398 Emerson, Ralph Waldo
that appeared on earth in human form for a while
Others, including Emerson, saw Jesus as having
been a divinely inspired person, no more and no
less. This belief was (and still is) a staple of Uni-
tarian thought, but at the time Emerson gave his
talk, the more conservative Unitarian leaders were
attempting to downplay the tenet that Jesus was
human lest their church be accused of not being
Christian at all. Emerson’s stance, while techni-
cally in keeping with Unitarian theology, was thus
somewhat upsetting to certain members of his faith
(including, for example, one of his former teachers
at the Divinity School).
In his address, Emerson characterizes the theol-
ogy of these more conservative church leaders as
telling followers that “you must subordinate your
nature to Christ’s nature; you must accept our inter-
pretations; and take his portrait as the vulgar draw
it.” In contrast with this dogmatism, he insists that
Jesus was a human being, divinely inspired but not
himself divine, and that Jesus therefore is simply
what all people have the potential to become. He
rails against the church’s denial of this point and the
fact that, in church teachings, “the divine nature is
attributed to one or two persons, and denied to all
the rest, and denied with fury. The doctrine of inspi-
ration is lost; the base doctrine of the majority of
voices, usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul.”
Although the combination of Emerson’s spiri-
tuality with his critique of the church could be
interpreted to mean that Emerson opposed orga-
nized religion generally, in fact the reverse is true.
His goal in the “Divinity School Address” is to stir
his listeners to revive Christianity, not to replace
it. This point is made especially clear in his state-
ment that he does not want the newly ordained
preachers to “establish a Cultus with new rites and
forms,” but instead to “let the breath of new life be
breathed by you through the forms already exist-
ing.” In other words, the goal is to bring life back
to the church’s existing practices. He repeatedly
stresses the importance, both to the spiritual and to
the social, of the preacher’s role. Regarding society,
he asks: “And what greater calamity can fall upon
a nation, than the loss of worship?” Through “The
Divinity School Address,” he hopes to reinvigorate
the church, its followers’ spiritual lives, and so the
nation as a whole.
Sarah Perraultspirituality in “The Divinity School
Address.”
“The Divinity School Address” is, first and foremost,
about spirituality. Although Emerson delivered the
talk at Harvard Divinity School, and although he
couched the talk in terms of religious reform, the
underlying motivation for that reform was a per-
ceived lack of spirituality, and the ultimate goal was
to bring individual spirituality back into religion.
The core belief in Emerson’s spirituality was that
the world was infused with divinity. This also was a
central tenet of transcendentalism, a philosophical
movement of which he was a leader, which said that
people could access the divine through their own
efforts, especially by heightening their awareness of
the natural world. This belief in the pervasiveness
of the divine shows up throughout “The Divinity
School Address,” starting with the first paragraph.
Emerson begins the talk by describing three kinds
of virtue, each more meaningful than the last. The
first, rooted in the material world, is the virtue asso-
ciated with human creativity, for example in industry
and agriculture. The second, also rooted in physi-
cal reality, is the virtue associated with a scientific
appreciation of the laws of nature. The third, which
transcends the material world, is the virtue associ-
ated with a human connection to spiritual law, also
referred to in the address as “Reason.”
According to Emerson, spiritual law is a posi-
tive force, meaning not only that it is good but that
it exerts an influence on the world. Unlike some
traditional Christian philosophies, Emerson did not
juxtapose battling forces of good and evil. Instead,
he compared goodness to heat—something present
in varying degrees, but with no opposite. Spiritual
laws “execute themselves,” meaning they manifest
in people’s lives constantly, reacting instantly to any
action. They are everywhere because “the world is
not the product of manifold power, but of one will,
of one mind,” and therefore everything in the world
reflects the presence of that will. Emerson expresses
the same idea of how spirituality permeates the
world when he says that “all things proceed out of