Harvard Divinity Address

I HAVE AVOIDED responding to Ralph Waldo Emerson's July, 1839 Harvard Divinity Address, (can be read on gopher://gopher.vt.edu:10010/02/79/1) until now. There is something about this Sunday evening lecture that is too close, too meaningful, to comment on flippantly. Normally I have no problem commenting on a lecture, thought, or idea that Emerson presents yet I fear trivializing this particular essay. It is one of the most eloquent presentations I have ever studied. More substantial than its eloquence, however, is its sheer power. The consequences of this address were directly felt. This prophetic utterance resulted in Emerson's virtual expulsion from all things Harvardian for thirty years. Emerson, introvert though he was, came to represent controversy in Boston's academic and religious settings.

It was not a formal invitation by the faculty or the administration that brought Emerson to the Sunday evening lecture. Rather, Emerson responded, as he was inclined to do when called on for guidance, to the entreaties of a few senior students about to embark on the responsibilities of professional ministry. It is accurate to assume that these graduating students realised a gap in their training and were calling on Emerson to articulate what that lack was and how to fill it.

Reading the Address evokes emotion in me because, in the end, Emerson is setting a lofty standard to evaluate how I perform my personal vocation as a mentor and counsellor. His criteria is unlike any formal qualification for counselling or spiritual direction that I have ever come across. While the Address includes insights that can be found in many spiritual traditions, it highlights lived experience and emphasises the necessity of a unique sort of consciousness that a guide to others must foster.

His initial criterion for effective spiritual mentoring is amazingly simple; it has to do with a conscious relation to nature. Emerson subtly invited his listeners to look beyond the wall of their classrooms, out into the nearby fields and rivers of Massachusetts. He reminded them that they exist in the world. A world that doesn't overtly speak or have language but declares and transmits meaning through the ecstasy of being alive. In many of his works, Emerson says that health and the ability to appreciate nature is the starting place of such spiritual perception. Sensual education is not highlighted in seminary or graduate colleges then or now.

Those who chief vocation in life has to do with the mind or spirit have a special struggle with acquiring the direct experience of nature. It is so easy to substitute the secondary language of concept for the primal language of the instincts. Learning the language of Gaia is the first step to growing a sensitivity to soul. Attending primary experience is difficult for me as I sit at my computer. I'm inhibited in the senses as I sit tensed before my keyboard. Yet I have a sleeping cat called Smoky Cheese Dog laying in my used paper box, breathing rhythmically and looking ever so contented. If I lift my computer neck skyward, I espy through my window a variety of icicles hanging from my neighbour's eavestrough. This crystalline assortment reminds me of nature's synchronicity which suggests to me all the ways in which things that just appear to happen do so in a very choreographed manner. The breath I take, even the pain that fires away in my joints and makes me uncomfortable, all mediate this particular life I must learn to call my own and to attend in a direct way.

Emerson is inviting his listeners to truly listen to their unmediated experience of nature; without it, their sympathy and service to others will be impeded. Ministers have been trained out of their senses. They have come to espouse the doctrine that the external duty is not rooted in their own nature but in an alien imperative of caring for others and forgetting to attend to themselves. The long and short of it is that a forgotten self can not care for anyone in a genuine way.

Once aware of ourselves and our immediate environment at a deeper level through contemplation of the sacrament of the present moment, Emerson says, we become aware of a greater consciousness at work in the world. He calls this Oversoul. Oversoul connects the universe establishing the unity beneath the diversity of forms in our world. We are not used to understanding this binding unity as Reason but that is what Emerson calls it. Through the contemplation of the diversity and the realization of unity, we stumble on principles and laws of nature that make particular examples of the law pale in comparison. For instance, the sleeping cat in my paper box is a living incarnation of peacefulness and rest. Since he has discovered this box he returns to it as a womb. He is encircled, surrounded by mellow music, warmed by the heater and yet the chief feature is his utter contentment. Contentment is a function of Oversoul. The principles beneath the perceptions are not that easily discoverable but require contemplation which is sustained; then the internal revelation comes. When that revelation does come, the form, while still important, becomes less so in light of the communication of the principle. The principle, what Emerson called the Law, evokes an emotive response. The terms reason, law, structure and principles have lost their coinage in our world because they have been misapplied. Perhaps a dynamic translation of Reason would be Intuition since Emerson does not advocate a stale use of logic but a seeing through to the forces and energies that guide our earthly experience. Structure could easily be translated as forms or paradigms and Law is rightly understood by the more neutral term, Karma, or consequences.

Ralph Waldo Emerson's

This sort of morality requires a lot more discipline that the rote memorisation and mechanistic obedience to externalise commandments. For instance, where does the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" come from? I may never kill anyone but I witness killing daily on the television both in form of drama and by way of the news. When I see the torn body of an innocent child whose arms have been blown off from a land mine, then I have an in breaking, a revelation, about murder ought to break my heart. This is far different from canting the commandment. This is participating in the experience that brought the statement, Thou shalt not kill, into being. Morality requires that I enter this experience of murder as a witness who is deeply effected. While watching actions such as these, do I just roll over, grunt and program my VCR for another diversion?, or do I allow myself to be effected, even momentarily, with life as it is? If I listen I become morally sensitive and a better spiritual companion to others.

