BOOK REVIEW

Illuminating Emerson’s spiritual development

By Richard Higgins, Globe Correspondent, 7/2/2003

ven now, as we mark the 200th anniversary of his birth, people still believe that Ralph Waldo Emerson left the ministry in 1832. He resigned the pastorate of the Second Church of Boston, yes, but as Elizabeth Parker Peabody and others have noted, he took the pulpit with him and carted it around for 40 years. Emerson could no more have stopped being a minister than he could have stopped being Emerson.

As David M. Robinson makes clear in ”The Spiritual Emerson,” Emerson’s four years of parish ministry were the foundation and springboard for his lifelong project of spiritual and moral empowerment. His sermons are seen as precursors of his essays and lectures. They made possible his literary achievement and enabled him to refine his quest for the essence of religion, which informed his life’s work.

Emerson is famous for rejecting the creeds and authority of the church and the personhood of God. He has been blamed (or credited) with the decline of institutional religion in America. What is less well known, and what this well-organized and highly readable volume makes clear, is how raw and undeniable were not only Emerson’s faith in God but his very desire to believe.

Emerson was not a pantheist, one who believes nature is God. Nature, he said, discloses God, which he sometimes called the Over-Soul or Universal Mind. ”The best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of the higher powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature before its God,” Emerson writes in ”Nature,” his first book and the opening of this collection of essays and lectures. In ”Nature,” Emerson ”proposes a new religious vision, a new theology,” Robinson writes.

Emerson’s religiosity is complicated. It was not fixed but evolved as Emerson grew. Americans are familiar mainly, if not only, with Emerson the iconic radical and religious idealist of the Divinity School Address, which he gave on July 15, 1838.

Decrying the church’s ”noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus” and calling the doctrine of miracles by Jesus a ”monster,” Emerson would have caused less of a stir at Harvard that day if he had personally set the pants of every faculty member on fire. In a way, he did. (”A great offense” and an ”insult to religion,” professor Andrews Norton fumed in the Boston Daily Advertiser.)

Robinson, a major Emerson scholar who is an English professor and head of American studies at Oregon State University, shows, however, that Emerson’s thinking about religion did not end there, and it is a great service of this book that it traces this spiritual development. Through the 1840s and ’50s, Emerson increasingly moved from visionary revelation toward committed ethical action as the core of religion. ”He became more and more convinced that spirituality could not be separated from morality,” Robinson writes.

This development highlights a contribution made by this volume: It includes no fewer than four later writings by Emerson, three of them from the 1860s. One is Emerson’s 1854 lecture in New York denouncing the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which required citizens to return persons who were claimed as escaped slaves. (”I will not obey it, by God,” he wrote in his journal.) The lecture makes a blistering attack on Daniel Webster for backing the compromise that led to the law, and it marks Emerson’s further emergence as a public intellectual. It shows that Emerson regarded slavery not only as a political issue but also as the gravest moral and spiritual crisis of his day.

Robinson includes what he calls Emerson’s most profound essay, ”Experience,” written in his numbness, bewilderment, and depression after the death in 1842 of his young son, Waldo. It is great, Robinson writes, because it ”dramatizes the struggle of the soul against emptiness” and ”questions all the affirmations that Emerson had until then preached.”

It also shows that even as Emerson accepts that there is no one sure path through the mystery of life’s dark hours, he is not undone by this knowledge. He embraces uncertainty as a necessary feature of the human condition and urges us to act anyway.

”The Spiritual Emerson” is also valuable in establishing the full texture and subtlety of Emerson’s much-misunderstood notion of self-reliance and nonconformity. Robinson shows that ”to describe Emerson’s message as purely individualistic is to distort and falsify it.” Emerson’s life project was to preach that each person is an outlet to the divine energy behind all creation. By ”self,” Emerson means, in essence, a unit of this larger whole. We gain the spiritual and moral energy this awareness provides only to the degree that we are in true ”acquaintance with our own being.” To gain that acquaintance, one does not, of course, need to read this book. But it would not hurt.

This story ran on page E3 of the Boston Globe on 7/2/2003.

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