Jeffrey J. Kripal writes eloquently of the roots of what might be called American democratic spirituality in "From Emerson to Esalen: America's Religion of No Religion" (
CHE 4/13/2007); however, his jumping off point -- R.W. Emerson's "Divinity School Address" on July 15, 1838 -- seems to have been miscast. "The goal of the religious life for Emerson was not Christianity," Dr. Kripal declares. "It was consciousness, or what he would later call the Over-Soul."
Whatever Emerson's enchantment with what he later called the Over-Soul, it is clear from his eloquent address at Harvard Divinity School that the goal to which he would inspire those half-dozen theology graduates was precisely a renewed Christianity, not something else; indeed, Emerson found good reason not to venture far from sacred paths well-trodden to his day: "All attempts to contrive a system are as cold as the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess of Reason -- today, pasteboard and filigree, and ending tomorrow in madness and murder," Emerson said. "Rather let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing. For, if once you are alive, you shall find they shall become plastic and new. The remedy to their deformity is, first, soul, and second soul, and evermore, soul. A whole popedom of forms, one pulsation of virtue can uplift and vivify." (An Address Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, Sunday Evening, July 15, 1838, in The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. I, rev. ed. [Boston: James Osgood 7 Co., 1875], 6581.
http://www.historytools.org/sources/Emerson-Divinity.pdf.)
A true appreciation of Emerson's respect for and forbearance of the Christianity of his day, despite his severe criticism of it, does not comport with Dr. Kirpal's apparent embrace of "America's Religion of No Religion." That may be the Esalen way, but the Emerson who encouraged independent, passionate preaching upon freshly minted Harvard theologians in 1838 would have had no part of it.
