For much of my reading life, I misunderstood what are surely the most familiar lines in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” In my mind, the man not keeping pace with his companions was a portrait of nonconformity because he banged his drum however he wanted to. But Thoreau’s walker is actually just listening carefully. The drum is not his own. The music he hears is far away, not stirring inside his own self-certain breast. Deliberate, patient listening is at the heart of this famous image. It is also at the heart of Thoreau’s religious sensibility and orientation to the world. And as Richard Higgins argues in his compelling book Thoreau’s God, it is right to describe Thoreau as religious and not just spiritual.

We tend to sort Thoreau’s legacy into three broad frameworks: the writer and literary figure, the naturalist, and the moralist and prophet of civil disobedience. Higgins is not insisting that we add theologian or religious visionary to this list. One of the strengths of his book is that he is careful to follow Thoreau only as far as Thoreau goes. He doesn’t make more of Thoreau’s religion than he should. But he does want to affirm this religious dimension, not only, I suspect, because it will help us see Thoreau better, but also because it will help us see our own relationship to the world with more clarity and purpose.

Religious life and religious narratives surrounded Thoreau as both a child and an adult. He was baptized at the First Parish Church in Concord and attended Sabbath School there. His household was devout. His three unmarried aunts all left First Church to join the new Trinitarian church in town, and they almost took Thoreau’s mother with them. For a time, the new church’s minister and his wife boarded with the Thoreaus. Young Henry’s childhood was steeped in the language and framework of a much-contested antebellum Christianity. As a result, he was able to quote and allude to the Bible with ease throughout his life. Walden, Higgins reports, has twenty-one references to the Gospel of Matthew alone. The lecture Thoreau delivered most often, “Life without Principle,” was originally called “What Shall It Profit”—a direct allusion to the words of Jesus. Part of Thoreau’s rhetorical strategy in attacking slavery was to draw on New Testament ideals that were clearly being contradicted. We know about Thoreau because he departed from his Protestant heritage to blaze unique trails of thinking. What Higgins shows is that Christian influences remain visible on these trails, and that Thoreau transformed those influences more than he abandoned them. 

Thoreau’s break with organized Christianity was signaled by his “resignation,” at the age of twenty-three, from the rolls of his childhood First Parish Church. In a statement that is direct and strategic (taxes were involved), he wrote, “I do not wish to be considered a member of the First Parish in this town.” That something more than tax avoidance was driving his decision is suggested by a more intimate gesture: he refused to attend church with Ellen Sewall, the young woman to whom he proposed, and perhaps the only woman he ever loved. He would not attend church even for her. His opposition to institutional religion remained consistent throughout his life.

As Thoreau’s religious sensibility evolved away from orthodox Christianity and toward nature reverence, the shadow of a famous neighbor who also left organized Christianity lengthened next to him. Any consideration of Thoreau has to deal with Emerson at some point. Emerson’s first book, Nature, nourished and provoked Thoreau as a college student. Emerson was also there at the beginning of Thoreau’s writing life, asking him if he kept a journal and so launching the lifelong enterprise that became Thoreau’s real masterpiece. Vocationally aimless in his twenties, Thoreau moved in with Emerson and had the run of his mentor’s well-stocked library, which included Eastern religious and philosophical texts. These ancient writings would become central to what Higgins calls Thoreau’s “eclectic faith.”

Thoreau was excited by the Bhagavad Gita, the Laws of Manu, and the Confucian texts in Emerson’s library not because they offered a clearer religious picture of the world or a rebuke of Christianity, but because they expanded his imagination and suggested, as he would write at the end of Walden, that “the universe is wider than our views of it.” Their expansiveness was the important thing for Thoreau. The problem with organized religion as he experienced it was not error but reduction (and hypocrisy). True religious experience involved soaring, seeing, and hearing—not narrow precision. “What mattered to Thoreau,” Higgins comments, “was the music behind a religious feeling, not the lyrics.” That music was something you heard, not something you played. The tune had more notes than any of the Concord congregations accounted for, and the notes resounded most dramatically in nature.

