On Thoreau's religion

including his Easter sermon

I made that little cairn over Thoreau’s name in the summer of ‘22, not at Walden but at the Hapgood Wright Forest just next to it in Concord MA. It was July 12th, to be exact, Thoreau’s birthday. I visited his grave in Sleepyhollow that summer as well. Because my parents live near Concord, I’m fortunate in being able, at least once a year, to visit on foot, bike, or occasionally canoe various places among Thoreau’s stomping grounds. They are, of course, utterly transfigured from Thoreau’s day. Even if the social and economic character of New England—especially Greater Boston—were not so different from what prevailed in the early and middle nineteenth century, the climate has already changed noticeably. If you read Thoreau studiously, you have a very good idea of what the climate was like in eastern Massachusetts 150-200 years ago. Winters are now much less severe and consistent, and autumn comes later.

And yet, despite the natural and cultural shifts, there is a spirit of the place that persists. I don’t mean in the sleek yet woodsy-feeling visitor’s center at Walden or in the crunchy bumper stickers on the cars you’ll see parked there. It has more to do with the innumerable stone walls that trace through what is now forest (in the nineteenth century New England was much more agricultural and pastoral than it is now since the forests have returned), and with the small farms that are still there, or have sprung up anew. This countryside makes a stark juxtaposition with the thrum of Greater Boston, where you can’t throw a stone without hitting a university or a biotech firm. It feels like an intellectually, technologically cutting-edge place (whether you consider that a good or bad thing), but at the same time it has a provincial feeling as well, and in Thoreau’s time, though the importance of the city and its environs (to the extent it was important) was of a different nature, there was that same paradoxical combination of metropolitan feeling and provinciality. Even when Massachusetts Bay was the biblical city upon a hill—especially then—it was also the middle of nowhere.

But I don’t right now want to go on about the provinces and peripheries in general, or the New England sense of place in particular. There will be plenty of that in my nonfiction book, which contains a lengthy section on Thoreau tentatively called “Between Sinai and Ktaadn.” There is no American author I feel closer to than old Henry. In Catholic parlance I could be said to have long ago conceived a special devotion to him, though in this case the basis of my devotion has more to do with the art of writing than with biography—Thoreau’s or my own. There is no one else to whom I am devoted in quite this way. My close study of Thoreau over many years has impressed upon me the conviction that very few people today (or at any time) have an accurate idea of the man. To be sure, he is, like Odysseus, a man of many turns, prone to going off where you least expect. Even in his few works people commonly read (usually restricted to Walden and “On Civil Disobedience”) there are many unexpected passages that seem to be overlooked or read counterintuitively.

For example, there is a passage in the “Spring” chapter of Walden which I think of as Thoreau’s Easter sermon. Since it is Holy Week right now on the Western Christian calendar, I thought I would share this passage today. People never seem to want pantheistic Henry to have anything to do with Christianity. I haven’t bothered to find out if this strictly true in a scholarly sense—I’m a writer, damnit, not a scholar. And of course Thoreau was not a churchgoing man. Yet he wrote a better Easter sermon (and blessedly shorter!) than many Christians are likely to hear this Sunday. That’s how I think of it anyhow. Here is young Henry:

A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring. In a pleasant spring morning all men’s sins are forgiven. Such a day is a truce to vice. While such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return. Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors. You may have known your neighbor yesterday for a thief, a drunkard, or a sensualist, and merely pitied or despised him, and despaired of the world; but the sun shines bright and warm this first spring morning, recreating the world, and you meet him at some serene work, and see how his exhausted and debauched veins expand with still joy and bless the new day, feel the spring influence with the innocence of infancy, and all his faults are forgotten. There is not only an atmosphere of good will about him, but even a savor of holiness groping for expression, blindly and ineffectually perhaps, like a new-born instinct, and for a short hour the south hill-side echoes to no vulgar jest. You see some innocent fair shoots preparing to burst from his gnarled rind and try another year’s life, tender and fresh as the youngest plant. Even he has entered into the joy of his Lord. Why the jailer does not leave open his prison doors,—why the judge does not dismiss his case,—why the preacher does not dismiss his congregation! It is because they do not obey the hint which God gives them, nor accept the pardon which he freely offers to all….

