 Freethought of the Day
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May 25
On
this date in 1803, Ralph Waldo Emerson
was born in Boston.
Educated at Harvard and the Cambridge
Divinity School,
he became
a Unitarian minister in 1826 at the Second Church Unitarian.
The
congregation, with Christian overtones, issued communion,
something
Emerson refused to do. "Really, it is beyond my comprehension,"
Emerson once said, when asked by a seminary professor whether he
believed
in God. (Quoted in 2,000 Years of
Freethought edited by
Jim Haught.) By 1832, after the untimely
death of his first wife,
Emerson cut loose from Unitarianism. During a
year-long trip to
Europe, Emerson became acquainted with such
intelligentsia as
British writer Thomas
Carlyle, and poets Wordsworth and
Coleridge.
He returned to the United States in 1833, to a
life as poet, writer and
lecturer. Emerson inspired Transcendentalism,
although never
adopting the label himself. He rejected traditional ideas
of deity in
favor of an "Over-Soul" or "Form of
Good," ideas which were
considered highly heretical. His books
include Nature (1836), The
American Scholar (1837), Divinity School Address (1838), Essays, 2 vol.
(1841, 1844), Nature, Addresses and Lectures
(1849), and three volumes
of poetry. Margaret
Fuller became one of his "disciples," as did
Henry
David Thoreau.
The
best of Emerson's rather wordy writing survives as epigrams, such
as the
famous: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." Other one-
(and two-) liners include: "As men's prayers are a disease of the
will,
so are their creeds a disease of the intellect" (Self-Reliance, 1841). "The
most
tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being"
(Journal, 1836). "The word
miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches,
gives a false impression;
it is a monster. It is not one with the blowing
clover and the falling
rain" (Address to Harvard
Divinity College, July 15,
1838). He demolished the rightwing
hypocrites of his era in his essay
"Worship": ". . . the
louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted
our spoons" (Conduct of Life, 1860). "I hate
this shallow Americanism which
hopes to get rich by credit, to get
knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to
learn the economy of the mind by
phrenology, or skill without study, or
mastery without
apprenticeship" (Self-Reliance).
"The first and last lesson
of religion is, 'The things that are seen
are temporal; the things that are not
seen are eternal.' It puts an
affront upon nature" (English
Traits , 1856).
"The god of the cannibals will be a
cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and
of the merchants a
merchant." (Civilization,
1862). D. 1882.
“The dull
pray; the geniuses are light mockers.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men (1850)
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