George William Allen and Christian Socialism: A Study of the Christo-Theosophical Society

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In this incisive study, noted philosophy professor Jeffrey Lavoie presents the Reverend George William Allen, an important figure in esoteric religious and cultural movements that swept North America and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. This original biography is the first serious scholarly attempt to define the man, his theology, and his philosophy and to trace his influence over the movements that helped to determine the cultural and religious avant-garde of the Western world from 1880 to 1914. Lavoie’s extensive background in theology and history and mastery of original documents lend his research terrific relevance in linking intellectual currents of Victorian, Edwardian, and modern esoteric beliefs and patterns. Allen’s dream theory, contemporary to but different from Freud’s, emphasized the notion that ordinary reality was a false state and that waking up process was linked to mystical connections and thus the one sure way to human self-knowledge. Allen’s influence lasted well into the twentieth century, affecting modernist poets such as Yeats and Pound as well as, at some remove, the spiritualism of the Nazis and other European fascist movements.