The Wilderness Theology of John Muir B Anthony MA Thesis

GOD’S FIRST TEMPLE:
THE WILDERNESS THEOLOGY OF JOHN MUIR
________________________________
A Thesis
Presented to the Faculty of
the Department of English
Kutztown University
Kutztown, Pennsylvania
________________________________
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
________________________________
by
Brian Patrick Anthony
December 2000

Table of Contents
Dedication .......................…..................................................... iii
Acknowledgments ................................................................... iv
Introduction ............................................................................. 1
Chapter One  Baptism in Nature ........................................... 14
Chapter Two  Industry ......................................................... 27
Chapter Three  Seeking ........................................................ 37
Chapter Four  Nature’s Cathedral ......................................... 57
Conclusion ............................................................................... 66
Bibliography ............................................................................ 69
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-786-
This work is dedicated to Imam Ja^afar ibn Muhammed As-Sadiq (),
who encouraged us first to seek balance.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge with gratitude my advisor, Dr. Guiyou Huang,
whose guidance and patience saw this project through to the end. I would like to
acknowledge Dr. David Laubach and Dr. Arnold Newman for their participation,
comments, and support.
Special thanks to my family, my wife Samina, my sister Alison, and especially
my mother and father, Patricia and Louis, for their love and support
As no work is a free-standing blossom of wisdom, I would like to thank the
numerous scholars whose works are synthesized here. I would also like to recognize a
few representatives of the long list of individuals who contributed to my education and
this work in a unique and indelible way: the late Mr. William D. Popp, Mr. Samuel K.
McBride, Dr. Barry Goldfarb, Dr. August Nigro, and Dr. Wm
. Bruce Ezell, Jr.
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Introduction
John Muir is revered as the founder of the Sierra Club, the catalyst for the
National Park System, an eloquent and impassioned spokesperson for nature. His
adult life is the story of devoted study and activism culminating in the preservation of
the Sierras as a protected region by the federal government. His written legacy has
fuelled the environmental movement and the appreciation of nature ever since it was
penned. But Muir's work is generally dismissed as “nature-writing,” and has only very
recently become the subject of academic study. A plaque laid in his honor near the
Muir homestead in Marquette County, Wisconsin, is instructive. It reads,
JOHN MUIR, Foster son of Wisconsin born in Scotland April 21, 1838
He came to America as a lad of eleven, spent his 'teen years in hard work
clearing the farm across this lake, carving out a home in the wilderness. In the
'sunny woods, overlooking a flowery glacial meadow and a lake rimmed with
water lilies,' he found an environment that fanned the fire of zeal and love for
all nature, which, as a man, drove him to study, afoot, alone and unafraid, the
forests, the mountains and glaciers of the west to become the most rugged,
fervent naturalist America has produced, and the Father of the National Parks
of our country.
The inscription sums up Muir's rugged popular image, but few have assessed the
driving force behind his lifelong journey. The objective of this thesis is to demonstrate
that Muir's principal drive was a religious one. His efforts were marked with

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passionate pleas for the cause of nature, not as an end in itself, but as a portal to the
divine. This project will contextualize Muir's spiritual outlook in relation to his
upbringing and the social and religious currents of mid- to late-19th-century America.
We certainly live in interesting times, when technique has usurped the place of
tradition, when technology has conquered all frontiers, when the project of civilization
has triumphed so absolutely that man is for the first time encased in a comprehensive
environment of wholly human design. While the miracles of our era are legion and
need not be enumerated here, we find ourselves before an equally broad array of
challenges. At the core of all of this is a view of nature and humanity’s relationship to
it that in turn results in a cycle of worldview modifying nature modifying worldview.
Humanity's drive to power, domination, and consumption has reached a startling
crescendo as we enter the 21st century. Biologists report that species are disappearing
at over 1000 times the normal rate of extinction. One in every four mammals is
endangered or in immanent risk of endangerment. Paradoxically, human population is
set to exceed 9 billion within 50 years. Average global temperatures are increasing
more rapidly than any models predicted a mere decade ago. The proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction has increased, not decreased, since the demise of the
Soviet Union.
Still, like the drug addict seeking just one more fix, we pursue more
technological solutions to these technological problems, ever assuming balance to be
just around the corner. Thus scientists have recently attempted to resuscitate extinct
species using cloning technology; other experts have proposed dumping large
quantities of iron pellets into the Arctic Ocean to alleviate global warming, while

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medicine promises to extend the life expectancy of the richest and most highly
consumptive segment of the human population well beyond a hundred years.
The most extreme manifestation of this cycle can be found in the
“transhumanist” movement, which seeks to eliminate human biology altogether and
“upload” human consciousness into immortal cyber-beings. Max More, a proponent
of transhumanism, has said:
The dawn of the new millennium will see the ability to use engineered
viruses to alter the genetic structure of any cell, even adult,
differentiated cells. This will give us pervasive control over our
physiology and morphology. Molecular nanotechnology, an emerging
and increasingly funded technology, should eventually give us
practically complete control over the structure of matter, allowing us to
build anything, perfectly, atom-by-atom. We will be able to program
the construction of physical objects (including our bodies) just as we
now do with software. The abolition of aging and most involuntary
death will be one result. We have achieved two of the three alchemists'
dreams: We have transmuted the elements and learned to fly.
Immortality is next.
(http://www.maxmore.com/becoming.htm)
The drive of humanity to subdue nature is an ancient one. Irrespective of the viability
of the above design, we stand poised in fact to finally overthrow nature altogether.
The motivation for this push to re-create the world and cast it as a wholly human
environment is manifold. Some cite comfort, others efficiency and speed, and still

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others simply claim it to be humanity’s natural and destined course. But these reasons
do not explain why humanity pursues this grand project even in instances where none
of these interests is served.
Some writers have posited a psychological motivation for this sort of fantasy,
this exaggerated extension of the rhetoric of civilization. In his book The Myth of the
Machine, Lewis Mumford raises the matter of ego-formation: “After emerging from
this perfect environment, the infant retains an illusion of omnipotence: for he has only
to cry to have his wish fulfilled … To carry this magic effortless existence into
maturity has been the tacit effort of the system of automation modern man has
perfected” (341). One might imagine that after the formation of the ego and the
demarcation of the self from worldly phenomena “out there,” there are three primary
strategies to dealing with the friction between self and other: the first is to dismantle
the ego altogether, the second is to balance the ego, employing it for its practical
necessity but acknowledging its essential non-reality and chiefly mediatory role, or
thirdly, to extend ego bonds into all phenomenal realms.
About this third strategy, Freud writes, “But one can do no more than that; one
can try to re-create the world, and to build up in its stead another world in which its
most unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by others that are in conformity
with one’s wishes” (31). Ironically, Freud was here implying what he viewed as
humanity’s superstitious religious past, but his words so lend themselves to the current
discussion that they cannot be ignored. For at the beginning of the 21st century, the
typical North American life is enclosed in a thoroughly planned and managed world of
human re-design, truly a world that meets Freud’s description.

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The advent of the new century finds many of us living in habitats designed to
smooth the edges of reality: to cool the air when it is hot; to heat the air when it is
cold; to provide food without labor or preparation; to fill the air with music; to fill the
eyes with moving pictures; to drug down the reactive emotions, and so forth.
Certainly Brave New World far more than 1984, but no doubt our contemporary
culture is comprised of a seamless amalgamation of tightly managed environments.
Mumford compares such an arrangement to “static space capsules”: “Those
committed to these megastructures will conduct their existence as if in interplanetary
space, with no direct access to nature, no sense of the seasons or the difference
between night and day, no change of temperature or of light, no contact with their
fellows except through the appointed collective channels” (309-310). Environments
such as these are the ultimate re-constituted worlds which Freud spoke of in
Civilization and Its Discontents. However, their history, as well as the history of the
idea of this sort of civilization and the rejectionist response to it, have a long and
complicated past, dating back even thousands of years.
Some writers have mentioned a deeper spiritual problem. Czech president
Vaclav Havel, commenting on recent anti-globalization riots in Prague, said, "We
often hear about the need to restructure the economies of the poorer countries and
about the wealthier nations being duty bound to help them accomplish this .... But I
deem it even more important that we should begin also to think about another
restructuring — a restructuring of the entire system of values that forms the basis of
our civilization today" (qtd. in Kahn). The incremental changes some seek to make at
this stage to “save the whales” and other such minutiae, are rearguard actions aimed at

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avoiding the truly grand change necessary. Ecotheologian Thomas Berry has
theorized that this change will require a transition comparable to "the great classical
religious movements, the emergence of Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Taoism,
the spread of Christianity and the rise of Islam. Each of these movements involved a
widespread change of consciousness and a new orientation in life" (qtd. in Greene,
15). Sayyed Hossein Nasr has echoed this call: "The ecological crisis is only an
externalization of an inner malaise and cannot be solved without a spiritual rebirth of
Western man" (9). According to Nasr, a series of intellectual crises in Western
Christianity has led to a desacrilization of knowledge and the rise of purely
quantitative sciences. These sciences are not epistemologically rooted in an awareness
of the interconnectivity of creation. Treating nature as a mere collection of
independent things, modern man can only see nature as resource, not as an organism
of intrinsic and sacred value. Nasr insists that only by revisiting and coming to terms
with traditional cosmology, theology, and mysticism, can modern humanity overcome
the challenges that lie before it.
The work of John Muir is an effort in that direction. Muir attempted to re-
sacralize nature by constituting an amalgam of disciplines and ideologies outside the
academic and scientific mainstream. Muir’s departure for the wilderness was a search
to strike a balance between civilization and wilderness, between ego and
unboundedness, between material and spirit. Scott Slovic has commented that writers
since Thoreau have “perpetuated his combined fascination with inner consciousness
and external nature” noting “the polarity of Thoreau’s frequent opposition of
civilization and wilderness” (354). Freud’s comments elucidate why this should be so,

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for from the mid-19th century, the Industrial Revolution began to solidify the resolve
to transform civilization and envelop man in the “auxilliary constructions” which
writers such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, John Burroughs, and Edward
Abbey, have fled. Though on the surface these writers take up the cause of “nature”,
whatever that label may connote, they are chiefly interested in this wild outward
environment for its capacity to disrupt the encapsulements of civilization and the ego-
constructs from which they derive.
John Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland, in 1838. His father, Daniel Muir,
was a fervent Calvinist and proponent of a stern and austere theology. He moved the
family to America in February, 1849, following other Scots of his Campbellite sect in
search of religious freedom and a simple agrarian lifestyle. Though life on the family's
Wisconsin farm was an endless cycle of arduous labor, Muir reveled in the raw nature
that surrounded him. It was in this grand classroom wilderness of the American
Midwest that he first began to familiarize himself with the flora and fauna that would
consume so much of his attention. In the absence of any schools on the undeveloped
frontier, Muir educated himself, plunging into countless volumes on mathematics,
poetry, science, and history, in addition to a rigorous schedule of labor and Bible-
study. He also took to invention, and developed a reputation for his machines which
helped him gain entrance into the newly-established State University of Wisconsin at
Madison.
Muir departed from the University of Wisconsin in 1863 for what he dubbed
“the University of the Wilderness.” Engberg and Wesling write, “We see him in this
period defining life by negation: sampling and then rejecting cities, the society of men

