Thoreau's a Week, Religion As Preservative Care: Opposing the Christian Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, and a Religion of Subjugation
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Syracuse University SURFACE Dissertations - ALL SURFACE May 2014 THOREAU'S A WEEK, RELIGION AS PRESERVATIVE CARE: OPPOSING THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY, MANIFEST DESTINY, AND A RELIGION OF SUBJUGATION Robert Michael Ruehl Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/etd Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Ruehl, Robert Michael, "THOREAU'S A WEEK, RELIGION AS PRESERVATIVE CARE: OPPOSING THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY, MANIFEST DESTINY, AND A RELIGION OF SUBJUGATION" (2014). Dissertations - ALL. 69. https://surface.syr.edu/etd/69 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the SURFACE at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations - ALL by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ABSTRACT This dissertation argues for a rereading of Henry David Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) as “Transcendental scripture writing.” By placing his book in this genre, Thoreau’s religious thinking comes to the fore. His book becomes a contextualized pilgrimage addressing three levels of human existence in the religious realm: (1) where we have been and are now, (2) where we could be, and (3) how to reach that next, better self with more intimate, liberative relationships with others. As he addresses human limitations and his hope for better human and nonhuman relationships, Thoreau articulates a religion of “preservative care” that seeks to address past wrongs while nurturing sustained peace, which makes his outlook significant for the present. This vision of life filled with sustained peace, however, does not circumvent a serious reexamination of the violence that went into America’s founding. As he addresses the history of the United States, Thoreau emphasizes a dominant oppressive trend in America as Native Americans and the environment are continuously devalued and pushed to the margins. Thoreau associates this oppressive trajectory with a Western politico-theological justification for the domination, conversion, and attempted extermination of non-Christian, Indigenous peoples—a repressive posture that scholars currently define as the “Christian Doctrine of Discovery.” Thoreau makes it clear that belief in Christian supremacy and the desire to construct a decidedly Christian nation have led to the attempted mastery over Indigenous populations, their land, and the natural world, which has concomitantly led to diminished lives for those perpetuating this “religion of subjugation.” He counters this with an ideal of non-institutionalized religion grounded in the natural world and informed by Native American values and ways of being. In the end, Thoreau’s “wild” religion seeks to preserve The Law of Regeneration or the dynamic laws of nature in all existence—human and nonhuman alike. This is Thoreau’s religion of preservative care, and it has important implications for current religious dialogues addressing Indigenous rights and the repudiation of the Christian Doctrine of Discovery—especially within the liberal religious Unitarian Universalist denomination as Thoreau is considered part of its religious heritage. A Week prods the tradition to be more ecologically attuned in religious matters, to be less anthropocentrically oriented, and to be united with the downtrodden through a religious presupposition affirming solidarity with all oppressed beings—human and nonhuman alike. This orientation re-envisions religion as a healthy, transformative presence in the world as it aims to cultivate sustained peace, which is needed in today’s world negatively affected by violence and injustice too often grounded in religious discourses and buttressed by pernicious religious sentiments. THOREAU’S A WEEK, RELIGION AS PRESERVATIVE CARE: OPPOSING THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY, MANIFEST DESTINY, AND A RELIGION OF SUBJUGATION By Robert Michael Ruehl B.A. St. John Fisher College, 2000 M.Div. Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, 2008 M.Phil. Syracuse University, 2010 DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Religion in the Graduate School of Syracuse University May 2014 Copyright 2014 Robert Michael Ruehl All rights reserved EPIGRAPHS I know of nothing more creditable to [Thoreau’s] greatness than the thoughtful regard, approaching reverence, by which he has held for many years some of the best persons of his time, living at a distance, and wont to make their annual pilgrimage, usually on foot, to the master,—a devotion very rare in these times of personal indifference, if not of confessed unbelief in persons and ideas. – Amos Bronson Alcott, “The Forester,” The Atlantic Monthly, 1862 Whilst he used in his writings a certain petulance of remark in reference to churches or churchmen, he was a person of a rare, tender, and absolute religion, a person incapable of any profanation, by act or thought. Of course, the same isolation which belonged to his original thinking and living detached him from the social religious forms . Thoreau was sincerity itself, and might fortify the conviction of prophets in the ethical laws by his holy living. It was an affirmative experience which refused to be set aside. A truth-speaker he, capable of the most deep and strict conversation; a physician to the wounds of any soul; a friend, knowing not only the secret of friendship, but almost worshiped by those few persons who resorted to him as their confessor and prophet, and knew the deep value of his mind and great heart. He thought that without religion or devotion of some kind nothing great was ever accomplished; and he thought that the bigoted sectarian had better bear this in mind. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Thoreau,” The Atlantic Monthly, 1862 What, for our purposes, the testimony of Thoreau’s contemporaries makes clear is that in his own day Thoreau was generally conceived in spiritual terms, even in some cases as a sort of charismatic, if decidedly unorthodox, religious figure. – Alan D. Hodder, Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness, 20 TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface 1 Introduction 17 Chapter One Thoreau and A Week: Organic Intellectual and Transcendental Scripture Writing 30 Introduction 30 A Guiding Trope: Gramsci’s “Organic Intellectual” 32 Transcendentalism: A Counter-Hegemonic Movement 45 Organic Intellectual Literature: Writing for the Gods 62 Thoreau as a Religious Leader: H.G.O. Blake 70 A Week: Manifesting the Qualities of the “Unnamed” 77 Conclusion: Alcott’s Assessment of A Week 82 Chapter Two Recontextualizing New England’s “Religion of Subjugation”: The Perpetuation of the Christian Doctrine of Discovery 86 Introduction 86 The Historical Foundations for a Religion of Subjugation: The Christian Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny 92 New England before Settlement 104 Edward Johnson and His Wonder-Working Providence 110 Puritanism Considered: Calvinism, Religion, and Civil Society 120 New England after Settlement 137 Religion of Subjugation in A Week 142 Conclusion: New England’s Christian Dystopia 157 Chapter Three Thoreau’s Nature Religion: The Event of Nature, Rebinding Oneself to Wildness, and an Ontology of Flows 161 Introduction 161 A Biographical Summary of Thoreau’s Contact with Wildness or the Wild 167 What Is Wildness or the Wild for Thoreau? 175 Thoreau’s Religious Foundation: An Ontology of Flows 195 Conclusion 205 Chapter Four Thoreau’s Practices for Religious Living in A Week 218 Introduction 218 The Pilgrimage or Quest 223 Labor as a Spiritualizing and Naturalizing Process 229 vi A Purely Sensuous Life 242 A Separate Intention of the Eye and Uncommon Sense 252 Withdrawing: Solitude and Silence 257 A Natural Sabbath 261 Wildness in Civil Society: Civil Disobedience 266 Civil Disobedience and Being a Good Friend 272 Conclusion 274 Conclusion Thoreau’s Contribution to Liberal Religion in the Present 277 Introduction 277 Seeking Restorative Justice 284 Toward a Bioregional, Ecological Perspective 288 Conflict Transformation 292 Toward New Principles and Purposes: Suggestions for Today’s Unitarian Universalists 297 Conclusion 314 Works Cited 323 Vita 352 vii PREFACE In this preface, I will cover three relevant points relating to the dissertation. First, I will offer a brief history of Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. As will be evident later in the dissertation, Thoreau’s first book is undervalued and remains obscure within his corpus. For those familiar with his text, this will be a quick reminder about the book’s background, composition, and the struggles to get it published. For those unfamiliar with it, this summary will orient readers and make them familiar with his first book and will help to enrich the dissertation’s overall argument. In the end, while not essential to the dissertation’s overall argument, I believe the summary helps to contextualize Thoreau’s A Week by showing the text’s personal side. Second, I want readers to be aware of my assumptions about Thoreau as I had come to recognize him after spending significant time with A Week and the secondary literature devoted to his text. For me, it is reasonable to see Thoreau as a nineteenth-century liberation thinker. He was embedded in white culture, but was always clear that to be “white” took a lot of learning, constraint, and domestication. His writings are oriented toward helping readers to escape their learned whiteness and all that this entails, such as the devaluation of “wildness,” the natural world, Indigenous peoples, unscripted actions, and spontaneous insights. As far as this dissertation is concerned, Thoreau’s liberation thinking addresses the interactions between whites in New England, the environment, and Native Americans. He wants to liberate whites, so they can appreciate the gifts of those non-white and nonhuman beings all around them. Lastly, I want to address some of the methodological decisions concerning how I approached A Week. One of the important topics in Emersonian and Thoreauvian 1 Transcendentalism concerns what literary criticism is. For them, criticism is not a negative task; this is too easy.