Religious Self-Reliance more

Religious Self-Reliance Author(s): Randy L. Friedman Reviewed work(s): Source: The Pluralist, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 27-53 Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/pluralist.7.1.0027 . Accessed: 03/03/2012 11:18 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. University of Illinois Press and Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Pluralist. http://www.jstor.org Religious Self-Reliance randy l. friedman Binghamton University (SUNY) The land was ours before we were the land’s. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours In Massachusetts, in Virginia, But we were England’s, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed. Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found out that it was ourselves We were withholding from our land of living, and forthwith found salvation in surrender. Such as we were we gave ourselves outright (The deed of gift was many deeds of war) To the land vaguely realizing westward, But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become. —Robert Frost (316), “The Gift Outright” robert frost read “the gift outright” to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at William & Mary College almost one hundred years after Emerson delivered his famous lecture “The American Scholar” before the Society’s Harvard chapter. In his talk, Emerson proclaims, “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close” (Essays and Poems 53). It is no accident that Frost’s poem brings to mind Emerson.1 The possession of the American imagination by other lands and its “withholding from our land of living” declare the same distractions. The distance between ourselves and our own possibilities represents for Emerson the misdirection backwards toward Europe, and not forward to the land vaguely realizing westward, the open horizon of our own discovery, as individuals and as a nation. Becoming our land’s people requires redefining our present in terms of our future and taking possession of our own possibilities, as we are possessed by them. the plur alist Volume 7, Number 1 Spring 2012 : pp. 27–53 ©2012 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 27 28 the pluralist 7 : 1 2012 Addressing Emerson It is easy to be distracted by the many debates surrounding Emerson. Is he a secularist? Is he a democrat? What is Emerson’s place in a possible genealogy of American thought? And, does he have a future?2 In the two most wellknown genealogies of American philosophy, Kuklick and West, Emerson does not fare well. Kuklick ignores Emerson, and West takes him to task for founding a tradition that avoids “epistemology-centered philosophy” (West 5). In Emerson, I find an anti-dogmatic, pluralistic, and “tough-minded” approach to religion, which deeply influences both James’s and Dewey’s philosophies of religion. I want to understand how Emerson translates traditional religious and philosophical categories, and to explore what is involved in his “naturalistic metaphysics.”3 In short, I want to read Emerson as a philosopher of religion. By asking these questions, I place myself in a line of interpretation that includes Russell Goodman, David Jacobson, Charles Mitchell, and Stanley Cavell, all of whom read Emerson philosophically, engaging his ideas and folding them into a discussion of the progression of classical American philosophy. Emerson’s turn from organized religion to religious experience preludes James’s work on religious experience and Dewey’s reconstruction of religion. Although Emerson leaves organized religion and its supernatural God behind, he retains a deep religiosity. Emerson offers a faith in individual experience that is meant to replace the faith of traditional religions with its attendant dogmas, rituals, and dependence on supernatural revelation. In other words, self-reliance does not entail a secular individualism. Emerson’s turn to the individual is not another form of subjectivism. I will argue that the sublime that Emerson intimates in nature and through experience serves a pragmatic, melioristic end—one that is set against the ritualized worship of a supernatural deity in traditional religions Emerson rejects in “The Lord’s Supper,” “Divinity School Address,” and elsewhere.4 The contrast between Emersonian religiosity, or religious self-reliance, and what might be termed traditional theism parallels the discord found in the debates between orthodox and liberal Unitarians in the early nineteenth century. The distinction is between two rival conceptions of experience and self. The first, which is deeply influenced by Locke, provides only an anemic empiricism, which allows access to the material but makes the individual dependent on supernatural revelation. Liberal theologians, inspired by James Marsh and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, recover a version of Kant’s faculty of Reason that supplies the individual with the power to see into the light of nature. The natural religion that emerges friedman : Religious Self-Reliance 29 displaces orthodox revealed religion, just as Emerson leaves his official pulpit and eventually turns toward the writing of Nature. The first order of business, then, is quickly to point out the qualities and consequences of some metaphysical systems, in order to distinguish Emerson’s approach. The vulgar rendition of Platonic metaphysics focuses on the differentiation between that which is and never is becoming, and that which always is becoming and never is (Plato, “Timaeus” 27b).5 The world around us, the natural world, serves to show those few who can see that it is not a stable basis for knowledge. Kant’s transcendental idealism, roughly, is more transcendental than Plato’s, because it places the ideal (noumenal) beyond experience. For Emerson, Reason (or the “moral sentiment”) puts the individual in touch with the noumenal through experience of nature as sublime. Richard Gale identifies four fundamental consequences of traditional Platonic metaphysics: Because it locates true being in some timeless supernatural realm it saps our incentive to take our workaday world seriously and fosters an undemocratic, hierarchical society in which one class exercises authority over other classes. Its theses are unverifiable and thus without cognitive meaning, and, as a result, it is completely aloof from the concerns and activities of ordinary people. (479)6 The undemocratic implications Gale suggests point the way toward another type of metaphysics; we find this non-supernatural or non-theistic rendition in Emerson. Emerson puts the highest value on the world around us in its most basic elements: fields, streams, skies. Russell Goodman agrees that “although Emerson’s links to the Platonic tradition are important, he is not, like Plato, a follower of Pythagoras, who maintained that the real is the unchanging. Emerson is a Heraclitian rather than a Pythagorean on this issue, maintaining that the real is the changing” (Goodman, American Philosophy 38). Instead of turning away from nature toward a transcendent ideal (or divine), Emerson believes the ideal is immanent in the natural world. He celebrates nature, its depths and atmospheres, its varieties of possible encounters, and its horizons of possibility.7 Unitarian and Transcendental Emerson’s Transcendentalism owes many allegiances, from English Romanticism to German philosophy as translated in America through the work of Channing, Marsh, and others. For my purposes I will highlight two major 30 the pluralist 7 : 1 2012 influences on Emerson’s thought: Unitarianism, heard through the sermons of William Ellery Channing, and Transcendentalism, as read through the writings of James Marsh. Although I cannot argue that these two sources exert paramount influence on Emerson’s thought, they do continue a trend that we see play out in Emerson (and later in James and Dewey). By fleshing out some of the many philosophical and theological influences on Emerson, I hope to show that Emerson’s resignation of his Unitarian ministry was influenced by the possibilities of the religious he found outside the bounds of an organized religious tradition. This umpteenth telling of a twice-told tale is meant