Waldo

Since I invoke the Romantic Orientalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, I should probably dedicate a little space to discussing his importance for my thinking.

I began reading Emerson in High School. My paternal grandmother had passed down her copy of The Complete Writings to my father, who kept it on the shelf as a kind of memento. Imagine that! It's like keeping a stick of dynamite on the shelf as a knickknack. When I first dipped into this volume, I didn't know what to think. Emerson was clearly not a Christian--not at least as I understood Christianity at the time--but what he was, I couldn't say. Years later I would read Harold Bloom's authoritative opinion: "What matters most about Emerson is that he is the theologian of the American religion of Self-Reliance" (Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? p. 198). Bloom's notion of the "American religion" (a variety of native Gnosticism--or gnosis in the American grain) has yet to be taken seriously by members of the Religious Studies guild--but no matter. All in good time.

When I went off to college, Emerson came with me. While I studied philosophy with the Analytic school, Waldo kept me mentally (and spiritually) alive. His love affair with Persian poetry and the promiscuous ease with which he moved from the Bible to Shakespeare to the Bhagavad Gita to Plutarch and Montaigne to Hafez and the Qur'an (and on and on) impressed upon me the conviction that here was, as Robert Richardson put it, a mind on fire. Here was a mind to emulate.

I have never left Emerson. Emerson has never left me. The question arises, however, was he a Pantagruelist? He was unquestionably a sublime ironist--but one who managed somehow to embrace Plato without much of the Socratic leaven intact. Emerson's self-conscious gravitas allowed him to be a theologian; his natural humility made his gravitas bearable. Pantagruelists everywhere should make Waldo a focus of intense study (as Tolstoy appears to have done) and welcome him to our feasts. If the shenanigans of our table cost him his appetite, then we will know that he is not of our tribe. But what of it? His was a mighty spirit; we should therefore honor him all the more.