Emerson's Transformation in the 1820's

Abstract

T INTEND, IN THIS ESSAY, to trace the development of Emerson's thought during the decade following his graduation from Harvard in I82I and preceding his resignation from the Second Church of Boston in I832. Of course Emerson's earlier ideas (in the midI820's) reveal his dependence on the Unitarianism current with his teachers and peers, just as his later ideas reveal the basis for the full fowering of his Transcendentalism in the I830's. However, even though I have divided Emerson's thought into the two obvious categories, Unitarianism and Transcendentalism, in an attempt to clarify the radical change which he underwent in this decade, I hope to suggest also that his ideas evolved gradually during this period and that there was no particular crisis and no special influence which brought about his very profound metamorphosis. In Nature (I836), which represents the culmination of his Transcendentalism, Emerson proclaims the unity of man, God, and nature. Yet the essay was preceded by a period of soul-searching which reflects and in a sense subsumes all of the crucial debates that have characterized American culture since its beginnings; between John Cotton and Roger Williams, Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Edwards, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Indeed, Emerson's Nature is of a piece with the independence of Williams, the religious fervor of Edwards, and the republicanism of Jefferson. Emerson grew up, however, in a spiritual and intellectual milieu dominated by the more conservative voices. His father had been a Federalist and a Unitarian minister-so much of a Unitarian in fact that he named one of his sons after Charles Chauncy.' Further-