Chapter 1
Chapter 1
Major Themes in Emerson one hundred nine of Self-definition. By destroying the boundary between the profane and the sacred, he was only incorporating the secular with a sacred religiosity. He was enlarging the area of his consciousness with reference to the sacred. His proclamation that "all our life is a miracle" was an effort to dispense with the necessity of believing in any one miracle, particularly the Christian miracle of the Revelation: "Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead." He wanted the experience of God to be a continual revelation. He wanted a continual celebration of this union rather than a formal representation of it. In eighteen thirty-eight, Emerson noted that "there is no miracle to the believing soul." By shifting the burden of belief on to the individual self, he was challenging one of the fundamental premises of Christianity. At least, that is how his definition of the 'divine' has been interpreted. According to William James: There are systems of thought which the world usually calls religious, and yet which do not positively assume a God. Buddhism is in this case. Popularly, of course, the Buddha himself stands in place of a God; but in strictness the Buddhistic system is atheistic. Modern transcendental idealism,
Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendental cult. In that address to the graduating class at Divinity College in eighteen thirty-eight which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance. James also maintains that "the sort of appeal that Emersonian optimism and pessimism make to the individual and the sort of response which he makes to them in his life are in fact indistinguishable from, and in many respects identical with, the best Christian appeal and response." Therefore, purely from the experiential standpoint, we must refer to these "godless or quasi-godless creeds" as religions. For Emerson, the "experiential" aspect of religion was its summum bonum. It was only through his own experiences that he had arrived at his religious philosophy.
It may be helpful at this stage to trace briefly the phases of Emerson's arrival at his belief in the Self. It is relevant to note the underlying continuity of his ideas amidst the upheavals of his career. Until his graduation from Harvard College, Emerson fulfilled all the roles his life in society had imposed on him. He was an ambitious, virtuous, hard-working son and student though he did not particularly distinguish himself in these roles. We are not aware that he was unhappy in his situation. His journals contain several references to the need for "self-improvement." All this was quite consistent with his embarking upon