Based on nominations by Thomas Moore, Natalie Goldberg, Rodger Kamenetz, Harold Kushner, Lawrence Kushner, Christopher de Vinck, David Yount, Kabir Helminski, Helen Tworkov, Ron Hansen, Frederic Brussat, Joseph Bruchac, Huston Smith, Lawrence Cunningham, and John Wilson.

List of Top Ten selections are indicated in bold

Adams, Henry, Mont-Saint Michel and Chartres
Agnon, S. Y., In the Heart of the Seas
Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous
Anonymous, The Gospel of Thomas
Balthasar, Hans Urs von, The Glory of the Lord
Barfield, Owen, Saving the Appearances
Barth, Karl, The Epistle to the Romans
Bernanos, Georges, Diary of a Country Priest
Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, The Cost of Discipleship and Letters and Papers from Prison
Buber, Martin, I and Thou & Tales of the Hasidim
Camus, Albert, The Plague
Chapman, John, Spiritual Letters
Chesterton, G. K., Orthodoxy
Daumal, René, Mount Analogue
Day, Dorothy, The Long Loneliness
Dillard, Annie, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Dunne, John S., The Way of All the Earth
Eisley, Loren, The Immense Journey
Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of Eternal Return
Eliot, T. S., Christianity and Culture & The Four Quartets
Endo, Shusako, Silence
Florensky, Pavel, The Pillar and the Ground of Truth
Foster, Richard, A Celebration of Discipline
Frankl, Viktor, Man’s Search for Meaning
Gandhi, Mohandas, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth
Greene, Graham, The Power and the Glory
Griffiths, Bede, The Golden String
Guardini, Romano, The Lord
Guenon, Rene, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times
Gurdjieff, G. I., Meetings with Remarkable Men
Hahn, Thich Nhat, Peace Is Every Step
Hammarskjold, Dag, Markings
Heschel, Abraham Joshua, God in Search of Man & The Sabbath
Hesse, Hermann, Siddhartha
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, Collected Poems
Huxley, Aldous, The Perennial Philosophy
Isherwood, Christopher, My Guru and His Disciple
James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience
John XXIII, Pope, Journal of a Soul
John Paul II, Pope, Crossing the Threshold of Hope
Jung, Carl, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Kafka, Franz, The Trial
Kelly, Thomas, A Testament of Devotion
Kerouac, Jack, The Dharma Bums
King, Martin Luther, Jr., I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World
Knox, Ronald, Enthusiasm
Krishnamurti, Think on These Things
Leclercq, Jean, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God
Lewis, C. S., The Chronicles of Narnia and Mere Christianity
Lusseyran, Jacques, And There Was Light
Maharashi, Ramana, The Spiritual Teachings of Ramana Maharashi
Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Maritain, Raissa, Journals
Maugham, W. Somerset, The Razor’s Edge
Merton, Thomas, New Seeds of Contemplation & The Seven Storey Mountain
Muggeridge, Malcolm, Something Beautiful for God
Newman, John Henry, Meditations and Devotions
Niebuhr, H. Richard, Christ and Culture
Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Nature and Destiny of Man
O’Connor, Flannery, Wise Blood
Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy
Ouspensky, P. D., In Search of the Miraculous
Peck, M. Scott, The Road Less Traveled
Percy, Walker, Lost in the Cosmos
Pirsig, Robert, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Ramakrishna, The Gospel of Ramakrishna
Reps, Paul, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones
Rilke, Rainer Maria, Duino Elegies
Rosenzweig, Franz, The Star of Redemption
Russell, George William, The Candle of Vision
Schimmel, Anne-Marie, Mystical Dimensions of Islam
Scholem, Gershom, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
Schumacher, E. F., A Guide for the Perplexed
Schuon, Fritjof, The Transcendent Unity of Religions
Singer, Isaac Bashevis, Collected Stories
Smith, Huston, The World’s Religions
Steinsaltz, Adin, The Thirteen Petalled Rose
Suzuki, D. T., Essays in Buddhism
Suzuki, Shunryu, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind
Tagore, Rabindranath, Gitanjali
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, The Phenomenon of Man
Teresa, Mother, A Simple Path
Thérèse of Lisieux, St., The Story of a Soul
Tillich, Paul, The Courage to Be
Tolkien, J. R. R., The Lord of the Rings
Tomberg, Valentin, Meditations on the Tarot
Traherne, Thomas, Centuries
Trungpa, Chogyam, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
Underhill, Evelyn, Mysticism
Weil, Simone, Waiting for God
Wiesel, Elie, Night
Yeats, William Butler, Collected Poems
Yogananda, Paramahansa, Autobiography of a Yogi

Lists have become something of a fad of late. And as the century and the millennium end, we seem to be seeing more and more of these rosters setting out the "best" of our time. One of the latest is the list of the 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Century, assembled by a team headed by Philip Zaleski and recently released by HarperSanFrancisco. Jurors included figures like Huston Smith; writer Natalie Goldberg; Helen Tworkov, editor of Tricycle magazine; Frederic Brussat, co-author of Spiritual Literacy; and the best-selling author Thomas Moore.

As it turns out, this list is what it claims to be: a first-rate assemblage of the century’s most impressive spiritual works. Surprisingly, given the faddishness of much modern spirituality, there is nothing here that could be dismissed as junk or pop or trivia. The Harper team appears to have succeeded in avoiding considerations of momentary fashion and choosing works that will endure.