Thoreau’s religious thinking is exploratory and not easily channeled. Nonetheless, there is one journal entry in particular that intrigues both Higgins and Alan D. Hodder, the author of a previous study of Thoreau’s religion, Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness (2001). In an entry from July 1851, Thoreau describes “a sense of elevation and expansion” incited by nature that he had “nought to do with.” With hints of rapture worthy of Wordsworth (whom Thoreau loved), he writes about feeling broadened, or, as he puts it, interfered with. “I perceive that I am dealt with by superior powers,” Thoreau writes. “This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence which I have not procured myself. I speak as a witness on the stand, and tell what I have perceived.” From these poetic heights, he makes an unexpected turn to religious and moral language: “The maker of me was improving me.” Then, anticipating the imagery that will appear three years later when Walden is published, Thoreau likens his feeling of apprehension to hearing and responding to music. The experience was ecstatic: “For years I marched as to a music in comparison with which the military music of the streets is noise and discord. I was daily intoxicated, and yet no man could call me intemperate. With all your science can you tell me how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?”

It is worth recalling here that Thoreau once described himself as a mystic. His friend Isaac Hecker said of Thoreau after his death, “Had he lived in the fifth century he would have been a father of the desert.” Maybe so. Though I’m betting he would have experimented with desert living for a year or two before deciding he had other lives to lead also. Thoreau is a mystic, but he’s a peculiar kind of mystic who thinks we get tuned to the ultimate principles of the universe not by renouncing natural conditions but by attending very patiently to nature’s incidents, and doing so with reverence and gratitude. Walden is many things. It’s a record and a portrait and an argument. It’s also an anthem, both to nature and our capacity to experience nature, to participate in it and to be expanded by it. Higgins is right that the juncture of attention and nature become the meeting ground of Thoreau’s piety: “Thoreau’s habit of attention was simultaneously the basis of his work as a naturalist and his primary spiritual discipline. Attention thickened his experience of the natural world and drew him into deeper contact with ultimate reality. It made his nature studies acts of contemplation.”

It’s tempting to try to organize Thoreau’s various modes into a single synthesizing category that will accommodate them all. Horace Greeley called Thoreau a pantheist. Emerson eulogized him as a stoic and a hermit. We look for ways to make sense of how Thoreau’s nature writing fits together with his moral critiques of government and slaveholding. Higgins, whose previous book was the meditative Thoreau and the Language of Trees (2017), doesn’t make the mistake of trying to transform the motions of Thoreau’s interests into a strong static argument about Thoreau’s religion. Instead, he does what Thoreau did in nature: he listens and gathers and tries to say something vivid about the results of his quest. What he doesn’t try to do is resolve the tensions in Thoreau’s thinking and pin his “real” religion down. “The soul does not inspect but behold,” Thoreau declared. Most books about thinkers involve inspection. Facing a vast, elusive riddle of a subject, Higgins tries to let himself behold. Thoreau’s God is a rich, rewarding study that meanders where Thoreau meanders, considers where Thoreau considers, and simply beholds where Thoreau beholds. For all the paradoxes of Thoreau’s writings, Higgins is convinced that, in the end, it’s right to call Thoreau religious. Thoreau is more mystical than theological, and his scripture is nature, but he frames his reverence freely and without apology in the language of religion. Careful to avoid dogma, his religion is earnest but not severe. Writing to his friend Harrison Blake, he fumbled for the right language, checked his casual reference to God, and added wryly, “you will know whom I mean.”

The payoff for thinking about Thoreau through a specifically religious lens is that it urges us toward a posture of reception. He asks us to be open to what we might experience if we discipline our attention. Thoreau insists that there is something to receive and hear if only we will slow ourselves down to listen. In his own experience, there was quiet rapture on the far side of that attention. The frost on a bush in the winter woods on a Sunday morning was as revelatory to him as the burning bush in the Bible. He lay face-down on a frozen Walden Pond and rapturously watched fish in the water below the ice. Thoreau’s religion was the framework he articulated to elevate those glimpses.

It’s easy to pretend that our ideals of self-expression are a faithful extension of Emerson and Thoreau, who told us to trust the motions of the universe stirring inside us. But we’ve stripped away the idea that the universe itself is stirring with anything we need to pay attention to at all. It is only airspace for the confident signals we send. We are all radios (or podcasts) broadcasting; Thoreau held an antenna, receiving. We are all walking through the woods banging on drums; Thoreau is listening to music far away.

Thoreau was skeptical of the newly invented telegraph because he thought Maine and Texas probably wouldn’t have that many important things to tap to each other, but he loved the actual telegraph wires stringing along the railroad. They hummed in the wind as if receiving messages from the universe. He liked that image—and its implications. On walks to and from Walden Pond, he stopped to listen.  

Thoreau’s God
Richard Higgins
University of Chicago Press
$20 | 224 pp.