Artifacts and Illuminations: Critical Essays on Loren Eiseley

11. Emerson and Eiseley

11 Emerson and Eiseley Two Religious Visions jonathan weidenbaum 237 Central to Emerson and the transcendentalists is a sense of sheer astonishment in the face of existence, a receptivity to nature as fresh and original as “Adam early in the morning”�to steal a phrase from Whitman (Leaves 95). The invitation to witness the universe “with new eyes” was not lost on Emerson’s countless literary and philosophical progeny (Essential 39). Chief among these is Loren Eiseley, the anthropologist, author, and bone hunter who perceived his whole life to be a religious pilgrimage and who saw “deep mystery in the heart of a simple seed” (All 141; Firmament 8). The Emersonian amazement before being was so extensive in the writing of Eiseley that it served, in fact, to strain his reputation as a serious and committed scientist. “I have had the vague word ‘mystic,’ applied to me,” he once complained, “because I have not been able to shut out wonder occasionally, when I have looked at the world” (Night 214). For Emerson the quest to recapture a state of primal innocence is but one component of the spiritual life. Transcendentalism joins numerous contemplative traditions East and West in seeking to draw out the moral and metaphysical implications of its most cherished moods and feelings. In the Varieties of Religious Experience, William James includes the “noetic,” or knowledge-bearing quality, as one of the four characteristics common to all mystical experiences (293), an analysis which fits Emerson’s famous “transparent eyeball” epiphany at the very beginning of Nature. Here, “perfect exhilaration” and self-transcendence while traversing a field is understood as a state of unity with the divine, an interpretation alternatively lauded and derided by generations of critics (and even turned into a cartoon by Christopher Cranch, a contemporary of Emerson’s [40–41]). “I am nothing; I see all,” writes Emerson, “the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God” (Essential 6). Emerson and Eiseley 238 The religious intuitions of Eiseley are not only knowledge bearing; they are the direct products of a sustained and ceaseless attempt to explore the natural world. As a scientist with a talent for poetry, Eiseley married the empirical with the personal in a fashion reminiscent of Thoreau, yet another of his strongest influences. Eiseley was well aware of this similarity, and identified with Thoreau’s refusal to segregate science from literature and vice versa. Of Emerson’s most famous disciple, Eiseley states, “He was a fox at the wood’s edge, regarding human preoccupations with doubt” (Star 271). That Eiseley perceived himself in the same way is evident in his own self-description as “a fox at the wood’s edge” (qtd. in Carlisle, Loren 186), a reference wisely chosen by Gale E. Christianson for the title of his biography. It is when placed next to Emerson, however, that the uniqueness of Eiseley’s religious thought is most vividly apparent. Though sharing classic Emersonian themes in some areas, the spirituality of Eiseley, a perpetual struggle with questions that exceed the limits of understanding, is often of an entirely different character. More specifically: while both authors acknowledge the reality of human finitude, it is the distinctive manner in which Eiseley approaches this central factor of our existence that provides for his richness as a contemplative thinker. Eiseley spiritualizes our finitude, and in a broad range of ways. He goes so far as to suggest, by way of love, the possibility of surmounting our physical and intellectual barriers and identifying with the rest of the cosmos. Hence, it is the mission of the pages that follow not only to detail some of the core similarities and differences between Emerson and Eiseley on topics of ultimate meaning and value, but to show by means of such a comparison the depth and relevance of Eiseley’s spiritual vision. Eiseley’s own take on the Sage of Concord should put to rest any reservations concerning the historical distance between the two thinkers. Widely read in almost every period of Emerson’s authorship, Eiseley repeatedly lauds “the great American essayist” for anticipating contemporary ideas: from the process metaphysics of Whitehead and his disciples, to the Darwinian indifference of nature to sentient life, human and otherwise (Star 221). Emerson’s mature work, according to Eiseley, portrays the natural jonathan weidenbaum...