, who retains a human being in involuntary bondage, as his property, is [according to Scripture] a MAN STEALER” [Exodus 21:16]; and “that all those laws which are now in force, admitting the right of slavery, are therefore before God utterly null and void; being an audacious usurpation of the Divine prerogative . . . a transgression of all the holy commandments.”28 The Declaration concluded with a list of the ambitious goals of the Society to increase its numbers and fame by establishing auxiliary organizations “in every city, town and village.” One such auxiliary society was the Concord

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Female Anti-Slavery Society whose leading members were Emerson’s closest friends and family. Thus, by accepting the invitation to bring the address to the West Indies Emancipation celebration, Emerson would appear to be admitting the failure of moral suasion of individuals to reform society, and he would be publicly allying himself with Garrison’s Society. Some critics of Emerson latch onto this decision as evidence of his leaving his transcendental idealism behind and becoming fully engulfed in the affairs of the material world. Such a case is strengthened by the fact that, by his own admission, Emerson’s extensive research in preparation for this address immersed him in the horrific conditions of slavery; the inference is then drawn that the abstract nature of his idealism shattered in the face of it all. ADDRESS ON THE EMANCIPATION OF THE NEGROES IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES Emerson’s Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies, given on August 1, 1844, begins with comments about the gravity of the slavery issue in New England, then, “Therefore I will speak—or, not I, but the might of liberty in my weakness.”29 This small phrase contains within it two important indications of what is to follow. First, in speaking out on this issue and risking that, in so doing, he will be misunderstood and mis-associated, Emerson is exhibiting his conviction articulated in the American Scholar Address of 1837 that the scholar who cultivates the intellect without action is an incomplete person. Second, the comment that “liberty will speak in spite of his weakness” is not merely a self-deprecating moment of humility but a reference to the transcendental metaphysic which underlies the address. As the address commences, Emerson, in sound rhetorical fashion, captures his audience’s attention by offering a flowery depiction of the hypocrisy of New Englanders that care nothing for the plight of the Negro in slavery, as long as his suffering sustains their own luxurious life of drinking fine coffee and eating ice cream. He then contrasts this with graphic anecdotes of the horrors befalling the slaves of the American South at the hands of their sadistic owners. Emerson then returns to the occasion of their gathering and tells the story of England’s eventual emancipation of the slaves in the colonized West Indies ten years prior. As he relates it, the story was ultimately one of conflict between matter/material and soul/spirit taking place in the human sphere and the resolution of that conflict through the metaphysical necessity that takes human history forward. The themes and their relations are much like what

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Emerson described in Experience, Oversoul, and Self-Reliance. The forces at work in England were the greed of the West Indian planters and English consumers on the one hand, and principles of justice and compassion on the other. After a detailed analysis of the material considerations, Emerson concluded that there may, indeed, have been a case to have been made that, all things considered, it would be more profitable to end slavery, but he praised Parliament for not coming to their conclusion on this materialistic basis. Instead, their conclusion was based on “delight in justice and honest tenderness for the poor negro.”30 Material calculations had been set aside for moral sentiment. The reaction of the planters and the slaves to the decision also displayed the matter/soul dualism. The planters feared an uprising that would threaten themselves and their property and took measures to protect themselves. Instead, there were no insurrections, and Emerson recited numerous accounts of the slaves filling their churches and chapels to pray and give thanksgiving. Of the reports he commented, “I have never read anything in history more touching than the moderation of the negroes.”31 Again, the pro-slavers revealed their fearful reliance on the material, while it was the negro that rose above such considerations to a spiritual celebration of the victory of the principle of liberty. Having told England’s story, Emerson returned to the horrors of American slavery and the personal impact his research for this address had on him. He enjoins political leaders to stand up against pro-slavery forces yet remains true to his principle that it is not political power that changes but individual reform, as that reform is an outworking of the metaphysical source creating human history in the future. It is, in fact, when we place our trust in “statesmen and social standing” that we allow the moral force to be blurred.32 Emerson thus argued that emancipation was not accomplished in England by power, but “this was a moral revolution . . . achieved by plain men . . . under sentiment . . . this was the repentance of the tyrant.”33 Emerson saw the moral revolution as being grounded in his monistic view that the laws of morality and of the universe are one. Thus, he continues, “The reasonableness of the law is the soul of the law” and then, in a comment reminiscent of his opening claim that liberty would speak through his weakness, “Out it would come, the God’s truth, out it came, like a bolt from a cloud, for all the mumbling of the lawyers. One feels very sensibly in all this history that a great heart and soul are behind there, superior to any man, and making use of each, in turn, and infinitely attractive to every person according to the degree of reason in his own mind.”34 In spite of his own weakness, and despite the mumblings of the English lawyers, God/Truth speaks out through the individual’s reason and takes human history forward.

