Don't Let Them Get Away With It

A Soalin' (live in France, 1965)

Neither Derivative Nor Eclectic

In the end Emerson would prove to be more than an American Plato since he would reject Plato's politics and would struggle to reconcile Platonism with democratic idealism. He is not just an American popularizer of Kant either, because he subjected German idealism to what may be called the critique of everyday life and because he brought life to Kant's acceptance of the authority of subjective knowledge by connecting it with the experiences of the great religious mystics and enthusiasts and with the passions and raptures of great poetry. Nor is Emerson merely an American Marcus Aurelius, because he reconciles classical Stoic insistence on self-rule with Dionysian wildness and a sweeping commitment to self-expression. Emerson is at least neither derivative nor eclectic. His insistence on grounding thought, action, ethics, religion, and art in individual experience is his center. He makes a modern case for the idea that the mind common to the universe is disclosed to each individual through his or her own nature. In this respect, Plato is a Greek premonition of Emerson, Marcus Aurelius a Roman one, and Kant a German one.

--Richardson, Emerson: The Mind On Fire, 234.

Emerson, Tolstoy, and Post-Christian Theism

In a sermon preached on May 27, 1832, Ralph Waldo Emerson told his congregation, "I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of redemption absolutely incredible." Robert Richardson comments:
"Emerson's preference for astronomy over conventional Christian theology constitutes his break with the church. It is not a break with theism, not a rejection of the religious view of the world. It is a specific rejection of the idea that the center of Christianity is the fall of humankind in Adam and Eve and the redemption of humanity through the sacrifice of Christ." Richardson, Emerson: The Mind On Fire, 124-125.

Regrettably, Emerson was wrong to think that the fall of humankind and its redemption through the crucifixion of Christ is not the "center of Christianity"--it is the center, theologically speaking and, in my view, he was right to reject it. Like his admirer Tolstoy, Emerson was a post-Christian theist who thought himself a "true" Christian. Hence, he had no choice but to leave the church (and, by the same token, Russian Orthodoxy had no choice but to excommunicate Tolstoy).

Billy Bragg - Internationale

Whence Is Your Power?

From my nonconformity. I never listened to your people's law, or to what they call their gospel, and wasted my time. I was content with the simple rural poverty of my own. Hence this sweetness.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson (Journal entry: see Richardson, The Mind On Fire, 4).

Inside Henry's Hut