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.