It is the bane of great thinkers to first be rejected because of the newness and originality of their thinking then (if they live long enough to be recognized) to be celebrated in the public eye without really being fully understood or embraced by both critics and admirers. Still today, the greatness of Ralph Waldo Emerson's thinking continues to be discovered only by a few even though he is taught in just about every institution of higher education on the Continent. Even though we hold him up as one of the saints of Unitarian Universalism, Emerson has been and continues to be an enigmatic figure.

Even though most of us know Emerson was a Unitarian minister around 1830, perhaps fewer know that he left the ministry after a few years because he could no longer believe in the act of serving communion. Even before his resignation, his ministry had been a rocky road. He was criticized by the previous minister for a lack of biblical references during his sermons. It seemed his interests in philosophy and science pulled his mind away from scripture. Emerson believed the gospel was not to be quoted but rather to be emulated! Although he was appreciated as a speaker, he didn't excel at the pastoral side of his duties. He sometimes set off to make calls without detailed directions and therefore spent time visiting complete strangers who had the same name or lived on the same street as a parishioner.[1] His bedside visit of a dying revolutionary soldier was so inept the old man told him, "Young man, If you don't know your business, you had better go home."

Ministry was the traditional route to follow for those who loved books in those days. His father, William Emerson, had been the minister of First Church of Boston. The family was not well off as his father's salary amounted to 25 dollars a year and 30 cords of wood. Most scholars don't think his father had much influence on him because he died when Emerson was only eight years old. The more likely source of his religious feeling was his mother Ruth who was a deeply religious woman. With remarkable determination after his father died, his mother took in boarders and was able to send all six boys to school and got them educated.

Probably the biggest influence stimulating Emerson's mental development was his father's sister, Mary Moody Emerson. Eccentric Aunt Mary (she had a fascination with death and slept in a burial shroud) had one of the sharpest minds in New England, limitless energy and enormous force of character. Emerson wrote after rereading her letters, "All your learning of literatures and states of society of Platonistic, Calvinistic, English or Chinese, would never enable you to anticipate one thought or expression [from her]." Living alone in calamitous poverty, Aunt Mary took great interest in all six of the Emerson boys prodding forward their intellectual development. Many of the first books Emerson read he discovered through her recommendation. It may have been her prodding to, "Always do what you are afraid to do." that helped him leave behind the status and financial security he found as minister at the Second Church of Boston and forge out on his own.

Or it may have been the grief at the death of his young and beautiful first wife, Ellen Tucker two years after their marriage. One of the striking differences between the early 1800's and our times today was the pervasiveness of serious disease. Probably half of Boston at that time suffered from Tuberculosis. Even as Ellen and Waldo courted she was weak and coughed up blood. Probably because of a mutual awareness of the fragility of her health, their relationship had great romantic intensity. It is quite likely Emerson suffered from TB as well. Before attending divinity school, he spent a year struggling with a serious eye disease TB sufferers get which made it impossible for him to read.

Emerson didn't just lose his father and first wife, but two beloved brothers, many friends at what today we would consider young ages and most painful of all, his 5 year old son Waldo eulogized in his poem Threnody. Each death was all the greater for him as he had left behind the view that he would be reunited some day with them in heaven. Death was bitter because he could find no consolation in it, no truth or beauty. Because Emerson is so well known as a great thinker many may not realize that he was also a great feeler as well. The tremendous grief he felt at the loss of family and friends speaks powerfully of how much he loved them.

Emerson's love was wide; a passionate flame stoked by his reading. By any measure, Emerson's reading was voracious. One can chronicle his life as much by what he read as what he did. Like most of the educated men of his day, he read the Greek and Roman classics in the original language although if he could find a good translation he'd choose that first. He read the English and German philosophers of the Enlightenment who laid the foundations of Democracy. He read the German Transcendentalists and the Romantic Idealists who inspired the American Transcendentalist movement. He was fascinated with the scientific writers who were revealing the secrets of the natural world. He savored the English and German poets, the travel writers exploring new worlds and classics of English literature. Not only did he read American and European authors but also the newly available translations of Hindu, Buddhist and Middle Eastern sacred texts. He fell in love with the Sufi poet Hafiz. There was hardly a book published in the 1830's, 1840's and 1850's that escaped his attention. He didn't read everything though. He particularly didn't like scholarly arguments or criticism. The books he cherished most were the ones which opened up a greater experience of the world for him. He read not to accumulate second hand knowledge but to confirm that same wisdom already within in his own experience.

Emerson's interest in first hand knowledge was a big problem for Andrews Norton, the president of Harvard University when Emerson gave his famous divinity school address to six graduating students in 1838. Emerson set as the goal of the graduating divinity students to find the same truth which inspired Jesus and preach it from their pulpits out of their own experience of the present world rather than relying on scripture, history and ecclesiastical authority. What was true then is every bit as true now and lives in this present moment. His major criticism of the Unitarianism of his day was its reliance on history and second hand sources for truth when it could be directly seen and validated in daily life. . This infuriated Norton who believed "There can be no intuition, no direct perception of the truths of Christianity." We must have Christianity through the Bible and its miracles, through the church and its authorities or not at all.[2]

This desire for direct contact with truth, with the divine unmediated by the Bible, by the church and its authorities inspired not just Emerson but the other Transcendentalists of his time. Along with Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, James Freeman Clarke, Henry Thoreau, Bronson Alcott , Orestes Brownson, Frederick Henry Hedge, Theodore Parker and other less well remembered Unitarian ministers, Emerson attended a symposium planning meeting in September of 1836 to form what became known as the Transcendentalist Club the first meeting of Unitarian heretics. These high wattage thinkers who out-shown the Harvard faculty in intellectual brilliance gathered because:

They were dissatisfied, individually and as a group, with the present state of philosophy, religion, and literature in America. They looked for hope to Europe, especially Germany, to Kant in philosophy, to Schleiermacher in religion, and to Goethe in literature. They were mostly anti-Lockean; most believed in intuition. They were romanticists not classicists or philosophes. They were radicals or liberals rather than conservatives in politics and almost all followed the logic of their belief in freedom and autonomy into one or another arena of social action.[3]

As Emerson points out in his famous essay, "The Transcendentalist," Transcendentalism isn't completely new but an American interpretation of a very old idea: Plato's idealism. What really exists, what came first if you will, is not the reality of this microphone but idea of a microphone. Before anything came into existence it followed a preexisting form. The chair exhibits chair-ness and the apple, apple-ness. Thus what is really real is not the physical manifestation found in our world but rather the ideas of which the material world is but a transient example. In the world we find only examples. In the mind we find the design which the world displays.

What the Transcendentalists add to the age old philosophy of idealism is the individual's personal relation to the world of forms. Not only is the form realm really real but it can be accessed directly by each individual through their intuition. We need not take report of truth second hand, we can find out for ourselves.

This intuition wasn't some dry analytical discourse dictated from the heavens to earthly scribes that could be tuned in on the intellectual channel. Far from it. As all readers of Emerson will quickly discover, the experience of this intuition is ecstatic, intensely felt, full of joy and a sense of contact with greatness. Emerson described it as "a sense of wonder, a surge of happiness." This intuitive experience was not something reserved for saints but the birthright of humanity. In this democratic, egalitarian spirituality, all of us, from the most simple to the heights of greatness have individual access to this intuition as we quietly sit on a warm spring day under a favorite tree absorbing the beauty of creation. Emerson proves his assertions not by citing historical authorities but appealing to the reader's or the listener's personal experience.

The purest expression of this ecstasy is its translation into poetry. Emerson said that poetry is a basic human drive as important as the need to eat, drink and sleep. We have a deep urge to express our inner fire in original creative ways. In reading poetry, we are changed by its liberating symbols which communicate nature's dynamic and ever changing quality. By our participation in the process of creation, our art, like nature itself becomes a meeting ground for creator and creation to know each other.

The creative repository Emerson is most known for was his prodigious journal. From his school days on, he kept journals on his life, his reading, his inspiration and ideas, and his feeling. Not only did he write in his journals, he indexed and cross referenced them. The ideas he collected and developed there were the seeds of much of his later writing and lectures. After leaving the ministry, he pioneered what today would be called the book publishing and lecture circuit, in his later years preaching up and down the Eastern Seaboard and out west along the Great Lakes and along the Mississippi.

Being a well known public speaker, Emerson's inspiration and influence connected him with great men and women. Probably the three best known of his friends were Thoreau, Fuller and Whitman.

Henry David was quite taken with Emerson's first book, Nature, and his lecture and description of an American Scholar. He practiced what Emerson preached by going into the woods "to live deliberately" on property owned by Emerson. It turns out he didn't live too deliberately as he boarded with the Emersons when we wasn't living by Walden Pond and developed a strong affection for Emerson's second wife Lidian while Emerson toured England and France. Although they had their ups and downs together, they remained good friend throughout their lives.

Margaret Fuller was probably the best educated and intelligent woman in New England of her time. Both Fuller and Emerson cut their teeth reading the German Transcendentalists and shared a passion for Goethe whom both read closely and repeatedly. Many have speculated that Fuller and Emerson had an unconsummated passion for each other which made Emerson uncomfortable. Fuller challenged and badgered him to become the kind of idealist friend Emerson wrote about but Emerson was either too reserved or too intimidated by her to accept the offer. They collaborated on the Transcendentalist's only publication, The Dial from 1840 to 1844 which she edited for two years then he took over for two years. Her tragic death in a storm in sight of land after returning from Italy with a son and a husband caused him great grief.

Finally Walt Whitman was the fulfillment of Emerson's call for a true blue American poet. When he saw the first edition of Leaves of Grass, the book so impressed him he sent Whitman a letter calling the book, "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed." Without Emerson's permission Whitman immediately took the letter and published it inside the second edition. Emerson's enthusiasm for his work was undiminished as he sought him out in New York, sent his friends to meet him and wrote even more enthusiastic letters of support to his publishers.

Much as we know Emerson as a high flying intellectual, he also had a strong social conscience. In 1838 he spoke against the looming expulsion of the Cherokee from their homeland. He wrote an open letter to President Van Buren which was published in the papers denouncing the crime against the Indian nation using uncharacteristically inflammatory language. He delivered a fiery and emotional speech in Concord in 1844 at the Tenth anniversary commemoration of the emancipation of the British West Indies calling for the abolition of slavery. He had always opposed slavery but the times called him to action and involvement in the abolitionist cause. He involved himself reluctantly for he had no love of the divisiveness and distorted public language required to forward the cause. It was when his feelings became engaged that he overcame his inner obstacles and spoke out.

Although Emerson spent his life speaking before the world, he remained a very private person. The early 1800's was a time of great enthusiasm for communal life and many utopian communities were attempted. The community the Transcendentalists attempted to bring to life through the efforts particularly of George Ripley was Brook Farm. While Emerson was attracted to the idea, he distrusted institutions and felt strongly that society could not be reformed through social reorganization. Individuals must discover and cultivate their inner nature first. His heart though was in community building but with a different slant. He attempted to get his friends to move next to him in Concord creating a neighborhood of great thinkers.

Even though Emerson was distrustful of institutional religion, we Unitarian Universalists receive from him a special inheritance since he served in our ministry and many of the Unitarians and Universalists of his day likely listened to his preaching and lectures or purchased copies of his essays. His thinking was a major force which caused a divisive Unitarian split in 1867 with the formation of the Free Religious Association. The individualism and self-reliance of his thought was not particularly friendly to institutional Unitarians trying to be good liberal Christians.

As we will see next week, Emerson's thinking has gradually triumphed even though the Free Religious Association was eventually folded back into the American Unitarian Association. Thankfully today in Unitarian Universalist circles Emerson's great religious insights are being more fully appreciated and shape our religious identity. I invite you back next week to dig deeper into Emerson's thought as I highlight how it can be used to create a vision for the Unitarian Universalism of tomorrow.

Copyright (c) 1997 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.

[1] Richardson, Robert D., Emerson: The Mind on Fire, University of California Press, 1995, (ISBN 0-520-08808-5 (alk. Paper)) p. 91 This is an excellent biography (although heavy on philosophy)

[2] Richardson, p. 299

[3] Richardson, p. 249