Thoreau, Body Theology, and Pneumachronicity

Since the deadline for our seminar papers draws neigh, and Mark has opened up our blog posts as a collaborative space to work through and share our ideas for our papers, I thought I take the opportunity to do just that.

Besides the course that we’re all taking together, I’m also in the Thoreau course (with a few of you also). For a few weeks now, I’ve been contemplating Thoreau’s particular theology, and how he deploys a theological framework to interpret, process, and shape his reality. Namely, I’ve been following an initial instinct about Thoreau that his theology centers in his body. That is, his experiences. Thoreau, though an intensely spiritual person, largely rejects and harshly criticizes Christian orthodoxy (in which he was reared and trained) across this writings in favor of a composite theology that draws on Hindu and Buddhist holy texts, classical mythology, and Native spirituality, in addition to his western understanding of the Bible. Although, in praxis, Thoreau seems to draw on and aggregate a number of spiritual traditions into a single theological system, he resists thinking of it in terms of an organized religion. Fiercely independent and self-reliant, he wants to develop a spiritual outlook that belongs only to him, one that uniquely resonates with his own spirit. Because Thoreau views his body as inextricably bound to his spirit (in his Journal, he writes that his body and soul stumble about like “unpracticed Siamese twins”), his body becomes a cipher through which spiritual knowledge is gleaned and interpreted; the symbiotic relationship between the body and soul blur the boundary between spiritual and corporeal knowing, both becoming requisite for a holistic theology, one that honors experience, self-knowledge, and personal conscience above the formulaic stringencies of orthodoxy.

In conjunction with my inquiries into Thoreau’s theology, I’ve also been wondering what theology has to do with time, in general, and, more specifically, how Thoreau’s theology seems to be working as a temporality in his river-expedition narrative, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, a time-obsessed work that privileges temporal disjuncture and fracture over a coherent linear conception of time. Throughout the text, Thoreau wanders “off course,” as it were, in his recounting of his river journey with his brother John. Rather than an attempt to accurately reconstruct the journey in a linear fashion, Thoreau interpolates myriad historical accounts, poetry fragments, mythological allusions, and spiritual musings into his text, creating a narrative with high stratifications of time. What’s more is these interpolations seem to be entirely associative; that is, invoked by the body in the space of the journey. And here’s where I’d like to make a connection between how the body and the spirit are at work in Thoreau’s text: the body, grounded in the material space of the journey itself, gathers experiences that inspire (and move) the spirit, creating a sense of temporal indifference in the text. That is, the body’s experience, beholden to space and time, gives way to the spiritual temporality (eternity?), one that transcends and transgresses those boundaries that anchor the body. I’d like to call this phenomenon pneumachronicity, or spirit time. In this sense, we see Thoreau’s body-centered theology merge with a spiritual-temporality in order to create history as a transtemporal phenomenon, one that is both within and without time.

So, I realize that this may seem incredibly nebulous at the moment. Well, maybe better to say, it is very nebulous at the moment. I’ve tried to distil some of my initial inkling and impressions here, but they by no means represent a ready-to-go outline for my paper. And that’s why I thought I might crowd-source the group for comments, suggestions, and resources as I prepare to shape these initial observations into a more cogent argument. Any and all insights welcome!