“All men divine”: Gnostic Political Theology in Emerson’s Antebellum Essays

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Abstract

In the poem “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson casts heaven as a paradoxical community of those who “stand against the world” (“Self-Reliance” 738–39). Heaven, for Emerson, is a location of fully realized individuality, a collective stitched together by its members’ sovereignty over themselves and oppositional relationship to “the world,” which they stand over and against. These heavenly beings represent absolute, eternal Being. “The days pass over me,” Emerson’s speaker joyously declares, “And I am still the same.” The fragmented individuals are an elite class, those who, like the speaker, “though he dearly loved his race” never “for fear of human eyes swerved from his plan.” Tellingly, the poem places the sovereign will of the individual in opposition to the love of fellow persons, implying that, to fully realize one’s potential, dedication to the self must overcome love of the other. The autonomous individual self, the bearer of the Gnostic spark of divinity, forms the core of the gospel according to Emerson, and provides the basis for his secularized Christianity, which reenchants the individual, although perhaps at the expense of the inhabited, shared world.

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Originally published in:

Literature and Belief, Vol. 43:1 & 2, pgs.125-155. 2024

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