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

“Alone is heaven”. It would be difficult to find a more succinct summary of Emerson’s conception of spiritual individualism. [170] Such an understanding and summons of Man remained the essential core of Emerson’s philosophy until the quiet end of his life. The point to recognize here, is that Emerson returned from the Old World to the New World — and to the young United States of America — more reconciled to his own individual self. Kireyevsky, coming from Czarist, post-Decembrist Russia, had seen the “present” in Central Europe, and returned to develop a renewed recognition and appraisal of Old Holy Russia’s past — and potent future. Emerson had come from the “future”, the New World of America, through the ne plus ultra of the Pillars of Hercules, [171] and reviewed parts of the West’s own historical past in the Old World: Malta, Sicily, Rome (Pope Gregory XVI in the Sistine Chapel), Florence, Padua, Venice, Geneva, Paris, London, Edinburgh, Liverpool; thence returning to New York. He returned, reinvigorated, to embrace his own life in America, in his own “present”. The “past” [in Europe] was for Emerson instructive and informative, but essentially lifeless; the “present” to Kireyevsky was educational, but deadening; returning to a Russia whose deep past of traditions, customs and lore he soon came to herald. Emerson’s individualism could stand in the American “present” and live into the future; Kireyevsky’s rejection of Europe’s “present” with its psychic and social isolation, had him look into the past, towards the community, traditions and heritage of Old Holy Russia — and its potency for the future.

It is helpful, in order to understand Emerson’s thought — and much of America’s spiritual history — to consider in what other directions Emerson might have turned, during his lifetime, in the United States of America during the nineteenth-century, to come to a personal resolution with the deeper questions of meaning in life. New England, while it had some of the oldest transplanted customs, ideas and traditions from the Old World to the New, was not itself the revered, old sourceful site for most of them. Of course, the New World had its own story; but its intellectual life was essentially transported from the Old World ‘in the minds’ of the settlers and colonists — it was not one deep with its own philosophic age. The bulk of the religious ideas by which the colonists to the New World lived, had come from distant lands, from Jerusalem to Canterbury. The New World was religiously dependent on the Old; such traditions as it had, were, in the main, importations into a “strange new world”; they were not inherent to it.