Sermon by the Rev. Charles J. Stephens
August 16, 2015
OPENING WORDS:
“The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around: brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again.
It came into him, life; it went out from him, truth.
It came to him, short-lived actions; it went out from him, immortal thoughts.
It came to him, business; it went from him, poetry.
It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought.
It can stand, and it can go.
It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires
Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.” Excerpt from “The American Scholar” by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Reading: – from Walden (1854), by Henry David Thoreau
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
“Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.”
Here in New England, Ralph Waldo Emerson has long been seen as one of the inspiring ancestors of much of Unitarian Universalist thought. Yet, after his address to the Harvard Divinity School in 1838, he was condemned not only by the orthodox Christians of the land but also by most Unitarian Ministers.
The Divinity School address became one of the early declarations of what came to be called the “Transcendentalist movement.” Emerson and those identified as Transcendentalists preferred the name Idealists to Transcendentalists. Others included in this literary, philosophical and political movement were Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Amos Bronson Alcott, Frederic Henry Hedge, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, George Ripley, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson and Theodore Parker.
The Transcendentalists were influenced by English and German literary Romanticism and the Biblical criticism of Friedrich Schleiermacher, and the philosophical skepticism of David Hume.
Henry Hedge brought a greater awareness of German thought and biblical criticism since his father, a Harvard professor, sent his son, Henry, to preparatory school in Germany at the age of thirteen.
As a seminary student I studied Schleiermacher and was drawn to his ideas long before I knew much about Unitarian Universalism or the mysticism of Ralf Waldo Emerson.
As a child I felt the beauty and the power of the nature world and found my spiritual connection with my feet on the ground and my eyes drawn to the flora and fauna all around me. My spiritual orientation was the love of nature, its energy, beauty and magnitude, along with a morality based on a unity of all that exists within the natural world. I sensed, in Emerson’s words, “ an original relation to the universe.”
About Emerson it was written “A sentence of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s is sometimes like… the mind held at an unexpected angle . . . a sudden burst of lovely blue light. It is not a transcendental illumination, exactly.” (Lance Morrow p.124, Time Magazine, May 10, 1982)
In his book “The Spiritual Emerson,” David M. Robinson noted that after his Divinity Address, Emerson was maligned as an infidel by many of his day, including most of the Unitarians, especially Unitarian ministers. In 1838, The Harvard Divinity Hall was small, with 70 people in attendance it was so packed with students, professors and friends of Emerson, that when Rev. Theodore Parker, friend and fellow radical walked over from his Unitarian Parish in West Roxbury, he had to sit outside the door.
Some of those there were George Ripley, founder of Brook Farm, Elizabeth Peabody, Frederic Henry Hedge, James Freeman Clark, Everett Edward Hale and possibly William Ellery Channing.
Those who strongly disagreed with Emerson were also there: Henry Ware, Jr. who invited Emerson to supply preach for him ten years earlier as well as Henry Ware Sr., both were Harvard Seminary professors. The young student James Russell Lowell was absent but when he heard about the address, he wrote to Emerson to say that he didn’t care a bit for what Emerson had said. Part of the controversy was that Emerson denied any significance of the supernatural miracles recorded in the Christian Scriptures, such as walking on water and raising the dead. Emerson went so far as to say that these miracles were irrelevant to the truths that Jesus did preach. Going even further he criticized the “…noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus,” among Christians. He went on to say that “the soul knows no persons.” This was a major departure from Christian religion because it was a denial of the “personality” of God or the image of God as a person. Such a realization was way before his time. Most people today, whether they are theists or even atheists, maintain a very personal view of God as a very specific divine being if no longer a divine father figure, at least having personal attributes. Emerson on the other hand held a very impersonal divine principle. He substituted the term “The Oversoul” for God, and defined it as a principle of unity. We might say, “The Spirit of Life,” a divine immanence present in and with the unity of everything that exists. This is much more of pantheistic or panenthistic or eastern view of the divine than biblical or theistic.
Thus Emerson’s Divinity School Address became like a battle cry for the Transcendentalist Movement because it showed respect for the prominence of the natural world and personal intuition rather than revealed religion from a supernatural God.
As wonderful as this was for Transcendentalists, it was condemned as “The latest form of Infidelity” by traditional Christians and sadly by the majority of Unitarians. As much as we Unitarians like to say we don’t have a creed, the reality is that as late as 1853, those who attended the annual meeting of the AUA (similar to our UU GA) unanimously protested the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker by resolving: “That the divine authority of the Gospel as founded on a special and miraculous interposition of God for the redemption of mankind, is the basis for the action of this Association.”
