“The Divinity School Address” 397source—the American scholar must lead the way.
The American scholar, in this sense, needs first to
develop an American spirituality, so the American
spirit can drive “Man Thinking” on his way. And,
Emerson, hopes, this American spirit will continue
in the minds and hearts of men and be passed along,
so a truly unique, and new, generation of Americans
will flourish.
Michael Modarelli
EMERSON, RALPH WALDO “The
Divinity School Address” (1838)
Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered the “Divinity
School Address” to the faculty, graduating class,
and guests at Harvard Divinity College on July
15, 1838. In this talk, later published as an essay,
Emerson described the problems he saw in Chris-
tianity at the time and urged his listeners toward
an understanding of spirituality that he hoped
would restore to religion the life it had lost. He
referred to two specific problems with Christianity.
First, he said that Christianity had done what reli-
gion historically has tended to do: It had replaced
the personal connection to spiritual law with words
and forms and rituals. This had sapped the vitality
out of preaching and therefore sapped the religious
and spiritual vitality of the American people. The
result was a lack of commitment to the kinds of
spirituality that generate and nurture a meaningful
religious practice.
Emerson’s proposal for revitalizing religion
can be summed up with a quote from paragraph
34 of “The Divinity School Address”: “The rem-
edy” for religion’s problems, he says, “is, first, soul,
and second, soul, and evermore, soul.” Emerson is
not specific about how his listeners might attain
greatness of soul; such specificity would have been
counter to his belief in the individual’s ability to
connect directly to spiritual law. This belief—that
people can transcend the constraints of physi-
cal and social context and access the divine for
themselves—was the heart of transcendentalism,
a philosophical movement in which Emerson was
a leading figure, and the heart of his spirituality
as well.
Sarah Perrault
reliGiOn in “The Divinity School Address”
“The Divinity School Address” reflects Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s desire to rescue religion from
dogma by infusing religious practice—in particu-
lar, Christian practice—with spirituality. Emerson
located the source of all religions, and the basis for
human civilization, in a common spiritual impulse
that “lies at the foundation of society, and succes-
sively creates all forms of worship,” but he believed
that the Christianity of his time had lost touch with
that impulse.
Emerson was well schooled in Christian theol-
ogy, having graduated from the Harvard Divinity
College and been ordained as a Unitarian minister
in 1829. He served in the ministry for three years
in the Second Church in Boston but resigned in
1832 because of theological differences with the
church’s leaders. These differences included his
“doctrine of the soul,” which said that people can
access spiritual law, or “Reason,” on their own:
“There is no doctrine of the Reason which will
bear to be taught by the Understanding.” In “The
Divinity School Address,” which expresses this
doctrine, Emerson critiques the church on two spe-
cific points. The first point is that Christianity has
deified Jesus, denying his humanity, and therefore
has lost contact with the living presence of God in
the world. The second point results from the first:
The deification of Jesus has led to a belief that
truth comes only from his words, not from one’s
own experience and life.
To understand why Emerson thought these
were problems, and why some people found “The
Divinity School Address” radical, it helps to know
something about Unitarian theology, and how
it was understood in early 19th-century Boston.
The name Unitarian comes from the practitioners’
belief in a unified (or unitary) God rather than
in the three-in-one God that makes up the Holy
Trinity in many other forms of Christianity (for
example, in the Catholic Church and the Church
of England). One consequence of a Unitarian view
of God is that Christ is not seen as divine but as a
divinely inspired man. Even within Unitarianism,
however, there are differences about how human
Jesus was. Some believers claim that although Jesus
was not God, he was a more-than-human spirit