The Biblical Language of John Muir

Ken Burns six-part foray into The National Parks, subtitled “America’s Best Idea,” debuts this month, with sweeping cinematography and historical riches. It focuses on early defenders of conservation and on such national treasures as Yosemite and the Everglades as fruit of their labor. 

 Of course, no conversation about national parks can continue long without mention of John Muir. The founder of the Sierra Club, and in many ways the founding figure of the preservation movement, Muir is perhaps most famous for securing Yosemite Valley as a national park during an influential camping trip with Theodore Roosevelt. Muir was raised on a farm in Scotland, and then Wisconsin, under the rule of a dictatorial father with a legalistic creed. He was elevated and educated thanks to his native facility as an engineer, but was always most drawn to the space and the freedom of the natural world, especially that promised by the American wilderness. 

Muir in many ways presents a sterling example of my previous post on memorization. He was required to memorize copious amounts of Scripture; by the tender age of 11, he had the entire New Testament and the majority of the Old memorized. This did little to keep him in the faith of his fathers, which he left behind for a pantheistic deism in adulthood. He was vocal about the God apparent through Nature, and of the transcendence that the wilds bespoke, holding that “one day in the midst of these divine glories is well worth living and toiling and starving for.” Despite no longer holding a Biblical faith, his ideas were articulated in a thoroughly Biblical cadence, no doubt thanks to his forced familiarity with Scripture from an early age. He routinely compared the natural beauty of the American wilderness to the most sacred temples, and was befuddled and appalled by the cavalier tourism and callous abuse of such places. His sensitivity to the sublime was heightened and articulated Christianly, though his belief was not:

It seems strange that visitors to Yosemite should be so little influenced by its novel grandeur, as if their eyes were bandaged and their ears stopped. Most of those I saw yesterday were looking down as if wholly unconscious of anything going on about them, while the sublime rocks were trembling with the tones of the mighty chanting congregation of waters gathered from all the mountains round about, making music that might draw angels out of heaven. Yet respectable-looking, even wise-looking people were fixing bits of worms on bent pieces of wire to catch trout [....] Should church-goers try to pass the time fishing in baptismal fonts while dull sermons were being preached, the so-called sport might not be so bad; but to play in the Yosemite temple, [...] while God himself is preaching his sublimest water and stone sermons!

 Although it is surely preferable to have a storehouse of Biblical text when it supports invested Christian belief, it fascinates to see the ways in which Muir turned to an elevated and poetic language informed by Christianity to convey as the most beautiful and awe-inspiring sights in his world. ‘