Thoreau's Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism by Alda Balthrop-Lewis (review)

Reviewed by: Thoreau's Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism by Alda Balthrop-Lewis Jerome Tharaud Alda Balthrop-Lewis, Thoreau's Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021) "I am large, I contain multitudes," Walt Whitman famously proclaimed. Yet perhaps the antebellum literary figure who has come to epitomize that sense of Romantic multiplicity is Henry David Thoreau. Twentieth-century critics found a Thoreau for every political persuasion: there was Thoreau the reclusive nature writer and Thoreau the countercultural icon; libertarian Thoreau, vegetarian Thoreau, and hippie Thoreau. In recent decades two versions of Thoreau have become dominant: the patron saint of modern environmentalism who inspired the likes of John Muir and Aldo Leopold, and the prophet of non-violent civil disobedience who famously spent a night in the Concord jail for refusing to pay taxes to a government that supported slavery. In her new book, Alda Balthrop-Lewis offers yet another version of the sage of Walden Pond, one that illuminates the connections between Thoreau's reverence for the natural world and his radical commitment to social justice: Thoreau as a religious thinker. Other scholars have considered Thoreau's religion. Wai Chee Dimock and Alan D. Hodder, for example, have explored Thoreau's fascination with "World Religions," particularly Eastern traditions. What is distinctive about Balthrop-Lewis's account is her emphasis on the Christian roots of Thoreau's thought, specifically the ancient and medieval traditions of "asceticism"—defined as [End Page 105] "forms of disciplined, religious life often characterized by renunciation" (12)—that surface in Walden's playful allusions to religious communities and animate its renunciation of material luxuries. One of the central arguments of Thoreau's Religion is that despite the suspicion with which secular moderns tend to regard asceticism as masochistic and politically quietist, Thoreau enacts a "political ascetic" (13) aimed at achieving social and environmental justice. "Too often," Balthrop-Lewis writes, "the Thoreau of Walden is imagined as asocial, apolitical, and areligious" (37–38). The book's opening chapters refute each of these misconceptions in turn. Thoreau's conception of social life encompassed not simply the friends and relatives who populate Walden but also relations with "more-than-human and more-than-living beings," including "natural objects, animals, plants, and the human dead" (42). By decentering the village as the locus of social life, Thoreau makes the woods the site of "a spiritual community of exemplary creatures, places, and former inhabitants" (60), particularly the formerly enslaved and free Black people who once squatted on the marginal land around Walden Pond. These relationships, Balthrop-Lewis argues, form the basis of Thoreau's political activity. Rather than representing a withdrawal from political commitments, his sojourn at the pond sought to establish "a more relational politics—invested more deeply in common goods—than interpreters of Thoreau's politics usually imagine that he had" (91). That politics critiqued Southern slavery as well as the Northern industrial wage economy that Thoreau knew first-hand from visiting local textile mills. In this context, Thoreau's exhortation to "simplify, simplify, simplify!" becomes not simply a private exercise in ascetic discipline but a political act, a refusal to depend on unjust labor systems. It is not until chapter three, when Balthrop-Lewis turns to Walden's caustic critique of philanthropy, that religion takes center stage. In contrast to critics who interpret his polemic as evidence of irreligiosity or outright hostility to Christianity, the biblical allusions embedded there and elsewhere in Thoreau's corpus reveal him as "a theological interpreter of Christianity" who advances a "relational understanding of theological ethics" (123). By this she means a communitarian ethic based on a collectively negotiated sense of justice rather than a prescriptive moral code that risks imposing one's own vision of the good on others. Thoreau's practical alternative to philanthropy, "political asceticism," is the subject of chapter four, in many ways the book's centerpiece. Key aspects of Thoreau's political asceticism include his critique of private property ownership as "idolatry" (174), his embrace of "voluntary poverty" (179), and his use of writing as a social practice, a means of refocusing attention beyond...