Emerson's Living Legacy

Reading

All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, or calculation, or comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie--an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.

. . . 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.

from "The Over-Soul" by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Sermon

Murray’s remarks reveal a profound understanding and experience of Emerson’s central ideas, recast in modern, secular terms. Emerson continues to live in the hearts and minds of many people today, and not just poets. This morning, I want to focus his living legacy, especially how he spoke to a current issue in our denomination, what has been labeled "God-talk," and how that relates to us today.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is a fit topic for this Sunday closest to the 4th of July. He sought "to release individuals from spiritual prisons of all kinds," as a recent critic has put it. He shared the "liberal," Enlightenment view of humans as inherently free, equal, and responsible that guided the makers of the Declaration of Independence. In particular, he sought to free his generation from limited notions of God that prevented from realizing their full potential.

"God talk" tends to make Unitarian Universalists uncomfortable. Our "covenant" (see Hymnal) never mentions "God" in its statement of what we "affirm and promote" or in the sources of our living tradition. Instead, it refers to "that transcending mystery and wonder" that "moves us to a renewal of the spirit," the "forces that create and uphold life," and the "interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part." Yet, we can find all of these versions of the holy or transcendent in Emerson. Most discussions of Emerson focus on just about everything but God, as if this word has become as suspect in thinking about him as in pledging allegiance to the flag. Emerson has been claimed by the secular world: he is the great thinker and writer--essayist and poet; reformer, idealist, humanist and transcendentalist; the prophet of Self-reliance, the champion of individualism, etc. Unitarians have been less sure where he fits in. But, as Richard Geldard points out in his book, God in Concord, God was at the center of everything Emerson said. Whatever his subject, the real theme was always religion. Emerson had moved far beyond the wrathful, controlling God of the Puritans and even the more benevolent God of the Unitarians of his day. That version of God was dead, but it still controlled many minds. His contribution was to reimagine God--to find new images that would convey the modern concept of God as immanent reality, without the baggage.

Murray avoids the word "God," substituting the undefined "something" for whatever is beyond her individual, rational, self, which she connects with through her poems. Yet, her statement is, at bottom, profoundly religious, despite the lack of overt theological language. That something exists beyond our limited, physical selves, that this "something" speaks to humans, and that we have a "duty" to respond to this voice through our work in the world sums up a connection between something we could call "God" and humans. In Emerson’s very positive, affirmative view of human nature, we are surrounded by and filled with divinity. Our duty is to open ourselves to this spiritual order and receive--to pull down the poems, the thoughts and insights that every human is capable of, because all draw from the same source. In our "Covenant," we call this one source "the interdependent web of all existence." Others call it "God."

Throughout his career, Emerson was engaged in re-imagining "God," stretching received notions of the great Mystery, the source of all. This was his response to the spiritual malaise of his day. Geldard finds Emerson’s vision still relevant: "What [Emerson] had to say--specifically about the effort of human beings to recover their humanity from the effects of materialism’s rampage across the American . . . landscape--has abundant vitality for our own reductive postmodernist age."

First and foremost, Emerson was a poet--one whose special talents were the ability to perceive spiritual truth and to transform it into images so that others might also see. Emerson grew up in liberal Unitarian culture that taught we are all capable of self-improvement. From an early age, he discovered his talent for "eloquence," the power to stir men’s inner being through words, and he invented a new career for himself as a public lecturer. In this role (as well as published writings) he served as a secular preacher across the U.S. By his last decade, Emerson was the best-known living American, viewed by many as a secular prophet and seer, the conscience of the nation.

I will focus on the "Divinity School Address," which Emerson delivered to the small graduating class of Harvard Divinity School on July 15, 1838, and which can be considered his religious declaration of independence. It lays out Emerson’s spiritual principles and his challenge to the church of his day. But, first a little background.

As many of you know, Emerson was a Unitarian minister before he became more famous as a public lecturer and writer. He was born in 1803 into a ministerial family in Boston, went to Harvard, and served as pastor of Boston’s Second (Unitarian) Church from 1829-1832. He resigned because he found the church’s formal doctrine too narrow, especially its position on Holy Communion. But, to support himself, he continued to preach from various pulpits in New England for the next five years, while he built his lecture career. At the end of this period he delivered the Divinity School Address, a radical and aggressive statement of his developing thoughts about "historical Christianity"--where Unitarianism had gotten stuck, in Emerson’s analysis.

