The Death of Faith: Emerson’s Divinity School Address 

The Rev. Ron Sala

Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford

February 2, 2003 

 

It is a pleasure to gather on this brilliant winter day, known variously as Candlemas, Inbolc, Groundhog Day. The sun feels warm on the skin, and zephyrs refresh us with crisp, cool air, and occasional gusts remind us that winter is still with us.

Robert D. Richardson, Jr., author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire, writes, “The opening sentence of the address (“In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life”) is not a casual allusion to the weather or a clearing of the throat. It is the central theological point of the talk. Divinity surrounds the living every day.”¹

Like a ragas in Indian classical music, which were composed to a fit a certain time of day, Emerson’s talk is designed to remind his listeners where and when they are. The raga is a way of saying, in contemporary parlance, “Be here now.” It reminds me of an experience I had recently. I was coming back late one night on a train from New York. The man next to me was listening to a Walkman. We struck up a conversation and I learned that he was from India and now lived in Stamford, working for one of the large corporations based here. He told me that his music was a raga, music for night that he listened to regularly as a type of meditation.

Our nation is experiencing a time of rapid religious change. As a percentage of the population, both Judaism and Christianity as a whole are shrinking. Pentecostal and fundamentalist Christianity are growing. So are the major faiths of Islam, Buddhism, and Taoism. The New Age movement is growing. So are secularism and humanism. The most liberal Christian denomination, the United Church of Christ, and Unitarian Universalism are growing as well.² American religion is changing. Establishment religion is unraveling, sending people in all directions, from the fundamentalist to the radical, or simply “none of the above.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson was quite critical of the establishment religion of his time. He called people out of the stupor of “we’ve always done it this way before.” Out of a dead and empty orthodoxy that did not speak to the real lives of men and women. He also had a vision of what he wanted to replace it.

Who was this, Ralph Waldo Emerson? He was born in 1803, son of a Unitarian minister. He also at first took up the calling of the Unitarian ministry, but resigned after just a few years, since he no longer felt he could in good conscience serve the Christian communion as it was commonly understood. So he took to the lecture circuit and writing essays that would become part of the bedrock of American literature.

He was part of the Transcendentalist Club, all but one a Unitarian, and many Unitarian ministers. The Transcendentalists sought to transcend what they regarded as the stifling confines of religious orthodoxy, philosophic rationalism, and social convention. They read extensively in the texts of Hinduism as well as European poets and thinkers such as Hegel and Carlyle, Goethe, and Coleridge.

In 1838, Emerson was invited to give the address at the graduation of the senior class of Harvard Divinity School—all six of them!³ His 45-minute lecture to the small class and others assembled was to set off a proverbial “firestorm of controversy” and be remembered for generations.

A few words about 1838. Samuel Morse had invented the telegraph two years before. That year, the British Empire began to rule Aden in Asia and Natal in Africa. Martin Van Buren was President. Queen Victoria had just begun to reign in Britain. Religiously, it was a conservative time. The American Unitarian Association, forerunner of our Unitarian Universalist Association, was only 13 years old. Many of its members were quite content to retain wholesale the conventional views of Protestant Christianity—minus the doctrines of the Trinity and Original Sin. While Emerson gave his speech, former Universalist minister turned freethinker Abner Kneeland was sitting in a Massachusetts jail, serving a two-month sentence for blasphemy, the last man to go to jail in America for this offense.⁴

A few days before he was asked by the Harvard students to deliver the address, Emerson had been contemplating a protest against his erstwhile profession. He wrote in his journal, “I ought to sit and think and then write a discourse to the American clergy showing the ugliness and unprofitableness of theology and churches at this present day.”

His attack began pleasantly enough:

In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers….

Dot Sonn, our congregation’s historian, suggested today’s sermon. She had the idea from the going away party for our Minister Emeritus, Stan Aronson. Stan and UUSIS member Howard Chase discussed the “Divinity School Address” with both of them reciting passages from it from memory. The conversation included what the word “refulgent” in the opening sentence means. In case you were wondering, it means “radiant, resplendent, or brilliant.”

To get back to Emerson, he quickly enlarged his scope from the immediate experience of the audience and himself to envelope the whole earth and all of humanity as he said:

Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy…. In its fruitful soils; in its navigable sea; in its mountains of metal and stone; in its forests of all woods; in its animals; in its chemical ingredients; in the powers and path of light, heat, attraction, and life, it is well worth the pith and heart of great men to subdue and enjoy it. The planters, the mechanics, the inventors, the astronomers, the builders of cities, and the captains, history delights to honor.

And then Emerson jumps again, taking his hearers from the outer world to the inner, declaiming,

But when the mind opens, and reveals the laws which traverse the universe, and make things what they are, then shrinks the great world at once into a mere illustration and fable of this mind. What am I? and What is? asks the human spirit with a curiosity new-kindled, but never to be quenched.

What opened Emerson’s mind? He, along with the other Transcendentalists, adored the restoring powers of nature, the stimulation of human conversation, the friction of protest meetings, the uplift of impassioned oratory. Each could yield some insight into the individual soul or the Oversoul, which lived in all things. Emerson continued,

Behold these outrunning laws, which our imperfect apprehension can see tend this way and that….

