By Richard N. Ostling
The Associated Press

Have you ever heard this one: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"?

The wordsmith of that phrase was Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), whose 200th birth anniversary falls on Sunday (May 25). This American philosopher was very influential in 19th-century intellectual circles but nowadays probably less so than his colleague Henry David Thoreau.

A probable reason is that Emerson's prose can be hard-going. ("Whilst thus the world will be whole, and refuses to be disparted, we seek to act partially.") As the flowery phrases and opaque abstractions flow forth, it's sometimes hard to discern what he was talking about.

Yet Emerson was a prime source of some enduringly popular ideas among Americans, as can be seen in his religious essays collected in The Spiritual Emerson by David M. Robinson of Oregon State University.

Individualism vs. self-absorption

Emerson thought Americans should unshackle themselves from Old World traditions, including those of the Bible and Christian orthodoxy. His "Transcendentalist" credo stressed self-reliance and individualism.

He insisted that each person must decide matters of right and wrong on his own: "No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it."

But speaking of "hobgoblins," this belief that morals are relative rather than absolute contrasted with his vehement absolutism in opposing slavery.

A New York Times editorialist wrote recently that Emerson's philosophy can turn into pernicious "individualism run amok" and "cruel self-absorption." The article used the Emerson anniversary to slam Republican tax cuts, unilateral foreign policy, larcenous Enron and Tyco executives, and Wall Streeters pitching bogus stock recommendations.

There's irony in the fact that the June assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association will mark the Emerson anniversary and that the denomination's Beacon Press issued Robinson's anthology.

Emerson followed his father into the Unitarian ministry but quit after only four years to become a freelance essayist and lecturer - what Robinson calls "America's most influential secular minister."

Religious views

In 1838 Emerson delivered the famously incendiary "Divinity School Address" to Harvard University's theology graduates. The talk denounced church structures, rituals and sermonizing, with Unitarians as prime targets.

The denomination's recognition in 2003 is fitting nonetheless. In Emerson's day the Unitarians rejected Christianity's definition of Jesus' divinity but otherwise considered themselves Christians. Today's Unitarians are largely Emersonians, less interested in Jesus than exploring an undefined God, preaching social moralism and elevating human potential.

For Emerson, who or what was God? Not a person, it seemed, but some mysterious energy, "the name of the Soul at the centre by which all things are what they are." The beauties of nature tumble forth, he said, and "God is but one of its ideas."

Is faith in God the way to happiness? No, said Emerson. "Nothing can bring you peace but yourself" and "nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."

Should we hope for heaven? To Emerson that was self-centered. "There is no other world" than this one. God is "here or nowhere."

What of Jesus? He was "a good man," but Christianity is guilty of "noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus," he charged, making the Nazarene into some Oriental "demigod."

Miracles? The concept as taught by Christian churches "gives a false impression; it is Monster."

And the Scriptures? They "contain immortal sentences that have been bread of life to millions," he thought, but they are spotty and lack integrity. "I look for the new Teacher."