By Tom Robotham 

ALL STORIES HAVE MANY POSSIBLE BEGINNINGS and this one is no different. I could start by telling you about a childhood spent among Staten Island’s densely wooded hills, which Henry David Thoreau admired so deeply a century before I was born, or about my gradual exile from paradise. I could share with you memories of idle hours spent between the stacks of the New York Public Library, where my father worked in contentment. (Or was it quiet desperation?) And, certainly, I could describe for you one gray January morning when I was blindsided by a wave of spiritual awe while walking alone in Central Park.

I will get to all of this in due course. But I’ve decided that this story must begin on the campus of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. For it was here, in the fall of 2002, that the first wave of resistance to writing this book fell away.

I had come to the campus to moderate a panel on nature writing, as part of the school’s annual literary festival. Among the participants, at my invitation, was Robert D. Richardson. Bob is not a nature writer. He is the author of two scintillating biographies, one on Thoreau and one on Ralph Waldo Emerson. With this in mind, I had hoped that he would shed light on our ideas about nature—ideas that those two literary giants did so much to shape. I was not disappointed. But the real pleasure of the afternoon came afterward, as Bob and I sat in the sunshine for 45 minutes or so, on an outdoor bench in the middle of the campus. It was there that I told him of my passionate and long-standing interest in Emerson’s work—and of my desire to write my own book on the subject.

I had been introduced to Emerson’s essays and lectures, I told him, during the spring semester of my freshman year at the State University College in Plattsburgh, New York. The course was called American Romanticism. The text assigned to us was Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Organic Anthology, edited by Stephen Whicher.

The beauty of Whicher’s anthology—the organic nature of it—lay in the fact that it used journal entries as a kind of connective tissue between the great canonical published works like Nature and “Self Reliance.” And it was, in fact, a journal entry that first captured my attention.

            “The whole world holds on to formal Christianity, and nobody teaches the essential truth, the heart of Christianity...” Emerson wrote on Oct. 1, 1832. “Every teacher, when once he finds himself insisting with all his might upon a great truth, turns up the ends of it at last with a cautious showing how it is agreeable to the life and teaching of Jesus…as if the blessedness of Jesus’ life and teaching were not because they were agreeable to the truth. This cripples his teaching. It bereaves the truth of more than half its force, by representing it as something secondary that can’t stand alone. The truth of truth consists in this, that it is self evident, self-subsistent. It is light. You don’t get a candle to see the sunrise.” [Emphasis added.]

            The simplicity and purity of this idea fascinated me, but its appeal was not primarily intellectual; I was also struck by the passage’s literary beauty, but, that too was secondary. What hit me, with the force of epiphany, was that Emerson had put into poetic language my own spiritual impulses.

I had grown up in an Episcopalian family and had, as a child, felt great attachment to my own little church. I loved the building—a small, graceful sanctuary established in the first decade of the 18^th century and constructed at the foot of Lighthouse Hill in Staten Island’s historic Richmondtown. I loved the hymns, especially “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God,” which promised that I could “be one, too”—and I loved the theatricality and mystery of the liturgy, especially on those Sundays when I served as an acolyte. Donning my black robe and white surplice; lighting the wick on a long brass pole and transferring the flame to the altar candles; leading the procession as the choir and congregation sang some jubilant hymn, assisting the priest in the preparation of communion—all of this seemed…well…I want to say transcendent. But of course I had never heard that word before and would not have understood it anyway. The resonance was entirely within my heart. It was not something I thought about or ever tried to articulate.

That, at least, was the case throughout my childhood and early adolescence. Somewhere around the age of 16 or 17, I can’t remember when, precisely, I did begin to think about the meaning of these rituals. And the more I did so, the more I began to question them—especially the recitation of the Nicene Creed. My reaction was not sparked by any bad experiences. I had not been subjected to the psychological and physical abuses that sadistic nuns had heaped upon many of my Roman Catholic friends; nor had I discovered any dark hypocrisies in the life of my priest. He was a gentle and caring man, an individual who seemed to embody the Christian faith about as well as anyone could. No, my discomfort grew in direct proportion to the time and energy I invested in simply thinking about the church and its teachings: The notion that Jesus was “the only Son of God”; the suggestion that he rose from the dead, and the rather bizarre idea that we were to celebrate his life, death and resurrection by eating his body and drinking his blood.

