Emerson, Agassiz, and the Mind of God

Guest blog post by Christoph Irmscher, professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington, and author of the recently published biography, Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science.

In one of his lesser-known poems, Ralph Waldo Emerson confessed that while he admired the outfit worn by priests, such masquerade was not for him:

I like a church; I like a cowl;
I love a prophet of the soul;
And on my heart monastic aisles
Fall like sweet strains, or pensive smiles;
Yet not for all his faith can see
Would I that cowled churchman be.

(Emerson, “The Problem”)

Emerson’s clipped lines reveal the dilemma in which he found himself, an ex-minister who had quit his job because he didn’t want to lose the substance of his faith while he was “seeking the shadow,” as he said, beautifully, in the last sermon he ever gave. Emerson was convinced that the human mind was equipped to understand “the substance” of the universe; priestly vestments or rituals (such as the Lord’s Supper) were nothing but a distraction in his quest for such understanding. And while Emerson’s “unchurchy religiousness” (to use a phrase from one of Max Eastman’s essays) needed no ministry, he gladly accepted help from one of his closest allies, the scientist Louis Agassiz, whose biography I have just published.

Agassiz was a minister’s son, as Emerson was. Born in Switzerland in 1807, Agassiz grew up under his father’s ever-watchful eye. Science was not among the career choices Pasteur Agassiz, a meticulous, exacting, unforgiving man, had in mind for his son. Like the smug Calvinist parson in “The Wonderful ‘One-Hoss-Shay,’” a satirical poem by Agassiz’s friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Rev. Rodolphe Agassiz would obsess about the smallest details, with the crucial difference that his project wasn’t a minister’s carriage but his son’s life. However, just as the carriage of Holmes’s parson eventually collapsed, so did Rodolphe Agassiz’s plans for Louis. The son rebelled against his father and obtained a doctoral degree in natural history from the University of Munich. Even if Louis’s first real teaching position was in Neuchâtel, close to where he had been born and close to his father’s vicarage, the seeds of discontent came to fruition when he left Europe for the United States in 1846. Louis never returned. And while his ideas on race, evolution, and taxonomy—hopelessly misguided, from a modern perspective—have eliminated him from the pantheon of truly great scientists, Professor Agassiz’s legacy nevertheless lingers, and in no small degree through the influence he had on the Transcendentalists.

After his arrival, the Bostonians did notice that Louis Agassiz, now a new professor at Harvard University, was not of the “churchgoing kind,” as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow noted in his journal. But he had something else to offer. Just what that was (and how much it would have resonated with someone like Ralph Waldo Emerson) is clear from a small text I found, a few years ago, among Agassiz’s papers in Harvard’s Houghton Library. It is one of the few Agassiz manuscripts not concerned with scientific matters, an explication of Psalm 8, lines 3-4: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained, what is man, that thou art mindful of him?”

Louis Agassiz and the Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce
contemplating the location of Cambridge, Mass., on the globe.
Photograph by Antoine Sonrel (Collection of Christoph Irmscher)

We do not know what had induced his hand at biblical exegesis; nor do we know why he had chosen this particular passage. But it is evident that he cared deeply about his subject. His writing is intense, at times lyrical, at times delirious: phrases pile upon phrases, sentences stretch to the length of entire paragraphs. When it comes to the point he wants to make, though, Agassiz doesn’t waste time. For him, the psalmist’s humility before God was a thing of the past, the distant past. Thanks to the revelations of modern science, the skies to us don’t look the way they did to King David. “We cannot if we would, we would not if we could, put out of mind the knowledge which the intervening centuries of study and observation have established.” Astronomy, for example, had made the universe seem more glorious than ever before: “There is now seen an order more extensive and perfect in the positions and motions in the heavenly bodies than the Psalmist could have dreamed of.” If God’s wisdom is infinite, so is that of man who comprehends it all, and when Agassiz says “man,” he really means “scientist”: “The mind of man profoundly considered is as vast and stupendous a creation as an outward firmament of worlds.” The stars in the skies cannot understand the nature of their own existence; the scientist, however, can.

