Abstract
This selection is part of the series “Modern Spiritual Masters” and, as such, is meant for a general reader rather than the student or scholar. Sweeney presents this volume as an effort to renew interest in Emerson’s writings and “to actually demonstrate why he was Concord’s sage” (p. 1). To that end he has selected passages from works published in Emerson’s lifetime and has arranged them topically. His professed desire to present only the Emerson his contemporaries would have read is at odds with his desire to attract twenty-first century readers, who would find in his journals not only some of his most challenging writings but also a more intimate look into his life and thoughts. Nevertheless, the Emerson represented here—the prophet of the God within, the sacredness of the individual, and the divinity that transfuses nature, as well as the enemy of form and ritual—is one who ought to appeal to those looking for a post-Christian spirituality, to use Sweeney’s term.
With some exceptions, such as the essay “Prayers,” most of the selections come from the major essays: Nature, “Self-Reliance,” “The American Scholar,” the Divinity School Address, “The Over-Soul,” “Experience,” “Montaigne,” and “Worship.” Rather than order the selections chronologically, Sweeney has arranged them under five topics, with a selection of aphorisms at the end (most of which are to be found in the previous selections). He opens with Emerson’s religious writings after he broke with the Unitarian church. “After Christianity” is followed by “Divinity of the Soul,” “Stoic Values,” “To Cultivate Virtue,” and “Encountering the Holy.” One has to sympathize with any editor who seeks to impose an order, even thematic, upon Emerson’s thought. The dominant theme, however, is Emerson’s doctrine of “the infinitude of the private man” (Journal entry for 7 April 1840). This embraces his break with Christian dogma, his concept of the moral sentiment as the divinity within, his belief that nature is the expression of the mind, that humankind is one, and that one design unites the lowest and highest in the world. These themes are to be found in all sections of this book because Emerson everywhere is, as scholars have remarked, all of a piece and all in pieces. That is, his essays read as if they are stitched together from disparate sources (which, indeed, is the case because they typically have their origins in lectures and journal entries), but despite the discontinuities and contradictions, they give the reader a sense of the whole.
Sweeney tries to bring focus to his selection by offering brief introductions to each one. By and large, he is a helpful guide to readers who are new to Emerson; he may overstress Emerson’s mysticism and organicism, but he has good grounds for placing his emphasis on Emerson’s belief in the divinity of humankind. Had he gone to the journals, he might have better balanced Emerson in his prophetic mode with the doubter who writes, “As a plant in the earth so I grow in God. I am only a form of him. He is the soul of me.… Yet why not always so? How came the Individual thus armed & impassioned to parricide, thus murderously inclined ever to traverse & kill the divine life? Ah wicked Manichee! Into that dim problem I cannot enter. A believer in Unity, a seer of Unity, I yet behold two” (26 May 1837). It is not that Emerson confined his doubts to his journals. In “Circles,” he proclaims, “I am a God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.”
This passage is not included in the selection, but it would be vain, if not churlish, to criticize Sweeney for sticking to the Emerson who was overcome with the revelation of the God within. And it is to his credit, as that of the series in which it appears, that though published by a Catholic press, he avoids theological differences and dogma and writes as an enthusiastic admirer of Emerson as spiritual thinker. To this end, he rightly stresses in his comments and selections Emerson’s animating vision of, as he puts it, “the natural divinity of humankind” (p. 23). Not wishing to give an account of Emerson’s historical development, he arranges selections without regard for chronology. So the first section opens with a few pages from “Worship,” published in 1860 in The Conduct of Life, only to be followed with a selection from the 1838 address to the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School. The more genial and positive passage from “Worship” stands in stark contrast to the sharp rebuke to institutional religion in the Divinity School Address, and so may serve as a more welcoming introduction, but it reveals that this volume is not for the serious reader of Emerson. One hopes it will make some of its readers serious about Emerson.
