smith and emmerson edits

Joseph Smith and Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Joseph Smith and Ralph Waldo Emerson: Contemporary Visionaries

Benjamin Tingey

A casual glance at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophy might make the common student

of American religious history wonder if he had any contact with the contemporary spiritual

leader Joseph Smith. Many parallels can be drawn connecting a selective reading of Emerson to

Joseph Smith’s theology, and there are some historical and theoretical similarities between these

two American visionaries.. By no means a comprehensive endeavor, this paper explores some of

the common ground as well as the key differences of the theologies of Ralph Waldo Emerson

and Joseph Smith demonstrating when and where parallels can be drawn.. Understanding that

Emerson and Smith’s ideologies are somewhat similar, yet sometimes divergent, highlights

some of the undercurrents of religious thought coming out of the Second Great Awakening and

sheds further light on the religious philosophy of their epoch. A comparison of these two men

can be beneficial for any student of early American religious history.

Background

Emerson and Smith emerged during a time of religious transformation in American

history during which many revolutionary thinkers were dismissing the Calvinistic doctrines of

the prevailing faiths and were creating their own schools of thought. They opposed the teachings

of man’s depravity and tried to redeem man’s humanity. Emerson critiqued the effect of the

Calvinist viewpoint, saying that “Now man is ashamed of himself; he skulks and sneaks through

the world, to be tolerated, to be pitied, and scarcely in a thousand years does any man dare to be

wise and good, and so draw after him the tears and blessings of his kind.”2 Emerson dedicated

substantial amounts of material on redefining man’s eternal nature in order to reverse such

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Deleted: In the past, some Latter-day Saint scholars have tried to claim Emerson as a secular supporter of many of Joseph Smith’s doctrines, asserting that Smith was the embodiment of Emerson’s idea of a true teacher, one that “show[s] us that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake”

Deleted: 1. In fact, a closer examination of the lives and beliefs of these two men finds simultaneously many similarities and many differences. But at the same time, scholars from other religions have done the same with their own spiritual thinkers, hoping to unite their dogmas with the respected Emerson’s. Therefore, it would be wise for religious scholars to first qualify the similarities and acknowledge the caveats between Emerson and their own doctrines before alleging such connections

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Calvinist ideas. Both Emerson and Smith rejected the contemporary Christian teachings of their

time and sought to bring man’s potential to the fore.

Though they lived around the same time period, Smith and Emerson’s socio-economic

and political backgrounds varied greatly. Amidst the radical religious change in nineteenth

century America, Emerson grew up receiving formal religious training, first from his father and

then at the Harvard Divinity School. He came from an upper-middle class background and was

well read in the religious and philosophical texts of the time. On the other hand, Joseph Smith’s

religious training consisted of informal family Bible studies and sermons from circuit preachers

at the various camp meetings and revivals that he attended. 3

Perhaps due to their religious upbringing, both Smith and Emerson were keenly aware at

young ages of their spiritual sensitivities. Recalling the religious fervor in his community when

he was fourteen, Smith wrote, “During this time of great excitement my mind was called up to

serious reflection and great uneasiness; but though my feelings were deep and often poignant,

still I kept myself aloof from all these parties.”4 As a 19-year old boy Emerson wrote in his

journal that he had received “occasional lofty communications which were vouchsafed to me

with the Muses’ Heaven and which have at intervals made me the organ of remarkable

sentiments and feelings”5. They each yearned for spiritual truth but would find their truth in

different ways.

Rejection of Historical Christianity

Another similarity was that both Emerson and Smith divorced themselves at an early age

from contemporary Christianity. According to his own account, Joseph Smith was commanded

by God, in what is known as his First Vision, to join none of the Christian sects because “they

draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the


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commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.”6 Emerson

similarly complained that “Historical Christianity [had] fallen into the error that corrupts all

attempts to communicate religion.”7 Robert Fuller suggests that “Emerson was thus unwilling to

settle for the conventional philosophies of his day. He was spiritually restless, yearning for a

mode of personal spirituality capable of unleashing humanity’s highest intellectual and

emotional powers.”8 Both Smith and Emerson felt compelled to lead out in reshaping the way

Christian spirituality was understood.

