Nature

Greenham, David

Abstract

© Cambridge University Press 2014. To begin to understand what the term nature meant to the intellectual culture of Emerson’s time it is perhaps best to start with William Ellery Channing, a prominent New England Unitarian of the 1820s and 1830s. In a late essay, “Self-Culture” (1838), Channing uses the word nature in ways that would be largely familiar to his audience, despite the fact that three quite different meanings are at work. For example, on facing pages Channing writes about “outward nature” and “that nature which is common to all men.” The first meaning suggests the wider world in which man finds himself; the second, the essence man finds inside himself. He then talks of “our common nature,” meaning that which inheres in all men. Any potential confusion is, of course, overcome because all these meanings were then, and remain, in common currency. They are straightforwardly discriminated by context. Even so, in Emerson’s concept of nature this potential ambiguity between inner and outer was explored and exploited. For the Unitarians, nature, be it inner or outer, particular or universal, was still but one part of God’s revelation; the other part was the Bible. In a letter to his aunt Mary Moody Emerson in October 1823, Emerson excitedly summarizes the conclusion of one of Channing’s sermons: “Revelation was as much a part of the order of things as any other event in the Universe” (L 1:138–39). Mary Moody Emerson was of an altogether less liberal strain of New England unorthodoxy. She replies sharply, “I can make nothing of Channings [sic] saying ‘Rev. was in the order of events as much as anything.’ What order? matter? like the growth of apple or animal? Civil? But all such order has been a return to barbarism? … but all we have to do with rev. is its miracles as they are the foundation of our faith. Now they must be of a different order of things from any thing we experience in the stated order?” For Mary, the rational Unitarian has reduced the world to a unity, whereas she is holding onto a Puritan tradition that starkly contrasts the material and the spiritual worlds. One world we can know, the other we can have faith in; only the latter properly matters.

Citation

Greenham, D. (2011). Nature. In W. Mott (Ed.), Ralph Waldo Emerson in Context (84-91). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139235594.014

• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2011
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 84-91
• Book Title: Ralph Waldo Emerson in Context
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139235594.014
• Keywords: Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist, transcendentalist movement
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/925387
• Publisher URL: http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/american-literature/ralph-waldo-emerson-context