This article argues that Henry David Thoreau believed in the essential unity of the five senses and privileged each as a source of wild and divine knowledge, which, when combined, created a full picture that might result in a true approximation of God in and beyond nature—the hallmark of Thoreau’s fundamentally incarnational theology. Thoreau treated each sense not only as a source of divine knowledge but as a site of theological discourse: for touch, the relationship between sin and grace; for smell, the conundrum of an eternal divinity acting in historical time; for taste, the efficacy of sacraments; for hearing, the possibility of continuing revelation; and for sight, the ability for human beings to actually see God. The senses were the practical entry point to Thoreau’s theological system, which was concerned with the discovery and redemption of internal “wildness” and reconnection to the mysterious, divine source of that wildness, to the unaccountable in nature.

Thomas Cranmer’s Eucharistic theology has been the source of no small amount of scholarship and dispute. I argue that these disputes are in part due to the fact that Cranmer wavers between describing two distinct realities and that these realities are not necessarily coincidental. There is the reality of the consecrated elements, which he understands figuratively as being the body and blood of Christ. But Cranmer also describes a second reality, which is the direct connection between the soul of the recipient and the actual body and blood of Christ. I highlight the latter reality by recourse to recent work on the notion of the spiritual senses in the Christian theological tradition.