Ralph Waldo Emerson's Biblical Criticism

 

Emerson was born May 25, 1803, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the son of clergyman Reverend William Emerson. Emerson was largely known for his poems and writings which were inspired during his early days of attendance at Harvard. Ralph Waldo Emerson was largely influenced by German philosophy and Biblical Criticism. His views were based on Transcendentalism which was a system developed by Immanuel Kant pertaining to the whole basis of understanding nature. Emerson’s views were that God did not have to reveal the truth, but that one could experience and reveal the truth to themselves through the experiences in nature.

Emerson believed that science could not explain the truth of creation by saying, “All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. We are not so far from the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous” (3).

Emerson was ordained at the Unitarian ministry at the Second Church in 1829. He then became a famous preacher and secured a position in the church. But, after his wife, Ellen Lousia Tucker, died of Tuberculosis in 1831 he began to question his own sermons. His brother, who had traveled to Germany, introduced Emerson to the ideas of Biblical Criticism. This is when his sermons to the people began to take a turn from historical, biblical facts to the ideas of one's own personal experiences in nature. Due to this, he resigned from the ministry in 1832. He left the church in search of his own experience with God and, in a sense, his own revelation.

Emerson made frequent visits to esteemed writers and thinkers in search of his own fortune. Once back home he began writing his work Nature and in the 1830’s he was a distinguished literary man. As time went on, his struggles and beliefs on the subject that nature must be found and not given, others saw this and realized they had the same struggles as him and followed in his footsteps.

In 1836, Emerson helped jumpstart the route of Transcendentalism by anonymously publishing Nature. This publication helped formulate his philosophy on nature through his own personal experiences after solving his problems which, in turn, made everything he created afterward a certain extension of the now existing philosophy.

Although his ideas were not entirely original, he certainly made his mark on the idea of Transcendentalism and nature. Because of his own personal experiences with his wife and the opportunities presented by his brother, he was able to further the research into the ideology.

The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson