SERMONS 

Emerson: A Born Believer

Earlier in the year, this two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson, I gave a contrite sermon acknowledging that in previous examinations I had taken a somewhat careless approach to Emerson’s ideas. It’s easy to do. He’s all over the map. In one moment he is blinded by circumstances of his time and nationality. At another moment he is prophetically proclaiming a universal vision. Much of his writing reflects a young man smitten with optimism. And much of it an older man burdened with life’s losses. As John Updike reflects in a recent piece on Emerson in The New Yorker, Emerson’s writings, once read, are “slippery in the mind.”

Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. 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.

Many have attempted this year, as in other years, to capture the man and his ideas. It’s risky business. As Richard Higgins points out in the March/April issue of Unitarian Universalist World, we use Emerson like a mirror—when his intention was not to reflect but to provoke. Alternately we give Emerson too much credit and too much blame. And this even after we’ve read “Self-Reliance.” After Emerson’s own admonition trust thyself.

This morning I want to look again, with you, at this man and what he offers us. I will use many of his own words. We’ll begin with his own sense of his vocation. In his own words:

I am to new name all the beasts in the fields and all the gods in the sky. I am to invite men drenched in Time to recover themselves and come out of time, and taste their native immortal air. I am to fire with what skill I can the artillery of sympathy and emotion I am to indicate, though all unworthy, the Ideal and Holy Life, the life within life, the Forgotten Good, the Unknown Cause in which we sprawl and sin. I am to celebrate the spiritual powers in their infinite contrast to the mechanical powers and the mechanical philosophy of this time.

From the very start, then, we can see one of Emerson’s primary concerns. “The mechanical philosophy” of his time. He experienced this philosophy in the Unitarian church of his day. It was an approach that he believed took the life out of life. That reduced everything to experience, ignoring the possibility of transcendence.

As I told you in my sermon last winter, Emerson had been a Unitarian minister. He resigned his pastorate after only a few years, though, and in his Divinity School Address exhorted the new ministers to bring life back into the church he was abandoning.

With all of his criticism of the church (God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and religions)—we can see his desperate hope that individuals find spiritual understanding. There was nothing more central to him than this. Or more natural. We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples. A self-poise belongs to every particle; and a rectitude to every mind...

This contrast between the actual practice of religion and the ideal of it is the heart of Emerson’s strivings. He was steadfastly an Idealist. The transcendentalist movement which he helped to found rejected the mechanical philosophy of the day. It was, to them, a form of materialism, based exclusively on experience. Emerson, and his colleagues, did not deny that experience has value—yet they contrasted experience with consciousness and lifted consciousness above it. Emerson used the word “reason” (oddly enough) to express the means to consciousness. “Understanding,” on the other hand, was the way of knowing through facts and reason.

Like Immanuel Kant, Emerson rejected the idea, advocated by John Locke, that we can know nothing except that which we learn directly from our senses. (This idea had taken hold in much Unitarian thought of the day in the form of “supernatural rationalism”—the idea that the proofs of the validity of Christianity were found in the miracles—actual experience.) Kant believed there is more that can be known. Likewise, the transcendentalists affirmed knowledge gained by intuition—and they considered this the truly relevant knowing. They were mystics, believing in the perpetual openness of the human mind to a new influx of light and power.

Emerson lived in the tension between the material world and the ideal world—perhaps we all do. But Emerson was a born believer. We can see in his essays and his journals the pain he felt that he could not maintain his grasp on the spiritual ecstasy he experienced.

A certain wandering light comes to me which I instantly perceive to be the Cause of Causes. It transcends all proving. It is itself the ground of being; and I see that it is not one and I another, but this is the life of my life. That is one fact, then: that in certain moments I have known that I existed directly from God, and am, as it were, God’s organ. And in my ultimate consciousness Am God. Then secondly, the contradictory fact is familiar, that I am a surprised spectator and learner of all my life. This is the habitual posture of the mind—beholding. But whenever the day dawns, the great day of truth on the soul, it comes with awful invitation to me to accept it, to blend with its aurora. Cannot I conceive the Universe without a contradiction?

There was no relief for Emerson from contradiction. His faithful struggle with the contradictions of life surely has been the cause of some misunderstanding of him.

