The Spiritual Appeal of Elizabeth Gilbert

The comparison may be less of a reach than it sounds, as there’s a shadow intellectual lineage, given Emerson’s handprint—and that of the transcendentalists generally—on the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book, which Gilbert, long a sponge for spiritual wisdom, has lately immersed herself in and quotes multiple times here. The Big Book’s emphasis on an individual concept of the divine (“God as we have understood him”) and spiritual awakening through experience rather than scripture or churches, is decidedly Emersonian. Emerson’s godson, the philosopher-psychologist William James, was also a major influence on AA cofounder Bill Wilson in the writing of the Big Book.

A Boston clergyman before parting ways with the church over his religious unorthodoxies, Emerson, like Gilbert, sojourned abroad, also spending several months in Italy. On his return, he hit the road, doing hundreds of talks across the country. Like Gilbert, he drew on Eastern mysticism, especially the Bhagavad Gita. Both depart from traditional Christianity to knit together an eclectic, novel spirituality—Gilbert’s latest update offers a mélange of 12-step insights, some occult and soul travel, along with neuroscience and trauma theory. Both locate a personal God that resides within and can be conferred with directly. Gilbert’s even answers back, though when she inquires whether she should start dating someone new after Rayya, frustratingly He keeps responding “Lol no.”

Breezy tone notwithstanding, Gilbert does often sound quite similar to Emerson: “What if Earth is nothing but a school for souls?” asks Gilbert. Emerson puts it more long-windedly in “The Over-Soul”: “The soul gives itself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks through it… Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, the universal mind.”