From July 4, 1845 to October 6, 1847—a period of two years, two months, and two days, for those counting—Henry David Thoreau bid adieu to the trappings of civilization to retreat into the forest, there to dwell in a 10 x 15 ft. cabin he had built with his own two hands out of mostly cheap scraps, such as repurposed shanty boards. We know the precise materials he used (and exactly what they cost him) because he proudly documented this construction process in his book Walden, a philosophical memoir about his experience.
Oh, how moving are these mysterious woods, he ruminated in prose and occasionally in something more akin to verse for the rest of his life. What a joy to dwell as one with nature, apart from ever-encroaching civilization; how much nobler it is for the heart, mind, and soul. Amazing how many books (including in Greek and Latin, of course) one can read in this time of civilized leisure that only wildness can facilitate (because, again, to read in Greek and Latin is the key to communing appropriately with nature). And wondrous how closely these woods bring one to God or some sort of divine force. Indeed, in a Journal entry from 1850, three years after rejoining civilization, he reflects, “What shall we do with a man who is afraid of the woods, their solitude, and darkness? What salvation is there for him? God is silent and mysterious.” Of course, Thoreau was not afraid of the woods, for it is there that he heard God and found his salvation.
There is just one obvious problem with the idealistic picture Thoreau paints of his hermit existence in a cabin in the lonesome woods. Located just two miles outside the town of Concord, Massachusetts, Walden Pond and its woods were already in Thoreau’s day more akin to the city park down the street from my house than a primeval forest beset with woodland sprites and elves. The friendly woodchucks and squirrels who came to frolic around his cabin (and, on one regrettable occasion, ended up as Thoreau’s dinner—but he’d rather not talk about it) were themselves quite accustomed to people and showed up to beg shamelessly for snacks. Besides, friends could and did drop by to chat with him at his cabin, and Thoreau could walk over at his convenience to visit or dine with them. Thoreau was no Natty Bumppo, the roughing-it-happy protagonist of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels.
But then, while Cooper was Thoreau’s contemporary, he was describing an era a century removed, a time when America was much wilder than it had become since throwing off the British yoke. The wildness of Cooper’s novels, filled with truly wild animals and no less wild Native Americans, was but a dream for Thoreau, not a reality he could live out in the increasingly crowded and industrialized landscape of mid-nineteenth-century America. Indeed, while his own Concord was still a farming town, the bustling industrial center of Lowell, filled with factories, was just 16 miles away from his cabin’s doorstep.
Yet the elusive dream of the wild woods continued to have a vivid hold on Thoreau’s imagination long after he left his Walden cabin. It became the foundation of his personal theology. So argues religious studies scholar Lydia Willsky-Ciollo in her new book Wildness: Henry David Thoreau and the Making of an American Theology. She traces Thoreau’s intellectual process over the course of his lifetime, showing the gradual development of his “theology of wildness through and in the experience of nature.”
Is a theology of wildness always a call to sterility, to a glorification of the primordial woods over the continuation of the human race? Perhaps not.
Willsky-Ciollo structures the book chronologically. Born in Concord, the center of New England Transcendentalism, Thoreau had from his earliest days a love of the outdoors and nature. He was also academically brilliant, with a special facility in languages, of which he mastered a total of six, Ancient Greek and Latin included. A stint at Harvard capped his formal education, although his self-education through reading and experiences would continue for the rest of his life. But while our idea of education and reading may bring to mind glorious libraries and cozy chairs by the fire, for Thoreau, a life lived outdoors was a life well lived.
Living in an age of spiritual and cultural upheaval, the young Thoreau thought much about questions of work and vocation, and about the relationship of man and nature. Working as a land surveyor allowed him to keep thinking about these matters while working outside and earning a paycheck, which in turn allowed him eventually the luxury of taking a two-year sabbatical in his famous cabin. All along, his longing for the spiritual dimension in the elusive “wildness” in a world where factories were being built all around was a logical development of the American Transcendentalist project, to which Thoreau was intimately connected through his friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson and other prominent Transcendentalists, all of whom were also on a spiritual journey.
Originally a Unitarian, floating on the fringes of the respectable Christianity of his day, Thoreau left church behind early on in his youth. But a void had to be filled. So building on the Transcendentalist ideas, he came to believe that “wildness was divinity, specifically, that divinity … the Transcendentalists so adamantly insisted existed in every person and in every molecule of creation. To be wild was to be divine, or to realize that one had been divine all along. This essential ‘wildness,’ which exists in every person and in every corner of the natural world, is Thoreau’s challenge to ‘the dominant tale of modern life as disenchanted.’” Thoreau became, in other words, “a theologian of wildness.”
But much as this intellectual and spiritual exercise was Thoreau’s own, it was also a distinctly American project, Willsky-Ciollo emphasizes. It was part of the quest for truth, identity, and uniqueness that came so naturally to the young United States on a quest to establish itself. What does it mean to be a good citizen of this new country? The question pulses just beneath the surface of Thoreau’s idyllic writing. Good citizens are not just people of this world; they are conscious of something else, greater than themselves, and even greater than their nation. Perhaps to take pride in the woods, older than the people or their cities in this new nation, was one way for him to discover roots and legitimate a relationship to the land. Indeed, Thoreau may have been searching for roots above all—for only from cultivating deep roots can there come fruits.
Thoreau’s theology of wildness is formulated most clearly in his final work, Wild Fruits, left unfinished at the time of his death at just forty-four. In this manifesto that he dubbed his own New Testament, Thoreau combines a love of place and roots, animals and plants, and the acute need for uncultivated wildness for true human flourishing. Put together, it all adds up to the divine for him. The less modern a man can be, the wilder. The wilder, the closer not only to God but to becoming divine himself. The story sounds as much ancient pagan as it is modern, presenting this ideal of self-creation, of determining what one can be by one’s own decisions and desires. Thoreau, it seems, was a man of his times, even in his rebellion against those very times.
As I was reading Willsky-Ciollo’s narrative of the evolution of Thoreau’s thought—from wild to wilder—I began to notice a key absence in his quest for this theology of wildness. It is a distinctly monastic theology, with the woods as his cathedrals and his friends as fellow monks. But aside from like-minded friends, Thoreau’s theology has no place for families or dependents. As such, this theology cannot reproduce. It can only die off, as its adherents become one with nature, buried in those lovely woods surrounded by modern factories. To consider these absences is to see the limitations in Thoreau’s beliefs anew. In its pursuit of wild fruits, the theology of wildness is ultimately sterile.
But is a theology of wildness always a call to sterility, to a glorification of the primordial woods over the continuation of the human race? Perhaps not. And perhaps the best alternative to Thoreau’s theology of wildness right now is Wendell Berry’s own philosophy—and maybe a theology even—of home. Thoreau desired roots but looked for them in the forest rather than on the farms of his small town of Concord. Berry desires roots but exhorts us to find them in the many places of rural America that, increasingly, over the course of the past several generations, have been abandoned as people left to pursue a more modern life in cities. In the process, ironically, parts of rural America have recovered a greater wildness than in earlier generations—and yet, this has not been for their good. It is not lovely when weeds overtake abandoned farms. Berry cannot see a forest reclaiming collapsed farmhouses and barns as a wildness worthy of praise.
There is an overlap, nevertheless, between Thoreau’s and Berry’s concerns in looking at the rapid changes in their respective societies. Thoreau’s world was being overhauled by the Industrial Revolution, as machines were changing the rhythm of labor and the very nature of work itself. Berry shares this concern over the mechanization of the fabric of our life and work today. He has been an outspoken critic of such advancements as mechanized industrial farming equipment and the personal computer, neither of which he has adopted in his own life. At the heart of his decision, though, is not a theology of wildness but a quest for the restoration of harmony between God and man, mediated through the recovery of peace with the land. What are people for, asks Berry in one of his books, showing the intricate connection between loving the land and loving people. The pursuit of roots and flourishing is the well-ordered telos of our lives together. And perhaps a little bit of wildness can be a part of this story yet.