While scholars may object to reading Emerson piecemeal rather than in the forms he published his works, this book is not meant for them, but as a book for general readers it should have a more informative general introduction by the editor. While Sweeney is adequate in highlighting major themes in the brief introductions preceding the selections, he is less reliable on Emerson’s place and times. He begins with a digression on the Parker House Hotel, where the Saturday Club, which included Louis Agassiz, Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and James Russell Lowell, met. We are given an anecdotal history of the Parker House Hotel, but are not told why the club or its members were significant other than that Emerson was the most important of them. He also errs in listing Charles Peirce as a member; Sweeney has apparently mixed him up with Benjamin Pierce and Charles Sumner, who were members. More seriously, Sweeney gives a summary account of the origins of Transcendentalism out of Calvinism and Unitarianism. If one wants a fuller account of Unitarianism’s conflict with the Congregational churches of New England and of Emerson’s break with Unitarianism, one should turn to Barbara Packer’s contribution to The Cambridge History of American Literature, Volume 2, 1820–1865 (1995). Sweeney also confuses the later-day Calvinists of New England with their Puritan forebears. The general reader would benefit from getting some sense of what it meant for Emerson to disavow the tepid liberalism of the Unitarians but not their rejection of the Calvinist doctrine of the natural depravity of humankind. Again, Emerson’s letters and journals would have provided access to these controversies and the toll they took on him. What Calvinists possessed but Unitarians lacked was a belief that divine revelation could still be possible for the individual today. This belief would be central to Emerson, whose divine revelation came when he first visited the Jardins des Plantes in Paris and had his vision of the one order that pervades nature.
Sweeney also errs when he says Emerson followed Kant in his belief “that every human mind is imbued with a divine instinct, an intuition toward apprehending higher ideas” (p. 7). This far exceeds Kant’s concept of mind and is closer to what Emerson got from Coleridge than it is to Kant, but this will be of little interest to the general reader. However, it is part of his presentation of Emerson as prophet and seer, and those who have never encountered Emerson in the classroom may find this selection stimulating and provocative.
If the first section has an overriding theme, it would be the affirmation of the One of which individuals are a part. The second section reflects Emerson’s belief in the presence of God as the indwelling spirit. The third, “‘A Wise Skepticism’ (Stoic Values),” shows Emerson in his optative mood, urging his audience to trust themselves and believe in the soul. The fourth, “‘Live in the Present’ (to Cultivate Virtue),” speaks to the need to realize one’s thoughts and faith in action. Here he excerpts a selection from the chapter “Spirit” from Nature that he also includes in the first chapter as an example of Emerson’s belief in the accessibility of God to the soul. Now this same selection is offered as evidence that Emerson was not a dualist but held that, as Sweeney puts it, individuals were but “God in distribution” (p. 123). The two uses do not contradict one another, but beyond appearing to be an editorial oversight, it serves as a reminder of the danger of trying to rearrange and classify Emerson’s writings. And when we get to the fifth section, devoted to the presence of God in nature, we might find ourselves thinking that Emerson is a more consistent thinker than he, in fact, was. This sense of consistency may well come from the fact that Sweeney has put together a volume that reflects Emerson’s major insight, the doctrine of the infinitude of the soul. Consequently, it tends to leave out passages that reflect Emerson’s antinomianism and his willful provocation of his readers. For instance, he includes the passage from “Self-Trust” where Emerson writes, “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string” (p. 95). He does not include the following: “The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self on which a universal reliance may be grounded?” Emerson’s answer will be “Spontaneity or Instinct,” which puts in question Emerson’s role as spiritual guide and, thus, the aim of this book. In the Divinity School Address, he writes, “Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul” (p. 90). In this remarkable sentence, Emerson sets forth a fundamental paradox of his place as sage and seer: he is not here to instruct but to provoke, not to instill but to call out. He will not be the Trustee and our tuition will prove wasted unless we are prepared to be ungrounded.
This juxtaposition does not make a book presenting Emerson as a spiritual guide for the twenty-first-century reader any less paradoxical than the Emerson who proposed that to follow him one must flee from him, except that “When me they fly, I am the wings” (“Brahma”). Faithfulness to Emerson requires unfaithfulness, a lesson that puts those who reject him in his debt. There’s enough in this selection to provoke, and if my experience teaching Emerson tells me anything, he can still unsettle his readers. So it is welcome to have a volume that aims at readers who seek spiritual and intellectual nourishment.