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Emerson concluded on a positive note for the future: emancipated slaves would be on a par with whites in developing a civilized society because it is not skin color that matters: it is the intellect, “the intellect—that is miraculous!”35 This prediction is contingent, however, on two factors: first, the individual man, black or white, is responsible for himself and his response to the divine; and second, the divine, irresistible nature must deem it so: “It [this nature] deals with men after the same manner. If they are rude and foolish, down they must go. . . . [On the other hand] If the black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization, for the sake of that element, no wrong, nor strength, can hurt him: he will survive and play his part.”36 Though it would be nearly twenty years before Emerson’s optimism would officially begin to see fulfillment,37 his view did not change. In those years he turned more and more to Vedantism to express the transcendental faith that made his optimism possible. In his Fugitive Slave Law Address given ten years after the West Indies Address, he still held that taking part in the public spectacle of the anti-slavery movement struck him as “odious and hurtful” and like “meddling or leaving your work,” but, regardless, to bring the voice of moral sentiment to combat the greed of materiality was precisely the kind of action necessary for one to be a complete person. In doing so, one plays their role in that aspect of the divine narrative we know as human history. Emerson concluded his 1854 address with “I hope we have reached the end of our unbelief; have come to a belief that there is a divine Providence in the world, which will not save us but through our own cooperation.”38 These words were written in the years between the publication of Emerson’s essay on Plato in Representative Men and his poem Brahma, two of his most Vedantic works. Experiencing the public issue of slavery as an aspect of the broader metaphysical drama of the Divine/Universal Soul putting forth nature through human individual perception and action was Emerson’s faith response to the greatest issue of his time. NOTES 1. MME-L 442. 2. Rusk, Life, 301. 3. Martha Banta, “Gymnasts of Faith, Fate, and Hazard,” in Emerson: New Appraisals: A Symposium, ed. Leonard Nick Neufeldt (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1973), 10. 4. Banta, “Gymnasts,” 16–17. 5. Whicher, Freedom and Fate, 141. 6. Len Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 35–36.

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7. JMN 9:120. 8. Joel Porte, Emerson in His Journals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 274. 9. Whicher, Freedom and Fate, 171. 10. Whicher, Freedom and Fate, 172. 11. Albert J. Von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 327. 12. Packer, Emerson’s Fall, 124. 13. CW 3:34. 14. CW 3:40. 15. CW 3:44. 16. CW 3:46. 17. Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero, 146. 18. L 2:371–72. 19. For the relationship between Emerson’s rejection of the Brook Farm invitation and his opening his home to Thoreau, see Joel Porte, Emerson in His Journals, 214. 20. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Present State of Ethical Philosophy,” in Kenneth Walter Cameron, Transcendental Climate 1 (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1963), 20. 21. JMN 2:49. 22. JMN 4:357. 23. Len Gougeon, “Emerson’s Abolition Conversion,” in The Emerson Dilemma: Essays on Emerson and Social Reform, ed. T. Gregory Garvey (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 177. 24. JMN 5:91. 25. JMN 7:281. 26. T. Gregory Garvey, “Emerson, Garrison and the Anti-Slavery Society,” in Emerson Bicentennial Essays, eds. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2006), 153. 27. John Michael Moran, Collected Poems of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of Transcendental Concord (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1964), 149–50. The volume includes a list of literary contributions to the Liberator by Concord transcendentalists. 28. Richard Harwell, “The Declaration of the Anti-Slavery Convention: Assembled in Philadelphia, December 4, 1833,” in The Touchstone (Massachusetts: Smith College, 1970). 29. CW 10:302. 30. CW 10:317. 31. CW 10:309. 32. CW 10:322. 33. CW 10:320. 34. CW 10:321. 35. CW 10:325. 36. CW 10:325.

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37. Reference here is to the official act of President Abraham Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. 38. W 11:244.

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Seeing Emerson’s Faith in His Life The Problem of California

Emerson made only one trip to the Far West to visit California. The year was 1871, Emerson was sixty-eight years old, and the duration of the trip was only six weeks. He traveled by Pullman car from Boston to Chicago, then to San Francisco, as the guest of his daughter Edith’s father-in-law, John Forbes, who had arranged the trip for select friends. Emerson would go on to write only one more work after this trip: Social Aims. Before he did so, his house would burn down, and he would make his third trip to Europe. It is difficult, then, to trace a direct line of influence between his trip to California and his published works.1 The value of the trip for Emerson was its existential confirmation of his transcendental view of faith. That confirmation came in the polarity of nature and observer, a polarity articulated in Nature and essential to transcendental idealism. Emerson’s journals and correspondence attest to the fact that the too-rapid expansion west, and California in particular, symbolized a challenge to transcendental faith. Long before his California trip, Emerson had come to share the same preconceptions and stereotypes of the Far West and its settlers as his fellow New Englanders. On the one hand, the American Far West was a provincial extension of the European metaphor of America as El Dorado.2 So, in his address in 1841, Emerson had said, “Who shall think he has come late into nature, or has missed anything excellent in the past, who seeth the admirable stars of possibility, and the as yet untouched continent of hope glittering with all its mountains in the vast West?”3 Appropriately, this quote came from his address on The Method of Nature, for it was in the nature of the West that Emerson saw the “stars of possibility.” Nature, as yet value-neutral, awaited human experiencing. In City of the West, Michael Cowan interprets the imputing of value to nature as a civilizing act and argues that Emerson shared the common social/political vision for colonization of the West: that the great challenge of the West was a moral 145

