Emersonian Baudelaire

It is that admirable and immortal instinct for the beautiful which makes us consider the earth and its spectacles as a revelation, as something in correspondence with Heaven. The insatiable thirst for everything that lies beyond, and that life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.

--Charles Baudelaire, "New Notes On Edgar Poe," Baudelaire As A Literary Critic, ed. and tr. Hyslop and Hyslop, Jr., Penn State Press (1964), 132.

Baudelaire was quite taken with E. A. Poe, and found in Emerson "a certain flavor of Seneca" (from "The Painter of Modern Life," an 1863 essay on Delacroix). Here he provides, in Emersonian fashion, the aesthetic basis of religious yearning.

Hodder On Emerson

Lately, I have been re-reading Alan Hodder's superb study of Emerson's book Nature (Emerson's Rhetoric of Revelation). Hodder understands both religion and literature--an understanding that is strangely absent from many of those who specialize either in religious studies or literary studies. Religion scholars typically undervalue literature and literary specialists typically have shallow regard for religion. That absence is yet another symptom of the intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy of our age, but we needn't go into that.

Hodder argues that Emerson's exposure to "higher criticism" of the Bible while at Harvard deprived him of the "Bible he knew in grammar school." Unwilling, on the one hand, to shut his eyes to historical scholarship and, on the other, to abandon a text that he cherished, Emerson concluded that "the Bible was ripe for revision." According to Hodder, "Nature is the book Emerson wrote about that discovery." (Hodder, 70).

This insight is parallel to Norman O. Brown's argument that, by the 7th century of the Common Era, it had become obvious to thinking people in the Near East that something had gone terribly wrong with Christianity. In response, says Brown, Muhammad came forward with his Biblical "revision," the Qur'an.

It should surprise no one, then, that Emerson bought and studied a copy of the Qur'an in 1830 (The Annotated Emerson, 18) and, six years later, published Nature.

The Uyghurs

Emerson and Neo-Confucianism

From the publisher's web page (palgrave macmillan):

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in Nature, "The moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference." The great Chinese synthesizer of Neo-Confucian philosophy Zhu Xi expressed a similar idea in the twelfth century: "In the realm of Heaven and Earth it is this moral principle alone that flows everywhere." Though living in different ages and cultures, these two thinkers have uncanny overlap in their work. A comparative investigation of Emerson's Transcendental thought and Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucianism, this book shows how both thinkers traced the human morality to the same source in the ultimately moral nature of the universe and developed theories of the interrelation of universal law and the human mind.

Seek Knowledge Even As Far As China

The title of this post is a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. The works of Emerson and Thoreau exemplify this hadith: they were out not only for knowledge but also for wisdom and, when they felt they had found it, they incorporated it in their own thinking and writing and then published it to the world.

Emerson and Thoreau initiated a native wisdom tradition refreshingly free from Christian supremacism. They sat at the feet of those whom they deemed to be sages regardless of time, race, religion, or geographic location. Their little circle of "Transcendentalists" dreamed an America neither Puritan nor mercantile. They tried, in vain, to reinvent the American experiment. The Mazeppist remembers them, along with Walt Whitman, as the "Refounding Fathers."

Pictured: The Great Mosque of Xi'an.

The Crawford Notch

"To find an American romanticism independent of Europe's, it is best to begin in the mountains, among the sharp peaks and edges from which all romantic pursuits take their bearings." --Lee Rust Brown, The Emerson Museum, 1.

In the Spring of 1832, Ralph Waldo Emerson informed the governing committee of the Boston church he pastored that he could not, in good conscience, continue to administer the Lord's Supper and asked that he be relieved of that duty. The committee responded that they could not so relieve him and, in June, Emerson left Boston in the company of his brother Charles and headed north, first to Maine and then to Conway, New Hampshire. At that point, Charles returned home, but Emerson continued on, crossing through "the cleft of the Notch" where, Brown tells us, he discovered his post-Christian vocation. (See Brown's "Introduction" to The Emerson Museum).

Kindred Spirits

An American student of British Romanticism, when he turns to the study of the domestic variety, soon finds himself obsessed with, lost in, dazed by--Emerson. Otherwise, he can't hope to find himself at all. Emerson is appalling and peculiar--at first. Then he is--simply--ourselves, perhaps for worse. But--a certain way into him--he is what Matthew Arnold asserted him to be--


the friend and the aider of anyone whatsoever who would live in his spirit.

--Harold Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, 46.

Emerson's Harvard Divinity School Address

In this address, delivered to the graduating class in 1838, Emerson admonished the Christian church for ignoring Christ's teaching and, instead, turning him into an idol.

He would not be invited back to Harvard for another 29 years.

If Being That Can Be Understood Is Language...

Then literature is the Over-Soul.

Pictured: Thoreau's notebooks.

Emersonian Circles

In nature, every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit....No truth so sublime but it may be trivial tomorrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled, is there any hope for them.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson, CW 2:189.

The way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson, CW 2:190.

Hafizian Emerson

I said to the heaven that glowed above,
O hide yon sun-filled zone,
Hide all the stars you boast;
For, in the world of love
And estimation true,
The heaped-up harvest of the moon
Is worth one barley-corn at most,
The Pleads' sheaf but two.

According to The Annotated Emerson, ed. David Mikics, this is a free translation of a poem by Hafiz (Book 25, Ode 10) from Emerson's May-Day and Other Pieces (1867).

Emersonian Steinbeck

"I figgered about the Holy Sperit and the Jesus road. I figgered, 'Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe,' I figgered, 'maybe it's all men an' all women we love; maybe that's the Holy Sperit--the human sperit--the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of.' Now I sat there thinkin' it, an' all of a suddent--I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it."



Rev. Jim Casy in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

Emerson and Embodiment

Adding Norman O. Brown as the fourth corner that squares the triangulation of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman insures that we do not get caught up in a common misunderstanding of so-called "Transcendentalism," i.e., that it is some sort of spooky philosophy that denies the body. Emerson would never have endured Thoreau (who was part mystic, part materialist) or hailed the arrival of Whitman (who sang the body electric) if he had an aversion to fleshly, physical life. Still, due perhaps to his reserved New Englander demeanor, he is frequently dismissed as a promoter of disembodied spirit.

Brown, who stands in the Emersonian line, not only celebrated life in the body but called for its resurrection.

Green On Brown

Martin Green understood what Norman O. Brown was up to and where he fit in American letters as early as 1966. In a review of Love's Body, published in the liberal Catholic journal Commonweal, Green wrote the following:

"Love's Body is a modern Thus Spake Zarathustra. Professor Brown is affiliating himself to a major line of 19th- and 20th-century prophets, Nietzsche, Carlyle, D. H. Lawrence, oddest of all, Emerson. All of these were practitioners of the aphorism, the gnomic saying, in richly odd diction, swinging ambiguously between the comic and the tragic, the prophet's personality strenuously swelling and strainfully collapsing in a self-mocking grimace. We have not had one of these wild men for some time, but we should be able to recognize him. Norman Brown has the same apocalyptic imagery, fire; resurrection, the judgment, the body, and a very similar apocalyptic message. There is even a native American tradition he belongs to. Emerson would have understood Professor Brown, and so would Whitman."

23 December 1966, 353.