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and women, and various careers from shepherd and sawyer to tour guide and lecturer
and author and professor” (17). We see something more in Muir’s life during this time
than a cantankerous young man out for self-definition. He traded a promising life of
invention and industry for something seemingly ephemeral. The collision of the
industrial with what preceded it produced different responses  most moved wholly
into the world of human design, rarely to step outside the comprehensive web of
invention, seldom to recall the rhythms and ways of the world gone by. A rare few,
like Muir and Thoreau, solicited direct encounter with that world, raising its
significance and wealth by recording its difference with the new world.
Muir started out with a knack for inventions and industry, and many sources
point out the life that lay before the young Muir as a successful industrialist. Wolfe
records Muir’s recollections: “I might have become a millionaire but I chose to
become a tramp!” (qtd. in Wolfe 110). He turned his back on that life “so to stand
against that ‘conspicuous, energetic, unmixed materialism’ which, Muir himself said,
‘rules supreme in all classes’” (22). That material civilization, with its modern drive
towards comprehensiveness, is the ultimate strategy for coping with the problems of
ego formation by extending similar bonds to the whole of human experience. Muir’s
My First Summer in the Sierra describes a counter-strategy to this development that
seeks to dissolve those bonds from the outermost to the innermost, resulting in the
author’s mystical experience of “unboundedness.”
Like many in his time, Muir found difficulty in making ends meet in the shifting
economic landscape. He had recently relocated to California following a stint at the
University of Wisconsin, after which he meandered with loose aim, in part hoping to

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stumble upon his place. Furthermore, he had sensed a special value in the fresh and
picturesque region he now settled in, a wealth of vitality that lay somewhere in the
pristine heights of the Sierra. So it was for want of bread, both mundane and spiritual,
that Muir accepted work as a shepherd for a wealthy local rancher. He seems mainly
to have been responsible as a back-up and helper, a post which afforded him all the
time and flexibility he needed to wander, observe, experiment, and write.
The Sierras were a high-altitude wilderness, more or less untouched, and much
of it uncharted. Throughout the subsequent years, Muir himself contributed greatly to
the body of botanical, zoological, and cartographical knowledge on the region. But it
was the absence of the human as well as the presence of the range of unhindered
ecological inter-relationship that Muir focused upon. In this context, Muir was able to
refine a way of seeing, a way of walking, a mind almost Edenic in quality, unretouched
by the necessities and impositions of modern civilization.
Muir uses nature as the starting point of an outward, but more significantly
inward, trek. Disillusioned by the widening materialism and industrialism which
ravaged the natural ecology as well as the spiritual balance of his time, Muir went
seeking, not in the realms of stifling dogmatism or dusty academe, but outside the
confines of the man-made world. He stepped beyond the limits of what he saw as an
increasingly artificial world into a world more complete, utterly connected, untainted
by human re-design. Muir found a milieu amidst that world which enabled him to
connect with his innermost soul, an innate and natural spirituality, informed by the
Romanticism of his day, but ever under the challenge of the encroaching economic
order and its attendant paradigms.

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For Muir, nature and soul are two sides of the same coin. To foster an
understanding of one is to foster an understanding of the other. This is a far cry from
the evangelical faith Muir was raised with, a dogmatism which was employed to direct
the human project against the natural world. Muir would deviate from the sterilizing
and leveling stewardship of mainline Reformist Christianity in favor of a more
ecological model, one that married the inner and outer worlds. Engberg and Wesling
note Muir's "ability to perceive wilderness as value, as ethics, as health, discovery,
instruction" (9). Here, stewardship benefits the gardener as well as the garden.
To his own mind, the spiritual transformation which Muir attributed to this
journey was a real one. Muir delved into the significance of the complex physical
relationships he saw before him, probing them for reason, intelligence, beauty, and
significance, and he came away with a new faith and a belief in the divine author of
that extraordinary living scripture. Though treading a path of rock and dirt, Muir
plotted a more ephemeral, anagogical path amidst the towering Sierras.
Muir's upward journey effects changes in his perception of nature and self, as
well as his mode of expression. Having confronted phenomena in a wholly new way,
Muir focuses on the essential unity of all and the illusory quality of individuation. As
he describes his surroundings, the very picture of which he becomes an organic part,
he beatifies the mundane, bringing into focus its link with the eternal. By this narrative
technique, he boosts the object to higher levels on the great chain of being. For
instance, he describes flowers: "tall bromus waving like bamboos, starry compositae,
monardella, Mariposa tulips, lupines, gilias, violets, glad children of light" (My First
Summer 22). Muir not only anthropomorphizes the flowers but also links them with a

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universal force. In doing so he asserts the association of all things great and small with
one another as well as with a higher source.
Muir's First Summer in the Sierra, though often dismissed for its simplicity and
unassuming tone, is really a neo-Platonic treatise for the post-industrial age. Muir's
narrative rages softly against the industrial and the urban, questioning the compatibility
of unchecked commercialism with the ecology of the soul. He flees to the wilderness
to seek refuge from a civilization gone out-of-balance and at the same time to pursue a
more essential, more abiding and divine order. "God's wilderness," as Muir terms it,
provides a contrast to the fettered world of human civilization. The ultimate reaches
of Muir's effort lay in salvation, a non-terminal annihilation in which death is "beautiful
as life" (166), a unity of being in which "man to man, the world o'er, shall be brothers
for a'that" (153). The traditional scriptures, co-opted and abused by man against man,
are but pale attempts when compared to the eternal verses embodied in the grandeur
and rhythms of nature. To Muir, as long as the wilderness remains, so does the hope
of human salvation, the path to paradisiacal bliss.
The term "wilderness theology," which figures in the title of this thesis, was
borrowed from various readings and is intended to highlight the peculiar nature of
Muir's approach to knowledge. The term is oxymoronic but apt, combining the notion
of unruly and untamed wilderness with the measured and organized realm of
speculative religious knowledge. Muir bridged the two, for he took to nature without
recourse to reductive positivism while imbibing in a mysticism free of dogmatic
constraints. He attempted to synthesize his science, ethics, and cosmology in a
manner strange to the academic mainstream of his day and ours. Muir described his

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profession thus: "A self-styled poetico-trampo-geologist-bot. and ornith-natural,
etc.!!!" (qtd. in Engberg & Wesling 3). His approach to knowledge was an organic
methodology without disciplinary bounds.
Chapter One will explore Muir's life from his youth in Scotland and Wisconsin
to his initiation into industry in his late teens. It will describe Muir’s early upbringing
in religion and nature and will assess the impact of this domestic experience on his
later life primarily using Muir’s narrative, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth. I will
focus on his first spiritual experiences gleaned from nature and religious influences
inherited from his father.
Chapter Two will examine Muir’s foray into industry and science. It will
explain Muir’s fascination with invention and his intellectual development both at
home and at the University of Wisconsin. It will contextualize the industrial accident
which changed the course of his life and sent him on A Thousand-Mile Walk to the
Gulf.
Chapter Three will place Muir amidst the currents of 19th century religion,
thought, and culture. It will describe developments in science and literature, and will
present the idea of “wilderness” against the backdrop of American expansionism. It
will compare and contrast Muir’s ideas with those of other American Romantics,
namely Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman.
Chapter Four will focus on Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra. It will
clarify the features of Muir’s “wilderness theology,” and will demonstrate this work to
be the culmination of his thought and mystical experience.

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The whole of the work will focus primarily on the circumstances and
philosophies that shaped his religious attitude, how that attitude manifested itself in
Muir's "wilderness theology," and the spiritual experiences which apparently derived
from it. I have chosen the works of John Muir for their warmth, sincerity, and
simplicity. We often err in confusing sophistication with truth. I would note however
that along with Muir's simplicity went a large number of grammatical and
punctuational errors. I have in all cases refrained from using the traditional "[sic]" in
these instances as they would be redundant and intrusive.
Chapter One
Baptism in Nature
Daniel Muir burst into the family home in Dunbar, Scotland, with a startling
announcement — the next day he would be taking his family to America. It was
February 18, 1849, in the midst of the greatest social and technical upheaval Scotland
had ever seen. The elder Muir had recently joined the Campbellites, an evangelical
offshoot of the Presbyterian faith. He was attracted by the simple purity of nascent
Christianity this sect attempted to reclaim. Though there were a few converts in
Dunbar, Daniel wanted to relocate to America, the native land of the Campbellites,
closer to the roots of the Great Revival which had given birth to the sect. Other
Campbellites were headed to the New World. As many religious groups found,

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America offered them the space and freedom, at least for a time, to articulate a simple
agrarian lifestyle of work, family, and faith.
Daniel Muir, like his famous son after him, had always been something of a
seeker. Though he ran a successful grain business, his principal interest was religion.
He was orphaned at a young age and was left in the care of his eldest sister. He
rebelled and ran away at the age of 21, joining a splinter church, but moved from sect
to sect throughout his youth. It was during this time, however, that he "dedicated his
life to an austere Calvinist concept of God" (Wilkins 6). John Muir would inherit his
father's religious passion, but opt for a wholly different concept of the divine.
Massive technical and demographic changes swept the whole of Scotland in
the mid-19th century. The constant population growth between 1800 and 1914 put
enormous strain on the economy, political and religious institutions, and traditional
Scottish life ways. Internal migration was so great that by 1861, only 36% of the
population remained in a rural setting, and many families are recorded to have had a
succession of children each in a different location. Growth continued unabated by
external migration. Over 50,000 emigrants departed in the 1830s and 1840s
respectively, and over 150,000 departed in the 1850s. Advancements in agriculture
displaced countless thousands, turning the majority from joint land owners to landless
laborers and seasonal workers. Many took up work as farm servants or as laborers in
the ascendant urban industrial economy.
Conditions in the new urban centers were less than ideal. Periods of economic
upturn produced only modest gains for the majority of workers, and periods of
downturn were devastating. Environmental conditions declined, and congested cities

15
with unsanitary conditions contributed to the outbreak of disease. Typhoid broke out
in 1818, 1826, 1837, 1843, and again in 1847, while cholera spread in 1832 and 1848.
Death rates soared during these outbreaks, and by 1847, reports indicate that famine
was starving out thousands in western coastal areas. McCaffrey states that it was no
wonder then that population and town growth, in addition to the conditions of urban
society, struck many Scots as "apocalyptic" (15).
Still, religious response to these developments was far from monolithic.
Scottish Enlightenment Christianity encouraged such economic developments as the
utilization of the material world for which humanity was destined. J.R. McCulloch and
other thinkers advanced the idea that "material progress was part of a providential plan
in which hard work and thrift brought its own reward" (McCaffrey 41). These
thinkers promoted a view of the natural world as a store room, a "standing resource"
as Heidegger would later have it, from which men of industry could draw at will. And
deriving from the Calvinist tradition, urban poverty and wretched living conditions
were simply considered the taint of sin upon the sufferers, an earthly visitation of
justice upon the condemned. By the 1840s, the majority of preachers held the view of
Thomas Chalmers, who "gave something like a divine sanction to the consequences of
uninhibited free enterprise" (Devine 380).
On the other hand, religious institutions spearheaded reform and attempted to
ease the pain of this transitory period. Contrary to the accepted academic view that
economic growth, urbanization, and education would necessarily relegate religion to
the "ash-heap of history," church growth and participation, as well as ecclesiastical
involvement in social activism and politics, soared during this period. Devine argues,

