Last year I was invited to submit a paper to a special issue of Religions, an on-line journal, on Transcendentalism and Religious Experience. Titled “That Which Was Ecstasy Shall Become Daily Bread,” the subject of the paper is the nature of Emerson’s mysticism and its subsequent influence on Unitarian theology in the 19th and 20th centuries. Emerson never called himself a mystic, but he believed that we are subject to ecstasies, or revelations of the Universal Mind common to all people. Such experiences represent “an influx of the Divine Mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the Individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the Sea of Life.” This experience—which can only be described as a mystical experience—is at the heart of all religions and common to all people.
Some have questioned whether Emerson was a mystic, since he did not seem to fit the mold of Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross. What is distinctive about Emerson’s mysticism is that it is non-sectarian, holistic and natural. For Emerson, God is impersonal, not personal, and immanent in the world, not apart from it. His brand of mysticism is best expressed in this passage from his famous essay, “The Over-Soul”: “We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal one. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.”
Although Emerson realized that moments of illumination are few and far between, he found such moments to be of great significance. He also knew that they could not be summoned at will. Nevertheless, he believed that people could improve the odds of their reception through cultivating the soul. This he sought to do by engaging in the spiritual practices of self-culture. He thought that society would be enriched by those who were able to communicate the wisdom gained in such experiences, but he never considered that illumination was reserved for a certain class of persons. The biggest obstacle is “that the community in which we live will hardly bear to be told that every man should be open to ecstasy or a divine illumination, and his daily walk elevated by intercourse with the spiritual world.”
This is because daily life is lived on a mundane level. We are accustomed to dealing with the everyday world in a practical, pragmatic way. We get up in the morning and go about our business thinking that this is the only reality there is. Empirical ways of knowing predominate over intuitive modes of thought. It is for these reasons that Emerson felt our life, as we live it, is common and mean, and sought to find a proper balance between the realities of everyday life and the demands of the spirit, in the hope that, as put it in his 1840 Dial essay, “Thoughts on Modern Literature,” “that which was ecstasy shall become daily bread.”
[Excerpted from “Religions” 2017, Vol. 8 No. 4, 75; doi:10.3390/rel8040075]
I invite you to download my paper from the following site: http://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/8/4/75
Although Emerson indeed did not fit the mold of Christian mystics, perhaps he fitted/fits the mold of non-Christian mystics?
Yes, indeed, Lorraine. In fact, Emerson and the Transcendentalists made it possible to speak of mysticism in a non-sectarian way. I suggest you read Leigh Eric Schmidt’s book, “Restless Souls,” in which he traces the development of this idea.