Richard Weaver on Emerson

From a collection of Southern essays by Richard Weaver, (which I might add, is a beautifully bound book that lays open flat without being broken in), some comments on the Transcendentalist movement in American literature, particularly its heretical and catastrophic view that man is naturally good:

It is not easy to muster oneself to attack Emerson, the prophet of the "over-soul" and the teacher of self-reliance to generations of Americans. He appears serenely possessed of the truth, and his delivery of what he has to say is winsome. But the destructiveness of his influence can now be traced. 

[... Weaver encountered the words of] a Southern essayist, roughly contemporary with Emerson, that "the theory of the natural goodness of man will blow up any society which is founded upon it." [...] 

The denial of evil is a very great heresy. If we are interested in classifying, it is a phase of the Gnostic heresy, whose chief impulse, originating in arrogance and egocentrism, is to substitute a dream world for the structure of reality. [... Emerson] depicted a world in which a divine nature and a Godlike man looked upon each other with mutual satisfaction. Thus for Emerson the world was monistic. The great struggle between good and evil, taught by the religion which he gave up, and dramatized by the greatest literature, does not exist because the Great Adversary, the power of evil, does not essentially exist. To be natural is to be good, and all things work harmoniously by divine prompting.

[...] It is interesting to note that the elder Henry James, father of the great novelist, saw through Emerson in this respect. Though professing an admiration for him, he stated that Emerson was "all his days an arch traitor" to the existing order. He was, James went on to say, "fundamentally treacherous to our civilization without being at all aware himself of the fact." This was because Emerson had no conscience; that is to say, no consciousness of evil in himself. It is the nature of conscience, James pointed out, to cry, "God be merciful on me, a sinner," but Emerson was incapable of passing that kind of judgment on himself. "He recognized no god outside of himself and his interlocutor," and what he understood as holiness was simply innocence.

[...] Emerson had simply banned the problem of evil from consciousness. Having decided that there was nothing divine outside himself to issue demands or pronounce rebukes, he arrived, not at victory but complacency.

I like Weaver's thoughts here, especially highlighting the grave error in refusing to believe there is a capacity for evil in mankind, especially in ourselves, which he describes as lacking a conscience. A firm belief and confidence in our own goodness turns us into monsters who do evil without remorse, for remorse requires knowledge of the capacity of evil in ourselves. Sometimes we become so bent on believing that we are good, and have the inordinate need to be right, that we ignore the plain truth of the duplicitous and malicious motives within ourselves, a presumption that turns us into real monsters: persons who believe they can do no wrong and can become saints by merely being and asserting themselves.

For those interested in reading the whole essay, it is called "Contemporary Southern Literature" (1959).