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Christus
Rex
Thoreau & the Dust of Death
Gregory Soderberg
"Why should not our furniture be as simple as the Arab’s or the Indian’s … At present our houses are cluttered and defiled with it, and a good housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave her morning’s work undone … I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken the ground."
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden Pond
Thoreau did not like rocks. More specifically, Thoreau did not like dust. Henry David Thoreau () has achieved lasting fame not only for his remarkable prose, but also for his willingness to take his ideas to their logical conclusions. Leaders like Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr. have praised and emulated him in his political philosophy. Thoreau modeled “passive resistance” when he spent a whole night (!) in jail for refusing to pay his taxes.
In the New Age/ Earth Goddess/ Environmentalism agenda, Thoreau has assumed a prominent place as one who truly sought authentic communion with Nature. Leaving all the trappings of civilization behind, Thoreau marched boldly into the woods (a piece of property owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson), and took up residence in a primitive cabin on the edge of Walden Pond. Thoreau’s journal of his stay here, appropriately entitled Walden, is actually very good reading. Thoreau’s mind strays over numerous topics, and while he does stray at times, he is never less than thought provoking.
Residing on Emerson’s turf, Thoreau self-consciously strove to embody Emerson’s philosophy. Emerson had been a Unitarian minister for a time, but found this broad religion to narrow for his expansive mind. After leaving the Unitarians, Emerson set about creating and
preaching a proto-New Age super-swirl of idealist philosophy, oriental mysticism, and
liberal Christianity. Emerson was the great lecturer (though he penned such famous poems as “Concord Hymn”) and said such things as: “He who would be a man must be a nonconformist,” and “To be great is to be misunderstood”. Emerson excelled in not conforming and also in being misunderstood. But, like Thoreau, he does achieve profundity from time to time.
Thoreau, after resigning from his teaching post because he had an aversion to spanking his students, decided to camp out on Emerson’s turf, both philosophically and physically. He wanted to be put Emerson’s individualistic nature-religion into practice. (But, the fact that he was conforming to Emerson’s philosophy shows that he didn’t really get it: “He who would be a man must be a nonconformist”. Does this include conforming to Emerson’s nonconformity? And as the Harvard critic/poet Robert Lowell observed, Thoreau still had to conform to society’s norms as he trekked to town to buy his supplies. If Thoreau had really wanted to be a nonconformist, he would have gone to northern Idaho.) Nevertheless, Thoreau was determined to do his best at nonconformity.
Finally, at one with nature on the cool, mossy banks of Walden Pond, Thoreau found rocks.
The rocks collected dust. Dusting meant work. Thoreau chucked the rocks. At a very basic level, Thoreau was rebelling against the basic creation-design of the world.
Dust is the perpetual presence of disintegration. Every time we inhale, we breathe in death and destruction. Things fall apart. Tiny bits of our clothing, furniture, pets, and who-knows-what-else, congeal and take up residence in nooks and crannies. It is no coincidence that the Psalmist speaks of the “dust of death” (Ps. 22:15). We are made from dust. Without the continual providential preservation of our bodies,
we would fall apart. Christ holds the universe together by the word of his power. If God the Father stopped speaking God the Word, the whole shindig would turn to dust and evaporate.
The amount of dust we now have is no doubt a result of the Fall. But, it is instructive to think about pre-fall dust. Adam and Eve were placed in the garden to tend and keep (protect) it. They were not supposed to simply sit around and commune with nature. They were supposed to plant things and get their hands dirty. They were instructed to take dominion. Note they were told to take dominion over the earth, not just the garden. The strong Biblical inference is that they were to go outside the garden and work in the world outside. The garden would then function as a sanctuary, where they would meet and commune with God, bringing him tithes and continuing to adorn his garden-sanctuary (1).
Work was involved in humanity’s task, even before the Fall. The Fall simply brought about an increase in the difficulty of work. We now have to work harder and see less fruit. This work would have involved dusting. For Adam and Eve to live in a world without sin does not mean they lived in a world where things never got messy or had to be straightened up. God said his world was good, not that it was an air-tight, surgically-clean laboratory.
No doubt God had told Adam his origins, and how he had been created from the dust of the ground. No doubt Adam would wonder about the connections between the dust he walked on every day, and his own living existence. No doubt he would have realized that just as God breathed the breath of life into him, unless God breathes His Spirit into the world, the world would not exist, much less continue to be.
Also, Adam would have noticed that things died in this good world. Death was not a result of the fall. As Romans 6 says, “death passed upon all men” (Ro. 5:12), because of Adam’s sin. Before the Fall Adam and Eve were told, by God, to eat all the other fruit in the garden, except the forbidden fruit (2). So, Adam and Eve were supposed to kill and eat fruit. Embodied in the world, even from the beginning was the principle of sacrificial life. Life must come from death.
Of course, Adam and Eve had the prospect of eternal life before them, and the lives of their children would not come from Adam and Eve’s deaths, but God designed the world in such a way that man would live through the death of another life. God placed man at the peak of his creation, with rule over the world, and so we should not pull out our hankies for the sake of the fruit. Rather, Adam and Eve shouldhave learned, firstly about their own preeminence in creation, and secondly, that one life must be laid down for another in God’s world. They would have learned to serve each other, to nourish each other through their selfless acts of sacrificial love and thus sustain each other in a sinless world.
Now, how does this all affect the average churchman(woman), who will probably never read Thoreau, but probably sympathizes with him on the subject of dusting. Should we chuck the furniture and cut down on dustable surfaces? No! Dusting is an essential part of taking dominion over the world. Dusting is part of our sanctification. When the Christian housewife dusts her house, she is taking dominion over her house, and asserting the rule of order over chaos.
As Christians, we cannot let our houses remain in perpetual disarray (although occasionally tearing the couch apart to build a fort is fine). To do so would to surrender ourselves to disintegration and the dust of death. These things are symbolic but symbols have meaning. Symbolic actions do form us into who we are. The bachelor with the dust of death covering everything that used to be white probably is rather dusty on the inside as well.
In rebelling against dust, Thoreau was also rebelling against decoration. The work of dusting was not worth the aesthetic pleasure of adorning his house. As Christians, we have no choice but to adorn our houses. First, they must be adorned with a spiritual aroma of love and self-sacrifice. Secondly, just as God placed Adam and Eve in a beautiful garden, so we should strive to make our houses aesthetically pleasing, within the means God has given us. What is our perspective: One more surface to dust, or one more beautiful surface to make more beautiful?
Thoreau had many other problems we could criticize, but in his drive towards consistency, he is a good example of a worldview showing itself in the details. Latching onto Emerson’s philosophy had very practical consequences. Like throwing rocks out the window. Luckily there was no glass. May we all be as consistent in the details of our lives, as we seek to put our Christian worldview into practice. 
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so drear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck all the marrow out of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
- Thoreau, Walden
1 For more on the symbolism and typology of the garden and the sanctuary, see James Jordan, Through New Eyes: Developing a Biblical View of the World (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2000), and Peter Leithart, A House for My Name (Moscow: Canon Press, 2000).
2 There will be prize for whoever finds out the origin of the pernicious legend of the apple. My vote is for the kiwi fruit.
Volume One - Issue Two
Literature: Thoreau & the Dust of Death - Gregory Soderberg
Theology: Historic Creationism on Trial - Maurice Hagar
Aesthetics: Hours - Maurice Hagar
Culture: Manhunt - Maurice Hagar
Sodomy: Letter to an Editor - Marcus Rench
Skeletal Thoughts and Emaciated Musings - Gregory Soderberg
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