Thoreau was not a fan of fiction, but there is a good deal of the novelist’s sensibility in this passage. You could call it a kind of universal pity or, if that sounds condescending, then say fellow-feeling, a sort of merciful sense of brotherhood. And clearly this is a kind of sermon as well. Thoreau even quotes a hymn by Isaac Watts (“While such a sun…”). You can take the Yankee out of New England (and if he had lived longer, I think Thoreau would have explored more of America), but you can’t take New England out of the Yankee. I would say it’s just as well, partly because I consider that, by dint of the central role the narrator plays in a novel, the sermon and the novel are more closely related than people commonly imagine. Mainly Thoreau can be said to have greatly advanced the genres of travel writing and what we now call (using a phrase I can’t stand) nature writing. But the way I read him, he foreshadows the modern essayistic novel (the first great instance of which is perhaps War and Peace), which I hold to be an important development in a time when fiction and reality, sacred spousal partners, are in danger of divorce…

But I don’t want to launch into literary criticism just now either. I meant this to be about Thoreau’s religion, or more accurately his relationship to what we usually think of as religion. Something to note is that in his Easter sermon, as with many things he wrote, it is possible and in fact quite easy to discover an orthodox Christian interpretation. For example, while some might say that in the passage I’ve quoted, with it emphasis on “liv[ing] in the present always,” Thoreau is anti-eschatological or, to use an older more colloquial Christian term, worldly, I would maintain that he is seeing the world, as he often does, sub specie aeternitatis: for eternity (if there is such a universe) is always here and now. It is not only here and now, but it is no more removed from this world than God, whose dwelling is eternity, is removed from his Creation, even while he is not confused with it.

Such has been the traditional Christian understanding. No doubt, it has been perverted in various times and places. Just the other day one of my children asked me where God lives beyond the stars and I had to explain that he does not live beyond the stars, or not only there, but among the stars as among us. The idea of a distant, deistic God made deep inroads in Western culture in recent times, but this was not the Deity that Thoreau knew. For him, the ancient Christian model of creation was still intact, however seldom his far more secular successors may realize this. Among other things, this means that for Thoreau the soul or spirit and body are not at war with each other or totally dissimilar and severable. In a passage like what I’ve called his Easter sermon the unity of spirit and body in this material creation is stressed. On another occasion, Thoreau the preacher could parse them. Here he is writing at the beginning of his last book, Cape Cod, which opens with his witnessing the aftermath of the wreck of a ship, the St. John, cruelly close to Plymouth harbor. The ship had been carrying destitute Irish immigrants:

If the last day were come, we should not think so much about the separation of friends or the blighted prospects of individuals…. I saw that the beauty of the shore was wrecked for many a lonely walker there, until he could perceive, at last, how its beauty was enhanced by wrecks like this, and it acquired thus a rarer and a sublime beauty still.

Why care for these dead bodies? They really have no friends but the worms or fishes. Their owners were coming to the New World, as Columbus and the Pilgrims did,—they were within a mile of its shores; but, before they could reach it, they emigrated to a newer world than ever Columbus dreamed of, yet one whose existence we believe that there is far more universal and convincing evidence—though it has not yet been discovered by science—than Columbus had of this; not merely mariners’ tales and some paltry drift-wood and sea-weed, but a continual drift and instinct to all our shores. I saw their empty hulks that came to land; but they themselves, meanwhile, were cast upon some shore yet further west, towards which we are all tending, and which we shall reach at last, it may be through storm and darkness, as they did. No doubt, we have reason to thank God that they have not been “shipwrecked into life again.” The mariner who makes the safest port in Heaven, perchance, seems to his friends on earth to be shipwrecked, for they deem Boston Harbor the better place; though perhaps invisible to them, a skillful pilot comes to meet him, and the fairest and balmiest gales blow off that coast, his good ship makes the land in halcyon days, and he kisses the shore in rapture there, while his old hulk tosses in the surf here. It is hard to part with one’s body, but, no doubt, it is easy enough to do without it once it is gone. All their plans and hopes burst like a bubble! Infants by the score dashed on the rocks by the enraged Atlantic Ocean! No, no! If the St John did not make her port here, she has been telegraphed there. The strongest wind cannot stagger a Spirit; it is a Spirit’s breath. A just man’s purpose cannot be split by any Grampus or material rock, but itself will split rocks till it succeeds.

If the subject of one’s sermon is not a kind of resurrection, as in the “Easter sermon,” but the death (or one of the kinds of death) that necessarily precedes resurrection, then the separation of body and spirit is more likely to take the emphasis. Nevertheless, at the core of this homiletic reflection, as you might call it, is the core New Testament teaching: It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. The body is not lacking from Thoreau’s imagery in part because it is never lacking from the traditional Christian understanding of the created order. From antiquity through at least the Renaissance, the spiritual was not perfectly dissimilar to the material. It was rather a refined form of the material, “subtle” in the older language.