As a case in point, Agassiz mentions the astronomer Urbain Le Verrier (1811–1877), who in 1846 had, through the power of mathematical deduction alone, predicted the existence of Neptune, a planet that can contain up to sixty Earths. Listen to how Agassiz sets up the story as if he had film treatment in mind:

A young astronomer in Paris sits down with his slate and pencil. He ascertains just the amount of various Irregularities in the motions of Uranus, not accounted for before et [and] then he reckons by a process which to the common and uneducated mind is utterly incomprehensible and amazing, reckons by figure and algebraic operations how large must that disturbing body be, how distant its orbit, and just where it ought to be found on any given day and hour.

Le Verrier hadn’t spent a minute peering at the sky, concentrating instead on the sheet of paper before him. Yet, once he did look up from his work, his prediction was found to be entirely accurate, as Agassiz insists: “The wondrous tube is pointed to the spot and so there it is a little twinkling star, yet a world, one of our family, and compared with which for vastness of size and orbit, this earth is but a child’s bauble.” Agassiz is unstoppable by now, the words pouring out of him like a veritable meteor shower, his prose tipsily soaring to the heights his text seeks to capture on the page. I am telling you, he continues, addressing his readers or listeners, straining to give his insights all the emphasis he can muster, “this mind of man, perverted, dwarfed and misused as it is, is a higher creation, a more astonishing display of God’s power and skill, a more signal expression of his attributes than the material worlds with which that mind deals.”

God’s skill? The great Protestant theologian Jean Calvin (1509–1564) had used that very same word, in his commentary on Psalm 8, or rather the Latin equivalent of it: those who are proud of their excellent intellects they possess, as if they had earned them by their own skill (industria) or merit (merito), forget that all they know or think they know has been gratuitously conferred upon them. Humans are miserable worms, squirming upon the earth: vile, contemptuous creatures all, utterly unworthy of receiving anything from God. For Calvin, Psalm 8 was, above all, an illustration of how wholly undeserved God’s grace was. Louis Agassiz couldn’t have agreed less. His unconventional biblical exegesis is an unashamed prayer not to God but to the power of scientific industria, a virtue Louis considered divine and which he, giving lectures all over the country and filling his museum to the brim with specimens, exemplified like no one else.

Decades after his father’s death, Louis Agassiz was still waging war against his meticulous father’s plans for his life. And he was giving the Unitarians what they needed—proof taken from the history of science that the human mind really was divine. Louis’s concept of the divine intellect was not at all like the God Rodolphe had told him about, a God who, like Rodolphe himself, micromanages the lives of others. Rather, Louis’s God was a skillful scientist—of the kind Louis had become. Professor Agassiz was not a humble man. Even death, the ubiquitous subtext of Calvin’s exegesis, did not faze him. Given the power of the scientific intellect, the end of human life to him was at most an inconvenience, an interruption, a brief eclipse. But it is not the end of the process of understanding, not the moment captured in one of Emily Dickinson’s gloomier poems when you can no longer “see to see.” The mind that tracks God cannot just be cast aside, like a withered leaf, after sixty or seventy years: “To fear annihilation of the human mind on account of death,” asked Louis Agassiz, “is it not as weak and puerile as the error of these simple children of nature, who thought the sun was extinct, when they saw the moon pass over and hid his face at midday?” Louis Agassiz was now taking on any number of passages in the Bible that he would have heard his father quote, perhaps most prominently Psalm 90.10: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” Louis Agassiz’s “devotion,” a term his contemporaries often applied to his tireless attempts to infuse science with morality, was not blind reverence. If it opens a way to understanding the secrets of nature, the keys to the door were, he believed, firmly lodged in the hands of the scientist, the King David of the nineteenth century.

