SOURCE: “Emerson and Christianity,” in Renascence: Essays on Value in Literature, Vol. 50, No. 3-4, Spring, 1998, pp. 221-237.

[In the following essay, Bishop examines Emerson's “Divinity School Address” to locate the “Emersonian alternative” to traditional or “historical Christianity.”]

Emerson and Christianity could seem almost too vague and ideological a topic to some at least among the current cohort of Americanists. A recent review of research by Lawrence Buell for the Emerson Society Quarterly observes that much recent work has concentrated either upon the youthful or the aging Emerson. To rediscover the comparative orthodoxy of the first or the adaptive Victorianism of the second is in either case to obscure Emerson the Transcendentalist. The influence of newer modes of criticism might also serve to “call into question,” as the phrase goes, the very idea of a central or essential Emerson who might still be identified and confronted. And the monumental new editions of the essays, journals, and lectures would only further reinforce such a disposition, as would the new biographies by Allen, Porte, and McAleer. Emerson can seem in some danger of disappearing back into his contexts, textual or historical.

To be sure the question of Emerson and Christianity might be approached in just this style. A reporter might collect opinions and exhibit attitudes as these are revealed anecdotally through an increasingly well-evidenced lifetime. Such an approach would make what it could of an Aunt Mary's eccentric traditionalism or the attraction of an unbelieving Achille Murat. Or it might count up references in journal or letter to Pope Gregory's blessing, or the mass in St. Augustine or Baltimore, or estimate the tone of certain comments on the influence of Calvinism, or Orestes Brownson, or the Shakers. But these, it is easy to agree, are minor matters. A broader sweep might once again examine the history of religious ideas in New England up through the emergence of Unitarianism and the beginnings of Transcendentalism. But Perry Miller and his several “sons” have already done this more than once. Or one might, less conventionally, pay attention to that curious contrast within the America of the time and since between the ethos represented by Emerson and his friends and the evangelicalism of the heart which in some mysterious way it can seem in cultural equilibrium with. Popular Christianity versus what has more recently been called the human potential movement has been a persistent conflict within our national experience. And the progress of the Emersonian impulse down through its repetitions among the half-baked and eccentric but also the learned and adventurous will always reward attention.

An approach by way of the history of American religion can in any case lead to ambiguities and thence into confusion, as more and more inquiry might demonstrate—not always on purpose. Some modern commentators have in fact found it oddly difficult to distinguish the doctrine advanced in the essays from one or another variety of Christianity. Randall Stewart, to be sure, as a testy Agrarian of old fashioned opinions, could at least repeat earlier judgments to the effect that Emerson is “radically anti-Christian,” and “has done more than any other … to undermine Christian orthodoxy in America” (33-40). But Robert Ward, writing in another southern journal, subsequently found occasion to rebuke Stewart by name in defense of what he was prepared to call Emerson's fundamental “orthodoxy.” Perhaps it needn't surprise us to find an up-to-date New York critic like Steven Donadio unable to disentangle one species of American spirituality from another; or even to discover at least one scholar, Harold Fromm, prepared to affirm a likeness between Emerson and, of all people, Kierkegaard. But surely it should seem odd that a recent History of American Religion by William Clesch detects an uninterrupted continuity from Jonathan Edwards through Emerson to William James. There is some reason, then, to re-examine the question in philosophical, not to say theological, terms. And it is most readily faced where Emerson himself deliberately and openly declared what he had to say—which is, of course, the “Divinity School Address.”

If we return to that central document, we need read no further than the opening paragraphs to find language acutely relevant to the general issue. The opening words of this deliberately contentious announcement to the academic and ecclesiastical powers that were on that Cambridge Sunday evening in mid-July of 1838 offer as good evidence as any to locate the Emersonian alternative to what he and his party were accustomed to call “historical Christianity.” He is addressing the graduating class of the first seminary in New England on the occasion of their commencement as Christian preachers. Time, place, and audience could not have been more carefully calculated to throw into relief the purport of his utterance. The only analogue indeed is Jesus teaching in the Temple. And like Jesus, Emerson is speaking not as an apostate from the received faith but what the enemies of both would call a heretic; that is, one who believes himself authorized to announce the real truth of a message which the apparently orthodox have somehow missed. He is claiming to be at the center of rather than outside the circle he would now reconstitute on a new principle—which of course intensifies our interest in what is being said.

