Man The Divine  Watering Our Neighbors’ Gardens

The Enduring Significance of Emerson’s Divinity School Address

By John Haynes Holmes

Now, the Unitarians had never seen this. Or, if they had seen it, had never followed the gleam. With superb resoluteness and courage they had trod the firm highroad of reason, along which moved the ponderous procession of philosophical and theological progress, but they had never escaped to the mountain peaks. Thus had they not seen the panorama of the Whole—least of all felt the ecstasy of transcendental vision. For all their moral principle and sound idealism, the Unitarians were still bound to doctrine, while Emerson was already free in spirit. It was in this sense that the man who wrote and spoke the Divinity School Address pointed the path to liberation, which many a young and ardent soul was panting to follow. Of course, Emerson did not all at once, nor singlehanded, bring freedom to these Unitarians who had valiantly sought but never really found it. Parker and many another must strike their blows upon the chains which still bound this New England group of pioneers. But Emerson's was the divine touch. His utterance at the Harvard Divinity School was the magic password. In an instant, dogmas dropped

away, miracles vanished into the realm of myth and legend, Jesus was dethroned from his place as the Divine Savior, to take his greater place as the supreme master of the human spirit. Controversy stayed the work of liberation. Its very fury, as conducted by men like Andrews Norton, showed how complete and instant was the recognition of the sweeping character of Emerson's thought. In due course the thunders and lightnings of the storm shifted from Concord and even Cambridge to Boston. Jovian shafts were now aimed at the devoted head of Theodore Parker, who stood for years at the very center of the blast. Emerson tended more and more, as time passed, to become not a focal point of attack, but rather an atmosphere of light which men could not dissipate and therefore had to abide. What he had said that night at the Divinity School he took out on to public lecture platforms in Massachusetts, New England, New York, and the Middle West. Discourses first spoken, then written and published as essays, were absorbed by all the best minds of the time, and transformed the thinking of a generation. Long before Emerson was done, or the young oracle had been changed into the aged seer, the Unitarians had become transcendentalized—if I may invent a word!—and thereupon the leaders of the free spirit in America. Francis G. Peabody—of blessed memory!—used to insist, in a day when rationalism was finding its way back into Unitarianism as a predominating characteristic of new scientific and philosophical interest, that Unitarians were properly not rationalists at all but mystics. He cited as his evidence the founts of poetry that welled up from the New England school of authors which was predominantly Unitarian, the prayers that poured from the hearts of Parker and

Martineau, the hymns of Samuel Longfellow and Samuel Johnson, of Hosmer, and Gannett, and Chadwick, which represent the supreme contribution of America to the hymnology of the Christian world. Here were the marks of a mysticism as genuine as anything that Christianity has known since the Quakers of George Fox, and its fountainhead was Emerson. From the Divinity School Address, as from a mountain spring, flowed the living water that quickened mere thought into "eternal life."