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"Far from religious erosion, the Victorian Age saw a quite remarkable and hitherto
unprecedented fusion between Christian ethos and civic policy. Many of the great
urban issues of the day, such as poor housing, sanitation, crime, and the provision of
public utilities, were dealt with from an overtly religious perspective" (365). Church
authorities and members drove social activism balanced with traditional Scottish
values of hard work, self-reliance, and temperance.
Church membership more than doubled between 1830 and 1914, and the
Scottish Episcopal Church, which seemed doomed heading into the 1850s, rebounded
by drawing on the new working class and assorted groups of protestant immigrants.
New sects, like the Campbellites, gained favor in this new environment. They grew
out of a rich and rapidly changing American social scheme where Presbyterianism had
deep roots. Dating from the time of the Puritans, strict confessionalism and the desire
to "Christianize" the American social climate were major features of the faith. A major
split occurred in the early 19th century between the "Old School" which emphasized
doctrinalist confessionalism and the "New School" which tended towards pietistic
revivalism.
Thomas Campbell and his son Alexander were Scots-Irish preachers who
preached in the Appalachian regions of Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and
Kentucky. Like many reformist sects, they sought a return to the pure and original
Christianity. They disparaged speculative theology and doctrine. Campbellites
disclaimed any special name for their sect, preferring to be simply called "Christians"
or "Disciples of Christ,” and their churches, "Christian Churches". They called for
Christian unity on the basis of the New Testament, and maintained that the only

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sacramental requirements for believers were baptism and the confession of Christ as
Lord and Savior. Some amongst their followers developed scintillating revivalistic
formulas which featured charismatic preachers, charged sermons, and rapturous
embraces of salvation.
The young John Muir and his brother David would have known or cared little
for all of these developments. They were ecstatic on hearing the news of their
departure for America. They had heard so many fantastic stories about Indians, wide
open spaces, and rich maple syrup flowing freely from the trees. But the greatest thing
about moving to America, the prairies still having little infrastructure, was that school
would be out forever.
One night, while David and I were at grandfather's fireside solemnly
learning our lessons as usual, my father came in with the news, the
most wonderful, most glorious, that wild boys ever heard. 'Bairns,' he
said, 'you needna learn your lessons the nicht, for we're gan to America
the morn!' No more grammar, but boundless woods full of mysterious
good things; trees full of sugar, growing in ground full of gold; hawks,
eagles, pigeons, filling the sky; millions of birds' nests, and no
gamekeepers to stop us in all the wild, happy land. We were utterly,
blindly glorious. (Boyhood and Youth 25)
Little did John and David suspect the rigorous life of grinding labor that lay ahead of
them.
Muir looked back with great fondness on his early childhood in Scotland, and
he attributes it with instilling in him his sense of wonder. He opens his account of

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boyhood: "When I was a boy in Scotland I was fond of everything that was wild, and
all my life I've been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and wild creatures"
(Boyhood and Youth 1). Dunbar was a rural coastal town, and afforded plenty of
opportunities for a young boy to exercise his natural curiosities. John and his brother
found occupation, amusement, and learning in the fields and woods around their
home: "Wildness was ever sounding in our ears, and Nature saw to it that besides
school lessons and church lessons some of her own lessons should be learned, perhaps
with a view to a time when we should be called to wander in wilderness to our heart's
content" (Boyhood and Youth 23). These were the beginnings of Muir's lifelong
interest in nature, and the outset of his education in the wild.
Muir's exposure to the wide-open "wonderful schoolless bookless American
wilderness," however, would imbue that interest with spiritual overtones. Muir would
say of his arrival in the New World, "This sudden plash into the wildness — baptism in
Nature's warm heart — how utterly happy it made us!" (Boyhood and Youth 29). In
retrospect, Muir saw this time as a sacramental initiation into the mysteries of the
natural world, and his own brand of natural mysticism, which would consume the rest
of his life. It would also acquaint him with the diversity of kind amongst the rocks,
plants, and animals he first encountered there. From their first discovery of a blue jay's
nest immediately upon arrival, John and David began an acquaintance with all manner
of frogs, snakes, birds, insects, and countless other creatures domestic and wild that
were to be found on and around the family farm.
As perhaps the chief motivation for Daniel Muir to move his young family to
the New World, religion played a major role in the Muir household. John would later

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recall, "My father was a steadfast enthusiast on religious matters, and, of course,
attended almost every sort of church-meeting, especially revival meetings" (Boyhood
and Youth 50). Though the children were no longer required to attend school, Bible
lessons remained at the fore. In addition to rote memorization and moral discipline,
Daniel gave impromptu lessons on the hazards of the wayward life and the blessings of
the virtuous one. Though he generally viewed wilderness as something to be tamed,
tended, and used above all, Daniel also found lessons in nature. One night he caught a
glorious sight, the aurora borealis, which he interpreted as a sign of the divine:
Father called us out into the yard in front of the house where we had a
wide view, crying, "Come! Come, mother! Come, bairns! and see the
glory of God. All the sky is clad in a robe of red light. Look straight
up to the crown where the folds are gathered. Hush and wonder and
adore, for surely this is the clothing of the Lord Himself, and perhaps
He will even now appear looking down from his high heaven.
(Boyhood and Youth 95)
Though a more anthropomorphic vision than the younger Muir would have voiced,
Daniel's theophany in nature would become a staple of his son's thought and writing.
Unlike his son, however, Daniel also saw the dark lessons in natural
phenomena. Young John was put to work burning brush one day, building a
tremendous fire. "Again and again, when they were burning fiercest so that we could
hardly approach near enough to throw on another branch, father put them to awfully
practical use as warning lessons, comparing their heat with that of hell, and the
branches with bad boys" (Boyhood and Youth 36).

20
On the whole, Muir seems to have found such incidents as little more than an
unfortunate nuisance, and church services as boring. Ultimately, his father's
sometimes overbearing religiosity drove Muir to locate his spiritual home in nature,
rather than in the church, and his co-religionists in animals, rather than men. But he
was no less emphatic than the elder Muir, even at an early age. Christian truths
became early observations in eco-theology. "On Sundays, after or before chores and
sermons and Bible-lessons, we drifted about on the lake for hours, especially in lily
time, getting finest lessons and sermons from the water and flowers, ducks, fishes, and
muskrats. In particular we took Christ's advice and devoutly 'considered the lilies' 
how they grow up in beauty out of gray lime mud, and ride gloriously among the
breezy sun-spangles" (Boyhood and Youth 55). Already, Muir is reading nature as a
sort of gloss of scripture, and coming away with inspired, though unorthodox,
understandings. Just how unorthodox is a matter of debate. Some have attempted to
present Muir as a sort of Taoist or Buddhist, though he had no direct understanding of
those ideologies. Whereas strands of common thought run through the various
religious traditions, what we might call a philosophia perennis, Muir's vision of nature
may have been only a mild variation from Calvinist doctrine.
The Reformed tradition arose at almost the same time as Lutheranism. Its
main proponents were Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) and John Calvin (1509-1564).
After a millennium, early Christian and pre-Christian texts re-emerged in their original
Latin and Greek, and caused a stir amongst theologians and intellectuals. Zwingli,
Calvin, and others urged church reform based on original New Testament teachings.
Amongst those reforms they sought the abolition of the monastic orders and the

21
invocation of saints, they rejected the doctrines of purgatory, papal authority,
transubstantiation, the sacrifice of the mass, clerical celibacy, and fast-days. John Muir
would have been raised with many doctrines in common with these patriarchs of
Reformism:
• God is one substance in three eternal persons.
• Christ was both human and divine and took incarnation in
a complete human nature.
• Rejection of the doctrine of the immaculate conception or
the assumption of Mary.
• As a result of the Fall, humans are born corrupt.
• Owing to that corruption, humans have no free will to
do good of their own effort.
• God freely elects or predestines individuals to salvation
or damnation.
On account of its stern theology, most moderns hold the view that Puritans and other
reformers were fanatical, anti-liberal, and without intellectual merit. The reality was
quite different. Though quite strict in matters of belief and practice, the Reform
churches were often at the fore of matters of social justice, including emancipation and
free speech. John Milton, one of the most famous Puritans, wrote an early
impassioned plea for freedom of speech, Areopagitica. New School Reformism was
deeply involved in the abolition movement in 19th-century America, and pushed for
complete emancipation.

22
Possible origins for John Muir's view of nature can be found within Calvinist
doctrine as well. John Calvin wrote, "The most correct way and most convenient
method of seeking God ... is to discover Him in His works through which He draws
near to us in friendliness and at times communicates Himself to us" (qtd. in Niesel 42).
To Calvin, God reveals himself in nature, and the design of the universe bears witness
to his existence and characteristics. Knowledge of nature would encourage true
worship of the Almighty and hope of eternal life. Niesel states, "Calvin teaches that
alongside the Scriptures and self-revelation of God in His Son to which they bear
witness, there is a second source of revelation and a second possibility of entering into
communion with God. Calvin does in fact speak of a twofold knowledge of God. In
nature God is manifested to us essentially as the Creator, but in the countenance of
Christ He is the redeemer" (43). Muir's first theological innovation would be to
reverse the significance of those two revelations, taking nature to be the primary and
universal, and Gospel revelation as ethical and particular.
Though Reformist doctrine was ideologically friendly to nature, 19th-century
Protestantism was certainly not a religion of the earth, and compassion for non-human
creatures was not a moral priority. Muir notes, "Think of the millions of squabs that
preaching, praying men and women kill and eat, with all sorts of other animals great
and small, young and old, while eloquently discoursing on the coming of the blessed
peaceful, bloodless millennium" (Boyhood and Youth 38-39). Perhaps as a result of
innate compassion, perhaps owing to overly frequent corporal punishment, Muir
intentionally modified his inherited faith and extended Christian ethos to all living
creatures. In an era when Protestant Christianity often viewed animals as standing

23
resource for human consumption and scientific materialism was reducing them to
"animated machines," Muir held that all creatures shared in spirit as all were part of
divine emanation. He states in Boyhood and Youth, "Whales and elephants, dancing,
humming gnats, and invisibly small mischievous microbes  all are warm with divine
radium" (86). In Muir's view, spirit was not a ghost embedded in a fleshy machine.
Rather bodily forms were manifestations of divine energy, radiating and intersecting in
infinitely complex and shifting lattices.
This interconnection then required respect, a respect for all life and indeed all
creation. Respect blossomed into compassion, and Muir was quick to draw
comparison between this universal compassion and what he viewed as the narrow and
cold compassion of the church.
Of the many advantages of farm life for boys one of the greatest is the
gaining a real knowledge of animals as fellow-mortals, learning to
respect them and love them, and even to win some of their love. Thus
godlike sympathy grows and thrives and spreads far beyond the
teachings of churches and schools, where too often the mean, blinding,
loveless doctrine is taught that animals have neither mind nor soul, have
no rights that we are bound to respect, and were made only for man, to
be petted, spoiled, slaughtered, or enslaved. (Boyhood and Youth 51)
Though Muir hunted occasionally in his youth, and recollects times when he treated
animals with cruelty, he seems to have recognized during his childhood in Wisconsin a
greater compassion and respect for life. He extended these feelings to lengths still
considered radical over a century later.

24
The exuberant ecstasy of boyhood adventure was tempered by Daniel Muir's
harsh discipline. Muir recollects throughout his writings the beatings he suffered at his
father's hand. "The old Scotch fashion of whipping for every act of disobedience or of
simple, playful forgetfulness was still kept up in the wilderness, and of course many of
those whippings fell upon me. Most of them were outrageously severe, and utterly
barren of fun" (Boyhood and Youth 39). Quite frequently, this discipline took on
religious significance, as Daniel Muir certainly believed his beatings would help steer
his boys from damnation. John claims he was driven by such beatings to memorize the
whole of the New Testament from Matthew to Revelation and the bulk of the Old
Testament as well. This tough discipline seems as much a part of 19th-century
Scottishness as it does of Daniel Muir's stern Calvinism.
John recalls of his school days in Dunbar that "if we failed in any part, however
slight, we were whipped; for the grand, simple, all-sufficing Scotch discovery had been
made that there was a close connection between the skin and the memory, and that
irritating the skin excited the memory to any required degree" (Boyhood and Youth
15). Much of The Story of My Boyhood and Youth seems a catalogue of beatings,
some of which he recalls with humor, the bulk of which seems to have driven a deeply
gentle and pacifistic sentiment into the man.
While Muir's early grammar school education in Scotland was stern and even
brutal by contemporary standards, the "bookless American wilderness" proved a far
more liberal teacher. He was especially enamored of the animals in and around the
farm. He said of his father's domestic animals, "We worked with them, sympathized
with them in their rest and toil and play, and thus learned to know them far better than

25
we should had we been only trained scientific naturalists" (Boyhood and Youth 42).
Even play was full of lessons for the knowledge-hungry boy: "We found a little basin
among the rushes at the south end of the lake, about waist-deep and a rod or two
wide, shaped like a sunfish's nest. Here we kicked and plashed for many a lesson,
faithfully trying to imitate frogs; but the smooth, comfortable sliding gait of our
amphibious teachers seemed hopelessly hard to learn" (Boyhood and Youth 58).
Though human teachers would appear later on, Muir was fully engaged in learning
what he could from the countless natural instructors around him.

26
Chapter 2
Industry
Muir was swept up in the industrial spirit of the day. This was the era of
Thomas Alva Edison, George Eastman, and Alexander Graham Bell. As new
inventions enhanced the detailed workings of technology, they in turn opened vistas
for still newer inventions and greater refinement. These new inventions promised to
re-create the human world, changing the character of work, family, and leisure, and
that in short order. Between 1860 and 1890, about 440,000 patents were issued for
new inventions. Cashman notes of the inventors, "They seemed like heroes because
they combined technical expertise in the new field of communications with the sort of
traditional pioneer spirit that had the tenacity to see a novel idea through from start to
finish" (17).
America, like Scotland and most other places in the West at the time, was
undergoing tremendous upheaval, of which industry was a major part. Between the
turn of the century and the 1850s, the population doubled with each generation,
growing from 4 million to about 17 million in just over 50 years. The first modern
factory in America opened production in Boston in 1814, kicking off an inspired
period of mechanization and invention. Trains had a great impact, covering great
distances in what were lightning-fast speeds. Track mileage tripled in the 1850s, and
the Mississippi Valley was fully linked with the Atlantic coast. Muir did not bear the
aversion to the locomotive or other mechanical inventions that Leo Marx attributes to

27
the Transcendentalists in The Machine in the Garden. He recalled a train trip in his
late teens: "I went out and walked along the foot-board on the side of the boiler,
watching the magnificent machine rushing through the landscapes as if glorying in its
strength like a living creature. While seated on the cow-catcher platform, I seemed to
be fairly flying, and the wonderful display of power and motion was enchanting"
(Boyhood and Youth 124). He was thrilled with the power and novelty of the new
machines, and found the challenge to human ingenuity inspiring.
He took to invention himself, and would spend countless hours in the basement
workroom of the family house tinkering with all manner of novelty. Many of his
inventions aimed to reduce the burden of grueling labor which fell on his shoulders.
His first invention was a self-setting sawmill. He often rose as early as one o'clock in
the morning so he could accommodate his personal work with his busy farm schedule,
and produced a prolific line of creative products. In addition to his sawmill, he
contrived water wheels, clocks, feeding machines, automatic wake-up machines, and
thermometers.
His father thought his time would be better spent at Bible study or ever-needed
farm work. After John had been clandestinely inventing for some time, Daniel finally
confronted him, "If you were only half as zealous in the study of religion as you are in
contriving and whittling these useless, nonsensical things, it would be infinitely better
for you. I want you to be like Paul, who said that he desired to know nothing among
men but Christ and Him crucified" (Boyhood and Youth 117). Daniel's view softened
over time, and it appears he hid a certain pride over his son's industrious genius. John
knew how to win his father over too: "I made another hickory clock, shaped like a

28
scythe to symbolize the scythe of Father Time. The pendulum is a bunch of arrows
symbolizing the flight of time. It hangs on a leafless mossy oak snag showing the
effect of time, and on the snath is written, 'All flesh is grass.' This, especially the
inscription, rather pleased father" (Boyhood and Youth 118). Engberg and Wesling
note how John adopted his father's faith and accommodated it to his own use. Muir
found
ways of obeying his father, ways which fulfilled all requests, but at the
same time transferred a problem back to its originator....Inventions
such as the early-rising machine (rousing the sleeper; good
fundamentalist morality), or the revolving study-desk, had always a
fanciful, witty possibility which showed the imagination was being
indulged ― but these items all had an obvious ethical or practical
purpose. (12-13)
By this and other means, John drew his father over to his side. And though Daniel
avoided praise of his children as kindling for pride, he came to appreciate his son's
inventions, and John sensed his hidden support. More importantly, his methods of
winning his father's support analogously demonstrate how he adopted his father's faith
in other areas as well.
John's attention was largely diverted from nature during this period. He had
found a rewarding occupation at which he excelled, and others told him so. He made
his own way to the Wisconsin State Fair in Madison, where he exhibited his inventions
to the delight of the crowds. "I got lots of praise from the crowd and the newspaper-
reporters. The local press reports were copied into the Eastern papers. It was

29
considered wonderful that a boy on a farm had been able to invent and make such
things, and almost every spectator foretold good fortune" (Boyhood and Youth 125).
Those foretellings would prove accurate, for Muir's ingenuity and promise would
nearly draw him from the natural world altogether. His appearance at the State Fair
would not only garner him a moment of fame, it would open doors as well: "These
inventions, though of little importance, opened all doors for me and made marks that
have lasted many years, simply, I suppose, because they were original and promising"
(Boyhood and Youth 125). He turned that moment to his advantage, and after
meeting with the Dean of the Faculty, he was admitted to study at the University of
Wisconsin, he said, "next, it seemed to me, to the Kingdom of Heaven" (Boyhood and
Youth 127).
Though Muir had not technically been in school since he and his family
departed from Scotland, he had done an excellent job of educating himself. He spent
many of those early mornings not only inventing but poring over books on
mathematics, science, and literature, including some of the English Romantics. He had
a tremendous desire to continue his studies but appears to have been only vaguely
interested in obtaining a degree. In all, he studied a full four years at the University of
Wisconsin before turning to the "University of the Wilderness." Amongst the subjects
he covered were chemistry, mathematics, physics, Greek, Latin, and geology. But it
was botany that most moved him. He recalled the world that the study of botany
opened to him:
Like everybody else I was always fond of flowers, attracted by their
external beauty and purity. Now my eyes were opened to their inner

30
beauty, all alike revealing glorious traces of the thoughts of God, and
leading on and on into the infinite cosmos. I wandered away at every
opportunity, making long excursions round the lakes, gathering
specimens and keeping them fresh in a bucket in my room to study at
night after my regular class tasks were learned; for my eyes never
closed on the plant glory I had seen. (Boyhood and Youth 130)
To Muir, observations on the classification of plants were observations on the very
mind of God, just as one might study paintings to gain insight into the mind of the
painter.
The new scientism and methods of classification Muir learned at the University
were not a significant detriment to his innate religiosity. Though Darwin served a
mighty blow to some of the faithful, Muir assimilated the doctrine and saw it as proof
of God's infinite wisdom, mercy, and love. Again, as in other challenging areas of the
day, official ecclesiastical response to Darwinism was varied, even within the strict
orthodoxy. Noll comments, "A further question concerns the relationship between the
'book of God' and the 'book of Nature.' Charles Hodge felt that ideas of design, which
he found in Scripture, negated Darwinism. A.A. Hodge and Warfield, on the other
hand, both felt that the Bible could be read in such a way as to make peace with
Darwinism" (20). Thus even amongst the patriarchs of the Reformed camp, there
were differing opinions on the meaning of evolution and strategies of coordinating the
theory with traditional Biblical exegesis.
Of Muir's position on evolution, Gifford notes,

31
When asked how he could reconcile his belief in God with his
knowledge of evolution, Muir responded, '...somewhere before
evolution was an Intelligence. You may call that Intelligence what you
please; I cannot see why so many people object to call it God.'
Scientific research played a large role in Muir's life and was the impetus
behind most of his excursions into the mountains. His scientific
knowledge did not detract from his spiritual understanding of Nature,
rather, it revealed to him the divine plan that lay beneath the surface of
the data he gathered. (5)
Evolutionary theory affirmed rather than weakened Muir's wilderness theology, though
his defense of evolution caused a major rift between him and his father.
Muir trailed off his studies at Madison seemingly without reason, lost in a
malaise of confusion about his future calling. His true love was nature, but he was
also compelled by medicine, as well as his extraordinary industrial talents. He wrote
to his benefactress, Mrs. Jeanne Carr, about his deep confusion.
I would like to go to college, but then I have to say to myself, 'You will
die ere you do anything else.' I should like to invent useful machinery,
but it comes, 'You do not wish to spend your lifetime among machines
and you will die ere you do anything else.' I should like to study
medicine that I might do my part in lessening human misery, but again
it comes, 'You will die ere you are ready to be able to do so.' How
intensely I desire to be a Humboldt! but again the chilling answer is
reiterated. Could we but live a million years, then how delightful to

32
spend in perfect contentment so many thousand years in quiet study in
college, so many amid the grateful din of machines, so many among
human pain, so many thousands in the sweet study of Nature among
the dingles and dells of Scotland, and all the other less important parts
of our world! Then perhaps might we, with at least a show of reason,
'shuffle off this mortal coil' and look back upon our star with something
of satisfaction. (qtd. in Engberg & Wesling 31-32)
Muir genuinely felt that he was receiving an inner calling, but to what he was
uncertain. He hoped upon leaving the University in the spring of 1864 to embark on a
long, three-month trek through the wilderness, to clear his head and let direction find
him. War and economic realities prevented him from doing that just yet, though he
would return to that plan again and again before finally setting out on his Thousand
Mile Walk to the Gulf.
In his deepest moments of doubt, Mrs. Carr reassured him of his higher
mission:
I have often in my heart wondered what God was training you for. He
gave you the eye within the eye, to see in all natural objects the realized
ideas of his mind. He gave you pure tastes and the sturdy preference of
whatever is most lovely and excellent. He has made you more an
individualized existence than is common, and by your very nature,
removed you from common temptations. He will surely place you
where your work is. (qtd. in Wilkins 46)

33
In a time when Muir felt deep longing and unrest, Mrs. Carr had an enormous
influence upon her young friend, and helped guide him to his direction. Muir met
Professor and Mrs. Carr while at the University of Wisconsin, and he said that Dr.
Carr was the first to open the "great book of Nature" before him. He especially
admired their library, and there he learned of great historical figures and scientific
minds. It was at the Carrs’ home that Muir would first find the works of Emerson and
other Romantics of the day. Where Dr. Carr passed to Muir intellectual support, Mrs.
Carr gave him emotional encouragement, and helped clarify for him his path.
It was by no means a straight course. After leaving the University he declined
to await his acceptance to the Ann Arbor School of Medicine, and departed for
Canada. War had broken out, and amidst a controversial draft, the deeply pacifistic
Muir didn't want to take any chances of being forced into the conflict. His brother
David joined him in Canada and the two worked in a broom handle factory. John
helped re-design the manufacturing process in the factory, and the owners were so
impressed that when the factory burnt down, they offered Muir part-ownership to
entice him to remain and help rebuild. He declined, apparently "having differed with
them on how to worship God and claiming to love nature too much to remain in work
'that involved the destruction of God's forests'" (Wilkins 42). Muir was beginning to
feel the exclusive nature of his various interests. He could not on the one hand
maintain the belief in the sanctity of nature, while simultaneously advancing a system
which plundered the natural world as mere resource.
Muir returned to the United States in 1866, again hoping to commence his
"long walk," but once again was sidetracked, and in a letter to his sister Sarah,

34
mentioned that he was compelled by "circumstances over which I have no control"
(Wilkins 43) to take up work in another factory in Indianapolis. He questioned that he
might be forced to give up his dream altogether and resign himself to a life of
invention. But a life-altering accident at the Osgood, Smith & Company factory
would help set his course.
Muir recounted the accident in a letter to his family:
I had put in a countershaft for a new circular saw and as the belt
connecting with the main shaft was new it stretched considerably after
running a few hours and had to be shortened. While I was unlacing it,
making use of the nail-like end of a file to draw out the stitches, it
slipped and pierced my right eye on the edge of the cornea. After the
first shock was over I closed my eye, and when I lifted the lid of the
injured one the aqueous humor dripped on my hand -- the sight
gradually failed and in a few minutes came perfect darkness. 'My right
eye is gone,' I murmured, 'closed forever on all God's beauty. (qtd. in
Engberg & Wesling 34-35)
The right eye almost instantly went blind, soon followed by the other eye, owing to
intense nerve shock. Muir spent the ensuing weeks in bed, and eventually regained
sight in both eyes. Some have described this event as Muir's great conversion, his
confrontation with mortality that forever changed his life. In truth, Muir had
confronted mortality much earlier and was not especially fearful of death. He was
quite fearful, as we have seen, of aimlessness, and the accident at the mill in
Indianapolis finally gave him the volition he needed to choose his path. "It was from

35
this time that my long continuous wanderings may be said to have fairly commenced.
I bade adieu to all my mechanical inventions, determined to devote the rest of my life
to the study of the inventions of God" (qtd. in Engberg & Wesling 35).

36
Chapter Three
Seeking
His will resolved by his blinding accident at the mill, John Muir set out for the
"University of the Wilderness," and initiated the trek documented in A Thousand Mile
Walk to the Gulf. Previously haunted by a fear of failure, concerned for lack of
sustenance, Muir later reflected on the ease of his journey: "I wandered away on a
glorious botanical and geological excursion, which has lasted nearly fifty years and is
not yet completed, always happy and free, poor and rich, without thought of a diploma
or of making a name, urged on and on through endless, inspiring, Godful beauty"
(Boyhood and Youth 132). In 1867, soon after his accident, he read about the
Yosemite Valley for the first time. The thought of the place captured his imagination
from that time, but he did not yet suspect the impact the place would have on him, nor
he on it. On September 1, 1867, Muir "set forth ... joyful and free, on a thousand-mile
walk to the Gulf of Mexico" (Thousand Mile Walk 1).
He set out armed with a scientific outlook bolstered by his studies at Madison.
The transition to the darker, more chaotic universe of the Darwinian worldview was
not sudden and cataclysmic. Evolution was theorized and debated for decades before
Darwin's famous journey on HMS Beagle. There were materialists well in advance of
that journey positing the purely earthly origins of species variation, and likewise there
were renegades, like John Muir, who saw divine intelligence in those same variations,
well after Darwin's revelation. In any case the scientific spirit of the early 19th century

37
was still deeply interested in exploring the heavenly designs in earthly forms, and some
anticipated thinkers like Muir by looking to nature as a bona fide source of revelation.
In 1802, Dr. William Paley published Natural Theology, or, Evidences of the
Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature.
Archdeacon of Carlisle and amateur scientist, Paley examined human and animal
biology, botany, ichthyology, entomology, astronomy, and other studies, and
explicated theological conclusions drawn from natural phenomena. He begins the
500-plus page opus with the now-famous parable of the watch found in the forest, and
surmises that like the discoverer of the watch, we must discern a sublime intelligence
behind the highly improbable detail found in creation.
Under this stupendous Being we live. Our happiness, our existence, is
in his hands. All we expect must come from him. Nor ought we to feel
our situation insecure. In every nature, and in every portion of nature,
which we can descry, we find attention bestowed upon even the
minutest parts. The hinges in the wings of an earwig, and the joints of
its antennae, are as highly wrought, as if the Creator had nothing else to
finish. We see no signs of diminution of care by multiplicity of objects,
or of distraction of thought by variety. We have no reason to fear,
therefore, our being forgotten, or overlooked, or neglected. (578-579)
Paley concludes his work with a comment on the revelatory quality of nature: "These
points being assumed to us by Natural Theology we may well leave to Revelation the
disclosure of many particulars, which our researches cannot reach....The true Theist
will be the first to listen to any credible communication of divine knowledge" (579).

38
He goes on to say that this scientific theologian will seek knowledge of the divine
wherever it is to be found. "His inward veneration of this great Being, will incline him
to attend with the utmost seriousness, not only to all that can be discovered
concerning him by researches into nature, but to all that is taught by a revelation,
which gives reasonable proof of having proceeded from him" (580). Paley not only
regards nature as a legitimate source of revelation, but seems tempted to find primary
significance in this living gospel. Muir will later indulge in that outlook
wholeheartedly, keeping biblical revelation on as a mere adjunct to the more perfectly
articulated Word of God found in the wilderness.
Muir admired another great scientist of the day, Alexander von Humboldt, and
modeled himself after the famous explorer during his youth in Wisconsin. Stories of
Humboldt's courageous travels from Egypt to the Amazon to Siberia exhilarated and
inspired the young Muir. Known as the father of modern geography, Humboldt
catalogued the flora, the fauna, the geology, the peoples and customs of every place he
went. His scientific endeavors reached well beyond geography into biology,
anthropology, and other fields. Shortly before his death in 1850, Humboldt compiled
his observations into a three-volume work entitled Kosmos, in which he set out to
"depict in a single work the entire material universe, all that we know of the
phenomena of heaven and earth, from the nebulae of the stars to the geography of
mosses and granite rocks ― and in a vivid style that will stimulate and elicit feeling"
(qtd. in Reynolds 244). Cold to church teachings, Humboldt nevertheless saw
complexity and order in the universe, reaching further outward in ever more advanced
forms. Though clearly not a man of God, Humboldt imbued his descriptions with a

39
sense of awe, and he made ample room for wonder in his works. He defined nature
as, "a harmony, or blending together of all created things, however dissimilar in form
and attributes, one great whole animated by the breath of life" (qtd. in Reynolds 244).
There is a spirit at work in Humboldt's universe, not an anthropomorphic or ethical
deity of the church, but a pattern, an ordering principle, behind the phenomena of
nature. This cosmic principle would have a great impact on John Muir's conception of
the divine, as would Humboldt's propensity for adventurous trekking and scientific
observation.
The Thousand Mile Walk is a transitionary work, a great piece of exploratory
writing. Muir here takes on the cast of a Whitmanian hero, roaming curiously and
freely in postbellum America. In contrast with his later nature works which focus
intently on the wilderness, this early excursion finds Muir probing the boundaries
between nature and civilization. Culled from his actual diaries recorded during the
trip, he observes men and their economies, buildings, peculiar habits, accents and
customs. He catalogues plants and animals minus the ecstatic exclamations of later
works. Humans figure more prominently in this work than in any other of Muir's
writings. Having departed with only a small shoulder bag and a leaf-press, Muir relies
heavily on the kindness of the farmers, miners, and even slaves whom he meets along
the way. Surprising considering his later stance on the human "stain," much of the
work records the human condition in the postwar South. He records peculiar
anthropological details, some of which perhaps contributed to his later animosity
towards human beings.

40
This is the most primitive country I have seen, primitive in everything.
The remotest hidden parts of Wisconsin are far in advance of the
mountain regions of Tennessee and North Carolina. But my host
speaks of the 'old-fashioned enlightened times,' like a philosopher in the
best light of civilization. 'I believe in Providence,' said he. 'Our fathers
came into these valleys, got the richest of them, and skimmed off the
cream of the soil. The worn out ground won't yield no roastin' ears
now. But the Lord foresaw this state of affairs, and prepared
something else for us. And what is it? Why, He meant us to bust open
these copper mines and gold mines, so that we may have the money to
buy the corn that we cannot raise.' A most profound observation.
(Thousand Mile Walk 18)
Muir is probing, thus far ambivalent as to the station of the human being in his
developing cosmology. But his growing contempt is obvious. We find here the
beginnings of the notion that humans are an exploitative transgressor, inherently dirty
and stupid, and that dull outward religiosity too often clothes blind gullibility.
On the other hand, he is increasingly turning to nature and finding sparks
where he finds none in civilization: "Oh, these forest gardens of our Father! What
perfection, what divinity, in their architecture! What simplicity and mysterious
complexity of detail! Who shall read the teaching of these sylvan pages, the glad
brotherhood of rills that sing in the valleys, and all the happy creatures that dwell in
them under the tender keeping of a Father's care?" (Thousand Mile Walk 19). While
most of The Thousand Mile Walk comprises the recordings of a young and wide-eyed

41
explorer groping awkwardly for inspiration, identity, and words, Muir makes his first
attempts towards the tenets of his wilderness theology that would culminate in his
First Summer in the Sierra.
While Muir was searching for his literary and philosophical bearings, broader
American society was doing much the same. Wilderness ― the condition of untamed
nature against which humanity strove for thousands of years ― suddenly took on a
new significance. In the second half of the 19th century, the tide would turn
dramatically, and writers like William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry
David Thoreau, John Burroughs, and others, would develop a wilderness ethic that
sought to preserve nature against the onslaught of human development. Gilbert White
was one of the first writers to focus on nature as a forum of singular value. Born in
Selborne, England, in 1720, White wrote a natural history of his native environs that
served as an inspiration and model to Thoreau, Burroughs, and other writers on the
other side of the Atlantic. His Natural History of Selborne evidenced a new ethic that
sought to relocate man in nature, and implied a deep compassion for non-human
creatures. In Stewart's words, Thoreau would later propel nature writing through this
medium, "using factualness as the guiding principle to a luminous and revelatory
understanding of the natural world" (Stewart 33). Subsequent writers would
recognize the efficacy of wilderness as a unifying symbol as opposed to the prevailing
mechanistic outlook.
George Perkins Marsh would take that wilderness ethic to a new level. In
1864, he published an extraordinary ecological study entitled, Man and Nature; Or,
Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. Marsh described the impact of

42
unchecked industrialism and was one of the first writers to describe an ecological
scientific outlook. He chided the inadequate science of the day for overlooking the
plight of nature: "Animal and vegetable life is too complicated a problem for human
intelligence to solve" (Marsh 43). Long before the use of chloroflourocarbons or the
notion of global warming, Marsh suggested that if science and industry were not
guided along ecological principles, disaster would result: "The ravages committed by
man subvert the relations and destroy the balance which nature had established ... and
she avenges herself upon the intruder by letting loose her destructive energies" (Marsh
43). Muir would glean influence from these and other developments, and would later
amplify Marsh's call for wilderness protection.
As the nation prepared for the celebration of the centennial of independence,
Congress resolved that the celebration should commemorate "the natural resources of
the country and their development and of its progress in those arts which benefit
mankind, in comparison with those of older nations" (Cashman 13). The defining
characteristic of the American nation in the late 19th century was not its adherence to
Enlightenment principles, its refined and balanced Constitution, or its military
supremacy. Rather the country found its pride in its scientific and methodical
domination over the continent and the proliferation of all manner of mechanical and
technical development. The country was stocked for just such an enterprise, and was
fabulously rich in natural resources. The United States possessed about two-thirds of
the world's coal, large deposits of iron-ore, sizeable petroleum resources, as well as
gold, silver, and copper mines.

43
America's rise in the 19th century was meteoric to say the least. In 1860, the
US was regarded as a second-rate power, but by 1890 it had surpassed Britain,
France, and Germany, and the value of its manufactures nearly equaled the total of the
other three together. The project to achieve that station was comprehensive, and saw
proliferation of every imaginable industry ― oil refineries, iron and steel mills,
meatpacking plants, clothing and shoe factories, breweries, transportation and public
utilities. Factories settled near train stations as the rapidly growing rail network
became the life-blood of the emerging industrial economy. Cities of a wholly new
variety rose around the factory, urban canyons the likes of which the world had never
known. Aided by developments in communications, construction, and transportation
technologies, the prototypical modern city was embodied in urban centers like New
York and Chicago, with networks of paved streets flanked by enormous skyscrapers.
As was the case in Scotland and many other places in the industrializing world, new
urban centers brought new urban problems. Sewage and industrial wastes poisoned
the waters and ran in the streets. Disease and crime were rampant, and a legion of
new public and social services were required to maintain balance.
Perhaps no aspect of the times captures the essence of the crisis of wilderness
than the condition of the American Indian in mid- to late-19th-century America.
Under the providentially-driven program of Manifest Destiny, settlers continued
pushing further and further westward, preceded by fleeing Indian tribes. Settler
brutality, aimed at clearing the frontier of any obstructions geological, animal, or
human, cannot be overstated. At the end of the Civil War, there were about 15 million
bison roaming in two major herds west of the Mississippi, and these served as the

44
backbone of the plains economy. To increase speed and efficiency, the major rail lines
decided to eliminate these herds, which often held up or even de-railed engines. In
1871, a tannery in Pennsylvania offered up to $3 for every bison, and within four
years, 3.7 million had been killed. By 1886, the two major herds had been destroyed,
and a member of the Smithsonian rounded up the last 25 that could be found. Thus
the lynchpin of the native plains economy was removed.
The Indians themselves did not fare much better. Russell Menard states, "The
European invasion of America initiated a holocaust, one of the great demographic
catastrophies of human history....And, in contrast to the European and Asian
experience with massive decline, where the recovery was fairly quick, 'the Indian
population of America recovered only slowly, partially, and in highly modified form'"
(56). Scholars estimate that of the 4.5 million Indians living in pre-contact North
America, by the end of the 19th century, their numbers fell into the thousands.
Reservations and re-culturation became official government policy in the mid-1860s.
The domination of the frontier was prolific and its speed increased
exponentially. Between 1607 and 1870, about 409 million acres of land had been
settled and 189 million had been cultivated, but between 1870 and 1900, over 430
million acres were settled and 225 million had been cultivated. In 1890, the Bureau of
the Census announced the frontier was essentially closed, and for the first time in
nearly four hundred years, it dawned on Americans that the unlimited bounty of the
New World might not be so unlimited after all.
Once again in America as in Scotland, contrary to the idea that religion would
fold in the face of scientism and modernity, religious expression exploded in the 19th

45
century. The churches had been hit with a series of crises stemming from the new
scholarship, and responded in various ways. Skepticism was on the rise, and new
secularist movements spread in the urban centers of the East. The First Society of
Free Thinkers, established in 1831, was dedicated to the "pursuit of 'useful knowledge'
such as the education of children 'without regard to religious opinions'" (Wells 39).
This was followed by a network of similar groups through the creation of the United
States Moral and Philosophical Society.
Wells comments, "The specter of unbelief, organizing itself, capitalizing on
economic disorders to enlist support for its socialism, and breeding communes and
subversive ideas, greatly alarmed Christian leaders, who exaggerated its importance"
(39). Later, natural selection, textual criticism, and advances in geology and other
sciences questioned the literal veracity of biblical texts. While some churches reacted
with denial, most religious thinkers moved towards accommodation, and sought for
deeper and more enduring Christian truths.
From Mormonism and Fourierism in mid-century to Christian Science and
Seventh-Day Adventism in the latter part of the century, mainstream reformation ideas
gave way to a flood of creative re-expressions of spirituality. Some of those
expressions took influence far afield from traditional Christianity. A residual effect of
missionary activity and anthropology, religious and philosophical ideas from China,
India, and other places found their way onto the American scene. The Theosophical
Society, formed by Helena Blavatsky in New York in 1875, headed the influx of
Eastern thought, and brought a panache of ideas from Hinduism to Buddhism to
spiritism into the mix.

46
As regards Muir's spiritual outlook, Dennis Williams has said that "Muir was
not nearly as unorthodox as others have interpreted him" (91), and he goes on to deny
that Muir was influenced by the Transcendentalists. This is an unfortunate and
inexplicable analysis. In fact not only was Muir deeply influenced by the
Transcendentalists, but in many respects he embodied their ideals better. Muir
apparently first encountered the works of Emerson and Thoreau at the Madison home
of his benefactors, Ezra and Jeanne Carr, while he was studying at the University of
Wisconsin. These works would remain a source of inspiration and direction to him
throughout his career. Muir met Emerson in Yosemite and the two spent a week
together there in the summer of 1871. They maintained an occasional correspondence,
and Emerson encouraged Muir to advance his geological studies of the Yosemite
Valley. Amongst his sparing personal effects he took along on his trip to Alaska in
1879 was a book of Thoreau's writings, and he is said to have adopted Thoreau as his
literary mentor when he turned to writing later in his career.
Muir had turned to the wilderness in a solitary lifestyle considered eccentric to
say the very least. Turner states that Muir turned to the words of Emerson to
"confirm the righteousness of his retreat" (Emerson on Transcendentalism xiv). Muir
marked this passage in his copy of Emerson's "Self-Reliance": "And truly it demands
something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity and has
ventured to trust himself for taskmaster." Muir truly embodied this rugged mode.
When he departed for his Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, he set out with no detailed
plan nor abundant supplies for the journey. In the age of super-lightweight designer
hiking luxury, which enables us to take all manner of suburban comforts on a simple

47
day-hike, it is hard to imagine that Muir set out on this long and difficult trek with only
a shoulder bag and a plant press. White notes that Muir "went alone, equipped only
with hob-nailed boots, an old blanket, a hand-lens, pencil and notebook. His food was
a sack of brick-hard bread, and 'a screw of tea' to add to the river water. He never
carried a gun to hunt game, or protect himself from grizzlies, pumas, and desperados"
(Thousand Mile Walk viii). Though he sometimes stayed the night with friendly hosts,
he often slept out under the stars without a tent, sleeping bag, or pillow.
Emerson further describes the ideal Transcendentalism in "The American
Scholar." Emerson states that the new breed of thinker should first turn to nature for
direction: "The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind
is that of nature. Every day, the sun, and, after sunset, Night and her stars. Ever the
winds blow; ever the grass grows....The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle
most engages" (51). Nature describes the patterns of interconnection and influx which
similarly influence the human spirit. The study of nature then becomes the study of the
self: "'Know thyself,' and the modern precept, 'Study nature,' become at last one
maxim" (53). This idea can be found throughout Muir's writing. In My First Summer
in the Sierra, he says while traversing the foothills,
We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm,
making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-
and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us,
as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees,
streams, and rocks, in the waves of the sun ― a part of all nature,
neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal. (10)

48
Thus the observer and the observed merge into one, and the knowledge of one is the
knowledge of the other.
But this knowledge is epistemologically different from book knowledge, and
its comprehension lies in qualitative inspiration rather than in quantitative information.
Emerson writes, "Outdoors is the place to store up spiritual influences. However
aimless our walks appear to be, always some particular object consciously or
unconsciously guides our steps, while we are alert and wide-awake to find what
Nature has in store for us" (qtd. in Fleck 138-9). This is an awareness that comes not
from analysis, but from synthesis. Emerson says in "Nature,” "The stars awaken a
certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural
objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence....When
we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the
mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects"
(Emerson 5). Although both men supported the endeavor to dissect and classify
nature in the interest of science, Emerson and Muir both were attuned to a more
integrative approach to understanding, one that eagerly sought to derive a
comprehensive truth rather than individual facts.
Emerson started out as a Unitarian preacher but found his religious enthusiasm
dulled by the passage through a skeptical and materialistic age. Walt Whitman, though
himself riddled with doubts, ever retained a belief in the soul and a higher principle
which at once directs creation and encourages humanity to a higher station. A
Brooklyn friend of Whitman said of the great poet, "the earthly and spiritual are so
closely intertwined in his verse that it is easy to miss the spiritual dimension altogether,

49
or to dismiss it as window dressing" (qtd. in Reynolds 252). Much the same could be
said of John Muir, and indeed both writers saw spirit in form and vice versa.
Late in his life, Whitman described what he thought to be of paramount
importance in his art. Reynolds writes, "In summing up his career in 1872, he
generalized that from the start of his poetry, 'one deep purpose underlay the others,
and has underlain it and its execution ever since — and that has been the religious
purpose'" (252). Whitman's work includes sweeping inclusive embraces of life,
humanity, art, and science. His observations were highly detailed, as his catalogues
amply demonstrate. Like Muir, however, those observations were directed towards a
higher purpose. Whitman had an almost gushing respect for the new science. He says
in "Song of Myself,"
I accept reality and dare not question it,
Materialism first and last imbuing.
Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!
Fetch stonecrop mixt with cedar and branches of lilac,
This is the lexicographer, this the chemist, this made a grammar of the old
cartouches,
These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas,
This is the geologist, this works with the scalpel, and this is a mathematician.
Gentlemen, to you the first honors always!
Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling,
I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling. (51)

50
Whitman chimes in with a resounding affirmation of the scientific method. For
Whitman, scientific exploration and quantification are amongst the greatest endeavors.
And yet, it is the affirmation of the scientific as method alone, not of scientism as an
end in itself.
Whitman suggests that there is a still higher plane of knowing. Deprived of
spiritual awareness, science becomes an exercise in reduction and a profanation of
reality. Reynolds says, "America, he constantly stressed, could be rescued from
materialism and infidelity only by literature that pointed to the spiritual and moral"
(252). This is what Engberg and Wesling termed the "ecstatic science" found in Muir's
work, a "form of discourse that ... took all objects of perception as signposts to the
eternal" (13). Muir's science was not driven by mere curiosity, or the "need to know"
that ostensibly drives so many practitioners of the hard sciences. Rather science would
give the opportunity at once to witness the higher mind behind secondary causes, and
the chance to elevate oneself by recognition of the ultimate interconnectivity and
mutual dependence of those phenomena before the first cause.
The recognition of that interconnectivity is a theme for Whitman as well. He
opens "Song of Myself, " "Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you / I
loafe and invite my soul / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a blade of summer
grass / My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil / this air" (28). All
of creation, to Whitman, is connected by the "influx" or "efflux" from the Divine which
ever changes, grows, evolves, intersperses between forms. Like Muir, Whitman was
comforted by the idea that if there were in fact no soul, his atoms would carry on in
the infinite process of life, death, and transformation. While Muir reflected on the

51
connections in the wilderness, Whitman was most compelled by human society. After
cataloguing all manner of men and women, over two pages, he concludes, "And these
tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them, / And such as it is to be of these more
or less I am, / And of these one and all I weave the song of myself" (44). So each and
all contribute to the fabric of humanity, this great tapestry of varieties and opposites
interwoven to form Whitman's grand "I". While Whitman's thought is self- or human-
centered, Muir is decidedly un-anthropocentric.
Muir makes little mention of politics, social trends, war, or any other
happening that would indicate the time in which he lived. Even during his long walk
through the post-bellum South, he scarcely mentions the war, the destruction left in its
wake, or the reconstruction already underway in his time. His writings indicate no
special admiration for democracy or any other politic, and he seems to shun social
trend as vile and aimless innovation against raw humanity.
Henry David Throreau indulged less of his misanthropy than Muir, but more
than the famed Civil War poet. Muir was deeply influenced by Thoreau and was
known to carry his works in his travels. A literary and ideological forebear to the
young Scot, Thoreau "taught Muir how to organize his narrative around the symbolic
events and features immanent in nature ― to discern myth on the mountain tops"
(Castellini 165). The two bore a strong resemblance to one another and Muir's natural
inclinations were strongly bolstered by exposure to this famous transcendentalist.
Thoreau found great value in solitude, and though he enjoyed the company of others
and found it difficult to separate himself from society altogether, appreciated a good
lapse in company. "I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be

52
in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone.
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude" (Walden 205).
Like Muir, Thoreau sees civilization full of unnecessary entrapments and distracting
banalities.
Thoreau bears contempt for civilization, and the civilized incur the taint of that
original sin that Muir talks about in My First Summer. Thoreau sneers, "Contrast the
physical condition of the Irish with that of the North American Indian, or the South
Sea Islander, or any other savage race before it was degraded by contact with the
civilized man .... Their condition only proves what squalidness may consist with
civilization" (Walden 131). Muir also talks of man alone, of all creatures, being dirty,
and that on account of civilization. But wherein lies civilization's corrosive effect?
Thoreau and Muir concur, it distracts humanity from its higher nature. Thoreau says,
Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not
only indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a
more simple and meager life than the poor. The ancient philosophers,
Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has
been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward. (Walden 115)
The solution to the dilemma posed by civilization is to withdraw from its excessive
enjoyments and simplify: "Our life is frittered away by detail .... Simplicity, simplicity,
simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand;
instead of a million, count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

53
In the midst of the chopping sea of this civilized life .... Simplify, simplify" (Walden
173).
Once the bonds of civilization are removed, the philosopher is free to observe
the movements and interactions of wilderness, wherein one will find the imprint of a
higher intelligence. Krutch notes, "As a good if somewhat unorthodox
transcendentalist he believed that the reality of those Higher Laws which a man
properly attuned might learn by intuition, but he believed that they were most likely to
be revealed to those who could, at moments, come close to that Nature to which these
Higher Laws were somehow related" (Walden 7). The successful philosopher will be
the one who, removing himself from the countless special obligations of society,
attunes himself to unconditioned reality.
But for Thoreau, this removal would prove elusive. Again, like Whitman,
Thoreau was far more anthropocentric than Muir, and for all his comment found
human company indispensable. In his observations he ever remains a human observer
on the edge of the wild, and frequently finds it necessary to describe nature in terms of
human experience. During the trip recorded in Week on the Concord and Merrimack
Rivers, Thoreau cannot help but mention the political boundaries he crosses, the
battles fought in each locale, and the economies and societies living nearby. Critics
often note that in his two years of ostensible solitude at Walden, he walked to nearby
Concord almost daily. Muir, in contrast, was a misanthrope of the highest order. He
found little use for human company, and more willingly abandoned human concerns in
the face of the wilderness. In his First Summer in the Sierra, we find the
Transcendentalist philosopher more completely embodied than in the works of the

54
Transcendentalists themselves. Muir describes nature as a sacrament, means it as
such, and loses himself completely in holy communion with the wilderness.

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Chapter Four
Nature's Cathedral
Muir finally stood at the edge of the Yosemite Valley, prepared by his arduous
thousand-mile walk for this plunge into what would become his spiritual home. After
hiking to Florida and crossing over into Cuba for a time, Muir returned to Florida
where he contracted malarial fever. He cancelled the South American leg of his
journey and set off instead for New York, where he caught a schooner loaded with
oranges, which carried him to Panama, and he arrived in San Francisco in April of
1868. According to his account, no sooner did he disembark than he stopped a
passer-by: "[I] inquired of a man, who was carrying some carpenter's tools, the nearest
way out of town to the wild part of the State. He in wonder asked, 'Where do you
wish to go?' 'Anyplace that is wild;' so he directed me to the Oakland ferry, saying
that would be as good a way out of town as any" (qtd. in Engberg & Wesling 37).
Passing through San Jose to Gilroy, he inquired about the way to Yosemite, and soon
found himself beneath the towering Sierras.
Engberg and Wesling comment, "'Oh, no, not for me,' Muir remembered was
his thought upon first seeing the Yosemite Valley. Into an autobiographic notebook
he wrote of finding the Yosemite too large, too deep, too incomprehensible for human
understanding" (43). It must be understood that Muir viewed the wilderness in
general, and Yosemite in particular, as a temple of divine theophany, and that in a
literal sense. His earliest trek through Yosemite would challenge him to an austere

56
and spontaneous way of life, actively shunning the bonds and comforts of civilization,
in order to discover higher truths.
Whatever the experience at the core of Muir's spirituality, the nomenclature of
that experience derives from the religious currents of his day. Many have sought
solutions to the puzzle of his intricate theosophy in Eastern traditions to which he
would have had no direct access or understanding. The Transcendental aspects of his
thinking, as we shall see, derive in part from his exposure to American Romantics like
Emerson and Thoreau. And though Muir was not exactly orthodox in his discourse or
practice, much of his theology is drawn from the Christian tradition in which he was
raised.
The journey chronicled in My First Summer in the Sierra took place in 1869,
amidst the turmoil and upheaval of the churches, amidst an era of spiritual and
scientific exploration and inspiration. Muir, like so many, would find in science the
capacity to overthrow historical religion in favor of a more direct theophany. For
Muir, that theophany would come in the embrace of Nature. In Muir's thought,
civilized man bears a taint, a spiritual stain akin to original sin. We might expect Muir
to at least exempt Native Americans from this category, but on seeing an Indian
woman in the wilderness, he comments: "In every way she seemed sadly unlike
Nature's neat well-dressed animals, though living like them on the bounty of
wilderness. Strange that mankind alone is dirty" (My First Summer 39). Everything
that is removed from the "joyful, rhythmic motion" of Nature, even incrementally, is
spiritually lost.

57
Commerce has much to do with the taint of civilization. Muir says of the
sheep-owner for whom he works,
The California sheep owner is in haste to get rich, and often does, now
that pasturage costs nothing, while the climate is so favorable that no
winter food supply, shelter-pens, or barns are required. Therefore large
flocks may be kept at a slight expense, and large profits realized, the
money invested doubling, it is claimed, every other year. This quickly
acquired wealth usually creates desire for more. Then indeed the wool
is drawn close down over the poor fellow's eyes, dimming or shutting
out almost everything worth seeing. (My First Summer 14)
Thus the acquirement of wealth, the fulfillment of desire, only lead to deepening of
want to the exclusion of more refined pursuits. Muir characterizes this as a deficiency
of spiritual vision.
This problem is not confined to humans, for Muir even finds in animal
domesticity an analogy for this essential spiritual problem. He employs sheep
throughout his narrative as a metaphor for the modern human condition. To Muir, the
sheep are cut off from their birthright, and so lose their capacity for self-sufficience,
instinct, and raw cunning available to their undomesticated cousins. After a midnight
bear attack on the herd, "six dead sheep lay in the corral, evidently smothered by the
crowding and piling up of the flock against the side of the corral wall when the bear
entered" (My First Summer 134). Muir would maintain that the human community,
like the herd of sheep, is stifled by its domesticity and detached from its animal
instincts.

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The first step in rectifying that deficiency is to step forth from the entrapments
of civilization. Civilization itself, that which seeks to dichotomize existence into
culture and nature, into high and low, into civilized and wild, is in fact the crisis of
spirit. He opens My First Summer thus hoping that he might "learn to live like the
wild animals, gleaning nourishment here and there from seeds, berries, etc., sauntering
and climbing in joyful independence of money or baggage" (My First Summer 1). He
characterizes these entrapments as a bondage which holds him back from exploring the
sacred mysteries of nature. By casting aside those bonds and re-contextualizing
himself amidst the natural world, the human being might reclaim some measure of his
Edenic inheritance.
He holds the wilderness to be the very arena of enlightenment. Having turned
from the orthodoxy and recognized the impotence of contemporary Protestant faith,
his excursions become contemplative retreats, and the material effects of the church
are discovered anew. A massive arching rock formation becomes a cathedral; hills and
groves become temples; a large mossy slab becomes an altar. Each part of the
experience is constructed to present the Divine Intelligence.
In contemplating the snowy peaks above Yosemite, he says, "Shall I be
allowed to go to them? Night and day I pray that I may, but it seems too good to be
true. Some one worthy will go, able for the Godful work, yet as far as I can I must
drift about these love-monument mountains, glad to be a servant of servants in so bold
a wilderness" (My First Summer 10). The human being, recontextualized and placed
back in his native environs, returns to his proper proportions. The hubris and
detachment that so vex civilized man shrivel in contact with pure, virgin wilderness.

59
Even Muir's hopelessly tainted companions share in this grace, beatified in their
contact with nature: "The calm that settled on their faces seemed almost divine,
something like the mellow meditative glow portrayed on the countenances of saints"
(My First Summer 6). Minus the entrapments of civilized living, the human being at
last becomes a human, being.
If given the choice, however, most would opt for the profane bondage of
civilization over the sacred servitude of the wild. As soon as his cohorts got the
chance, they would rush to their familiar surroundings: "Having escaped restraint, they
were, like some people we know of, afraid of their freedom, did not know what to do
with it, and seemed glad to get back to their old familiar bondage" (My First Summer
39). The taint of civilization is not a superficial one, but reaches into the depth of the
human. A man of this original sin would never see the wild before him, would never
perceive the countenance of the Divine therein, and would replicate the horrors of
human destruction wherever he might be. Such souls are asleep, over-burdened with
the vulgar concerns of a frivolous society.
Once on the path, Muir the seeker finds that all things in the heavens and the
earth point to the Divine. Inanimate things ― rocks, streams, winds ― take on
animate vitality, and animate creatures take on an almost human sentience. In Muir's
scheme, all phenomena receive Divine influx, a universal spiritual energy. All things in
the cosmos exchange this energy and exist in balanced symbiosis ― a truly "world-
wide web." All of life is interconnected by a living energy, an intelligent order which is
not God but the imprint of God: "new life, new beauty, unfolding, unrolling in glorious

60
exuberant extravagance ... spreading, shining, rejoicing everywhere" (My First
Summer 21).
No feature of the wilderness escapes his attention. He notes, "How fine the
weather is! Nothing more celestial can I conceive. How gently the winds blow!
Scarce these tranquil air currents be called winds. They seem the very breath of
Nature, whispering peace to every living thing" (My First Summer 24). In this transfer
of energies, Muir sees a hopeful side to evolution and even death. Forms lead to other
forms, and the natural world is devoid of the waste common to the modern
manufacturer. In the wilderness, nothing is lost: "We see that everything in Nature
called destruction must be creation ― a change from beauty to beauty" (My First
Summer 159).
But what is this theophany Muir seeks? And what is the form of his God?
Muir strips God of most of his anthropomorphic attachments. Throughout the
narrative, God is utterly transcendent, and Muir barely makes mention of the Deity
directly. Up to the stages of highest devotion, God is known through his signs,
embedded in the ecological narrative which lies before man. Muir notes the absence
early on: "The place seemed holy, where one might hope to meet God" (My First
Summer 33). That God is present, Muir has no doubt, but his inability to perceive the
ineffable restrains him to second causes. By those natural effects the Divine is known
― "God himself seems to be always doing his best here, working like a man in a glow
of enthusiasm" (My First Summer 40). The perfection of ecology, the attention to
minutest detail, the relentless maintenance of balance reveal the personality of the
Godhead.

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In Christian theology, the ineffability of the Divine requires a demiurge, a
secondary agent from which all temporal phenomena derive. This logos in Muir's
theology is "Nature" with a capital "N". And just as Christian theology, to enter into
communion with the demiurge in the personage of Christ, is the pinnacle of being and
the witnessing of non-being, so Muir involves himself in the personage of Nature. For
by knowing the laws of this demiurge and by subsuming his ego in this "grand man,"
Muir witnesses the completeness of being. He says of a number of hearty manzanita
shrubs, "I must try to know them better" (My First Summer 61). By gazing upon the
variety of forms in Nature, Muir loosens the bonds of human particularity. This is why
Muir can speak of a human "stain," for humanity is alone in presupposing its particular
forms and agendas to be superior and universal. "Sauntered up the meadow about
sundown, out of sight of camp and sheep and all human mark, into the deep peace of
the solemn old woods, everything glowing with Heaven's unquenchable enthusiasm"
(My First Summer 71). Human civilization bears interests, presuppositions, practices,
and restraints which enforce the misperception of individuation, of independence, a
defilement of man's original heavenly station. "Heaven's unquenchable enthusiasm"
proceeds from the unbinding of ego.
Lest the reader should take Muir's commentary merely as a romantic turn, he
demonstrates the powerful impact of this enthusiasm: "I was suddenly, and without
warning, possessed with the notion that my friend, Professor J.D. Butler, of the State
University of Wisconsin, was below me in the valley, and I jumped up full of the idea
of meeting him, with almost as much startling excitement as if he had suddenly
touched me to make me look up" (My First Summer 125). Muir scrambled down the

62
mountain immediately, and the next day found his friend "as the compass-needle finds
the pole" (My First Summer 125). Muir differentiates between this experience and the
superstitious spiritism of the day: "This seems the one well-defined marvel of my life
of the kind called supernatural; for, absorbed in glad Nature, spirit-rappings, second
sight, ghost stories, etc., have never interested me since boyhood, seeming
comparatively useless and infinitely less wonderful than Nature's open, harmonious,
songful, sunny, everyday beauty" (My First Summer 126).
Salvation in Muir's theology is not the otherworldly reward of exoterism,
rather it is a mystical awareness that reaches the core of one's being. He refers to it as
an absorption, a dissolution, an abandonment of ego. He calls it "true freedom, a good
practical sort of immortality" (My First Summer 26). Some have argued that Muir
gleans Eastern influence through the Transcendentalists. This argument is viable, but
it also hinges on the reduction of Christian mystical power present even in Reformism.
However rare that power, the potentiality of Muir's native theistic structure toward
monism should not be dismissed out of hand.
St. Bernard once said, ”What I know of the divine sciences and Holy Scripture,
I learnt in the woods and fields. I have no other masters than the beeches and the
oaks" (qtd. in Huxley 69). John Muir was neither a pantheist or a nature-worshipper.
Rather to him nature was a forum built expressly to present the divine to the human.
Muir would spend much of his life after his first journey into the Sierra fighting for the
preservation of the American wilderness, for as Schuon has said, "everything is false
which is not consonant either with virgin nature or with a sanctuary; everything
legitimate is connected with nature on the one hand and with the sacred on the other"

63
(Schuon 128). Muir's task would be imperative heading into an age in dire need of
both sanctuary and sanctity. His extraordinary work and unusual talent bridged the
gap between science and tradition, and provides a launching-point for the necessary
marriage of ecology and theology in these unique and challenging times.

64
Conclusion
If we truly can judge a tree by its fruit, we need only summarily ponder the
fruit of modernity to realize that we have missed something deeply significant, and are
in dire need of a major philosophical reappraisal. Environmentalism on the whole has
been a slow project of limited effectiveness. Its manifestation in the popular
mainstream is a series of conservative actions aimed at trimming back convenient
excesses while leaving the economic essence of the age ― unlimited development,
eternal progress, ever-expanding markets ― solidly in place. Impotently nature-
focused, contemporary environmentalism stands largely ill-equipped to confront the
very human drives and appetites which have produced the current situation. Any
effective solution must promote a comprehensive outlook that locates the origin of the
problem squarely in the heart of man.
However uncomfortable it may be, we find ourselves therefore in the realm of
religious tradition. Al-Khwarizmi, the man credited with inventing algebra, was a
companion of Imam Ja^afar as-Sadiq, the sixth Imam of Shi’ite Islam. One time the
Imam said to him, “Any knowledge we ask of God, he teaches it to us.” Al-Khwarizmi
marveled aloud how many great things the Imams could teach the people, improve the
quality of life, and change the world. To which the Imam replied, “Yes, but you must
first learn al-mizan ― you must first learn balance.” In spite of abuses, in spite of holy
wars, inquisitions, and crusades, there lies in the great traditions of the world sciences

65
of epistemology, being, and balance which our present modes of knowing have
relinquished.
This does not mean that going to church, spinning the dharma wheel, or sitting
in a full-lotus position for hours each day will solve our earthly problems. Rather
there lies in the world’s traditional past gems of knowledge about knowledge itself;
about the dangers of Promethean knowledge freed from a comprehensive ontology
and a system of values. It would behoove us to cull our own past for the thinkers,
saints, and sages who addressed these matters, and who provided and alternative
vision for humanity’s posture in the natural world. This thesis has been a step in that
direction. John Muir serves well as an intermediary between modernity and tradition,
for he arrived amidst the collision of the two.
Muir’s approach to nature and to knowing grew out of the tradition in which
he was raised. Muir inherited an innate religious enthusiasm and a seeking soul from
his father, Daniel. Analogues for his subsequent treatment of nature can be located in
the writings of John Calvin and subsequent Reformist theologians, and we need not go
as far afield as Taoism or Buddhism to pinpoint Muir's sources in this regard. As his
innate belief was in fact bolstered by the new science, neither was it negatively affected
by advances in technology. His observations on the workmanship of the Creator
would carry him to the heights of spiritual ecstasy. Muir's My First Summer in the
Sierra represents the greatest articulation of his wilderness theology and the pinnacle
of his singularly mystical experience. Muir spoke of ecology, of the
interconnectedness of life, long before anyone gave a name to the concept. For Muir,
ecology is rooted in an intuitive understanding of and experience of the divine.

66
Spirituality, as we have seen, was the single greatest motivator in Muir's lifelong
journey, and God-consciousness was his unparalleled goal.
The fullness of Muir's message can only be recognized by those who have
made a pilgrimage to virgin nature. Muir's is "a hard and brutal mysticism," as Abbey
would say, an approach to being that cannot be effectively grasped from the pages of a
book. Muir's works have not and in the future will likely not yield a substantial body
of scholarly work, and I am not convinced that they should. For if they are effective in
the way they were intended, the reader would step away from scholasticism and
imbibe the bliss of a more universal philosophy.
For those, however, who would carry on with Muir in a more academic vein, it
would be valuable to see Muir's work and experience in light of the works of Rene
Guenon, Frithjof Schuon, Huston Smith and others of the perennialist school. Muir
would undoubtedly fare well in tandem with the work of William James. As this thesis
was composed with the requirements of a literature program in mind, it was out of the
range of the project to stray too far afield into deeper speculations on theology and
consciousness per se. The next step would have been an exploration in that direction,
and I encourage the interested reader to take up the topic; Whereas the times he lived
in left an indelible imprint on the man, Muir's central experience is one that historicity
alone can only vaguely comprehend. I hope this brief work has elucidated for the
reader one man's regard for the sanctity of Creation, from which we, facing
monumental crises of world and spirit, might learn.
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