Hermits by Peter France

Author:Peter France
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473511637
Publisher: Random House

Religion

There is a story that an elderly lady used to make a pilgrimage to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery every spring and lay flowers on the graves of Emerson and Hawthorne before turning and shaking a fist at the grave of Thoreau with the words: ‘None for you, you dirty little atheist’. But Thoreau has also been widely hailed as a spiritual genius, and he certainly valued what he himself would have called the spiritual dimension in his life.

His early and formal education had not predisposed him to a taste for spirituality. At Harvard, the Professor of Divinity, Henry Ware, was of a practical temperament. Two textbooks used by him were Paley’s Evidences and Butler’s Analogy. Both deal with the journey through life and the need to overcome its inevitable hardships. They approach religion through the intellect, and were not to likely to strike sparks from an intuitive and impetuous youth such as Thoreau. Their analysis of the human condition is basically unenthusiastic. They do, however, share a concept which Thoreau was to accept: that the natural and the moral and spiritual elements of human life are linked.

Thoreau grew to hate all organised religion and its ministers. When asked to deliver a lecture in the basement of a Congregational church, he said he ‘trusted he helped to undermine it’. He despised the complacency of established Christians: ‘The church! It is eminently the timid institution, and the heads and pillars of it are constitutionally and by principle the greatest cowards in the community.’70 He wished that ‘the ministers were a little more dangerous’.71

He was critical of the effect of Christianity on his contemporaries and thought it was often a ‘blast’ on youth that prevented their full development.72 His religious interests were nourished by Emerson, who had a strong leaning towards the mysticism of the East. There are references to Hindu texts in Emerson’s journals from the early 1830s, and the famous lecture at Harvard in 1838, which finally made public his distance from the organised Christianity of the time, expressed belief in the divine element in man, akin to the Atman.73 Thoreau read Hindu, Chinese and Persian scriptures in. Emerson’s library, and his journals attest an enthusiasm for Manu, Confucius, Zoroaster and the great masters of Eastern spirituality: ‘Arabia, Persia, Hindostan are the native lands of contemplation. If the Roman, the Greek and the Jew have a character in history – so has the hindoo. He may help to balance Asia which is all too one-sided with its Palestine.’74

He tells the story of Alexander’s meeting with the gymnosophists75 with enthusiasm: ‘It was not an unfilling nor unpleasing contrast that the impetuous Macedonian should be met – at this which he thought the eastern boundary of the world – by the calm philosophy of the Brahmens’.76

He was interested in a universal religion made up of the high points of all the scriptures. He wrote: ‘To the philosophers, all sects, all nations are alike. I like Brahma, Hari, Buddha, the Great Spirit as well as God.

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