to refresh and reconstruct the reading of Emerson’s contributions to philosophy of religion and American pragmatism. While the distances between Calvinism and Unitarianism are well known in American thought, it is helpful to recall just a few of the conceptions of Unitarian theology that distinguish it from its more orthodox precursor.8 I will focus on the nature of divinity and its relation to the natural world, the function of Reason against Locke’s Understanding, and the celebration of benevolence over omnipotence in the consideration of God’s nature. Arthur Ladu provides a good starting point: With the Unitarians, Channing rejected Calvinism and proclaimed the unity of God, the dignity of man, the significance of Jesus as divinely sent to be an example for humanity, and the love of God for man. With them, too—and this was perhaps most important of all—he welcomed the spirit of free inquiry, the untrammeled activity of the human spirit in its attempt to establish its proper relationship with God and man. (130–31)9 The democratic and pluralistic tendencies that we find at the core of the liberal critique of Calvinism (and the Transcendentalist arguments against Unitarianism) permeate Classical American pragmatism. In sermons including “The Character of Christ,” “Christianity a Rational Religion,” and “Unitarian Christianity,” Channing forcefully argues that Christianity is best understood and practiced as a rational religion, that does not place itself “in hostility to human nature.” Being a Christian and being rational are complementary. Channing argues that Reason is the “highest faculty we have derived from God.” Using Reason, then, should not lead the Christian into error; “the divinity within us” must guide the Christian both to understand scripture and to determine the value and goodness of the beliefs that guide her religion (Channing 33–34).10 Channing returns a dignity to the individual believer, accorded the ability to discern that which accords with Reason, understood as a gift or attribute of the divine. The individual friedman : Religious Self-Reliance 31 stands over and against a religious tradition that holds its own institutional motivations, the least of which might demand a disappearing or subservient congregant. This situation of the human reflects an underlying assumption about the nature of the human: “Revelation does not find the mind a blank, a void, prepared to receive unresistingly whatever may be offered; but finds it in possession of various knowledge from nature and experience, and, still more, in possession of great principles, fundamental truths, moral ideas, which are derived from itself, and which are the germs of all its future improvement” (Channing 38).11 The idea that individuals enjoy an innate moral sense is common to many Romantic thinkers and American Transcendentalists. And it is a crucial argument against the notion that Channing and others find repellent—which may be traced to Locke—that each human appears as a tabula rasa. The force of Channing’s argument undermines some of the basic assumptions of a more orthodox Calvinistic Unitarianism. This rebellion against church authority moves the center of gravity away from orthodox religious tradition, ecclesiastical hierarchy, or dogma, to the individual as a moral and rational force. The primal human intuitions and human Reason form the groundwork for what Emerson would later call “natural religion” (Later Lectures 180–81). Channing’s argument that moral ideas are to be found through individual Reasoning serves as the root of the argument against the necessity of the guidance of church doctrine. We also find it at the heart of Emerson’s notion of self-reliance. The human mind is not a blank slate, but includes a faculty formed with and by Reason, with which one may “infer and look beyond the letter to the spirit, to seek in the nature of the subject, and the aim of the writer, his true meaning; and, in general, to make use of what is known, for explaining what is difficult, and for discovering new truths” (Channing 42). The sermon “Love to Christ” opens with Channing declaring that the duty to love Christ is not dependent on supernatural revelation. Instead, it is a natural duty “inculcated with more or less distinctness by our moral faculties [which] are parts of the inward law which belongs to a rational mind” (Channing 316–17). Channing insists that Reason must be applied in the interpretation of scripture.12 Revelation, he argues, “is addressed to us as rational beings.” The objection that God’s “discoveries will surpass human Reason” makes no sense to Channing. He answers this as he does the notion that the individual is born into sin: “We say, first, that it is impossible that a teacher of infinite wisdom should expose those, whom he would teach, to infinite error. . . . If God be infinitely wise, he cannot sport with the understandings of his crea- 32 the pluralist 7 : 1 2012 tures” (43). Even the more orthodox Andrews Norton found it Reasonable that “what cannot be comprehended cannot be made known, and therefore cannot be revealed” (Haroutunian 203). Channing also rejects the notion of the inherent depravity of human nature. Here we find open conflict between the attributes of God celebrated by the Orthodox and the Liberals. In Channing’s judgment, which he allows to qualify the theological position, “it is plain that a doctrine which contradicts our best ideas of goodness and justice cannot come from the just and good God, or be a true representation of his character” (Madden 562).13 Channing appreciates goodness and not force or power (or mystery) as the highest attribute of the divine. “We venerate not the loftiness of God’s throne, but the equity and goodness in which it is established” (Channing 376). The replacement of church authority and supernatural revelation with the function of individual Reason was both influential and scandalous. American Transcendentalism emerges from Unitarianism with as much controversy as the latter did as it evolved from Calvinism. In fact, “this latest form of infidelity” seems to have been foreseen by the Orthodox, as Calvinistic opponents of Unitarianism were known (Faust 300). Opponents of Channing and liberal Unitarianism rejected the “ascription of final authority to Reason rather than to revelation” because they saw in this surrender a path that would only lead to greater heresy (Faust 302–04). Part of the liberals’ defense was that the appeal to Reason was “the only barrier against a wild, unprofitable enthusiasm on the one hand, and a deadening unbelief on the other” (Faust 308). Here is where Emerson falls into the fray. His address to the Harvard Divinity School served as evidence for the Orthodox and an embarrassment for many liberal Unitarians when, following Channing, he appealed for a form of religious self-reliance. Orthodox critics leapt at the opportunity to vent their scorn on him and his betrayal of what they took to be fundamental principles of the religious tradition: “[Emerson] warns the candidates for the ministry to look only into their own souls for the truth. He has himself succeeded thus in discovering many truths that are not to be found in the Bible. . . . In a word, Mr. Emerson is an infidel and an atheist” (Faust 315–16).14 This charge holds the attention of commentators today who find in Emerson a champion of the secular and the skeptical, and not a critic of revealed theology and any brand of theism that places God (or any divine) beyond the reach of human experience. For some historians of nineteenth century New England religion, Channing is the bridge between liberal Unitarianism and American Transcendentalism.15 friedman : Religious Self-Reliance 33 In line with the Orthodox vitriol against Channing and company, Cameron Thompson describes the emergence of Transcendentalism as a natural progression from liberal Unitarianism. For the Transcendentalists, Emerson became a prophet, and his Nature, “their New Testament.” The biblical metaphor is apt: James Marsh is said to have provided the Transcendentalists with their Old Testament (Thompson 444).16 John Dewey referred to Marsh’s edition of Aids to Reflection as his first Bible.17 James Marsh’s introduction to Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection is a seminal work in American Transcendentalism. Marsh engages both theological and philosophical questions, responding to a crisis faced in both fields.18 Marsh and Channing share a concern for the autonomy of the human actor and the location (and possibility) of moral goodness in the human, which stands in stark contrast to the orthodox Calvinistic positions on the necessity of accepting a religion of revelation and the inherent depravity of human nature. Marsh’s central contribution to the debate between Orthodox and Liberal and to the Transcendentalists, generally, is his recognition of the possibilities of the spiritual life of individuals (via Coleridge) instead of adopting, like the popular metaphysicians of the day, a system of philosophy at war with religion, and which tends inevitably to undermine our belief in the reality of any thing spiritual in the only proper sense of that word, and then coldly and ambiguously referring us for the support of our faith to the authority of Revelation. (Marsh 497) Marsh is unambiguous in his disdain for the theology he traces to Locke, which tethers humans to the realm of the natural and leaves the spiritual beyond the reach of human understanding (508–09). The similarities between Marsh and Channing follow Coleridge’s “vindication of the distinctively spiritual and peculiar doctrines of the Christian system” and his belief that the “Christian faith is the perfection of human Reason” (Marsh 496).19 For Marsh, there is to be no distinction between religious and secular; “the genuine philosopher can have rationally but one system, in which his philosophy becomes religious, and his religion philosophical” (501).20 The goal is an agreement of religious thought with the function of individual Reason.21 Religious truths must make sense, must jibe with our own sense of right and wrong. “Our philosophy” keeps religion and the mandates of religious authority in line (Marsh 502–03).22 The distinction that Marsh draws between philosophy and religion may be translated into the difference between a religion of revelation instructed and mediated by church hierarchy, and a religious sentiment or experience whose sources may 34 the pluralist 7 : 1 2012 be both within the individual and nature. At the very least, Marsh insists on running the religious through the philosophical faculties. Ladu explains that “insistence upon the validity of immediate intuition, independent of any external experience or teaching, is an important tenet in the transcendental philosophy. In fact, it gives transcendentalism its most significant characteristic; namely, its striking faith in the infallibility of the individual conscience” (132). At stake, in large part, was the “authority of Revelation,” specifically the role of miracles in grounding or proving faith. Coleridge provides Marsh with the tools to base faith in something intuitive (Gura, American Transcendentalism 50–52).23 One of the most often mentioned consequences in America of the publication of Aids to Reflection is the introduction or influence of Kantian thought (through Marsh and Coleridge). For my purposes, I agree with Menand: “What matters here is not whether Coleridge exactly follows Kant or whether Marsh or Emerson fully understood the nuances of either Coleridge or Kant. What matters is the idea of Reason itself and what Emerson does with it” (93).24 “If the Reason is God,” Packer writes, “then God is interior to the self, and the self has a principle of illumination no empiricism can menace” (37).25 The democratic inspiration of this claim is obvious. What is not so clear is the relation of this particular rendition of Reason to nature. Perhaps, the democratic nature of this shift in theology reflects its core understanding that the approach to God is internal—or that God’s will is not something externally imposed or reflected in dogma and ritual that requires feasance. On the one-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Aids to Reflection, John Dewey located “the more obvious phase of the radicalism of Coleridge in religion” in “his attack on what he called its bibliolatry.” Dewey explains: “He condemned the doctrine of literal inspiration as a superstition; he urges the acceptance of the teachings of Scripture on the ground that they ‘find’ one in the deepest and most spiritual part of one’s nature. Faith was a state of the will and the affections, not a merely intellectual assent to doctrinal and historical propositions” (134). Not surprisingly, Dewey recasts Marsh’s religious philosophy in the light of his own. Marsh, according to Dewey, rejects the Aristotelian contention that Reason could be actualized in contemplative knowledge apart from any effort to change the world of nature and social institutions into its own likeness and embodiment. . . . He held that Reason can realize itself and be truly awake or conscious of its own intrinsic nature only friedman : Religious Self-Reliance as it operates to make over the world, whether physical or social, into an embodiment of its own principles. . . . By its own nature, Reason terminates in action and that action is the transformation of the spiritual potentialities found in the natural world, physical and institutional, into spiritual realities. (141–42)26 35 Dewey’s Marsh helps bring into relief the central question in Emerson’s metaphysics: what is the relationship between the individual and nature? The question of the location and nature of divinity follows closely. If our own moral sense allows us to judge the teachings of scripture and offers unfettered access to the divine through the sublime, then organized religion is unnecessary. Worse, religion can serve to impede the blossoming of one’s own moral sense. Self-reliance takes on a meaning and import that neither excludes nor precludes religious experience. The interplay of the faculty of Reason and experience represents a move beyond miracles, the mediation of Jesus, and the reduction of the individual to mere material in the hands of a God. This new type of experience, the encounter of individual Reason and nature, is at the heart of the dispute between Transcendentalism and Unitarianism. Kuklick notes that Reason, in Emerson, becomes identified with an “intuitive emotional prerogative,” and does not attempt to ground religious faith on “facts, tradition, or authority” (7). P. Eddy Wilson uses the term “natural piety” to designate an individual’s religious response to nature. For Emerson, Wilson writes, “this religious response to nature is an outgrowth of one’s intuitive grasp of his or her relation to nature. . . . Through a change of one’s own conscious perspective one becomes aware of one’s metaphysical dependence upon nature. . . . Only by quietly attuning oneself to nature can an individual enhance his or her relation to nature” (331). I follow Wilson’s point here and view Emerson as a figure who bridges the divides; he has precious little patience for a Church that projects its own authority and traditional belief structure onto individuals. The heart of his project is the advocacy of a religious sentiment that is predicated on an awakening to a holistic experience in and of nature (not unlike what James describes in Varieties). Levinson offers that “in Emerson’s view, religious experience—immediate solitary encounters with Nature’s own being—made all the difference between a life of vital fulfillment and one of vacuous and slavish morality” (26–27).27 Emerson finds agency in the human, rejecting pre-determination and any causal and transcendent supernatural Being. We find Emerson between or beyond Unitarianism and Transcendentalism. 36 the pluralist 7 : 1 2012 Breaking with Traditions It is helpful to turn to Emerson’s journals, if briefly, to begin the discussion of his move away from Unitarianism. Here, Emerson the Minister begins to put words to what he finds oppressive and counter-productive in his chosen field: “I have sometimes thought that in order to be a good minister it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers. Were not a Socratic paganism better than an effete superannuated Christianity?” (Early Lectures 2:27). Unitarian religion is misdirected: Ancient Christian texts and the doctrine extracted from them point the congregant backwards. Emerson asks himself: What is the message that is given me to communicate next Sunday? Religion in the mind is not credulity & in the practice is not form. It is a life. It is the order & soundness of a man. It is not something else to be got, to be added, but is a new life of those faculties you have. It is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble. (Early Lectures 2:27) Already, we can hear the not-so-subtle shift from a notion of belief as subscription to law or dogma, toward a more pragmatic rendering as the practice of a life lived at first hand. Emerson’s conception of the divine is eventually drawn under his questioning. A God who sits apart—a transcendent God—no longer has any force. In a telling passage, Emerson asks: “What is God but the name of the Soul at the centre by which all things are what they are, so our existence is proof of his. We cannot think of ourselves & how our being is intertwined with his without awe & amazement” (Early Lectures 2:33). Emerson pines for a relationship with the divine that is not an object of distant or detached worship. For Emerson divinity is effusive and yet located at the center of all existence. While Emerson attributes a supernatural quality to divinity (as the “source” of all existence), he is well on his way to lowering the profile of a supernatural God. In place of dualistic theism, we find some version of pantheism in Emerson. As with Channing and Marsh, the individual becomes the locus of any revelation: The truth of truth consists in this, that it is self-evident, self-subsistent. It is light. You don’t get a candle to see the sun rise. Instead of making Christianity a vehicle of truth you make truth only a horse for Christianity. It is a very operose way of making people good. You must be humble because Christ says, “Be humble.” But why must I obey Christ? “Because friedman : Religious Self-Reliance God sent him.” But how do I know God sent him? “Because your own heart teaches the same thing he taught.” Why then shall I not go to my own heart at first? (Early Lectures 2:45)28 37 The rejection of apologetic theology announces Emerson’s path to religious self-reliance. If one is guided by her own heart, Christianity must be careful not to stand in the way. “The Lord’s Supper” marks the end of Emerson’s professional career as a minister.29 In it, we hear him give voice to the challenges he puts to Unitarianism in his journal entries. Emerson, as is well known, refuses to continue to offer his congregation communion. For him, the sacrament was the ultimate form of mistaken worship, and points to the central impossibility of his ministry. The ritual had become its own meaning; or, the force of the symbolism had been lost. Emerson has little patience for outmoded practices, arguing that “Jesus did not intend to establish an institution for perpetual observance” (Essays and Poems 955). The action of taking communion “clothes Jesus with an authority he never claimed and which distracts the mind of the worshipper” (Essays and Poems 962). Emerson shifts the focus from worship or celebration of Jesus back to the individual congregant: “Whatever forms we use should be animated by our feelings; our religion through all its acts should be living and operative.” Jesus should be taken as a mediator between God and man “that is an Instructor of man. He teaches us how to become like God” (Essays and Poems 963). But Jesus should not be mistakenly transformed into the object of worship; worship is to become action on the part of the individual. We find a similar argument in “Faith and Its Object” in Dewey’s A Common Faith. Emerson sees Jesus as offering a way of life; the practice of worshipping Jesus gets this truth backwards. Importantly, there is no sense of an absolute dependence on Jesus or his teachings or the need for mediation through him in order for the individual to become like God. By the time Emerson addresses the Harvard Divinity School class of 1838, he has already put his official ministry behind him. But the lessons he preached earlier ring true here, as he challenges a new generation of ministers to accommodate his radical rendition of the religious sentiment: “All things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with it” (Essays and Poems 77). This pluralistic charge reflects the budding natural religion Emerson has already begun to take to heart. Emerson is no longer satisfied with a particular religious tradition and demands the recognition of a general or broader religiosity, a plurality of approaches limited only by the variety of individual experiences. Emerson rejects “the noxious exaggeration of the 38 the pluralist 7 : 1 2012 person of Jesus, the exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual” and recognizes the source of religious sentiment as naturally given in the individual (Essays and Poems 81).30 David Robinson describes Emerson’s “growing preference for a natural theology based on Reason rather than a revealed theology which relies on miracles. [For Emerson] rationalism undermined the historicism of revealed religion, preparing the way for a faith based in the immediate perceptions of the self ” (Robinson, “Emerson’s Natural Theology” 73). This suggestion will ultimately involve the same kind of function for Reason that Channing and Marsh share. Emerson wants the graduates to practice a new form of preaching, one which gives “expression [to] the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life.” He calls on them to “cast behind all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity” (Essays and Poems 84, 89). This must have struck fear into both instructor and student. The abandonment of conformity—as well as the emphasis on the natural religious sentiment—places Emerson beyond any particular religious tradition and its practices. His celebration of “primary faith” renders impossible the job of preaching: “Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing” (Essays and Poems 79).31 So much for the traditional sources of religious authority!32 Emerson does locate a notion of melioristic self-reliance in Christianity: “That for which Paul lived and died so gloriously; that for which Jesus was crucified; the end that animated the thousand martyrs and heroes that have followed him, was to redeem us from a formal religion, and teach us to seek our wellbeing in the reformation of the soul” (Essays and Poems 965). Emerson carefully distinguishes between the spirit of Christianity and its institutional incarnation. Grusin concludes: “In urging Harvard’s ministerial aspirants to preach no historical Christianity but moral truth, Emerson criticizes the teachings of New England’s divinity schools not for being too professional but for not being professional enough” (79). In this vein, Richardson notes that “it is also untrue that his break with the church marked a loss of faith. If anything, Emerson believed too much, not too little” (125). The historical Christianity that was taught, or perhaps the type of religion that depended so centrally on the ministry to provide revelation (and not provocation), was insufficient for Emerson’s needs and did not reflect the vastness and possibility of the religious he found through nature. The “Divinity School Address” echoes many of the same charges Emerson puts to the Phi Beta Kappa society in “The American Scholar,” what Reyn- friedman : Religious Self-Reliance 39 olds calls “an attempted cultural rescue mission” (493). Here, too, Emerson demands both a rejection of tradition(s) and a reliance on one’s own faculties. His lines are well known: “Our days of dependence . . . [on] the learning of other lands draws to a close. Each age must write its own books. The books of an older generation will not fit this. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe” (Essays and Poems 53, 56–57, 70). Emerson dismisses the adequacy of theological reflection devoid of practical action in the education and inspiration of the “active soul” (Essays and Poems 57).33 The lessons of books are no substitute for praxis; “without action, thought can never ripen into truth” (Essays and Poems 60).34 Again, the ability to access truth, or direct oneself toward it, lies within the student and her experiences, pressing her forward to action. The obvious religious aspects and consequences of Emerson’s charge in “The American Scholar” are often overlooked. By requiring a turn inward, toward “the law of nature,” Emerson highlights both a universalism that permeates his thought and the centrality of experiences of nature in his religious philosophy. What is true for one is “universally true. A man is related to all nature. One design unites and animates” (Essays and Poems 62, 69). Again, this idea is pluralistic at heart and liberal in its opposition to the traditional Calvinist notion of election. Emerson argues that each individual retains the possibility of revealing for herself the universal truths of the law of nature. There is no one path toward religious truth, just as there is no one religious tradition that holds a monopoly on access to the divine. The individual, now challenged to judge for herself, should not be mistaken for a solipsist. Freed from the shackles of tradition, she is directed on a path of self-discovery leading to a self-reliance that reveals the interconnectedness and unity that is Emerson’s nature. He tells the students that know thyself and study nature are one (Essays and Poems 56). Our age is retrospective. It should not be surprising that we find these words at the opening of Emerson’s Nature. This work shares with his “Divinity School Address” the distrust of institutions and authorities that usurp the possibility of religious self-reliance, a concept intimately linked with Emerson’s understandings of nature and the power of nature. Emerson desires “a philosophy of insight and not of tradition, a religion of revelation to us, and not the history of [foregoing generations].” He demands “an original relation to the universe” (Essays and Poems 7).35 Original has two meanings: not traditional, and situated or originating in the individual, freed of the material trappings and roles of social and economic position. The central move in Emerson’s reconstruction of religion is his substitution of natural religion for supernatural revelation. This is what he means when he writes “a religion of revelation to 40 the pluralist 7 : 1 2012 us.” Gone are the mediation of doctrine, the literal ‘interpretation’ of sacred texts, and the revelations of foregoing generations. When he writes “insight and not tradition,” he shifts the voice of authority from organized religion to the individual, specifically, the individual’s moral faculties. The Religious Sentiment Emerson’s use of nature fluctuates throughout his writings, as, too, does the relationship of the individual to nature.36 At times, Emerson situates the individual against nature, suggesting that nature coheres and has meaning only in relation to the functioning of human Reason. Sometimes, though, Emerson portrays people as being at the mercy of nature; or nature is described as retaining its own moral sense, independent of the attentions of an individual’s Reason. I hope to show that these references, which will emerge in detail as we make our way through Emerson, do not obfuscate the role of nature in his overall philosophy. Emerson suggests two complementary approaches to understanding nature, which I do not find undone in his later writings. The commonsense version of nature retains a power extolled by so many Romantics and Transcendentalists, and others. One goes out into nature in order to lose oneself, to be relieved, rejuvenated, resurrected. Ishmael knows when it is “high time to get to the sea as soon as I can” (Melville 3). Thoreau has his Walden Pond, and Wordsworth his Tintern Abbey. Emerson’s affection for Wordsworth is well known; the similarity between a central passage in “Nature” and one in “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” is clear. Wordsworth writes: . . . Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. . . . (Wordsworth 109) Emerson’s rendition, in the essay “Nature” reads: “Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,— all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God” (Essays and Poems 10).37 It is easy to obfuscate the friedman : Religious Self-Reliance 41 commonsense presentation of nature as healing: “Nature is medicinal; [it] restores the tone of body and mind;” “We are never tired so long as we can see far enough;” “[Nature’s] enchantments sober and heal us” (Essays and Poems 14–15, 542). Cavell argues forcefully that abandonment and selflessness are themes throughout Emerson’s work. Being nothing, then, would not come as a surprise. His understanding of self-reliance recalls Kierkegaard’s relational self in Sickness. Cavell works this out in relation to Emerson and Thoreau’s “inhabitation” in and through writing, through their interest in the fact that what they are building is writing, that their writing is, as it realizes itself daily under their hands, sentence by shunning sentence . . . the making of it happen. . . . Such writing takes the same mode of relating to itself as reading and thinking do, the mode of the self ’s relation to itself, call it self-reliance. (174)38 Cavell’s skeptical Emerson is influential, because it is clear that Emerson does fit some version of skepticism. David Greenham writes: [T]he target of Kant’s critical philosophy is the idea that the everyday world that we experience always leads us beyond that experience, from the domestic to the divine. . . . It is as though we are drawn out beyond ourselves by our very way of living and unable to ground ourselves on such attenuated foundations. And it is the fact, or at least the experience, that we are led outside of our own faculties (Reason and Understanding) by those faculties themselves—and from which perspective we discover our disappointment with their range—that is the origin of our skepticism. (257) Greenham quickly points out that the “turning into each other of the divine and the domestic answers to skepticism”; by this he means that there need be no division between the two (257). Greenham and Cavell make their cases through examinations of the various faculties of the self they find in Kant and Emerson. I argue that founding the self—the goal of self-reliance—is better understood with reference to the place, function, and relation of the Over-soul to the self through Reason. Greenham finds the self grounding itself, “address[ing] itself as itself within the categories, or words, provided for it a priori. It is in language that the self will find its ‘conditions of possibility’” (266). While Emerson undoubtedly plays with language through writing, the story he tells reaches beyond language to nature and finds its mark in the Over-soul. 42 the pluralist 7 : 1 2012 Emerson allows for a type of response in and through what he calls the moral sentiment that seems to bring nature into play in a way which Kant, Coleridge, and Marsh do not allow. In order not to lose our way, we should trace out a few themes that will lead us back to Emerson. First, he is fond of circle imagery; placing the individual at the center of a universe that rotates out from and around that part of the individual that it reflects, namely, “the spirit.” Because this structure is shared by all, the core of this great sphere is also known as the “Over-soul.” Wherever we may wander, we may always find ourselves at the center of a natural world in which we and others share a spirituality that links us one to another and to the greater natural world that surrounds us. At times Emerson identifies this spiritual nature as a moral force, writing: “every natural process is a version of a moral sentence. The moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference” (Essays and Poems 29).39 The identification of this moral law or spirit within nature and the individual will serve as the evidence of my argument that self-reliance and the Over-soul are complementary and not contradictory concepts, and that the Over-soul is a necessary aspect or component of self-reliance. Moral law may be the reflection or suggestion of an invisible world or order. Emerson describes the relation in geometric terms: “The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world.” He adds, “The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass. The visible world and the relation of its parts, is the dial plate of the invisible” (Essays and Poems 25, 24).40 It is unclear if the human mind is itself a part of the material, visible world, or if it belongs to the invisible world, operating as the source of the moral law. Emerson writes: “1. Words are signs of natural facts. 