EMERSON AND RESTORATION
by Robert C. Grayson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a younger contemporary of Alexander Campbell; and Emerson’s ideas were a part of the religious ferment of the first half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, his thought is of more than historical interest, for many of the characteristics of his culture exist in the middle of the twentieth century, and he examined his culture with a critical eye.

Although Emerson is noted as a lover of nature and as one who communed with nature directly, he was more interested in truth than in the phenomena of nature. He meditated among the pines, but he hoped to distill from them, not pine oil, but truth. In “The Apology” he said:

Think me not unkind and rude

That I walk alone in grove and glen;

I go to the god of the wood

To fetch his word to men.

What is the word that he brought back from his communion with the god of the wood? That “word” has many aspects, but chiefly it is that all things are one and that this one is spirit or God. Philosophically, then, Emerson was an idealist and a monist. As a monist, he failed to distinguish sharply between the Creator and his creation, between God and man (To him man’s mind is an inlet from the ocean of God, and all that is possible to God is possible to man: in Nature he said: “Build your own world.”), between good and evil (In “The Divinity School Address” he said: “Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity.” Or, as Dr. Randall Stewart has said, in Emerson’s system there is “no struggle between God and the Devil because the Devil is a ‘nonentity,’ that is, he does not exist.”¹). What is, if possible, an even more fundamental difference between Emerson and the Christian is the attitude toward the person of Jesus. In “The Divinity School Address” Emerson said that the first error of historical Christianity was “the noxious exaggeration about the person of Christ,” for he believed all men to be equally divine. He asserted that Jesus taught the divinity of all men and was misunderstood by his disciples. According to Emerson, Jesus was an imperfectly understood Emerson!

What, then, can one who is removed from the Christian faith have to say of value to Christians? First of all, as an idealist he evaluated many things in the same way that a Christian does. Years after he had resigned his position as minister of the Unitarian Church because he could not conscientiously administer the Lord’s supper, he recorded in his Journal: “This old Bible, if you pitch it out of the window with a fork, it comes bouncing back again.” And, as Dr. Randall Stewart has noted:

When he wanted to state ‘the first and the last lesson of religion,’ he could do no better than quote St. Paul’s ‘the things that are seen are temporal, the things that are unseen are eternal.’²

Indeed, in Emerson’s firm conviction in the reality of God and the realm of the spirit lies perhaps his greatest value to Christians. Not only did he hold the existence of God to be a firm certainty but he also drew (in “The Preacher”) a sharp contrast between the God-less man and the God-fearing man:

Unlovely, nay, frightful, is the solitude of the soul withot God in the world. To wander all day in the sunlight among the tribes of animals, unrelated to anything better; to behold the horse, cow and bird, and to foresee an equal and speedy end to him and them . . . To see men pursuing in faith their varied action, warm-hearted, providing for their children, loving their friends, performing their promises—what are they to this chill, houseless, fatherless, aimless Cain . . .To him, heaven and earth have lost their beauty.

As an idealist Emerson saw, too, that one cannot follow popular standards of what is good. “Do not be deceived by the name of goodness,” he said, “but question whether it be goodness.” Christians, especially those who seek the restoration of Christ’s congregation to apostolic principles, must follow this advice. Every innovation from the clergy to institutionalized charity is defended on the basis of its goodness, the good it renders. Furthermore, Emerson recognized that in following an ideal a man might be led to take stands that are not consistent with his former views: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen, philosophers, and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.” Those who seek the restoration of the ecclesia of God must assimilate this lesson. It is not enough that an idea or an approach has been taught, accepted, or promulgated; but all such must be examined in the intensity of the light of God’s word. And the creative ideas that can unify God’s people must be sought out.

As Emerson meditated among the pines in order to bring the word of the god of the wood back to his fellowman, he achieved some incisive insights into Christianity as it existed in his day. Many of his comments apply with almost equal appropriateness today. In an essay entitled “Worship,” published in The Conduct of Life, Emerson berated contemporary religion:

I do not find the religions of men at this moment very creditable to them, but either childish and insignificant or unmanly and effeminating. The fatal trait is the divorce between religion and morality.

This statement sounds prophetic of the present; this age is a time when many profess religion as a simple act of social conformity or as a means of deriving a psychotherapeutic effect. Many today have a form of religion but deny its power.

