Angelic Troublemakers

Religion and Anarchism in America

A. Terrance Wiley

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781623566012
• eBook ISBN: 9781623564063
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Anarchism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Angelic Troublemakers is the first detailed account of what happens when religious ethics, political philosophy, and the anarchist spirit intermingle. Wiley deftly captures the ideals that inspired three revered heroes of nonviolent disobedience-Henry Thoreau, Dorothy Day, and Bayard Rustin. Resistance to slavery, empire, and capital is a way of life, a transnational tradition of thought and action. This book is a must read for anyone interested in religion, ethics, politics, or law.

1

The conscience on fire: Thoreau’s anarchist ethic

My thoughts are murder to the State, and involuntarily go plotting against her.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU in “Slavery in Massachusetts”

The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention.

ALBERT CAMUS, The Plague

You will understand that to remain a servant of the written law is to place yourself every day in opposition to the law of conscience, and to make a bargain on the wrong side; and since this struggle cannot go on forever, you will either silence your conscience and become a scoundrel, or you will break with tradition, and you will work with us for the utter destruction of all this injustice, economic, social, and political. But then you will be a revolutionist.

PETER KROPOTKIN

I

Many stories have been told about Henry David Thoreau. His 44-year life has proved rich material for ideological contestations that stretch from at least his death in 1862 up to the present. What Thoreau’s detractors and devotees agree on is that he was an iconoclast bent on breaking with conventions prevailing in Massachusetts social circles. What divides them is how they assess this break—the reasons, the extent, and the effects. For persons sure that American democracy is the last best hope for humanity, either Thoreau is not a democratic thinker and must be discarded, or his thought and action must be translated into an idiom that vindicates his democratic credentials. Hannah Arendt belongs to the former class while Nancy Rosenblum and George Kateb can be cast as principal players in the latter role. For persons certain that religious, supernatural, theological, or metaphysical ideas or orientations represent barriers to social progress, Thoreau must either be cast as a thoroughgoing naturalist or cast aside.

My aim here is to portray Thoreau’s commitments in a way that calls into question prevailing stories about him. Taking my cue from political theorists and social critics, such as Isaiah Berlin, whose work stress the centrality of anthropological questions in modern political and social thought, my sense is that we will best apprehend Thoreau’s political philosophical commitments if we familiarize ourselves with his ideas about the human person, the moral order, and the divine.

Let me begin this story, then, by trying to convince you that we must take seriously Thoreau’s religion, which means turning to Thoreau’s nineteenth-century milieu. His idiosyncrasies and iconoclasm notwithstanding, Thoreau had fellow religious travelers and his unconventional flourishes are best understood in relation to them. Born in 1817, Thoreau came of age in the 1830s, arriving for undergraduate study at Harvard College just as Transcendentalism and abolitionism were shaking up New England’s educational, religious, political, and cultural life.

Transcendentalism emerged in the midst of religious revivalism, heated theological controversy, cultural contestations about the meaning of America, and political conflict that always teetered on the edge of violence. Such times are made for passionate ethical striving. Appropriately, as the nineteenth century progressed, “more and more, [American] religious thought was devoted to questions of ethics.”¹ And as ethics or ethical questions pervaded religious discourse, quite naturally, theological questions about the nature of the human person—theological anthropological questions—assumed growing significance. According to Lewis Perry, “The conclusion seemed irresistible [among certain theologians and clerics] in the new republic: if God was lawgiver, then he must have implanted both knowledge of the law and the capacity to fulfill it in the constitution of man.”²

The ethical turn in early to mid-nineteenth-century American religious thought had far-reaching effects on New England’s religious practice and social life in general. In fact, the conclusion that God endowed human persons with the knowledge of and capacity to fulfill the moral law can be understood as both a cause and effect of antislavery and abolitionist activism. Moral controversy about race-based chattel slavery instigated religious debate about the nature of God, the moral order, political order, and human identity and nature. And for persons—from David Walker to William Lloyd Garrison to John Brown—convinced that black Africans were creatures of God and that slavery constituted an affront against God and God’s law, religious fervor manifested as prophetic social criticism and activism. New England enthusiasts such as James and Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Peabody, Margaret Fuller, Orestes Brownson, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, and Bronson Alcott would found congregations, schools, newspapers, journals, reform organizations, and communes during our period, and so greatly effect American religious and activist life during antebellum and beyond.

All of this is important for our consideration because, while American Transcendentalism has been remembered mostly for its lasting contributions to (secular) American literature, the movement actually began in the 1830s among ministers and religionists dissatisfied with the extent of reform enacted by Unitarian Congregationalists, so that in many respects Transcendentalism started off as a Christian-dissident uprising focused on theology and theological anthropological disputes. Accordingly, several early participants in the “Transcendentalist Club” meetings—Frederick Henry Hedge, Ralph Emerson, George Ripley, and William Henry Channing—were first and foremost religious reformers, extending liberal and Unitarian strands of Congregationalism in radical directions.

American Transcendentalists were notoriously independent individualists, which militated against Transcendentalism’s sustenance, over time, as a cohesive movement. But what united the disparate figures now routinely referred to as Transcendentalists were the theological anthropological assumptions that they eventually embraced. In short, Transcendentalists, Thoreau included, broke with Calvinist theology and theological anthropology. Inspired by Quakerism, the European Enlightenment, and German and English Romantics, the Transcendentalists had no place for the Calvinist’s pessimistic view of postlapsarian human nature and the concomitant emphasis on the permeation of sin and “total depravity of man.”³ Significantly, American Transcendentalists replaced the Calvinist emphasis on sin-sick selves with a view of the “divine in all.”⁴ Lawrence Buell, correctly in my view, goes so far as to aver that “the central message of Transcendentalism itself [was] the idea of divine immanence.”⁵

The trend toward radicalism among Transcendentalists gained momentum during Thoreau’s final years at Harvard. He graduated in 1837, one year after and one year before Ralph Waldo Emerson published his groundbreaking masterpiece Nature and delivered his subversive “Divinity School Address” at Harvard, two statements spelling out the Transcendentalist theological and philosophical tenor: the divine rests both within nature and each individual, and “intuition” as opposed to revelation represents how humans arrive at truth. This basic proposition rests at the heart of Thoreau’s religious imagination and any effort to understand his religiosity or his political philosophy must be attuned to Thoreau’s meditations on the nature of the self and its relation to the divine—that is, his theological anthropology. Thoreau’s wordplay, affinity for paradox and irony, aversion to systematicity, and reputation as a naturalist make attunement difficult.

Still, if we tend to Thoreau’s theological statements with care, it will be hard to miss his profound religious sensibility, a sensibility rooted in a conception of a divine being. His complex religious views extend from his unorthodox conception of God; he explicitly expresses a belief in God, even if there is often ambiguity when he does so. This is no clearer than in a letter written to Harrison Gray Otis Blake, his spiritual companion, where Thoreau proclaims: “God Reigns! I say God. I am not sure that is the name. You know who I mean.”⁶

As is often the case, this instance of ambiguity, the fruit of a fallibilistic impulse, is revealing, as subtle hints of Thoreau’s mysticism come to the fore. The mystic, of course, is both overwhelmed by exposure to the deity and burdened by an inability to wholly grasp the nature of the deity. The “being” whose reign is known, yet whose name and nature is not, is the infinitely complex being that is typically referred to as God. The mystic knows better than to say whether the name that is typically bestowed on the being is the name that ought to be bestowed. Thoreau’s terse statement to Blake is not necessarily an enunciation of a mystic’s religious knowledge, but it does betray the inclinations of a mystic.

Thoreau’s faith in the existence of God, and belief in the human person’s capacity to know and experience this God, is especially on display in A Week, published in 1849, where Thoreau converts into prose his sensual encounter with the Divine, or the divine self, what Thoreau will refer to as “that everlasting Something”:

I see, smell, taste, hear, feel, that everlasting Something to which we are allied, at once our maker, our abode, our destiny, our very Selves; the one historic truth, the most remarkable fact which can become the distinct and uninvited subject of our thought, the actual glory of the universe; the only fact which a human being cannot avoid recognizing, or in some way forget or dispense with.⁷

And in Walden, published in 1854, Thoreau conveys a similar sentiment:

I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is you.⁸

These pithy statements, essential to understanding Thoreau’s thought, constitute a window not only into Thoreauvian theology but also Thoreau’s epistemology and ontology, that is, his understanding of how and what persons can know about the character of reality (God) and the constitution of the self. Thoreau, in mystical form, is moved by faith and inspired by experience: in addition to being humbly confident that God reigns, he is conscious of the fact that God reigns with or even within the self; for, Thoreau knows that we are allied to “that everlasting Something” which is “our very Selves.”⁹ While not predominant in Thoreau’s New England or America, a variant of this theological view constituted a distinctive feature of American Transcendentalist (transcendentalist) thought and caused much controversy in mid-nineteenth-century New England religious circles.¹⁰

