Ralph Waldo Emerson - A service By Dawn Elvidge June 2006

I am a New Zealander born .I had not heard of Ralph Waldo Emerson He never featured in my reading. It was only when I came to the Unitarian Church that I heard him mentioned-- though not frequently. You folk from the States were no doubt nurtured knowingly or unknowingly in the influence of Emerson. He has been nominated Sage of Concord, Sage of America. The embodiment of the American spirit, the prophet of self reliance and independent thought. He was a nonconformist wanting every one to seek knowledge in freedom, to sacrifice certainty and make their own quest for truth, trusting their own experience and intuition.

His being such an advocate for heretics I thought there would be more of his writings in our Songs of the Living Tradition. There are six entries-- two songs and four readings.

Our Order of Service is non-conformist today-- not by intent but by lack of my computer skills -- that landscape arrangement. -- but the gist of the service is there---Ralph Waldo Emerson is the topic and Ralph Waldo Emerson is the focus. I am speaking of him as a prose writer , not as a poet, a” wisdom writer“, he is too inconsistent to be a philosopher. Life, work, influence, his readings and one of his songs

We will sing that song now-- No. 44

As this song shows he was at home at peace in nature,

Song 44 We sing of golden mornings

Light the Chalice 563 “A person will worship something.” by Emerson

Joys and concerns

Covenant Let us stand and say together our Covenant -found on the back cover of our book-and followed by song 123 - and think about what we proclaim as our doctrine, our sacrament our prayer

Life

Ralph Waldo was born in 1803, descended on both sides of family from a long line of ministers, first Calvinist and then Unitarian. Father William, pastor of Boston’s First Church died when Waldo was eight years old. The lad was then raised by his mother and a pious aunt who expressed her cynicism in a style her nephew admired and imitated-- a style that has been called convoluted and gothic.

At age fourteen he went to Harvard, graduated in 1821. While at university he started the habit of keeping a daily diary. He wrote these personal journals for 55 years 1820 --1875 under the title “ The Wide World’. After graduation he took over his brother’s school for young ladies for 2/3 years. Then entered Harvard Divinity School, ill health -- tuberculosis was the family curse- and doubts about dogma made him a rather desultory student; he graduated as a Unitarian minister in 1826 . In 1829 he married Ellen Tucker , who died of tuberculosis at the age of 19 five months later. He wrote in his diary“ God be merciful to me a sinner and repair this miserable debility in which her death has left my soul”. His health deteriorated and his doubts increased. Feeling 1. “ that in an altered age we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers” and 2’.that he could not conscientiously administer the Lord‘s Supper and3 that he had doubts about public prayer, he resigned his post as pastor at Second Church Boston .

He went off on his big OE for a year or more. He met with Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Wordsworth, Coleridge, through whom he became associated with transcendental thought and its sources in German idealism . He read Plato, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Homer The Bhaghavita, Hume and Locke. By the time he returned to Concord he vowed not to utter any speech, poem or book that was not utterly and peculiarly his own work“. His 55 journals were his resource- the bank of his own experiences, his own observations his thoughts, ideas, these formed the basis of his lectures, and he reworked lectures through many drafts into polished erudite essays.

Life began again for him in 1835, he married Lidian Jackson. They had four children. A son died aged five of scarlet fever. He bought a large house . His study there was the meeting place for friends and scholars in an environment of gracious and true courtesy. . Having left the ministry Emerson earned his living as a writer and travelling lecturer.

Emerson’s diary entry on 24th July 1872 reads “ House burned” . Elsewhere it is reported that a newly hired servant was snooping in the attic and upset her kerosene lamp. Emerson gathered his family outside and shouted to his neighbours for help. Teenage boys with wet handkerchiefs tied around their faces formed a relay line to pass books and papers out the study window. The roof was gone and the house uninhabitable. The family left for Egypt and Europe and stayed away a year. When they returned a brass band playing “ Home Sweet Home” met them at the rail station and escorted them back to their fully restored home. A wonderful homecoming but the shock of it all fell heavily on Emerson and affected his health . Over the next eight years he slid into senility, his mind a calm blank. He died of pneumonia in 1882.

He always looked frail but he had a sense of optimism, a dominant will, a great belief in him self and he held there was a spiritual nature to reality-- the Over Soul that permeates all nature , all thought..

In our books we have a reading concerning that idea “The Over Soul”

Responsive reading 531-- Over soul it is another term perhaps to add to the synonyms God, collective unconscious, higher origin, deep power, wise silence, the highest dwells within us, the Over Soul-- 531

Work

Emerson enjoyed an astonishing public career first as a Unitarian minister then as a secular lecturer teaching self trust.. . Though his books sold well ,and his newspaper articles were popular Emerson’s fame and influence came as a lecturer. He had a deep voice, spoke with enthusiasm, had a egalatarian respect for his audience, was noted for his eloquence and insight, he had the sage’s charisma-- serene, restrained yet intense and spiritually formidable.

He would cheerfully deliver a series of 10/12 orations , for good fees, in city after city, and on diverse topics;-the philosophy of history, conduct of life, human culture, representative men, experience, mind and manners, antislavery, American civilization, English traits and self reliance.

In 1836 he published his essay “ Nature” . In it he proclaimed“ Why should not we also, enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should we not have insight instead of tradition; a religion by revelation to us and not the history of our forefathers”.

Out of this grew the Transcendental Club with like-minded intellectuals. The Transcendentalists trusted an inner personal intuition, the spark of the Eternal, born in each of us, enabling us to see the true the beautiful , and giving us the moral strength to live by that truth and beauty. Their core belief was an ideal spiritual state that transcends the physical, and is only realized through an individual’s intuition -- rather than through the doctrines of the established religions. Emphasis was on personal experience-- and trusting your own intuition.