Emerson believed that we craft our character in milliseconds of moral decision. He says, "Thus, of their own volition, souls proceed into heaven, into hell." He goes even further by suggesting that through establishing religious sentiment we are, at least momentarily, deified. Our nature is changed when we allow moments of inbreaking to become rooted in our consciousness. For Emerson, it is from obedience to a very natural law that Jesus becomes as significant as he is. Jesus was obedient to Oversoul in that he responded with sensitive morality to what was before him. This gave him a new kind of authority. Emerson expresses his christology in a nutshell:

Jesus belonged to a true race of prophets. He saw with opened eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished by its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is within you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of His World. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me he speaks. Would you see God, see me, or see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.

Traditional religion is more concerned with the special nature of Christ intentionally setting him apart from the rest of humanity. In contrast, Emerson focussed on how each of us could participate in the same consciousness which allowed Jesus to view reality the way that he did. Traditionalism, said Emerson, "dwelt on the noxious exaggeration of the person of Jesus."

When Jesus is exalted beyond common humanity, his benefit becomes a deficit since it estranges humanity. Emerson said that, "Jesus who was a friend of humanity was turned by the Church into the injurer of humanity." He strove to establish a Christology that emphasised Jesus' humanity and focussed on the nature of his consciousness. Contrary to the depravity views of his Calvinist environment, Emerson thought it essentially human to have union with God.

More radical than that is Emerson's confession, "that which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and wen." Emerson strove to liberate the senior class from an inadequate understanding of Christ which he considered a barrier to natural sanctity. Emerson once said that what traditionalists called Christianity he called consciousness. In doing this he exchanged the authority of a revealed text for the authority of primary religious experience. The same experience, Emerson would affirm, was at the root of Jesus' God consciousness.

Emerson's second emphasis in the Address involves his departure from the traditional understanding of revelation. Revelation, traditionally, is limited to events or even words recorded in the Scripture that have ceased in contemporary times. The source of this revelation is a wholly other God, a being beyond creation. Emerson is interested in establishing a living and contemporary relationship to the Universe, not a second-hand one. His conception of revelation is deeply natural and is found most exquisitely in human consciousness. The graduating seniors who first listened to the Address were required to preach. Emerson exhorted them to preach what they lived, not what they have merely heard. "But the man who aims to speak as books enable, as synods use, as fashion guides, and interest commands, babbles. Let him hush," he said.

Direct experience was mediated through Nature, received in human consciousness and embraced in a spirit of love. Reception of Nature's revelation transforms human character and improves the morality of culture and individuals. The goal for these seniors was to mediate life. Emerson said that "the true Preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to his people his life - life passed through the power of thought." To put it in contemporary language, if you don't have a conscious life you have nothing to share worth hearing. In short, "Graduates, get a life!"

Emerson engraves a cameo of a typical preacher of his era on the mind of his audience. Mercifully he does not name the origin of his example. Nevertheless, he is drawing from a living metaphor of dull preaching represented by Concord's new assistant minister, Barzillai Frost. Using the a parody on Frost's name, he alludes to the fact that the frost outside on the church windows was more inspiring than the Frost in the pulpit. The thrust of his argument is that nothing of the man's life entered his sermon leading to its pallid tone.

Emerson's parody of preaching implies that the stereotypes of ministers that we see in general culture, for us in television and novels, may be rooted in a very specific lack of courage to value experience. Stripped of embodiment and humanity, the gospel is jeopardized when its advocates lack passion and personal self awareness. The minister who stands only on revealed faith suffers a crisis of courage, especially before individuals who have lived hard and passionately. Emerson points out that "the village blasphemer sees fear in the face, form and gait of the minister."

There are exceptions to this existential whimpishness both in Emerson's and our era but they are rare. To put it plainly there is something castrating about second hand spirituality which leads to a pathetic state of not having lived. As Emerson said, "The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity."

Tradition bound ministers harm not only themselves but diminish the dignity of being human for their parishioners. Psychologically, conventional faith leads to personal shame and low ambition.

Now man is ashamed of himself; he skulks and sneaks through the world, to be tolerated, to be pitied, and scarcely in a thousand years does a man dare to be wise or good, and so draw after him the tears and blessings of his kind.

The minister in Emerson's view is to mediate the potential for greatness that human beings have; the minister's strategy is to reclaim Christ's own belief in the infinitude of man to stir them to strive for a original relation to the universe.

Emerson is not the typical revolutionary. Eventually Emerson abandoned historic Christianity entirely, yet paradoxically he advised the seniors not be be swayed by his eloquence and message to the point of starting a new denomination. Emerson is so committed to individual self recovery as the core of renewal that he doesn't place hope in structural reform. He suggest that the seniors stay in the structure and change themselves. His parting words are:

Rather, let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing. For if you are alive, you shall find they shall become plastic (flexible) and new. The remedy to their deformity is first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore soul.

In modern terms what Emerson is pointing to is that building new structures without the requisite of deepening spirituality is virtually useless and doomed to failure. If you want to serve, get a life, by that Ralph Waldo Emerson meant a spiritually formed, natural life.