The Lone Pilgrim

Ralph On Ralph

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

The Broken Covenant

In 1992, when I received a flyer from the University of Chicago Press announcing the publication of the second edition of Robert Bellah's The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial, I ordered a copy on the spot. I had never read the first edition nor anything else by Bellah at that point. In fact, I'd never heard of the book and had no idea what it was about. But I had a feeling...

The book exceeded all of my expectations and became something of a political handbook for me throughout the 1990's. Nothing Bellah wrote before or after it has had the same effect on me--in fact, I generally found his post-TBC work disappointing. It was almost as if he had embarrassed himself by writing such a stirring "jeremiad" (his word) and was determined never to repeat that mistake. Maybe I should be more charitable, because I owe him so much from this one book; nevertheless, I cannot help but think that what happened to him in its wake was nothing less than a failure of nerve.

Recent events have compelled me to pick up the book again. As I re-read it, I am stunned once more by Bellah's masterful juxtapositions of American Myth and the historical record. For my money, this is religious studies at its best: timely, insightful, self-critical. The Broken Covenant deserves to be considered a classic. If we neglect it, we do so to our shame.