The Harper list contains its share of acknowledged literary masterpieces. There’s The Trial, Franz Kafka’s indictment of the guilt that weighs on every soul; T.S. Eliot’s haunting and elusive Four Quartets; and the Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats, the great Irish poet who also just happened to be an occult magician. The list also features the Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose rich tales of Eastern Europe’s vanished Jewish communities often seem as close to Hasidic fables as they do to realistic fiction. And there’s Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor, a quirky and hilarious novel portraying a mad preacher who tries to set up a "Church of Christ without Christ."

The title most widely nominated by the panel may come as a surprise to some: The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard, a French Jesuit anthropologist, wrote this work in the 1950s as an attempt to reconcile the hopes of Christian redemption with the theory of evolution. He suggested that humanity is struggling toward what he called the "Omega Point" a general awakening of consciousness that will mark the culmination of human destiny. As such it is the key text in the modern attempt to view spiritual awakening as a collective enterprise the next step in human evolution. (Interestingly, Teilhard also appears as the most influential figure in a 1980 survey of leaders of the human-potential movement that appeared in Marilyn Ferguson’s seminal work The Aquarian Conspiracy.)

The list has also some pleasant surprises on it. I personally never would have dreamed that Valentin Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot, a brilliant but obscure journey into Christian hermeticism, would have made a list like this, but I’m extremely grateful that it did. Nor would I have suspected that works like P.D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, his account of his studies with G.I. Gurdjieff, a mysterious spiritual master from the Caucasus, would have appeared, but it’s also a favorite of mine, so I’m delighted to find it here.

Lists are made for quibbling with, of course; that’s part of their fun. So I hope you will indulge me in some nitpicking over the selections. One of the oddest flubs is not in the choice of a book but in the ascription of authorship: it lists Black Elk, the great Oglala Sioux prophet, as the author of Black Elk Speaks, a work chiefly noted for that sets out a "great vision" for the religion of the Plains Indians. This work is without question great and influential: some have even considered it a kind of bible of North American Indian spirituality.

The only thing is, Black Elk didn’t write this book: John G. Neihardt did. And this mistake is more than a matter of detail, because Black Elk spent the last 47 years of his life as an active, proselytizing Roman Catholic a detail that Neihardt conveniently fails to mention. While it’s true that Neihardt’s book covers the time before Black Elk’s conversion to Christianity, this fact does cast an odd light on this work. All this, of course, doesn’t mean Black Elk Speaks shouldn’t be on this list; it just means they should have named the right author.

Other obscure but worthy choices include René Guénon, a French metaphysician who lived in the first half of the century. Guénon is one of the most important spiritual philosophers of his time he has had a powerful influence, for example, on Huston Smith, author of the highly acclaimed World’s Religions (which, deservedly, appears on the list as well). It’s a pity, though, that one of Guénon’s worst books was chosen. Entitled The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, it is little more than an elaborate rant against modern civilization. It exemplifies the weakest rather than the strongest aspects of Guénon’s work. A better choice would have been his Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines, a first-rate entrance point both to Guénon’s thought and to the spirituality of India.

There are only two books I can think of that should have been on this list but failed to make it. One is that mysterious work known as A Course in Miracles, probably the greatest and most influential spiritual book published in the U.S. in the last quarter-century. The Course is admittedly a perplexing work. To begin with, it is a "channeled text": that is, the woman who wrote it down, a New York psychiatrist named Helen Schucman, did not claim authorship for it but said she wrote it as dictated by an inner voice claiming to be that of Jesus Christ. The Course is thus a reformulation of Christian teaching, emphasizing the undoing of "false perception" through forgiveness. Its tremendous grass-roots popularity has ironically hurt its reputation among serious thinkers, who regard is as nothing more than another flaky New Age text. But anyone who has spent any time with it will, I believe, agree that it is a rigorous, powerful, and transformative spiritual method. Regardless of whether you believe the author of this work really was Jesus Christ (a claim that’s impossible to prove one way or another), the Course belongs here.

The other work is considerably less inspirational but has been at least as important: The Quest of the Historical Jesus by Albert Schweitzer, first published in 1906. It’s an exhaustive review of the literature of Christology up to Schweitzer’s time. In it Schweitzer tried to determine exactly how much in the Gospels could really have happened and how much is a matter of mythic elements that were added on later. The quest for the historical Jesus has been a matter of tremendous concern to Christians in this century, as can be attested not only from the frequent Time and Newsweek covers devoted to this subject, but from the voluminous spate of titles that pour out about it from HarperSanFrancisco itself. Schweitzer’s book is the seminal work on the historical Jesus, and it deserves to be here as well.

One final caveat: the fact that there is no fluff on this list means that many of these titles are going to be difficult reading. Annemarie Schimmel’s Mystical Dimensions of Islam, for example, Reinhold Niebuhr’s Nature and Destiny of Man, and Martin Buber’s I and Thou are all superlative works, but they are about as far from brain candy as you can get. On the other hand, there are a number of more readable and inspirational writings, like Simone Weil’s Waiting for God, Mother Teresa’s A Simple Path, and St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s Story of a Soul.

Quibbles are quibbles, though. Overall as I look through this roster, I’m grateful for its thoughtful and intelligent selections. And it’s also well to remember that a list like this is not a sacred canon; it’s just meant to be a general guide for readers who may want to explore some works they may not know about. And this aim it fulfills extremely well. You can pick anything on this list for your next reading choice, and you won’t go wrong.




Reviewed by Richard Smoley
2000 by Richard Smoley

List can be viewed at the HarperColllins site.