Revelation

One of Emerson’s issues with historical Christianity was that “Men have come to speak

of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead.”9 Both Emerson

and Smith felt that the current teaching among the Christian churches about the finality and

mode of revelation was incorrect. They both held that man could have a personal relationship

with the divine, though their methods of attaining this relationship differed. They insisted that

God and man could communicate with each other. “The great moves that Smith and Emerson

make in common are what might be called the presencing and the appropriation of prophecy, the

conversion of revelation from past to present tense and from the experience of others to

something I can have.”10 Smith and Emerson were heading in the same direction by urging

Christians to come to know God in the here and now, and not rely on what they felt were the

corrupted and impersonal forms of the past.

God

The perceptions of God held by Joseph Smith and Ralph Waldo Emerson differed

radically in concept and identity. They each grew up believing in the sectarian doctrine of the

Trinity, being the standard interpretation of the day. But they each shifted their interpretations as


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their understanding grew. Smith’s interpretation became more specific whereas Emerson’s

definition became slightly more abstract over time.

Joseph Smith departed from traditional views of the Trinity and revolutionized the

concept of the Godhead. Richard Bushman explains Smith’s doctrine best:

Perhaps [Joseph Smith’s] single greatest theological departure was

to state that God was of the same order of being as humans. Smith

would not have used that formal language, but his description of

God’s body of flesh and bone amounted to the same thing. God’s

transcendence took the form of his might, glory, holiness, and

intelligence. But, though exalted and powerful beyond our

comprehension, God has the form and substance of a man. We

humans exist in the same ontological realm as the creator of

heaven and earth. We are even of the same species.11

Smith’s revelation on God’s physical reality meant that when man communicates with deity he is

communicating with an actual being that has ears to hear and eyes to see. He is a personal god

with whom one can build an intimate relationship.

Emerson viewed God as an intangible essence that fills the immensity of space and

houses within itself the abstract ideas of “Justice, Truth, Love, [and] Freedom.”12 It is a universal

soul that connects mankind with nature. “Emerson’s concept of God as the Over-soul succinctly

captured his faith in an ever-present, but impersonal, spiritual power.”13 Emerson believed God

could be discovered in nature, and that the fastest way to find him was through the portal of

one’s own soul. Hence “the Oversoul is better conceived as a source of energy, an enabling

power, of which each individual is a particular manifestation.”14 This progressive departure from


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traditional concepts of the Godhead made Emerson’s God more accessible in that one was no

longer limited to the confines of a Church in order to worship God.

In contrast to Smith’s view of a personal God, man’s communication with Emerson’s

God became an abstract experience that focused inward instead of outward. Robert Fuller sheds

light on Emerson’s concept of God stating that Emerson taught that “God is always and

everywhere present to the properly attuned mind . . . and the only barrier between God and

human beings is limited spiritual understanding. The route to a more vibrant spiritual life thus

requires greater self-awareness rather than the repentance called for in traditional Christianity.”15

Therefore, Smith’s new definition created a sharper image of God than the Trinity creed, and

Emerson’s definition created a more relativistic version.

Christ

In regards to the divinity of Jesus Christ, Emerson and Smith completely disagreed.

Smith considered himself a special witness of Christ’s divinity and testified of his own prophetic

calling publicly and privately. Emerson departed from his own Christian roots and came to

believe that Christ was a prophet type who “alone in all history, estimated the greatness of

man.”16 Emerson believed that Christ was not divine because of any spiritual or physical

qualities, but because he was the only one to reach the heights of spiritual understanding to see

the presence of the Over-soul in everyone.

When asked to outline the key doctrines of Mormonism for a newspaper reporter in

Chicago, Joseph Smith penned the famous Wentworth Letter.17 Part of which is now canonized

as “The Articles of Faith” and they delineated the central themes of the Latter-day Saint religion.

The first Article states, “We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ, and

in the Holy Ghost.” Another states, “We believe that through the Atonement of Christ, all


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mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel.” And another,

“We believe that the first principles and ordinances of the Gospel are: first, Faith in the Lord

Jesus Christ . . .” Clearly Joseph Smith’s focus and the focus of the Church was on Jesus Christ

and his divine role as Savior and Redeemer.

