The Esoteric Emerson: The Spiritual Teachings of Ralph Waldo Emerson [Paperback]

Richard G. Geldard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2000

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American transcendentalist, poet, essayist, and reformer, has been presented in many ways, hut never simply and radically as a guide in self-transformation.

Geldard traces Emerson's path of awakening to "the life above life." He shows how Emerson's path of "voluntary obedience" to the intuitive whisperings of the world through "the act of reflection" leads to an understanding of mind and the human condition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Lindisfarne Books (January 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0940262592
• ISBN-13: 978-0940262591
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 8.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,476,614 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Richard Geldard is a full-time writer and lecturer living in New York City and the Hudson Valley. He is married to the artist and writer Astrid Fitzgerald.

Before turning to writing he was an educator, teaching English and philosophy at both the secondary, undergraduate and graduate levels. Before turning to full-time writing, he was a member of the faculty at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpenteria, California, where he taught the Greek Mystery Religions. Prior to that he taught Greek Philosophy and The Science of Mind at Yeshiva College in New York. Presently, Dr Geldard is a member of the faculty of the University of Philosophical Research in the Online Masters Degree Program. (see uprs.edu)

Geldard is a graduate of Bowdoin College, The Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College and Stanford University, where he earned his doctorate in Dramatic Literature and Classics in 1972. He has also studied at St. John's College, Oxford and was a Visiting Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece.

Geldard is the author of ten books, including studies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Greek philosophy and culture. He is also a frequent lecturer. In June, 2003, and September, 2003, he was a featured speaker at Faneuil Hall in Boston as part of the Emerson Bicentennial Celebrations. In June, 2005, he was the Keynote speaker at the re-instatement of the Delphic Games in Delphi, Greece.


Geldard delivered the Annual Flora Levy Humanities Lecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette on October 14, 2009


Dr Geldard has a web presence at rgbooks.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Same as _The Spiritual Teachings of Ralph Waldo Emerson_, January 25, 2002

By 

John S. Ryan "Scott Ryan" (Cuyahoga Falls, OH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Esoteric Emerson: The Spiritual Teachings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Paperback)

So don't buy them both (as I see some shoppers have done). Here's what I wrote in my review of the later edition:

Harold Bloom repeatedly names Ralph Waldo Emerson as the great theological architect of the "American religion" in his book of that title. However controversial some of Bloom's other theses may be, there is much truth in his characterization of the Sage of Concord. Probably most of us have been influenced by Emerson, at least indirectly, in far more ways than we realize.

But reading Emerson directly is at once an enlightening and maddening experience: "enlightening" because Emerson was a philosopher in the best sense of the word -- a lover of wisdom -- and "maddening" because he was _not_ a philosopher in any _other_ sense of the word. He was stubbornly disinclined to argumentation or even systematic exposition; his essays read more like sermons than like philosophical arguments; he preferred to deliver himself of his oracular insights without, it seems, subjecting them either to the criticism of other minds or even to the rigors of critical self-reflection, on the view that Reason was an all but infallible source of insight into truth and its objects are known with the same immediacy with which we know that we are awake. (It is a curious view of reason which makes no allowances for improvement of one's understanding.)

As a result of this take-it-or-leave it approach, his writings are all too easy to misunderstand, and for this he must bear much of the blame. For example, his remarks on charity in "Self-reliance" have led some readers to suppose that he was opposed to charity altogether, whereas in truth he believed that we are each of us suited by talent and temperament to be "charitable" to a special class of persons for whom we are therefore _truly_ responsible. Then, too, his remark in the same essay on "a foolish consistency" has been infamously and endlessly misquoted -- but even in its proper context it invites misunderstanding by failing to pay sufficient attention to the non-foolish variety of consistency (which Emerson supposed would take care of itself more or less automatically). Here again, Emerson's account of Reason, in giving so much weight to intuition, leaves strangely little room for reflection.

But in my own opinion, at least, Emerson's insights are genuine, sometimes brilliant, and essentially right, and it would be a shame if the readers who needed him most were unable to profit from his writings merely because he had been needlessly obscure. It would be nice, then, to have from another writer the guidance that Emerson himself was unwilling or unable to provide.

As you've probably guessed by now, that's where Richard Geldard comes in.

In this volume (which is a revised edition of _The Esoteric Emerson_, so don't buy them both!) Geldard does a marvelous job of exposition. He knows his Emerson backwards and forwards, and he sets out the essential features of Emerson's thought in clear and orderly fashion, chapter by chapter.

His essential "take" on Emerson, as you can tell from his title, is that Emerson is best approached as a spiritual teacher. I think this is not only correct but even obviously so; yet it is surprising how few available critical studies of Emerson are actually written from this point of view. At any rate, Geldard's exposition will provide the reader of Emerson with a much-needed "map" of the territory traversed in his writings.

I suspect that Geldard's "map" will make Emerson available to many readers who might otherwise have found him unpalatable. Some readers may, for example, be put off by what seems to be Emerson's extraordinarily cavalier attitude toward tradition in favor of present experience.

But according to Geldard, Emerson's actual meaning was as follows: "We have to break, lovingly, the vessels of our tradition in order to become one with the source of that tradition" [p. 176]. Now, certainly there is a difference in emphasis here with the religious tradition in which Emerson was brought up. But surely this is not far from, say, the Christian doctrine that the scriptures are a closed book unless read "in the Spirit." (Granted, Emerson had much more in common with the Quakers than with the Calvinists in what he made of this point. Nevertheless it is not alien to even the most theologically conservative Christianity.)

Not being a Christian myself, though, I am interested not primarily in reconciling Emerson with Christian theology but in simple exposition of his teaching. And Geldard excels in this regard: in ten straightforward chapters he sets out the essentials of Emerson's teaching and places it into the context of his life. Not bad for 177 pages of text.

There are one or two points on which I wish Geldard had done a _little_ bit more explaining (for example, on the difference between the meanings of "idealism" in its philosophical and its popular senses), since he does not seem to be presuming any prior acquaintance with philosophy on the part of his readers. But this is just nitpicking on my part. (Hey, I have my own favorite hobby horses too.) This is a fine book and it will be of immense value to anyone who wants to understand what in the world Emerson was on about.