God in the Details: Thoreau's Dreams of Divinity

If in the past I had been asked about my general impressions of Henry Thoreau, I would have said simply, knowing very little on the topic in fact, that he was an environmentalist who wrote about living by a lake. I have come to understand now that if he was an environmentalist (whatever that means), he only learned to be one of any note late in life; more importantly, he was only one so far as he came to believe that being so would bring him nearer to the mind of God. In my effort to speak to (within the severe limitations of these pages) Thoreau's attempts at reconciliation between the physical and intimations of the non-physical, I will focus largely on a chapter in Walden called 'Higher Laws.' My attention was drawn to that chapter by a 1965 essay John Pickard wrote called "The Religion of 'Higher Laws.'"

Thoreau's ecological mind is not to be downplayed, of course, remarkable as it was, especially for his day and age. His Journal and similar artifacts from his brand of thorough, patient, intimate, and personal ecology, which was honed and refined over time, were extensive and influential. It is clear, though, that they attain particular poignancy because of Thoreau's pronounced theological and philosophical penchant--his more mature ecological thinking developed, for example, right alongside his knowledge of Asian and American-Indian mythology and cosmology (McGregor, 1997). So it is that if one takes Thoreau only as a nature writer, one might end up calling into question, as John Muir was said to have done, the very validity of Thoreau's knowledge (1997). How could a person know much about wild nature, really wild, having learned of it mostly in Concord, Massachusetts, even the Concord of the mid 1800s?

In fact, it seems to be Thoreau's religious thinking, his radical thinking in the way of questioning the roots of our condition, that is what truly distinguishes his lasting gift, what raises his writing up to its undeniable and influential status as classic. For example, though he was one of the first to advocate conservation and preservation measures, he certainly was not the first, nor is he the most well-known today of the conservation-oriented thinkers of the mid to late eighteenth century. So too, his observations of the natural world seem almost superfluous when compared to the work of contemporaries such as Darwin, whose research gave Thoreau something to study, something other than his own journal notes, and helped him to feel he was on the right track. Robert McGregor, in his book A Wider View of the Universe, goes so far as to say that Thoreau's nature orientation was a thing he fell back on when he himself fell on hard times: "Searching through the wreckage of his career in late 1849 and 1850, Henry seized on wild nature as his proper subject. Nature alone seemed responsive to the small spark of spirit within him, seemed worthy of his time, his study, his pen" (1997). In this light, nature and a focus on it were vehicles for that spark of spirit he wanted to explore, the questions with which Emerson and others had left him.

E.B. White says of Walden:

"If Thoreau had merely left us an account of a man's life in the woods, or if he had simply retreated to the woods and there recorded his complaints about society, or even if he had contrived to include both records in one essay, Walden would probably not have lived a hundred years. As things turned out, Thoreau, very likely without knowing quite what he was up to, took man's relation to nature and man's dilemma in society and man's capacity for elevating his spirit and he beat all these matters together...If (Walden) were a little less good than it is, or even a little less queer, it would be an abominable book." (1968)

What White means by using the word "queer" is to refer not only to Thoreau's frequent use of contradiction and paradox, keeping a reader forever on the tips of the toes, but also to his recalcitrant nature which constantly insisted that we question the very fundamentals of our perceptions. This queer Thoreauvian role of the jester, serving us all right with a dark, critical humor that smacks of divinity, is a role widely misinterpreted but still as valuable as ever. White also says, "Thoreau, the home-seeker, sitting on his hummock with the entire state of Massachusetts radiating from him, is to me the most humorous of the New England figures, and 'Walden' the most humorous of the books, though its humor is almost continuously subsurface and there is nothing funny anywhere" (1968).