Henry Beers - The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays

Emerson’s biographers make a large claim for him. One calls him “the first of American thinkers”: another, “the only great mind in American literature.” This is a generous challenge, but I believe that, with proper definition, it may be granted. When it is remembered that among American thinkers are Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, William James, and Willard Gibbs, one hesitates to subscribe to so absolute a verdict. Let it stand true, however, with the saving clause, “after the intuitional order of thought.” Emerson dwelt with the insights of the Reason and not with the logically derived judgments of the Understanding. (He capitalizes the names of these faculties, which translate the Kantian Vernunft and Verstand .) Dialectics he eschewed, professing himself helpless to conduct an argument. He announced truths, but would not undertake to say by what process of reasoning he reached them. They were not the conclusions of a syllogism: they were borne in upon him – revelations. At New Bedford he visited the meetings of the Quakers, and took great interest in their doctrine of the inner light.

When the heresies of the “Divinity School Address” (1838) were attacked by orthodox Unitarians (if there is such a thing as an orthodox Unitarian) like Andrews Norton in “The Latest Form of Infidelity,” and Henry Ware in his sermon on “The Personality of God,” Emerson made no attempt to defend his position. In a cordial letter to Ware he wrote: “I could not possibly give you one of the ‘arguments’ you cruelly hint at, on which any doctrine of mine stands; for I do not know what arguments are in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in telling what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men.”

Let me add a few sentences from the noble and beautiful passage written at sea, September 17, 1833: “Yesterday I was asked what I mean by morals. I reply that I cannot define, and care not to define… That which I cannot yet declare has been my angel from childhood until now… It cannot be defeated by my defeats. It cannot be questioned though all the martyrs apostatize… What is this they say about wanting mathematical certainty for moral truths? I have always affirmed they had it. Yet they ask me whether I know the soul immortal. No. But do I not know the Now to be eternal?.. Men seem to be constitutionally believers and unbelievers. There is no bridge that can cross from a mind in one state to a mind in the other. All my opinions, affections, whimsies, are tinged with belief, – incline to that side… But I cannot give reasons to a person of a different persuasion that are at all adequate to the force of my conviction. Yet when I fail to find the reason, my faith is not less.”

No doubt most men cherish deep beliefs for which they can assign no reasons: “real assents,” rather than “notional assents,” in Newman’s phrase. But Emerson’s profession of inability to argue need not be accepted too literally. It is a mask of humility covering a subtle policy: a plea in confession and avoidance: a throwing off of responsibility in forma pauperis . He could argue well, when he wanted to. In these journals, for example, he exposes, with admirable shrewdness, the unreasonableness and inconsistency of Alcott, Thoreau, and others, who refused to pay taxes because Massachusetts enforced the fugitive slave law: “As long as the state means you well, do not refuse your pistareen. You have a tottering cause: ninety parts of the pistareen it will spend for what you think also good: ten parts for mischief. You cannot fight heartily for a fraction… The state tax does not pay the Mexican War. Your coat, your sugar, your Latin and French and German book, your watch does. Yet these you do not stick at buying.”

Again, is it true that Emerson is the only great mind in American literature? Of his greatness of mind there can be no question; but how far was that mind in literature? No one doubts that Poe, or Hawthorne, or Longfellow, or Irving was in literature: was, above all things else, a man of letters. But the gravamen of Emerson’s writing appears to many to fall outside of the domain of letters: to lie in the provinces of ethics, religion, and speculative thought. They acknowledge that his writings have wonderful force and beauty, have literary quality; but tried by his subject matter, he is more a philosopher, a moralist, a theosophist, than a poet or a man of letters who deals with this human life as he finds it. A theosophist, not of course a theologian. Emerson is the most religious of thinkers, but by 1836, when his first book, “Nature,” was published, he had thought himself free of dogma and creed. Not the least interest of the journals is in the evidence they give of the process, the steps of growth by which he won to his perfected system. As early as 1824 we find a letter to Plato, remarkable in its mature gravity for a youth of twenty-one, questioning the exclusive claim of the Christian Revelation: “Of this Revelation I am the ardent friend. Of the Being who sent it I am the child… But I confess it has not for me the same exclusive and extraordinary claims it has for many. I hold Reason to be a prior Revelation… I need not inform you in all its depraved details of the theology under whose chains Calvin of Geneva bound Europe down; but this opinion, that the Revelation had become necessary to the salvation of men through some conjunction of events in heaven, is one of its vagaries.”

Emerson refused to affirm personality of God, “because it is too little, not too much.” Here, for instance, in the journal for Sunday, May 22, 1836, is the seed of the passage in the “Divinity School Address” which complains that “historical Christianity.. dwells with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus”: “The talk of the kitchen and the cottage is exclusively occupied with persons… And yet, when cultivated men speak of God, they demand a biography of him as steadily as the kitchen and the bar-room demand personalities of men… Theism must be, and the name of God must be, because it is a necessity of the human mind to apprehend the relative as flowing from the absolute, and we shall always give the absolute a name.”

The theosophist whose soul is in direct contact with the “Oversoul” needs no “evidences of Christianity,” nor any revelation through the scripture or the written word. Revelation is to him something more immediate – a doctrine, said Andrews Norton, which is not merely a heresy, but is not even an intelligible error. Neither does the mystic seek proof of God’s existence from the arguments of natural theology. “The intellectual power is not the gift, but the presence of God. Nor do we reason to the being of God, but God goes with us into Nature, when we go or think at all.”

The popular faith does not warm to Emerson’s impersonal deity. “I cannot love or worship an abstraction,” it says. “I must have a Father to believe in and pray to: a Father who loves and watches over me . As for the immortality you offer, it has no promise for the heart.

I do not know what it means to be absorbed into the absolute. The loss of conscious personal life is the loss of all. To awake into another state of being without a memory of this, is such a loss; and is, besides, inconceivable. I want to be reunited to my friends. I want my heaven to be a continuation of my earth. And hang Brahma!”

In literature, as in religion, this impersonality has disconcerting aspects to the man who dwells in the world of the senses and the understanding. “Some men,” says a note of 1844, “have the perception of difference predominant, and are conversant with surfaces and trifles, with coats and coaches and faces and cities; these are the men of talent. And other men abide by the perception of Identity: these are the Orientals, the philosophers, the men of faith and divinity, the men of genius.”