Lincoln And Whitman  Our Times Await A Tougher Emerson

The Enduring Significance of Emerson’s Divinity School Address

By John Haynes Holmes

Thus, for Unitarians, for the wider circle of Christianity, and for our whole American society, was Emerson the philosopher and prophet—the seer who caught for us

. . . . that serene and blessed mood

In which . . . . we see into the life of things.

That Emerson spoke any final word is not to be imagined. He was a man of his time, who would be strangely confused and baffled by our time. Thus, in this later age, we have encountered difficulties in democracy he never saw. We have become entangled in complexities of human nature he never uncovered. We are developing plans of society at the expense of the individual he would not have approved. The events of a century have wrought evils and terrors, and precipitated vast disasters, which shake to its foundations the triumphant optimism which was the essence of his faith. At this moment, as though in defeatist reaction upon all that we have gained in a hundred years, we seem to be swinging back, in frontal retreat, to ground once occupied but we had thought long since abandoned. Thus, in Unitarianism I seem to detect a faltering faith in that mystic vision which Emerson imparted, and a return to that barren rationalism which leads in our time to desert ways as sterile in their radicalism as the old ways were sterile in their orthodoxy. In contemporary Protestantism what do we see so significant as the recrudescence of Calvinism, with its despair of human nature, and its fatalistic dogma that the soul is as incompetent as it is unworthy to achieve its own salvation? As for democracy, this new society of free men which was to subdue the world, is it not everywhere yielding under the impact not so much of attack without as of collapse within? For behind the dictator who usurps the rule of the people, the barbarism which is engulfing civilization there lies that loss of confidence in the single man apart from the mass, or horde, of men which seems now, as in savage days, to be the center of social integration. Spiritually, that is, as well as politically and economically, our world is retreating, which means that there no longer burns upon the altar of life that quickening fire which Emerson saw in his day was "smoldering, nigh-quenched," and which straightway he fed with the fresh fuel of his spirit!