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Book Review
| God's Wilds: John Muir's Vision of Nature. By Dennis C. Williams. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002. xiv + 246pp. $39.95.
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| Dennis C. Williams introduces his volume as a "narrative of the conclusions" at which he arrived in his "exploration of several issues related to Muir's thought" (p. x). The first issue, and the principal focus of the book, concerns Muir's association with evangelical Protestantism. The second issue probes Muir's relationship with science, and, finally, Williams explores the tensions of Muir's relationship with "faith and science" and how it "shaped his behavior as an author and a political activist" (p. x). |
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God's Wilds presents, in fact, an excellent contribution to our understanding of the depth and species of Muir's religious attitude and how his theological commitments informed his life and work. Muir was raised in a home heavy with the theology of Reformed Scottish Presbyterianism and he inherited and maintained "a fundamental set of orthodox Christian values" (p. 6) about people, nature, and the relations between them. The schema is familiar and as persistent and powerful as it is, ultimately, troubling. Nature stood as symbolic of the character and glorification of God; as the human race rebelled against nature so it rebelled against God and "condemned itself" (p. 6). |
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Yet, Muir's evangelism insisted on the possibility of redemption. Thus, Nature was to be investigated as a lesson in the "proper" human conduct of glorifying God. Studying the Water Ouzel or the Water Lily, Williams informs us, Muir believed he was learning the "example of a pure life seeking only to know God's provision" (p. 16). However, Williams chooses not to explore what becomes apparent in his account as an obvious tension in Muir's thinking. Muir, ironically, had little faith that redemption was, finally, much of a possibility. Muir's decidedly fundamentalist theology saw "(w)ild Nature (as) a primary document out of the mouth of God"; thus, any human influence represented a corruption of God's "revelation" (p. 136). |
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Williams's engaged review of Muir's religious fundamentalism provides the best explanation yet of Muir's preference for the faith-minded science of Asa Gray and Joseph LeConte over "Darwinism, in both its biological and social strains" (p. 196). To the end of his life, Muir believed in "an ordered, God-filled natural world" and so "to see God's character ... one had to experience raw, primary nature" (p. 197). Thus Muir's impassioned preservationist efforts: saving "wild" nature was saving the very path to God. |
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Previous Muir biographers (including Michael Cohen and Frederick Turner) have no doubt sidestepped Muir's Christian fundamentalism for the same reasons that he has yet to be brought to a full accounting for his attitudes about race: Muir occupies a rather preeminent position in America's green hagiography, a position from which his admirers are very loathe to dislodge him. Williams rather ironically both further secures Muir's "place" and compels us to raise our eyebrows a bit. |
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Reviewed by Stephen Germic, assistant professor of English, James Madison University. |
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