This essay traces the contours of a trans-Atlantic Romantic legacy of aesthetic, moral and religious taste from its inception in Edmund Burke, through its modifications by Immanuel Kant, to its culmination in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Divinity School Address. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful Burke suggests that religious experience is an aspect of aesthetic and moral taste. Immanuel Kant follows suit in the Critique of Judgment, offering a distinct account of religious taste. Emerson alludes to yet significantly refines aspects of both accounts in his Divinity School Address. Whereas Kant and Burke’s variously stoic accounts depict good religious taste as an experience of alienation from God and from the world, Emerson’s religious agent cultivates a modern spirituality quite at home in the world. Adapting Burke’s re-enchanted moral psychology of taste, Emerson offers a distinctively religious, indeed Christian, form of this modern re-enchantment. Yet for Emerson, refined religious taste allows agents to recognize the full spectrum of normative demands in nature and thus to make a home of such a world.

Christians have traditionally conceived of the moral life as an imitation of Christ, whereby followers enter into fellowship with God. The American Transcendentalists can be understood as extending rather than dispensing with this legacy. For Emerson, a person cultivates virtues by imitating those she loves and admires. Ultimately, however, the virtues enable her to innovate on received models, to excel by pressing beyond exemplars. Emerson's famous line, “imitation is suicide,” is not a contradiction but a fulfillment of the imitation of Christ, understood in his terms. In his own time, John Brown was the public figure who, for Emerson, most nearly exemplified this innovative imitation of Christ. An examination of exemplarity, of this artful union of imitation and innovation in moral and spiritual formation, sheds light on how modern agents can cultivate the virtues needed to be at home in the modern world.

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Until recently, popular presumption and scholarly consensus have cautioned against using Emerson as a constructive resource for eco-justice. Emerson’s views of nature, race, and gender as well as his involvement in the abolitionist and women’s movements of the nineteenth century have been a source of ongoing debate. At a time when concerns about social justice and equity have rightly become prominent in eco-justice, scholars of theology, religion, and ecology may wonder whether Ralph Waldo Emerson is best used, if at all, as a foil. Emerson’s anthropology and his reception history are both, at points, deficient. Nevertheless, because justice and love are central to his theological anthropology, he provides a resource for thinking about right relations among human beings and thenatural world. This anthropology provides a way beyond the false binary between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism that continues to haunt environmental ethics.