salvation. Thus the process of atomization gives birth by way of reaction to that
of communion with a collective and the establishment of a new principle which
shall rescue him from isolation” (1931, 160-1).
Nicholls also notes that totalitarianism is “ultimately a religious tragedy” because it gives
“religious legitimation to social structures and institutions in the form of a political pantheism”
(1989, 126-27). Irving Howe echoed Berdyaev in an ambivalent critique of Emerson: “The
experience of our century both underscores the inadequacies of an absolutist individualism and
the dangers of too sweeping an attack upon it” (1986, 44). Howe is right to question these
extremes, but he may have missed the vital paradox that the extremes, coming full circle, are
closely linked. Howe’s “absolutist individualism” is, to restate Nicholl’s formula, “the sand on
which collectivist autocracies are constructed.”
Nihilism and the “Gnostic Sublime”
Of course, totalitarianism, whether benign or violent, is only one possible path of
individualistic pantheism. Another, as Harold Bloom breezily admits, is nihilism. Bloom argues
that individualism is “more than ever the hope for our imaginative lives” (1985, 10). And yet he
is not unaware of the danger: “Place everything upon the nakedness of the American self, and
you open every imaginative possibility from self-deification to absolute nihilism” (11). Bloom
speaks approvingly of Emerson’s evasion of evil and pain: “Was it not Emerson’s peculiar
strength that what to me seems a catastrophe was to him--by the mad law of Compensation--
converted to victory?” (118). But surely Bloom must realize that this was a cheap victory, one
based purely on assertion and one that Emerson himself never honestly achieved.
Steven Whicher has characterized this refusal to accept tragedy as a chief failing of
Emerson: “Tragedy is a recognition of limitations, while the philosophy that sustained Emerson
was a denial of them.” The denial of tragedy and limitations caused an “impoverishment” of
Emerson’s thought and betrayed “him into saying some foolish or shallow things” (1971, 46).
Convention