Through the Flaming Sword

On Reading the Bible

This quote is from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 essay Nature:

“Every scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth,” is the fundamental law of criticism.

It’s as if Emerson had taken this principle directly from early Quaker writings, and maybe he had. Or maybe from Friends he knew. Or perhaps this is a principle that the Unitarians of his time shared with Friends, for Emerson, like many of the Transcendentalists, started out as a Unitarian minister. I don’t know enough about 19th century Unitarianism to know the answer.

Throughout this essay, Emerson has been making a case for a spiritual understanding of and relationship with Nature as a text, a sacred scripture written by God. In the paragraph that has this quote, he goes on to say:

A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text. By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.

This harkens back to the idea expressed in part one of this series on Transcendentalism, that: “In proportion as we receive this spirit, we possess within ourselves the explanation of what we see. We discern more and more of God in everything, from the frail flower to the everlasting stars.”

Creation is the first, and still continuing, divine revelation, and when embraced with arms of Spirit, it reveals the truth and beauty of the Divine Mind. That Mind is the Logos, the Word, the source and wisdom and purpose of evolution.

Of course, Darwin had not published On the Origin of Species yet (1859), so Emerson had only a limited intuition of how nature was evolving. But he had a deep understanding of how it teaches.