Ralph Waldo Emerson would have agreed, except that for him Agassiz’s scientist was, of course, the poet: two names, really, for the same thing.

Bibliographical note: Louis Agassiz’s autograph essay “VIII Ps. 3.4. When I consider Thy heavens . . .” is in the Louis Agassiz Papers at Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1410 (142). Houghton Library’s permission to quote from Agassiz’s unpublished papers is gratefully acknowledged.

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• “A very pleasant dinner”: Longfellow, Agassiz, and friends
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“A very pleasant dinner”: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Louis Agassiz, and friends

Guest blog post by Christoph Irmscher, professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington, and author of the recently published biography, Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science.

I collect rare books and manuscripts. Or, perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that I would like to collect rare books and manuscripts. I make my living as a college professor, which means that there are strict limits to what I can (or ought to) buy. A few years ago, I acquired, for not very much money, a letter written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Louis Agassiz, sent from Longfellow’s house on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Mass., to Agassiz’s house on Quincy Street, also in Cambridge, on June 17, 1867. The letter covers only one sheet, one half of a bifold with the other half (neatly) torn off. In the upper left corner, there is the embossed seal of “Delarue & Co.,” a London stationer and printer that had been in business since 1821. The letter is written in ink, in Longfellow’s characteristic handwriting—so straight and capable, leaning neither much to the left nor much to the right, that William Dean Howells felt compelled to compare it to Longfellow’s poetry: even-handed, safe, not given to extremes of feeling, aiming for the comfortable middle-ground where author and reader meet in mutual recognition.

My little letter didn’t have to travel far to reach its recipient, and what it says is so unremarkable that you might well wonder why I decided to buy it in the first place:

My dear Agassiz,
     It will give me great pleasure, as ever, to dine with you on Tuesday.
          Always Yours
          Henry W. Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to
Louis Agassiz, 17 June 1867,
Collection of Christoph Irmscher.
[Click to enlarge]

The letter presents no problems to the transcriber, with the exception perhaps of the European-looking “1” in “17,” which differs from the “1” in “1867” (it was not unusual, however, for Longfellow to write it both ways). June 17, 1867, the day he wrote the note, was a Monday. Longfellow’s unpublished journal gives us the barest indication of what else he did that day: as happened so frequently, an unbidden visitor showed up at his house, a young lawyer named Budd, carrying a letter of introduction from the well-known Philadelphia editor Samuel Allibone. Mr. Budd, with the sense of cheerful entitlement that seemed to come naturally to many of Longfellow’s uninvited guests, stayed on for dinner. The next day, Tuesday, June 18, the British publisher George Routledge dropped by (“much talk about books”). The weather was lovely, so Longfellow later in the afternoon would have walked to dinner at Agassiz’s house, past Appleton Chapel, across the leafy grounds of Harvard College.

Despite the considerable dents Darwin and his friends had made into his reputation, Agassiz, professor of natural history in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University, was still one of the world’s most famous scientists. A staunch anti-evolutionist and believer in the separate creation of all things living and dead, including the human races, Agassiz had returned just the year before from a massive specimen-collecting expedition along the Amazon River and had quickly become a kind of self-declared expert on Brazilian–American relations. He now served as the spiritual godfather for a host of emigrants who, disgusted with Reconstruction, turned their backs on the newly reunited United States to seek their luck in the more reliably retrograde racial climate of the Brazilian empire. That afternoon at Agassiz’s house (among the Boston Brahmin, what we call “dinner” and they regarded as “supper” usually took place later in the evening), the departing Brazilian ambassador, Joaquim Maria Nascentes de Azambuja, had joined the party, as had Longfellow’s closest friend, the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner. “A very pleasant dinner,” Longfellow noted in his journal, with the characteristic refusal to share salient details that is a hallmark of his journal-writing.

