Transcendentalists

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THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THIS MOMENT

The Gospel According to the Moment by Barry M. Andrews

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.

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The Spirituality of Henry David Thoreau

In September Harvard Divinity School hosted a program on Henry Thoreau’s religious views. I was on a panel with Laura Dassow Walls, author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life; Richard Higgins, author of Thoreau and the Language of Trees, and Terry Tempest Williams, author of The Hour of Land. What follows is a shortened version of my remarks that evening.

Barry M Andrews at the Harvard Divinity School on a Panel discussing Henry David Thoreau's Religion

Barry M Andrews at HDS

This bicentennial year at least a dozen books have been published about Henry David Thoreau. This scholarship is a boon to those of us who feel that Thoreau is worth the effort to understand him better and discover more about his interests and subsequent influence on American life and culture.

The danger we encounter amidst the welter of information produced in the wake of this recent scholarship, as Rebecca Solnit points out in her essay on the “Thoreau Problem,” is that we will end up compartmentalizing him, as in Thoreau the writer, Thoreau the abolitionist, Thoreau the naturalist, and so on. Or, worse yet, bifurcating his life between the recluse of Walden Pond on the one hand and the tax-resister in the Concord jail on the other; or between the dreamy Transcendentalist of his youth and the hard-headed scientist of his later years. Thus, we fail to see how the myriad parts of his life are of a piece and hang together.

From my perspective as a minister and a student of Transcendentalism, the thread on which all the beads of Thoreau’s many-faceted life are strung is his idiosyncratic and unconventional faith—a dimension largely unexplored in Thoreau scholarship. Richard Higgins is one of the few to venture into this area. It is a major thread of Laura Walls’ recent biography as well.

Thoreau’s earliest religious views were informed by his Unitarian upbringing. He was baptized and catechized in Concord’s First Parish Church. His mother and father were members there. But he signed off from the church when he was a young man. By the time he entered college in 1833, he was perhaps not a devout Unitarian, but his Harvard education was nevertheless steeped in Unitarian tradition, the school having been a training ground for over a generation of Unitarian ministers. Many of his professors were noted Unitarians. His textbooks expounded the virtues of Unitarian moral philosophy.

However, as a student he was drawn to counter-cultural ideas then in vogue, the so-called “new views” of religion, self and society that were being entertained by a younger generation of Unitarian intellectuals and divines. The Transcendentalists, with whom he came to identify, were generally of the opinion that the religious sentiment is natural and universal in human experience, whereas religious institutions are but parochial and limited forms which this sentiment takes. They also believed that religious truth is known by experience, intuitively, and thus does not depend on religious scriptures or church teachings. They conceived of a natural or absolute religion, shorn of sectarian elements.

Professor Walls has suggested that Thoreau’s purpose in going to live at Walden Pond was “profoundly religious,” and that in writing of his experience he was intending to produce a “scripture for the modern world.” To this, I would add that Walden is not only a religious treatise, it is also a manual of spiritual practice.

Self-culture played a central role in Transcendentalist spirituality. Sometimes termed “the art of life,” for them it meant the cultivation of the soul. “The art of life!” Thoreau wrote in his journal. “Was there anything memorable written on it? By what disciplines to secure the most life, with what care to watch our thoughts.” The disciplines he practiced and described in Walden include leisure, self-reliance, reading, contemplation, solitude, conversation, sauntering in nature, simple living and action from principle. By such practices we may, even today, attempt “to secure the most life.”

As for Thoreau’s religion we should perhaps heed his own admonition: “What is religion?” he queried in his journal. “That which is never spoken.” Part of the difficulty we have in describing Thoreau’s religion is that the word “religion” was only then in the process—one accelerated by the Transcendentalists themselves—of being thought of apart from its historical manifestations in the various faith traditions.

What we can say, I believe, is that his religious views were experiential, nature centered, and pluralistic. God, for him, was immanent rather than transcendent. He was, if anything a nature mystic and a pantheist. He was familiar with the Bible since he read it in Greek at Harvard and frequently drew from Biblical language and imagery in his own writings, but—in my view at least—he was not Christian in any meaningful sense of the word.

Leigh Eric Schmidt argues in his book, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality, that the Transcendentalists were responsible for introducing the distinction between religion and spirituality, a prominent feature of religious life today. Thoreau eschewed religious institutions, but was a deeply spiritual person. And this is one of the reasons that many people today find him so appealing. He may have been decried as a heretic and an atheist in his own time, but now he is viewed as the avatar of an alternative way of being religious in the world.

Read more about the event on Harvard Divinity School’s News & Events page.

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Why Transcendentalist Spirituality?

People often ask me why I am attracted to the Transcendentalists. For the Greeks and Romans, to be a philosopher was not to craft subtle arguments, but to live a philosophical life. As Thoreau said in Walden, “To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates.” For the ancients, philosophy was akin to what today we call spirituality. I, too, aspire to live a philosophical or spiritual life, and for me the Transcendentalists offer the best model for doing so.

Their discipline, or praxis, was termed self-culture. For them, culture was not high-brow entertainment, as it is for us today. It did not “consist in polishing or varnishing,” Emerson said. Rather, culture meant cultivation. And the self in question is not the self of modern psychology, but the soul. Self-culture is the cultivation of the soul. Their spiritual exercises included contemplation, solitude, walks in nature, reading, journal writing, conversation, simple living, and action from principle.

Theoria, for the Greeks and Romans, was wisdom gained through contemplation. The wisdom of the Transcendentalists consisted in the belief that there is a cosmos, or unity of nature, including human nature. It is best expressed in these words of Emerson: “We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.”

My own spiritual practice has been enriched and guided by what I have learned from the Transcendentalists, Emerson and Thoreau above all.