The difficulty of doing justice to a thinker as complex and many-sided as Emerson, even for those who agree on his central importance in American letters, is illustrated by the diametrically divergent interpretations advanced by Harold Bloom and Sacvan Bercovitch. Bloom has written about Emerson in many places, most provocatively in Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (1982). Emerson is important to Bloom because he and other modern writers can be seen as heirs of the gnostic tradition Bloom is so eager to revive. Gnosticism, as Bloom observes, is the "knowledge of what in the self ... is Godlike." It is a "timeless knowing, as available now as it was [in the second century], and available alike to those Christians, to those Jews and to those secular intellectuals who are not persuaded by orthodox or normative accounts or versions of religion, ... but who know themselves as questers for God." It is easy to see how Emerson, who urged his readers and listeners to be faithful to themselves, condemned institutional religion, and often spoke of the divine spark in human nature, lends himself to such readings (or creative "misreadings," as Bloom would say). But Bloom's and other gnosticizing interpretations of Emerson—including those presented in Barbara Packer, Emerson's Fall (1982)—rest largely on highly selective quotation, rarely on careful analysis of the arguments conducted in Emerson's writings. The presupposition that Emerson traffics not in arguments at all but in metaphors, "orphic" wisdom, and sibylline hints of the sublime serves to absolve commentators of any responsibility for following the course of his thought. An attentive reading, however, should make us wonder how anyone who set so much store by common experience (as opposed to the experience shared only by a self-selected spiritual elite), who was so little disposed to regard religious knowledge as a closely guarded body of secrets, and in any case who regarded faith, not knowledge, as the heart of religious experience can be very clearly understood as a gnostic or even as an antinomian. My own explorations of the gnostic tradition, preliminary reports of which appear in "Notes on Gnosticism," New Oxford Review 53 (Oct. 1986): 14-18, and "Soul of a New Age," Omni, Oct. 1987, 78ff., lead me to the conclusion that the gnostic cult of mysteries accessible only to a few initiates was deeply at odds with the general tendency of Emersonian spirituality.

Bercovitch's interpretation of Emerson in The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975) and The American Jeremiad (1978) plays up the very qualities played down by Bloom. Far from articulating a "vision whose fulfillment, by definition, must be always beyond the cosmos," as Bloom puts it, Bercovitch's Emerson identified himself all too closely with America and with Americans' image of themselves as a chosen people. "The self he sought was not only his but America's, or rather his as America's, and therefore America's as his." Like Bloom—but for opposite reasons—Bercovitch exaggerates the difference between Emerson and Carlyle, finding "fundamentally opposed concepts of greatness in Emerson and Carlyle." Whereas the latter's hero "gathers strength precisely in proportion to his alienation" and thus "stands sufficient in himself' in a "latter-day Antinomian brotherhood," Emersonian heroism is distinguished by its "reliance on a national mis

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