Biblical scholar and Harvard professor, Andrews Norton, often known as the “Unitarian Pope,” complained of “a restless craving for notoriety and excitement,” which he traced to German “speculatists” and “barbarians” and “that hyper-Germanized Englishman, Carlyle.” Emerson’s “Address,” he concludes, is at once “an insult to religion” (T, 248) and “an incoherent rhapsody” (T, 249).
Interestingly, in the midst of all the controversy, Emerson remained personally out of the fray. When Emerson finished addressing a literary society during a commencement in Middlebury, Vt., the president of the society asked a visiting minister to conclude the service with a prayer. The minister went to the pulpit, Emerson had just spoken from and prayed, “We beseech the, O Lord, to deliver us from hearing any more such transcendental nonsense as we have just listened to from this sacred desk.”
When the minister finished his prayer, Emerson, turned to the man next to him and asked the minister’s name. When told, Emerson remarked with characteristic gentleness, “He seemed a very conscientious plain-spoken man,” and then he went on his peaceful way.
When Henry Ware Jr., who Emerson knew from serving at the Second Church in Boston , criticized his views, Emerson wrote to Ware, saying, “These things look so to me; to you otherwise: let us say out our uttermost word, and let the all prevailing truth, as it surely will, judge between us.”
At least within the world of Unitarianism, the prevailing truth sided with Emerson. One hundred years later in 1938, at the Harvard Divinity School, John Haynes Holmes called Emerson’s Divinity School Address “The most important religious utterance in the history of the American people…” Then Holmes said that Emerson’s Divinity School Address completed spiritually and intellectually what the Declaration of Independence had begun politically.”
I wonder what Emerson would think of the religious conservativism we see around us today. Emerson said that the word miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is a Monster. It is not one with the glowing clover and the falling rain.” The concept of monster as something not being natural. Emerson held that “Historical Christianity (had) has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. . . . it (the church) dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus.”
What Emerson was saying comes through in his words which we used as our Responsive Reading (#531):
The revelation of all nature tells us “. . . that the highest dwells within us.. (that) there is no.. wall in the soul where we, the effect ceases, and God, the cause, begins.” We can say that there is no wall in the world where nature ceases and God begins which leaves not room for a supernatural divine being.
Emerson wrote that the Oversoul, which Emerson used rather than God is always accessible to us. Those moments when we feel its presence are memorable miracles. Such moments are simple, not super natural and are known as insight and we sense the miracle of life within us and within nature.
“When it breaks through our intellect, it is genius;
when it breaths through our will, it is virtue;
when it flows through our affections, it is love.”
Emerson wrote that for someone to say they cannot sense any inspiration or spirituality it would be like someone saying in rainy weather, there is no sun, when at the moment we are witnessing one of (its) his superlative effects.” (Worship, 1860)
No wonder now, so many years after Emerson, his thoughts about the Oversoul, the bible, nature and miracles still make sense to many of us present day religious liberals and millions who have rejected traditional religion.
We are attracted to Emerson’s nature based spirituality. He reminded Transcendentalists that religion’s task is the human task to move human beings to act out a divine spark of compassion and not to convince people that they are unworthy and unclean.
The Oversoul has no personality. It is not a person or any kind of special divine being, rather it is the presence or the principle within each fiber of nature and as such within our very own human consciousness.
For Transcendentalists back in the 1840’s and for many religious liberals today, personality is far too small a concept for the unifying spirit of life. This is so for us, even as it is so for others. We don’t want a god or a spirituality which someone can give to us in a book, a sermon, a creed, a prayer or a teaching.
For me and for most UUists, spirituality is not and cannot be something that one person can ever give to another person or even cause to appear for another person. Spirituality is a way of being in and with nature, and with life. Spirituality is being in a deep connected relationship with nature: the earth, the air, the fire, the water and all that lives, grows and exists within it.
This world and all that is in it, is truly a miracle. Breathe it in, and feel it flow over and through your body, see and sense its beauty and power.
CLOSING WORDS: From Emerson’s poem “Woodnotes”
Enough for thee the primal mind
That flows in streams, that breathes in wind:
Leave all thy pedant lore apart;
God hid the whole world in thy heart.
