Muir

“No synonym for God is so perfect as Beauty. Whether as seen carving the lines of the mountains with glaciers, or gathering matter into stars, or planning the movements of water, or gardening – still all is Beauty!.. In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world – the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware… I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness. Heaven knows that John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God's mountains… I used to envy the father of our race, dwelling as he did in contact with the new-made fields and plants of Eden; but I do so no more, because I have discovered that I also live in creation’s dawn. The morning stars still sing together, and the world, not yet half made, becomes more beautiful every day… Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul… The world is big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark… I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in…  The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls. Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, inciting at once to work and rest! Days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God. Nevermore, however weary, should one faint by the way who gains the blessings of one mountain day; whatever his fate, long life, short life, stormy or calm, he is rich forever… The mountains are calling and I must go.”

~ “John Muir was born to Daniel and Anne Muir in Scotland at a time of tremendous religious schism… Those sects which rejected orthodox Calvinism and which emphasized free grace to the repentant and a religion of the heart had attracted Daniel after his religious conversion at age fourteen... He searched until the Campbellites came to Dunbar in the 1840s... Inspired by the Campbellite desire to recreate the primitive Church, Daniel Muir practiced a hard and humorless religion. Every evening at family worship Daniel prayed long and fervently; he was a strict disciplinarian, and required John to memorize Bible verses or hymns daily or face a whipping. After a while Daniel stopped playing the violin he had built as a teenager, and his wife, by nature a fun-loving and boisterous woman, learned to keep her lighter side to herself and to practice such small pleasures as knitting and needlepoint only when her husband would not see her. Anne was an obedient Christian wife, acquiescing in her subordinate place within the Biblically-ordained patriarchal family.

When Daniel heard of religious freedom and cheap land in America, he settled among a community of Campbellites in Wisconsin. In the comparative isolation of the frontier… Daniel's propensities towards religion and discipline were exacerbated. While his children, often including the girls, labored to clear the forest and raise the crops, Daniel retired to his study to read the Bible. The Disciples of Christ had no regular clergy but relied on "preaching elders," usually self-taught, like Daniel. Very popular as a preacher, he traveled around the countryside to whichever churches would hear him. At home he was a tyrant, and allowed no stopping of work, even for sickness, and his children were afraid to rest in the shade or get a drink of water. Only once, when John had pneumonia, did Daniel allow him to stay in bed, although no doctor was called, for "God and hard work were by far the best doctors." For any infraction, real or imagined, the punishment was a severe whipping. The family kept their small pleasures out of his sight, and John spent his free Sunday afternoons enjoying nature and the changing seasons.

Daniel had forbidden all but religious or practical books as frivolous or impious. Muir's intellectual horizons suddenly opened up at age fifteen when two neighbor boys with whom he was working recited to him their favorite poets--Byron, Poe, Wordsworth, Milton. He discovered that many neighbors had small libraries in their homes, and secretly but avidly he began to read the Romantic poets, novels, biographies, natural history, and philosophy. Here began Muir's life-long love of poetry. The Romantics attracted him with their love of nature, mountains and wilderness… Around the same time, Muir began to rise hours before breakfast in order to gain some free time. In the summer he read, but in the darkness of winter he invented and built an astonishing array of devices: wooden clocks, thermometers, pyrometers, hygrometers, a barometer, a combination lock--all without any formal training… His father was clearly impressed but refrained from praising John, which he feared would encourage the sin of pride… Muir took his inventions to the state fair at Madison, where he hoped to win the attention of an inventor or machine shop with whom he could work. He won renown but no permanent job, but to his joy, the struggling young University of Wisconsin gladly accepted him.

The knowledge Muir acquired during his short time at the university would be invaluable to him in later life. Away from his father's tyranny, he threw himself with great delight into his studies at the university… His classics teacher had Muir read Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Emerson, and acquainted him with the transcendentalist regard for nature. In imitation of Emerson, he began to keep a journal, the first of great stacks of journals he would create by the time of his death. Finally, one of Muir's fellow students introduced him to one of his life's loves, botany. Muir's exposure to geology and botany brought him face to face with science which could not be harmonized with a literal reading of the Bible, but exposure to liberal Christianity showed him a way to reconcile religion and science. Carr's wife, Jeanne, introduced him to the thought of William Ellery Channing, with his positive view of a loving God and indwelling divinity. Muir also accepted Agassiz's precept that "a physical fact is as sacred as a moral principle." Toward Darwin he was not so charitable; he accepted evolution, but rejected "Darwin's mean ungodly word `struggle' in favor of a principle of divine guidance. At this point, Muir still held actively to his Christian beliefs and an evangelical concern for the state of everyone else's soul…

Without intellectual stimulation, lonely, approaching thirty, unmarried and with no prospects, Mrs. Carr became a sort of mother/mentor figure for Muir… Working in a major machine shop, Muir so impressed owners that they were on the verge of making him a partner. Then a file slipped and pierced Muir's right eye. His sight quickly drained out of the one eye, and the other went into temporary "sympathetic" blindness… Plunged into despair, depression, and literal darkness, Muir experienced something of a conversion as his sight slowly returned, and he came away from the accident inspired with a new sense of purpose. When a doctor first told him his sight would return, he wrote Mrs. Carr, "Now had I arisen from the grave. God has to nearly kill us sometimes, to teach us lessons. As soon as I got out into Heaven's light I started on another long excursion, making haste with all my heart to store my mind with the Lord's beauty and thus be ready to any fate, light or dark. And it was from 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."… Ever afterwards aware of the preciousness of sight, Muir referred to God and nature in terms of light, and dubbed the Sierras the "Range of Light."

