Divinity School Address

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The "Divinity School Address" is the common name for the speech Ralph Waldo Emerson gave to the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School on July 15, 1838. In the address, Emerson adumbrates many of the tenets of Transcendentalism against a more conventional Unitarian theology. He argues that moral intuition is a better guide to the moral sentiment than religious doctrine, and insists upon the presence of true moral sentiment in each individual, while discounting the necessity of belief in the historical miracles of Jesus.^[1]

The address touched off a major controversy among American Unitarian theologians, primarily about the necessity of belief in the historical truth of the Biblical miracles, but involving other secondary issues as well. The Unitarian establishment of New England and of the Harvard Divinity School rejected Emerson's teachings outright, with Andrews Norton of Harvard publishing especially forceful retorts, including one calling Transcendentalism "the latest form of infidelity." Henry Ware, Jr., one of Emerson's mentors as a divinity student more than a decade prior, published The Personality of the Deity in order to argue against Emerson's position.