WRITING BEYOND PROPHECY: EMERSON, HAWTHORNE, AND MELVILLE AFTER THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE

Abstract

WRITING BEYOND PROPHECY: EMERSON, HAWTHORNE, AND MELVILLE AFTER THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE. By Martin Kevorkian. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2013. xviii + 259 pp. $45.Martin Kevorkian's book considers the religious life of three key figures of the American Renaissance: Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), and Herman Melville (1819-91). Kevorkian proposes that these three writers, having positioned themselves outside prevailing religious orthodoxies their prime years, reconciled themselves to a more sympathetic view of conventional religious faith and the figure of the minister particular their late years.The Emerson chapter is the foundational essay Kevorkian's argument. Kevorkian claims that, after a mid-1830s crisis of faith the possibility of ministry and an early 1840s skepticism toward the practical capacity of men to reason their way out of idolatry to true religion, and after long silent years concerning religion and faith the 1840s and 1850s (61), Emerson at the end of his career-and most visibly the Worship essay of The Conduct of Life (1860)-to reconsider more generously the possibilities of a more communal aspect to spiritual and moral life. Kevorkian does a fine job reviewing Emerson's ministerial and religious crises of 1832-41. But this sketch also highlights the difficulty that Kevorkian faces trying to make the argument for Emerson's supposed shift by 1860. Emerson's religious heterodoxy was both deeply thought and deeply felt, and Kevorkian notes that, by 1840, Emerson's skepticism raged virtually unchecked (55). It is easy to imagine that this skepticism would mellow some respect, but Kevorkian's argument then faces the vexing question: What, very precisely, does this softening of intensity betoken the intellectual biography of Emerson? Kevorkian himself vacillates between two conclusions: the rather modest claim that Emerson eventually became somewhat less dismissive of conventional religion than he appeared to be 1841 and the more vigorous claim that the late Emerson reconciled himself to a more interpersonal or communal vision of the action of religious truth and subsequently returned to a more ministerial role his speaking and writing (127).The book advances two serious arguments support of its claim for the shift represented by Worship. One follows from that essay's declaration that is a leading topic the scheme of human life and that, indeed, grounds the greatness of a man and the greatness of any great age civilization (64). All of this granted, readers might still reasonably wonder what Emerson intends by the word worship. Emerson's own quotation, as given by Kevorkian, glosses its meaning as one's being in earnest, one's thoughts fixed on spiritual verities, even as one pursues greatness the world of action (20). The word thus defined, it is difficult to see Emerson's championing of worship as much of a break: earnestness of and commitment to thinking through spiritual verities were surely characteristic of Emerson even at his most radically heterodox.Kevorkian develops an argument that Worship announces Emerson's yearning for-and granting the actual possibility of-a spiritual mentor or model or master, whose superiority of holiness and moral sentiment (21) would exert an attraction undeniable even to a man so extraordinary as Emerson. Kevorkian offers evidence of Emerson's view of the desirability of such a personage by 1860 and argues that this wish constitutes a shift Emerson's thinking insofar as it departs from the solipsistic intellection that was previously Emerson's model for spiritual questing. In 1836, Emerson was conceptualizing God as the impersonal mind of the mind, the soul of the soul, the law of the laws (36), and concluding, therefore, that only the faculty of reason offered a sure way to God and religious truth, eschewing the susceptibility to failure and corruption endemic to common sense, emotion, and man's constitutional weakness for idolatrous superstition (53). …