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challenge to create from value-neutral resources societies that radiated the brightest of American ideals and dreams, rather than the darkest.4 But surely for Emerson the most fundamental act of value assignment comes in the epistemic act of human experiencing. The quote above from The Method of Nature came in a refrain praising not the social structures that educate/civilize one into a mature appreciation of nature, but rather the divine which transcends the human act of experiencing with meaning and value. The refrain continues: “I know, that these qualities [of the soul] did not now begin to exist, cannot be sick with my sickness nor buried in any grave; but that they circulate through the Universe: before the world was, they were.”5 For Emerson, the mature, civilized mind does not impute meaning and value to nature; rather, nature provides the occasion for that mature mind to experience the transcendent, by which meaning and value are discovered. This reception of the transcendent through nature is the core of the transcendentalist notion of faith. In this sense the ambiguity of the West presented a challenge for transcendental idealism that was firstly about the individual. It was not nature that needed to be conformed to society, but the individual who needed to be opened to nature. The seriousness of this challenge was very real for Emerson because he also shared with his fellow New Englanders the view of the settlers moving west as rebels fleeing civilization, motivated by greed in the case of gold seekers or by asocial values epitomized by the case of the polygamous Mormons. In 1823, while still at Harvard, he referred in his Journals to these pioneers as the “offscouring of civilized society who have been led to embark in these enterprises by the consciousness of ruined fortunes or ruined character, or perchance a desire for that greater license which belongs to a new & unsettled community”6 and indicated his concern that this “overflowing richness wherewith God has blessed this country be not misapplied or made a curse of; that this new storehouse of nations shall never pour out upon the world an accursed tribe of barbarous robbers.”7 A journal entry of 1850 indicates that his view had not changed: “My own quarrel with America, of course, was that the geography is sublime, but the men are not . . . that the means by which events so grand as the opening of California, Oregon, & the junction of the two oceans, are effected, are paltry, the filthiest selfishness, fraud, & conspiracy.”8 What Emerson did not share with his fellow New Englanders was his view that traditional Christians around him in New England were, in a spiritual, existential sense, no better off than this “offscouring of civilized society.” According to Emerson, the Christian churches’ response to life in the new world had been a failure. Instead of capitalizing on the opportunity to free religious experience from the dead forms of the past, it had turned to those forms for a sense of security and rootedness. The church had turned Jesus and revelation into relics of the past instead of illustrations of the life of faith for

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each person of today. The same mentality had reduced the life of faith to the recitation of church dogma. Because religious faith had come to mean a static belief in the propositions that comprised the doctrines of the church, Emerson seldom used the word faith to describe his deeply religious experience; he preferred to refer to it as “the ideal view.” Faith for Emerson was a view, or, perhaps better, viewing. Faith was not a commitment to dogmas but the dynamic activity of interpreting each moment of experience. The challenge that the ambiguities of the West offered to Emerson as Transcendental Idealist was quite different from the challenge his fellow New Englanders saw. For them, the problem was how to impose their own meaning and values on the vast human and natural resources of the West, the same challenge faced by earlier generations of European colonizers of the Americas. For Emerson, the problem was not with nature but with the settler. For him, meaning and value cannot be imputed to nature but are discovered there by one whose character is grounded in faith. In reading Emerson’s most famous work, Nature, as an anti-Jacksonian-expansionist political work, Kris Fresonke puts it this way: “The important distinction here is that for Emerson, American nature was not just an adornment of Columbus’ arrival, but had a preexisting, pre-Columbian genius, one that Columbus fortunately happened upon. . . . The Jacksonians would miss this point entirely . . . in their view that nature would only come to life when heroics like western settlement took place; otherwise, it had no genius of its own.”9 But the “genius” of nature can be apprehended only by the faith perspective that experiences the transcendent divine in the human act of transcending. For Emerson, the threat that the West represented was not social/political but individual/spiritual. Its promise of unbridled freedom was undermining the character of those leaving to settle it. If the settlers of the West were without depth of character, then the “overflowing richness wherewith God has blessed this country” would indeed be “misapplied or made a curse of.” EMERSON’S TRIP TO CALIFORNIA Emerson’s trip to California confirmed his transcendental view of faith by presenting him with the awesome spiritual resources of its natural wonders, in contrast to the settlers whose characters seemed ill-equipped to respond in faith. Of the four weeks that he spent in California, he spent fourteen days in Yosemite; the balance of time was spent in and around San Francisco and Oakland, with a side trip to Lake Tahoe. He read five papers in San Francisco and one in Oakland to audiences respectable enough in size but lacking in

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enthusiasm. Newspaper reviews of his lectures were poor, emphasizing failure in delivery more than content.10 The greatest impression made on Emerson was the geography and climate of California. Reflecting on his experience, he wrote to Carlyle: “California surprises with a geography, climate, vegetation, beasts, birds, fishes even, unlike ours; the land immense; the Pacific Sea . . . the mountains reaching the altitude of Mont Blanc; the State in its 600 miles of latitude producing all our Northern fruits, & also the fig, orange, & banana. But the climate chiefly surprised me.”11 In one of the very few journal entries made during this time, he noted, “The attraction and superiority of California are in its days. It has better days, and more of them, than any other country.”12 It is not surprising that by visiting California in the spring and spending nearly half of his time in Yosemite (some of that time with John Muir), Emerson would see his expectations of an El Dorado fulfilled. The attraction of this El Dorado was so great that he wrote to Lydia: “And if we were all young—as some of us are not,—we might each of us claim his quarter-section from the Government, & plant grapes & oranges, & never come back to our east winds & cold summers—only remembering to send home a few tickets for the Pacific Railroad to one or two or three pale natives of the Massachusetts Bay.”13 But the lure of an El Dorado has its dark side. Emerson’s firsthand experiences of the settlers that he had referred to in his youth as the “offscouring” of society began when he stopped along the way in Salt Lake City to meet Brigham Young, husband of twenty-seven wives, father to fifty-six children, and president of the Mormons.14 The reputation of this group was well known: Emerson’s daughter Ellen made the comment in a letter to him that “Elizabeth Ripley laughed to hear that he had called on Brigham Young,”15 and the women of Emerson’s traveling group refused to join him in the visit. The visit was the low point of the trip. James Thayer, the group’s biographer, recorded the uncomfortable nature of the conversations with Brigham, as well as Emerson’s comment immediately afterward that Mormonism was “an afterclap of Puritanism.”16 Still later Emerson would remark in a letter to Carlyle regarding Brigham Young and his Mormon followers: “He is clearly a sufficient ruler, & perhaps a civilizer of his kingdom of blockheads ad interim; but I found that the San Franciscans believe that this exceptional power cannot survive Brigham.”17 He found the general populace in California little more impressive. In a letter to Lydia, he wrote: “There is an awe & terror lying over this new garden—all empty as yet of any adequate people, yet with this assured future in American hands—unequalled in climate & production.”18 Appalled at the lack of respect shown for elders, Emerson made the anecdotal comment in his Journal: “What they once told me at St. Louis is truer in California, that there is no difference between a boy & a man: As soon as a boy is ‘that high,’ (high

