MARKS OF GREATNESS

If a man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will receive both. --- Horace Mann

I am doing this essay at the suggestion of my dear Ouida, who is my most trusted confidant. If she thinks something should be written, then it should be written. That comes close to what Pilate said, “What I have written I have written.”

Frequently I share goodies with her from my reading, and she helps me to dangle them about. We do together what I have often laid on my students in confronting an idea: (1) what does it really say?; (2) is it true?; (3) if true, is it important, does it matter?

This time around I was reading her some stuff I had underlined in Emerson’s essay on Self-Reliance, which I was reading as part of my research on a Christian world view, which is the theme of this journal for this year and next. As much as I admire Emerson, especially his doctrine of self-reliance, I consider him more humanistic than Christian. Man is not and cannot be self-reliant, not in any ultimate sense, for he is not responsible for his own existence and is thus responsible to his Creator. It was an incipient self-reliance that led to man’s fall, and as a fallen creature man must have a commodity from his Creator that he can find nowhere else, grace.

Emerson was not as orthodox as I. In fact he gave up his pulpit because he was not orthodox. But he was honest, and we all admire him for that. And he wielded a pungent pen, creating some of the most penetrating essays ever written. In my own thinking I seek to “canonize” Emerson, or interpret him as if he were a believer. But that is another subject. Emerson is generally very quotable, especially when you have someone like Ouida to quote him to.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

Emerson is a veritable goldmine of such “hard rock” philosophy, controversial and debatable to be sure. But as I interpret him, he is on target. In that last quote about consistency, for instance, he goes on to say: “With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradicts everything you said today.”

I like that kind of stuff, perhaps because it gets close to some of my own experiences. Some of our debaters make a big deal out of catching an opponent in an inconsistency, and they’ll research his life to find one. “You said such and such back in 1958,” they will say. So what? It is only a fool that never changes his mind, and, as Emerson would no doubt say, it is only a fool that thinks he has to be consistent all his life.

But these were not the ideas that led Ouida to urge me to write this article. She is hard to please. Even Emerson must come up with something special to get into Restoration Review with Ouida calling the plays.

It was only when we discussed Emerson’s idea of greatness that Ouida said, “Why don’t you write an article about that.” This is the paragraph. Ponder it for yourself:

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Ah, for the wisdom that comes from the sage of Concord! If heeded it would not only make a person great but a nation as well. And it could start in Washington where we have bureaucrats who suppose they know more about how to manage our lives than we do.

What is greatness to Emerson? He pinpoints it: the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. What is he saying? Two things are easy: to be like the world around you and to be your own true self when apart from the crowd. What is difficult is to be your own true self in the midst of the crowd, and that with perfect sweetness. That is to be great!

Cynicism is no part of the answer for our troubled world. Anybody can bellyache. It is the guy that can stand up there and smile with “perfect sweetness” and stand for the right let come what may who is the answer. He who waits to see the way the crowd goes will save neither himself nor his people. And we do not grumble our way to victory, however right we may be.

Emerson’s idea of greatness is not all that different from what our Lord taught when he related greatness to childlikeness. Not only does the child have that sweetness that Emerson refers to, but he has not yet learned to deceive himself and thus to mimic the crowd. The child knows no better than to be himself wherever he is and he will say what he thinks if he says anything at all. He has not yet learned double talk. And cynicism and defeatism, those twin blights upon all that is good, are no part of childlikeness.

If I cannot have Emerson, I will take Horace Mann, quoted at the outset, who provides us still with one more goodie about greatness: it does not come by being sought. We must rather seek truth: truth about ourselves, our universe, our Creator. In finding truth we find the only greatness that really matters.

And again this is what Jesus has been saying to us all along. You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. If there is no greatness (magnanimity) without truth, there is no greatness without freedom. Especially freedom from self-deceit. “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates said it well. --- the Editor