Ralph Waldo Emerson The following is an excerpt of an article by Frederick Turner and originally published in the May 2003 issue of The Smithsonian Magazine.

A gift seems to have been granted to certain people in the moments in history we call renaissance. One can hear the gift in the voice of that time—a confident exuberance, accepting the tragic aspect of life, but also full of hope and belief;capable of a genial irony but devoid of cynicism and academic intellectual vanity. It is a voice that more cynical or exhausted ages find annoying. Emerson is a renaissance voice.

Living in the afterglow of the New England Puritan age of faith, and in the dawn of America’s political, artistic and exploring power, Emerson combined a boisterous energy with a rational and judicious piety. Too intellectually adventurous to remain a Unitarian minister (he became fascinated by Hindu theology), he did not abandon his religious tradition altogether. At the center of his insights was a vision of nature’s intimate relationship with the human and the divine.

In 1836, Emerson caused a stir when he published a long essay called Nature. At 33 years of age, he had finally broken with his church, moved from Boston, where he was born and grew up, to Concord, Massachusetts, and set out to create his own theology. The ideas Emerson put forth in a second, more prophetic essay also entitled Nature, published in 1844, boil down to two concepts:

First, that a purely scientific understanding of our physical being does not preclude a spiritual existence; Second, that nature embodies a divine intelligence.

Reconciling those views, he argued that we need fear neither scientific progress nor the grand claims of religion.

In his own time, Emerson was accused of being a pantheist, or a believer in the idea that nature is God, but that accusation misses its mark. For Emerson, nature is not God but the body of God’s soul—nature, he writes, is mind precipitated. Emerson felt that to fully realize one’s role in this respect is to be in paradise. He ends Nature with these words:

Every moment instructs, and every object; for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence until after a long time.