Complete Works
About This Book
The Complete Works of Kahlil Gibran brings together the full body of his written work in English — including The Prophet, Jesus the Son of Man, The Madman, The Garden of the Prophet, The Death of the Prophet, Spirits Rebellious, The Broken Wings, Sand and Foam, and his other prose-poetry collections — allowing the reader to experience the arc of his creative and spiritual development across a career that spanned from his youthful rage against Lebanese religious and social hypocrisy to the mature mystical serenity of his later masterpieces.
Gibran is a unique figure in twentieth-century spiritual writing: a poet, painter, philosopher, and mystic who worked entirely in the border zone between Christianity and Sufism, between East and West, between traditional religious sensibility and Nietzschean individual assertion. His Jesus the Son of Man — in which fifty-seven different characters offer their perspectives on the figure of Christ — is one of the most remarkable treatments of the Jesus story in any literature, presenting him not as a doctrinal figure but as a living human being of extraordinary spiritual radiance encountered by people across the full spectrum of human type and experience. The Complete Works is a treasury that rewards a lifetime of return visits.
What You'll Learn
• Experience the full arc of Gibran's creative development: from the fierce social protest of Spirits Rebellious and The Broken Wings through the ecstatic mysticism of The Prophet to the mature cosmic vision of Jesus the Son of Man
• Understand Gibran's synthesis of Sufi mysticism, Lebanese Christian tradition, and Western philosophical Romanticism into a genuinely original spiritual voice that belongs to no single tradition
• Appreciate Jesus the Son of Man as a unique literary and spiritual achievement: how the perspective of fifty-seven different witnesses creates a portrait of spiritual genius that no single point of view could achieve
• Grasp the consistent themes across all of Gibran's work: the divinity of the human being, the tyranny of social convention over authentic self-expression, the inseparability of love and pain, and the mystic's recognition of the eternal presence within the temporal
• Encounter Sand and Foam's aphoristic genius: how Gibran's capacity for compression allows him to deliver in a single sentence a depth of insight that other writers require pages to approach
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