Mary Moody Emerson And the One That Got Away

Mary Moody Emerson. Defender of the faith. Brilliant intellect and determined theologian. Mary Moody Emerson, the aunt of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was keen and incisive in intellect, literate, and unrelentingly orthodox. She strove mightily through the force of her convictions to preserve her nephew for the Christian faith, and she filled her journal, his journal, and their correspondence with her thoughtfully reasoned “apologia” for that faith. Emerson said of her, “She was as great an influence in my life as Greece or Rome.”

Mary Moody Emerson was a spitfire, a strict pietist, a sharp-tongued social misfit who spoke her mind. She spent years in the Emerson home teaching the Emerson children and nurturing in them orthodox belief. “Aunt Mary wrote the prayers which first my brother William and then I read aloud morning and evening … and they still sound in my ear with their prophetic and apocalyptic ejaculations.… I could not find any examples or treasuries of piety so high-toned, so profound, or promising such rich influence as my remembrances of her conversation and letters,” Emerson recalled.

This irrepressible defender of the faith wanted desperately to pass on her orthodox religious heritage. Born in 1774, she was one of several children of the Reverend William Emerson and Phebe (Bliss) Emerson of Concord. As a two-year-old child she was given to a maiden aunt during the Revolutionary War, perhaps to lighten the family burden. Mary remained there after her father died and her mother remarried, working hard and finding little outlet for her intellectual or emotional inclinations. At age nineteen she returned home to help her remarried mother raise a second family, and at age thirty-seven she moved to the home of her deceased brother William, to help raise his six fatherless children. There she became one of the chief influences in the life of young Ralph Waldo Emerson. Probably it never occurred to her to pursue an active intellectual profession of her own, but all her later correspondence with her maturing nephew suggests that she should certainly have done so.

She awed Emerson by her grasp of the “new ideas” that were filtering into New England from the German transcendentalists, and she grappled with these ideas in her journals and letters. Her early reading, Emerson records, was Milton, Young, Akenside, Samuel Clarke, Jonathan Edwards, and always the Bible. Later, when the new or “rediscovered” ideas of transcendentalism and neo-platonism filtered into New England, she added to her accomplishments Plato, Plotinus, Marcus Antoninus, Stewart, Coleridge, Cousin, Herder, Locke, Madame DeStael, Channing, Mackintosh, Byron. “Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus—how venerable and organic as Nature they are in her mind!” Emerson observed. “What a subject is her life and mind for the finest novel! When I read Dante the other day, and [read] his paraphrases [of] Christ or Jehovah, whom do you think I was reminded of? Whom but Mary Emerson and eloquent theology?”

Emerson’s respect for this woman made possible her theological influence over him. He listened, and heeded for a while, her impassioned and acute defenses of the Trinity, biblical revelation, the necessity of the Cross, the historical validity of the Resurrection, the providence of God, the uniqueness of the Holy Spirit. Whenever they exchanged letters, she took an opportunity to urge him toward belief. She did not spare him in her criticism of his increasingly unorthodox ideas. Of his exchanging the Holy Spirit for the universal Spirit of transcendentalism, she wrote: “He talks of the holy Ghost. God Mercy what a subject!… It was lost, stifled; it was regiven embodied in the assumed humanity of the son of God.…” Of his plans to attend a liberal school: “Would to God thou wouldst not to Cambridge. True, they use the name Christo [but] it is but a garnished sepulchre where may be found some relics of the body of Jesus—some grosser parts which he took not at his ascent!” Of the debate over the Scriptures: “Disputed texts have an antiquity of indisputable authority. They were early begun and have stood the test of almost the whole age of Christianity.” Point for point she countered him as he moved toward liberalism.

And when he made his decision, and left the church ministry rather than administer the Lord’s Supper any longer, she lamented, “It is far sadder than the translation of a soul by death of the body to lose Waldo as I have lost him.… I do believe he has no fixed faith in a personal God! His letters have been confused and dark … annulling a simple rite which has bound the followers of Jesus together for ages and announced his resurrection.… No, he never loved his holy offices—and it is well he has left them.”

After Emerson’s disconcertingly unorthodox Harvard Divinity School address five years later, in 1838, Mary Moody Emerson saw that her work was finished. She withdrew from her nephew and retreated into idiosyncrasy and old age. At her death, few appreciated or mourned the loss of her remarkable mind. Perhaps she lived too long, and certainly she lived without tangible reward.

But Emerson never forgot her, or her teachings. “The present is ever too strong for the past,” he wrote, “and in so many late years she has been only a wreck … [so that] few know or care for her genius. Yet I who cling always to her writings, forget everything else very fast.… Her genius was the purest, and though I have learned to discriminate and drop [her] huge alloy of theology and metaphysics, her letters and journals charm me still as thirty years ago, and honor the American air.”

She died aged, disappointed, but triumphantly Christian. Her journal, which Emerson saved and excerpted in his biographical sketch of her, records her love of the Redeemer-God time and again. Emerson seems to have misunderstood her theology, but never the essential spirit of her faith, for he quotes long passages from her journal declaring her love for God. “Alive with God—’tis rapture!”

How unsettling to think that Emerson, having exchanged his transcendental faith for realism in old age, and having become increasingly disillusioned near the end of his life, may have seen only too well the tragedy of his repudiation of that Christian faith which Aunt Mary had so urged upon him. “The sad realist is content in keeping his hard nut,” he said of himself. “I can well omit this parish propensity for creeds, pictures, Westminster Catechism, Athanasian Creeds, Egyptian Christian, Mahometan or Hindu paradises or hells. I will not be the fool of fancy nor a child with toys.” But he senses that he has lost something, after all, as he reminisces about the old orthodoxy. “When the game is run down, when the enemy lies cold in his blood at our feet, we are alarmed at our solitude. We would gladly recall the life that so offended us; the face seems no longer that of an enemy.”

Did he know, at last, that Mary Moody Emerson was right?

Nancy Barcus is assistant professor of English at Houghton College, Houghton, New York.

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