Which is, through these opening paragraphs, to outline the possibilities of the ideal human subject, which Emerson calls the “Soul.” His first words are deliberately provocative. For he begins with suavely insinuating praise of the high season which prevailed as he spoke, with its delicious burden of flowers, trees, stars, and night. “In this refulgent summer,” he says, the “mystery of nature was never displayed more happily.” It therefore behooves even such tightly cravatted and black suited folk as their reverend selves to “respect the perfection of this world in which our senses converse” (Works I, 76). The words “perfection” and “senses” are loaded with animus: such rhetoric advances the claims of the body in a style which mocks any reasonable expectation of his audience. Here is the Soul, to be sure; but on the level of scent and touch, where its proper “object” is not the moral law but that circumambiant environment within which us children of Adam might always enjoy ourselves—if only we dared. The praise this erotic opportunity as already “perfect,” and so virtually “spiritual” in its own right is on the face of it to insult every decent feeling.

Such language is insolent. But though Emerson is more than willing to shock, his tongue is really in his cheek. The point of the joke is lost unless we remember that he is very far from being a sensualist. He is ordinarily more than willing to reinforce the distrust of the flesh normal to his society and profession. Perhaps as a result he suffered, as he occasionally complained, from a certain detachment from his own sensations and feelings. There is besides his eventual reaction to Whitman's very different disposition to recall if we need reminding how Emerson could feel when someone actually proposed doing what he humorously alludes to here. He is shocking, but he is not serious. It would be others who would explore the possibility thus opened out.

The second half of this initial paragraph is devoted to the practical “faculties” of mankind, which make of fruitful soils and navigable seas resources to be worked up into things useful to human kind. This side of nature is worth, he observes, the “pith and heart of great men to subdue and enjoy it.” But “commodity,” or the practical mode of our engagement with the world, is in this context only a pendant to the sensuous abandon with which Emerson began. It is not on this occasion a topic to be explored on its own account.

A third step up the scale of the faculties which Emerson is climbing in these paragraphs brings us to the mind. When that “opens,” he says, the impressions and circumstances which man enjoys or makes use of through the passive or active body “shrink” to mere “illustrations” of that mind's proper objects, the “laws” which define nature as a system of ideas. The world in which our senses converse becomes significant of a universe we understand through the intellect. Emerson had already explored this mode of the Soul in Nature and “The American Scholar,” and would do so again, several times. The natural history of intellect is one of his most persistent concerns.

But in this context even activity of mind is reduced to a mere “entertainment.” Within a religious perspective, the highest in rank among the faculties is not the intellect but what he then goes on to praise, the “sentiment of virtue,” or “moral sentiment.” It is this interior power that most entirely informs whoever exercises it that the human subject is indeed “without bound”; that he or she (we can always supply the other pronoun, as Margaret Fuller once had to insist) is already “born” to the perfection of the Soul. “That which he [or she] venerates is still his own,” the most explicit sentence affirms, “though he has not realized it yet.” The deliverances of conscience belong not to an internalized society or external God, but to ourselves as human beings. To realize this privilege is accordingly to re-appropriate what may have become alienated from us as most properly our own. By way of the moral sentiment, man becomes God. The subject is altogether unlimited on just this side.

The sources of Emerson's belief in the moral sentiment as at once inborn and infinite can be found in the proposition of less extravagant thinkers. Joel Porte's first book showed the extent to which we could understand Emerson as a descendent of those eighteenth-century British philosophers, Price, Shaftesbury, Hutchinson and Stewart, who had long before proposed an inherent moral sense as the chief faculty in what was to become the standard Bostonian idea of human nature. Daniel Walker Howe and more recently David Robinson have shown how much the Unitarian conscience and the ideal of self-culture organized around it could depend on an optimistic assessment of this resource. The founding texts of this species of moral humanism, read in college, would to that extent make Emerson a pious student of the previous century. We could then appreciate the incitements of Coleridge and through him a misunderstood Kant as latter-day repetitions of an expectation that had already become intellectual second nature. For Emerson like invariably went with like; his reading could only confirm what he knew already, not challenge it. So he might be understood to have assimilated not just the German idealists but his favorite neo-Platonists and in due course the Orientals.

The idea that the moral sentiment is not only intrinsic and universal but functionally identical with God is already in any case the central thesis of the movement for which Emerson is speaking on this occasion. The same apotheosis of the conscience may be found, if not quite in Channing, at least in Ripley or Brownson or Parker. And Emerson had already made his own agreement clear, most recently in two lectures, one on “Religion,” delivered in the series on the Philosophy of History at the Masonic Temple in January of 1837, and another on “Holiness” delivered in the series on Human Culture in January of 1838.