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as the table,) he contradicts his father. When introduced to a stranger, he says, ‘I am happy to make your acquaintance,’ and shakes his hand like a senior.”19 The one bright spot was Emerson’s association with John Muir which began on May 5, 1871. Muir’s intimacy with nature made him a kind of existential mirror of Emerson’s intellectual articulation of transcendental idealism. The two became immediate friends, and Muir even planned a camping trip for the two of them so that they might sleep out in a tent in the midst of Yosemite Valley. Muir described Emerson’s childlike euphoria over the idea, along with the squelching of the plan by his stuffy New England traveling companions who were too imprisoned by their “house habit” to imagine a night under the clear sky.20 Their shared sense that nature is a vehicle of a transcendental awareness of the Spirit formed a bond that held them together beyond the duration of Emerson’s visit. Through their correspondence each would attempt to lure the other to make a move closer to themselves: both geographically by traveling across the country and existentially. Muir wrote long, flowing prose enticing Emerson to return to the spiritual family of Yosemite’s natural wonders; Emerson would send books to Muir and invite him to leave his “mountain tabernacle” and “bring your ripe fruits so rare and precious into a waiting society.”21 But Muir was a radical exception to Emerson’s perceptions of the settlers of the West. Indeed, the last line of his letter of invitation to Muir in 1872 promised that if he would come to New England, “I will show you better people,”22 a comment Muir picked up on and mocked in a letter of his own to his mentor and friend, Mrs. Jeanne C. Carr.23 The juxtaposition of Emerson’s experience of the richness of California’s natural wonder and the poverty of its culture was expressed in his letter to Lydia and Ellen upon his departure for home: “The country is everywhere rich in trees & endless flowers, & New England starved in comparison. . . . [A few lines later:] ’Tis a delightful & a cheap country to live in for a New Englander, though costly enough to the uproarious unthrifty population that drift into it.”24 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TRIP California was therefore a paradigmatic symbol of the challenge to transcendental idealism. The overcoming of the polarity of nature and observer which lies at the center of transcendentalism was put into its starkest form: the overwhelming beauty and grandeur of nature, and the uncultured crassness of the observer. The speed of expansionism and the ambiguity of awesome vastness presented opportunities for lawlessness and greed. Emerson shared

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with his New England contemporaries the concern that the race westward had outstripped the development of culture. For his contemporaries, however, culture entailed imposing meaning and structure upon individuals and the natural world. For them, the culture that the West needed was a sociopolitical order that would educate individuals in proper moral values and Christian beliefs. From this would follow the appropriation of nature according to these values. For Emerson, however, proper moral values and truly religious faith could be penultimately grounded only in education. For him, the role of education was to cultivate an openness to the transcendent which is the true ground of values. What was lacking in the settlers of the West was the depth of character necessary to experience the transcendental activity of the Oversoul pointing back to itself in each moment of the experience of nature: in a word, faith. NOTES 1. William Hawley Davis, “Emerson the Lecturer in California,” in California Historical Society Quarterly 20 (1941), 10. 2. Emerson uses it in both ways: “Europe would lack the regenerating impulse, & America lie waste if it had not been for El Dorado.” JMN 2:194. 3. CW 1:136. 4. Michael H. Cowan, City of the West: Emerson, America, and Urban Metaphor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 42–43. 5. CW 1:137. 6. JMN 2:115–16. 7. JMN 2:115–16 (1823). See also JMN 11:284 (1850). 8. JMN 11:284. 9. Kris Fresonke, West of Emerson: The Design of Manifest Destiny (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 121. 10. Davis, Emerson the Lecturer, 12. See also Lois Rather, R.W. Emerson, Tourist: The Story of R.W. Emerson’s Visit to CA in 1871 (Oakland: Rather Press, 1979), 31–42. 11. Joseph Slater, ed., The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 582. 12. J 1864–1876, 353. 13. L 6:152. 14. James Bradley Thayer, A Western Journey with Mr. Emerson (Boston: Little Brown, 1884), 43. 15. L 6:151. 16. Thayer, A Western Journey, 44–48. 17. Slater, Correspondence, 582. 18. L 6:158. 19. JMN 16:239–40.

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20. William Frederick Bade, The Life and Letters of John Muir (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1924), 256. Quoted from John Muir’s Our National Parks. 21. Bade, The Life and Letters, 1:259. 22. Bade, The Life and Letters, 1:260. 23. Bade, The Life and Letters, 1:261. 24. L 6:157.

Epilogue

EMERSON FOR TODAY The setting in which Emerson’s story took place was in many respects like our own. In his time it was the youth of the nation that supplied a prevailing sense of uncertainty, but it was also that youthfulness that provided optimism for the future. In our time it is the failure of that future that fuels a similar sense of existential uncertainty.1 Emerson’s America was seeking to define itself in relation to its European heritage. In this context Emerson described America as a child among its elders. Like a child it was responsible to carve out its own autonomous identity in that relation. If this process did not bring with it enough ambiguities, it was further complicated by the fact that American intellectuals were confronted with the same challenges that were rocking the European intellectual world itself. In the philosophical sphere, Locke’s empiricism seemed unable to survive Hume’s skeptical critique, and Kant’s critical philosophy seemed, to many, to be a remedy that was worse than the malady. On the theological front, the foundations of traditional Christianity were being shaken by the development of scientific biblical criticism, the results of which denied the divine origin or even the uniqueness of the Bible. And finally, due to imperialist expansion and colonization, the cosmic centrality of Western European culture was coming into question. As I have briefly outlined in the first section of this work, the reaction to these challenges by the intellectuals in Emerson’s milieu was what one would expect of youthful insecurity: to grasp for something solid. Locke’s empiricism, or a form of it, was reaffirmed; the intrusion of biblical criticism into the claims of biblical authority were all but ignored; and non-Western cultures encountered through colonialization were dismissed as barbarous. Philosophical and religious foundations, and the culture they supported, would continue, transplanted from Europe but relatively unscathed. 153

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Emerson’s prophetic contribution began with his rejection of this attempt to find security in the present by looking to the past. In his revolutionary phase, Emerson found inspiration in post-Kantian idealism and Vedantic/ Neo-Platonic metaphysical monism. The former emphasized the active role of human cognition in constructing meaningful experience; the latter placed this dynamic activity of meaning creation into the context of the Divine/ Oversoul whose ongoing creative activity puts the world forward through our experience. The paradigmatic expression of this was found in the story of Krishna and Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. From this Emerson rejected the traditional philosophical and theological attempts to find safety in the institutions of the past. He could no longer see the person of faith as the one who assents to the truth of a particular set of propositions whose content and authority reside in the past and then organizes her/his life around the external demands derived from them. Faith was, for him, living in the recognition that one is, in each moment of experience, the conduit of God’s/Oversoul’s creative activity. A central aspect of this activity of the Oversoul through the individual self was, for Emerson, the unity of the natural and the moral law, known in the self as the moral sentiment. Thus the life of faith is lived from within outward. Understanding Emerson’s faith in this way sheds light on just how it was that the greatest tragedy of his life, the death of his child, led him into a deeper sense of the relation of faith to the mundane affairs of life. Thanks in part to the greater availability of original sources, he turned more and more to the Vedantic stories and Persian poetry to express this sense of the divine dimension of everyday life. Appreciating that Emerson’s monistic metaphysic was central to his thought throughout his mature years, and that his transcendental living faith was at the center of this, acquits him of some charges commonly leveled at him and results in a reassessment of his contribution to American intellectualism. Since in his view human experience takes place in what Vedantism calls maya—the reality which is ultimately illusory—the metaphysical truth of the unity of all in the One/Oversoul is experienced by humans as the transcendence of the One in the individual: the all in each. The individual self is then always penultimate to the One/Oversoul which transcends it. Since the individual self is neither ultimate nor the source of its own divinity, Emerson cannot be accused of divinizing the self or even holding to a radical egoism. Further, though Nietzsche appreciated Emerson’s emphasis on individualism, Nietzsche did not locate the power of the individual in its reliance on a metaphysical source; Emerson was not an American version of Nietzsche. In this vein it might also be concluded that Emerson’s notion of the individual did not result in the rugged American individualism attributed to him; he was more the prophet of faith than the prophet of American individualism.

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The message of this prophet of faith, however, did not survive the nineteenth century. I have argued that Emerson was a century ahead of his time in his notion of a transcendental living faith and that some postmodern philosophers of religion in the last half of the twentieth century have been arriving at a similar view through a similar train of reasoning. Why was it, then, that this view of faith did not speak to Emerson’s world but is finding an audience today? Zygmunt Bauman offers a description of the development of postmodern society from its modern predecessor that provides some insight into this question. Emerson lived on the cusp of this transition. The post-Kantian revolution in epistemology that would usher in postmodernism was just entering the American intellectual scene, but in the face of this perceived threat, the mainstream was clutching to the modernism of Lockean empiricism. Bauman’s description of modern society fits Emerson’s nineteenth-century setting quite well. According to Bauman, modern society was characterized by structure and authority. Nature was tamed and controlled by conforming it to human reason and gradually commodifying it to meet human needs. Human identity and interpersonal relationships came to be defined and controlled through role definitions grounded in social institutions such as the family, church, workplace, and so on. The world became safer as we seemed to become masters of it. Reason, that enabled us to control the natural world, would likewise enable us to create the best possible society.2 Bauman sees this reasonable society as an artificial construction, replacing the natural relation of human individuals to nature. Thus power to have authority over others had to be conferred on some in order to keep this otherwise unnatural order in place.3 In Emerson’s America the power to keep this order in place was grounded in religion and wielded by its interpreters. This would soon give way to classical capitalism with its twin powers of the intellectual and the economic communities that would define the order of society and the roles of individuals within it. The intellectual and economic communities were each arranged hierarchically with an elite class at the top. The two communities complemented and validated one another: the intellectual community provided the avenue for gaining expertise needed for advancement to higher levels of leadership and responsibility, as well as the philosophical justification for a capitalist economic social order itself, and the capitalist economic structure guaranteed that the intellectual elite would be members of the class of wealthy power brokers defining society. Institutions within classical capitalist society such as education, medicine, religion, etc., would take their place as sub species eternai of the larger social structure. In each case there would be a hierarchy of expertise linked to a corresponding hierarchy of wealth. Eventually, corporations were organized as microcosmic reflections of the reasonable society. Owners hired managers