In the spring the New York Times ran an editorial column on Emerson by Adam Cohen. It’s a harsh and mostly one-sided assessment which claims that Emerson’s brand of individualism slips into “self-absorption.” Cohen clearly, if indirectly, traces our contemporary ugly nationalism and what he considers selfish tax breaks to Emerson. In his essay, “Self-Reliance,” Emerson criticizes much of the charity he sees the churches engaging in. Cohen quotes from that essay: though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.

Cohen has captured a piece of Emerson here. He was critical of, or at least impatient with, efforts to reform society. His concern was the reform of the human spirit. Yet in the same essay Emerson demonstrates his deep conviction in the interdependence of all humanity, of the importance of seeing ourselves as coming from the same source, as related one to another: To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,--that is genius. And, in “The Oversoul”: Within us is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One.

The contradiction here is difficult. Yet remember Emerson’s struggle with the material world. Remember he longs to live in a realm of spirit. He is concerned that much of the work of the church is stuck in the material world.

Cohen also complains about Emerson’s seeming inability to demonstrate grief over lost loved ones. In particular, related to his son’s death at the age of five. Using his melancholy essay, “Experience,” as evidence, Cohen describes Emerson’s reflection on his son’s death as callous. Many consider this essay a turning-point for Emerson. In it he grapples with a loss of innocence, with the building realization of life’s claim on him. Here the contradiction claims him at a deeper, more personal level. Still, despite the distance he has discovered between experience and ideal, he writes underneath the inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection, the Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam.

Forrest Church offers a more judicious criticism in his article about Emerson in the UUWorld. Church suggests that Emerson’s solitary temperament, his shyness, contributed to his aloofness—his seeming disregard for others. Though he idealized friendship and made many friends, he often reflected on his disappointments. All association must be a compromise. Again, Emerson would rather dwell in the realm of spirit—not in the realm of other humans. Leave me alone and I shall relish every hour and what it brought me. This solitary temperament was a good fit for Emerson’s idealism.

Church also calls Emerson’s philosophy “adolescent” and equates his own development with the development of the new nation that helped make him who he was. If this assessment is accurate, then Emerson was appropriately asserting his independence; differentiating from the schools of thought that made him who he was; overcompensating, we might say, for youth. The highest virtue is always against the law. Updike makes a similar case. Reflecting on Emerson’s place in the history of this country he writes, “a country imposed on a wilderness needs strong selves.” As Emerson ages, the nation is aging as well. As he loses some innocence, the nation faces its greatest challenge in Civil War. It is important for us to remember, when appropriating Emerson for today, what a different age we live in.

Yet, in Emerson’s prophetic moments, he offered challenges that seem tailor-made for this new century. As Cohen reflects in his editorial column, “Two hundred years after his birth, Emerson the secular preacher still matters not because he has all the answers for how we should live, but because he so intriguingly reflects who we actually are.” He was not flattering us—yet I find truth in what he says.

And this reflection may be clearer these two hundred years later. Emerson’s travel and reading of Eastern classics provided images and language quite foreign to his contemporary readers and listeners. We are not surprised to hear him, though, when he says We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. Or What am I? And what is? Asks the human spirit with a curiousity new-kindled, but never to be quenched. behold these infinite relations, so like, so unlike; many, yet one.

The challenge that Emerson faced, living with a “double consciousness” as he called it—living in the tensions between the material and the ideal, between the mechanical and the organic, between moments of insight and days of mundane experience—this is the challenge we face in our own spiritual journeying. Emerson is a great companion. He reminds us that to find the Ideal we must surrender and see it there before us.

Every insight from this realm of thought is felt as initial, and promises a sequel. I do not make it; I arrive there, and behold what was there already…I clap my hands in infantine joy and amazement, before the first opening to me of this august magnificence, old with the love and homage of innumerable ages, young with the life of life, the sunbright Mecca of the desert. And what a future it opens! I feel a new heart beating with the love of a new beauty. I am ready to die out of nature, and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West.

It’s an invitation. Not to follow him, but to find ourselves. And to remember the Ideal and Holy Life, the life within life. That we have glimpsed ourselves and yet forgotten. May the glory and wonder of the life of the Spirit be ours, in the midst of all that is our life.