Across all of Muir's life lay the shadow of his father, Daniel… Boys identify with their fathers, and in doing so emulate not only attitudes, values, roles, gestures, and emotional reactions but problem-solving strategies, thinking processes, and vocabulary as well. Thus, in many sundry ways John Muir's life paralleled Daniel's. Daniel found God at age fourteen; Muir discovered the world of poetry and books at age fifteen… Muir and his father were similar in that each rejected orthodox religion and preached the Gospel according to his own lights--for Daniel the Campbellite Gospel, for Muir the Gospel of Nature. Both father and son were only too happy to abandon mundane tasks to dedicate themselves to higher, holy causes… Scottish preachers have long been popular in the United States for their serious demeanor and declamatory style of "Thus saith the Lord." … Muir's increasingly strident rhetoric inspired his friend, Congressman William Kent, to make the remark, "With him, it is me and God and the rock where God put it." Muir liked to describe himself in biblical terms, a John the Baptist preaching the wilderness gospel. The sight of Muir, long beard flowing in the breeze, descending from the Sierras caused visitors to recall images of prophets returning from the wilderness. Interestingly enough, just as the biblical Daniel, prophet of the Old Testament God of Wrath, was succeeded by John, prophet of the New Testament God of Love, so was the wrathful Daniel Muir succeeded by the loving John Muir.

John Muir's affection and compassion for children and animals may have roots in his rejection of the model offered by his punishing father, and his identification instead with fellow victims of the whip. Muir could never bring himself to strike children or animals. He once wrote, "When the rod is falling on the flesh of a child, and, what may oftentimes be worse, heart-breaking scolding falling on its tender little heart, it makes the whole family seem far from the Kingdom of Heaven." As a university student, Muir taught school for a while and caused parents to complain that "he don't half whip." Muir saw animals overworked on his parents' farm, and Daniel once drove a horse to death. As an adult, John Muir fired on the spot any hand abusing an animal on his ranch. Ranch ownership was perhaps too close to his father's life and values to be comfortable to Muir. He never seemed happy there, and a possibly asthmatic cough constantly bothered him; allergies are sometimes psychosomatic, and conceivably his cough was related psychologically to the pneumonia that excused him from farmwork as a boy.

As John Muir rejected Daniel's harsher aspects, he also rejected his father's concepts of God and nature. Daniel subscribed to the contemporary view, based on the Bible and strengthened by the Enlightenment and the necessities of frontier life, that God made nature for man's dominion and use. John Muir broke from this view and developed a conception of the value in itself of all creation and the ecological interconnectedness of all things. God made nature for man's use, yes, but also for his spirit. A walk into the wilderness was a religious experience, for there one immersed oneself in the glory of God's immaculate handiwork. The study of nature was also a religious activity, for there the scientist read the manuscripts of God as surely as he read them in the Bible… When John Muir rejected the wrathful, punishing model of fatherhood, he also rejected the same concept of God, and with it the identification of natural disasters with divine fury. For him, the God of Love was revealed in all nature, even storms and earthquakes.

Daniel's preaching emphasized sin and damnation at least as much as joy and salvation, for hatred of sin and fear of damnation could move a potential convert to repentance. Muir remembered burning a pile of brush and waste wood during his Wisconsin boyhood. He and his brothers enjoyed the spectacle of the flames until his father turned the fire into a lesson on the horrible flames of hell awaiting every unrepentant sinner. As an adult, Muir reversed Daniel's emphasis and spoke much less of sin and damnation than the promises of salvation that the wilderness offered. In Muir's wilderness catechism, sin was a product of the man-made environment of the city. Cutting oneself off from nature could cut oneself off from God. But rarely did Muir discuss sin, concentrating instead on the promise of renewal, both spiritual and physical, that nature held for humanity...

Daniel's overactive concern for his children's souls was simply a reflection of his concern for his own. "Strange to say," wrote John Muir, "father carefully taught us to consider ourselves very poor worms of the dust, conceived in sin, etc., and devoutly believed that quenching every spark of pride and self-confidence was a sacred duty, without realizing that in so doing he might at the same time be quenching everything else. Praise he considered most venomous. . . ." Daniel was simply applying evangelical theology to family government: a hatred of sinful flesh which reflected a basic tenet of Protestantism, and the evangelical morphology of conversion, whereby the conviction of one's worthlessness and helplessness without God precedes a conversion experience. Thereafter, the convert attempts to suppress all sin and sinful thoughts in himself and to achieve Christian perfection in this life. John Muir internalized hatred of sin as self-criticism and low self-esteem, which manifested themselves in his lonely avocations of botanizing and mountain-climbing, and in his youthful lack of grooming habits…



Anxious to raise obedient and pure-minded Christian children, Daniel controlled, restricted, and punished them. Psychologists have noted that such childraising methods impede the masculinity of sons. Indeed, Muir was quite shy and did not "court" girls as a youth, or as far as is known for certain until he got married at age 42. During his Yosemite days his friends thought that he was a woman-hater or a confirmed bachelor. His botanist's fascination with flowers brought the occasional questioning remark about the manliness of the pursuit. As adolescent boys become men… sons and fathers see each other as competitors and rivals…He split rails so much better than Daniel that the latter gave over the entire job to his son… Even in their more spiritual adult callings, no matter how much Daniel preached to whoever would hear, it was John Muir whose preaching stirred the nation… Muir always claimed that Daniel had a good heart, and to some degree admired him and identified with him. But so driven was Daniel in his pursuit of godliness that he drove his son away from him, his life model, and his religion, and into a wilderness suffused with the divine light of a loving, accepting Deity. That Muir was thus reborn, not from a life of sin to submission to the God of the Bible, but from a life of repression to revelation of the God of Nature, has left us the rich and inspiring legacy of his wilderness gospel.”
~ Sierra Club