A very pleasant dinner? How could it have been so, given that the conversation, with the ambassador in attendance, would very likely have turned to race? Slavery in Brazil was not officially ended before 1888, and Emerson and others report in their journals that Agassiz would inevitably broach the topic of race relations—and the allegedly detrimental effects of racial mixing—whenever someone as much as breathed the word “Brazil.” Awkwardly, Longfellow, whose account books show that he gave a considerable part of his income to ex-slaves and their supporters, vehemently disagreed with Agassiz on racial matters, as did Sumner (who actually felt that interbreeding would improve the impoverished genetic stock of whites).

What Longfellow’s letters and journals do not reveal, his poetry often barely hints at, but when it does so, it is hard to forget. After Agassiz died in December 1873, his powerful body holding on for days after his mind had already crumbled, Longfellow wrote an untitled sonnet commemorating his friend, without ever mentioning him by name. Imagining himself alone on the beach at Nahant, where Agassiz had maintained a seaside laboratory, Longfellow hears the ocean bemoan his dead friend’s absence, even as the rest of nature, from the rocks to the trees to the weeds at the bottom of the sea, acknowledges that Longfellow is still there.

I stand again on the familiar shore,
          And hear the waves of the distracted sea
          Piteously calling and lamenting thee,
          And waiting restless at thy cottage door.
The rocks, the sea-weed on the ocean floor,
          The willows in the meadow, and the free
          Wild winds of the Atlantic welcome me;
          Then why shouldst thou be dead, and come no more?

This is the point where, in the traditional Italian sonnet, the volta (literally, a “jump”) would mark a turning point, a new beginning. But the finality of Agassiz’s death makes such a dramatic shift impossible, and so the sestet picks up simply where the octet left off, with Longfellow’s lines twice spilling over into the next one:

Ah, why shouldst thou be dead, when common men
          Are busy with their trivial affairs,
          Having and holding? Why, when thou hadst read
Nature’s mysterious manuscript, and then
          Wast ready to reveal the truth it bears,
          Why art thou silent? Why shouldst thou be dead?

Louis Agassiz at the blackboard,
Carte-de-visite, ca. 1862.
Austin Augustus Turner, photographer.
Autographed by Louis Agassiz.
Collection of Christoph Irmscher

The agonizing refrain, an outburst really, “Why shouldst thou be dead?” is repeated three times in the crowded space of the sonnet, a moving testimony to the bereft poet’s helplessness in the face of death. But the intensity of this question, fanned by the wild winds of the Atlantic, also throws into bold relief Agassiz’s brazen confidence that science (practiced the way he thought proper) would allow him to uncover, once and for all, the meaning of the Book of Nature. Now it turns out that nature is doing fine without Agassiz there to inform us what it all means. Louis Agassiz, the great would-be decipherer of nature’s mysteries, was gone, forever gone. Yet men’s trivial affairs—the eating of meals, the visiting of friends, the writing of letters—continued, hour after hour, and day after day, the whole dreary business of living in a world where we “have and hold,” where we cling to our possessions as if none of this could ever end: a world Longfellow knew all about, a world that had produced that little note I bought, a world that, even when someone has died, at first gently, then relentlessly, tugs us back into ordinariness. What if there was no great secret to reveal, no final truth to tell?

We don’t know what, if anything, Longfellow, seated next to the Brazilian ambassador, said or felt on that warm summer afternoon at Agassiz’s Quincy Street house. But we do know that, a week later, on June 26, his translation of Dante’s Paradiso appeared in the bookstores, a tribute to the living light, “ever changing as I changed.”

* * *

Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Rebecca Stott praised Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science, noting that although men like Agassiz are often difficult to like, “irreconcilable contradictions make for interesting biographies. . . . Irmscher is a richly descriptive writer with an eye for detail, the complexities and contradictions of character, and the workings of institutional and familial power structures.” Professor Irmscher also edited John James Audubon: Writings & Drawings for The Library of America. You can read more about Agassiz’s life and influence at Irmscher’s blog.

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