Spirituality: Session Seven A


Session Summary - The Harvard Divinity Address

Paul began by emphasizing the fact that Emerson's much vaunted "Divinity Address" lecture wasn't a huge, formal deal when it actually happened. A conventional view of history is one in which only important events (at the time) count, yet in reality significant historical events have happened in unlikely situations by unimportant people. For instance, the "Divinity Address" was arranged not by the suited Harvard faculty but by several student "radicals" in the graduating Divinity School class who felt their education was flimsy and perhaps unapplicable in the real world. They wanted a "pep talk" by this interesting guy they heard about, Ralph Waldo Emerson (whose fame had not yet fully materialized). The audience was therefore quite small.

The "Divinity Address" contained a direction of ministry and of life that some considered antithetical to orthodox teaching and led to Emerson being excluded from Harvard for approximately 30 years. The controversy may not have been so sweeping if some of the students hadn't invited some conservative-minded clergy to the event.

Andrew Norton, perhaps his strongest critic, suggested afterwards that "a new heresy was on the loose". Paul said the Address basically contained Emerson's unconscious hatred of institutional religion, evidenced by the fact that Emerson said he was surprised at the criticism the "Address" received. He added that perhaps if Emerson was living in today's more psychological aware culture he wouldn't have been as surprised that unconscious motivations played such a central role.

In understanding the Address it is important to note who Emerson's "enemies" were. The Unitarians, who Emerson was reacting too, were heavily rationalistic. They used the "facts" of the physical miracles in the New Testament as proof of God's existence and power, relegating their lived experiences to the very margins. In comes Emerson with his prophetic utterances of everyman and everywoman's divinization, and you sense the clash of views! (It was noted that Unitarians today who have become more theologically liberal since the 1830's, think Emerson was quite right and tend to hold him in high esteem.)

Paul said although Emerson comes across as "off the edge" of where religion was at the time, he was still religiously conservative and orthodox in some ways. This thesis hasn't been explored much yet. Emerson was conservative in that he didn't actually advise the students to leave the institution of church. He believed that groups that break of from institutions in order to "change the world" tend to implode and lose the integrity of their message. However, he thought that those who believed that they need to change themselves first were on the right track. When you change, the whole world changes a little.

Our group then was divided into subgroups to study selected texts of the Harvard Divinity Address. Each subgroup was asked to write modern paraphrases of Emerson original words, and to evaluate their truthfulness. Here are a few examples of the results.

Emerson: "The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws. These laws refuse to be adequately stated. They will not be written out on paper, or spoken by the tongue."

Part of Dave's paraphrase included: "Love, Hope and Truth's connection to the universe cannot be contained by language."

Emerson: "Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute; it is like cold which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real."

Dave said that evil has also been compared to clouds that are temporal and not as constant as light. Although the vision of evil as "twisted good" is not the only one, it is a powerful image on which to build a spirituality.

Emerson: "See how this rapid intrinsic energy worketh everywhere, righting wrongs,correcting appearances, and bringing up facts to a harmony with thoughts. Its operation in life, though slow to the senses, is at last as sure as in the soul. By it a man is made the Providence to himself, and evil to his sin."

Essentially Emerson is saying that when you are in your essential nature, your stupidity will be corrected and synergy will happen.

Emerson: "The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man; - indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology."

Cal said his group paraphrased this text by saying that the problems of theology today are : 1) religion isn't evolving with the times, 2) we don't believe inspiration is current and 3) we have a cryogenetically frozen Christ that does not keep up with the archetypes of what it is to be human.

Emerson: "Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempt to communicate religion. As it appears to us, and as it has appeared for ages, it is not the doctrine of the soul but an exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The soul knows no such persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love."

Eldon said that Soul only reorganizes itself, and knows no exclusivity. All can participate in the Divine as Christ did, but we tend not to trust this. Paul summarized it this way: New Ager's tend to believe that we are all God. Fundamentalists tend to believe that we are none of God. But the truth is somewhere in between: we are all some of God. God is human; humans are divine. Realizing this tension brings consciousness.

Emerson: "That which shows God in me, fortifies me, That which shows God out of me,makes me a wart and a wen (a cancerous growth!)."

Lyle's group's paraphrase: "When we express God or the Higher side of ourselves we are ennobled and strengthened. When we express our dark side, we become a cancerous growth, an aberration."

Emerson: "If Man is at heart just, then in so far as he is God, the safety of God,the immortality of God, the majesty of God do enter into that man with justice. If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own being."

A paraphrase: We actually are expressions of the struggle that God has. God has to progress somehow in cooperation with us, and thus our distorted forgetfulness of our humanity and divinity is a block to ourselves, and perhaps to God as well. To quote Shakespeare, as Marty did: "To thine ownself be true!"

Emerson: "The doctrine of divine nature being forgotten, a sickness infects and dwarfs the constitution. Once man was all; now he is an appendage, a nuisance."

A paraphrase of Bev's: When we lose touch with the God in ourselves, we become little more than a mosquito drone.

Emerson: "Courage, piety, love, wisdom, can teach; and every man can open his door to these angels, and they shall bring him the gift of tongues. But the man who aims to speak as books enable , as synods use, as the fashion dictates, and as interest commands, babbles. Let him hush."

Lydia's paraphrase: "The one who speaks from the Spirit of the Law has the eloquence of angels, but the one who speaks from the letter of the Law is a babbler. Let him or her hush!

Emerson: "Now man is ashamed of himself; he skulks and sneaks through the world to be tolerated, to be pitied, and scarcely in a thousand years does any man dare to be wise and good, and so draw after him tears and blessings of his kind."

Lorna's paraphrase: When humanity does not acknowledge the divine within, we have nothing but a pathetic path. In other words, don't thrive on despair. It can turn you evil.

back to emerson section            comments            next