Emerson’s speech, The Divinity School Address, is an echo of a certain form of religious thought that has been prominent since Martin Luther provoked the protestant revolution early in the sixteenth century.
Well-spoken religious men had been calling for the rethinking of "organized" and "historical" Christianity for hundreds of years when Emerson gave this speech. These historical figures, had, in fact, been very often successful, having created protestant Christian branches with power to rival that of the Catholic Church. I find it very ironic that the people to whom Emerson was speaking, the Protestant based Harvard Divinity School, were the very people meant to carry on a tradition created on the same values that Emerson got in trouble for preaching to them.
I believe the irony was not lost on Emerson either. He must have observed the decay of the Protestant churches away from the new age anti-establishment values they were founded on towards a system of power and preaching that came to mirror the catholic ideas that they were a backlash of.
Emerson seeks, as did Martin Luther, a church that gravitates away from the strickness of papacy towards the liberation of the spirituality of the human soul. This idea clearly would offend the Harvard Divinity School, seeing as most people there had made their living off being religious “authorities”. The basic protestant views that Emerson held were a threat to the continued aristocracy that had developed in the religious sectors of America, and it was for this that he was banned.
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A very thoughtful and perceptive post, Max (well done!). I think you're going to find that the connection you make to Luther is an apt one as, a couple of hundreds years later, a new approach to the Bible had begun to be taken in Germany, one that looked at it less as a sacred text than a literary one (Emerson's line about the Bible lacking "epical integrity" was sure to draw some grumbles (if not outright gasps) from his audience. So, too, with your point about the need to establish a immediate relationship with the divine, one that had not intermediaries, do you touch on a natural outgrowth of the protestant movement (for which Luther was largely responsible). I look forward to hearing your thoughts in class!
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely thrilling connection.
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