2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.
3. Nature is the symbol of spirit.
The first proposition derived from Emerson’s belief in a primitive, universal language that originated in man’s observation of the natural world. As he put it, “as we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols,” and the same symbols are found to make “the original elements of all languages.” Thus, “the use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history; the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation.” The relations between words and things, and things and the spirit, pervade nature, for “man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects.” When he learns to read the universe correspondentially, he sees that nature mirrors the Ideal, for there is “a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms.” Natural facts are thus “the end or last issue of spirit,” and to know the world is to know the divine. 65
Nature’s chapter headings further indicate its general purpose and direction. In his “Introduction,” for example, Emerson interrogates man’s relation to nature, and asks him not to “grope among the dry bones of the past,” but to realize that “the sun shines today also.” But Emerson’s contemporaries seemed intent on rejecting nature’s manifold uses. “To speak truly,” Emerson writes, “few adult persons can see nature,” for most people “do not even see the sun.” The true lover of nature, he claims, “is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.”66
As Emerson proceeds, he sets out the varied uses of nature, moving sequentially through commodity, beauty, language, discipline, Idealism, and finally, to spirit. Commodity is simply “those advantages which our senses owe to nature.” Nature is firewood; it is the millstream; it provides food, clothing, and shelter. But nature is also beauty, satisfying us with its loveliness, harmony, and unity. Nature is language, too, providing man the symbols to speak about his innermost thoughts as well as to describe the world around him. Nature offers discipline, teaching what is true, beautiful, and good, for the physical laws of the universe are analogous to the great moral laws. The moral law, Emerson writes, “lies at the centre of nature and radiates to its circumference,” where men exist. Nature also reflects the Ideal, for it is “made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us.”67 Finally, nature mirrors the spirit; it makes man acknowledge his relation to the Oversoul, the spiritual ether that flows through all creation. “At present,” Emerson concludes, “man applies to nature but half his force.” He works upon it with his “understanding” alone. He lives in it “and masters it by a penny-wisdom.” He needs to understand that the “invariable mark” of wisdom is “to see the miraculous in the common.” Then man feels “part or particle of God” as Me and Not-Me are reunited.68
Although Nature sold out its first edition of five hundred copies (which Emerson had subsidized) by late October, it did not make as large a stir as Brownson’s or Alcott’s books of the same year. For one thing, it was so unmistakably different, in language and play, that many people simply did not know what to make of it and threw it off as so much transcendental mist and moonshine. Bowen’s severe review in The Christian Examiner, for example, and Peabody’s measured endorsement in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review were among the only memorable contemporaneous notices in prominent journals; the venerable North American Review simply ignored it.
How, then, to account for Emerson’s steady rise to prominence in the emergent Transcendentalist group? Brownson had one explanation. Emerson’s popularity, he wrote in 1838, was accounted for “without any especial regard for his peculiar notions.” There was “something in his personal manners,” Brownson explained, and much about his “peculiar characteristics of style as a writer and a lecturer,” and “still more to his independence, to the homage he pays to the spirit of freedom,” that attracted disaffected Unitarians. It was “as the advocate of the rights of the mind,” Brownson concluded, “as the defender of personal independence in the spiritual world” that Emerson won the accolades of “many young, ardent, and yet noble minds.” Brownson pointedly warned the Unitarian elders, however, to show how “freedom and life can be found elsewhere than in connection with the speculations of Ralph Waldo Emerson, or to Ralph Waldo Emerson they may rest assured their pupils will resort.”69 A writer in The Western Messenger concurred. It was not that Emerson’s readers all agree with his speculations, he explained, “but that they sympathize with his independence, manliness, and freedom.”70
At this point in Emerson’s career, his chief charisma derived from a challenge to conventional wisdom rather than for his particular wisdom itself. As significant as Nature subsequently proved to American literary and cultural history, as Transcendentalism developed in the mid-1830s Emerson continued to play only a secondary intellectual role, trying to make a success in his new career as a lecturer. Without pulpit or regular platform, author of a single idiosyncratic tract, he was in the wings as people like Brownson, Ripley, and Alcott played center stage. It would be two more years before he became a lightning rod for the new Transcendentalist cohort.
By year’s end, 1836, a cadre of younger Unitarians had made known their displeasure with the status quo in their churches. Some, like Emerson, already were disenchanted enough to sign off; others, like Ripley and Brownson, remained within the denomination but preached a social radicalism that went far beyond what their onetime champion William Ellery Channing had counseled. When in March 1837, for example, James Walker and Francis Greenwood, in an editorial notice in The Christian Examiner, redefined the journal’s purpose, they pointed to precisely this fact. To their satisfaction, they reported, controversies with the Trinitarians were over, but now other questions had arisen “in the public interest” on which leading members of their denomination greatly differed. 71 They wanted their journal to be a chief forum for these debates.
Recalling this period in his memoir, The Convert, Brownson made a similar comment. Unitarianism had “demolished” Calvinism, he observed, and “made an end in all thinking minds of every thing like dogmatic Protestantism.” But now Unitarianism satisfied nobody. “It is negative, cold, lifeless,” he continued, “and all advanced minds among [them] are dissatisfied with it, and are craving something higher, better, more living and life- giving.”72 The intellectual fabric was wearing thin and soon enough would have to give way, though precisely where was still an open question.
4
RELIGIOUS COMBUSTION
Throughout the antebellum period, America’s Unitarian clergy were trained at Harvard, which since 1819 had assigned college faculty to instruct those who wished to prepare for the ministry. With the completion of Divinity Hall in 1826, the institution took on a more formal character and was called the Divinity College. Situated on a wide avenue about a quarter of a mile from Harvard Yard, the hall contained, in addition to thirty-seven rooms for students, a chapel, library, lecture hall, and reading room. The surrounding landscape was bucolic: behind the hall was meadowland extending all the way to Andrews Norton’s home, Shady Hill, and in front there was open space that the students used for games.1 Students followed a rigorous academic program, overseen by four faculty members responsible for courses in divinity, Hebrew and other “Oriental” languages, biblical criticism, and pastoral theology. The courses in biblical criticism were most important, for there students were introduced to the German scholarship that had transformed understanding of the scriptures. If the outside world seemed remote, the students’ excitement came from debates over interpretive issues raised by foreign scholars as well as by their own faculty.
In Divinity Hall the veracity and import of Christ’s miracles, as recorded in the Gospels, was a central topic of inquiry, as it was among Unitarians generally. How could Christians
who believed in a rational, orderly universe overseen by a benevolent God hold that mankind needed supernatural proofs to sanction and validate faith? In other words, if God worked in rational, predictable ways, why did he have to break through the normal order of things to establish Christ’s special mission in the world?
On these questions, through the early 1820s most Unitarians adhered to the “Supernaturalist” position. That is, they believed fully in the veracity of the Gospel accounts: Christ performed miracles because he was a special being endowed with extraordinary powers. Aligned against them were “Rationalists,” who believed in the general thrust of the Gospel accounts but held that Christ’s miracles in fact were subsequently embroidered to give more weight to his message. By the late 1820s more young Unitarians, much to their tutors’ chagrin, began to espouse this latter view. Until 1835, there things stood, in the United States as well as in Europe.
In that year a young German theologian, David Friedrich Strauss, published his Life of Jesus Critically Examined, in which he argued that the Gospel accounts were essentially all mythical. After exhaustive study, Strauss concluded that little could be known of the historical Jesus because the stories of his life and death essentially were symbolic constructions based on attempts by early Christians to fit him to their messianic expectations, themselves based on earlier Jewish religious beliefs. Strauss’s Life of Jesus exploded on the nineteenth-century religious landscape, shattering any tentative agreement to which Unitarians had come regarding the meaning of the Gospels.
The book quickly made its way across the Atlantic, where the young Unitarian divinity student Theodore Parker was one of the first to read it.2 At the request of William Ware, then editor of The Christian Examiner, Parker, already widely acknowledged for his learning in German, reviewed the book for that journal. Although he was skeptical of the pantheistic drift of Strauss’s religious beliefs, he still believed that the work was of “profound theological significance.” He praised Strauss’s bravery and intelligence in bringing before the public a matter of such great import, but he found problematic Strauss’s dismissal of the entire story of Christ as myth.3
Among emergent Transcendentalists, William Henry Furness was one of the first to address at length this “miracles question” when he stirred his Remarks on the Four Gospels (1836) into the seething cauldron of liberal Christianity. Emerson’s boyhood friend, Furness graduated from Harvard College in 1820 and then attended the Divinity School. In 1825 he left for Philadelphia, where for fifty years he ministered to the city’s First Congregational Unitarian church. An early student of German, Furness, like other young Unitarians, found the new European exegetical scholarship liberating. His particular interest was the New Testament, and over his lengthy career he published a score of volumes that displayed the influence of the new historical criticism. Its first fruits were evident in his Remarks on the Four Gospels.
Furness never denied the truth of the three synoptic Gospels, for their uniformity convinced him of the veracity of the basic facts of Christ’s life. But like Ripley in his “Jesus Christ, the Same Yesterday, Today, and Forever,” Furness argued that Christ did not perform miracles to validate the truth of his message. Mankind believed in his teachings primarily because of their congruence with man’s own internal, spiritual sense. Further, rather than claiming that Christ’s deeds marked divine intervention in the physical world, Furness maintained that, given man’s limited and still expanding knowledge of the physical world, he should not presume to know whether such things indeed were beyond the realm of sensory experience. For example, Furness pointed out that “the restoration of a dead man to life is not the least more wonderful than the birth of a human being.”4 Nature was so grand, so immense and unfathomable, that to doubt what Christ accomplished through it was presumptuous. Thus Furness believed in Christ’s miracles as evidence of his superior moral and spiritual powers, even as he denied their necessity to prove the truth of Christ’s message.
