by Robin McNallie
April 12, 2015
The title of my presentation this morning, The Lengthened Shadow, is taken from Emerson’s most-quoted essay, “Self-Reliance,†in which he states that “an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.†Not given to understatement, Emerson here was simply stressing that every institution owes a boundless debt to the individuals both male and female who have contributed significantly to that institution over time. Ralph Waldo Emerson certainly has not been under-sung as one of our prophets, remembered particularly for two rebellions against the Unitarian orthodoxy of his day.
The first occurred on Sept. 9, 1832, when he delivered from his pulpit at Boston’s Second Church a sermon, “The Lord’s Supper,†expressing his opposition to administering communion to his congregants. Two days later, on Sept. 11, he offered his resignation. It was accepted, although on a divided vote. The second, more ripple-creating challenge to his Unitarian elders was his Harvard Divinity School address delivered on July 15, 1838 (99 years to the day before my birthday), to its graduating class at their personal invitation. In it he inveighed against the continuing adoration of Jesus as a man/god/wonder-worker. This time, no divided vote from the establishment figures at Harvard. He was disinvited from Harvard Yard in any official capacity for the next 30 years.
These two addresses are however often taken out of wider context. Emerson’s resignation from the Second Church can probably be attributed as much to his still-fresh grief over the death of his young bride, Ellen Tucker, from TB in early February of that same year, 1832, as to his qualms over the Communion ritual itself. Robert Richardson, a UU himself, in his superb biography on Emerson, The Mind on Fire, reminds us chillingly of the following entry Emerson made about a month and a half after Ellen’s death, which reads, “I’ve visited Ellen’s tomb and opened the coffin.†As for the Divinity School Address, Emerson in considerable part was taking a backhanded swipe at his own Unitarian minister in Concord, the Rev. Barzalai Frost, for the latter’s monotonous pulpit orations. Some commentators have even suggested that Emerson didn’t much engage in the ensuing battle of words generated by his talk because he felt more than a little chagrin over the personal element he had initially and somewhat inadvertently brought to it.
Viewing this wider context aids us in delineating Emerson’s emergence as the leading voice of Transcendentalism. For his Transcendentalism, I believe, can be accurately called his own brand of Liberation Theology – a liberation of the individual self from depression to affirmation, from deadness to renewal. Ellen Tucker’s death, as Emerson’s shocking journal notation makes clear, threw him in so deep a grief that it forced him to reassess everything, from his Unitarian ministry to the very tenets of that Unitarianism itself. It’s worth noting, however, that he never gave up his membership. He never left it. He simply went about transforming it, along with himself.
Emerson’s process of recovery began with his relinquishment of the pulpit in September of 1832, followed by embarkation for Europe on Christmas day, 1832. He was to record in his journal upon departing that he was “carrying ruins to ruins.†He returned home in September 1833, evidently recovered in body and spirit, having met at first hand among others, the leading English voices of the Romantic age – William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (himself briefly a Unitarian minister), and Thomas Carlyle. These surely must have stimulated Emerson to take up his new line of preaching in the Boston area, where he began proclaiming in Unitarian pulpits, including his old Second Church, the urgency of self-renewal. Emerson even before his foreign sojourn had found his Unitarian church to be populated by too many Barzalai Frosts; to be, as he said later, “corpse-cold.†We might say now he was in the process of administering CPR to the inert body.
This freelance circuit therapy culminated in 1836 with the publication, anonymously, of his long essay, “Nature,†sent forth between grass-green covers — the work generally considered to be the manifesto of the Transcendentalist movement. Not surprisingly the first meeting of the Transcendentalist Club occurred at about the same moment at the Boston home of one of its charter members, Frederick Henry Hedge. Sometimes the group called itself “Hedge’s Club.†The next year, 1837, Emerson returned to his alma mater, Harvard, to deliver his American Scholar address before the Phi Beta Kappa society there, an annual part of the school’s commencement rituals. In 1838, he returned to deliver his fateful Divinity School Address. These 3 works sent forth over 3 consecutive years contained the core of his Transcendentalist outlook and the legacy, I believe, of what he’s left us UU’s.
I seem to remember not too long ago reading a letter someone had submitted to UU World in which the writer mentioned a minister who referred to him- or herself as a First and 7th Principle UU. That is, one who promoted “the inherent worth and dignity of every person†and “respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.†Essentially Emerson in these 3 closely clustered manifestos was introducing effusive rough drafts of the 2 principles. In “Nature,†he presents the natural world as the vital center to which individuals must repair to find their own vital center. At the midpoint of his essay, he sets forth the axiom, “Nature is the symbol of spirit.†This statement suggests that individuals must not merely look at nature, but through nature, wherein they will apprehend a divinity that moves within them as well. This divinity he refers to as the Oversoul, just introduced in our responsive reading. It can also be seen in the hymn that we sing so often, including last week, “Spirit of Life.â€
While our 7th Principle speaks of the interdependent web of all existence, Emerson liked to choose the metaphor of a flowing stream to emphasize the sense of that eternal indwelling spirit. A powerful expression of this is his poem, “Two Rivers,†an ode to his own Concord River, which he refers to by its Indian name, Musketaquit. Why he calls the poem “Two Rivers†is apparent in the following lines:
Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,
Repeats the music of the rain;
But sweeter river pulsing flit
Through thee, as thou through Concord plain.
Thou in thy narrow banks art pent:
The stream I love unbounded goes
Through flood and sea and firmament;
Through light, through life, it forward flows.
The American Scholar address describes 3 influences on the mind and character of the young scholar (that is, the would-be college graduate) but nature, once again predictably, Emerson gives pride of place to over the other two influences: books and involvement in the affairs of the public square. However, it is really the 1838 Divinity School address which we usually point to as one of the founding documents of the American Unitarian movement – together with Wm Ellery Channing’s “Unitarian Christianity†of 1819 and Theodore Parker’s “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity†of 1841.
Emerson’s address immediately drew the ire of Andrews Norton, an established Unitarian eminence, theologian and Emerson’s former proctor in the Divinity School. So formidable and self-important a personage was Norton that some referred to him as the “Unitarian pope.†Recently retired from the faculty and working on a book of biblical exegesis, upon reading Emerson’s address Norton fumed that it was “the latest form of infidelity.†Norton’s response leads me to imagine that he must have viewed Emerson, the recently rising star of pulpit and lectern, much as Robert Greene, an undistinguished Elizabethan playwright, viewed a newcomer to the London stage of his time, sneering at that particular wannabe as “an upstart crowâ€; the object of Greene’s scorn being, of course, the Bard from Stratford. Emerson, who would himself later be dubbed “the sage from Concord,†to me more closely resembles in his portraits a hawk than a crow.
Anyway, what must have really steamed the good Rev. Norton was not merely Emerson’s handing Jesus a demotion in rank but his elevation of nature, which is immediately signaled in Emerson’s opening words: “In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers.†And so it goes on, in most of the printed versions I’ve read, for a full ecstasy-brimming paragraph. Emerson, as he proceeds in his discourse, questions the authenticity of miracles in the Bible, proclaiming that the real miracles are to be found outside in Nature, to wit, in that grass, those buds, and that spotted meadow he has rhapsodized about. He is telling his auditors they will find more inspiration in the book of nature than the book of scripture.
At first glance it would seem that Emerson was making a high-stakes gamble in choosing to deliver his address at the Divinity School’s commencement ceremonies, but we need to remember that he came at the behest of the students, not the faculty. Besides being a speaker bred for the role of graduation sendoffs – his American Scholar address the previous year had testified to that – Emerson already was the new prophet for the young. In his engagingly vigorous essay appearing years later (1867), and entitled “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,†Emerson memorably observes of the generation coming to their maturity in the 1820s and 1830s, that they were “born with knives in their brains†— the phrase implying that such young people were eager to cut through the dead layers of hypocrisy, conformity and unexamined catechisms. He was correct in that perception. Among the rapt listeners in Divinity Hall that July of 1838 was Theodore Parker, who 3 years later in his “The Permanent and Transient†would make his own plea for revitalization of what both he and Emerson called the “religious sentiment.â€
Many have asserted correctly that Emerson was not a social-justice activist in the sense of those other Unitarian Transcendentalists, knives-in-their-brains generational cohorts – those born like him in the opening decade of the 19th Century – Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, and Elizabeth Peabody, pioneers in movements for women’s rights, abolition or educational reforms. Emerson, the author of “Self Reliance,†feared that in joining associations, no matter how worthy their aims might be, he would find his own distinctive voice significantly mediated or muted.
He chose instead to march under his own banner. He might be better seen from our perspective as what we might call a “public intellectual,†who through letters, editorials and of course, the lecture platform goaded others to a greater awareness and effective action. To my mind, his legacy for us UUs and even beyond us was what I would call a submerged legacy, one that has to be dug for a bit, for he made some contributions both publicly and privately that have not gotten much overt and sustained recognition.
Examples: In 1838, he sent off an angry letter to President Martin Van Buren protesting the forced expulsion of the Cherokees from Georgia. In 1839, he asked Margaret Fuller to edit the influential Transcendentalist journal, The Dial, setting her on a course which would lead to publication of her influential book on feminism, Woman in the 19th Century. In 1859, he delivered a series of lectures to raise funds for the nearly destitute family of John Brown following Brown’s execution.
In closing, what stands out for me in what I’ve called Emerson’s submerged legacy is the suggestion that he made to his younger neighbor and protégé, Henry David Thoreau, on one of their ambles around Walden Pond, that someone really needed to consider an extended stay at the pond. Thoreau, of course, took up the suggestion, with Emerson giving him permission to build on a site Emerson owned. We environmentally concerned UU’s should be both grateful and proud that our distinguished Unitarian forebear served as midwife in the birthing of Thoreau’s great handbook-cum-meditation on how to live in, and with, Nature, but we must also note that the actual conception of Thoreau’s masterpiece probably goes back to 1836, to that little volume with the grass-green cover.