The doctrine, then, is by no means new. The differences between other renderings of the key proposition and Emerson's on this occasion is in the first instance rhetorical: he is speaking face to face with those he is challenging on behalf of a declaration which by that very act becomes an either/or that has to be answered in kind. And this rhetorical crisis is itself the manifestation of an emergent spiritual claim. Emerson is not only speaking for but also as the infinite subject he proclaims. Joel Porte's more recent book has observed that Emerson had recently been reading his father's unfinished Historical Sketch of the First Church of Boston, before the elders of which Anne Hutchinson had been brought, exactly two centuries before, to answer a charge he knew might now be raised against himself (Porte 98-101). For to assert that the right of judgment is infinitely exercised while speaking in the name of that power to those who are free to deny it is at the very least to repeat the old Antinomian claim that the elect are each endowed individually with just that Spirit whose authority must prevail over Church and State alike. But it is also a claim to act as the ultimate agent here and now. Emerson makes himself the Christ anew for this occasion. His words translate the same I am which, Mark tells us, confronted the high priest and elders of another establishment once upon a time, and which, on that authority, John would make the key motif of his gospel.

It is this revelation—the term would be exact—that determines our understanding of the language at the very end of the “Address”, where Emerson somewhat disingenuously calls for a “new Teacher” who should improve upon the oracles of “those Eastern” men who once delivered the holy word. The role of the Baptist apparently adopted here seems a transparent mask. Nor do the parallels with Jeremiah traced by Carol Johnston in a recent article appear sufficient to account for the identity presumed. In fact, we also know, Emerson's friend Jones Very supposed that he was the Messiah here looked for—and came by night to identify himself as just this figure to Henry Ware (Gittleman 187-92). The result was a forced retreat to Salem, where that unfortunate Greek tutor was to live out the remainder of a melancholy life. But for one moment at least Very had been Emerson's best contemporary hearer—in his own schizophrenic fashion. But a saner understanding would have to be equally startling. Who but Emerson himself, and at just this time of speaking, could more reasonably appropriate the identity proposed? He is in fact already the “new born bard of the Holy Ghost” he urges the graduates sitting before him to become. If so, he is competing directly with Jesus on his own elder brother's spiritual as well as social territory. To adopt Harold Bloom's useful language, Jesus is the “precursor” for who Emerson is the “ephebe.” The speech is accordingly an agon to decide which of the two shall prevail. At stake, it is not too extravagant to claim, is America's consciousness of itself. For here at last would be a declaration of independence going beyond either the political or the cultural.

If Emerson is adopting a Messianic role, though, it is very much in his own style. The character of his declaration may be thrown into relief by comparing it with some alternative affirmations within the same apocalyptic genre. The most obvious of these would be found within the tradition of German idealism to which Emerson owed so much. This had already made the “Reason” man's highest faculty, and so his access to infinitude. In Fichte or Hegel such a “strong” misreading of Kant would become direct assertion. But in them and the tradition which descends through Husserl to the philosophic day before yesterday, the unlimited subject is regularly understood in cognitive terms. It is Mind that constitutes the universe, and so occupies the place of God. But in Emerson this absolute possibility belongs to the sense of duty. He is a moral, not a rational, idealist. So his I AM is not collective or intellectual but ethical and solitary. The scene is New England, after all, not Germany.

Another contrast just worth making would bear on more current manifestations of the Emersonian inheritance. His literary descendants, creative or academic, have been inclined to honor him as if it were not the moral sentiment or even the intellect that offered an “open channel to the highest life” but the imagination. The imperial self has taken that form for modern men of letters. Harold Bloom's own solipsistical sublime, to cite him once more, is, however grandiose its central encompassments, most centrally the product of an imaginative contest. But Emerson would not, I think, have been pleased with such a metamorphosis of his central claim. The Poet, however capitalized and inspired, is according to him always subordinate to the Preacher—and the “Address” is kerygma, not poetry.

We might forestall this modern disposition to translate Emerson downward on the scale of the faculties by contrasting his message with other figures or movements which have frankly reversed the psychic hierarchy upon which he depends. Whitman could show, for instance, what might happen if one started at the other end of the Soul. On the level of the body, intuition is simply identification; and evidently identification is the first principle of Whitman's poetic project. He too believes in infinitude—and sometimes manifested Messianic tendencies. But on the level of the body infinity presents itself as either intensity or multiplicity, those other angles of the Whitmanian enterprise. These, though, obliterate or diffuse the solitary ecstasy Emerson values.

