USH - Ralph Waldo Emerson - Church

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts on May 25, 1803, and died in Concord, Massachusetts on April 27, 1882, at the age of 78. Through his essays, poems, and lectures, he was a leading spokesman of transcendentalism (movement which held that “every individual can reach ultimate truths through spiritual intuition, which transcends reason and sensory experience”) and also a major influence on American literature.

Emerson’s father was a minister of the First Unitarian Church in Boston and thus his early years were “filled with books and a daily routine of studious and frugal home life”. When his father died (Emerson was 8 years old), he lived with his aunt, an eccentric but brilliant woman who stimulated his independent thinking.

He did attend Harvard for four years, where he began to record his thoughts in the famous Journal. Although he did begin to study at the Harvard divinity school, he had to leave his studies and move south due to his poor health and developing tuberculosis. He became a pastor of the Old North Church in Boston, where he preached for three years before retiring due to differences in religious opinion with his congregation.

After leaving his pastorate, he took a trip to Europe where he met several notable English writers (including Coleridge and Wordsworth). Through them, his interest in transcendental thought began to grow. The three basic tenets of transcendentalism were “a belief that God is present in every aspect of nature, including every human being,” “the conviction that everyone is capable of apprehending God through the use of intuition,” and “the belief that all of nature is symbolic of the spirit.”

It has been said that “probably no writer has so profoundly influenced American thought as Emerson.” During the early 1830s (his early 30s), he began his active career as a writer and a lecturer. He was noted as being “a very abstract and difficult writer who nevertheless drew large crowds for his speeches.” He was a great orator, a man who could captivate crowds with his “deep voice, his enthusiasm, and his egalitarian [democratic] respect for his audience.” Later in his life, he was very outspoken in his support for abolitionism, despite the protest and jeers that this produced from the crowds to which he spoke. His work expressing transcendentalism did lead to a speech entitled The American Scholar, considered to be America’s “Intellectual Declaration of Independence.” He once said that his central doctrine was “the infinitude of the private man.”