At his cabin near Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau famously kept three chairs: “one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” Even when he sat alone, Thoreau contained multitudes. We know him best as the man who lived for two years in a hut in the woods, recording his experiment in simplicity in Walden, a seminal entry in what would become a thriving American genre, the self-help book.
Beyond his stature as the nation’s first decluttering expert, however, Thoreau (1817-1862) was a man of many angles. He lamented the speed and scale of the railroads, but liked that the train connected him with Harvard’s library. He celebrated solitude, but remained close to friends and family. He sniffed at newspapers as trivial distractions but drew on them as a social activist. Thoreau questioned the worth of commerce, but brought invaluable innovations to his family’s pencil business. He seemed an idler to many and wrote about the virtue of standing still, but he worked incredibly hard at his writing and endures as one of the world’s most industrious and ambitious naturalists.
Thoreau’s paradoxes fascinate some readers and frustrate others. Kathryn Schulz, in a controversial piece, cited some of Thoreau’s inconsistencies as evidence of what a pompous fraud he was. Donovan Hohn, rebutting her, pointed out that Thoreau’s contradictions instructively resonate with our own conflicted feelings about who we are, how much we want, and what we’re willing to pay for it.
A man who wrote as much as Thoreau was bound to reveal evolving opinions. His journal alone stretches to 14 volumes and some two million words. Few readers, even within his circle of ardent admirers, have tackled his entire oeuvre. Much of Thoreau’s legacy rests with earnest anthologists who extract bits of his prose into thematic collections, hoping a few bright shards will imply the larger whole. There are various distillations of his journal, a collection of his writings on education, even a whole book of Thoreau’s thoughts on water.
In his recent anthology—Henry David Thoreau: Spiritual and Prophetic Writings (Orbis, 224pp., $22)—editor Tim Flinders drew on a selection of Thoreau’s letters, journal entries, essays, and books to capture his thinking about God and religion. His book was published by a house run by the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, a liberal arm of the Roman Catholic church. Although Thoreau’s message of simplicity chimes with the no-frills style of Pope Francis, the Sage of Walden wasn’t Catholic himself. A product of deeply Protestant New England, Thoreau eschewed organized religion and claimed no church affiliation. He was a Transcendentalist, embracing the idea of a direct relationship with God through nature.
“When you knock,” he told a friend, “ask to see God—none of the servants.”
That friend was Harrison Otis Blake, a widower who had written to recruit Thoreau as a spiritual adviser. Thoreau demurred, admitting that he was still trying to work out this part of his life for himself. He told Blake that any advice would come from “faith and aspiration,” not a mastery of the subject. Thoreau distrusted clerical authority, and he seemed reluctant to claim his own disciples or a firm set of religious beliefs. He was something of a dabbler, drawing on Western religious traditions, Eastern religions, and his intuition to discern the divine.
This kind of do-it-yourself theology would seem to have renewed appeal today, as more and more Americans choose (like Thoreau) to avoid religious affiliation altogether. According to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center, the number of Americans who claim to be affiliated with a religion has dropped from 83 percent in 2007 to 77 percent today. Thoreau’s spiritual life, which drew on personal observation and reflection rather than congregational worship, seems like an attractive alternative to praying in a pew. If one can find God in a sunrise or a tree, why bother with a church, synagogue, or temple?
Flinders doesn’t address that question directly. But in his introduction, he notes that Thoreau’s self-guided spiritual odyssey led him to form some of the same insights already available within Catholicism. Touched by ecstatic states he couldn’t understand, Thoreau apparently didn’t know that Saint Augustine, Saint Teresa of Avila, and Meister Eckhart had recorded similar experiences.
Thoreau’s Walden interlude, conditioned by simple labor, apparent celibacy, and long stretches of solitude, had obvious parallels in ecclesiastical history: “Though Thoreau remained irreligious in his disposition,” Flinders writes, “his routine unintentionally mirrored those of a vowed Catholic monastic—the seclusion sought by a Trappist monk in his cloister.” And Thoreau’s view of grace expressed through daily routine involved a sacramental sense of faith: “I do believe,” he told Blake, “that the outward and the inward life correspond.”
Flinders isn’t the first person to suggest similarities between Thoreau’s spiritual practices and those of the church of Rome. Andrew Delbanco made the case more directly several years ago in a perceptive essay, “Thoreau Faces Death.” Confronting the prospect of mortality, Delbanco concludes, “Thoreau became what I would call a secret Catholic—the pilgrim who discovers and takes refuge in what he judges to be the one durable church in which the spirit of God has consented to be realized in human form.”
The title of Delbanco’s essay makes clear that Thoreau knew what was at stake regarding questions about God. He’d been deeply shaken by the death of his brother John, and he lived in an age when the average life expectancy for an American male was less than 45 years. Thoreau, who would die at 44, knew that earthly life was often short, and this knowledge deeply shaped his writing. It’s why the passages in Walden about how to spend time ring with such urgency.
Spiritual and Prophetic Writings contains parts of Walden, along with such widely anthologized essays as “Life Without Principle,” “Civil Disobedience,” and “Walking.” There’s nothing really new here, but Tim Flinders does a nice job of arranging some of Thoreau’s iconic writings, like an artful line of dominoes, to create a sense of his spiritual progression. In “Walking,” Thoreau mentions that the word “saunter” is derived from idle people who sought charity on the pretense of going “à la Saint Terre”—to the Holy Land—when they had no real intention of traveling that far. Thoreau’s sympathies are with such walkers who find revelation closer to home: “He is a sort of fourth estate,” writes Thoreau, “outside of Church and State and People.”
Thoreau seems to be arguing here for a kind of democratized spirituality—one available close at hand, without the meddlesome mediation of clerics and theologians. But we know, too, that Thoreau’s Walden regimen was relatively short-lived. He stayed there only two years, leaving for reasons he never fully explained. The pared-down disciplines he was trying to master were, quite possibly, easier to sustain within an equally committed community, which is why monks tend to live in groups—and why, we might reasonably infer, there’s still value in exploring one’s spirituality the old-fashioned way: with other people.
Danny Heitman is the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.
