The Carolinian Trail

January 25, 2001

First published on the now-defunct website, Themestream, as an essay, "A different beauty from Emerson's."

Tonight I am grappling with Nature; not with the universe itself, but with Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous 1836 essay by that name. I've always liked his poetry. And his ideas, embodied as brief, sanitized quotations, sounded appealing. I've even read a description of his concept of transcendentalism. Though unconvinced, I remained interested.

Now I have actually voyaged through the terrain of Emerson's philosophy in his own words. Nature starts off innocently enough (or perhaps I should say naīvely) with idealistic assertions about how the universe touches (or should touch us) on a daily basis. But in the middle of Chapter III, "Beauty," I realize I'm in for a ride, and the horse's name is Assumption.

"Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue," he asserts.

For this to be true we must assume not only that God exists, but that everything requires a meaning, all meaning is rooted in God, and God is moral. Or something like that. By the time I finish reading, Emerson has carried me away from quaint intimations about the New England countryside to peaks and chasms of rhetoric about spiritual principles too grand and perilous to survey in one evening.

I've been thinking a lot about beauty lately. In fact you might say it has been an obsession throughout my life. In my former tenure as a devout evangelical Christian, when every action required justification, I tried to explain my artistic and literary inclinations with the thought, "I want to create something beautiful for God." To study nature was to study "the work of the Creator." Art and nature were things some of my religious friends discounted as temporal and valueless, so I had to rationalize my interest.

I no longer believe everything must mean something, that every action must be morally justified, or that God, if he or she exists, is paying much attention.

I think I prefer Annie Dillard's assertion about God, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

You see the creatures die, and you know you will die. And one day it occurs to you that you must not need life. Obviously. And then you're gone. You have finally understood that you're dealing with a maniac.

Far from being a despairing view, this requires us to make the most of today. We have the capacity for choice, benevolence and joy, and we can do no better than to exercise it.

Dillard: "These are our few live seasons. Let us live them purely as we can, in the present."

One of the things I choose, in which I see meaning, is to honour and protect that which is beautiful. And perhaps create some beauty when I can. Whether I do this for beauty's own sake, for the Divinity within creation, for a personal God, or for myself, I am never certain. It is just something I value, which doesn't make me any better than people who for whatever reason value something else. But I believe it makes my life better than one governed by apathy or a "torpid spirit."

The important thing about religion or spirituality is not what we believe, but how it bears out in the way we carry ourselves through life and treat the world around us.

Perhaps I will agree with Emerson on this point: "The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both." As long as he doesn't insist on telling me what that truth might be, absolutely.

I like much of what he has to say. Enough of it that I might read this essay again soon, and try to understand more of his meaning. But I have trouble with his notion of reading too much meaning into nature, rather than appreciating it for what it is; or expecting too much reasonable communication from the vast and incomprehensible divine power I encountered while reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

It's a relief to find myself applying critical thought to whatever I read (I never used to do this). One doesn't have to decide transcendentalism, the Bible or anything else is altogether correct to appreciate and learn from it.

Emerson begins Nature with this argument: "The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?"

Surely he would appreciate us taking this to heart for ourselves also, 165 years later.