Towards the Spiritual Convergence of America and Russia: American Mind and Russian Soul, American Individuality and Russian Community, and the Potent Alchemy of National Characteristics

It is of great significance and meaning that Emerson uses the “old fable… that there is One Man”. For by doing so he brings the question of the identity of Man in America (and the American Scholar as “Man-Thinking” [151] in America) into direct association with the deepest spiritual traditions and heritage of Occidental Man, of which the Russians are also progeny. Emerson, also, embraces an idea of Man in America which is far older, grander and deeper than America itself. It is not the American Man which Emerson heralds; it is the American Man. So that, this “quintessential American”, this author of America’s “Intellectual and Spiritual Declarations of Independence”, solicits for his use and meaning, an idea of Man which far surpasses in time and heritage, any temporary, historical, lesser conceptions of “American”. [152] This is inherent in the two addresses of Emerson, from which citations above were made.

But we must understand more fully what Ralph Waldo Emerson meant when he thought of the inner constitution of this “One Man”.

The fundamental idea of Man which Emerson, and Kireyevsky and Khomyakov embraced — it also constitutes the core anthropology of Orthodox Christianity — was that Man was a potential God, a small god incarnate. Men and women of Mankind could participate in divinity; they could bring, as it has been described, “the spark of God”, within their selves, into bright realization. This is clearly and unambiguously expressed in the Orthodox Christian doctrine of deification, apotheosis. In Kireyevsky and Khomyakov, the idea of Man was basically influenced — if not principally determined — by this Orthodox anthropology. It is an idea which constitutes, essentially, the highest spiritual idea, and ideal, of Man in the history of the Occident It is the idea of Man “made in the image and likeness of God”. [153] This great idea, this tremendous ideal — which sources ultimately, in the historical record for Occidental Man, in the “wisdom of man” of Zarathustra [154] — constitutes the intellectual and spiritual core of Emerson’s summons to Man in America. The ideal of Man to Ralph Waldo Emerson was not based on the Deist anthropology of Jefferson [155]; it sources, ultimately, in what could be called the anthroposophy of Zarathustra. [156]

While the idea of divinity in man is, of course, not historically unique to Emerson; it was uncommon enough, in the America of Emerson’s time, to have brought about much controversy in the society around him, into which it was spoken. In Russia, on the contrary, in “Holy Russia”, the idea of deification, was central to the teachings of the Orthodox Church; so that for this reason, Kireyevsky and Khomyakov were able, essentially, to embrace — from their own perspectives — this religious tradition and its teachings. As is written in a current, popular (English-language) study of the Orthodox Church: