Emerson’s Divinity School Address: a Gaze Into the Persistence of Conservative Religion

Tyler Day English - American Enlightenment Dr. William Huntting Howell May 4, 2012

Reflecting on monumental speeches in the history of the United States, most often they occured in front of vast crowds or at least are given on the precipice of world shifting events.

Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address”, King’s “I Have a Dream”, Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or

Give Me Death”, and JFK’s “Inaugural Address” all share these characteristics. This is what makes the particular address in question here, ’s “Divinity School

Address”, continuously interesting to both literary and religious scholars alike. As D. Elton

Trueblood remarked in 1939, “Is there another modern instance of a speech so famous given in so small an auditorium…where on Sunday evening, July 15th, 1938, there assembled probably six members of the senior class, their teachers, a few of their friends and the thirty five year old man whom they had chosen as their speaker?”1 Given to no more than a few dozen people, some who later would refute the work, and others “aroused by an intoxicating new doctrine” would build upon its premise in their respective communities. Still Emerson’s discourse deconstructing traditional religion to a small graduating cohort would create waves in the intellectual and religious world of New England, causing a divide between establishment Unitarians and free thinkers that would later be referred as “Transcendentalists”. Eventually, many of the tenets

Emerson advocated would filter beyond and set the stage for the ascendancy of liberal theology in mainstream American religion. The historical legacy of this address locates it as a turning point in American intellectual culture, with Emerson as an “American apostle of self-religion”.2 In some ways this is not just the legacy of historical miss-representation, based by the fact that Emerson’s now popular “” received only a handful of reviews during the three years leading up to the Divinity Address. That is contrasted with an explosion of thirty

1 D. Elton Trueblood, "The Influence of Emerson's Divinity School Address." The Harvard Theological Review 32 (1939): 45. 2 Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 59.

1 reviews of the Divinity Address within a few months of its publication. In short, a growing public consciousness of Ralph Waldo Emerson became fully realized after the controversy sparked over theological and institutional ideas in the Divinity Address. But as Clarence Gohdes remarked, “the Divinity School Address had better be regarded as one of the concrete manifestations of a general attitude among the transcendentalists, and not as an extraordinary bit of spiritual pioneering.”3

The purpose of this reflection on the “Divinity School Address” will be to point towards a few elements in Emerson’s progress before the speech, analyze the particular contents within its text, and put that in discussion with a continuous element of American religion that Emerson did not foresee. I am particularly interested in what Emerson thought to be an inevitable decay in tradition religion, and given the current strength of traditional religion in American and the world, I will argue there are elements of Emerson’s expose that points towards that persistence. I will put that question in dialogue with what appears to be a lack of clarity in theological summations, an objective/subjective tension in his understanding of reason, and an unquenchable thirst for knowledge of the world. The result will be a clearer picture of Emerson’s context, an understanding of his specific arguments, and a few angles from which to conceive of American religion today.

As already stated, Emerson should be understood as a representative of an already conceived tradition in American literary culture at the time known as the transcendentalists. One of its pioneer members, Frederic Hedge, was in attendance for Emerson’s address, along with others associated with this strand of thought, including, Theodore Parker, George Ripley,

Margaret Fuller, and others. The transcendentalists reacted to a persistence of a Lockean

3 Clarence Gohdes, "Some Remarks on Emerson's Divinity School Address." American Literature 1 (1929): 31.

2 understanding of British empiricism and sense-, and came to articulate in the tradition of intuitionists and romantics. They are linked to the work of Immanuel Kant, translated by

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, especially in regards to morality being based on intuition and that truth must be internalized through moral autonomy, not by external authority or revelation. By 1835, they had created the “Transcendentalist Club” in Boston, termed “Hedge’s Club” by Emerson as it became a gathering place whenever Frederic Hedge would make the journey from his home in

Maine to Boston. The legacy of the Transcendentalists is that they “created a literary counterculture that had a flair for stylish intellectual expression that was new in

America…proclaiming that religious and moral truth is founded not upon sense-derived knowledge, but on immediate intuitions of the divine.”4

Emerson was surely influenced by this growing movement, but he must also be understood in the context of his religious heritage, especially the development of his brother

William. Emerson came from a line of New England Unitarian establishment ministers, so his preparation for the ministry was more assumed than sought. People often point to the resignation from his post at Second Church Boston in 1932 in connection with a refusal to administer communion, believing the ritual to be out of touch with the “anti-formalistic spirit of Jesus and true religion.”5 This is certainly true, but this was more of a symbolic act at the end of an arduous struggle with the profession. Perhaps an even more consequential development took place for his brother William, which ended up having a reverberating effect on Waldo. At an earlier time, William was also training for the ministry when he began to study in Germany. He became greatly influenced by the burgeoning biblical and historical criticism of people like

Johann Gottfried Eichhorn and Christian Gottlob Heyne. Originally an inspiring notion to

4 Dorrien, 67. 5 Dorrien, 63.

3 William to unleash a newfound faith soon became an all-consuming doubt in the tenability of religion itself. William came back from Germany, left the ministry, and decided to venture into law. From that point a seed had been planted in Emerson, who although never relinquishing the notion of an intuitive religious sentiment, employed “historical criticism to demote the importance of history for religious belief.”6 Emerson left his position as minister of Second

Church Boston, but as we will see in his ending remarks of the address, didn’t discard religion itself. In fact, despite his harsh critiques of institutions, he believed a “new faith” could provide an innovative malleability to transform the existing forms of religious life. With this we can now turn to the address itself.

A Subjective/Objective Address

Despite there being only a few dozen people in attendance, their names are significant in the history of Unitarian and mainstream religion in America. There were faculty members including , Henry Ware, Jacob Pelfrey, and William Ellery Channing.

Emerson’s friends included Frederic Hedge, Theodore Parker, and George Ripley. Interestingly enough, the six or seven graduates whom Emerson spoke to never became substantial historical figures, but that was not the case for the aforementioned members in attendance. It is important to note that Harvard at this time was seen as a liberalizing institution, relatively speaking compared to the likes of Yale, Andover, and other American institutions. The appointment of the liberal Henry Ware in 1805 caused reverberations in American religion, as the staunch orthodox Calvinists quickly formed Andover Theological Seminary as a response. As for

Andrews Norton, the foremost critic of Emerson’s address, he utilized biblical criticism to

6 Dorrien, 59.

4 question the reliability of certain religious texts and concepts. Relatively speaking, Harvard was seen in the eyes of many as a liberal institution. This is why the address and reception is fascinating to religious historians, as it was to Emerson himself.

The Address itself cannot be read as some cohesive philosophical treatise, and Emerson’s critics were correct in citing it as containing “mistiness, vagueness, and undigested philosophy.”7

Perhaps the best way to understand the piece is as a series of arguments around the topic of true and false religion. Although I’m sure one could point to a handful more, I see the following main points in Emerson’s speech.

First, Emerson begins his speech with an admiration of nature, showcasing from the beginning that it is to be understood as a source for true knowledge. Pointing to birds, trees, oceans, and stars, Emerson reflects, “One is constrained to respect the perfection of this world, in which our sense converse.”8 But he quickly admonishes any expectation of a perfect grasping of knowledge. The world is seen as “out-running laws”, which for a variety of reasons, “our imperfect apprehension can see tend this way and that, but not come full circle.” This inability to grasp the whole is not an excuse for ignorance, as Emerson claims a feverous curiosity existing in the human spirit, “never to be quenched”.

From this first principle of the world as source, Emerson moves to the heart of knowledge, mainly a sentiment of virtue common in the human condition. Again rejecting the full grasping of this sentiment, Emerson dictated these virtues “will not be written out on paper, or spoken by the tongue. They elude our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly in each other’s faces, in each other’s actions, in our own remorse.” Yet still these virtues exist as an

7 Trueblood, 52. 8 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Divinity School Address” from Emerson, The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Writings (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003).

5 objective moral order, “out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance.” This is the subjective/objective tension one finds in Emerson. There is an objective moral order, infused with this divine energy. But it cannot be related or known through texts, doctrines, and the like.

It is the subjective personal experience that knows truth, virtue, and goodness.