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with expertise in organizing material and human resources for efficient production, minimum cost, and maximum profit. In the case of religion, the mantle of expertise was bestowed by the religious community through structures such as seminaries and divinity schools, which were part and parcel of the larger network of educational institutions. Advancement through various levels of education corresponded to levels of respect and compensation. The individual in this modern capitalist society found her sense of identity in her participation in a variety of social institutions; conforming to the role expectations of each provided stability in relationships and a feeling of existential security. There were rules to play by, and playing well would be rewarded. High levels of expertise meant impressive job titles in prestigious firms and salaries that would enable one to purchase symbols of social success. If one were religious, one exercised their religious faith by membership in a church or similar social institution where there were doctrines or bylaws to accept and role definitions to abide by. The doctrines and role definitions were grounded in the revelation of God but defined by the church and its intellectual elite. Even personal piety would be pious only when it conformed to the implicit or explicit parameters that were grounded in the authority of the church. Since the truth of church doctrine is not known in the same way as the mundane fact claims of the natural order, it must be chosen in faith. The virtue of faith is, in this understanding, the commitment of the individual to the revealed truths of God as transmitted through tradition and made available to the individual by the intellectual elites. The church and other social institutions were dependable sources of meaning and identity formation because they were ultimately grounded in the larger network that one was assured was the most reasonable society. Bauman describes this as the legislative society because of the authority of the intellectual/economic power structure to legislate social roles that define individuals.4 In the classical capitalist legislative society, it was the profit motive, or, put more broadly, the hope that one might advance oneself and/or one’s family up the social ladder, that kept the whole structure from collapsing. Emerson lived in the early stages of this development of the American capitalist society and shared the optimism of his contemporaries that such a development was a reasonable outworking of the evolution of human society forward. He was dismayed, however, to see that the greed inherent in such a development perverted the moral sentiment of the intellectual elite, specifically when it came to issues of social justice. Daniel Webster’s support of the Fugitive Slave Law was, for Emerson, the paradigmatic symbol of this perversion. He was also disillusioned by the failure of the church as a social institution to provide a prophetic voice to either individuals or social issues. According to Bauman’s analysis, the modern capitalist structure that Emerson knew eventually collapsed; the ladder broke, and with it went the

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hope that it could be trusted to deliver one upward. Bauman describes this crisis in terms of overproduction. As the gap between the wealthy owners of production and the human resources of production grew, those at the top disengaged.5 Laborers and management became interchangeable and expendable means of production; they became commodities themselves. Globalization has exacerbated this trend by allowing corporate powers to shop for natural and human resources for production in the worldwide mall. The twin powers that once guaranteed the artificial order imposed on nature and our human relationships are no longer interested in doing so. As the wealthy disengage from the means of production and treat those means as pieces on a global chessboard, the intellectual elite retreat into the freedom of anonymity.6 The profit motive and hope to climb the ladder are useless in this fluid context of the multinational corporate world where individuals live adrift, awaiting the next displacement. Instead of defining themselves in terms of the roles legislated within a stable social network, individuals find their meaning and sense of empowerment in their power to consume goods. The intellectual elite are displaced by the market and its ability to seduce consumers into buying commodities, as well as its proclivity to commodify everything from education itself to political candidates and issues. It is not expertise that is of value, but the salary which gives one the power to consume. Where acquiring luxury items was once a symbol of success, it is now the success itself; where becoming an educated person was once of value, it is now the diploma. Owning a new Mercedes does not point to the fact that one has reached a level of success in society; the owning of the Mercedes is one’s success, and the degree from a prestigious university is far more important than whether or not one received an education there. A job title is only a passing epitaph; status must be sought in possessions because only in consuming can one exercise freedom and demonstrate the power to control something. Postmodern society is therefore a pastiche of worldviews expressed in forms of life that are self-validating. Individuals move about this landscape forging temporary alliances around common, but usually temporary, interests.7 In the midst of this insecure and fluid environment, religious faith seems little more than a nostalgic attempt to recapture a bygone era. According to Bauman’s analysis, the postmodern religious person clings to a structure she knows full well has collapsed. The idea that the church through its authoritative structure can legislate role definitions for its members went out with the legislative society in which it was embedded. Religion can no longer relieve one of the freedom and responsibility of creating the pastiche that will be one’s life. In Bauman’s language the legislative society of modernism has been replaced by the interpretive society of postmodernism.8

