Thoreau found God in the natural world
“We are not human beings on a spiritual journey,
but rather spiritual beings on a human journey.”
Teilhard de Chardin
— from: “Thoreau’s God”
I discovered Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson when I was in high school. From that point on, Thoreau and Emerson became true teachers for me going forward and into and during my college years. My first ‘wisdom-keepers’ you might say. And I’ve continued to read and re-read their work to this day, identifying essentially with their spiritual connection to the natural world and the universe.
Two subjects of primary interest that continue to inspire and mystify. During my years living in the Southern Appalachian woods and off-the-grid, Thoreau’s “Walden” became something of a bible for me. Much has been written about Thoreau since his lifetime (1817-1862) and a new book has just been published that focuses on his spiritual writing and specifically on his idea and interpretation of God (Thoreau’s God, Univ. of Chicago Press, 2024, 232 pgs.) by journalist, Thoreau scholar and author of four books on Thoreau, Richard Higgins.
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Higgins writes in the book’s Introduction, “{This is a book} that grounds Thoreau’s philosophical views and how he related to the natural world. It gives us a better sense of what motivated him and what he was all about.” Higgins goes on to say that Thoreau was “interested in people’s private encounters with the holy and the difference those moments made in their lives.”
None other than Ralph Waldo Emerson said of Thoreau: “Few know about nature’s secrets, as Thoreau did and none in a more large and religious synthesis.” Higgins says: “His writings and the example of his life helped blaze a trail that many others have traveled ... and has more readers today than any American author from before the Civil War.”
“The more thrilling, wonderful, divine objects I behold in a day, the more expanded and immortal I become,” Thoreau wrote. He was interested in a profound and sacred experience of a sacred mystery that is greater than ourselves. His writings show a man actively seeking to find the divine in nature and to fathom its depths. He emphasized a more loving God and the goodness and potential of human nature, rather than its depravity. As a young man, as Higgins reminds us, Thoreau did not want to study religion, he wanted to experience it. To “revere” he says, was for Thoreau, to truly see something, to value it and be humbled by it — not in fear, but in awe. He saw the forests as a “grande and sacred church.” Thoreau believed in putting belief into practice. “the only prayer for a brave man is to be a doing,” he wrote.
On a more cultural level, Thoreau believed that capitalism, with its machines, markets mindless work and trivial entertainment, was damaging people’s capacity for reverence. His daily visits to the woods, fields and waters of Concord set his spiritual wheels in motion. “We must drink from the very fountains from which truth springs,” Thoreau wrote; “however high up the mountainside they may be.”
In terms of his idea of one’s relationship to God, “It is only by forgetting yourself that you draw near to him,” he says. He was always teaching the importance of the Present and the present moment. “Looking back at our failings robs our attention of what we are being given in the present,” he writes. Or as Higgins says, “The natural world, and the gladness and freedom he found in it, was Thoreau’s antidote to despair.”
“Thoreau’s God” focuses not only on Thoreau’s brilliance, wit and authorship, but also cites many of his major influences and supporters with references to and quoted material from such spiritualists and naturalists as Emerson, Jonathan Edwards, William Blake, John Muir, Darwin, Loren Eisley, E.O. Wilson, Chaucer, Wordsworth and many others including Emily Dickinson and Tielhard de Chardin, whom I have quoted above. Thoreau kept good company, before, during and after his lifetime — even when he was living alone at Walden Pond as a voracious reader. As we turn the pages, Higgins goes on to cite the minor role that humanity holds in the scheme of things and Thoreau’s higher regard for the wild, non-human world and his view of the universe as a divine creation. And then he comes back to the subject of the human perspective when writing “God is my father & my friend — men are my brothers — but nature is my mother and my sister.”
So there are apparent contradictions, which is in many ways who Thoreau is. “A walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,” as the saying goes. But in the end his spiritual thinking and longing go beyond Earth and earth atmosphere. “There are higher planes. Infinitely higher planes, of life than this thou art now traveling on. Know that the goal is distant, and is upward,” he writes. Yet, in the end, he has practical advice for his readers when he writes: “We must securely love each other as we love God, with no more danger that our love be un-requited or ill-bestowed.” And finally we’re back in Walden woods with Thoreau’s last word and denoument: “God begins where nature ends.”
(Thomas Crowe is a regular contributor to The Smoky Mountain News and Smoky Mountain Living and is the author of the award-winning memoir “Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods” and is publisher of New Native Press.)
