1838 ‘We shun to say that which shocks the religious ear of the people’, Emerson warned himself in his journal on this day in 1838, only a week before he was due to deliver the commencement address to the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School. ‘But this fear is an impotency to commend the moral sentiment.’
Until now Emerson had been a Unitarian, the son of a Unitarian minister. This was already a pretty radical break from the rest of Christianity – whether Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, Protestant, or even Puritan – in that it refused to insist on the divinity of Christ. Jesus was a good man and prophet whose works and teachings were there for all to read in the New Testament. His life and example in the world were ‘divinity’ enough.
Now, though, Emerson was preparing to demystify the works themselves, and to deconstruct the titles traditionally applied to Christ, like our ‘lord’ and ‘king’. ‘The idioms of his language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth’, he would say in the address, ‘and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes.’
Where does that leave the miracles? Christ ‘spoke of miracles’, Emerson would admit, but that was because ‘he felt that man’s life was a miracle’. What Emerson hinted at, but didn’t say, was that to treat the miracles as the magical interventions of a supernatural being was to denature Christ’s work, to divorce it from ‘the blowing clover and the falling rain’. ‘Let me admonish you’, he would urge the young graduates about to embark on their ministry, ‘to go alone, to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.’
Records differ on how many divinity students were graduating that year. Some say six, others seven. Yet so portentous were the Sage of Concord’s cogitations that the Boston papers the next morning were full of alarm and denunciation. Among the Unitarians themselves opinion was divided. A few, like William Ellery Channing, welcomed the address, but most agreed with Andrews Norton, who called it ‘irreverent’ and ‘atheistic’, then published his response, On the Latest Form of Infidelity, a year later. It would take two decades for Emerson to be asked back to lecture at Harvard.
Though radical, however, the address was a logical enough development of New England Puritanism, which rejected the formalism and episcopacy of Anglicanism – not to mention its ‘tropes’ – as so many ‘veils’ between worshippers and their god. But would a philosophical shift of position cause such a stir today, however eminent its mouthpiece? Unlikely, though we still ‘shun to say that which shocks the religious ear of the people’.