In spite of my qualms, I continued going to church through my teens. Perhaps it was force of habit that brought me there week after week; or perhaps it was passive submission to the will of my mother. One Sunday, however, as I approached my high school graduation, I found that I could no longer push my doubts aside. Oh, I went as usual, taking my seat next to my father in a pew, midway up the left side of the sanctuary, as my mother joined the other members of the choir, just as she had every week for as long as I could remember. I even recited the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, sang the hymns and listened politely to the sermon. But when the celebration of the Eucharist began, and the ushers inched their way back toward my pew, I was overcome with both anxiety and anger. And when they finally reached me, and motioned that it was time for my father and me to walk to the altar rail, I just sat there. My father, after realizing that I hadn’t gotten up, looked at me with a sense of alarm, then gave me a discrete but urgent wave to follow him. I knew even then that my refusal to receive communion didn’t bother him personally; religion never meant much to him. He was merely disturbed by the fact that I was calling too much attention to both of us—and that we’d hear about it from my mother when we got home.

I stayed put nonetheless. My decision to do so was influenced, in part, by my recent reading of the novels of Ayn Rand, an avowed atheist who celebrated the nobility and unlimited potential of the human mind. But my new conviction was more deeply rooted than any ideas that I might have picked up from books. It came from within me— from a desire not to reject God, but to liberate myself from what I perceived to be restrictions of the Church so that I might meet God on my own terms. Indeed, as I look back on that time, I realize that I never came close to embracing atheism. My will to believe, as William James puts it, was far too strong. But my will to be free of external restraint was just as powerful.

Dwelling in this spiritual no man’s land, I felt very much alone—all the more so after I went home and learned how upset my mother was that I had refused to take communion. I was torn between my own instincts and my own self doubt.

It wasn’t until I went to college and discovered Emerson that this spiritual loneliness began to fade. Reading the passage about the candle and the sunrise, I felt a tremendous sense of affirmation—an emphatic Yes! resounding in my mind. And my sense of Emerson as a kindred spirit grew with each page that I read. Especially resonant was a line in his first book, Nature, published in 1836: “Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any  occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration,” he wrote. “I am glad to the brink of fear.”

The work that spoke even more directly to my qualms about church, however, was the “Divinity School Address.” The address was delivered to the 1838 graduating class at Harvard Divinity School at the invitation of some of the students. There were only six in all, along with family members, present for the address. But Emerson’s challenge to the church reverberated through Cambridge, Boston and beyond -- and subsequently helped revolutionize the way many people thought about organized religion.

It begins the wonderful line: “In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life.” As Richardson points out in his biography, this is no casual allusion to the joys of being outdoors in July. It is the central theological point of the talk—the idea that Divinity surrounds us every moment of every day. More specifically, I think, it is an allusion to the lines in Genesis: 2:7—Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” That Divine breath, Emerson seems to be saying, that life-giving, spirit-filled wind that was God’s first gift to Adam, is available to us, right now. 

            None of this would have been particularly offensive to the faculty of the Divinity School or to the religious leaders in greater Boston. By this time, the Unitarian Church— which evolved from the liberal wing of the Congregationalists—had become predominant among the area’s elite, and they had accepted the idea that every man has within him a spark of divinity. The Unitarian Church of Emerson’s day, however, was not the one we know today. They had not yet given up on traditional ideas about Jesus.

Emerson, apparently, had – and he invited his audience to consider his new perspective.

            “Jesus belonged to the true race of prophets,” Emerson said. “He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, [this is one thing I love about Emerson’s writings, his intensely paradoxical phrases] ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there….One man is true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his World.”

             In the centuries that followed the death of Jesus, Emerson argued, “the idioms of [Jesus’] language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth….Christianity became Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt before. He spoke of miracles; for he knew that man’s life was a miracle…and he new that this daily miracle shines as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.”

            Emerson concluded his address by urging the graduates, tomorrow’s clergymen, to “go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.”

            This, for him, was no radical prescription; it hearkened back to ancient times. “I look for the hour,” he wrote, “when that supreme Beauty which ravished the souls of …the Hebrews, and through their lips spoke oracles to all time, shall speak in the West also.”

THERE IS MUCH MORE TO THE DIVINITY SCHOOL ADDRESS than that which I have highlighted here: much more theology and much more poetry, and I’ll return to all that in a later chapter. For now, let me just acknowledge that while I have read the Address countless times over the last 30 years, I still don’t fully grasp its meaning. Some of it continues to strike me as enigmatic; and some of it I have a hard time swallowing. But to this day, it always feels fresh and full of the light of truth that Emerson spoke of in that 1832 journal entry.

