Henry David Thoreau is the original American antihero who is famous for resistance to industrial capitalism and the elite company to appear in the forest. His contempt for organized religion and love for nature has inspired generations of seekers who want to understand themselves and the world outside the four walls of a church. But he also had a deep and lasting belief in God as his creator.
Press of the University of Chicago
224p $ 20
In his new book, Thoreau's GodRichard Higgins shows us that Thoreau despised organized religion and Christianity, but was a “deeply religious person without religion”. It is a fascinating journey through Thoreau's extensive work and examines the way the philosopher thought about the divine and human relationship with the divine.
This is a book of theology, not a spirituality. It is not tried to give the reader instructions on how to live your life, but only instructions on how Thoreau lived his. I appreciated this and enjoyed the author's writing style, which is woven closely with quotations. At the same time, Higgins' own Frommes Unitarianism (he is a member of the Church, the Thoreau, the first parish of Concord), clearly underpins his letter, in a way that feels for a book about a man who may come closest to a Holy Unitarian – even if he has not always liked her version of the institutional religion very much.
I had the feeling that I couldn't adequately check a book about Thoreau if I read it in my apartment. So I left my cell phone in my room and went on the train without looking at a schedule. It was a nice experience when a squirrel jumped from one branch to the other to take a chipmunk without realizing that I watched it and see ants that undoubtedly crawl with other ants, just like the Thoreau, which were observed in Concord.
I thought about the plants and animals that I saw, the part of the same line of New England Wildlife, which could be observed in the 1840s. I thought about the dead leaves that would grow fertilizers for new life and the mushroom from a dying tree trunk. I thought about the rocks that were there when Thoreau studied on the other side of the river in Harvard when all the residents of this country were native people who were there, long before a person ever got on this continent and who are here long after our.
I would recommend this to read Higgins book. Thoreau was frustrated by the organized religion because he did not believe that words could adequately express the human relationship with God. It had to be experienced personally, and for Thoreau it meant through the world that God had created. We won't live in the Walden Pond, but we can have a version of the radical separation of the 21st century. It is good to be really physically grounded as he reads about a man who longed for the indiffection that he had found for only in a temple without walls.
I also discovered a hollow tree stump in which someone had carefully planted flowers. An alcoholic anonymous chip was bound by part of the blunt: Clean and relaxed for 60 days. If nature is supposed to be a temple, people have left their offerings here.
I liked it, but I'm not sure if Thoreau would have done it. He was often contemptuous towards the material material expressions of the religion of other people and fought his way to connect with other people, even with those he regarded as friends.
Higgins also examines Thoreau's melancholy, including his thoughts of suicide. This is a man who was deep and deeply depressed, partly because of the death of his brother, but also because of his difficulties to adapt to those around him.
While Thoreau rejected his Puritan heritage, he was deeply rooted in his theology and aesthetics. Higgins shows the immense width of the biblical allusions of Thoreau, a much more expansive list than that of his less religious contemporaries such as Ralph Waldo Emerson or Emily Dickinson. And like many new England transcendentalists of the 19th century, he had an appreciation for a tradition of belief, which in many ways represented the antithesis of puritanism: Catholicism.
When he didn't like any kind of organization or materiality, Thoreau would never become Catholic like his friend Isaac Hecker or his teacher Orestes Brownson. But he was shocked to see how young rural Canadians knelt in the cathedral in Montreal, and admitted that he could not imagine seeing young rural men from Massachusetts at the Concord meeting house. He considered that only Catholics still knew how to be awesome.
One of Thoreau's main complaints about the American organized religion was that it is not the most important moral question of the day: slavery. Even in Massachusetts, one of the most pro-abolition states in the country, many churches were lukewarm or still on this topic. Although he did not believe in the divinity of Jesus, Thoreau estimated the teachings of Jesus over his arms and he had the feeling that the Church had left her.
It is impossible not to see parallels in our own time. However, this is not a book that makes an explicit comment on contemporary topics. If so many politically progressive books feel didactically, it is refreshing to read someone who doesn't.
Higgins uses Thoreau's extensive body to carefully analyze his religion Walden but also A week on the Concord and Merrimack rivers And Thoreau's many essays and letters that not all were published. The chapters in Thoreau's God Concentrate on different dimensions of Thoreau's spirituality, such as his mystical experiences in nature, his complicated relationship with Jesus and the traditional Christian theology and the way he understood silent and what cannot be spoken in relation to God.
I thought about institutional failure while eating Thoreau's God. When I read it in Chestnut Hill Reservoir, I was able to see the campus of the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, where I had visited a class. The Archdiocese of Boston had sold this property to the university years ago, partly to pay all settings for sexual abuse.
I also see closed churches that were closed every day because they couldn't convince enough people that they were worth visiting, which is a different kind of institutional failure. Thoreau's anger, both about a lack of moral strength and about the senselessness of religion in general, it is easy to understand.
Even someone who has deeply committed to his faith community will find something that resonates in this book. Thoreau did not believe that the problems with the institutional religion would be resolved with which many people, including his friends who were unitarians, would not agree. But in a world in which the formal religion is rejected, but is not increasingly widespread for conviction, how better for those who stay in the church to understand this attitude than by their most famous representative?
Thoreau's God is a well -written band that offers a focused view of one of the most famous authors in America. It does not offer an insight in Thoreau as a naturalist or secular asceta, but as someone who strongly believed in God as love. Regardless of their religious beliefs, this book is worthwhile for everyone who is interested in American religious experience.