by John Updike
The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.
In the two great poets Emerson’s influence seems to bifurcate: his boastful all-including optimism trumpeted by Whitman, his more playful, skeptical quizzing of God and Nature intensified by the Amherst recluse.
We should not, however, imagine that all the great names of the American Renaissance obediently constellate around Emerson’s. Hawthorne, a year younger than he, and of the same upper-class Yankee stock, shared Concord and a long acquaintanceship with him, and lies buried a few paces away; but in life there was always between them a certain distance and coolness of appreciation. When the author of The Scarlet Letter died in 1864, Emerson wrote in his journal:
I have found in his death a surprise & a disappointment. I thought him a greater man than any of his works betray.… Moreover I have felt sure of him in his neighborhood, & in his necessities of sympathy & intelligence, that I could well wait his time—his unwillingness & caprice—and might one day conquer a friendship. It would have been a happiness, doubtless to both of us, to have come into habits of unreserved intercourse. It was easy to talk with him—there were no barriers—only, he said so little, that I talked too much, & stopped only because—as he gave no indications—I feared to exceed.
Amid the quiet ghosts of Salem, Hawthorne had worked out his artistic and personal credo with no assistance from Transcendentalism; he took a generally satiric view of enthusiasm, Unitarianism, The Dial, and Margaret Fuller, and remained at heart loyal to the Puritan sense of guilt and intrinsic limitation which Emerson so exultantly wished to banish. Melville loved Hawthorne and his “power of blackness”; he is the second great member of what we might call the anti-Emerson party. “I do not oscillate in Emerson’s rainbow,” he wrote. After reading some essays by “this Plato who talks through his nose,” he pronounced, “To one who has weathered Cape Horn as a common sailor what stuff all this is.” In that scarcely coherent voyage of rage called The Confidence-Man Melville planted a caricature of Emerson called Mark Winsome, who is travelling on the Mississippi with a Thoreau-like disciple named Egbert. Winsome is portrayed as “with such a preternaturally cold, gemmy glance out of his pellucid blue eye, that he seemed more a metaphysical merman than a feeling man.” As “coldly radiant as a prism,” Winsome spouts Plato and mocks consistency. The author, represented by his hero “the cosmopolitan,” seems to find double fault with Winsome: he is too mystical and also too practical. His philosophy is unreal, yet at the same time it serves the world’s base purposes. “Mystery is in the morning, and mystery in the night, and the beauty of mystery is everywhere,” Winsome is made to say; “but still the plain truth remains, that mouth and purse must be filled.… Was not Seneca a usurer? And Swedenborg, though with one eye on the invisible, did he not keep the other on the main chance?” The disciple Egbert appears “the last person in the world that one would take for the disciple of any transcendental philosophy; though, indeed, something about his sharp nose and shaved chin seemed to hint that if mysticism, as a lesson, ever came in his way, he might, with the characteristic knack of a true New-Englander, turn even so profitless a thing to some profitable account.” In the end the two are dismissed as professors of an “inhuman philosophy”—“moonshine” suited to “frozen natures.”
It is high time to let Emerson speak for himself. His first book, Nature—published in 1836 and the only one of his major prose writings that did not first exist in the form of public utterance—proposed some remarkable inversions of the common way of seeing things:
Nature is the symbol of spirit.… The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation.… 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.… 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.… There seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms; and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali, preëxist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of preceding affections, in the world of spirit. A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world.
Such thought is called Idealism, and has long roots in Plato and the Neoplatonists, in Christian metaphysics, in Berkeley and Kant and Swedenborg. Hegel, whom Emerson read only late in life and then without enthusiasm, made Idealism the dominant mode of nineteenth-century philosophy; it came to America through the writings of Coleridge and Carlyle and Goethe, whom Emerson did read. This way of construing reality awakens resistance in us, but a hundred and fifty years ago the men and women of Christendom were imbued with notions of an all-determining, circumambient invisible Power around them. Insofar as Idealism expresses the notion of repeating laws and analogies and interchanges permeating the universe, it is modern, and scientific; and Emerson was quite scientific-minded. In Nature he wrote:
Not only resemblances exist in things whose analogy is obvious, as when we detect the type of the human hand in the flipper of the fossil saurus, but also in objects wherein there is great superficial unlikeness.… A rule of one art, or a law of one organization, holds true throughout nature. So intimate is this Unity, that, it is easily seen, it lies under the undermost garment of nature, and betrays its source in Universal Spirit.