The particular Christian world that formed Thoreau was of course that of Protestant New England. Thoreau is famous for stating on his death bed, when confronted by his pious aunt, that he did not need to make peace with God because he had never quarreled with him. That is probably not an orthodox Christian position, to be sure. Deep in the Maine Woods, when Henry was reproached by his Indian guide Joe Polis for wanting to exert himself on a Sunday, Joe asked him whether he was a Catholic (presumably from neighboring Quebec) or a Protestant. At least from the text of The Maine Woods, we do not know precisely what Thoreau answered, for what he wrote, ambiguously, was that Joe “stated that he was a Protestant, and asked me if I was. I did not at first know what to say, but I thought that I could answer with truth that I was.” Certainly he was—to use some other socio-religious terms—a nonconformist and dissenter in many ways.

Thoreau could have known little of forms of Christianity other than the diluted Yankee Protestantism of his own time. The Catholicism of the poor Irish immigrants he encountered in New England was impenetrable to him. But in 1850 he traveled to Quebec, the only journey abroad he would ever take. He left this record of his impression of Notre Dame in Montreal:

I soon found my way to the church of Notre Dame. I saw that it was of great size and signified something. It is said to be the largest ecclesiastical structure in North America, and can seat ten thousand. It is two hundred and fifty-five and a half feet long, and the groined ceiling is eighty feet above your head. The Catholic are the only churches which I have seen worth remembering, which are not almost wholly profane. I do not speak only of the rich and splendid like this, but of the humblest of them as well. Coming from the hurrahing mob and the rattling carriages, we pushed aside the listed door of this church, and found ourselves instantly in an atmosphere which might be sacred to thought and religion, if one had any. There sat one or two women who had stolen a moment from the concerns of the day, as they were passing; but, if there had been fifty people there, it would still have been the most solitary place imaginable. They did not look up at us, nor did one regard another. We walked softly down the broad-aisle with our hats in our hands. Presently came in a troop of Canadians, in their homespun, who had come to the city in the boat with us, and one and all kneeled down in the aisle before the high altar to their devotions, somewhat awkwardly, as cattle prepare to lie down, and there we left them. As if you were to catch some farmer’s sons from Marlboro, come to cattle-show, silently kneeling in Concord meeting-house some Wednesday! Would there not soon be a mob peeping in at the windows? It is true, these Roman Catholics, priests and all, impress me as a people who have fallen far behind the significance of their symbols. It is as if an ox had strayed into a church and were trying to bethink himself. Nevertheless, they are capable of reverence; but we Yankees are a people in whom this sentiment has nearly died out, and in this respect we cannot bethink ourselves even as oxen. I did not mind the pictures nor the candles, whether tallow or tin. Those of the former which I looked at appeared tawdry. It matters little to me whether the pictures are by a neophyte of the Algonquin or the Italian tribe. But I was impressed by the quiet religious atmosphere of the place. It was a great cave in the midst of the city; and what were that altars and the tinsel but he sparkling stalactics, into which you entered in a moment, and where the still atmosphere and the somber light disposed to serious and profitable thought? Such a cave at hand, which you can enter any day, is worth a thousand of our churches which are open only Sundays—hardly long enough for an airing—and then filled with a bustling congregation—a church where the priest is the least part, where you do your own preaching, where the universe preaches to you and can be heard. I am not sure but this Catholic religion would be an admirable one if the priest were quite omitted. I think that I might go to church myself sometimes some Monday, if I lived in a city where there was such a one to go to. In Concord, to be sure, we do not need such. Our forests are such a church, far grander and more sacred. We dare not leave our meeting houses for fear they would be profaned. Such a cave, such a shrine, in one of our groves, for instance, how long would it be respected? for what purposes would it be entered, by such baboons as we are? I think of its value not only to religion, but to philosophy and to poetry; besides a reading-room, to have a thinking-room in every city! Perhaps the time will come when every house even will have not only its sleeping-rooms, its dining-room, its talking-room or parlor, but its thinking-room also, and the architects will put it into their plans. Let it be furnished and ornamented with whatever conduces to serious and creative thought. I should not object to the holy water, or any other simple symbol, if it were consecrated by the imagination of the worshippers.

“As for the Protestant churches,” he adds, “here or elsewhere, they did not interest me. for it is only as caves that churches interest me at all, and in that respect they were inferior.”

There is a great deal to reflect on in this passage. I won’t draw this post out any longer, having already written—or quoted—so much. I will point out Thoreau’s prescience in his idea that Catholics are “a people who have fallen far behind the significance of their symbols,” and that proper churchgoing Protestants are in an even worse state. Long before Nietzsche (who was six years old when Thoreau went to Canada), he seems to have realized that God is dead and it is we modern Westerners who have killed him. But in the groves of Concord and the Catholic churches of Quebec, Thoreau intimated the kind of re-enchanted, re-wilded Western religion that is more and more on people’s minds in our “post-secular” phase.

Deus vobiscum

JMG

Holy Thursday (Western calendar), 2024