God in Concord: Ralph Waldo Emerson's Awakening to the Infinite
By Richard Geldard
Burdett, NY: Larson. 1998. Hardcover, 192 pages.
Geldard describes the essential Emerson as a spiritual teacher who outgrew his birth tradition's image of God and blazed a trail toward new worlds of transformative mystical experience and social possibilities. More than an essayist and American philosopher, he was, in Emerson's own words, "an endless seeker with no past at my back," who struggled to express, as Geldard says, "what it means to be a human being and, given that, how we are to conduct our lives."
An ethical dimension is inherent: within Emerson's speeches and essays. Geldard captures the inner vision that attracted the Sage from Concord and explains that this vision apprehended One Mind as the whole reality. He describes the Transcendentalist as a genius who remained a vulnerable, private human being. Emerson's intuitive insight awakens the infinite inside others and ignites their aspirations to embody divinity. Geldard's earlier works include The Vision of Emerson and The Esoteric Emerson.
-DANIEL ROSS CHANDLER
July/August 2000