Emerson attempted to humanize Christ in order to provide mankind the exalting vision of

their potential to be as Christ. By redefining Christ as simply a great man and not the Son of God

made it easier to show that all humans were just as capable of greatness. Clarifying this point,

Emerson declared, “I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see

God, see me; or see thee, when thou thinkest as I now think.”18 According to Emerson’s view of

divine progression, Christ had progressed faster than any man had before and reached a point of

divine interaction that he could “[see] with open eye the mystery of the soul.”19

Emerson argued that Christ’s affirmation that he was divine was not meant to exclude the

rest of mankind. “[Historical Christianity] has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about

the person of Jesus. The soul knows no persons.”20 He blamed historical Christianity for

corrupting the message of Christ and focusing on creating a character and not a lifestyle.

Emerson suggested that Christ was not trying to exalt himself but to exalt mankind. His message

was “that he found God to be in himself, and he found himself to be God—and so can others,

when they are in a state of spiritual exaltation.”21

Man’s Potential

Both Emerson and Smith strove to show that man was “more than ‘poor worms.’”22 They

taught that man had a special potential within, but they diverged in their interpretation and the

application of man achieving his potential. Both clarified the individuality of the human soul and

how he fit into the puzzle of nature, but they also showed how the individual was a part of a


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greater whole. Each wanted to ennoble mankind from the station that they had been placed in by

Calvinism, but again, their methods split.

Joseph Smith ennobled man by defining him in terms of God and Christ’s divinity. “If

men do not comprehend the character of God, they do not comprehend themselves.”23 Smith

learned and then taught that God was a glorified being who had progressed from a mortal state

similar to ours to his current spiritually exalted state. Christ “continued from grace to grace, until

he received a fullness” and became as God, his father. Man could follow in their footsteps and

progress in the same way. 24 “The mind or intelligence which man possesses is co-eternal with

God.”25

Emerson boldly testified, “In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, the infinitude of

the private man.”26 Like others of his time, Emerson rejected Calvinism to the point of deifying

man from his fallen state. The reaches of the Over-soul penetrated all things, including man, and

therefore all connected things were divine. If man is thus connected to the Oversoul, then he

himself penetrates all things and is connected with all things. Emerson reasoned, “[Man] learns

that his being is without bound; that, to the good, to the perfect, he is born.”27

One important difference between Smith and Emerson’s teachings on the divinity of man

was the distinction between the individual and the collective. Smith taught that man’s core

spiritual essence, called the intelligence, “is eternal and exists upon a self-existent principle. It is

a spirit from age to age, and there is no creation about it. All the minds and spirits that God ever

sent into the world are susceptible to enlargement.”28 Man’s individual intelligence can and must

interact with other intelligences, but at all times it is a distinct and separate being from all others.

Emerson, however, believed that one’s individuality is swallowed up in the Over-soul. “Within

man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and


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particle is equally related; the eternal One.”29 Describing his famous “transparent eye-ball”

experience, Emerson affirmed, “I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being

circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”30 Therefore, when Christ pled that we “be

one” with Him, even as He and the Father are one (John 17:11), Smith and Emerson would have

conflicting interpretations on what Christ was intending to convey.31 Smith might have said that

we must follow the Son’s example and do his will, whereas Emerson might have said that we

will someday be one with the Over-soul as Christ became one with the Over-soul.

Religious Institutions and Ritual

Having rejected the Christianity of their time, both Emerson and Smith called for

religious reform. But here their roads parted and pursued different destinations. Smith either

reformed the errors found in contemporary Christianity or, through what he claimed was divine

inspiration, revealed completely new concepts. Emerson believed that all form and convention

only stifled true worship and said, “When we have broken our god of tradition, and ceased from

our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with his presence.”32 Both sought religious

reform, but their proposals were polar opposites.

Joseph Smith separated himself from the contemporary forms of Christian ritual only to

redefine them. Baptism was still an ordinance of salvation, but it had to be done by someone

holding God’s authority. Conferring the gift of the Holy Ghost was still essential, but it occurred

“by the laying on of hands by those who are in authority.”33 The Sacrament was still

administered, but with an effort to simplify the rite to focus on effect and not as much on form.

By modifying the transmission of the ordinances, Smith attempted to bring back the

spiritual essence of the rituals that he felt was lacking. He asserted that without divine authority,

rituals become sterile and hollow, without divine validation. He believed he was called to restore


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the “form of godliness” that they once had when they were originally delivered in Christ’s time.

