Henry David Thoreau is known for many things. He was by turns a schoolteacher, a pencil maker, a surveyor, and a handyman. He was also an advocate of simple living, civil disobedience, and environmental preservation in addition to being a naturalist and a writer. I believe that the thread on which all the beads of his many-faceted life are strung is his idiosyncratic and unconventional religious faith.
As for describing his religious views, we should perhaps heed his own admonition: “What is religion?” he once asked. “That which is never spoken,” he said. What we can say, I believe, is that his religious views were experiential and nature-centered. God, for him, was immanent rather than transcendent. He was, if anything, a nature mystic and a pantheist.
He had little use for religious creeds, rites and institutions. He was put off by the hypocrisy and absolutism of sectarian religion. “I do not prefer one religion or philosophy to another,” he wrote. “I have no sympathy with the bigotry and ignorance which make transient and partial and puerile distinctions between one man’s faith or form of faith and another’s,—as Christian and heathen. I pray to be delivered from narrowness, partiality, exaggeration, bigotry. To the philosopher all sects, all nations, are alike. I like Brahma, Hari, Buddha, the Great Spirit, as well as God.”
His god was in the woods, not in a church. “I feel that I draw nearest to understanding the great secret of my life in my closest intercourse with nature,” he said. “I suppose that what in other men is religion is in me love of nature.” Thoreau’s spirituality was devoid of doctrines or formulas or philosophical propositions. It had primarily to do with transcendent experiences triggered by his encounters with the natural world. “To watch for, describe all the divine features which I detect in Nature,” he wrote, “My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in nature—to know his lurking places, to attend all the oratorios, the operas, in nature.”
He often referred to such experiences as ecstasies, or what we might call mystic states, like this one described in his journal:
In youth, before I lost any of my senses, I can remember that I was all alive, and inhabited my body with inexpressible satisfaction; both its weariness and its refreshment were sweet to me. This earth was the most glorious musical instrument, and I was audience to its strains. To have such sweet impressions made on us—such ecstasies begotten of the breezes!… I was daily intoxicated and yet no man could call be intemperate. With all your science can you tell me how it is and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?
As the frequency of these mystic states diminished over time, he was drawn to the idea that he might, through a certain kind of regimen, put himself in a receptive frame of mind and thereby enhance the odds that such experiences might recur.
His spiritual practice was in keeping with what was then termed “self-culture,” or the cultivation of the soul. “The art of life!” he called it. “Was there anything memorable written upon it? By what disciplines to secure the most life—with what care to watch our thoughts.” The disciplines he practiced and described in Walden and elsewhere include leisure, self-reliance, reading, contemplation, solitude, conversation, sauntering in nature, action from principle, and simple living. By such practices we may, even today, attempt “to secure the most life.”
From my forthcoming book, The Gospel According to This Moment: The Spiritual Message of Henry David Thoreau to be published by the University of Massachusetts Press, spring 2024.