2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. 3. Nature is the symbol of spirit” (Essays and Poems 20).41 Emerson’s explanation of his first claim is straightforward: “every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. Right means straight, wrong means twisted,” and so on (Essays and Poems 20). While moral and intellectual facts find their roots in material appearance, “every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as a picture” (Essays and Poems 20). Emerson finds in and through the reflection of spiritual facts in nature the source for his religious sentiment (Later Lectures 269.)42 In an often-quoted passage (taken from the section explaining his second claim), Emerson writes: friedman : Religious Self-Reliance Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul he calls Reason: it is not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its property and men. And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself. And man in all ages and countries embodies it in his language, as the FATHER. (Essays and Poems 21) 43 This early mention, in “Nature,” of a “universal soul within or behind” is recalled in “The Over-Soul,” in which “from within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing but the light is all” (Essays and Poems 387). As Goodman has pointed out, Emerson follows Heraclitus and not Pythagoras (and Plato), viewing the real as that which changes (is becoming, in Plato). Here, the natural world manifests the deeper metaphysical reality. In this way, as well, human Reason reflects the “Spirit” of nature. But what are we to make of the universal soul? And how do we understand the metaphor of spirit as “Creator?” The universal soul is identified with Reason, but not an individual’s Reason. Here it is important to return to the traditional philosophical distinction between Reason and Understanding. Following Hegel (or Marsh’s rendition of Coleridge’s Kant), Emerson relies on Reason as the faculty that reveals the greater truths; understanding is Reason’s lieutenant. The types of knowledge understanding provides might allow someone access to the world of working, but only through Reason can one become awakened to the deeper human nature. In an often-overlooked lecture, “Religion,” given as part of a series “The Philosophy of History,” Emerson draws out his usage of these terms: That Universal mind our English professors distinguish by the strict use of the word Reason. Of Reason as the Contemplative Power contradistinguished from the Understanding which is the Executive faculty. Reason is the Eye, the Understanding the Hand of the mind. We belong to it, not it to us. It is in all men, even in the worst, and constitutes them men. (Early Lectures 2:834)43 Understanding is the mistaken attention to particulars that busily distracts the individual from the truths or deeper realities that are only perceived 44 the pluralist 7 : 1 2012 by Reason. For Emerson, “the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount are the utterances of the mind contemning the phenomenal world. . . . This is falsehood and nonsense, says the Common Sense.—I can make nothing of it, says the Understanding. The Reason affirms its immutable truth. He has filled the world with the music of words which only Reason can interpret” (Early Lectures 2:90). The moral teachings of the Sermon on the Mount become clear through Reason; it is not accidental that Emerson would use this specific example of a religious inheritance which complements and guides moral life. It is passed down from Jesus to the believer directly. The language of “Creator” and “FATHER” is misleading. Emerson is not Christo-centric; he recognizes in Spirit—through Reason—a transcultural and transhistorical possibility (man in all ages and countries).44 Joseph Gardner argues that Emerson “particularly accepted with great gratitude Coleridge’s insistence—in contra-distinction to Kant—that the Reason could, indeed, come into contact with the noumena lying behind the phenomena of the material world” (33). There are countless passages in Emerson in which he offers Reason as the foil to Understanding or brute sense experience. Although the use of excerpts from Emerson can tend toward the statistical, a few more passages will help to bring out the relationship between the individual, nature, and Over-soul that is brought forth through Reason. In “Idealism,” Reason overcomes the “despotism of the senses.” He continues, “when the eye of Reason opens, to outline and surface are at once added, grace and expression. . . . [O]utlines and surfaces become transparent” (Essays and Poems 33). Against the tradition of interpretation that has Emerson immersed in language, I find Emerson again and again using a metaphor of vision projected from and through Reason into nature. For Emerson, the central function of the encounter with nature is spiritual, which provides the alternative to the principles and dogmas of the divine writ small. Here Emerson turns away from language to an experience of “that which refuses to be recorded in propositions.” At this moment, “language and thought desert us.” It is nature, “the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it” (Essays and Poems 40). Even in “The American Scholar,” Emerson denigrates the potential of the written word: “Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings” (Essays and Poems 58). Instead, Emerson declares “in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason” (Essays and Poems 70). friedman : Religious Self-Reliance 45 Conclusion A reading that emphasizes Emerson’s religiosity does not challenge the value or validity of Cavell and others’ work. But Cavell and others seem blind to the other Emerson that comes across when we account for the centrality of Reason, sight, and the divinity of nature in his work. Perhaps the most significant challenge to my emphasis on the importance of the relationship between Reason and the Over-soul is found in what is often considered to be absent in later Emerson, namely any significant mention of either. Where and how do we find nature and Reason in his essay “Experience”? Even in this painful and mournful essay, Emerson recognizes a source or divinity through a particular experience. While life can feel dreamlike, and the world of working distant and unreal, “underneath the inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection, the Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam” (Essays and Poems 484). Emerson concludes the essay by dismissing the “paltry empiricism” that hinders “passage into new worlds [we] carry with [us]” (Essays and Poems 492).45 “Nature,” published with “Experience” in Essays and Poems (Second Series), begins with a similar description of the variety of possible moods and temperaments (the term used in “Experience”) that color our relationship with nature—something we find also in “Over-soul.” Here in “Nature” the consequence of being “nestled in nature” is the reflection of the “degrees of natural influence . . . up to her dearest and gravest ministrations to the imagination and the soul” (Essays and Poems 542). The “moral sensibility” that abides nature, is found in “points of astonishment” where it seems the heavens meet the earth. The difference is not between landscapes, Emerson writes, but “in the beholders. There is nothing so wonderful in any particular landscape, as the necessity of being beautiful under which every landscape lies. Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty breaks in everywhere” (Essays and Poems 544–45). Nature’s beauty does not distract from “the thing to be done,” Emerson writes in response to nameless critics. For Emerson, again, nature offers direction through repair: “Man is fallen; nature is erect, and serves as a differential thermometer, detecting the presence or absence of the divine sentiment in man” (Essays and Poems 546). Instead of abandonments and discontents, we find in Emerson—through the relationship of individual to nature—“no discontinuity” as “the divine circulations never linger” (Essays and Poems 555). If we do not make enough of the divine in Emerson, we miss too much of the value and function of nature and the force of Reason that Emerson 46 the pluralist 7 : 1 2012 locates in one’s soul. It is “not a faculty, but a light, is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being in which they lie” (Essays and Poems 387). Its measure is far greater than that “of the senses and the understanding” (Essays and Poems 388). Emerson continues in the Over-soul to identify the “announcements of the soul” with or as “Revelation” (Essays and Poems 393). The secular reading of “Self-Reliance” runs into the problem of denying the self Emerson recovers, when it ignores his method and the tools of revelation, “that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within” (Essays and Poems 259). When Emerson poses the question, “What is the aboriginal Self?,” he ends up locating a source within the soul in which “the sense of being . . . is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them” (Essays and Poems 259). The warning Emerson issues is to beware of the person “who claims to know and speak of God, and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world” (Essays and Poems 269–70). Self-reliance is Emerson’s answer to the religious tradition its discoveries transcend; it is found through the inspiration that uncovers the Over-soul, the gift of sight, the religious sentiment, or Reason. Against the prevailing tradition of interpretation, we can certainly conclude that Emerson is ruggedly not a secularist. His religiosity transcends any particular religious tradition and replaces the supernatural and theistic, and the dualism that follows both, with an experiential appreciation for the divine in and through nature. My reading of Emerson leads me to argue that the faculty of Reason, which Emerson identifies as the moral or religious sentiment, provides the individual with the grounds to explore her deeper nature. The Over-soul that the moral sentiment uncovers represents the ultimate grounding of the self, and its revelation serves as the basis for religious self-reliance. notes This article is dedicated to the founders and staff of Colvig Silver Camps. Thanks to Michael Slater for his helpful comments throughout. 1. Sears describes the influences of James, Bergson, and Emerson on Frost, arguing that “they provided Frost with a source of suggestive metaphors for the connection between spiritual fact and natural fact, between mind and event, feeling and process, which he could adapt to his own philosophical or poetic needs” (343). See also Poirier 70. 2. See O. W. Firkins. Or, as David L. Smith puts it, “Did he advocate self-reliance or God reliance, imperialistic individualism or acquiescence to fate? Was he a transcendentalist or a humanist, a Puritan or a pragmatist, a Neoplatonist or a Nietszchean, an abstract spiritualist or a world-affirming champion of the ordinary?” (835–36). friedman : Religious Self-Reliance 47 3. See “A Naturalistic Defense of Metaphysics” and “The Logic of a Critical Naturalism” in Romanell 15–38. 4. Although this paper focuses mainly on Emerson before 1860, I believe it retains some applicability to his later works too. 5. Cf. Emerson (Essays and Poems 38). (From “Nature”): “Culture inverts the vulgar views of nature, and brings the mind to call that apparent, which it uses to call real, and that real, which it uses to call visionary.” Nietzsche’s well-known admiration of Emerson is based in large part on their shared rejection of the basic tenets of Platonic metaphysics. 6. For more on the democratic aspect of Emerson’s thought and its influence in American pragmatism, see Naoko Saito. 7. Robert Corrington shares this conception of metaphysics with Emerson. “Metaphysics,” he writes “is not a spurious enterprise that wants to leap outside of the confines of the transcendental subject. Rather, it is the attempt to find the most basic categories through which phenomena (orders of relevance) can become available to the human process. To engage in metaphysics is to probe into the most generic features of a given order and to isolate those features for special treatment” (3). 8. For an excellent discussion of the decline of Calvinism, see Daniel Walker Howe. He traces the evolution of Calvinism into Protestant humanism to a number of forces, including “a secular trend toward greater reliance upon human rather than divine power” (307). Some of the classic works include Gura, American Transcendentalism; Gura, Transient and Permanent, ed. Capper and Wright; Grusin, Transcendentalist Hermeneutics; Buell, New England Literary Culture; Buell, Literary Transcendentalism; and Hutchison, Transcendentalist Ministers. 9. Ladu does not argue that Channing had a strong influence on Emerson’s ideas. Others disagree; see Robert D. Richardson, Jr., specifically chap. 9, “The Paradise of Dictionaries and Critics.” 10. This sounds like the writing of another Romantic theologian. See Hegel: “The fundamental error at the bottom of a church’s entire system is that it ignores the rights pertaining to every faculty of the human mind, in particular to the chief of them, Reason. Once the church’s system ignores Reason, it can be nothing save a system which despises man” (143). 11. Channing, like Emerson, was intimately familiar with the work of William Wordsworth (see John Beer). Emerson visited Wordsworth in England in 1833, as Channing had in 1822. Emerson’s visit is recalled in his journal; see Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 222–26. Cf. Wordsworth, “Ode” (Selected Poems 186–91). 12. For an excellent discussion of the influence of Herder et al. and Higher Criticism, see Gura (American Transcendentalism), esp. chap. 1, “Searching Scriptures”; and Grusin. 13. See Edward H. Madden: “To punish with endless ruin the so-called sins of beings who could not act or wish to act any way but evilly and sinfully would be a wrong paralleled by the most merciless despotism. Moreover, the doctrine of the Elect according to which a select few will be arbitrarily chosen to be saved by way of showing God’s mercy cross-grains unmercifully any sense of fairness, however slight the sensitivity to fairness may be. Even worse, those who are not ‘elected’ are promised forgiveness if they repent, which their very nature makes impossible” (562). 14. Faust cites “Transcendentalism,” Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review 11 (1839): 97. Emerson may indeed reject theism, but he is quick to replace the supernatural deity and the traditional form of revelation through scripture with natural theology. 48 the pluralist 7 : 1 2012 15. See Ladu; see Thompson. Ladu argues that “Channing’s fundamental philosophy forced him to stand as far aloof from that of the transcendentalists as it did from the orthodoxy of the Unitarians” (137). 16. Thompson attributes the Old Testament designation to Odell Shepard’s in Pedlar’s Progress (159). Nicolson argues that Marsh’s “Preliminary Essay” “may be called the first publication of American Transcendentalism” (38). 17. See Marsh cxxv. 18. See Menand: “Marsh provided Emerson and his friends with an alternative to the Unitarianism and empiricism they were trying to find a way to renounce” (248). Even still, Marsh was concerned enough about the possible controversy to be caused by Coleridge’s work, that he warns his audience in advance, and yet hopes that Coleridge will awaken some re-evaluation of their habitual beliefs. See Marsh 494, 495. 19. In the original, the quote is in all capital letters. 20. Kevin Van Anglen laments the division of Transcendentalist thinkers into “secular” and “religious” categories, arguing that critics who do so “all too frequently end up privileging ‘secular’ interpretations of the evidence at hand, thereby problematizing the explicitly religious element in Transcendentalist art and experience” (154). 