“Smith is another great restorationist; but in his version of prophecy, recovering unmediated

access to the Spirit leads to the re-establishment of religious institutions, not to their

dissolution.”34 Joseph’s revisions did not do away with institution, but sought to bring back its

original power.

Emerson advocated a departure from all things ritual and institutional. “All attempts to

project and establish a cultus with new rites and forms, seem to me vain . . . all attempts to

contrive a system are as cold as the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess of

Reason.”35 In accordance with his idealism, the material forms of ritual could not measure up to

the spiritual forms. Emerson felt that ritual forms would always impede true spiritual expression.

“In Emerson, restored access to the spirit in ‘the hour and the man that now is’ causes the

dissolution of everything institutional, returning religion from the ritual and formal to a living,

spiritual pulse.”36 Emerson so fervently believed this that he resigned his ministry because he no

longer felt comfortable administering the Sacrament. He complained that its ritual aspects had

encumbered its true meaning, and alleged that Christ had never intended it to become ritual in

the first place. Like Smith, Emerson endeavored to hearken back to original intentions behind

ritual.

Smith’s intent was to reform Christianity and bring it back to its purest form. Emerson

was rejecting all organized religion to create a more intellectually based theology. “Emerson was

staking out a new, unchurched spirituality that offered his audiences the possibility of achieving

a mystical connection with God without requiring them to dwell upon their personal sinfulness or

to surrender their freedom of thought.”37 For Latter-day Saints, the idea that Christ’s gospel does

not require a formally organized Church seems impossible. Emerson’s pleas to change the way


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Christianity was communicated did not involve the creation of another institution, but the

abolition of any institution that intermediated between man and the Oversoul. Emerson would

not have agreed with Smith’s efforts to formally organize and establish the kingdom of God.

Conclusion

Perhaps, like Emerson claimed of Christ, both Smith and Emerson were more capable

than other men of “estimat[ing] the greatness of man.”38 This led them to comparable

conclusions about many subjects, including a rejection of historical Christianity, man’s divine

potential, and restoring the original intent of religious communication, among others. However,

it is also apparent that their philosophies did not align like theological puzzle pieces. We may

never know if Emerson would have found his true teacher, his “bard of the Holy Ghost” in the

character of Joseph Smith,39 nonetheless, we can acknowledge that a comparative study of their

teachings yields a rich and beneficial experience for any student of early American religious

history.

2 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris (New York: W.W. Norton & company, 2001), 77. 3 Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Vintage Books, 2007).

4 Joseph Smith History 1:8. 5 Emerson, 485. 6 Joseph Smith History 1:19. 7 Emerson, 73. 8 Emerson, 89. 9 Emerson, 74-75. 10 Richard H. Broadhead, Prophets in America CA. 1830: Emerson, Nat Turner, Joseph Smith, ed. Reid L. Neilson and Terryl L.

Givens in Joseph Smith, Jr.: Reappraisals after Two Centuries (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 25 11 Richard L. Bushman, Mormonism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 7. 12 Emerson, 35. 13 Robert C. Fuller, Religious Revolutionaries: The Rebels Who Reshaped American Religion. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan,

2004), 95. 14 David M. Robinson, “Emerson and Religion,” in A Historical Guide to Ralph Waldo Emerson. (New York: Oxford University

Press, 2000), 165. 15 Robinson, 95. 16 Emerson, 73. 17 Bushman, 418. 18 Emerson, 73. 19 Emerson, 72. 20 Emerson, 73.

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21 Brodhead, 22. 22 Fuller, 89.

23 Joseph Smith Jr., The King Follett Discourse (Salt Lake City: Joseph Lyon & Associates, 1963), 2. 24 Doctrine and Covenants 93:13 25 Smith, 12. 26 Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 59.

27 Emerson, 70. 28 Smith, 17. 29 Emerson,164. 30 Emerson, 29. 31 King James Bible 32 Emerson, 172. 33 Articles of Faith, 1:5. 34 Brodhead, 26. 35 Emerson, 80. 36 Brodhead, 26. 37 Fuller, 91. 38 Emerson, 73. 39 Emerson, 79.

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