The importance of this theological (anthropological) view, especially for the purposes of my analysis, lies in the implications that it had for questions of legitimate authority, particularly in relation to ecclesiology, church polity, politics, and ethics. Not only did the idea of “divine in all” or “divine immanence” extend the Protestant Reformation idea of a “priesthood of believers,” undermining respect for traditional priestly authority, which I will say more about shortly, it also set the stage for an evasion of several ethical, particularly metaethical, dilemmas confronted by theologians and philosophers during the nineteenth century. By deifying the self, that is, locating God within the self, Transcendentalists were able to sidestep moral skepticism and avoid being too disturbed by cultural relativism.

Significantly, conceptions of God seem to presuppose the idea of worship. In the purest sense worship is the complete devotion to an object. In the case of religious worship, a deity or deities are typically the objects of worship. Religious theists take their respective gods to demand a host of acts, including sacrificial offerings, prayers, salutations, and so on. To be devoted completely to a given God or gods requires the performance of the appropriate act or range of acts. Akin to many religiously inspired social activists, Thoreau’s religiosity does not primarily entail the performance of the kind of acts listed above. Instead, Thoreau is devoted to a God that demands moral self-perfection and adherence to moral laws that are fundamentally about the proper way to treat animate and inanimate beings. His religiosity, then, is profoundly ethical.

Thoreau may be unsure about the reigning deity’s name, but he is resolute about the deity’s role. Thoreau’s God is the ultimate moral judge. As well, Thoreau, after stoics and deists, believes God to have created a world wherein nature, including human persons, is suffuse with moral meaning. The epistemological debates and attendant uncertainties that the Enlightenment and cross-cultural encounters had instigated in European thought did not undermine Thoreau’s certitude with respect to moral truth. In fact, similar to later religious pluralists, Thoreau found themes unifying the diverse religious and social practices across the world, so that the areas of overlapping interest or agreement among diverse religions served to reinforce his moral stance. For Thoreau, reflecting on the character of human personality, society, and the natural environment discloses moral truth. So he rhetorically asks, “May we not see God? Are we to be put off and amused in this life, as it were with a mere allegory? Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?”¹¹ Thoreau insists that moral truth is God’s truth and each person has the capacity—call it reason or conscience if you would like—to discern it.¹² Conscience is God’s gift to humanity and the human person’s guide on the path upward—higher living in accord with the higher law.

Thoreau’s belief in God, objective moral truth, and human capacity to know come together in an evocative passage in A Week:

I must conclude that Conscience, if that be the name of it, was not given us for no purpose, or for hindrance. However flattering order and expediency may look, it is but the repose of a lethargy, and we will choose rather to be awake, though it be stormy, and maintain ourselves on this earth and in this life, as we may, without signing our death-warrant. Let us see if we cannot stay here, where He has put us, on his own conditions. Does not his law reach as far as his light? The expedients of the nations clash with one another, only the absolutely right is expedient for all.¹³

Thoreau asserts that God is lawgiver, maintains that God’s law determines absolute rightness, and contends that human persons, through “Conscience,” can know God’s law. Thoreau thinks that human beings are called to become moral and he fervently believes in the capacity of individuals to realize moral truths; knowing that we (human beings) are divine moral beings points toward what we should do. Yet he adds an important contention: recognition of God’s law and, subsequently, the will to abide by it hinge on the prior choice to “be awake, though it be stormy.”

Surrounded by neighbors who, in practice, have not chosen wakefulness, who have not determined to stay where God has put them, on God’s conditions, at every turn Thoreau is confronted with actual behavior and social practices that appear to contradict his epistemological and ontological claims. Thoreau insists that “men do not fail commonly for want of knowledge.” However, as Thoreau intimates in A Week, they do “want of prudence to give wisdom preference.” Why is this? According to Thoreau, we struggle to give wisdom preference because we often establish “durable and harmonious [routines that] . . . all parts of [our] nature consent to.”¹⁴ So, on Thoreau’s view, persons’ failure to choose wakefulness is largely the effect of their having fallen into certain routines. The most detrimental routines and habits are often those enforced or imposed by social institutions, customs, and norms. Over time, su...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Introduction
• 1 The conscience on fire: Thoreau’s anarchist ethic
• 2 Love in action: Dorothy Day’s Christian anarchism
• 3 The dilemma of the black radical: Bayard Rustin’s ambivalent anarchism
• Conclusion: “The Awakening to Come”
• Notes
• Selected bibliography
• Index