The recollection of Whitman could remind us too of another not so distant “newness,” when the word “movement” once again bore a religious as well as a political import. Many have since felt the likenesses between the Transcendentalist moment and what we now so familiarly call “the sixties,” when the Soul once again awoke in America—only to fall asleep, as before. But the subject that revived in our more recent time of fervor was a manifestation of the Soul's “lower” energies. It was our desires, our feelings, our capacity for group identification that found themselves encouraged. The typical pronoun of the time was accordingly “We” rather than “I.” Whitman would have joined in; Emerson, surely, would have held back.

The Soul is hierarchically ordered, then, with the moral sentiment at the top. And it is accessible to individuals, not collectivities. The essential singularity of its manifestations, which Emerson never tires of insisting upon, reinforces both these presuppositions. There is always one Man, one Mind, one Spirit. To be sure this emphasis does not imply a high value for individuals as such. Emerson repeatedly insists that the Soul is no respecter of persons. It can sometimes be hard to believe he means what he says. We are apt to think him a sponsor for individuality in himself and others. And to some extent it clearly is. But strictly speaking his doctrine prohibits what it may in fact have promoted. The various modes of the Soul in action are all anonymous in principle, whatever name tags may be tied to the various instances. These are no more than representations, performances, examples—never the whole of the Subject as such. There are in fact no true selves in the Emersonian universe. No wonder then that his rhetoric always prefers the type, as Poet or Scholar, Transcendentalist or Conservative. This is Emerson's Platonic side, which also explains his insistence that the Soul knows nothing of time or place. It is always essentially identical with itself, whatever the circumstances of its manifestation. History too is degraded to illustration, like biography. The Soul is time-less—rather, we may observe, than eternal.

This synchronic impersonal ideality of the Soul goes with Emerson's already old fashioned emphasis on its different “faculties.” We may understand this psychology by translating it into somewhat more recent critical jargon as “competence.” Emerson would then be inviting us to develop our abilities in whatever spheres of life are open to us. The resulting exhilaration comes from the discovery that we are entitled to exercise one or another of just these powers; that we are old enough to vote, as it were, in so many elections. It is the typical experience of youth. Emerson's vision of possibility can seem a very academic invitation, well suited to an ideal process of education. To be sure, Americans are always in school, and have trouble believing in history. But it is worth stressing that the question—who is the person that disposes of these abilities?—has in principle not yet been either asked or answered. And this would be as true for the moral sentiment as for the intellect or any lesser power.

The Soul, then, is Anybody, not Somebody. This can have its chilly as well as its encouraging side. Emerson believes that the Soul is immortal; indeed, he must, for the subject as defined in such a way would be accessible to whoever becomes conscious of the opportunity to practice it at any time or place. It is Permanent, not Transient, as Theodore Parker would say. This kind of immortality, though, is little comfort to a mere individual haunted by his own mortality—or to a bereaved lover. The issue was evidently most acute for Emerson immediately before and after the death of his first wife Ellen. They appear to have made a pact that she should reveal herself somehow after death. The Journal contains pathetic pleas to this effect (JMN III, 230, 240, 275, 309). We must gather that she did not. It was Ellen's money that proved immortal after all, not her presence.

To be sure there are also advantages to the impersonality of the soul. The distinction between impersonal privilege and its individual manifestation helped preserve Emerson from the madness that has so often overtaken Messianic pretentions. His appreciation of the difference between entitlement and fact was presently to make up the burden of his wisdom as opposed to his gospel. For this invariably exhibits a controlled acceptance of every diminishment that could ever hinder the exercise of the very powers he begins by celebrating. Infinitude in principle is finitude in practice. “I am God in nature,” the familiar sentence from “Circles” confesses, “I am a weed by the wall” (Works II, 182). Within this skeptical gap his best work as on-going man of letters was shortly to be done—which allows us to admire his personal defeat rather more than the victory of his principle, if we choose.

The perfect Subject, then, is ideally intrinsic, infinite, superordinate, and impersonal. It manifests itself most acutely as a timeless moment of human triumph. “They call it Christianity,” says a Journal entry of the same year with the “Address”: “I call it Consciousness” (JMN VII, 28). This makes a neat formulation of his challenge, which should resonate through a variety of modern instances. Should we not always be reducing the tradition to so much of the subject as it can be made to produce? What else are we here for? I shall venture some answers to these questions shortly; but let me go back now to the problem of Jesus, which arises in the middle of the “Address”. If the doctrine of the Soul as just outlined is the true meaning of what used to be known as Christianity, what role is left for Emerson's rival on this ground?

