The Enduring Significance of Emerson’s Divinity School Address

By John Haynes Holmes

The audience that gathered on the evening of the 15^th crowded the little chapel of the Divinity School to the doors. In the front rows were the seniors, and other members of the student body. The faculty were present, some professors from the college, and many graduates of the school and other ministers. Theodore Parker was not the only one to travel a considerable distance to be on hand. Excitement was in the air—some sprung from dark foreboding and alarm, much from confident anticipation of prophetic utterance. Lowell's description of the Phi Beta Kappa oration the year before—"an event without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene always to be treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent"—all this could be applied to this event as well, with the single substitution of the word "religious" for "literary." Yet if anything could have allayed the excitement in the beginning, and thus stilled the waves of controversy, it was that serene countenance in the pulpit speaking, in that deep and resonant baritone voice, destined to become so familiar on the American platform, those opening sentences about this "refulgent summer" when it "has been a luxury to draw the breath of life," which constitute today, a hundred years later, one of the classic pages of our American literature. There can be no doubt of the effect of this passage as it drifted, like quiet yet happy organ-tones, through the little

room to eagerly expectant ears. It did just what Emerson intended it should do—unite the audience in a common sentiment and outlook. This effect was continued when the speaker turned from the outward to the inward world, and called attention to the "mind" which "reveals the laws which traverse the universe and make things what they are," and therewith "shrinks the great world at once to a mere illustration and fable" of itself. This was an affirmation of "the greatness of the soul, its divinity, its union with God," and thus quite in the Channing tradition. But then came the unforgettable sentences about "the sentiment of virtue," and the "intuition" of this sentiment as "an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul." That word "intuition" was dangerous, as it suggested contrast, or even conflict, with the traditional doctrine of revelation. The idea of "laws of the soul" was also dangerous, at least as Emerson used it, for he declared that they "execute themselves," and thus are "out of time, out of space," and in the heart of man, so that "if a man is at heart just, then in so far he is God." This seemed to banish the transcendent deity, and make way for immanence, which the true leaders of the faith had come long since to fear as pantheism. Indeed, what was it but pantheism, this statement now being spoken from the Divinity School pulpit, that "the world is not the product of manifold power, but of one will, of one mind, and that one mind everywhere active"? This seemed to deny the whole concept of God as creator, and the world as "the product of his creation," just as this pernicious idea of "intuition," to which the speaker now returned, discredited the Bible as the word of God. Truth, Emerson was saying, "cannot be received at second hand." I must find truth within myself, not from any external sources, however august and sacred, else is it of no avail.