Jesus: Emerson's Prophet

"The imperfect is our paradise"
‹Wallace Stevens

"I came that they may have life and have it fully."
‹John, 10:10

Emerson incorporates Biblical expressions and ideas as the antitypes of the type that is his transcendentalism. Within his essays he accordingly introduces a new interpretation of the Bible for the Nineteenth Century. He does so by foregrounding the treatment of the existential dichotomy between our experience of particulars and our intuitive attraction to the absolute. In his own terms, he addresses the opposition of "flesh" and "Final Cause."
Both Emerson and the Bible cast Final Cause, also called "secret cause" and signifying infinity and the absolute, into a tension with "flesh," or the particular, the necessities of physical being. Particulars would include food, shelter, and Emerson's insuperable "temperament," which seems to limit our freedom and experience. Emerson cannot but be aware of his anticipation in the Gospel of John, where the dichotomy between these two basic elements of experience is broken with a single sentence: "the Word [Logos] became flesh." In each of the four cannonical Gospels, Jesus as symbol of God associates himself literally with the bread and wine of the passover-meal at the Last Supper: the Logos, or Final Cause incarnates and offers itself as sustenance in the physical world.
Emerson focuses on the frustration of knowing the Final Cause at the same time as recognizing the inevitable particularity of experience when it is mediated by our necessary and limiting temperament. He gives this dichotomy a number of descriptive turns. In first inroducing it, he expresses it obliquely as an intuitive dissatisfaction with the particular. When he says, "Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. We may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philosophy," he foreshadows a later, more explicit description of human nature as including an inherent longing for the absolute. The ideal forms, such as the sphere, are merely Nature's baubles to tempt us, and the common objects of our experience‹the raspberries‹elude the search for absolute truth, for their essence or being; they elude our direct experience of them.
Emerson elaborates this frustration with the discrepancy between the mind's expectation of essence and Nature's or perception's refusal to grant it:

On its own level, or view of nature, temperament is final. I see not, if one be caught in this trap of so-called sciences, any escape for the man from the links of the chain of physical necessity. Given such and embryo, such a history must follow. On this platform, one lives in a sty of sensualism, and would soon come to suicide. But it is impossible that the creative power should exclude itself. Into every intelligence there is a door which is never closed, through which the creator passes. The intellect, seeker of absolute truth, or the heart, seeker of absolute good, intervenes for our succor, and at one whisper of these high powers, we awake from ineffectual struggles with this nightmare. We hurl it into its own hell, and cannot again contract ourselves to so base a state. (p. 246)

Though it is never satisfied, the hungry idea of the absolute keeps us always searching, always trying to settle the differences between the universal and the particular, the Final Cause and the flesh. Emerson expresses the same idea in the negative:

The child asks, "Mamma, why don't I like the story as well as when you told it me yesterday? Alas, child, it is even so with the oldest chrubim of knowledge. But will it answer the question to say, Because thou wert born to a whole, and this story is a particular? (p. 247)

Here, instead of longing for the absolute, we are impatient with the particular. Whether pulled forward by our desire for the absolute, or repelled by our boredom or natural antagonism with the particular, we are always forced to move and change by the subtle direction of our mostly-latent sense of the absolute. For Emerson, there is no reaching an understanding of the absolute. He says that it is always "felt as initial, and promises a sequel"(p. 255). Just as "Power" is "like a bird which alights nowhere, but hops perpetually from bough to bough," and "for a moment speaks from this [person], and for another from that one," so the sense of the Final Cause is fleeting. We are moved by it from one grounding of assumptions to another. "Everything good is on the highway," everything worthwhile is in transit.
Yet Emerson believes that Final Cause may be experienced from time to time, albeit in fleeting moments. He describes the experience of consciously apprehending the absolute, or Final Cause, in much the same way that the Gospels, particularly the Gospel of Luke, describe the 'kingdom of God.' He establishes the theme of a hovering, tantalizing perception early in "Experience" with the statement about our genius that "we never got it on any dated calendar day. Some heavenly days must have been intercalated somewhere...."(p. 241) "Power,"‹the power of creativity that comes from our refusal to maintain any particular vision of the world‹ "Power keeps quite another road than the turnpikes of choice and will, namely, the subterranean and invisible tunnels and channels of life"(p. 252). Emerson presents his own personal experience as characteristic:

By persisting to read or to think, this region [the universal] gives further sign of itself, as it were in flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty and repose, as if the clouds that covered it parted at intervals, and showed the approaching traveller the inland mountains, with the tranquil eternal meacdows spread at their base...But every insight from this realm of thought is felt as initial, and promises a sequel.

