Emerson would make the hourglass of history disappear if he could because the grains that have fallen through that hourglass have not fallen into the kind of heap that he likes to look at. He fears that the next heap of grains will look the same as the last heap, and so his solution is to make that first heap disappear so that what happens has nothing in history to reprove it. That’s my theory. His paradise is a world in which whatever one does will not effectuate its natural results; or if it does, recourse to history for the purpose of admonishment will not be adverted to. But he cannot entirely believe in his wish. Who can be fully convinced that a worldview can prevent facts from causing logical, inexorable effects? Or that history can be so effaced that no one brings it forward to censure someone? A kind of nirvana is needed to leap into. This is why Emerson tries to transcend. By the style he employs, he tries to infuse power into his words to convince himself and others that transcending is possible to do. Poets like Wordsworth have tried, by the use of sheer style, to transcend. Even contemporary 21st century musicians have admitted trying the same. They try to believe that Art is capable of accomplishing some sort of Redemption from whatever it is they shrink from or tremble to think about, be it present personal unease, or the unhappy future that impenitent sinners suspect might be their lot to one day endure forever. On page x of the Introduction we read, “We are now men and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.” The Emersonian Man is just another breed within the species of Humanistic Man, advancing in his private effort to redeem himself from the upshot of history. Not only by his cryptic communication does Emerson try to transcend. He tries to do it by well placed capital letters on certain words. The same thing may be observed in the fiction of Joseph Conrad. Some Christian writers use capital letters for emphasis and beauty. But that is not the same thing, for their compositions point to an actual redemption for man and an extant transcendent Godhead to make it happen. Emerson eggs himself on in spite of gnawing doubts that God has not and will not give to man the superhuman capabilities that are necessary for self-transcendence. The truth is that man stays inside his little bubble of life and reaps repercussions from history until God calls his soul to eternity to wait and see what the final judgment has in store, which will be based on nothing less than history and man’s reaction to it. In other words, that Jesus died a satisfactory death for the sins of others is a historical fact; whether the sinner has faith in him or not will decide whether the sinner will be judged or not for unbelief and sinful deeds. “History does have meaning; the past brings forth the present and the present influences the future. Something happens in history because of a previous effect…Cause-and-effect does exist, not only in science but in meaningful, significant human events…Just as Joshua stood in judgment against the Amorites when their iniquity was full, Jesus will come in flaming judgment on the world when the iniquity of the era of the Gentiles is full” (Francis Schaeffer, Joshua and the Flow of Biblical History, pp. 148, 151.) This, mainly, is what Emerson tried to believe was ‘alien to the spirit of Christ.’ This is why even the Trinity-denying Unitarian Church was too ‘creed-oriented’ for him. The man did not like the flow of biblical history: how it had flowed from the past into the present, and how it was about to flow from prophecy into the future.
Emerson’s capitalization convinces me that in his essays he is trying to believe, and trying to make us believe, in his unbelievable postulate concerning the ability of man to be his own and sole solution. Capital letters to begin key words do not always evince the hubris of an outrageous proposition, though, as I have already alluded to. Take James Killen, for example, Emerson’s contemporary scholar on the other side of the Atlantic, a man who truly deserves to be republished and read: “It may be that the complex mechanism of Jehovah’s Providences can only be rightly appreciated by those Seraphic Spirits who have had long experience of the Almighty’s proceedings” (James Killen, The Inhabitants of Heaven, p. 303.) This much can be said from reading both the immediate context and Killen’s book at large, as compared with Emerson’s History: Killen’s capitals are used to embellish substance; Emerson’s capitals are used in place of or even as substance. The writings of Octavius Winslow and Beilby Porteus could be quoted to shame Emerson some more and to the same purpose.
