EMERSONASAMERICANSCRIPTURECHARLES.docVIP

EMERSON AS AMERICAN SCRIPTURE CHARLES HOWELL FOSTER I At a superficial glance, Emerson seems to be a grindstone throwing off sparks in an irresponsible fashion. Hesi-tating for the most part to call his performance philosophical, critics have called it literary, and stressed its diffusion if not its self-contradiction. One has, they say, a magnificent stream of glitter, and that is about all. But on a closer view, Emerson is seen to be not so much a grindstone as a Fourth of July pinwheel, which scatters some sparks as it swishes around, but which is essentially a spiral pattern to be appreciated as a to-tality. One must start at the center and follow the burning line as it works into larger and larger circles if one is to retain an after-image that matches the original. No handful of sparks will do the trick. As one thumbs through the Journals from 1833 to 1836, when Emerson was formulating his mission, one sees not only the burning center of Emersons thought but also the appro-priateness of comparing him to fireworks in celebration of the Fourth. The influences, to be sure, that set his powder off are mainly foreign: German idealism from Coleridge and Carlyle, romantic doctrine from Wordsworth, and Neo-platonism, but Emersons play of thought and emotion was American by in-tention. Having been liberated by Unitarianism from the dogmas of Calvinism, having been made aware of mysticism as a living faith by Quakerism, Emerson was ready to com-bine contemporary European thought with American politi-cal principles and to blend Plotinus and Thomas Jefferson into a radical doctrine. One may see in Emerson a revitalizer of the mysticism of Anne Hutchinson, which underwent a second birth in the Great Awakening of the 1740s or de-scribe him as a romantic on Puritan ground, but the impor-tant matter is that to Emerson his New England heritage, his democratic heritage, his romantic and classical heritages were all in essential harmony: they all amounted to a belief in the