Thoreau’s God

Though Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) is often characterized as a loosely spiritual thinker “unmoored from common understandings of” faith, he was actually “religious to the bone,” according to this intriguing inquiry from journalist Higgins (Thoreau and the Language of Trees). Yet Thoreau’s life and writing on religion is marked by “a series of baffling paradoxes,” Higgins writes, claiming that Thoreau was “often irreverent” but “never irreligious”; was not “bound” by his Puritan background but could not “quite shake” it; wove pantheistic themes into his work but did not ascribe to the pantheistic view that God and nature are one and the same; and was often associated with humanism despite believing that the universe was divinely created. Those contradictions aside, Higgins sees Thoreau’s God not “as the oxymoron many people have taken it to be” but a “riddle” that is unlocked by the thinker’s “desire to embrace and be embraced by” a “wildness, a benevolence, and a love that he often understood as God.” While readers may not agree that Thoreau’s construction of religion is the purposeful puzzle that Higgins suggests, they will come away with a nuanced understanding of Thoreau’s religious thought, thanks to the author’s fine-grained and surprisingly poetic analysis (“Thoreau called the natural world the ‘face of God,’ but as a religious thinker, he would not let that energy be reduced to... a bearded, white-robed being enthroned above us”). It’s a worthy reconsideration of an important American philosopher. (Nov.)