The Harvard Addresses: The American Scholar, Divinity School Address

In the years following the publication of his Transcendentalist classic, Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered two significant orations at Harvard that would cement his reputation as a radical American thinker. The American Scholar is an address Emerson gave to Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa society in 1837. At the time, despite sixty years of independence, Europe still exercised significant influence over American cultural life. Keen to encourage an authentic American perspective, Emerson called for the emergence of a new intelligentsia that would reflect the American experience and uncover new truth and wisdom free from old-world authority. He also promoted his belief in the importance of nature as the ultimate source of inspiration. Indeed, he saw it as the scholar’s duty, as society’s “delegated intelligence,” to study nature and uncover fresh truths that could uplift and unify his fellow men and women. TheDivinity School Address, delivered to the senior class of Harvard Divinity School in 1838, is a challenge to mainstream Christianity. Emerson argued that with its focus on ritual and technical theology, the church was in danger of obscuring the real, life-affirming meaning of Jesus’s teachings. He implored his audience of young preachers to restore truth and humanity to pastoral work. He also shared his belief in the capacity of all human beings to experience divine virtue and know themselves as spiritual beings–a perspective that was widely rejected by clerical authorities. Brought together here as The Harvard Addresses, The American Scholar and the Divinity School Address show Emerson as a radical challenger to established thinking.