In fact the view of Jesus specified in the “Address” follows directly from Emerson's general definition of the subject. Jesus too is an avatar, as it were, of the moral sentiment. He saw once what Emerson now confirms in his own person, the infinite potential of the Soul. “Alone in all history,” Jesus “estimated the greatness” not of God but man. “One man was once” true to what is “already” in you and me. Therefore he said, though no more extravagantly than Emerson is saying now, “I am divine, through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see thee, when thou thinkest as I now think.”

We may feel that this Jesus is an oddly epicene version of the figure of whom we can also read in the New Testament. The second person singular placed in his mouth is only Biblical language for Emerson's own views. But that is of course the point. Jesus can be so thoroughly recast in Emersonian terms because he has no room, as it were, to be otherwise within the scheme of possibility just reviewed. Jesus and Emerson alike are no more than figures of Absolute Spirit. For those bold enough to realize as much, all other persons, past or present, are therefore prophecies of one's own ideal self. Jesus stands for what Emerson and any member of his audience (and therefore every reader of the “Address” since) ought to be. But in that case he has no identity or language of his own that need be respected.

Christology is an obvious test for any religious proposal that purports to redefine Christianity. Emerson's idea of Jesus is accordingly the likeliest point at which to insert a critical crowbar, the better to separate the Transcendentalist gospel from its older original. Of course Emerson takes for granted that Jesus is man rather than God. So far he is merely Unitarian. He had indeed written a sermon on “Christ Crucified” ten years before the Address in which he had elaborated a portrait of Jesus as a model for moral growth and unworldly sublimity of character. His present doctrine differs from that of his culture and his own earlier views chiefly in affirming that the idea of Man includes the possibility of infinitude. But even his newer doctrine continues to presume that it is still the human subject that Jesus manifests. Divinity has moved over, as it were, to the near side of that old Jewish difference between man and God. In the process, of course, the gap itself disappears. There is no other, human or divine, in the Emersonian universe. There is only what the contemporary French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has called the same. The Soul is then a psychic tautology. Jesus is the same as Emerson because that is all there is for anyone to be. Aesthete or hero, he can be no better than Somebody; who is, we have already noticed, no more than Anybody in disguise. He cannot possibly be the true other in the correspondingly capitalized sense, or Somebody Else.

But Somebody Else is indeed who Jesus appears within the Christian tradition—including, for this occasion, so much Unitarian feeling as might be shocked by Emerson's ventriloquism. For to feel distaste would be to experience in an attenuated form the impropriety of any language that assumes an immediate identity of Jesus with ourselves. The Christian would have to confess on the contrary that Jesus should be understood as coming to meet us, as it were, from the other side of the relation. He is God incarnate; not Man in apotheosis. And if so, his words and deeds acquire an infinite right to be respected. They had better not be preempted by one's own. For in that case they are truly the voice of the Other. And in that recognition, the Other is always God. The Subject, by whatever name, is only Me.

Emerson's absorption of Jesus can be linked with another feature of the opening paragraphs of one “Address.” It may be observed that the hierarchy of faculties has its linguistic reflection. The so-called “conversation” of the senses with their world is literally pre-verbal. No language mediates that intercourse. The Soul simply “breathes” in the bounty dealt forth in “never-ending silence.” Nor do the things grasped by the hand of farmer or mechanic become words. But when the mind opens, this mute environment of the senses and the muscles shrinks, says Emerson, to “an illustration and a fable.” Nature becomes a dictionary of symbols. The moral sentiment, though, once one has arrived at that height, turns out to be as far above language as sensation is below it. Infinitude is post-verbal. Its laws cannot be “adequately stated. They will not be written out on paper, or spoken by the tongue.” Yet once this inner divinity has been realized, words may once again be used on its behalf, to affirm its prevalence—as in the “Address” itself.

If we attend to this verbal dimension of the Emersonian scheme we become more aware of what is at stake between him and the authorities of the Divinity School, and so in the end between him and Jesus. The issue is, who shall command the discourse? Does language belong to the Other, or to the Subject? If the Other is understood profanely as society in general, then the struggle is simply between Me and Them. Emerson's literary strategy already enfigures his answer here. To keep a journal is implicitly to take secret possession of discourse in advance. To rewrite its contents in sermon or lecture or essay is to claim for oneself the essential privilege of repetition. Thus writing itself is shifted inside the boundaries of the same, where the Subject dominates. So far Emerson is fighting the familiar nineteenth-century war between the individual and society.

But this struggle to command the discourse is most acute when the other is not merely Harvard but Jesus—who is already, by a previous tradition, the word of God himself. Who shall say what Jesus has said—or would say now? We have seen that Emerson feels free to put his own words in Jesus' mouth. He is not the first to do that. But his conquest is in fact incomplete. The apparent willingness to shock is complicated by an unconscious diffidence. This appears in the curious weakness that infiltrates these words. They rather parody Emerson's message than exhibit his power to incorporate the Other. Indeed the same weakness appears whenever Emerson attempts to speak directly on behalf of the moral sentiment. At just these moments his language becomes over-poetical and effete. We must often apply his own objection to those sermons in which is to be heard “no arrows no axes no nectar no growling.” His but I say unto you lacks evangelic power. A concentration of this debility may be found in what has surely struck many as the feeblest single sentence in the whole “Address”, the definition of a “true conversion, a true Christ” as that which is brought about by, of all things, “the reception of beautiful sentiments.” To be sure, the word “beauty” often leads Emerson astray. It cannot be made to mean what he wants it to say. So it represents an erosion from the moral to the aesthetic, and thence to the sentimental. On this ground he is regularly defeated by his own rhetoric.

The question, who shall command the word, had already arisen in a still more acute form six years previously, when Emerson resigned from his church over the issue of the Lord's Supper. The chief document of that event is the sermon Emerson delivered to explain his unwillingness to celebrate this ordinance. In it he examines the relevant Biblical texts with conventional care. It has in fact been discovered that the argumentative middle of this discourse was cribbed from Thomas Clarkson's Portraiture of Quakerism, which Emerson borrowed from the Athenaeum for the purpose (McAleer 120). But his proper conclusion really precedes the evidence he so uncharacteristically rehearses. It is that Jesus did not mean to establish a perpetual institution at the last supper. He meant only to offer a parable the significance of which should evaporate on that occasion. We had better understand the words over the bread and wine as an allegory of his teaching, in the style of the sixth chapter of John. In any case the idiom employed is too “oriental” for a civilized congregation (Essays and Lectures 429-1140).

We may detect in this last objection the strongest grounds for that “disagreeableness” to his “feelings” upon which Emerson eventually depends. He is not “interested” in the eucharist, to use his word, because the mute bodiliness of bread and wine, not to mention flesh and blood, affronts a sensibility as fastidious as his. A symbol should exhaust itself on its occasion. There is no reason thereafter to repeat the mere vehicle. Besides, to allow this low idiom would be to confess an alien authority. In the Lord's Supper the officiant sinks his own identity in that of his master. He does not speak for himself but as the Other, whose words are confessed to be more efficacious than his own. The rite thus concentrates everything that Emerson most feared in traditional Christianity: carnality, altereity, and subordination.

The struggle between Emerson and Jesus, then, is not only over who shall control the language, but what sort of language is to be used. Emerson claims verbal eloquence for the Soul—in this case with rather less success than his argument requires. Jesus claims the body for God. And this vulgar idiom, we may observe, is not exceptional to the eucharist but typical. The Jesus of the traditional texts is shown proving his case by touching the unclean, the disabled, and the mad. It is sinners and tax collectors who are brought into the kingdom, not scribes and pharisees. And the same principle informs the method by which the kingdom is established; not a military victory but a criminal passion. For Emerson an appeal to the body is at most a polemical joke, as we have seen. For Jesus it seems to have been the key to his strategy. Like Whitman, Jesus reverses the normal hierarchies—but on behalf of the Other rather than the same.

To revert to the problem of the Lord's Supper and the implications of the quarrel Emerson had with this ordinance is to become more confident of the case that would need to be made in answer to the “Address” so as to disengage Christianity once again from Consciousness. Against immanence one would need to reassert transcendence; against hierarchy, reversal; against abstraction, concreteness; against timelessness, the scandal of persons in history. For eternity, in the Christian conception, is not the absence but the fullness of time.

Before continuing our general contrast, though, we should glance at one or two of the particular answers the “Address” provoked at the time. For these can now be seen to include elements which should appear in any ideal reply to Emerson's challenge. Henry Ware's sermon on “The Personality of the Deity,” for instance, delivered two months later to the same audience, is a public rebuttal to at least one of the heresies announced in the Address. Emerson's depersonalization of the divine being, objects Ware, blends God with his commandments in a moral pantheism. But if there is “no consciousness and power of will and action behind these laws, they cease to apply.” Atheism is, practically speaking, a denial of God's personality: “There is a personal God, or there is none.” For without such a God, to whom I may be related in love or fear, “I am left to myself,” and so without a motive to obey the moral law (84-91).

