<i>Thoreau's God</i>. By Richard Higgins.

Thoreau's religion is an issue of evergreen interest. When, at age twenty-three, Henry David Thoreau declared he did “not wish to be considered a member” of Concord's First Parish, he took care not to imply that he ever had been a member. Yet Thoreau's faith is more honored at First Parish today than that of any minister who has served the church in its nearly four centuries of history. The people of First Parish, along with millions who keep a copy of Walden on their bedside table or think of “Walking” when they go for a walk, recognize what Richard Higgins says so well in this book: Thoreau repudiated the church because he wanted to be more religious, not less. “Behind his criticism,” Higgins writes, “was a desire to commune with the divine” (10). That desire was so strong that “Thoreau's whole life was a prayer” (14).While Thoreau's religion is continually relevant, its content is hard to specify. Higgins begins by asserting that “Thoreau's religion is first and foremost a riddle” (1). He concludes by calling it a “puzzle” (193). In between, he asserts that Thoreau “was a deeply religious person without a religion” (170). Higgins is at his best when he honors that insight by lifting up seemingly contradictory bits of evidence without seeking to reconcile them. All of Thoreau's writings were laced with biblical references and allusions to Puritan classics such as Pilgrim's Progress, yet he professed even greater devotion to the Bhagavad Gita and the Laws of Manu. Thoreau's conflict with the church was sharper than that of his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, yet virtually everyone who knew both of them regarded Thoreau as the more religious of the two. Emerson himself said that Thoreau's “petulance of remark in reference to churches” could not disguise that he “was a person of a rare, tender, and absolute religion, a person incapable of any profanation” (6).Perhaps most poignantly, Thoreau was always divided between his “love of the ‘solid and sunny earth’ and his sense of something beyond the physical world” (52). This is not to say that he fully shared Emerson's Platonism, much less that he sympathized with his age's desire to speak with ghosts. Rather, as Higgins shows in a poignant penultimate chapter, Thoreau's naturalism coincided with a lifelong meditation on death and its sequel. “The other world is all my art,” he told Emerson as a young man, and in 1857 he shared with a friend that “I keep a mountain anchored off eastward a little way, which I ascend in my dreams both awake and asleep” (171–72).I came to this book believing that Thoreau could be characterized as a pantheist or religious naturalist, and Higgins convinced me that such labels do justice to only part of the evidence. Yet at times, Higgins puts his thumb on the other side of the scale. Much as I admire a pithy, two-word title, I worry that Higgins's choice conveys only half the content of his book. I hope that readers will not miss the more revealing epigraph, in which Thoreau writes, “I say, God. I am not sure that that is the name. You will know whom I mean.”Just as Higgins's title comes too close to asserting flatly that Thoreau was a theist (or perhaps a pantheist), so too there are passages where he drives too sharp a wedge between Thoreau's religion and that of twenty-first century skeptics and seekers. Thoreau's faith was, perhaps, deeper than that of many skeptics or seekers, but what Thoreau-loving skeptic or seeker would disagree? To deny his kinship with them is to dissuade them from seeking his wisdom for their own spiritual journeys.I wrote at the outset that Thoreau's religion is evergreen. As long as there are churches, some sensitive souls will intuit that whatever churchgoers seek can be better found outside their doors. Such souls will always find a balm and a guide in Thoreau's words. For this reason, I find it odd that Thoreau's God is laced with defensiveness. On the second page, Higgins complains about the “consensus that [Thoreau] was ‘spiritual’ in some vague, eclectic way grounded entirely in the natural world and unmoored from common understandings of religion.” That view, he writes, “projects the predominant secularism of our society and of academic studies in particular” (2). But Higgins does not cite a single interpreter who holds the view he bemoans. A few pages later, he writes that “the long neglect of Thoreau's spirituality has begun to shift in the last two decades,” and cites ten prominent scholars, some of whom began writing and teaching about Thoreau's religion in the 1980s (6).What Thoreau's God offers, in short, is not a new interpretation of Thoreau's religion but an eloquent and accessible statement of the scholarly consensus. The heart of that consensus, perhaps, is the sheer wildness of Thoreau's religion. Thoreau's religion is contradictory in the same ways that wild nature is contradictory: at once nurturing and predatory, unified and diverse, deeply rooted and newly sprouted. “The wild, as Thoreau conceived of it,” writes Higgins, “is a generative, renewing and liberating force that is both in us and at the same time is larger than us. It emanates from a source beyond us and will go on without us” (105). These words describe God and nature equally well, and they are words to which ancient mystics, contemporary seekers, and most scholars of Thoreau in any age can say a hearty “Amen.”