Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essay Self Reliance and American Triumphalism

All of American idealism is related on some level to the essay Self Reliance.   And I'd like to discuss some of it here.

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

It is a fundamental American ideal to believe in the inward self, and much of our language concerning the self comes to us through Emerson.   To be sure he did not invent the American conception of the self, but he is our most vital prophet, and the prime influence upon American Poetry and Literature.   For example, Walt Whitman was "simmering, simmering simmering,"and then read "Emerson and was consumed."   Robert Frost is certainly the greatest disciple of Emerson, while Emily Dickenson almost certainly sought to evade Emerson where-ever possible.  Allen Tate called Emerson "the devil."  T.S. Elliott sought to erase Emersonian self Idolatry.  Every American poet or mystic goes back to Emerson in some way even if they have never read him.   Surely every American of every intellectual stripe can find resonance here:

A man should learn to detect and watch the gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of firmament of bards and sages.  Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.   In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts:  they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty...I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.   I would write on the lintels of the door-post, WHIM.  

The lustres we behold in literature, art and philosophy are our own, though we have alienated them from ourselves.   This gives us the freedom to appropriate that which we love and did not ourselves create.    All American artforms from Poetry to Jazz are built upon this principle of the inward self and it's angst free ability to appropriate.   For example:   Charlie Parker's appropriation of Gershwin's "I've Got Rhythm" with his marvelous re-write "Anthropology" is a prime example.  With-in Gershwin is Parker's own rejected thought re-worked.    Emerson gives us the blueprint to owning intellectual property that is nor ours to possess.  But what limit is there in Emerson upon the human capacity for appropriation?  I have to confess I can find no limit whatsoever, and this is beautiful but should put us on moral guard.

Creeds are the disease of the intellect, our prayers the disease of the will.

This is a blueprint for the American Religion, which finds God with-in, and not anywhere else.   Emerson is more explicit in his "Divinity School Address."  (All of Emerson's Essays read to me like a Graduation ceremony address)

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets...the understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age.  "This was Jehovah come down out of heaven.  I will kill you, if you say he was a man."  The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes...Let me abmonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models.

This is misleadingly called Christianity by American churchgoers, ministers, and scholars who should probably know better.     Yet the corruption of Christianity here is so pervasively American that it can hardly be separated from continental "creedal" forms of Protestantism and Catholicism.   Creedless creeds that go inward to find truth make up the American Religion, and they form all of our mystical and liberal religious leanings.    

At the same time there is a great triumphalism in Emerson.   One must ask:  How can a large group of people know truth if it can only be inwardly understood?

To be great is to be misunderstood.

American's are closest to the truth when they are alone and lonely.   This is marvelous and  deadly!    Like John Milton, Emerson is a "sect of one."   And he preaches being a sect of one to the masses.    This shapes the American self like no other, since each of us believe ourselves to be correct and knowledgeable, and  our neighbors to be media induced automatons, unable to think for themselves.    Emerson speaks  both to anti-establishment hippies, and the establishment itself, since nearly every American establishment wants to think of itself as an outsider.   Emerson's essay's and particularly Self Reliance flatter us, and more importantly give us the traits upon which to flatter.  

The essence of Emerson's writing is power and the self's relation to it.   Nietzsche and Kierkegaard both wrote movingly of the emergence of the individual self, but it is Emerson who can express it in terms of American frontier-ism and our desire for space (Both inward and outward).    "Space" is the prime word for the American psyche, and as we have run out of it in our cities, there has been more of a turn inwardly for it, and Emerson speaks to us regardless of our religion and politics.




   




Sunday, March 14, 2010

Genesis 6

And the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.  And it repented the LORD that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at His heart.  And the LORD said: 'I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and creeping thing, and fowl of the air; for it repenteth Me that I have made them.  Jewish Publication Society Genesis 5-7

What is the character of God?    Surely Platonic theology must always seek to downplay the plain display here of Yahweh's character that seems at odds with itself.     To get a handle on the potency of this passage it is good to read some Christian and Jewish commentary of it.  Here is the Geneva Study Bible's commentary on verse 6.

"God never repents, but he speaks in human terms, because he destroyed him, and in a way that denied him as a creature."

If you are a Calvinist (Plato influenced) Christian, the writer of Genesis must have slipped into a "human" mode of explanation since God's thoughts cannot be understood and later Scripture and theology flatly denies that God is capable of repenting his own actions.  

Wesley is just as uncomfortable with Genesis 6:6.   Here is his commentary.

