Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) is often described as a secular writer, a natural philosopher, who turned against the common Christianity of his day. Richard Higgins — a journalist by trade and former staff writer at the Boston Globe — says it isn’t true that the author of Walden and the seminal American essay “Civil Disobedience” was anti-religious.
Not to say he wanted anything to do with churches. He didn’t! A leading figure of the Transcendentalist movement in nineteenth-century New England, Thoreau turned to the natural and the philosophical more often than to the theological. And he wasn’t a theist in a traditional sense.
In chapter 9, Higgins describes Thoreau’s brand of theism “tentative.” See the excerpt accompanying this review for a sample.
Subjects such as animism, Quakerism, Emanuel Swedenborg, Calvinism, Puritan theology, and the Bhagavad Gita also receive ample discussion here.
Higgins reveals in seventeen chapters how his subject was a spiritual seeker with a religious imagination from beginning to end. He shows Thoreau’s interest in the dynamism of God, the wildness of God, how God is revealed in nature, and even when and how Thoreau sensed God’s “closeness” to human life. He quotes Thoreau writing in his journal, for instance, “God should come into our thoughts without any false reverence…. God should come into our thoughts with no more parade than the zephyr [breeze] into our ears. Only strangers approach him with ceremony. How rarely in our English tongue do we find expressed any affection for God. No sentiment is so rare as love of God.”
Such expressions are repeated often in Thoreau’s writings. This book will be a surprise to those who value the author of Walden for his qualities as a proto-anarchist, social reformer, and naturalist. But he was no atheist; Higgins makes that clear.