What Ware can be taken as defending in his own pained style is the relevance of relation as such, together with the persons it entails. As we have seen, Emerson's gospel excludes these altogether. There is no relation in his universe, and therefore no real persons, human or divine. This aboriginal absence reappears in Emerson's famous refusal to answer Ware's pamphlet version of the sermon on the ground that he could not understand what “arguments mean in reference to any expression of a thought.” For argument presupposes at least an intellectual relation. He would prefer, he says, to go on reading the words of others just so far as they “speak my thought, skipping the page that has nothing for me” (Letters II, 166-67). Impersonality is in danger here of becoming indistinguishable from solipsism, not for the last time.

Other responses conveniently reprinted in Perry Miller's anthology can also supply material for a retrospective reply to Emerson that might go beyond the intentions either of the original writers or their modern compiler. Andrews Norton's initial reaction in the Boston Daily Advertiser for August 27th, some six weeks after the “Address,” is not, to be sure, an answer to the case Emerson had proposed. It is simply an expression of scornful disgust that anyone should have been invited to deliver such self-evidently unChristian opinions in the Chapel of the Divinity School to a class of graduating clergymen. Emerson had failed to recognize his social place. Such a protest displays the collective link between doctrine and manners that Emerson was in part objecting to. The same composite standard is evoked by The Christian Examiner's similar reference to the “utterly distasteful … notions” which must have been “altogether repugnant” to the feelings of those who listened to the words of “an individual who has no connection with the school whatever. … ” (Miller 193-96).

But Norton's more considered response, the notorious “The Latest Form of Infidelity,” is indeed useful. This essay connects the traditional Unitarian affirmation that miracles are essential to Christianity, which the “Address” had almost casually denied, with a rehearsal of the anthropology the argument presupposes. Man is not infinite but finite, the “creature of a day, just endowed with the capacity of thought, at first receiving all his opinions from those who have preceded him, entangled among numberless prejudices, confused by his passions, perceiving, if the eyes of his understanding are opened, that the sphere of his knowledge is hemmed in by an infinite of which he is ignorant. … ” (Miller 211). So limited a humanity requires a miracle-working God for its enlightenment. According to Norton, Jesus is at least the Moses of a new dispensation. But his authority to teach what God commands requires the confirmation supplied by the wonders he is reported to have done. Belief that the miracles did indeed occur is therefore indispensable to the Christian case. This in turn throws a heavy responsibility on the scholar who, though “just endowed with the capacity of thought,” can at least make himself reasonably sure that the events reported may be accepted as facts, however long ago and far away.

The weakness of Norton's argument lies in the assumption that though miracles can just be inferred to have occurred in the past, it need not be supposed that any such thing would ever happen in the present. This means in turn that man's relation to God has to be not faith but reason—and reason in the reduced sense of the Coleridgean “understanding,” exercised not even upon the sensations of the moment but on the evidences supplied by old texts. The strength which corresponds to this weakness lies in the realization that without the possibility represented by miracle itself, the otherness of God disappears. For a miracle is by definition something only God can do. Thus the Transcendentalist is strong where the Unitarian is weak and vice versa. For Transcendentalism correctly realizes that a God who could once act but is now impotent must be a Deistic figment. A true miracle would have to be possible in the present too. But the Transcendentalist assimilates this possibility to the powers of mankind. In that case, though, miraculousness once again disappears, for the Soul cannot do anything that could be distinguished in principle from the operations of nature. Miracles and otherness stand or fall together.

One position, then, leaves God out of the present; the other assimilates him to the Subject. It is possible to imagine a third position that would admit otherness with the Unitarian and contemporaneity with the Transcendentalist. In such a scheme, the place filled by exceptions to the laws of nature in first century Palestine might very well be filled with other pneumena (to coin a term) either in Emerson's day or ours. The modes by which the infinitely Other is revealed would not have to be limited to what made that kind of sense once upon a time. On the human side too such a third option could realize that both the contending parties omit the possibility of faith. In the place where this might occur, the Unitarian substitutes induction. In the same place the Transcendentalist supplies an experience of the sublime. The quarrel between the parties, scholarship is accustomed to observe, concerns the nature of man. But a detached perspective could add that the nature of man does not really matter—provided the figure in question is related to God. Once that obtains, the amount of change to be found in our psychic pockets scarcely matters.

The objections to the “Address” at the time must be eked out, then, to be fully useful. But carefully read, they provide materials out of which to construct an ideal answer to the Emersonian project from the side of Christianity. This had better begin, I have already suggested, with the primary distinction between immanence and transcendence. The first will supply the ground for Emerson's trust in the unlimited possibilities of the human subject. But only the second can be, I suspect, altogether consistent with the Christian gospel as soon as this has been seriously entertained. And from this difference others derive.