His primary audience was the six young men who were about to become Unitarian ministers. Even though Emerson had left the church, he was not suggesting they follow him. Instead, he asked for reform from within, specifically in the institution of preaching, which had become deadly and uninspiring, timid and rooted in the past. Why, indeed, he asked, should anyone bother to come to church on Sunday morning when he could gain far more inspiration by taking a walk in the woods?

The true goal of preaching (and teaching), Emerson believed, was to wake people up to their own potential. "It is not instruction but provocation that I can receive from another mind," he told the young men. What he wanted from a preacher was his "life passed through the fire of thought." The preacher’s special task was to "convert life into truth." This is not easy, but Emerson believed it was work he was meant to do. Performing one’s special role was the secret to the good life, and it required tapping into the great source of our being, feeling connected and receptive to the streams of life that flow around and through us.

In this eloquent speech, Emerson practiced what he preached. He served as a model of the ideal preacher he described. His Address was powerful because it represented his life passed through the crucible of his imagination.

But, there were others in the audience besides these young men--their families, Harvard faculty, local ministers, etc.--and what Emerson had to say was regarded by the Unitarian establishment as an attack on the church itself. Emerson knew he was being provocative, but he got more than he bargained for. Controversy erupted and Emerson was personally attacked: the Address was labeled "transcendental nonsense and impiety" and "German insanity" and Emerson called a "heretic"--even "insane." In fact, these men had much to fear from Emerson’s radical ideas about the nature of God and humans, about Jesus, nature, and human potential. Most of Emerson’s ideas were not entirely new, but they were packaged in a new way and delivered on a prominent occasion. The ideas in this address had radical implications for Christianity, and the issues it raises are still with us.

So, what were those issues? I’ll briefly summarize the Address:

Emerson begins with a beautiful description of the natural world on a lovely July day such as this. But, then he leaps to a higher point of view, calling the material world an illustration of the great "mind" that makes the universe. Contemplating nature can lead us to perception of "higher laws" and the great questions that drive human consciousness. (This seeing the material as a symbol of the "real" is idealism; Emerson’s leap from the natural to "higher" principles is an example of the "transcendentalism" most of you remember from studying Emerson in high school.) And, then, he makes still another move: just as opening our senses to the beauty of nature can lead to perception of spiritual laws, so opening our hearts to the "sentiment of virtue" leads to perception of the "moral law." Experiencing this "moral sentiment" or feeling--the inner voice we sometimes call conscience, though Emerson means much more by this--is the essence of religion. It means acting from universal and eternal principles. The implications of this doctrine are vast, as just this short passage makes clear:

[The moral] sentiment is divine and deifying. It is the beatitude of man. It makes him illimitable. Through it, the soul first knows itself. It corrects the capital mistake of the infant man, who seeks to be great by following the great . . .--by showing the fountain of all good to be in himself, and that he, equally with every man, is an inlet into the deeps of Reason. When he says, "I ought;" when love warms him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then, deep melodies wander through his soul from Supreme wisdom.

Having explained his view of true religion, Emerson used his platform to demonstrate how the church of his day was failing to promote this "doctrine of the soul." Instead, it was contributing to the spiritual hunger, the sense of emptiness, that pervaded society in his day--as in ours. He identified two "defects" of "historical Christianity": the church’s position on Jesus (and miracles) and its preaching "as if God were dead." These were the causes of a "decaying church and wasting unbelief."

Emerson’s discussion of these aspects hit hard. Even though Unitarianism had, since the late 18th century, embraced liberal views of human nature and of God, it had not divested itself of all "supernatural" elements, particularly the authority of the Bible as revelation and the basis for faith. Thus, Unitarians still located God "out there," knowable as a result of some supernatural appearances. Jesus was still a special, divine source of revelation, the last and finest example of the perfection of human nature. The biblical miracles were God’s proofs of the authenticity of revelation.

But, Emerson rejected the whole notion of external authority because he had experienced "God" directly--as he tried to communicate in this famous passage: "I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me." Emerson’s doctrine of the soul relocated God as a contemporary, active power "within" each person. "God is, not was," he proclaimed. Jesus was remarkable only because he most perfectly realized what was possible for everyone, that "I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks." And, all life is a miracle; miracles happen around us every day, are not locked up in one book, in the past.

