The Divinity School Address

This address was given to the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School in 1838 by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The reason in which I believe the dean and staff of the school became so enraged and decided to ban Emerson from speaking at the college for 30 years is he, in a sense, undid all the students had been taught about religion and God, he undermined them. Emerson believed that if one was a truly good person, with a just heart and moral integrity one was good with God. One's physical actions were not as important as one's character and could do as one pleased if he was such a character. He also made a big point in the fact that he believes that religion and Christianity has been somewhat lost in translation and has succumbed to corruption and misinterpretation as many things do. It lost the original sense of the foundations on which it was built. "The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes." The God that is built up in our heads in merely a fantasy, he does not see and necessarily believe in all of the divine miracles that are being told to us, and that the figure of God should not be the dominant, driving force of religion. The act of surrendering yourself entirely is also an unattractive element in religion, completely forgetting who you are and adopting God and his ways and his teachings as your own seems like a horrible ideal. It is the way in which the church captures individuals into blindly following and accepting everything they have been told and by doing this they become a man of God. Of course all of this is not what the head of a school educating future priests and clergymen want their pupils to be taught. They want them move forward and on from the school and begin to spread the words of God and the speech that Emerson gave threatened that. The possibility that the students’ entire education and time at the school had been compromised was too much of a liability and therefore they banned him for a time from speaking at the school. They couldn't afford one man dissuading any of the students from doing the only thing they had been taught and trained to do while at the Harvard Divinity School.