Thoreau's God
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
Meditative reflections on the great spiritual seeker’s deeply felt experience of the divine.
Henry David Thoreau’s spiritual life is a riddle. Thoreau’s passionate critique of formal religion is matched only by his rapturous descriptions of encounters with the divine in nature. He fled the church only to pursue a deeper communion with a presence he felt at the heart of the universe. He called this illimitable presence many names, but he often called it God.
In Thoreau’s God, Richard Higgins invites seekers—religious or otherwise—to walk with the great Transcendentalist through a series of meditations on his spiritual life. Thoreau offers us no creed, but his writings encourage reflection on how to live, what to notice, and what to love. Though his quest was deeply personal, Thoreau devoted his life to communicating his experience of an infinite, wild, life-giving God. By recovering this vital thread in Thoreau’s life and work, Thoreau’s God opens the door to a new understanding of an original voice in American religion that speaks to spiritual seekers today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
