The Visionary Company

The American poets in the Emersonian line (including Thoreau, Whitman, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost) reach back to Wordsworth, Keats, and Coleridge but also, through Emerson, to Hafiz and Saadi.

We have in this visionary company an embarrassment of riches: poetry of the first order by which we receive what Frost called the "immortal wound" and from which--if we are lucky--we never recover.

Emersonian Individualism

Emersonian individualism is neither antisocial nor imperial; it does not advocate withdrawal from society, nor does it seek to rule others. It is overwhelmingly concerned with the self-education and development of the individual, and convinced that there can be neither love nor society unless one first has a group of autonomous individuals. Emersonian self-reliance is, like the Stoic's self-respect, the necessary means to self-culture, to the development of the self. Insofar as it is a means to power it is only power over the self, not over others.

Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, 56.

A Sign of the Times

Religious enthusiasm is perhaps the most dangerous of threats to the humanistic enterprise, since it is patently anti-secular and antidemocratic in nature, and, in its monotheistic forms as a kind of politics, is by definition about as intolerantly inhumane and downright unarguable as can be. Invidious commentary about the world of Islam after 9/11 has made it popular wisdom that Islam is by nature a violent, intolerant religion, much given to raving fundamentalism and suicidal terrorism. There have been no end of "experts" and evangelists repeating the same rubbish, aided and abetted by discredited Orientalists like Bernard Lewis. It is a sign of the intellectual and humanistic poverty of the times that such patent propaganda (in the literal sense of the word) has gained such currency and, even more disastrously, that it is carried on without the slightest reference to Christian, Jewish, and Hindu fundamentalism, which, as extremist political ideologies, have been at least as bloody and disastrous as Islam...Religious fanaticism is religious fanaticism no matter who practices it. It is inexcusable to take an "ours is better than yours" attitude toward it.

--Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 51.

The Academic Study of the Religious Imagination

In the Emersonian grain...

Here at the beginning I wish to stress my own conviction that it is fruitless either to literalize or to dismiss spiritual experience, whether ancient, medieval, or contemporary. This conviction is pragmatic, and I follow William James in acknowledging religious experiences that make a difference as being authentic differences: from one another, and among us…

I am not a Jungian, and so give no credence to the archetypes of a collective unconscious. But I am both a literary and a religious critic, a devoted student of Gnosis both ancient and modern, and I have enormous respect for recurrent images of human spirituality, no matter how they may be transmitted. Images have their own potency and their own persistence; they testify to human need and desire, but also to a transcendent frontier that marks either a limit to the human, or a limitlessness that may be beyond the human.

Harold Bloom, Omens of the Millennium (1996), 4, 11.

A Gnostic Christmas Meditation

Religion, for me, is now and has always been rooted in an experience of language as Logos--something I encounter both within and without myself, both native to me and, yet, independent of me. There is nothing particularly esoteric or "spooky" about such an understanding of language: it is a perfectly "natural" phenomenon.

The key (re-)cognition (or gnosis) of my religion (for it is not a religion exclusively or even primarily of faith) is that we cannot get "behind" our symbolic representations of what Kant called "the manifold" (the "found" world) to the thing-in-itself. As a practical matter, then, what really exists for each of us are verbal symbols. Language is the "Real."

Those who submit to this linguistic exigency--"submission" in this case being a form of acknowledgement or gnosis--become philologists in the literal sense: lovers of the word. Our investigations into language and literature are a kind of sacred practice in which we explore that which is and invent/discover ourselves through that practice. Priests of the Word, we labor to induce linguistic epiphanies and bear witness to our philology.

The philologist's religion is an ancient one, emerging from the power of language to fascinate us. Philologists harm no one and save no one--least of all themselves. Linguists or cognitive scientists may offer explanations for the hold that language has upon the philological imagination, but those explanations do not change the fact of the effect that being language's vassal can have upon one. From the philologist's perspective, such explanations are beside the point. They celebrate the Logos, and leave it at that.

Critical Emersonianism

Learning to trust Emerson is not easy, particularly when one has observed how smoothly his aphorisms fit into the self-justifying patter of the capitalist, of the Neo-Con. Certainly those lines are wrenched from their context--but still...It is clear that the Concord Sage's wisdom cuts more than one way.

When he tells us that if we but find the oldest and deepest part of ourselves we cannot go wrong--we want to believe him. For this is the ancient gnostic gospel that whispers to us from we know not where. But how many monsters have we witnessed do just that--trust the "oldest and deepest part" of themselves and, in the process, inflict untold suffering and ruin upon the innocent?

And what exactly is the "oldest and deepest part," and how shall we know it? And how can we be certain that it is trustworthy?

The true Emersonian--the Emersonian worthy of the name--is critical. Here we may look to someone like Ralph Waldo Ellison as a model and a guide. Ellison was an Emersonian with eyes wide open. He embraced his namesake, even as he acted to correct the deficiencies of his insular, white American world.

Jack Gilbert, 1925-2012

Tear It Down.

Al-Qarawiyyin

The world's oldest university was founded in 859 CE by Fatima al-Fihri, daughter of a wealthy Moroccan businessman.


It continues in operation to this day.

Bloom On Emerson

Click here.

Homage to Professor Harold Bloom

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Emerson's Nature

Emerson's Nature "...bears personal witness to core truths about the self and the world, or consciousness and nature. And if the book is at some points compatible with Christianity, it is at least as compatible with classical Stoicism. Nature must be compared not only with the great twelfth chapter of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria and with Carlyle's Sartor Resartus but also with the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and the Enchiridion of Epictetus. But even those famous little books are mainly self-help guides, officers' manuals for the warfare of living the just life, so Emerson's Nature may even more fitly be compared to Lucretius's De rerum natura--which Rolphe Humphries translated The Way Things Are."

--Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind On Fire, 226.

The Wheel of Illusion

It is the responsibility of every thinking human being to forsake the wheel of illusion and go in search of the Tao/Logos.

The Tao

The Book of Chuang Tzu, composed sometime in the 4th century BCE, teaches that "meaning depends entirely upon context and that there is no such thing as a 'fact' which stands apart from the context of the speaker." (from the Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, tr. Martin Palmer, 1996).

Emerson taught that we do not find meaning, but make it. To read well, he wrote, is to read creatively. Reading creatively requires that we read for context. (Emerson, The American Scholar).

This is the Tao. There is no other.

The Times

Our forefathers walked in the world and went to their graves tormented with the fear of Sin and the terror of the Day of Judgment.






These terrors have lost their force, and our torment is Unbelief, the Uncertainty as to what we ought to do; the distrust of the value of what we do.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Times.

Republic of Beauty

When the subject is Islamic aesthetics, it is difficult to know where to begin...

The First Commandment: Read!

What prepares us to read the Qur'an? For Norman O. Brown, it was the "simultaneous totality" that he discovered in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (see Brown, Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis, 89).

My own preparation was Bakhtin's study of Dostoevsky's polyvocal poetics. But once I began to read and appreciate the Qur'an (in the mid-1990's), I found myself returning to Emerson's Nature: for now the Qur'an was no longer something alien to me, and I began to think of it as an American scripture, fit for a post-Christian milieu.

Emerson as refounder was already moving on into that milieu; like John the Baptizer, he came first, pointing the way. By the mid-'90's, I thought we, as a nation, had finally arrived. And since, as Brown tells us, "The Koran is pregnant with the future," it seemed to be the right text for the times (AM, 84).

In 2014, however, American readers of the Qur'an are still ahead of their time. In the United States, we continue to press the accelerator to the floor, but the transmission is stuck in reverse.