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One response to Bauman’s critique of postmodern society and the place of religion in it would of course be to simply reject it. One could argue along the lines that religion is in fact an expression of revolt against the perception that life is transient and that individuals are without role definitions by which to find meaning, that in religion one finds that source of meaning that postmodern society seems to be missing. But that would dislocate religion from its social context and create a kind of schizophrenic reality for the person of faith: one would be continually interpreting and reinterpreting oneself in terms of the opportunities and dislocations of a fluid postmodern society, while in the same moment holding to a religious faith that legislates one’s self-understanding in terms of an unchanging divine order. Such nostalgia for the safety of the past deprives us of an opportunity to reconsider the new condition in which people of faith find themselves and to rethink the nature of faith in that context. If Bauman is correct in describing postmodern society as fluid and the plight of individuals within that society as continually creating and re-creating themselves as they tour through transient stations in life, then essential to the postmodern individual is the continual process of interpreting their world and themselves in that world. Religious faith conceived as an element of that interpretive process affirms the reality in which the postmodern individual finds herself, while at the same time providing a way of experiencing that reality as having a dimension which transcends it. In this postmodern context, the religious person is no longer a tool in the hand of the religious tradition; the tradition is now one of the many tools in the hand of the religious person as they go about interpreting their world. This requires a dynamic notion of religious faith. It is in this context that contemporary philosophers of religion, building on post-Kantian epistemology and Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, have developed the notion of religious faith as an interpretive element in experience and discovered its clearest articulation in the Vedantic teaching of Hinduism. The case I have made is that Emerson, without the advantage of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, developed a nearly identical view of faith a century earlier. Bauman’s analysis of the development of postmodern society from modern capitalist society offers us one way of seeing why it was that Emerson’s transcendental faith did not prevail in his day but is flourishing in ours under a new name. Emerson’s generation was rebuilding on American soil the legislative society it knew from its European heritage. In that context religion was a static social institution whose deep roots in the past promised security in the uncertainties of the present; faith was the individual’s consent to the propositions that defined membership in that institution. Emerson’s rejection of this kind of religion constituted for him and his contemporaries a rejection of the faith, but it was in fact the beginning of a

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dynamic living faith. Emerson’s faith was his existential awareness of participating in the creative act of God/Oversoul transcending the human interpretive act of experience. He too found the clearest expression of this faith in the Vedantic philosophy that inspired pre-Socratic and Platonic philosophers and produced the Bhagavad Gita. Far from being irrelevant for today, Emerson’s transcendental idealism presents us with a view of religious faith that Western society is only now growing into. NOTES 1. Parts of this chapter have been reproduced with permission from my chapter “European Immigration to America: Dislocation and Responses,” in The Meaning of My Neighbor’s Faith, eds. Alexander Y. Hwang and Laura E. Alexander (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2019), 311–23. 2. Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (New York: Routledge, 1992), 9ff. 3. Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 26–34. 4. Bauman, Intimations, 11. 5. Bauman, Community, chapter 3. 6. Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity, 12–18. See also Community, 57. 7. Bauman, Community, 65–73. 8. Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity, chapter 5.

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Index

Andover Theological Seminary, 22–26

covenant theology, 5–6, 8

Banta, Martha, 133 Bhagavad Gita: Cousin’s use of, 38, 71, 73; Emmerson’s use of, 75, 87, 106–107, 110, 116 bible commonwealth, 4–5 biblical criticism, 12, 13, 35–36, 52; influence on Emerson, 37–38, 73, 77 Bloom, Harold, 86 Brooks, Mary Merrick, 137 Buckminster, Joseph, 36

Degerando, Joseph Marie, 38, 67, 69–70 de Stael. See Holstein, Baroness de Stael The Dial, 101, 115, 127, 137

Calvin, John, 5–6, 8–9, 22–23, 25, 59, 74; Old and New Light Calvinism, 9 Calvinism. See Calvin, John Carlyle, Thomas, vi, 83, 127, 148 Cavell, Stanley, 89 Channing, William Ellery, 10, 24, 30, 52–53, 112 Chauncy, Charles, 10 cognitive freedom, 96–97 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 67–68, 71–72, 83–84, 98, 110 compensation, 75 constructivist epistemology, 115 Cousin, Victor, 38, 70–71, 73, 84

Edwards, Jonathan, 9 Emerson, Charles, 20, 66, 76, 78 Emmerson, Edith, 145 Emerson, Edward, 20, 21, 26, 66, 67, 71 Emmerson, Ellen Luisa Tucker, 65–67, 70–71, 72, 102, 108 Emerson, Mary Moody, 15–17, 19, 54–55, 57, 67, 72, 76, 83, 85, 137; interactions with the Emerson family members, 15–17, 21, 26, 66, 72; influence on Ralph, 17, 20, 21, 46n74, 55–56, 60–62, 76, 83–85, 113, 133 Emerson, Ruth, 15, 16, 26, 54 Emerson, William Jr., 21, 37, 43, 66, 67, 78 Emerson, William Sr., 15, 17–20, 55 Emmerson, Waldo, 102 empiricism, 12. See also Locke, John Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. See PostKantian philosophy Fourier, Charles, 126 167