Except for the use of the term “spirit,” this search for a Grand Unified Theory is familiar enough. And Idealism does locate a real cleavage in our consciousness: “Idealism acquaints us with the total disparity between the evidence of our own being, and the evidence of the world’s being.” The two types of evidence, indeed, are so disparate that only moments that savor of mysticism fuse them:
In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. 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 eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.
Now, our concern is less to explicate Emerson’s philosophy than to test whether it, and the elaborations that followed from it, still might serve as the cause of wit in others. That the Idealism set forth in Nature served to guide Emerson himself through a productive life of exceptional serenity is a matter of biographical record. In 1871, when he was late in his sixties, he visited northern California, descending even into the opium dens of San Francisco; a travelling companion, Professor James B. Thayer, wrote this of a trip to Yosemite:
“How can Mr. Emerson,” said one of the younger members of the party to me that day, “be so agreeable, all the time, without getting tired!” It was the naïve expression of what we all had felt. There was never a more agreeable travelling companion; he was always accessible, cheerful, sympathetic, considerate, tolerant; and there was always that same respectful interest in those with whom he talked, even the humblest, which raised them in their own estimation. One thing particularly impressed me,—the sense that he seemed to have of a certain great amplitude of time and leisure. It was the behavior of one who really believed in an immortal life, and had adjusted his conduct accordingly; so that, beautiful and grand as the natural objects were, among which our journey lay, they were matched by the sweet elevation of character, and the spiritual charm of our gracious friend.
Though he never again stated the tenets of Idealism at such length, and with as near an appro
ach to system, as in Nature, they remained at the core of his thought, and all his lectures circle around the reassuring assertions that spirit is the author of matter and that our egos partake of the benign unity of Universal Being. “I have taught one doctrine,” he wrote in his journals, “the infinitude of the private man.”
The year after publishing Nature, Emerson was invited to give the annual Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard, since the society’s first choice, a Dr. Wainwright, had declined. Emerson’s address that last day of August made his fame. Oliver Wendell Holmes was present on the platform, and called it at the time “our intellectual Declaration of Independence.” In it Emerson told the young scholars of his audience that “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,” and that “if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.” Not books but nature—with which North America, amid many deficiencies, was well supplied—shall be the foremost shaper of these indomitable instincts. Emerson describes education by osmosis, out-of-doors:
Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is suggested, that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein.… He shall see, that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal, and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind.… So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, “Know thyself,” and the modern precept, “Study nature,” become at last one maxim.
Can this, we wonder now, and his audience then must have wondered, be true? In what sense can nature, that implacable other which our egos oppose, whose unheeding processes make resistance to our every effort of construction and husbandry, and whose diseases and earthquakes and oceans extinguish us with a shrug, be termed identical with our own souls? Is not a world of suffering scandalously excluded from such an equation? Emerson’s next address, to the graduating seniors of the Harvard Divinity School in July of 1838, takes up again the theme of nature as the end and means of education:
The child amidst his baubles, is learning the action of light, motion, gravity, muscular force; and in the game of human life, love, fear, justice, appetite, man, and God, interact. These laws refuse to be adequately stated … yet we read them hourly in each other’s faces, in each other’s actions, in our own remorse.… The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus; in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire.… See how this rapid intrinsic energy worketh everywhere, righting wrongs, correcting appearances, and bringing up facts to a harmony with thoughts. Its operation in life, though slow to the senses, is, at last, as sure as in the soul.… Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.
