Deep River and the Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death

Howard Thurman And The Negro Spiritual

I was encouraged to explore the works of the African American philosopher-mystic Howard Thurman (1899 -- 1981) through reading Gary Dorrien's book "Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Social Gospel" together with a scholarly study by Anthony Sean Neal "Howard Thurman's Philosophical Mysticism: Love against Fragmentation". Thus I was led to Howard Thurman's study of the Negro Spiritual in two works combined in this book, "Deep River", a compilation of lectures Thurman gave at Spelman College and first published privately in 1945 and "The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death" which Thurman delivered as the Ingersoll Lecture on the Immortality of Man in 1947 at Harvard. In republishing the works, Thurman discussed the lifelong importance the spirituals held for him as reflective of his own experience as an African American. Thurman saw in the spirituals the voice of a valiant people seeking God and religion as a source of strength and pride amid degradation and adversity. Thurman also saw the spirituals as illustrating timeless, universal truths of the human condition. Thurman's understanding of himself as an African American and his striving for a universalist, mystical philosophy are eloquently combined in these studies of the Negro Spirituals, as in his other writings. I will first discuss the Ingersoll Lecture.

Established in 1893, the Ingersoll Lectures on Human Immortality, have featured great thinkers over the years, including William James, Josiah Royce, Alfred North Whitehead, and many others. When Thurman accepted the invitation to deliver the 1947 lecture, he became the first African American to do so at a time when it was rare indeed for an African American to be so honored. His lecture "The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death" is profound and does honor to this distinguished series.

In his lecture, Thurman weaves together broad thoughts about the mystery of life and death in human life; and he examines these thoughts through a close study of the spirituals because "in many ways they are the voice, sometimes strident, sometimes muted and weary of a people for whom the cup of suffering overflowed in haunting overtones of majesty, beauty and power!" Thurman combines reflections on the nature of death and of the nature of life. He sees human beings as "time binders" and "space binders" by which he means that their lives are lived within finite space and time experience but are also lived beyond these discrete, joined experiences. He develops difficult thoughts of life and death and then shows how these insights are illustrated in the words of the Negro spirituals. The work has a great deal to say about the spirituals and about the human condition. In a passage near the end of the lecture, Thurman summarizes his themes and combines his discussion of the spirituals with his philosophical mysticism:

"This personal immortality carried with it also the idea of rest from labor, of being able to take a long sign cushioned by a deep sense of peace. If time is regarded as having certain characteristics that are event transcending and the human spirit is not essentially time bound but a time binder, then the concept of personal survival of death follows automatically. For man is never completely involved in, nor absorbed by, experience. He is an experiencer with recollection and memory -- so these songs insist. The logic of such a position is that man was not born in time, that he was not created by a time-space experience, but rather that man was born into time. Something of him enters all time-space relationships, even birth, completely and fully intact, and is not created by the time-space relationship. In short, the most significant thing about man is what Eckhart calls the 'uncreated element' in his soul. This was an assumed fact profoundly at work in the life and thought of the early slaves."

I found the Ingersoll Lecture best captured Thurman's reflections on the Negro Spiritual but the earlier sermons and lectures collected in "Deep River" also repay reading. Thurman expressed the wish that these lectures would cast light on "the reader's struggle for courage, self-respect, and emotional security." The collection begins with an introductory chapter which finds the sources of the spirituals in nature, human experience, and the Bible. Thurman recognizes the elements of protest in the spirituals but his focus is on the attainment of dignity and courage through the search for God. In subsequent chapters of the book, Thurman examines particular spirituals and draws out their themes. For example, in discussing "There is a Balm in Gilead" Thurman observes that "the basic insight here is one of optimism -- an optimism that grows out of the pessimism of life and transcends it. It is an optimism that uses the pessimism of life as raw material out of which it creates its own strength."

Throughout his lectures, Thurman uses other literature and his own thoughts to illustrate the spiritual's meaning. The lectures have in places the character of a sermon, but Thurman always is insightful. For example, in discussing the spiritual "Wade in the Water, Children", Thurman discusses, among other things, Thornton Wilder's novel "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" Thurman finds that Wilder in his novel "dissects the lives of the people who fell on the bridge, and shows that the same logic that was at work mechanically in the collapse of the bridge was also at work in the lives of the persons who found themselves on the bridge at that particular moment." Thurman emphasizes the unity and regularity underlying all experience but finds that this does not lead to fatalism. "Always there is the order; always there is the logic. We are not altogether bound by it, because we are living, thinking, deciding creatures. In this concept there is abiding hope for man."

Thurman finds a message of love and hope at the core of the spirituals. "This is the great disclosure: that there is at the heart of life a Heart. When such an insight is possessed by the human spirit and possesses the human spirit, a vast and awe-inspiring tranquillity irradiates the life."

Thurman's works on the Negro Spiritual combine a study of the particulars of the spirituals and their creators with broad reflections on mysticism and the human condition. I enjoyed getting to know these works together with other works of Thurman.

Robin Friedman