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"There is no character in which the want of gentleness is not a defect."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Appendix materials and suggested reading
When it comes to Ralph Waldo Emerson, there is so much to read. Emerson's own writings that are available today in collected works total more than fifty volumes (with still more in preparation). Also untold numbers of biographies and critical studies have been written during the last 140 years, as well as many relevant-to-Emerson studies on Unitarianism, Transcendentalism, and moral philosophy that can also be very useful. Where to begin?
The following suggestions are offered by an Unitarian Universalist clergyman who hasn't read everything he wants to yet, but who knows what he's found helpful so far in getting the most out of Emerson's sermons.
If you haven't read David Robinson's Apostle of Culture, start there. It situates you in the Unitarian context of Emerson's day better than anything else I've found and it pays particular attention to the theology of self-culture which is so essential for an understanding Emerson's approach to Christianity and what he was attempting to do in his sermons. To deepen your background understanding of Harvard moral philosophy, faculty psychology, and self-culture, read Daniel Walker Howe's The Unitarian Conscience. (Howe's later study, Making the American Self, is also helpful in this vein and includes a wonderful essay on Neoplatonism and the New England Transcendentalists on pages 189-211.)
Other essential background reading takes a closer look at New England Puritanism and its transition from Calvinism to Arminianism and early Unitarianism. Conrad Wright's The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America is helpful here as is David Robinson's The Unitarians and the Universalists, pages 9-46. Wright's short essay "Rational Religion in Eighteenth-Century America" in his book, The Liberal Christians, is also an excellent essay that highlights the supernatural rationalism that many religious liberals of the period embraced, including the very early Emerson himself.
Once you've covered those bases (the above) you're ready to read the sermons. (All of Emerson's sermons, in their most readable form, are available in The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson.) As you go through the sermons, note the connection Emerson makes again and again between obeying the commandments and the compensation that brings: well-being in this life and the next. Character development and immortality are linked for Emerson, and he sees immortality as both a present and a future reality.
To find out what Emerson was reading during his years in the ministry, as well as what was on the reading lists that William Ellery Channing gave to Emerson during Emerson's seminary days, read Robert D. Richardson Jr.'s Emerson: The Mind of Fire, pages xi-127. (See pages 55-58 and note 11 on page 594, in particular, for information about the reading lists.) Richardson's biography of Emerson is essential reading: it resurrects Emerson the living, breathing human being like no other study out there.
For more information about Emerson's reading, see also Kenneth Walter Cameron's Ralph Waldo Emerson's Reading. This scholar has been urging his colleagues to focus their critical studies on Emerson's sermons for a long time, since 1956 at least, and he has also been preparing study helps of all kinds for decades. His work has both opened doors for me and handed me useful tools. His Index-Concordance to Emerson's Sermons remains a big help, even in these days of electronic texts and key word searches: I often find in Cameron's Index-Concordance key words to search for electronically that I wouldn't have thought of on my own.
Studies of Emerson the minister that I have found particularly useful, in addition to Arthur Cushman McGiffert Jr.'s Young Emerson Speaks, include: David Robinson's "The Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Introductory Historical Essay" in volume one of The Collected Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson; Wesley T. Mott's The Strains of Eloquence: Emerson and His Sermons; Mary Kupiec Cayton's Emerson's Emergence, pages 119-190; and Gustaaf van Cromphout's Emerson's Ethics (while this is not a study of Emerson's ministry per se, the author does quote from more than fifty of Emerson's sermons in this excellent study of Emerson's ethics). I might also include here two other studies that shed light on Emerson's ministry even though that is not their primary focus: William A. Huggard's The Religious Teachings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (hard to find but very readable!) and "The Development of Emerson's Thought in His Early Manhood," found on pages 50-83 in Warren Staebler's Ralph Waldo Emerson.
What may turn out to be the most significant breakthrough in recent Emerson-related research, especially with regard to Emerson's own religious understanding and development, is the work on Mary Moody Emerson: see Phyllis Cole's Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism; and The Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson, edited by Nancy Craig Simmons.
Nothing, however, has excited activist ministers more than the research that was done during the last decade of the 20th century on Emerson's antislavery work. Since I had been reading Emerson's sermons exclusively, I knew nothing about this scholarship of the 1990s until it was suggested to me that I would like reading Albert J. von Frank's, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston. I found it good enough for an immediate second-read; perhaps you will too. If so, follow it with von Frank's "Mrs. Brackett's Verdict: Magic and Means in Transcendental Antislavery Work" in Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright's collection, Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts. You'll also want to read: Len Gougeon's Virtue's Hero and his "Historical Background" in Emerson's Antislavery Writings and Joel Myerson's "Textual Commentary" in the same, and all of Emerson's pieces in there as well; Gregory T. Garvey's collection, The Emerson Dilemma: Essays on Emerson and Social Reform; Gary Collison's "Emerson and Antislavery" in Historical Guide to Ralph Waldo Emerson edited by Joel Myerson; Linck C. Johnson's "Reforming the Reformers: Emerson, Thoreau and the Sunday Lectures at Amory Hall, Boston, [1844]," in ESQ ; and Barbara Ryan's "Emerson's 'Domestic Social Experiments': Service, Slavery, and the Unhired Man" in American Literature.
That's a start anyway. By this time you'll be ready for Sarah Ann Wider's The Critical Reception of Emerson: Unsettling All Things, and Robert E. Burkholder and Joel Myerson's "Ralph Waldo Emerson" chapter in The Transcendentalists: A Review of Research and Criticism so you can find out what other must-read books and articles you need to find. (There are two other articles in this volume that you might want to consult as well: David Robinson's chapter on "William Ellery Channing," and Conrad Wright's chapter on "Unitarianism and Transcendentalism.")
Last, but not least, one other useful research tool to know about. Albert J. von Frank has prepared An Emerson Chronology of almost 600 pages of key names, dates and places. It includes biographical sketches, year-by-year summaries of Emerson's career, and chronological entries of thousands of key events.