Waldo Emerson appears in this portrait in a pose for the lecture circuit, a main medium for him after he left the ministry. (Concord Free Public Library.)
Two months later, on July 15, 1838, Emerson proved much more inspired when he addressed the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School. Having left the full-time ministry in 1832 over his inability to perform the sacrament of the Lord's Supper with sincere conviction, he had grown only more restive under the sleepy preaching of the New England pulpit over the next six years. Unitarian liberals were mired in doctrinal debates with traditional Calvinists–and often with each other as well–about everything from Original Sin to Christ's divinity to biblical miracles, and Emerson found the whole scene dispiriting. The address to the senior class of the divinity school provided him with the opportunity to declare the emancipation of human curiosity in the realm of religion, the freedom from dogmatic and canonical constrictions, and the awakening of spiritual intuition and individuality. “Truly speaking,” Emerson exhorted, “it is not instruction, but provocation that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject.” Refuse the old path of imitative piety; throw off “secondary knowledge”; eschew “hollow, dry, creaking formality.” “Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost,” Emerson cajoled, “cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.”8
Though his address ended on a cautious note in self-contradictory praise of breathing new life into the old institutions of the Sabbath and regular preaching, the oration nonetheless created a considerable stir. More controversy followed upon its publication the next month, and, since nothing vended quite so well in antebellum America as a religious hullabaloo, Emerson's goading of his alma mater quickly sold out. The rise of religious liberalism had many milestones and monuments in the first half of the nineteenth century: The election of Henry Ware, a theological liberal, as Hollis Professor at Harvard in 1805 pointed ahead to the movement's dominance over religious education there. William Ellery Channing's ringing defense in 1819 of a Unitarian conception of God against Trinitarian orthodoxy was another important sign of the times, as was his affirmation of the powers of self-cultivation against Calvinist notions of human depravity. Then there was the duo of September 1836—the organization of the Transcendental Club and the publication of Emerson's Nature. The latter included Emerson's famed moment of spiritual exhilaration, the experience of becoming a transparent eyeball at one with its surroundings, subsumed into God, all egotism gone. That episode helped earn him his enduring reputation as the movement's greatest mystic. The year 1838 represented another critical passage, and not only because of Emerson's divinity school address, so deeply inspiring to other “heretics” of the period like the young Theodore Parker. The all but forgotten meeting of the Transcendental Club two months earlier to discuss mysticism was perhaps the most telling signal of change: Religious liberals intended nothing less than a redefinition of the spiritual life.
Christopher Pearse Cranch, an artist within the Transcendentalist movement, was also its best in-house caricaturist. Here Emerson, the mystic, appears as transparent eyeball. (MS Am 1506 [3]. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.)
Cranch also pegged Emerson as among those Transcendentalists who relished all too much their spiritual absorption with nature. (MS Am 1506 [4]. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.)
To see how innovative Transcendentalist discussions of mysticism were, to see why the birthday analogy is not too far-fetched, it is necessary to step back for a moment into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That mysticism should come to stand, in the second third of the nineteenth century, as the pinnacle of a universal and timeless religious experience was anything but an obvious development. Through the early decades of the eighteenth century, the English category of “mysticism” did not exist. The prevailing notion instead was “mystical theology,” and it signified a specific devotional branch within Christian divinity. In 1656, the lexicographer Thomas Blount, working off a Roman Catholic description of mystical theology from 1647, arrived at the following definition for his formative dictionary of “hard words”: “Mystical Theology, is nothing else in general but certain Rules, by the practise whereof, a vertuous Christian may attain to a nearer, a more familiar, and beyond all expression comfortable conversation with God.” Mystical theology, in other words, was a way of life that involved the Christian in a “constant exercise” of prayer, contemplation, and self-denial. And that was the heart of it: Blount's work contained no parallel entries for the nouns mystic and mysticism.9
Added to these theological dimensions were exegetical ones. From the first centuries of Christian history forward into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, among the most common associations for mystical were its connections to allegorical forms of biblical commentary. Scriptural texts, in this view, were not transparent, but contained hidden or spiritual senses behind the surface of the literal. To take a commonplace example from the eighteenth century: the passage in the book of Genesis saying “let there be light, and there was light” literally referred to the light of the sun but in its mystical senses pointed to the Messiah, grace, and the glory of God. These ancient forms of biblical commentary remained evident in as basic a compendium as Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopœdia (1738), which still foregrounded “the mystical sense of Scripture” as central to understanding the term's religious significance. Like Blount, Chambers also stressed “MYSTIC theology” and did not employ “mysticism” per se as a category. Through the early eighteenth century, the meanings attached to mystic and mystical were inextricably woven into a larger system of Christian theology, linked at the level of practice to a recognizable set of devotional and exegetical habits.10
When “mysticism” emerged as an object of discussion in the middle of the eighteenth century, it was usually seen pejoratively. The concept initially crystallized within the eighteenth-century critique of Protestant enthusiasm–an attack aimed especially at taming the ecstatic extravagance that accompanied the rise of such high-flying movements as the Quakers, the French Prophets, and the Methodists. It was Henry Coventry (c. 1710–1752), a Cambridge wit and a relatively minor player in the larger world of the English Enlightenment, who first employed mysticism as part of a sustained critique of sectarian Protestant excitement. In a series of dialogues entitled Philemon to Hydaspes; or, The History of False Religion, the initial installment of which appeared in 1736, Coventry explicitly contrasted “the seraphic entertainments of mysticism and extasy” with the “true spirit of acceptable religion.” By the latter, he meant a wholly reasonable commitment to civic virtue, cosmopolitan learning, public decorum, and aesthetic proportion. Religion, rightly practiced, was a “manly, rational, and social institution,” and the “deluded votaries” of mystical Christianity had no place in that world of erudite conversations, moderated passions, and refined tastes. Coventry's understanding of mysticism was thus socially situated within debates about the fundamental comportment of religious people: were they to carry themselves with the genteel gravity of Cambridge divines and dons or the bumptious assurance of Quakers and Methodists?11
Coventry shared wider Enlightenment suspicions of false religion as a product of credulity, fraud, fear, and the ignorance of natural causes (for example, mistaking thunder for the angry voice of God or an earthquake for divine punishment). His dialogues tapped into all of those explanations at one point or another, and, in that sense, he was a secondary colleague of more famous and cutting philosophes such as Voltaire and David Hume. Still, his account of mysticism, though now completely forgotten, possessed its own edginess and originality. Probing for its erotic psychology, Coventry went further than the usual sexualizing of religious upstarts. That tack was epitomized in the prurience and wit of Jonathan Swift, who, in his Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit (1704), had richly satirized the “ogling” and “orgasmus” of Quaker spiritual exercises. Whereas Swift dwelled on the ease with
