Thoreau: Mystic, Prophet, Ecologist

By William J. Wolf

Book Overview

Author William J. Wolf delivers more than just another biographical portrait of Henry David Thoreau -- he examines traits and aspects of Thoreau that many today would hold to be in conflict with each other. In particular, Wolf focuses on Thoreau's "religion" as expressed through his writings (Wolf himself was a professor of theology at Cambridge Episcopal School). A scholarly yet accessible read, getting at the heart of this great man's spirit.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 082980269X
• ISBN13: 9780829802696
• Release Date: January 1974
• Publisher: Pilgrim Pr
• Length: 223 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Religious Side of Thoreau

This book is an interpretation of religious aspects of Thoreau's life and writings. Wolf was serving as professor of theology at Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts when he wrote this book in the mid-1970s. In the book, Wolf argues that despite Thoreau's aversion to church-going and all other aspects of organized religion, he was a deeply religious man, and that religious ideas, even many based on mainstream Christian scriptures, permeated his writing. Although such a claim may not be surprising to those familiar with Thoreau's works, from the way Wolf presents his material, it seems that many church leaders, from Thoreau's time up through the present, vilified him as an anti-religionist or cultist based on superficial readings or lack of familiarity with his texts. In the first part of the book, Wolf analyses the religious ideas found in Thoreau's major published texts, including A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, "Civil Disobedience," and "Walden." He then examines each of the concepts "mystic," "Transcendentalist," and "natural philosopher," with respect to Thoreau, before concluding with an epilogue on "Thoreau and the religious situation today." End material includes a brief description of how one might enter the Thoreau literature, endnotes, a selected bibliography on Thoreau and religion, and an index. The book is engaging and well written, but assumes that readers will be conversant in the terminology and themes of modern Christian theology. Wolf supports his arguments with frequent quotations drawn from Thoreau's works. However, he also uses occasional quotations from other authors. Citations to the authors of these quotations and the works they are drawn from do not appear within the main text, so readers must hunt up the endnotes at the very end of the book in order to find out who wrote any given quotation, and when and where it was first published. For Christian readers who are not familiar with Thoreau's religious nature, Wolf does an admirable job of explaining how Thoreau, despite being so opposed to organized churches, had a lot of value to say to Christians, and that his beliefs weren't entirely blasphemous. Indeed, Wolf suggests that Thoreau's works can be adopted as a means of helping Christians develop strong religious connections to the natural world: "What the ecological crisis of our day is plainly demonstrating to us, and what Thoreau so well anticipated, is that neighbor love needs to be expanded to include all the creation, inanimate as well as animate...There is nothing more hardheadedly realistic than a love that nourishes respect for, and preservation of, the universe in which our lives are cast." Wolf argues that Thoreau's interpretations of New Testament passages made him "a pioneer of the Christian theology of liberation," in the sense that " by Christ's teaching and action anything done to another human being by way of compassion and justice and love is done to Christ himse