Such reasoning led Furness to a point that Emerson adumbrated in a different way in Nature, that miracle derives from the Latin “miraculum,” a wonder. “Taking the term in this sense exclusively,” Furness wrote, “no one is disposed to doubt the reality of an event, solely on the score of its wonderfulness, because in this sense there is nothing that is not miraculous.” The existence of an atom, he continued, is a wonder, and “the universe—all being—is miraculous.”5 Again, the point was not to question whether Christ performed wonderful deeds, but rather to acknowledge that they were tangential to the divine message that resonated in every soul.
Martin Luther Hurlburt, another Unitarian minister in Philadelphia, reviewed Furness’s book for The Christian Examiner. He began sympathetically, praising the clergyman’s belief that the synoptic Gospels were authentic narratives of Christ’s life. But he resisted other parts of Furness’s book with “unqualified dissent,” specifically the lengthy section on “Miracles.” Of late Hurlburt had noticed a growing disposition on the part of some Christians to get rid of the question of miraculous agency altogether, “as if it were a burden that embarrassed them.” More specifically, there was a class of writers, epitomized by Furness, “consciously or unconsciously philosophizing away the peculiarities of the Gospel, and reducing it to a level of mere naturalism.”6 Hurlburt thus affirmed precisely what Furness attacked: the belief that “miracle” implied “a violation, or suspension, of the laws of nature.”7 He also objected to Furness’s notions that because of the inherent religious sentiment, “all men are endued [sic] with miraculous powers” and that thus the mind possesses supremacy over material things. To Hurlburt this was “startling,” for it supposed a sort of “sixth sense” that men possessed but were not always aware of.8 This was precisely Furness’s point. Needless to say, because of the volume’s radical implications, Hurlburt did not endorse it. The journal’s editor James Walker offered Furness the courtesy of a rebuttal in the next number, in which Furness unrepentantly reiterated his position, according Strauss’s book a central place in Unitarians’ increasingly acrimonious debates over Christ’s message.9
The blowup came in the summer of 1838, when the graduating class of Harvard’s Divinity School invited Emerson to deliver the customary discourse on the evening before commencement.10 The previous year the college had asked him to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa address during August’s festivities—after their first choice, the Reverend Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, an Episcopalian, had declined. Emerson, who circulated in the Boston area as a Unitarian “supply” minister after his resignation from the Second Church in 1832, obliged with a lecture on the American Scholar that, in retrospect, has become one of his best-known writings, “our intellectual Declaration of Independence,” Oliver Wendell Holmes termed it.11 Not the least important task Emerson set himself therein was to correct what he regarded as “the extreme Eurocentrism” of many of his friends.12 He proposed to the students that they emulate not the mere “thinker” but “Man Thinking,” and urged them to honor and build on the nation’s political commitment to democracy. Emerson’s Phi Beta Kappa address ratified other incipient Transcendentalists’ belief that the most important demand of their faith was to speak from the soul.
Emerson printed five hundred copies of the American Scholar at his own expense, and its circulation had a good deal to do with the divinity students’ decision to offer him their podium the following year. On the evening of July 15, 1838, in Divinity Hall’s chapel, Emerson addressed a small audience of six students, their families and friends, the faculty, and a few of his own friends—Ripley, Hedge, James Freeman Clarke, Elizabeth Peabody, and Theodore Parker—on challenges the new clergy faced. Harvard was represented by an imposing group: Andrews Norton, recently retired to pursue scholarship on the Gospels; Henry Ware, Sr., Hollis Professor of Divinity; his son, Henry, Jr., with whom Emerson had worked at Boston’s Second Church and who had become Professor of Pulpit Eloquence and Pastoral Care; and the dean of the school, John Gorham Palfrey. Given t
he small audience, the occasion was not particularly auspicious for a major pronouncement on the “new views” that Emerson and his cohort were forwarding. Nevertheless, his words fractured the infant American Unitarian Association and marked his final, emphatic break with organized Christianity.
Emerson opened with an invocation to the beauty of nature, a studied parody of religious language that foreshadowed his radical critique of the sitting clergy. “In this refulgent summer,” he announced, “it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life.” “The grass grows,” he continued, “the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay.” Moreover, “the corn and the wine have been freely dealt to all creatures.” One is “constrained,” he continued “to respect the perfection of this world, in which our senses converse.”13 Innocuous as his words sound today, his audience would have snapped to attention. Nature, Emerson was saying, is not fallen, as Christians maintained, but is itself perfect and worthy of our worship. The sacramental corn and wine are not reserved for saints alone, but are available to all who seek them. But how did this pertain to the young men about to embark on their ministry?
They had to attend to such truths and incorporate them into their preaching, for when man truly knows nature, he knows the divine spirit. “When the mind opens,” Emerson said, “and reveals the laws which traverse the universe, and make things what they are, then shrinks the great world at once into a mere illustration and fable of this mind.” Nature mirrors the divine and thus offers moral guidance, but “while the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every man, and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely; it is an intuition” and cannot “be received at second hand.”14 To unite with spirit through nature, Emerson claimed, is to experience the paradisiacal state of Man before the Fall.
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