The Thoreauvian Complementary Difference

Tolstoy was an admirer of Thoreau but, as Clarence Manning pointed out in his essay on the two figures in the early 1940's, Tolstoy was primarily interested in humankind and only secondarily interested in nature; with Thoreau, opposite emphases obtained. [Manning, "Thoreau and Tolstoy," The New England Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 2 (1943), 235].

There are other interesting differences to be noted as well. Tolstoy immersed himself in the sacred literatures of religious traditions; with Thoreau, "we never fail to notice" his "secular education. When he was a student at Harvard College, he loved Greek poetry, and the classics of the world, including the Oriental philosophical writers that he had read" [ibid., 239]. In the pages of Walden, Thoreau offers the following advice:

The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; ... It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations [Manning 239/Walden, Everyman's Library edition, 89].

Manning's preference for the Thoreauvian difference manifests itself throughout his fine essay, though probably no more so than in this comparison: Tolstoy, as Manning read him, organized his life around a principle of abdication. He wished to find a way through this world (and, ultimately, out of it) with what he perceived to be his essential integrity intact. Thoreau, on the other hand, "was endeavoring to progress" as a human being despite the low level to which civilization continually threatened to drag him. "Tolstoy's last years and the tracts produced in them are very different from those stories in which he grasped the nature of simple man--what Merezhkovsky called the Aryan man--who was freed from the tyranny of laws and customs and Semitic asceticism, and sought to merge with Nature" [Manning, 242].

It is interesting to note how the "Semitic" Tolstoy and the "Aryan" Thoreau reproduced, between them, the "Semitic" (Arab) and the "Aryan" (Persian and Greek) sensibilities of classical Islamic tradition.

The balancing of (or tension between) these competing sensibilities is what Paul Tillich called "biblical religion and the search for ultimate reality."