Emerson and Secularism

Perry Miller argued that the two strands of seventeenth-century Calvinism—the rational strand urging social conformity and the ecstatic strand finding in nature evidences of God and Providence—secularized into Unitarianism and Transcendentalism. Edwards’s ecstasy flowed into Emerson’s “transparent eye-ball,” a mellowing of Calvinism to what would seem infidelity: that we can all be “part or particle of God.” This secularization narrative of “Edwards to Emerson” became, for a long time, the very terms by which the literary history of the United States was narrated. This essay positions Emerson as a participant in and influence on the development of basic tenets of the secularization thesis, the main narrative at the heart of secularism as an ideology of Western modernity. In examining how he articulates the dialectic between religion and the secular, there can be seen the emergence of American forms of “spirituality,” including a category of belief now termed “spiritual but not religious.”