Similarly he criticized the religion of his day because it was culture-bound. The slave-holder used Christianity to justify his slaveholding, etc. And it was long before the Northern churches joined in the abolitionist movement. However, Emerson himself is not above criticism on the same basis; for when the war came, Emerson, the philosopher, lest his philosophical abstraction and became the avid partisan. On the other hand, at the Virginia constitutional convention Alexander Campbell, as a Christian, labored in a practical manner for the freeing of slaves. He freed his own inherited slaves, employed, and finally pensioned them. And he sought by teaching Christian love to avoid the conflagration of war. Although the teachings of the Bible have been misused time and again to justify or maintain an unjust status quo, properly used the Bible presents ideal concepts by which culture-bound man can see at least some of the shortcomings of his time.

Furthermore, Emerson saw that the sectarian state of Christianity destroyed its force. In “Self-Reliance” he cried out:

. . . it may be a question whether we have not lost . . . by a Christianity, entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?³

Even now, a century and a half after the beginning of the Restoration Movement, the question is pertinent. It burns like a hot iron. As men strive to be a part of some sect or party—to be a Baptist Christian, a Church-of-Christ Christian, etc.; to be a one-cup Christian, a no-located-preacher Christian, etc.—they lose “some vigor of wild virtue,” which Christianity properly contains.

Sectarianism in Emerson’s day was not only “entrenched in establishments and forms,” but also enclosed by boundaries clearly laid out by creeds. Today formal creeds mean little in most churches; many who have them treat them simply as a statement of faith not to be stringently applied as a test of fellowship. Ironically, some who have benefitted greatly from the Restoration Movement of the un-sectarian Alexander Campbell, et. al., are today the most rigidly held by creeds, unwritten but strong as iron. In “Self-Reliance” Emerson affirmed:

. . . creeds (are) a disease of the intellect. They say with those foolish Israelites, ‘Let not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and we will obey.’

Emerson would extend the implicatons of this statement to any authority, even that of the teaching of Jesus, for he believed that each man is capable of receiving revelations from God and of arriving at knowledge of God and truth intuitively. There is a sense, nevertheless, in which his statement expresses a great truth. God has spoken unto us by his Son; yet few dare to hear this expression of Divine truth without its being interpreted by some respected teacher or exalted preacher, or interpreted in accordance with the concepts of some sect or faction. “‘Let not God speak to us, lest we die.’” Furthermore, as the Jews, who were afraid to hear God speak, could not become a nation of priests (The Levites were set aside as the priestly tribe) so Christians have refused the responsibilities—responsibilities of preaching Jesus and of teaching their fellow-Christians—that their priesthood entails. (Genesis 19:5-9, 16-20; 20:18-20; I Peter 3:9)

Since Emerson had this concept of unlimited revelation, one might expect that he would have but little respect for religious teachers. However, he held the function of “preacher” or “minister” in high regard, but not the usual representatives of that function. As he saw it, these men usually spoke of the party position, not the word of God. In “Self-Reliance” he presented the latter point succinctly:

A man must consider what a blind-man’s-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look at but one side, the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their very truth is not quite true.

Another aspect of conventional Christianity that Emerson sharply criticized is the tendency to place emphasis on numbers. Although in the New Testament there is no reference to numbers beyond its initial impact and early spread in Jerusalem, this tendency is all but universal in our culture. “Our religion vulgarly stands on numbers of believers,” he said in “The Over-Soul.”

Whenever the appeal is made—no matter how indirectly—to numbers, proclamation is then and there made that religion is not. He that finds God a sweet enveloping thought to him never counts his company.

Sectism, or partyism, contains an inherent appeal to numbers: it proclaims, “I do not stand alone, content to uphold the teaching of Jesus as fully as I understand it; but I stand with a formidable group and adhere to the party-line.”

Though not intended to be complete, this examination of Emerson’s ideas concerning Christianity has shown that Emerson was not at all a Christian, but that as an idealist he shared some concepts with followers of the Christ, and that his criticism as an idealist outside the Christian realm are often illuminating. He was especially critical of sectarianism and its various ramifications. Today sectarianism is not so proud and bold as it was in Emerson’s day; there is great interest in the unity of all believers, but the sects still exist.

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Robert C. Grayson is Instructor of English at Southeast Missouri State College. He studied at Harding and David Lipscomb, took the M. A. at George Peabody and is moving toward a Ph.D. at Vanderbilt.