21. Marsh praises Coleridge’s “reconciliation of religion and philosophy—a reconciliation which, as he points out, was regarded by orthodox New England as heresy. But, says Marsh, it is our privilege as rational beings and our duty as Christians to see that our convictions of truth rest upon right Reason” (Nicolson 40). 22. Marsh stands with Coleridge, emphasizing that Christianity “is not a theory, but a life” (Marsh 504). 23. Barbara Packer explains the “assault on Locke:” Marsh described empirical philosophy as a system that by insisting that all knowledge is ultimately derived from sensation ‘tends inevitably to undermine our belief in the reality of anything spiritual in the only proper sense of that word’ and then ‘coldly and ambiguously’ refers us for the support of our faith to ‘the authority of revelation.’ In Aids to Reflection Coleridge makes a strong distinction between what is spiritual and what is natural and in so doing eliminates the need to reduce the one to the other. The Reason is the supersensuous, intuitive power, at once the source of morality and of the highest kind of intellection; the Understanding is the humbler servant who works by combining and comparing ideas derived from sensation, who helps us reflect and generalize—the faculty Locke had mistaken for the whole of the mind, in other words (Packer 24). 24. See also Menand (261–72) for a discussion of Marsh’s inheritance and interpretation of Kant. Packer restates the well-known: “As many have noticed, Coleridge’s terminology differs in significant ways from its source. For Kant, the Reason consists of all the categories of mental activity that make perception possible but cannot themselves be derived from it. . . . Kant’s Reason is neither a repository of particular truths nor the faculty of intuitively apprehending them” (Packer 25). Following the publication of Aids to Reflection, the Transcendental Club began meeting. Among its members, all of whom were taken by Marsh’s philosophy, was Emerson (Nicolson 29). Also of great influence on Emerson were his correspondence and conversations with Mary Moody Emerson about Channing, Kant et al. See Phyllis Cole, especially chap. 8: “The God Within.” See also Peter C. Carafiol: “Between the time he first read Marsh’s Aids to Reflection, in late 1829, and 1838, however, Emerson mentioned no writer so frequently as Coleridge” friedman : Religious Self-Reliance 49 (42). We find Locke and Coleridge on opposite sides of the aisle in “Over-soul”; one speaks “from without,” one “from within.” “It is of no use to preach to me from without. I can do that too easily myself. Jesus speaks always from within” (Emerson, Essays and Poems 395). 25. See A. Bronson Alcott: “His genius is ethical, literary; he speaks to the moral sentiments through the imagination, insinuating the virtues so, as poets and moralists of his class are wont. The Sacred Class, the Priests, differ in this,—they address the moral sentiment directly, thus enforcing the sanctions of personal righteousness, and celebrating moral excellence in prophetic strain” (18–19). Direct access to the divine in many ways grounds the democratic and pluralistic appeals of Emerson: the religious is open to anyone and everyone who accesses the divine through her own experience. 26. The influence of Swedenborg and his doctrine of correspondence is obvious here and elsewhere—and is mentioned in most standard histories of Transcendentalism. Packer notes: “Here the human being is at the center of the correspondential universe, and the natural world radiates out from him like a vast Unconscious; the task of the naturalist is to reverse the process (whatever it was) that alienated these human properties into the foreign shapes that constitute the vast allegory we behold as the universe” (49). 27. Meliorism appears again and again as the goal of religious experience and democratic culture, generally, in James and Dewey. 28. [October 1, 1832]. “Holding a candle at dawn” brings to mind Nietzsche’s madman and his lantern. 29. For an excellent discussion of Emerson’s move away from his official ministry, see Grusin, especially chap. 1: “Emerson’s Resignation from the Ministry.” 30. See Alfred Kazin: “Emerson says that the religious sentiment ‘is divine and deifying.’ Without the slightest attempt to prove that there is a God, it is enough for Emerson to say that the ‘sentiment’ is ‘the beatitude of man. It makes him illimitable.’ Here is the crux of the Emerson religion, which is not God but man’s excited sense of what the ‘religious sentiment’ does for him” (46). 31. See also Emerson, Young Emerson Speaks 92–93 [from “The Authority of Jesus,” first given May 30, 1830]. 32. See also Emerson, Essays and Poems 187 [from “The Conservative”]. Many have noted the incredulous reception Emerson received. He was not invited back to the Divinity School for almost thirty years. See Reynolds 23–24; Updike 157. For an excellent description of the troubled climate in which Emerson delivered his talk and its reception, see Habich. He cites one review of the talk that declared: “The whole world are in commotion on account of Ralph Waldo’s last manifestation. . . . [The address] is an open declaration of war against Revealed or Historical Religion—& is so written that to common minds, it seems entirely destructive of all faiths” (224). In short, Habich writes that “when Emerson returned in his coach to Concord, he left in his wake a stunned faculty and a fired-up student body” (220). See also Hurth; and Robinson, “Transcendentalism.” 33. In “The Method of Nature,” Emerson recalls “that old religion which, in the childhood of most of us, still dwelt like a sabbath morning in the country of New England, teaching privation, self denial and sorrow!” (Essays and Poems 130). 34. Cf. Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned” (Selected Poems 107). 35. Kenneth Dauber identifies some of the same directions: “a liberation from restrictive theology,” “revolt,” “dissent,” and “cleave to a tradition of revolution” (227–31). 36. The standard interpretation of Emerson now has him progressing through three 50 the pluralist 7 : 1 2012 stages. Jacobson identifies his ultimate stage as offering an “antihumanist conception of nature” tied with his “turn from freedom to fate” (4–5). I offer a dissenting reading of “Fate” in Friedman, “Traditions of Pragmatism.” 37. Harold Bloom attributes the metaphor of the eye to a fear of blindness and “an episode of hysterical blindness during his college years, and its memory, however repressed, [which] hovers throughout his work” (23). David Reynolds suggests that Emerson is in fact making use of common imagery, borrowing from popular frontier humor (Reynolds 491). 38. See Stanley Cavell: “The universe is as separate from me, but as intimately part of me, as one on whose behalf I contest, and who therefore wears my color. We are in a state of ‘romance’ with the universe; we do not possess it, but out life is to return to it, in ever-widening circles, ‘onward and onward.’ . . . This no doubt implies that we do not have a universe as it is in itself. But this implication is nothing: we do not have selves in themselves either” (170). 39. This is the essential argument of Emerson’s “Natural Religion” (Later Lectures). 40. Cf. “The Method of Nature”: “Every natural fact is an emanation, and that from which it emanates is an emanation also, and from every emanation is a new emanation” (Essays and Poems 119). 41. Cf. Emerson [from “Circles”]: “The Eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end” (Essays and Poems 403). 42. From “Essential Principles of Religion” [March 16, 1862]. 43. Russell Goodman references this lecture in his article on Emerson and Hinduism (“East-West Philosophy”). The lecture was originally delivered on January 19, 1837. 44. Emerson often writes that there is but one true religion, which does not know of sects and divisions. The one true faith that lies at the heart of all traditions. See Emerson, Later Lectures 273. From “Essential Principles of Religion,” March 16, 1862; Jonathan Levin finds this pluralistic tendency in Emerson to be a central aspect of his pragmatic idealism (18–19). 45. 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