"And it repented the Lord that he had made man upon the earth" — That he had made a creature of such noble powers, and had put him on this earth, which he built and furnished on purpose to be a comfortable habitation for him; and it grieved him at his heart - These are expressions after the manner of men, and must be understood so as not to reflect upon God's immutability or felicity. It doth not speak any passion or uneasiness in God, nothing can create disturbance to the eternal mind; but it speaks his just and holy displeasure against sin and sinners: neither doth it speak any change of God's mind; for with him there is no variableness; but it speaks a change of his way. When God had made man upright, he rested and was refreshed, Exodus 31:17. and his way towards him was such as shewed him well pleased with the work of his own hands; but now man was apostatized, he could not do otherwise, but shew himself displeased; so that the change was in man, not in God.

I must hasten to point out that both commentaries  are uneasy with Yahweh's unease.   "It doth not speak any passion or uneasiness in God, nothing can create disturbance to the eternal mind."   Both Wesley and the Geneva Bible manage to miss the point.   Yahweh's passion cannot be denied as he repents of his own act of creation, and his subsequent, perhaps even hasty decision to blot out man from the earth in an unparalleled act of human genocide.   Any sense of God's Immutability (A Platonic ideal) is deeply called into question by this passage, and I would submit that all of us, of every theological and secular stripe are left disturbed here.  

Historically Genesis 6 was probably written by the writer scholars call "J."   The early Old Testament was more than likely a combination of complex, subtle and not so subtle edits of various writers designated as J, E, P, and D.  J, the Yahwist, because his writings all contain Yahweh or "The Lord" may have been the earliest writer in the Bible.   This explains the cognitive dissonance evoked by certain verses, and also why some of Genesis makes more sense when the J passages are separated from the rest.   

I was fifteen when I first read Genesis 6, and nothing brought into question the theology of my Christian upbringing more than my own contemplation of Yahweh's character, particularly as it is presented here.  Nothing is more anti-theological than Yahweh who will be where he will be, and won't be where he won't (Exodus 3).   "Immutable" is a theological concept, and Yahweh does indeed seem to become immutable over time (E, P and D each present a more unchanging Yahweh with less character).   Yet even Christian theologians are disturbed by this passage.    The "J" verses are often quoted by "Open theists" as proof that God can change his mind, and that he in fact learns as he goes, giving us the choice.   God and Man Choose together.   This is close to a Jewish treatment of Genesis 6.   I recommend Arbraham Herschel's "God in Search of Man."  Most Jews by definition would be "open theists" except with-out Christ.    It's only the Platonic influenced parts of Judaism that are disrupted by this passage.  Kabbalah influenced commentaries seem to ignore it altogether, instead focusing on the numerology of the verses in a complex way.    It is easier to ignore Genesis 6 then to face it, particularly if you are theologically driven.    If you are a Christian and not an Open theist you may be disturbed by the ramifications of Yahweh's character displayed here.    One apologetics website fights Open Theism with this retort:

(Genesis 6:6).. is not a problem for Classical Christian Theism nor is it a proof text for Open Theism.  The verse simply tells us that the Lord was grieved and had sorrow in His heart for making man.  Why?  Because mankind had fallen into great sin and this grieved the Lord.  Does it mean that God didn't know that mankind would fall and become sinful?  Of course not.  Cannot God know that they would become sinners and also be grieved when it happens?  Of course.  Let me illustrate.


I have children.  I love them and provide for them.  But, they have grieved me in their various sins -- as any child will do to his parents.  I knew they would grieve me when they were born because I know they are sinners by nature.  This doesn't mean I was surprised and didn't know they would rebel when it happened.  Quite the contrary; knowing they would sin doesn't mean I won't be grieved when their rebellion and sin is finally manifested.
The open theist would have us believe that God was grieved because He was surprised or didn't know the depths of sin to which the world would fall.  But surely, even in Open Theism, God knew that people would sin.  So, this verse can't be claimed to demonstrate that God didn't know the future choices of people.

This is funny because it misses the point.   The apologetics writer here may know that his children are going to rebel against him.   But he doesn't decide to drown them out of his foreknowledge!   Yahweh is more shocked then we want to admit, and this may be disturbing to some, but I find it quite liberating.   "All too human" is a good description of Yahweh as he is presented in "J."    We can write whatever we want about Genesis 6, but we cannot change the wording of it.   All of our theological disruptions go back to it, and careful readers of the Bible can drown in it, without the ark of theology and later explanation.