Divinity School Address

Ralph Waldo Emerson is the best known adherent and writer on Transcendentalism. In fact, the clearest enunciation of Transcendentalism is from Emerson’s essay Nature (1836), published roughly two years before his speech. This philosophical system emphasizes an appreciation for nature that informs a correct understanding of man’s soul. It argues that society has slowly stripped away the “wholeness” of man and that solitude within in nature is the means to restore it. This developed from the artistic and intellectual movement of Romanticism, which revolved around appreciation of nature and the elevation of individual subjectivity. Emerson interchanges the idea of God with a Universal Being, which man may find by looking into the spirit of nature and one’s own spirit.

The inseparability of man and nature is a core tenant of Nature. The universe and what’s in it act as one entity. Therefore, when we look into our soul and rely on our intuitions, we are effectively looking into the reality of nature, as well. Man and his soul, along with all created things, are all aspects of the single entity that Emerson calls the Universal Being.

These ideas can be seen as a precursor to the arguments made in “Divinity School Address.” He argues that “the world is not the product of manifold power, but of one will, of one mind; and that one mind is everywhere active, in each ray of the star, in each wavelet of the pool” (4). It was his application of these philosophies into Christian thought that caused a stir among Unitarians.

Emerson was just one of many notable intellectuals who formed this movement. In 1836, the Transcendental Club was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it included the essayist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, the feminist activist Sophia Ripley, the journalist Margaret Fuller, and many other prominent writers, artists, and philosophers. The name itself came from critics of the movement, who saw its ideas as unreasonable. Many of Emerson’s contemporaries, including Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote satirically of the movement.