The Encyclopedia of Protestantism: Volume 2 D–K
Early Years
Born May 25, 1803, in what was once the staunchly Puritan town of Boston, Emerson was the second of four surviving sons of Ruth Haskins Emerson and William Emerson (1769–1811), minister to Boston’s First Church. The Emersons descended from a long line of New England clerics, but in contrast to the Calvinist faith of his Puritan forebears, Emerson’s father aligned himself with the liberal Unitarian wing of the the Congregational churches. After his father died in 1811, Emerson and his brothers were raised primarily by their mother and a charismatic aunt, Mary Moody Emerson (1774–1863) who was for years her nephew’s chief religious confidante and mentor.
At the age of fourteen Emerson entered Harvard College, where he was trained in the standard curriculum of the classics, rhetoric, history, English, and theology. Though only a middling student, he demonstrated some flair as an aspiring poet and essayist. It was in college, however, that he first began keeping the voluminous journal that served throughout his life as a rich resource for his essays, lectures, and addresses.
Here he was also introduced to the new German school of biblical scholarship—the HIGHER CRITICISM—from the popular lecturer Edward Everett (1794–1865).
In 1825, after much indecision, Emerson resolved to enter the ministry, whereupon he began formal study at Harvard’s Divinity School. Licensed to preach the following year, he served as a supply preacher for congregations in eastern Massachusetts until his ordination in 1829 at Boston’s historic Second Church. Having meanwhile married a beautiful young heiress named Ellen Tucker, Emerson now seemed launched on a happy and prosperous career, but after a mere sixteen months of marriage, Ellen succumbed to tuberculosis, leaving her husband adrift and disconsolate. The next year, in protest over his church’s insistence on the traditional administration of the COMMUNION rite, Emerson resigned his pastorate and embarked on his first extended journey abroad.
In the wake of Ellen’s death in 1831, Emerson underwent a kind of religious transformation, of which the first fruit was the publication in 1836 of his book, Nature. Part sermon, part prose-poem, Nature was Emerson’s earliest attempt to put his new romantic religious and philosophical vision into words. In the weeks following the appearance of Nature, Emerson began meeting informally with several of his friends, mostly Unitarian clergymen, to discuss recent views on art, religion, and science. The meetings soon attracted the attention of a wider association that formed the nucleus of the transcendentalist movement.
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