In 1838 this fame he earned with essay “Nature” turned to notoriety. He was invited to give the graduation address at the Harvard Divinity School. His remarks managed to outrage the establishment and shock the whole community. He proclaimed to the Divinity graduates that Jesus was a great man, a very good man , but he was not God, and did not ascend to heaven. Two hundred later Cupitt and Geering are saying the same.

Emerson was denounced as an atheist, a poisoner of young men’s minds. He was not invited back to the Divinity School for another thirty years -- by which time his radical position was standard Unitarian doctrine, but still not accepted in the wider community-- Didn‘t Lini point out to us that the Unitarians were banned from Chester Cathedral just his year.

The only God Emerson acknowledged was the God within, which he defined as the oldest and best part of himself. So as a result of the Havard Divinity Graduation speech in 1838 the church banished Emerson.

Then it was he became a very popular secular lecturer-- changing the pulpit for the lectern.

Emerson suggested that we give ourselves to ourselves, that each of us can be cosmos rather than chaos.

Power exists only in the process, he reveres transition. “Power“, he says ”ceases in the instant of repose“. Power resides in the transition from a past to a new state.

His essays are full of very quotable quotes just a few:-

“As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect’’

“A man is a god in ruin“

As far as a man thinks , a man is free. “

Intellect annuls fate”

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

Travelling is a fool’s paradise-- our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home .

Intuition is primary wisdom whilst all later teachings are tuition.”

In saying “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” I feel it was a protection for himself. He is inconsistent-- promoting standing by own experience, not relying on past knowledge, tradition etc, but in his essay

“Representative Men” he says no great men are original. The greatest genius is the most indebted man ’”he has taken and used all that the past has offered.” eg Shakespeare-- plots from Holenshed, Ovid and Plutarch.

“There is no history, only biography.” He argued that government is required only in so far as people can not govern themselves.

Law of compensation “Nothing’s got for nothing“-- is that “If you can’t beat them, join them.?”

He spoke out against slavery and the South.

The essay ‘ Conduct of Life” , consists of three parts “ Fate” “Power” “Illusions“

“Power” could have been written this decade. He did value power for its own sake.

“ One comes to value power when he sees that all difficulties vanish before it. “

Then later he writes “ Certitude leads to violence’ and “ The power of violence is only a slightly lower order of the violence of power.”

“Society never advances. It undergoes continual changes. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.”

A man cannot be happy or strong until he lives with Nature, above time. “

Meditation

Emerson encourages us to live not remembering the past nor planning the future but to learn from the rose, from nature to be above time. Read it silently and meditate.

Influence

There was something contagious in Emerson’s aura, every one was affected by it, nobody seemed to resist it. He drew large crowds to his public lectures , he set students on fire. Thoreau, Whitman , Alcott and later Frost were devotees. After Emerson an American writer can be anti - Emerson if so desired but he can not be non-Emerson. He usurped the imagination of the USA and did so with extraordinary pugnacity. He was a fierce opponent of Slavery and spoke with increasing radicalism and against increasing jeers and protests but he was not concerned about his own popularity . He did not join the public arena as a member of any group or movement . He always retained a stringent independenceTwas the point. He wanted every one to find their own way to a principled good life. He always insisted he wanted no followers, that his aim was to give man back to himself as a self reliant individual-- this was his doctrine of ’the infinitude of the private man”.

Why has Emerson this reputation of the ”embodiment of the American spirit’, the shaper of American history‘. Is such a reputation justified? Well he was against America’s habit of looking back to England for guidance. He says as long as the American people quote England’s standard’s they will miss the sovereignty of power. He even said he would like to see it made a penal offence to bring an English law book into an American court.

Some reject Emerson’s doctrine of self reliance as elitism, some condemn it as it turns to arrogance, some blame Emerson for encouraging Americans to dangerous grandiosity-- Bush imposing order on the universe. Self reliance for Emerson did not involve dismissal of common concerns, it is more a need to meet each one’s full potential , in spite of other people or bureaucratic systems, not to follow the crowd but for each to find own way through nature and society to an understanding of a meaning for living.

In the nineteen fifties Emerson went out of favour, he was eclipsed by TS Eliot and Ezra Pound . Eliot wrote that “ The essays of Emerson are already an encumbrance’, Emerson was the Devil , poisoner of young men‘s minds, a man without a handle. How dare Emerson claim for the human intellect the power and authority to judge what is fact or myth in the Bible, what is revealed from heaven and what has been made up by man. .--What is intuition, how do you know you’ve got it? No man has the right to attempt to weaken or destroy a faith which he cannot or will not replace with loftier beliefs.

Harold Bloom , present Professor of Humanities at Yale University writes in 2003 that “Emerson is closer to us than ever, on this his two hundredth birthday. In the States we continue to have Emersonians on the Left, organizers of Peace Marchers, and on the Right Libertarian Republicans exalting President Bush the second. Both parties are inspired by Emerson’s vision of Self Reliance.

Bloom is delighted there is in Emerson such an abundance to go on offending as well as inspiring. What with Emerson’s “ As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of their intellect” and his

“ Certitude leads to violence’ Bloom concludes that “ In George Bush’s America Emerson could not be elected even dogcatcher.’’

But he does have a lot to offer the 21st century.

As we extinguish the chalice. --

- We will read responsive reading 661 as our closing words “The heart Knoweth”

Postlude.