If God is transcendent, for example, it would follow that the Other is more instead of less than the same. Both sides could agree with Kierkegaard that subjectivity is truth. But Emerson understands subjectivity in the mode of identity. To take the Other seriously is on the contrary to discover that subjectivity is truth only in the mode of relation. In that case Spirit would not be the superlative of Soul but its opposite. Then the central task of the Subject would not be an indefinite expansion of itself but faith. For faith is relation realized. And faith, we could also find, would indeed have to be suffered in historical persons, whom it defines. The impersonality of the Emersonian Soul would then have to be replaced by a recovery of the actual individual in exactly the scandalous sense he refuses. Fides facit personam, said Luther, who was also one of Emerson's heroes, though not on that ambiguous personage's Christian side: relation produces persons—and persons, stories. This is not to say that a Christian analogue to Emersonian self-reliance would have to be some reassertion of the personal as such. The true alternative, it seems to me, would rather take the form of self-acknowledgment—which could involve either some appropriation of power in virtually the Emersonian style or a thoroughgoing confession of disability, as occasion determined. For in Christianity there is in principle no hierarchy of faculties, as we have seen. Such a self-acknowledgment would then be the reflexive mode of faith.

Obviously the role of Jesus would also have to be very different within any Christian perspective. In most versions, we may notice, there is a place for him on either side of the relation. To begin and end with, he is on God's side; which is to say, as Somebody Else, not Somebody. It is this uncanny figure whom the various individuals in the gospel stories either accept or deny. It is these needy or antagonistic persons, therefore, who represent the human subject, not Jesus, who throughout stands in for the Other, not the same. We may sum up this role in Catholic terms as his sacramental identity. But he also has what may be called his Protestant role on the near side of the relation. As Somebody like and unlike ourselves he represents us not in the positive, like other heroes of the Soul, but in the negative, as victim. Jesus is then either resurrected or afflicted—but never merely exemplary. To look for him in that guise is to gaze into an abyss—or make up some figment, as we see Emerson doing in the “Address”. And that process is of course familiar in more orthodox contexts too.

But such implications need not be overdrawn. I need only add, in conclusion, an acknowledgment of my own. It has seemed odd for me to be reviewing the arguments of Emerson and his antagonists as if one were still involved in the issue; even if that has also got to be true. It has felt unacademic, not to say anachronistic, as if one were supplying yet another item to the Miller anthology. This predicament may go with any approach to a “classic.” But it still made me uncomfortable. In what century did one live, after all? Besides, it felt ungrateful. How should an old student of this author now speak or write not just in elucidation as once but in objection, as if Emerson still lived a short distance out of town and could receive one more pamphlet not worth answering? It seemed that I needed to restore a decent ambivalence to my own discourse.

Let me in that spirit return accordingly to still another text for a final instance. This is a paragraph in the introductory announcement composed for the Dial in 1840, or two years after the “Address”, which must, it is agreed, be attributed to Emerson though it did not go out under his name. The paragraph concludes with a survey of those for whom the new journal hoped to speak, who had, though “without pomp, without trumpet, in lonely and obscure places, in solitude, in servitude, in compunctions and privations, trudging beside the team in the dusty road, or drudging a hireling in other men's cornfields, schoolmasters, who teach a few children rudiments for a pittance, ministers of small parishes of the obscurer sects, lone women in dependent condition, matrons and young maidens, rich and poor, beautiful and hard-favored, without concert or proclamation of any kind, have silently given in their several adherence to a new hope, and in all companies do signify a greater trust in the nature and resources of man, than the laws or the popular opinions will well allow” (Miller 249). It is easy, I hope, to find this series poignant. There is love in it, and of an unusual kind. I suppose too that others may feel that the concluding clause, “the nature and resources of man,” is something of an anti-climax. The kinds of people mentioned, and vividly enough for us to bring their several predicaments painfully to mind, seem to deserve something better than that. They are like the poor of the Beatitudes, who in a similar series are told that they should consider themselves blessed, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. These people though are offered instead the “nature and resources of man.” It can seem a stone instead of bread. But the momentum built up in the sequence as it proceeds allows us, I think, the option of reading through this diminished formula the fullness of its ghostly original. I think it is this possibility that makes the poignancy of the passage ring true, and not merely occasional or sentimental. In which case even our best criticism of Emerson might become reconstructive at last, leaving us able to admire unreservedly after all—even against the intent of the author. And that might not be so bad in the long run.

Works Cited

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