7 - “Degenerate effeminacy” and the making of a masculine spirituality in the sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Summary

For a group of writers and ministers in mid-Victorian Britain, Christianity had about it a “muscular” quality, though, perhaps as Charles Kingsley suggests, the adjectives “manly” and “manful” might be more appropriate labels for the version of Christianity that “represented a strategy for commending Christian virtue by linking it with more interesting secular notions of moral and physical prowess” (Vance i). Indeed, in his Christmas sermon at Cambridge in 1864, Kingsley chaffed against the term “muscular,” preferring in its stead “manful”: “We have heard much of late about ‘Muscular Christianity.’ A clever expression … For myself, I do not know what it means … Its first and better meaning may be simply a healthful and manful Christianity; one which does not exalt the feminine virtues to the exclusion of the masculine” (quoted in Martin, 220). As Norman Vance suggests, that meant infusing Christianity with the “rough and ready tradition of physical sturdiness” (11), social reform, and an insistence on the whole person. A generation earlier and an ocean apart, another minister wrestled with the meaning of a “manful Christianity,” fusing secular and Christian traditions and constructing a religion that affirmed the manly or masculine in ways that both foreshadow and diverge from British muscular Christianity, and that allow us to understand better the links between the religious, social, and personal anxieties that pervaded Anglo-American thought during the nineteenth century.

Between the years 1826 and 1832, a young Ralph Waldo Emerson contended with personal and social forces that threatened to cast him into a maelstrom of doubt and anxiety about his position in society and the universe.