Emerson draws upon the physical reality of the present moment in opening “The Divinity School Address.” He describes the lushness of nature in high summer (the address was delivered in the middle of July) and acknowledges the perfect loveliness of the physical world. Man under the summer stars is like a young child, and the world is his toy. But Emerson quickly turns away from the material and takes up universal laws, which dwarf the significance of nature’s beauty and prompt questions about the world and its order. He proceeds to answer these questions in the first part of the address by reiterating ideas developed at length in Nature, thus laying the groundwork for what he will say about the state of religion at the current time.”
A beauty more “secret, sweet, and overpowering” than that of nature is apparent when man opens himself to “the sentiment of virtue.” Man then sees the divine and universal that encompass his existence, and knows that his place in the larger picture assures him a limitless capacity for goodness. When man strives to apprehend the absolutes of right, truth, and virtue, he is in harmony with God’s creation of the universe for that very purpose, and he pleases God. The “sentiment of virtue” is identified as “reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws,” which are revealed through experience of the world and through life. Universal laws cannot be fully envisioned or articulated, but are evident in our character and actions. The “sentiment of virtue” is at the heart of religion.
Emerson holds up intuition as the means of perceiving the laws of the soul, which are timeless and absolute, not subject to current values and circumstances. Goodness and evil are instantly rewarded or punished in the enlargement or diminishment of the man who practices them—external reward and punishment are beside the point. Man is God to the degree that he is inwardly virtuous. In subordinating himself to the expression of the divine virtue that speaks through him, he knows himself and realizes his capabilities. As he does so, he acts in accordance with the workings of the universe, and his efforts to understand and exercise virtue are reinforced. Emerson asserts that the human soul, in its ability to elevate itself, has the power to determine whether it will go to heaven or hell—that is, there is nothing predetermined about the ultimate fate of the soul. All of this is true because of the unity of man and nature in the divine mind (the , although here, as in Nature, Emerson does not so refer to it). Because the divine is intrinsically perfect, Emerson suggests, goodness is real, while evil—the absence of goodness—is not an absolute quality in and of itself. Goodness is identified with life; evil, with death. In straying from goodness, a man progressively loses his connection with the divine, is diminished, and—from a universal point of view, if not physically—ceases to exist.
The religious sentiment brings joy and makes sense of the world for us, empowers and deifies us. Through the religious sentiment, a man understands that goodness is within him, that he and every other man enjoys a direct relationship with God through intuitive Reason, and that virtue cannot be attained by emulating other men. All of society’s forms of worship—Oriental as well as western—were founded on an original direct understanding of God by man. Emerson emphasizes the importance of intuition to the individual in achieving the religious sentiment, stating that it cannot be received “at second hand,” and stresses that the process takes place through inspiration or revelation rather than learning. If religion is not based on this intuitive individual connection with the divine, the church is meaningless, man’s importance is reduced, and the inner drive to achieve the true religious sentiment is perverted into rejection of a direct relationship with God. “Miracles, prophecy, poetry, the ideal life, the holy life” then are present through religion only historically, in its ancient intuitive origin, but not as it currently exists. Emerson points to the established Christian church as an illustration of this decline of religion from what it was and should be.”
Jesus, Emerson declares, “belonged to the true race of prophets.” He saw and lived the inherent relationship between God and man, perceived the human soul as the outlet of the universal soul, and consequently accorded man his proper greatness. In his life, he demonstrated the agency of God through men. But the example of Jesus has been misused by the church, which quickly came to deny his humanity and to focus upon “the idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric” instead. The church has offered false miracles in place of the miracles of human life that Jesus himself recognized, and it has replaced inner perception of truth and goodness with externally imposed commandments.
Emerson then explores two errors in the administration of Christianity as an institution. Firstly, rather than promoting the doctrine of the soul as it applies to all, Christianity raises Jesus up above other men. The soul “knows no persons,” Emerson writes, but indiscriminately invites each man “to expand to the full circle of the universe.” Jesus has been made into a kind of eastern monarch, his name associated with official, formal titles that obscure his original position as “friend of man.” If we accept this view of Jesus and subordinate our own importance to his, we do not recognize our ability also to enter into the divine. The approach that takes God out of man weakens man; that which reveals God within strengthens man. If God is not within, then there is no reason for man’s existence, and he will “decease forever.” Jesus and the prophets—the “divine bards”—only serve to remind us that our intuitions of the divine do not emanate from us, but from God. Ordinary men tend to exaggerate the importance of a “great and rich soul” like Jesus, and not to see that they themselves can elevate by “coming again to themselves, or to God in themselves.” Emerson points out that the current “vulgar tone of preaching” denigrates Jesus as much as it does the rest of mankind. It isolates Jesus and discounts the warmth and vigor that characterized his life and words.