Already, Emerson draws this experience within a modern context into proximity to the ancient formulations of it in the New Testament. Above we find the experience of the absolute described as the drawing near to a "region." He directly relates this notion of experience guided by the idea of the absolute to the Gospel of Luke:

In the thought of genius there is always a surprise; and the moral sentiment is well called "the newness," for it is never other; as new to the oldest intelligence as to the young child,‹"the kingdom that cometh without observation." (p. 253)

The similarity between references to the kingdom of God and Emerson's notions of creative power run deep. The kingdom of God requires the same undivided attention that Emerson exhorts us to pay to our own impulses:

[Jesus] said, "Follow me." But he said, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father." But Jesus said to him, "Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God." Another said, "I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home." Jesus said to him, "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God."(Lk; 9:59‹62)

The man in "Experience" escapes the prison of natural necessity by the creative power of the idea of the absolute. He must shun the particular and never be satisfied with it. Here, the "kingdom of God" is attained by forsaking the most constricting particulars of life: the family and the home. Emerson echoes the difficulty of leaving family when he writes: "The reason of the pain [that the discovery of the inadequacy of particulars] causes us ... is the plaint of tragedy which murmurs from it in regard to persons, to friendship and love." The kingdom of God requires the same sacrifice that Emerson expresses in his refusal to grieve for his dead son: "So it is with this calamity: it does not touch me: some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar."
The kingdom of God is the moment when we step from the world of particulars to that of Final Cause. As such, it is immediately available, and yet the most difficult of human pursuits.

Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, "The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, 'Look, here it is!' or 'There it is!' For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among/within you." (Lk; 17:20‹21)

There is no power of expansion in men. They stand on the brink of the ocean of thought and power, but they never take the single step that would bring them there. ("Experience" p. 247)

Luke expresses the immediacy of the kingdom of God by placing it within each person, or amoung all people, and in the present tense. Both Emerson and Luke describe the kingdom or the creative power that comes with the vision of Final Cause, as being immediate to every person.
The Gospels are a major and direct influence on Emerson's theory of experience. Emerson goes beyond what he finds in the Gospels, however. Whereas the New Testament tends to exalt the spiritual at the expense of the material, or the Cause at the expense of the flesh, Emerson's project is to unify spirit and flesh, to reconcile our experience of the particular with our intuition of the universal. Whereas the New Testament tends to indicate the possibility for continual experience of the universal cause, Emerson says that it is impossible.
The key passage in this endeavor follows immediately on Emerson's conclusion that experience is disjointed because we have made the "unhappy...discovery...that we exist."(p. 257) It is a discussion of the implications of Being:

The great and crescive self, rooted in absolute nature, supplants all relative existence, and ruins the kingdom of mortal friendship and love. Marriage (in what is called the spiritual world) is impossible, because of the inequality between every subject and every object. The subject is the receiver of Godhead, and at every comparison must feel his being enhanced by that cryptic might. Though not in energy, yet by presence, this magazine of substance cannot be otherwise than felt: nor can any force of intellect attribute to the object the proper deity which sleeps or wakes forever in every subject. Never can love make consciousness and ascription equal in force. There will be the same gulf between every me and thee, as between the original and the picture. The universe [as opposed to the particular] is the [spiritual] bride of the soul. All private [particular] sympathy is partial. Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point, and, whilst they remain in contact, all other points of each of the spheres are inert; their turn must also come, and the longer a particular union lasts, the more energy of appetency the parts not in union acquire. [Experience, p.257]

Here, Emerson certainly paints a bleak picture for human and material relationships, but just as the "ineffable cause" makes itself known in "flashes of light," so Emerson gives a glimpse or instant of hope: "The universe is the bride of the soul." In the midst of proclamations of the impossibility of marriage between subject and any of the objects of its experience, Emerson plants a single conciliatory sentence. For brief moments, all particulars, unified in an intuitive perception of universe, become the "bride of the soul," enveloping the soul rather than making an isolated point of contact with it.
Emerson further grounds his system of experience in the reality of every-day perception, and simultaneously strengthens his association with Biblical tradition. He incorporates skepticism as one of the most important components in the "new statement," the "new picture of life and duty" that is "already possible"(pp. 256 and 257).

The new statement will comprise the skepticisms, as well as the faiths of society, and out of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed. For, skepticisms are not gratuitious or lawless, but are limitations of the affirmative statement, and the new philosophy must take them in, and make affirmations outside of them, just as much as it must include the oldest beliefs.

"Out of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed." As Emerson fundamentally shifts the message of the New Testament, even as the New Testament fundamentally shifted that of the Old, he exhibits vestiges of Biblical language; gramatically and in his use of paradoxical proclamation. Because it surprises us at the same time as informing of something new to come, this proclamatory paradox is the appropriate tool for introducing a new era, a "new picture," or a "new testament" that will require the wakefulness of its participants. While faith or, more precisely for Emerson, "the universal impulse to believe"(p. 256), is a cruxial aspect of Emersonian transcendentalism, it is the incorporation of skepticism that makes it possible to proclame such a paradox, for without it the 'new statement' would be very much like the old New Testament.
'The Fall' is no longer a state to be recovered from, but one from which we can see the limits of our possibilities, from which we can survey the "interminable oceans" farther than which "we cannot go"(p. 256). Our condition, for Emerson, is ever to live with these 'oceans' instructing our perception and reception of the fleshy world, and ever more precisely to define the border between the world of particulars and the oceans, and never to be satisfied with the limits we define.






Bibliography

Emerson, "Experience" from Esssays: Second Series from Essays: First and Second Series
Vintage-Random House Library of America:
New York, 1990

Bible, New Oxford Annotated Bible
Oxford University Press:
New York, 1991