Go and preach this good news about the soul, Emerson told the young men. "In how many churches, by how many prophets . . . is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God?"

Emerson’s writing is full of images like "drinking the soul of God," but "God" is just one name for an eternal consciousness that Emerson also calls the One Mind, or the infinite Absolute, Infinite Being, the Highest Law, the ground of being, "dread universal essence," and the "vast flowing vigor." Everything is the result of the same spirit; every individual has direct connection with this One Mind through his own mind. Emerson's point is not that we should adopt his images but that we should find our own--think for ourselves. In his essay "The Over-Soul" (another name for this fluid divine energy), he offers a beautiful image of our human connection with the source of our being:

Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. . . . I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.

We can’t live in the past or the future. Life is now, and it is always changing. The key is to accept the moment and BE in it fully. He calls this "reception": it means tuning ourselves to our intuitions, because they come from somewhere else. If we learn to listen, we can trust that inner voice that prompts us to be all that we can be. (The analogy I’ve used with my students is TV: spirit, like the TV signal, is out there all the time, but we have to sit down and turn on the TV to receive it.)

But we don’t live this way--for many reasons we lack the "self-trust" that Emerson also called "self-reliance." We are busy and distracted, caught up in our mechanical, economic, material world, with little time for true reflection. We are afraid--of failure, of society’s opinion, of rejection, or looking foolish. We are afraid to rebel against authority and tradition. And, we are lazy: it is easy, as Emerson points out, to follow the crowd, much harder to swim alone, or upstream. It is difficult to cast off traditional teachings about God, Jesus, the Bible, prayer, and salvation that we learned as children. We fear our "inner voice" could be delusional, is not to be trusted without external validation. We make lots of excuses for not accepting responsibility for discovering our own answers to the big questions all religions grapple with: who am I? Why am I here? What is best for me to do while I’m here? Where am I going, what happens when I die?

Emerson devoted his life, his career, to waking people up--provoking them to think for themselves, to trust themselves because they could rely on "a higher origin for events than the will I call mine." This is a statement of religious faith. It is also his way of affirming and promoting "a free and responsible search for truth and meaning."

Emerson’s central doctrine was what he called "the infinitude of the private man." This connects the individual with the infinite. Today we might say, "the infinite potential of the individual human consciousness" (Geldard13)--or "the inherent worth and dignity of every person." Emerson rejected the Calvinist reading of Genesis in which disobedience forever separated sinful man from God unless saved through the mediation of Jesus. In his reading of this myth, modern man had fallen away from, lost his connection with, his true nature, oneness with God, "within" and without and everywhere. As Emerson put it, "We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and know, Love, Freedom, Power." We know these laws of the soul because we experience them in our lives.

Rather than salvation, Emerson called the path to wholeness "self-recovery."

Emerson’s whole philosophy rests on his belief in the divinity (infinitude) of man. Two major scholars of Emerson have summed this up in different, yet similar ways: for Barbara Packer, the "rock" on which all of Emerson’s thought stood is his "internal faith": his immediate conviction of his soul’s connectedness to godhead. For David Robinson, it is his belief in the power and presence of the soul.

Emerson has been criticized because his doctrine of "self-reliance" seems to lead to opportunistic individualism. But, anything that would deny another person his own inherent right of access to sources of spiritual power--his opportunity to reach his fullest potential--violated the deep laws of the universe that were also attributes of "God": justice, truth, love, freedom, power. Respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person places limitations on our freedom. In a lecture opposing slavery, Emerson called this limitation justice:

Among men, this limitation of my liberty by yours,--allowing the largest liberty to each compatible with the liberty of all,--protection seeking my benefit, as long as it does not interfere with your benefit,--is justice,--which satisfies everybody.

And, in the Divinity School Address, he had said, "If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God."

Emerson challenges us to continue to reimagine God--for, after all, as he well knew, humans can experience "God" only in their consciousness. And, in reimaging God, we are also reimaging ourselves.

Closing words

I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.

from "Circles" by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Copyright 2002, Nancy Craig Simmons; Commercial Duplication Prohibited

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