"The Instructed Eye"
"While Emerson waited in his room in Liverpool, he returned in his journal to the problems he had left behind. With a new decisiveness and clarity he formulated for himself what he called the 'errors of traditional Christianity as it now exists' and of 'religionists.' The latter, he thought, 'are clinging to little, positive, verbal, formal versions of the moral law...while the laws of the Law, the great circling truths whose only adequate symbol is the material laws, astronomy etc. are all unobserved and sneered at when spoken of.' He now counted Calvinism and Unitarianism among the imperfect versions....Here Emerson made his explicit break with most of orthodox, formal Christianity. 'I feel pledged,' he wrote, 'to demonstrate that all necessary truth is its own evidence: that no doctrine of God need appeal to a book; that Christianity is wrongly received by all such as take it for a system of doctrines... It is a rule of life not a rule of faith.'...
"Rushing on--working now in bold strokes--Emerson outlines the purpose of life not in terms of the traditional catechism but in terms of Goethe's 'Bildung,' or self-cultivation: 'The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself.' He declares himself free not only of the conventional past but of the conventionally conceived future: 'He is not to live to the future as described to him, but living to the real future by living to the real present.' He closes his sketch of main points with a simple statement of the central truth of religious--not secular--humanism, the idea that is also the fundamental foundation of democratic individualism: 'The highest revelation is that God is in every man.' This is not anthropomorphism but its antithesis, theomorphism."
Pp.151-152, EMERSON THE MIND ON FIRE, by Robert D. Richardson, Jr. (University of CA Press, Berkeley: 1995)
Friday, November 22, 2013
EMERSON..EXCERPT
"The Instructed Eye"
"While Emerson waited in his room in Liverpool, he returned in his journal to the problems he had left behind. With a new decisiveness and clarity he formulated for himself what he called the 'errors of traditional Christianity as it now exists' and of 'religionists.' The latter, he thought, 'are clinging to little, positive, verbal, formal versions of the moral law...while the laws of the Law, the great circling truths whose only adequate symbol is the material laws, astronomy etc. are all unobserved and sneered at when spoken of.' He now counted Calvinism and Unitarianism among the imperfect versions....Here Emerson made his explicit break with most of orthodox, formal Christianity. 'I feel pledged,' he wrote, 'to demonstrate that all necessary truth is its own evidence: that no doctrine of God need appeal to a book; that Christianity is wrongly received by all such as take it for a system of doctrines... It is a rule of life not a rule of faith.'...
"Rushing on--working now in bold strokes--Emerson outlines the purpose of life not in terms of the traditional catechism but in terms of Goethe's 'Bildung,' or self-cultivation: 'The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself.' He declares himself free not only of the conventional past but of the conventionally conceived future: 'He is not to live to the future as described to him, but living to the real future by living to the real present.' He closes his sketch of main points with a simple statement of the central truth of religious--not secular--humanism, the idea that is also the fundamental foundation of democratic individualism: 'The highest revelation is that God is in every man.' This is not anthropomorphism but its antithesis, theomorphism."
Pp.151-152, EMERSON THE MIND ON FIRE, by Robert D. Richardson, Jr. (University of CA Press, Berkeley: 1995)