The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws…. These laws refuse to be adequately stated. They will not be written out on paper, or spoken by the tongue.

This passage sounds like the growing sentiment among Emerson’s fellow Unitarians, and now a staple of Unitarian Universalism, that faith should be a creedless enterprise, that to prescribe a common faith in written form was as stifling as it was difficult. Each person should decide for him or herself. Emerson goes on,

[These divine laws] elude our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly in each other's faces, in each other's actions, in our own remorse…this sentiment is the essence of all religion….

Here is one place where Emerson’s more traditional hearers and readers, even many of the Unitarians, would have been most scandalized. He sets up the moral sentiment in each human being as the basis of religion. Elsewhere in the address, he rejects the importance what most of those in his day (and many in ours) regarded as the bedrock of Christianity, namely the miracles in the Bible. To Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists, every day was a miracle to be appreciated through nature and through interpersonal relationships as experienced with an openness of soul.

Emerson did not naively claim that humans were necessarily good because of the inward spark of divinity in each of us. Rather, he was convinced that a sense of right and wrong was part of our nature and that what we do, good or bad, left a mark on our character. In his words,

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. He who does a good deed, is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed, is by the action itself contracted….

And then Emerson began to refer to the problems of a religion that presumed to save souls by convincing them of the right beliefs rather than helping them to find their access to the mystery of what Emerson called the Oversoul:

Meantime, whilst the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every man, and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely; it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand… the absence of this primary faith is the presence of degradation… Let this faith depart, and the very words it spake, and the things it made, become false and hurtful…And because the indwelling Supreme Spirit cannot wholly be got rid of, the doctrine of it suffers this perversion, that the divine nature is attributed to one or two persons, and denied to all the rest, and denied with fury…

Here Emerson’s criticism of traditional Christianity became pointed. It was all well and good to debate whether God were a unity, a duality, or a trinity, but what did it matter if it did not speak to the individual human soul? did not help it to live more fully every day? Emerson went on,

…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. The soul is not preached.

What Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists advocated was a “personal religious consciousness.” Like twentieth century Unitarian Universalist R. Buckminster Fuller, they wanted “no more secondhand God.” ⁵ Emerson once remarked, “They call it Christianity. I call it consciousness.”

I’m reminded of something from my childhood. I was raised in a devout Mennonite home. When I was in first grade, I declared myself an atheist. You can imagine that that didn’t go over very well with my parents! I just couldn’t square what I had learned about the dinosaurs and evolution with a belief in a six-day creation. But my parents made me go to church—atheist or not. One day, I don’t remember how old I was, but in elementary school, I was with my family at Sunday service. Mennonites are known for their wonderful four-part harmonies. I don’t remember what hymn we were singing or what theology it described, but at that moment I realized that I believed in God. There was something about the beauty of the music and being surrounded by people that loved me that went beyond rational argument.

I listened recently to a favorite song of mine by the Pagan rock band The Waterboys. The rather witty tune is called, “I just found God where he always was.” We may use different words to describe such experiences, and not all of us would use the word God to describe them, but the Transcendentalists, as do many contemporary Unitarian Universalists, held that ultimate reality is no farther away than our intuitions, available at every moment.

I think of our fellow UU Christopher Reeve who is so in touch with the Spirit of Life and would not let physical disability diminish him.

I think of Margot Adler, a reporter for National Public Radio and a member of All Souls Unitarian Church in New York. She wrote one of the most influential books on Neo-Paganism, Drawing Down the Moon. She has said what attracted her to UUism was our traditions of skepticism and rationality. I think she exemplifies the best in our faith, holding on to both rationalism and intuition.

Emerson once said, “God enters by a private door into every individual.” What is your private door? To some it is the appreciation of art, to others meditation or prayer. To some it is the faces of friends and loved ones, to others the intricate web of creation. To once again quote Emerson, “To fill the hour—that is happiness.”

In one of his recent addresses, the president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, William Sinkford, described a painting Marlin Lavanhar, the minister of All Souls Unitarian in Tulsa, recently commissioned:

The painting depicts a colonial table, representing the roots of Unitarian Universalism in this country. And there are some books on the table: the Bible, recognizing the Judeo-Christian origins of this faith; a volume of Emerson, who taught that individual experience was a key source of religious faith and life; and one unnamed volume indicating that, for us, revelation is not sealed. There's a spray of flowers representing the diversity of persons who call themselves Unitarian Universalist and the diversity of spiritual paths we follow.⁶

I will conclude with the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote a poem later in Emerson’s lifetime that I feel captures marvelously the open-ended search for spiritual deepening that we hold so dear:

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, 

As the swift seasons roll! 

Leave thy low-vaulted past! 

Let each new temple, nobler than the last, 

Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, 

Till thou at length art free, 

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!

¹ Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 289.

² “Largest Religious Groups in the USA” (http://www.adherents.com/rel_USA.html, http://www.census.gov/)

³ Richardson, 288.

⁴ Ibid., 287.

⁵ Ibid., 288.

⁶ William Sinkford, “Sermon: The Language of Faith” http://www.uua.org/president/030112.html [accessed 1/26/03]