As this sentiment of virtue is common in the human condition, and here he blurs the lines here between sentiment of virtue, moral intuition, and a religious sentiment, he claims it is a common sentiment of society at large. “This sentiment lies at the foundation of society”, a sort of precursor to Durkheim’s notion of religion as the social glue of humanity. The main point here is that because of this common intuition, there is present in reality a common morality translatable for society at large.

Nearly halfway through the oration, Emerson moves into a negotiation between these epistemological conceptions and the Christian religion in particular. He tells his audience it is in the Christian Church that “all of us have had our birth and nurture.” There seems to be a sort of contradiction between this sense of nurture as Emerson begins the “call to preaching” half of the speech, as there is conflict between an intuition based religion and one of cultural conditioning or nurture. Still, Emerson grounds his understanding of Christianity as a testament to a prophetic

Jesus who taught, “I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see

God, see me; or see thee, when thou also thinkest as I know think.” There is a sense of admiration heaped upon Jesus as “the only soul in history who has appreciated the worth of man”.

It is this point, the divine presence in humanity, that Emerson sees as the essence of true religion. From there he sets about the two most enduring and controversial portions of the

Address, what he referred to as the “errors of Administration” in historical Christianity. They

6 can be simply referred to as first the locating of divinity solely in the person of Jesus, and second the closed nature of revelation in Christian tradition. On the first, Emerson comments that

Christianity “as it appears to us, and as it has appeared for ages, it is not the doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual.” Second hand religion has emphasized the distance between God and humanity, the wretchedness of the human condition, and object worship of a deified individual, instead of viewing Christianity as a method of recognizing that divinity indwells in all that lives. For Emerson, “Jesus proclaimed his own divinity, taught others to see God in him, and urged them to follow him by seeing God in themselves.”9 This first critique is connected with the second, where worship of a deified object grew into a movement adhering to a closed revelation. “Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead. The injury to faith throttles the preacher; and the goodliest of institutions becomes an uncertain and inarticulate voice.” It is interesting to note here the influence of George Fox, Quaker pioneer, on Emerson’s religious understanding. Scholars have pointed to Emerson’s journals leading up to the Divinity

Address, which included numerous references to Fox and his consideration of the “inner light”.10

After this evisceration of historical Christianity, Emerson qualified his criticism with three rousing calls to the graduates. First, the office of preaching is “the first in the world” and for the most part “the man who aims to speak as books enable, as synods use, as the fashion guides, and as interest commands, babbles. Let him hush.” Still, preaching has potential to be used to “preach the soul”, and execute “power and charm” over the moral sentiment. Second,

Emerson rouses his audience to “Go alone; refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.” This “going alone”

9 Dorrien, 73. 10 Trueblood, 55.

7 seems impossible in reality, as by listening to Emerson and abandoning “good models”, they are not really going alone anymore. They would be at least initially going with Emerson. Third, and perhaps most often overlooked, Emerson did not advocate a total abandonment of religious institutions. Instead, somewhat contradicting the “go alone” mantra, he tells them that a “breath of new life can be breathed by you through the forms already existing.” This “new life” will make the forms seems plastic and malleable, able to be reshaped to better provoke people to a self-exploration of the internal religious and moral sentiment. Maybe this is the reason his address was so provocative for New England clergymen. It is one thing to start a new “cultus” of self-religion. It is something entirely different, and much more dangerous to the establishment, to transform the existing arrangements with a sense of “new life”.

Enduring Questions of the DSA

If that brief summary and analysis of the Divinity School Address was scattered and disorganized, then it could be said it is true to the subject at hand. One Boston newspaper responded to the address by claiming it was -“neither good divinity nor good sense” 11. His main critic was Harvard faculty member Andrews Norton, pioneer of biblical criticism. He publicly chastised the address as a “result of that restless craving for notoriety and excitement, which, in one way or another, is keeping our community in a perpetual stir.”12 One scholar points out,

“The Transcendentalists talked easily of certainty, by which they meant their own inner conviction, and they seemed peculiarly unmindful of the need of external tests to help in determining whether the individual were a fool or a prophet.”13 Needless to say, the work of the

Divinity School Address was not a systematic exposition on religion, but a series of scattered

11 Dorrien, 75. 12 Quoted from Dorrien, 74. Andrews Norton, “The New School in Religion and Literature”, The Boston Daily Advertiser (Aug. 27, 1838). 13 Trueblood, 53.

8 objections and constructions that related to Emerson’s intuitive sense of things. It is on this lack of clarity in the prose that I point towards one interesting angle of the legacy of the Address.

Emerson made it very clear he believed “parishes are signing off” and there was a

“universal decay and now almost death of faith in society”. He essentially claimed that if

Christianity, manifested here in the vocations of these graduates, did not respond to the intellectual current of the time, it would become an inconsequential force in the world. In short, traditional religion was in decay. Any observant or mere participant in the 21st century context would be foolish to claim traditional religion is no longer a force in the world. On this point,

Emerson was wrong. Yes there has been a disestablishment of Christianity through the process of secularization in the American context, but adherence to traditional and orthodox forms of religion in America and the world are in fact undergoing a dramatic explosion. Pentecostalism,

Evangelicalism, Mormonism and the like all adhere to traditional doctrines of revelation and authority, with some distinct variations. Sociologists of religion have for years put forward different arguments for failure of a scientific worldview to overtake a traditional religious one.

This is not the time to decipher between their arguments, but instead I believe Emerson becomes a representation of why more liberal forms of American religion have always been reserved for distinct groups. A contemporary of Emerson put it this way:

“The converts of Mr. Emerson, if he made any, were converts not to his opinions, but simply to admiration to himself as a poet, a moralizer, and a rhetorician…we suppose it true that not an individual of his crowed of hearer at the close of his lectures could have stated with any confidence what his religious or philosophical system was: whether he himself was theist, pantheist, or atheist.”14

In many ways, Emerson’s religious formulations are reserved for a literary elite who possesses the rationality to both understand his concepts and deconstruct their inherited

14 Quoted from Gohdes, 28. William Ware.

9 traditions. It is no coincidence that the more literate portion of America, New England in particular, became adherents of a liberal theology akin to Emerson that possessed a transcendental nature of reality, as well as a mythological character of religious symbolism. This is not to say people not among intellectual elites always adhered to a conservative doctrine of scriptural revelation, sin, and salvation. But it is clear on the macro level the vast majority of those who envisioned a theological break through from restrictive orthodoxy were those who intellectual, political, and social context allowed them to make that leap. My argument is that perhaps the reason for the continued relevance of conservative theological traditions in America is that wider populations more easily understand traditional analytic concepts rather than metaphorical “mistiness”. There is something in Emerson that frees one from the confines of

Calvinistic dogmatic orthodoxy. But I maintain there is an equally stifling obscurity in presentation and style of the moral intuitive. Liberal theology grew to dominate academic institutions in America, and the suspicion of religious scholarship still exists in traditional religion. This has not always been the case, and Emerson’s Address shows a decisive example of this shifting current.

I’d imagine if Emerson’s speech were given today it would meet a similar reaction as his time. Traditional groups would decry it as sacrilegious, atheistic nonsense. Some Liberal theologians would praise it for its liberating qualities and deconstruction of notions of power.

Perhaps the only difference would be that there would be an entirely new category that rejected the concept of “religious sentiment” or “moral intuition” on all grounds. And quite possibly

Emerson has a role to play in that development as well. These changing dynamics could just be more evidence for Emerson that in his words, “God speaketh, not spake.”

10 Works Cited

Dorrien, Gary. The Making of American Liberal Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, and David Robinson. The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Writings. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.

Gohdes, Clarence. "Some Remarks on Emerson's Divinity School Address." American Literature 1 (1929): 27-31.

Hursh, Brad. "Emerson's Divinity School Address: Conditions and Reactions." Chrestomathy: Annual Review of Undergraduate Research at the College of Charleston 3 (2004): 101- 118.

Johnson, Linck. "Emerson: America's First Public Intellectual." Modern Intellectual History 2 (2005): 135-151.

Johnston, Carol . "The Underlying Structure of the Divinity School Address: Emerson as Jeremiah." Studies in the American Renaissance 1 (1980): 41-49.

Trueblood, D. Elton. "The Influence of Emerson's Divinity School Address." The Harvard Theological Review 32 (1939): 41-56.

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