Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson left the ministry over a sacrament. In 1832, three years into his pastorate at the Second Church in Boston, he told his congregation that he no longer believed the Lord's Supper had been instituted as a permanent rite and that he could not administer it sincerely. They declined to dispense with it. He resigned, travelled in Europe, met Coleridge, Wordsworth and Carlyle, and came home without a pulpit and without a settled occupation.

Nature, published anonymously in 1836, is what came out of it. Its argument is that the natural world is not raw material and not decoration but the visible face of spirit, legible to anyone who looks at it directly, and that every generation is entitled to its own encounter rather than to a report of somebody else's. The opening question, why should we not have an original relation to the universe, is the whole programme in one sentence.

Underneath sits the idea he called the Over-Soul: a single mind or ground in which every individual mind participates, so that what is deepest in a person is not private property but universal. That is why self reliance in his usage is not egotism. Trusting yourself, on this account, is trusting the universal that speaks through you, and the injunction to do so is closer to a religious duty than to advice about confidence.

Invited by the graduating class rather than by the faculty, Emerson addressed the Harvard Divinity School in July 1838 and told the students that historical Christianity had made two errors. It had exaggerated the person of Jesus, turning a man who saw the moral law clearly into an object of worship, and it had treated revelation as something finished, so that preaching had become the repetition of another man's experience. The word miracle, he said, as the churches used it, had come to sound monstrous, because it was set against nature rather than being one with it.

The reaction was immediate and severe. Andrews Norton, the leading conservative Unitarian scholar, published a reply calling it the latest form of infidelity; the address was denounced across the liberal establishment; and Harvard did not invite Emerson to speak again for close to thirty years. The controversy is the moment Transcendentalism separated from Unitarianism rather than remaining a wing of it.

His long term influence ran outside the churches. He was read as a permission rather than as a doctrine, and by people he would not have predicted: Whitman took a poetics from him, Nietzsche read him with pleasure, and the American New Thought movement adopted him wholesale, to the point where Ernest Holmes said everything he himself taught was already in Emerson. The atlas records that line of descent because it is the main channel through which his religious thought reached ordinary practice.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Emerson was ordained junior pastor of the Second Church in Boston on 11 March 1829, as colleague to the senior minister Henry Ware. The office was not a formality he drifted into: he had studied at Harvard Divinity School, was licensed to preach in 1826, and supplied pulpits for three years before Second Church called him. For a while it suited him. He married Ellen Tucker in 1829, and the congregation, an old and settled one, gave him a stable income and a public platform he used seriously.

The break came over a single point of practice, not a sweeping crisis of belief. On 9 September 1832 he preached a sermon telling the congregation that he could no longer administer the Lord's Supper as a perpetual, literal rite, because he did not believe Jesus had instituted it to be repeated forever rather than observed once, as a Passover meal among friends. The congregation, through a committee, offered him a way to stay: he could keep the pulpit and simply not administer the sacrament himself, leaving that part of the service to someone else. He declined the compromise and submitted his formal resignation on 22 September 1832.

What followed was not a plan. He had no other position, and no immediate income beyond his first wife's estate, settled after her 1831 death. He travelled to Europe in 1832 and 1833, met Coleridge, Wordsworth and Carlyle, and came home to build a new occupation from lecturing, an activity that did not yet have the institutional respectability the ministry carried. Nature followed in 1836. The position and its ending were not preamble to that book; they were the condition that made writing it possible, since the pulpit he left behind was the platform he would have kept using if the Lord's Supper had not forced the question.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Nature reads Asian scripture only at a distance; by the 1840s Emerson was reading it directly, in the translations then available to him. He first encountered the Bhagavad Gita in Charles Wilkins's English translation, and wrote in his journal in 1845 that he owed it "a magnificent day," that it was "the first of books," carrying "the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us."

Brahma is the direct result. Published in the first issue of The Atlantic Monthly in November 1857, it puts the Hindu god Brahma in the first person, drawing on the Gita and the Katha Upanishad for its central paradox, that the slayer and the slain, the doubter and the doubt, are one thing seen from two sides. Antebellum readers mostly found it baffling, and it drew more parodies than any other poem Emerson published; his own suggested remedy was to substitute the word Jehovah for Brahma and read it again.

His Persian reading ran alongside the Hindu. He did not read Persian, but he read German, and worked from Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall's German translations of Hafiz and of Saadi. He rendered some of Hafiz's verse into English himself from that German, closer to an adaptation than a translation, and his 1842 poem Saadi takes its name from the other poet directly. Between the Gita, Hafiz and Saadi, Emerson and his Transcendentalist circle were among the first Americans to treat Asian religious and literary texts as scripture and as literature, rather than as curiosities.