The Enduring Significance of Emerson’s Divinity School Address

By John Haynes Holmes

Channing is, of course, the supreme illustration of what I mean. His was a free mind—no doubt about that! His powerful intellect and exalted sensibility forced a break with an orthodoxy which had no place for such profound ideas as the divinity of man, the goodness of God, man's kinship with Christ, the inspiration of the moral ideal. Again and again Channing apprehended and gave expression to intuitions of the reason which carried him far beyond the bounds of his theology. It is this fact which explains his agreement in essence with the Divinity School Address. But Channing never thought his way out of the philosophy in which he was reared. Christianity still remained to him a matter of evidence rather than of direct inner discovery. Thus, to the end he believed if not in the infallibility yet in the unique inspiration of the Bible, at least of the New Testament, in the record of the miracles as attesting the authority of Christ, and in the elevation of Christ above humanity as a being uniquely related to the one God. Already, before his death, there was forming, right in the body of Unitarianism, a new orthodoxy which his free spirit abhorred, but which was none the less implicit in a theological point of view, which, whatever its particular heresies, was yet, in its idea of basic revelation, a part of the substance of established Christian thought.

It was into the very heart of this Unitarian orthodoxy, the Divinity School at Cambridge, that Emerson threw his bomb on that fateful July night. This bomb was fabricated—if I may use such a word in connection with Emerson!—out of different material and by a different formula from any known to, or at least used by, the Unitarian divines. These gentlemen, says 0. B. Frothingham, in his "Transcendentalism in New England," were "good scholars, careful reasoners, clear and exact thinkers, accomplished men of letters, humane in sentiment, sincere in moral intention," but (with certain individual exceptions) they "belonged to the class which looked without for knowledge rather than within for inspiration." Emerson had little commerce with these men. He broke absolutely with the tradition, so typical of the Anglo-Saxon mind, which ignored the existence of spiritual intuitions in the nature of man in favor of ideas sprung from information imparted by the senses, and fashioned by reason into thought. He had been tethered in this rationalistic pasture, but had early broken loose and wandered afield. What he sought, and found, were those high tablelands of the spirit, where the air is thin, and the sunshine of eternal being as caught by the white snows of inner sensibility often too dazzling for the sight, but whence the eye may again and again catch visions of far horizons and over-arching firmaments. Emerson moved naturally, in other words, in the realm not of the rationalistic but of the mystical experience of the race. He turned within rather than without for evidence, and counted the soul the witness of reality.

Emerson's reading shows the native instinct of his spirit—the lore of the Hindus, the poetry of the Persians, the so-called sacred books of oriental religions, the mythologies of Greece and Rome, the curious geographical and astronomical works of the ancients, the philosophies of Plato and the neo-Platonists, the speculations of Plotinus and the Christian mystics, the writings of Kant and Schelling, the new idealistic literature of Germany glorified by such names as Herder, Richter, Schleiermacher, Schiller, Goethe, and the derivative literature of the English school as represented by Coleridge and Carlyle. Emerson was disturbed by no irrationality. The testimony of the inner spirit, though it be as remote as Meister Eckhart or as unstable as Swedenborg, stirred his sympathy and captured his imagination. He wanted "the deep books," as he called them, and sought primarily for sincerity.