The Divinity School Address

In 1838 Emerson was asked by the senior class of the Harvard Divinity School to deliver their graduation address. In the letter requesting his presence they asked for “the customary discourse on occasion of their entering upon the active Christian ministry.” Wanting to have a better understanding of the students’ desires and thoughts, Emerson met with them at least once prior to his speaking at their graduation.

On July 15, Emerson gave what became known as “The Divinity School Address” to the graduates, their families, and educators. “In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, a balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed more happily.”

Emerson went on to argue that every person could have a relationship with the divine without the mediation of the church or clergy. His speech was so controversial that he was not invited back to his alma mater for 30 years.

Emerson was surprised by the negative reactions to his address in the press and from the pulpit. However not everyone disagreed with his ideas for change. Theodore Parker, a popular Unitarian minister and also an advocate for reform wrote, Emerson “…surpassed himself as much as he surpasses others in the general way…so beautiful & just, so true…”

Emerson’s Uncle Samuel Ripley – a minister in Waltham MA – was supportive of Emerson and remarked he was proud that his nephew stood “firm and unmoved” and did not allow the negative response bother him anymore than “the whistling of the wind.” In fact, Emerson never joined the controversy or responded, declaring he was “merely and observer, a dispassionate reporter.”

Mr. Emerson Speaks

Starting in 1833, Ralph Waldo Emerson earned his living by lecturing across the country and eventually in Europe as well. He was able to leverage the rising enthusiasm for the lyceum movement, which began in England and made its way to America. Lyceums offered speakers a platform to provide education, discussion and entertainment to audiences hungry to hear about a broad range of topics including history, science, nature and agriculture.

Emerson began his career as a Unitarian minister. By 1833, he took his considerable skills in speaking from the pulpit to join the lyceum movement and deliver lectures. His reputation as an author and lecturer grew thanks to the publication of his first book, Nature in 1836. Acknowledging that he would be supporting his growing family through speaking, Emerson made the decision in 1836 to manage his own engagements, rather than relying on the Lyceum Association. A decision he never regretted. As an example, when speaking at the Masonic Temple in Boston, attendance at one Emerson event was 439 people. Ticket sales amounted to $796 and after expenses he cleared $571. Five hundred dollars in 1800 was worth more than $10,000 today.

Creating his lectures between the spring and fall seasons, he would go on the road to lecture in the winter. In many ways, this represented early “social media” because he was connecting in person with his audiences who might then purchase and read his poetry and essays. He started giving lectures at the Concord Lyceum but quickly expanded to all of New England, south to Washington, D.C. across the mid-west and north into Canada. From 1847 to 1848 he lectured in England as well. To understand how rigorous a schedule he kept, between January and March of 1846 he gave 37 lectures, most at different locations.

While many other people of various disciplines were also on the lecture circuit, Emerson had a vital advantage – he was able to connect with his audience. He made people “feel taller.” One laborer in Boston who attended all his lectures was asked if she understood what he was conveying. Her response was “Not a word, but I love to see him standing up there thinking everyone else is just as good as he is.”

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody – a transcendentalist, publisher and creator of the kindergarten in America – wrote, “Mr. Emerson was always preeminently the preacher to his own generation and future ones, but as much – if not more – out of the pulpit as in it; faithful unto the end of his early chosen profession and the vows of his youth.”

The American Scholar

On August 31, 1837 Emerson delivered An Oration later entitled The American Scholar, to an audience at Harvard that included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, James Russell Lowell, Richard Henry Dana, Wendell Phillips and Edward Everett. The occasion was the annual meeting of Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society. Five hundred copies of the talk were printed and sold out within weeks. Fifty years later Oliver Wendell Holmes (speaking of America) declared The American Scholar “our Intellectual Declaration of Independence.”

Emerson wrote The American Scholar to liberate the individual, not a group or in this case his audience. He directly addressed the issues of individual Americans becoming self-reliant, “the single man plant himself indomitable on his instincts and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.” From then on his writing was directed at the individual, not any institution. He wanted to inspire original thought, to encourage people not to be bound by past traditions or the thoughts of others. Regardless of how education strived to influence and control the thoughts of its students. “Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote those books.”