By the time the Unitarian and Universalist theologies were incorporated into religious institutions of our own, much of our faith had become overly rational, lifeless, and dry. Emerson and the Transcendentalists imagined a new Unitarian religion free from the church pew, free from the Bible and the preacher, communing with nature, encountering the divine directly in the world around us and in our own minds. Our identity includes both strands: the rational and the mystic, the scholastic and the ecstatic.
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“In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed more happily. The corn and the wine have been freely dealt to all creatures, and the never-broken silence with which the old bounty goes forward has not yielded yet one word of explanation.”
This is Emerson: the opening of his Address to the Senior Class of the Harvard Divinity School given on July 15, 1838.
Emerson’s short career as a Unitarian minister at Boston’s Second Church had lasted only from 1829 to 1832. For the rest of that decade, he preached regularly at the Unitarian church in East Lexington, but he refused their offer to call him as their minister. He worked on his first book of essays, titled, Nature, which was published in 1836.
Although he was invited to give the address to the graduating class of new ministers at Harvard, in 1838, this would prove to be his final parting with Unitarianism, at least with our churches if not our faith. He left congregations and ministers and church buildings behind and followed his own way and his own mind. He remained a philosopher who continued to think deeply about spiritual subjects, and a writer who enjoyed discussing spiritual ideas with friends and colleagues, such as Margaret Fuller, but he never again was a minister, or church-member, or even a church-goer.
The critique Emerson gives in his Harvard Divinity School address is that the Christian church of his time, including the most advanced and liberal of Christian churches, the Unitarian Christian church, had become dull and lifeless. He once described in one of his diaries the “corpse-cold Unitarianism of Brattle Street and Harvard College”.
How did we get so cold? How did we get so dead?
Emerson continues from that opening paragraph about the glories of nature to describe the glories of the human spirit when we open our souls to the wonders of nature. He says that contemplating nature encourages contemplation of our place in the universe, the beauty of all we encounter, and our own beauty in it, and the delights of the mind and the moral sentiment that are our own particular human contributions to nature.
In the second paragraph of his Harvard Divinity School address, Emerson asks the question that we’ve been asking for the last several weeks and that this contemplation of the vastness of nature awakens in us, “What am I?” Emerson believes we all ask when we look up through the transparent darkness to the distant stars, “with a curiosity new-kindled but never to be quenched.”
For Emerson, our own direct experience of the stirring depth and brilliance of the world around us, naturally urges to explore the religious questions of virtue, good and evil, the revelation that all the universe works as though governed by a single law, or directed, perhaps, by a single mind.
He writes in The Oversoul, his essay published, three years after the Divinity School address:
“I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.” “Within us is the soul of the whole; the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal One.” “When it breaks through our intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through our will, it is virtue; when it flows through our affections, it is love.”
Emerson writes as though this is a common observation of anyone who looks directly and deeply at the world:
“For all things proceed out of this same spirit, which is differently named love, justice, temperance, in its different applications, just as the ocean receives different names on the several shores which it washes. All things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with it.”
From this common spirit humanity then creates religion.
And this, then, is the problem. We put religion first and imagine that love and justice flows from it, when we ought to see that the spirit of love and justice comes first and that religion flows from it.
Instead of recognizing that the foundation of religion is accessible to every person in every age, simply by delighting in the world around us and directly communing with it, we have, through the history of the church, begun to believe that the wonder and the delight of the spirit only happened long ago, in a special place, to special people. And all that is left to us now is to gather in our cold churches, and to venerate those people, and to read over the texts they left us. We’re asked to read their records of their marvelous experiences, rather than claiming our own experiences. We’re asked to believe that the text is sacred, rather than that the world is sacred.
Similarly, Emerson complains that Christian churches have gotten so focused on the person of Jesus, that we miss the message of Jesus which speaks to the universality of spiritual experience. Emerson writes of historical Christianity, and he includes the Unitarian church as but the latest iteration of that historical line:
“Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts 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 persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love.”
