Divinity School Address

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s primary theme is the inherent virtue of all things. Primarily a philosophical idea, Emerson uses it theologically to tell his audience to preach from their own conscience and life experience. Inherent virtue is self-evident to Emerson through natural laws, human intuition, and the prophets of the past.

Emerson states that humans’ inherent understanding of morality “is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul” (3). Therefore, people can be self-reliant in their attempt at divinity because the very laws that govern their soul govern the universe. Humans can then become their own God because of their own virtue. For Emerson, this is not a dethroning of a higher power but in line with divine laws. When people do good, it is because they have followed divine laws. People who do good deeds receive a spiritual benefit, and people who do bad deeds must pay the price in their soul. Such worldly experience teaches people that these laws are true.

It is also human intuition that expounds divine laws. Since humanity, God, and the natural world all share an inherent virtue, they share she same intuition. Emerson uses the image of a single will and a single mind. People may alternately call virtue love or justice, but it nevertheless all derives from the divine single mind. Evil, then, comes from eschewing this intuition; it occurs any time a person fails to follow their divine intuition. Good is an outpouring of divine intuition.

This explains humans’ “religious sentiment” for Emerson. As people look to their intuition to guide their life choices, they have created religion to give credence to their beliefs. The prophets of the past reveal this. Emerson lists the birthplace of many world religions as examples of a divine impulse to quantify universal intuition. This intuition, however, does not have to be learned; people do not have to practice it. It is innate to all people of the world, Emerson argues, and from it come all human religions.

Emerson’s self-reliant argument would not have been new to his audience, as his essay Nature was already in circulation, and Unitarian thought placed a high value on personal responsibility. However, the assertion of man as divine, and the implication that man’s intuition is as reliable as the commands of God, was seen as blasphemous to many.

Emerson argues that people have misunderstood the primary teachings and purposes of Jesus. While Unitarian theology already holds that Jesus is not equal to God, Emerson goes a step a further and argues that Jesus, while a prophet, held no unique level of divinity that is not accessible to other men. Instead, Jesus is the best example of living as a divine human.

Emerson believed that Jesus was divine and quotes the Bible as his evidence. However, he also believed that the Church’s understanding of the divinity of Jesus was distorted. Slowly, the church removed the humanity of Jesus, which Emerson suggests taints his teachings. If Jesus was not man, Emerson argues, then we are no longer following his “principles,” but instead following his teachings as “tropes”; that is, forgetting about the humanity of Jesus and overemphasizing his divinity squeezes the life out of his teachings and leads to Christians’ inability to understand his “principles” in the context of their own experience of life.

Emerson suggests that Jesus has been elevated such that people fixate on biblical miracles, and no longer recognize the miracle of nature that of which humanity is a part. The result of this fixation is that people begin to mythologize Christ, “as the Orientals or the Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo” (9). When people designate Jesus as such, they pull him out of nature, and into the heavenly realm. Therefore, when Jesus is simply a myth, people lose sight of their own ability to join him in his divinity.

Emerson wishes to reinstate the humanity of Jesus. He argues that what made Jesus great was his teaching that people are both divine and human. This reflects Emerson’s primary theme that all beings are divine and have inherent virtue. The true teaching of Jesus is that God works through all things, that “the soul knows no person” (8), and therefore the intuition that leads Jesus is the same intuition that leads humanity.

While this proved to be one of the most controversial themes in his argument, Emerson meant it to encourage ministers. As he saw the church becoming more and more formal, he wished ministers to take control of their own teaching, think for themselves, and rely on their own learning to guide their sermons.