Do you have a perennial mind? Thoreau, Job and the search for spiritual continuity

By Walter Hesford | FāVS News Columnist

Do you have a perennial mind?… body?

In his new book, “Lessons from the Mountain Top: 10 Modern Mystics and Their Extraordinary Lives,” Lawrence Pintak states that “he is an avid student of the perennial truths at the core of the world religions.”  

That there are universal truths at the core of world religions is a proposition of the Perennial Philosophy, according to a lengthy Wikipedia article on this topic. This philosophy has ancient roots, but blossomed during the Renaissance among those who blended Christian and Platonic thought.

During the 18th century, Eastern religions, especially Hinduism, were added to the blend.  In 19th century America, Ralph Waldo Emerson and his Transcendental followers promoted a perennial philosophy, a universal spirituality.

One of his followers, Henry David Thoreau, adhered to a different kind of perennialism. Thoreau was a self-proclaimed Transcendentalist who enthusiastically read Eastern scripture but his dedication to the experience and study of nature ran even deeper. In his maturity he committed himself to the cycles of nature and rejoiced in the perennial greening of the earth every spring.

The winter of 1855-56 had been particularly long and severe, so Thoreau was particularly happy when the landscape showed signs of rebirth: “How encouraging to perceive again that faint tinge of green, spreading amid the russet on earth’s cheeks! I revive with Nature; her victory is mine.” Thoreau participates in nature’s perennial victory over death.

Later in the same journal entry, Thoreau admires the perennial agricultural tasks that a farmer must engage in. He reports that when he hears Hosmer, an old farmer friend, complain that he must once again shovel out a vast amount of manure from his barn, he encourages his friend to be “brave and  hopeful with nature.”

Thoreau notes that this Concord farmer is engaged in the same spring task as that described by Columella, a 1st century CE Roman author: “Human life may be transitory and full of trouble, but the perennial mind, whose survey extends from that spring to this, from Columella to Hosmer, is superior to change. I will identify myself with that which did not die with Columella and will not die with Hosmer.”

Thoreau may be poking fun at airy Transcendent thought here by stating that “the perennial mind” concerns itself with such a mundane job as the spreading of manure. Just as the ongoing cycles of nature provide universal and eternal truths, so do the humble tasks farmers perform to nurture life.

Perennial cycles

Of course, many down through the centuries have longed for something more than perennial cycles of nature and human endeavor, be it the merging of the mind with an eternal All, the reincarnation of the body or the resurrection of the body in a spiritual realm.

Job, in the biblical book bearing his name, even expressed envy of trees, since they enjoyed a cyclical rebirth denied humans: “For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease. Though its roots grow old in the earth, and its stump dies in the ground, yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant. But mortals die, and are laid low; humans expire, and where are they?” (Job 14:7-10)

Where indeed? Probably composed between the 7th and 3rd century BCE, the Book of Job expresses the dominant Hebraic view of this period that there was no meaningful afterlife for humans. And unlike Thoreau with his earth-bound perennial mind, Job takes no comfort in the cycles of nature.

For Thoreau the perennial mind is really just an epiphenomenon of the perennial body … manure to manure, dust to dust. Many who espouse a religious faith would disagree. How about you? What is the future of your mind? Your body?