Season 4 Podcast 64 Self-Reliance Concept 9 God
Season 4 Podcast 64 Self-Reliance Concept 9 God
I have selected twelve concepts from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Self-Reliance. Each concept expands the virtues and variations of Self-Reliance or warns of the vices of the ways we forfeit Self Reliance:
· Concept 1: Blind Obedience
· Concept 2: False Charity
· Concept 3: Truth
· Concept 4: Faith
· Concept 5: Non-Conformist
· Concept 6: To Thine Own Self Be True
· Concept 7: Self-Reliance
· Concept 8: Character
· Concept 9: God
· Concept 10: Solitude
The above principles are not presented in any kind of order. They are randomly selected from Emerson’s Essay. The ninth principle below taught by Emerson could easily be Number One:
· Number Nine: God.
No discussion on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Self Reliance would be complete without including his views on God. Emerson, who was a freethinker, integrated a belief in God with self-reliance.
It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.
Emerson graduated from Harvard Divinity School and became a Unitarian Minister like his father. Emerson, however, fell out with the church and resigned his position. Influenced by his brother, his views on Christianity were significantly altered, and when he was invited by Harvard to speak at the Divinity School, he so angered them from his independent thinking that they didn’t invite him back for 30 years.
A PBS presentation entitled “God in America: People: Ralph Waldo Emerson,” quoted Historian Grant Wacker’s description of Emerson's belief in God. Wacker, also a Harvard Graduate, taught at Duke Divinity School. Professor Wacker described Emerson’s religious views in the following way:
"God was best understood as a spirit, an ideal, a breath of life; everywhere and always filling the world with the inexhaustible power of the divine presence. God was as close as the atmosphere, as intimate as the 'blowing clover and the falling rain."
I particularly like Professor Wacker’s description because it is validated throughout Emerson’s essay Self- Reliance. In Emerson’s view without God there would be no self-reliance. Linda is going to share five brief quotes from Emerson’s essay.
1. The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the center of the present thought; and new date and new create the whole.
2. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.
3. Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within.
4. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends.
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