Do we, in late 1983, believe this? I suggest we do not: it is part of our received wisdom to believe that stone walls often conceal murder very well; that character is obscure and deceptive; that whatever harmony we enjoy with nature is the cruel and monstrously slow haphazard work of adaptive evolution; that our moral dispositions are bred into us by the surrounding culture; and that no great soul is shared by our own greedy egos and the ravenous natural forces at bay around us. In so believing, if Emerson is correct, we differ from all mankind hitherto, which has conceded the “facts” of indwelling moral sentiment. “These facts,” he claims,
have always suggested to man the sublime creed, that the world is not the product of manifold power, but of one will, of one mind; and that one mind is everywhere active, in each ray of the star, in each wavelet of the pool; and whatever opposes that will is everywhere balked and baffled, because things are made so, and not otherwise. Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.… Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength of nature.
These assertions, too, we tend to doubt, though our popular arts, as recently exemplified by the Star Wars saga, join Emerson in proposing that a good man is naturally strengthened and evil is in the end an illusion that dissolves. To many of Emerson’s audience (raised, after all, not only in the hard world but in a religious orthodoxy whose central figure was a suffering God) his optimistic cosmology must have seemed moonshine, to use Melville’s word. His assertion that nature and our souls are one is a deliberate affront to our common assumptions, as is Jesus’s that the meek shall inherit the earth, or Luther’s that men are saved by faith alone, or Buddha’s that the craving for existence and rebirth is the source of pain: such affrontive assertions mark the creation of a new religion. And have no doubt that Emerson thought a new one was needed. He was, we must remember, a radical, whose negative views of the Christian church were considered extreme even in Transcendentalist circles. In middle life, he told a visitor,† “I cannot feel interested in Christianity; it is deplorable that there should be a tendency to creeds that would take us back to the chimpanzee.” Even the mild and minimal Unitarian faith—“the ice house of Unitarianism,” he called it in his journals—had so strained his credence that he had resigned the ministry. He did not mince words to the Harvard Divinity School students:
… it is my duty to say to you, that the need was never greater of new revelation than now. From the views I have already expressed, you will infer the sad conviction, which I share, I believe, with numbers, of the universal decay and now almost death of faith in society.
To those of us whose religious views have been formed by the crisis theology of Kierkegaard and Barth, which predicates a drastic condition of decay and collapse within so-called Christendom, it is an eerie sensation to apprehend, in the young life and thought of Emerson, the collapse arriving, as the geology, the paleontology, and the Biblical criticism of the early nineteenth century pile in upon thinking men with their devastating revelations. Emerson was well aware of the historical situation: “The Puritans in England and America,” he said in his Divinity School address, “found in the Christ of the Catholic Church, and in the dogmas inherited from Rome, scope for their austere piety, and their longings for civil freedom. But their creed is passing away, and none arises in its room. I think no man can go with his thoughts about him, into one of our churches, without feeling, that what hold the public worship had on men is gone, or going. It has lost its grasp on the affection of the good, and the fear of the bad. In the country, neighborhoods, half parishes are signing off,—to use the local term.”
Yet there is, he feels, great need for a religion:
What greater calamity can fall upon a nation, than the loss of worship? Then all things go to decay. Genius leaves the temple, to haunt the senate, or the market. Literature becomes frivolous. Science is cold. The eye of youth is not lighted by the hope of other worlds, and age is without honor. Society lives to trifles, and when men die, we do not mention them.
What is to be done, then? Emerson invokes the soul: “In the soul, then, let the redemption be sought.” What does this mean, exactly? It means, I think, what Karl Barth warned against when he said, “One can not speak of God by speaking of man in a loud voice.” Emerson defined “the true Christianity” to the divinity students as “a faith like Christ’s in the infinitude of man.” An infinitude, in Emerson’s if not in Jesus’s terms, based upon an understanding of each man’s soul as a fragment and mirror of the Universal Soul, the Over-soul, whose language is nature. A special beauty of this new religion is that, new wine though it is, it can be poured into the old bottles of the existing churches. Emerson concludes with a peroration that touches upon practical concerns:
