Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. V, p. 196

Machine translation of the 1948–1954 Italian original. The original text is authoritative.

EMERSON, RALPH WALDO. – American thinker and writer, born in Boston on 25 May 1803 into a Puritan family, died in Concord on 25 April 1882. He studied at Harvard. He became a Unitarian minister; from 1827 he was a famous preacher and pastor. Later (1832), consistently with his critical-philosophical ideas, he withdrew from pastoral activity. In 1833 he made his first journey to Europe; on returning to America, in 1836 he published his first essay, Nature: an obscure and vague message for an American spiritual renewal. He followed it up in 1837 with The american scholar: a clamorous appeal for detachment from the European past. In 1838, in a lecture, he openly took a stand against Christianity, with which he finally broke. In 1841–44 he published the Essais, gaining international renown. He played a leading role in American transcendentalism, a broad movement of romantic-idealistic and immanentist-subjectivist renewal. In 1847 he delivered several lectures in England on the spirit and customs of the age; Representative men, E.’s most famous work, was extracted from these. He returned to Europe once more in 1872.

Besides religious and Enlightenment influences, E. was affected by the currents of Romanticism and transcendental idealism, imbuing everything with the mystical-sentimental pathos of his personality. The result is a cosmic-spiritual pantheism centered on man. His approach is intuitive, aphoristic, and contradictory, lacking clarity, organic coherence, and depth, which are poorly replaced by a suggestive and obscure, wholly spiritual lyricism. The profound essence of reality is a «super-soul»: a divine spirit that enlivens and binds everything. Man must be himself, reacting against every form of conformity and every mediocrity; attentive to grasping and confessing to himself his moods as felt and lived. It is a meeting of American psychologism, Puritan fervor, and European Romanticism in the exaltation of a vague moralism. Representative men are so because they are truly, profoundly men, in intimate and continual communion with the «super-soul», participants in «its infinite life, as every wave participates in the infinite pulsation of the sea». His poetry, too (the first Poems date from 1847), is rather philosophical and didactic in content. His work influenced European intuitionism and existentialism.

BIBL.: Works: The Complete Works, 12 vols., Boston 1903–1904; Journals, 10 vols., there 1909–14; as well as various correspondence. Italian translation: Essays: L'anima suprema, translated by P. Zampini Salazar, Milan 1904; L'anima, la natura, la saggezza, translated by M. Cossa, Bari 1911; La guida della vita, translated by D. Petroello, Turin 1923; Uomini rappresentativi, translated by A. Bancotti, there 1934. – Studies: J. E. Cabot, Messals of W. E., 2 vols., Boston 1887; M. Dugard, R. W. E., sa vie et son oeuvre, Paris 1907; G. W. Cooke, A bibliography of R. W. E., New York 1908; P. Sakmann, E.s Geisteswelt, Stuttgart 1927; R. Michaud, La vie inspirée d'E., Paris 1930. Further references in W. Ziegenfuss, Philosophen - Lexikon, I, Berlin 1949, pp. 280–83.

Giacomo Seleri

(from M. Dugard, R. W. E., sa vie et son oeuvre, Paris 1907) EMERSON, RALPH WALDO – Portrait.