            Toward the end of my conversation with Richardson at ODU, he suggested I attend a conference scheduled to take place in Boston in April, 2003, in anticipation of Emerson’s bicentennial. (Emerson was born in Boston on May 25, 1803.)

            I decided to take his advice. I was excited by the thought of hearing scholars talk about the Divinity School Address and other works that I had lived with for so long, and I was looking forward to private conversations with some of the people in attendance. In the course of my daily life, I rarely meet people who have any interest in Emerson. And I know of no one in my circle of friends and acquaintances who shares my profound and abiding fascination. I suspected it would be deeply satisfying to be surrounded by people who are as drawn to his work as I am.

            The conference began, appropriately enough, in Emerson Hall on the campus of Harvard University (Emerson graduated from Harvard in 1821) with an address and reading by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky.

            “Emerson is a great poet,” Pinsky asserted at the outset, though he quickly recognized what most Emersonians do—that the poems are not nearly as great (nor as poetic) as the essays and lectures. Nevertheless, he noted, many of the poems stir in us the same sense of awe that his prose writings do. As an example, he read what is undoubtedly Emerson’s most famous poem: “The Concord Hymn,” which was originally written—and sung (to the tune of “Old One Hundredth)—for the unveiling of the town’s Battle Monument on July 4, 1837. Pinsky is a great reader, as well as a fine poet in his own right, and I had never fully appreciated the hymn until I heard him recite it.

            The following day, the conference began in earnest with a series of panel discussions inside the supremely quiet and elegant rooms of the Massachusetts Historical Society on Boylston Street in Boston.  When one discussion inevitably came round to the Divinity School Address, it suddenly dawned on me that we were sitting just a few miles from where Emerson had delivered it. I had been to Emerson’s home before, but for some reason it had never occurred to me that I might visit the chapel where he gave this talk which had had meant so much to me. When someone at the conference confirmed that the chapel is still intact and provided me with general directions, I decided to forgo lunch and take the subway back to Harvard.

            The chapel is located on the third floor of Divinity Hall, which is now a dormitory. When I walked in, I was struck by its modest size. Its twelve oak pews, six on either side of a central aisle, reminded me that Emerson’s audience had been tiny. Indeed, everything about the space, from the fixed lectern in front to a little pipe organ in the rear was the very picture of modesty. So was the plaque commemorating the Address itself. Set into the rear wall, to the left of the pipe organ, an inscription on polished gray stone read: In this chapel, on July 15, 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson read his Divinity School Address. Underneath these words was a short quotation that captures the essence of the Address and, indeed, the core of Emerson’s philosophy of religion: Acquaint thyself at first hand with Deity.

            It was a wonderful encounter with a piece of American literary history. But Emerson, for me, is not, primarily a historical figure. He is a living figure. His works crackle with energy and are vitally relevant to the present moment. Indeed, I continue to read him for as many reasons as one turns to books in general – for companionship; for lines of soaring poetic beauty; for insights into America’s history and character, and for light in times of spiritual darkness.

What I have never done is read Emerson’s essays, lectures and poems as Gospel. Nothing would be more contrary to the Emersonian spirit. It was Emerson’s firm belief that each person, as Richardson puts it, has to “follow the curve of his own faith into his own form of worship.” The curve of my own faith has been quite different from Emerson’s. And yet there is this sustained resonance—this sense that somehow Emerson knows me and understands my potential. Thus, even as I have followed my own path, I have repeatedly turned to Emerson for aid, comfort, inspiration and—as the literary critic Richard Poirier puts it—to “test” my own “adequacies.” 

This book is, in part, an effort to understand why – to grasp the nature of this resonance.  What is it about Emerson’s writing, I wonder, that speaks so deeply to me? Is it simply a matter of recognizing the universality of his ideas? Or is it something more personal—some cultural, genetic or spiritual common ground that I share with Emerson?

These questions interest me not only because they probe at the heart of my enduring passion for Emerson’s work but because they touch upon larger questions about the nature of artistic resonance? Why does a particular work of literature or music or visual art strike augmented chords at the very core of your being or mine, while stirring only minor interest in the hearts and minds of others?

In the following pages I hope to shed light on the broader idea. My primary interest, however, continues to lie in Emerson’s body of work, and in my own relationship to it. What I find astonishing is that after all these years, the relationship still bears so much fruit. The force of inspiration never wanes. Indeed, even as I write this book—which I put off for several years after that initial resistance fell away—I continue discover him—and myself—anew.