Ralph Waldo Emerson

Who Was Ralph Waldo Emerson?

Ralph Waldo Emerson was the founder of American Transcendentalism and the most influential American thinker of the nineteenth century — a former Unitarian minister whose rejection of institutional Christianity in favor of a direct, unmediated experience of the divine shaped American intellectual and literary culture more profoundly than any other single figure. Born in Boston in 1803, the son of a minister, he was educated at Harvard Divinity School and ordained a Unitarian pastor before resigning his pulpit in 1832 over his inability to administer the Lord’s Supper.

His 1836 essay Nature announced the Transcendentalist program: the conviction that the human being has direct access to the divine through nature and through the intuitions of the self, that organized religion and its institutions are obstacles rather than aids to this access, and that the American continent offers the conditions for a genuinely new and genuinely spiritual form of human life. His 1837 address “The American Scholar” announced the intellectual independence of American culture from European tradition, and his 1838 “Divinity School Address” provoked a scandal that effectively barred him from Harvard for thirty years.

Emerson is significant for TLA as the supreme American instance of what happens when the Christian formation is preserved while the Christian theology is abandoned: the moral seriousness, the sense of the sacred, the conviction that the individual human being is of infinite worth — all of these survive the rejection of their theological ground, but without that ground they gradually become unmoored from the realities that gave them their force.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Nature — 1836
• The American Scholar — 1837 — address
• The Divinity School Address — 1838
• Essays: First Series — 1841
• Essays: Second Series — 1844
• Representative Men — 1850
• The Conduct of Life — 1860