And then Emerson repeats the same critique about the moral teaching of the church: that religions teach morals as though morality were a code specially revealed once long ago, rather than as a universal, eternal truth, that can be discerned by anyone, anytime, who simply cares to look around at the way the world works. He writes:
“…the Moral Nature, that Law of laws whose revelations introduce greatness—yea, God himself—into the open soul, is not explored as the fountain of the established teaching in society. Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead. The injury to faith throttles the preacher; and the goodliest of institutions becomes an uncertain and inarticulate voice.”
It is these defects that turned the Unitarian church “corpse-cold” for Emerson. We are “uncertain” and “inarticulate” because we have borrowed a faith from centuries ago, rather than living the faith of our day. And he despairs for the future of our faith if we don’t correct the defect. He writes, in a famous passage that still sounds a warning to us:
“My friends, in these two errors, I thinks, I find the causes of a decaying church and a wasting unbelief. And what greater calamity can fall upon a nation than the loss of worship? Then all things go to decay. Genius leaves the temple to haunt the senate or the market. Literature becomes frivolous. Science is cold. The eye of youth is not lighted by the hope of other worlds, and age is without honor. Society lives to trifles, and when men die we do not mention them.”
This is what theologians call the disenchantment of the world. That the world was once a place of wonder and mystery. The spiritual surrounded us. The trees, and mountains and animals were divine creatures. The stars and planets were gods and goddesses. Our ancestors spoke to us through signs and wonders. The age of miracles.
And then with the rise of science, more of the world became known to us. And the story of science, at least initially, is that the world wasn’t alive with magic. Miracles have explanations. The physical universe was more like a machine, mostly lifeless, bound by physical laws. And thus not only miracles were lost but also meaning, and purpose, and morals, and goals. We grew in knowledge, but we lost a life where living mattered.
And so, as the old mysteries give way to rational explanations, the question is how to avoid a meaningless life and a lifeless religion? Without regressing to supernaturalism is there a way to re-enchant the world? A religion that honors what we know, but also gives us the hope and meaning we need?
Emerson’s argument is that what we seek exists in the relationship between nature and our own minds. And his prescription, is for the student ministers he is speaking to, to give religion back to the people in the pews. Let them have their own experience. Awaken in them the curiosity to go out and experience the world directly and they will find in it the spirit they seek and define it for themselves. Stop shutting religion up in ancient prophets, and ancient revelations. Open the doors of the church, and the windows of our souls, to the glories of the world we live in, and let today, and this world, and the divine spirit still flowing through all things, teach us what we want to know.
Here is Emerson’s closing paragraph:
“I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty which ravished the souls of those Eastern men, and chiefly of those Hebrews, and through their lips spoke oracles to all time, shall speak in the West also. The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures contain immortal sentences, that have been bread of life to millions. But they have no epical integrity; are fragmentary; are not shown in their order to the intellect. I look for the new Teacher that shall follow so far those shining laws that he shall see them come full circle; shall see their rounding complete grace; shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart; and shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy.”
Emerson warns the young ministers that it is easier to borrow a gospel from an earlier time, and cower behind it, than to live one’s own gospel and defend it. But the old gospels rely on a supernaturalism we can no longer tolerate, post-Enlightenment. And so the frightened church abandons the wonder of the ecstatic vision to other folks at other times, and no one comes to church any more expecting anything like the experience we sang about in our opening hymn:
Once when my heart was passion free to learn of things divine,
the soul of nature suddenly outpoured itself in mine.
I held the secrets of the deep and of the heavens above;
I knew the harmonies of sleep, the mysteries of love.
And for a moment’s interval the earth, the sky, the sea –
my soul encompassed each and all, as they encompass me.
How did we get so cold? How did religion get so dead?
Two weeks ago, I spoke to you all about the salvation scheme from Paul that ends up forcing Christians into the doctrine of the trinity. Jesus wins our salvation by taking the punishment that we deserve for our sins onto himself. Jesus’ death requires that he be human. The resurrection requires that he be divine. Thus, Jesus is magically two-in-one. And Jesus being divine, requires that Jesus share divinity with God and the Holy Spirit, and thus God becomes magically three-in-one.
