Fifteen years ago, I drove from Chicago to Concord, Massachusetts, to research a book about Henry David Thoreau. I soon made a wonderful discovery: The original, handwritten copy of “Walking,” Thoreau’s iconic essay, was housed in the local library. Though he delivered the piece many times as a public lecture, “Walking” was not published until a few weeks after he died in 1862.
That morning, after obtaining the manuscript for review, I sat in the sunlight in wonderment: Thoreau had actually written this essay on this paper with his own hands. You can see his cross-outs and rewrites. Delighted, I waded into the text, and tried to accustom myself to Thoreau’s loopy and elusive scrawl. Soon, I could not help but notice marks suggesting he was unsure whether to use capital or lowercase letters on certain important words.
In one spot he changes “god” to “God.” In several places he adds three little underscores to the w in “wildness,” making them capitals, unsure how to render this central idea in his work. The same indecision appears in the word “nature.” I left the library wondering if these apparent tensions, of first having made “God” ordinary (god) and “nature” extraordinary (Nature), offered a glimpse into the depth of Thoreau’s philosophical honesty at the end of his short life.
Though some of his devotees may disagree, Thoreau was as much a seeker as a seer. His life philosophy and religiosity were always evolving. In recent years, several scholars have written books about Thoreau’s spirituality, attempting to explore what the sage of Walden Pond really thought about God and religion.
None of these books captures the breadth and evolution of Thoreau’s religious understanding as well as Richard Higgins’ Thoreau’s God. Higgins, a former staff writer for The Boston Globe, did an extensive review of Thoreau’s voluminous writings, enabling him to chronicle the evolution of Thoreau’s beliefs from his early disparaging of the Church to his “experiential, noninstitutional spirituality” to his prophetic moral positions, which later inspired the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi. “Thoreau was religious to the bone,” Higgins writes in his introduction, “and had a profound sense of the holy.”
As the first celebrated nature writer in the United States, Thoreau lived before it became a cliché to say “the ordinary is sacred.” He deeply understood that the word “ordinary” has religious resonances — consider its relation to words like “ordo” and “ordination.” Increasingly, he found his religion in the woods themselves, in the wild, divine patterns and relationships among flora and fauna. This community he understood much better than the human community, the kind of community required to form a church.
According to Higgins, Thoreau’s ideas were sparked by his reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature while he was a student at Harvard. The linkage Higgins proposes may offer the clearest window yet into Thoreau’s early religious beliefs, revealing how he first came to understand the Concord woods as both scripture and temple. “The happiest man,” Emerson writes, “is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.” Thoreau sought no human structure or contrivance or community to worship God. Rather, he found God in the most ordinary aspects of life. His daily bath in Walden Pond was a “religious exercise.” Reading and walking were central spiritual practices.
But Thoreau evolved toward this understanding and its practice over time. He wrote his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, published in 1849, during his two-year stay at Walden Pond. A rumination on the premature death of his brother, John, it is known for its fierce critique of the Church. Higgins explores Thoreau’s attack on clergy and institutional religion early on, using it as a jumping-off point for his analysis.
While Thoreau’s critique of the Church gave him “a pitchfork and horns in the popular imagination,” writes Higgins, that image of the author misinterprets his intentions. “Thoreau’s animus against the church was not entirely religious,” he explains. “He distrusted institutions of all kinds — schools, governments, and philanthropic societies as well as religious bodies.”
The church, Thoreau believed, had “sold its soul to power, prestige and property.” He was appalled at what he perceived as the moral cowardice of ministers, exemplified by their half-hearted support of the abolitionist movement. Higgins sums up: “Religion without the moral law was no religion at all for Thoreau.”
Thoreau imagined the social gospel a decade or two before it coalesced into a movement. He repeatedly called out the Church for its hypocrisy. Higgins cites a journal entry of November 16, 1858, in which Thoreau writes: “The church! It is eminently the timid institution, and the heads and pillars of it are . . . the greatest cowards in the community.”
Aside from these moral failings, Thoreau simply never saw the institution of the church as necessary for religious practice. Following Emerson, he believed he had no need for the church or a pastor to mediate between him and God. Unlike his Puritan predecessors, who believed they would know God sola scriptura (by scripture alone), Higgins notes, Thoreau believed he would come to know God sola natura (by nature alone).
“The strains of a more heroic faith vibrate through the weekdays and the fields more than through the sabbath and the church,” Thoreau wrote to a friend. “To shut the ears to the immediate voice of God, and prefer to know him by report will be the only sin. . . . Our religion is where our love is.”
Love is not a word you often hear associated with Thoreau. Yet it points to why I keep returning to his work. Not for the clarity of his religious faith, but for how he teaches himself and his readers to see and love the whole of God’s Creation.
I, too, love to walk, though sometimes I struggle to focus on the journey rather than the arriving, on the present rather than the buzzing, flashing lures of the future. Amid this culture of perpetual distraction and interruption, Thoreau reminds me to take my time. And to live in what he called “the gospel of this moment,” to let my walk be a kind of prayer, an opening or turning to God, to seek the reconciliation of my being and my vast longings in a sense of belonging.
Thoreau died of tuberculosis in 1862 at the age of 44. Many friends visited him at his Concord home during the final weeks of his life, and some of his last recorded thoughts reflect his ever-evolving faith. When the minister Parker Pillsbury commented that Thoreau was “near the brink of a dark river” and wondered “how the opposite shore may appear,” Thoreau responded, “One world at a time.” When his Aunt Louisa asked him if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau said, “I did not know we had ever quarreled.”
Two of Thoreau’s final six words were “moose” and “Indian.” The others?
“Now comes good sailing.”
Tom Montgomery Fate’s most recent book is The Long Way Home, a collection of essays. He teaches part-time at St. Francis University in Joliet, Illinois.