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Fourierism, 129 Garden of Plants, 83, 102, 104 Garrison, William Lloyd, 138–139 Gnothi Seauton, 73 Gottfried Eichhorn, Johann, 36 Grandison Finney, Charles, 9 Harvard College: and Hinduism, 38, 39, 40; and Kant, 32–34, 62, 70; and liberal Unitarianism, 22–25; campus environment, 27; curriculum at, 28–32, 38–39; library holdings of, 18, 32 Harvard Theology (Divinity) School, 25 Hedge, Frederic, 84, 101 Hinduism. See Vedantic Hinduism Hick, John, 96–97 Hodge, Charles, 52 Holstein, Baroness de Stael, 32–33, 34, 56, 61–62, 105 Hooker, Thomas, 6–7 Hume, David, 12, 28–29, 59–60, 61 the ideal view. See Transcendental Idealism Indian Superstition, 38–39, 40 interpretive society, 157 Jackson, Lydia, 101–102 Jones, Sir William, 13, 18, 39, 40, 56 Kant, Immanuel, 31–32, 61, 68, 69, 95, 115 legislative society, 156 Locke, John: sensationist philosophy, 12, 28, 52, 120; propositional faith, 27–28, 52 lusters, 56, 70, 117 Man Thinking, 108–109, 110 Marsh, James, 67–68 Michaelis, Johann David, 36

monism: causal, 90; dualistic, 86–87; Emerson’s use of, 73, 110, 135, 154; Vedantic/NeoPlatonic, 41–42, 57, 71, 103, 107– 108; Xenophanes and, 103 Mormonism, 148 Muir, John, 148, 149 Murat, Achille, 61, 64n34 Neo-Platonism, 58, 59, 73, 74, 103, 117, 135, 136, 154 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 154 nirguna Brahman, 95, 97, 118 Norton, Andrews, 37, 113 Norton, Andrews, 85 ordinary language philosophy, 89–90. See also constructivist epistemology Oversoul, 82, 84, 118, 130, 136, 139, 154 Persian philosophy, 70, 137 Plato, 50, 56, 57, 69 Platonism. See Plato Plotinus. See Neo-Platonism the problem of evil, 42, 58–59, 62, 74–75 Poirier, Richard, 89–90 Porte, Joel, 88, 134 Post-Kantian philosophy, 32, 50, 61, 84, 106–107, 115–116, 120 postmodern society, 157 Priestly, Joseph, 19 propositional faith: accepted by Emmerson, 43; as common to all versions of Christianity in Emmerson’s setting, 10, 31, 54; in Channing’s view, 30–31; in Locke’s view, 28–29; in Revivalism and Edwards, 8–9; rejected by Emmerson, 68, 120, 147, 154, 158 Puritanism, 4–5

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Reason: Coleridge’s use of, 68, 110; Cousin’s use of, 71; Degerando’s use of, 69; Emerson’s use of, 105– 110; Kant’s use of, 68 Reid, Thomas. See Scottish CommonSense philosophy Revivalism, 8–9 Ripley, George, 126, 127 Ripley, Sophia, 127 Roy, Rammohun, 13, 40, 41–42 saguna Brahma, 95, 97, 118 Schelling, Friedrich. See Post-Kantian philosophy Scottish Common-Sense philosophy, 30, 34, 62 Second Church, 50, 65–66, 77–78 Skepticism, 29. See also Hume, David Sphinx, 116 Stewart, Dugald, 30, 34, 38, 39, 56, 57, 62, 70 Stuart, Moses, 36–37, 51 Thoreau, Henry David, 137, 143n19 Transcendental Club, 85, 101, 108, 115, 127 Transcendental Idealism, 98, 104, 106, 136, 147; and John Muir, 149; and Kant, 94, 115, 120; and the Oversoul, 115–119; and Persian poets, 137; as existential utopianism,

125, 133; referred to as the “ideal view,” 98, 103, 106–107, 119, 147 Unitarianism: and Rammohun Roy, 41–42; articulated by William Ellery Channing, 24, 30, 53. See Harvard College Understanding: Coleridge’s use of, 68, 110; Emerson’s use of, 105, 107, 110; Kant’s use of, 68 Urbas, Joseph, 90 Vedantic Hinduism, 95; and Classical Greek metaphysics, 56–57, 59; and Neo-Platonism, 103, 117, 136; and Persian poets, 137; compared with popular Hinduism, 39, 41–42, 43; Emerson’s early exposure to, 19, 38, 39; Emerson’s use of, 71–74, 84, 95, 106–108, 120, 135– 137, 154; Hick’s use of, 97 Ware, Henry Jr., 65, 111 Ware, Henry Sr., 22 Whicher, Stephen, 86–87, 133–134 Winthrop, John, sermon, 5–6 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 90 Xenophanes, 103, 108 Yannella, Donald, 87–88 Young, Brigham, 148

About the Author

Daniel Campana is a professor of philosophy and religion at the University of La Verne, California. He received his PhD in philosophy of religion from Claremont Graduate University in 1989. Professor Campana has authored several papers dealing with post-Kantian epistemologies of religious faith, particularly as these developed in nineteenth-century transcendental idealism and postmodern philosophy of religion. He has directed study abroad programs in Athens, Greece, and Marburg, Germany, and currently teaches courses in philosophy of religion, and religion and social issues. He is actively involved in the American Philosophical Association, the American Academy of Religion, and the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association. RECENT PUBLICATIONS Campana, D. (2019). “European Immigration to America: Dislocation and Responses.”  In The Meaning of My Neighbor’s Faith: Interreligious Reflections on Immigration, edited by A. Y. Hwang and L. E. Alexander. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Campana, D. (2019). “The Coherence of Emerson’s Epistemology.” The Southwest Philosophy Review, 35(1).

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