In the monolithic Christian church that existed from the council of Nicea to the Protestant Reformation, the church taught that participation in the sacraments: baptism, confession, the eucharist, and so on, were the means to receiving the gift of Jesus’ sacrifice.
The central criticism of Protestantism, when we get to Luther and Calvin, is that this work of the sacraments seems to say that whether a person is saved or not depends on a choice made by that person: that your choice to make confession and receive communion forces God to save you.
For the Protestants this made human beings more powerful than God. Calvin and Luther argued that the decision to save or not to save must be God’s free choice. There is nothing human beings can do to change God’s mind. And, because God exists eternally, God’s decision to save you or not, was already made, irrevocably, long before you were born!
What a depressing teaching!
And furthermore, the purpose of the church can’t be performing ritual acts in an attempt to manipulate God into saving us, rather, the best the church can do is open up the Bible and teach you the scriptures that prove to you how guilty and powerless you are.
That is the Protestant, Calvinist, religion, that, guess what? Is the religion that our Unitarian and Universalist churches in America broke away from. As we ask the question of identity, “Who are We?” this is part of our answer. We are the descendants of the corpse-cold Unitarianism of 19th century New England.
Now, from Humanism, which we talked about two weeks ago, flourishing at the time of the Renaissance, Unitarians had developed a positive view of humanity, which we clung to as we rejected the desperation of Calvinism. But we retained from Protestantism a culture that said churches should be places of teaching and learning: lots of talk replacing ritual, texts to read, ideas to discuss and argue, long, lecture-y sermons. To focus intently on the mind we worked to minimize sensory experience, take down the paintings and the sculptures and the tapestries. Simplify the music, or stop it altogether. Plain dress, and plain architecture, quiet emotions, solemn church.
This, too, is what Emerson experienced in his Unitarian church and characterizes as “corpse-cold” a life-less religion that clings to long dead people and books, and a life-less worship that can’t compete with the real-life happening just outside the church door.
Another great line from Emerson’s Divinity School Address. He writes: quoting, he says, “a devout person, who prized the Sabbath, [saying] in bitterness of heart, “On Sundays, it seems wicked to go to church.”
Can we then, do, with our Unitarian Universalism, what Emerson recommended nearly 200 years ago? Can we recover our religion from other people and their records of their experiences and their supernatural explanations and still have direct religious experience of our own? Can we do it for ourselves? Can we, within our rational, naturalistic religion create a way to re-enchant the world?
And can our churches and our worship services, be places of life and joy? Preaching where we learn something but also feel something? Worship that makes room for mystery and silence as well as raucous laughter and rationality? Could we have deep human connection as well as spiritual transcendence and mental agility? Good thinking, absolutely, but good feeling, too and simply good times? Beauty for the eyes, and the ears. A tune to hum, and a thought to ponder the rest of the week? A friend to greet, and good work to do? The gifts of human nature that match and celebrate and include the gifts of nature outside?
Emerson seemed to say no. Though he encouraged those Divinity students to try, he gave up himself and never went to church again.
But I say he’s wrong.
Because I am my own person and I have my own experience I don’t have to borrow Emerson’s experience. And I have experienced worship and life in a church community that is all those things I hope it can be, and want and need it to be.
This church isn’t always the lively place we strive for, but striving for an ideal, and sometimes succeeding, and then failing, and then trying again… well isn’t that what we mean by life? Isn’t that what a living church ought to look like?
I don’t look at you all, or the choir, or the band, and see a corpse-cold church. I see beautiful human bodies, eager human minds, warm human hearts, strong human hands. I see good people wanting that weekly encouragement to be the best they can be. I hear confidant human voices singing our faith. I see wide smiles appreciating the gifts of others. I see proud faces glad they can give and humble souls knowing how much all of us are in need. I see courageous souls willing to face their fears and frailties. And satisfied souls grateful for the blessing of belonging to a community of people moving through life together, based on a faith that preaches the ultimacy of love.
I wish Emerson had what we have here. I wish he’d come to our church.
Let us ever continue to fill our church with the spirit of life that all of us needs, and all of us can give.