The Spiritual Teachings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
A magnificent book, through which Emerson's teaching becomes again an instigator.... It contains our own best thoughts. --ROGER LIPSEY, editor and biographer of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, author of An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art
“Richard Geldard has written a magnificent book through which Emerson’s teaching becomes again an instigator. Is Geldard the last of Emerson’s great disciples—or the first of a new generation? This book deserves to be widely read; it contains our own best thoughts” (Roger Lipsey, editor and biographer of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, author of "An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art").
“Through Geldard’s book, Emerson shows a new generation of Americans that it is possible and necessary to bring to the spiritual search an open heart joined to a critical mind” (Jacob Needleman, author of "The Heart of Philosophy").
No one who has felt the life-changing pull of Emerson’s enormous planetary mind has ever doubted his power or his greatness, though we are often puzzled to know whether he is primarily a poet, an essayist or a philosopher. Richard Geldard is not puzzled at all by this; he has written a book that plainly shows the essential Emerson to be a teacher, the Socrates of Concord, a man with a message that we need to hear today. Previous generations “beheld God and nature face to face,” Emerson says, and he adds, provocatively, that we moderns seem able only to see those things through the eyes of the earlier generations. “Why,” he asks — and the question is intended to shatter our complacency — “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
Emerson’s life was devoted to showing how one may still attain an original, that is to say, an authentic, relation to the universe, and Geldard’s book aims to focus and distill the famously dispersed Emerson and put his central teachings into the modern reader’s hand.
