Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essential Spiritual Writings ed. by Jon M. Sweeney (review)

This selection is part of the series “Modern Spiritual Masters” and, as such, is meant for a general reader rather than the student or scholar. Sweeney presents this volume as an effort to renew interest in Emerson’s writings and “to actually demonstrate why he was Concord’s sage” (p. 1). To that end he has selected passages from works published in Emerson’s lifetime and has arranged them topically. His professed desire to present only the Emerson his contemporaries would have read is at odds with his desire to attract twenty-first century readers, who would find in his journals not only some of his most challenging writings but also a more intimate look into his life and thoughts. Nevertheless, the Emerson represented here—the prophet of the God within, the sacredness of the individual, and the divinity that transfuses nature, as well as the enemy of form and ritual—is one who ought to appeal to those looking for a post-Christian spirituality, to use Sweeney’s term.

With some exceptions, such as the essay “Prayers,” most of the selections come from the major essays: Nature, “Self-Reliance,” “The American Scholar,” the Divinity School Address, “The Over-Soul,” “Experience,” “Montaigne,” and “Worship.” Rather than order the selections chronologically, Sweeney has arranged them under five topics, with a selection of aphorisms at the end (most of which are to be found in the previous selections). He opens with Emerson’s religious writings after he broke with the Unitarian church. “After Christianity” is followed by “Divinity of the Soul,” “Stoic Values,” “To Cultivate Virtue,” and “Encountering the Holy.” One has to sympathize with any editor who seeks to impose an order, even thematic, upon Emerson’s thought. The dominant theme, however, is Emerson’s doctrine of “the infinitude of the private man” (Journal entry for 7 April 1840). This embraces his break with Christian dogma, his concept of the moral sentiment as the divinity within, his belief that nature is the expression of the mind, that humankind is one, and that one design unites the lowest and highest in the world. These themes are to be found in all sections of this book because Emerson everywhere is, as scholars have remarked, all of a piece and all in pieces. That is, his essays read as if they are stitched together from disparate sources (which, indeed, is the case because they typically have their origins in lectures and journal entries), but despite the discontinuities and contradictions, they give the reader a sense of the whole.

Sweeney tries to bring focus to his selection by offering brief introductions to each one. By and large, he is a helpful guide to readers who are new to Emerson; he may overstress Emerson’s mysticism and organicism, but he has good grounds for placing his emphasis on Emerson’s belief in the divinity of humankind. Had he gone to the journals, he might have better balanced Emerson in his prophetic mode with the doubter who writes, “As a plant in the earth so I grow in God. I am only a form of him. He is the soul of me... . Yet why not always so? How came the Individual thus armed & impassioned to parricide, thus murderously inclined ever to traverse & kill the divine life? Ah wicked Manichee! Into that dim problem I cannot enter. A believer in Unity, a seer of Unity, I yet behold two” (26 May 1837). It is not that Emerson confined his doubts to his journals. In “Circles,” he proclaims, “I am a God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.”

This passage is not included in the selection, but it would be vain, if not churlish, to criticize Sweeney for sticking to the Emerson who was overcome with the revelation of the God within. And it is to his credit, as that of the series in which it appears...