On July 15, 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson addressed the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School, his alma mater. His audience that day was small -- the school's only six graduates, their families and the faculty -- but the reverberations were so great that the poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (father of the Supreme Court Justice), called the speech "our intellectual Declaration of Independence."
Emerson was 35 at the time, and had already given up his ministry -- "self-defrocked" as he put it -- in large part because his study of Eastern religions "dispelled once and for all the dream about Christianity being the sole revelation." He had also published the seminal essay "Nature," which had launched his career as a lecturer and put the Transcendentalist movement on the map. In it was this memorable description of union with the divine:
"Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."
In the Divinity School Address, the Sage of Concord did the religious equivalent of speaking truth to power. "Let me admonish you first of all to go alone," he told the ministers-to-be, "to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil." He called for less blind obedience to doctrine; he excoriated ordinary preaching as coming "out of the memory, and not out of the soul"; and he spoke of the typical Sunday service with such disdain that it's a wonder anyone present ever attended church again. "Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist," he said, "then is the worshipper defrauded and disconsolate."
What mattered, he declared, was to encounter the Infinite directly. He accused "historical Christianity" of engaging in "noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus," calling it a "perversion" to say that one person alone was by nature divine and the rest of us are not. Christianity, he said, had become "a Mythus," like the religions of Greece and Egypt, and had turned Christ into "a demigod," like Apollo or Osiris.
This was radical stuff in pre-Civil War America. Emerson was essentially turning religion 180 degrees on its axis. Instead of a deity presiding over creation from somewhere up there, divinity was here, there and everywhere. What we call God is the essence of all that is, the "cause behind every stump and clod," and it is within us, as our own essential nature. "That which shows God in me, fortifies me," he said at Harvard. "That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen" (wen = cyst). In the Emersonian vision, as in that of the Eastern sages, we are neither fallen nor depraved, and divinity incarnates at every instant, not just not just once in the distant past. "God is, not was," he said, and each of us is "an infinite Soul" who is "drinking forever the soul of God."
His lesson for the future ministers was plain: "Cast behind you all conformity and acquaint men firsthand with Deity."
The speech was well received by the students, who had invited Emerson in the first place, but the rest of the crowd was not pleased. When the text was published, clerics and theologians were outraged. Emerson said, proudly, that he had been "raised into the importance of a heretic." Harvard declared him persona non grata, but 28 years later, after he'd become a superstar, the school gave him an honorary doctorate.
The Emersonian vision is alive today in all the independent seekers who pursue firsthand the "indwelling Supreme Spirit." July 15 marks the 174th anniversary of the Divinity School Address. The date should be commemorated by everyone who insists on critical thinking in religious matters and by everyone who knows that "the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every man, and the oracles of this truth cease never."
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"Intellect"-when he speaks of the Trismegisti, the priesthood of the pure reason...they of the "old religion", who make the ideas of Christianity and Christians look Parvenues and Popular, he is asserting the pre-eminence and also historical precedence of the "old religion" over Christianity-by which he meant late antique Neoplatonism. In short, he had all but become a late Classical/Hellenistic Greek "pagan"; which of course has many natural connections with Eastern thought.
One later Transcendentalist, Alexander Wilder, eulogized him at the Concord Summer School as "this Plato of America"; Wilder also thought that Emerson's Over-Soul-"that Over-soul; that ONE"!, was derived from the founder of Neoplatonism, the Greco-Egyptian Plotinus-who saw SOUL as the third of three proceeding Divine Hypostases-The One/the Intellect (realm of Plato's IDEAS) /the Soul-closely connected with our individual souls and the World-Soul-see, e.g., Plato's Laws X and his 'creation story" the TIMAEUS.
I wonder how close a connection we may someday find for the Hindu worldview and Plato. The Indo-European language family suggests such but I do not know if that is pre-Alexander the Great's travels or post-. I was interested to see that Hebrew resembles the North African and Near Eastern ancient languages. In view of all the trading and warring pre-Plato, I cannot tell who influenced him, apart from the Pythagoreans. Heidegger claims somewhere that the Greeks had an indigenous and unique worldview prior to Plato. Dunno how much evidence remains, if any, of that.
"Given the many similarities between the Upanishadic tradition and the Platonic school and taking into account other similar doctrines in the earlier Pythagorean and Orphic teachings, many scholars naturally wonder whether there were contacts (or cross-influences) between India and Greece before Alexander’s thrust into N-W India in the late fourth century BC. There are some indications that some contacts may have taken place. But this issue requires a separate study.
There are important differences, as we saw, between the Dialogues and the Upanishads. On the other hand, the similarities are just as significant. Both teachings emphasize the man’s need to free himself from his slavery to desires and his blinding attachment to mundane pursuits and to turn inwards to his true self, the immortal aspect of his being.
In the Eastern Mediterranean the idea of the Unity of Being, the identity of the self (or soul) with the Absolute (or Godhead) appears some centuries after Plato in the Gnostic (or Proto-Christian) teachings."
and is still working more on it. Indo-Euro scholars following Benveniste and Dumezil -Google C. Scott Littleton (Occidental College), on the new Indo-Euro mythology. Plato's 3 parts of the Soul, which reflect the three parts of the State have been associated with the old indo-European tripartite structure-human social classes, gods and co-like the Castes in India. For early influences on Grecce of Ancient Near East and Egypt-see M. West -the "East Side of Helicon"? and W Burkert-"Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis" Or some such title) , they know the sources and avoid going on "trips", PC or otherwise
I discovered that primarily in the work of Harvard professor emeritus Stanley Cavell. Cavell admits that he originally saw RWE as a lesser Thoreau but a closer reading proved that to be negligent. Maybe finally our world has caught up to RWE, as it tries to catch up with HDT. Both make better sense of our modern predicament than most of their critics. Maybe the U.S. does have something worthwhile to offer to the world after all.
This is "spiritual independence".