Midterm Exam

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau treat nature as a legible text in which spiritual truths are inscribed, but they read it with distinct emphases. In "Nature," Emerson claims that the mind and the world are made of the same "stuff," so imagination is not fantasy but an organ of insight that perceives correspondences between natural forms and moral laws. His famous "transparent eyeball" image signals self-emptying in order to receive the Over-Soul's light. Nature becomes a symbolic language that, when rightly read, discloses divine unity.

Thoreau, by contrast, apprentices imagination to disciplined attention. In Walden and the Journal, he aggregates particulars like ice-thickness, bird calls, pond soundings until patient noticing flowers into revelation. For Thoreau, imagination is calibrated by place and season.

Their Transcendentalist trust in intuition and self-reliance both converges with and departs from biblical theology. They converge with Psalm 19 and Romans 1:20 in affirming general revelation, creation "speaks" of God's glory and eternal power. They also have Genesis 1's goodness of the world and humanity's dignity as perceivers. Yet they diverge on authority and ontology. Emerson's Over-Soul and Thoreau's sacral immanence tend to blur the Creator– creation distinction that Genesis guards. Likewise, "self-reliance" can chafe against biblical dependence on God's revealed Word and the church's communal discernment, even as Scripture also affirms Spirit-guided conscience. In short, they intensify general revelation but loosen the tether to special revelation.

Still, their works can stir contemporary Christian reflection on ecology and vocation. Emerson's symbolic reading of nature invites a sacramental imagination which is to treat created realities not as raw material but as signs that train praise. Thoreau's practices including simplicity, local attention, economy of means model ascetic habits similar to Sabbath restraint and stewardship. For vocation, Thoreau's call to "live deliberately" encourages Christians to integrate craft, study, and contemplation, resisting consumerism by embracing work that serves neighbors and land. Read alongside Psalm 19 and Genesis 1, Emerson and Thoreau help believers "read" both books.

Jack London and Willa Cather both send Americans to the margins where weather, work, and want strip away pretense, but they render moral courage differently. London's naturalism places characters under an iron sky of causality. In "To Build a Fire," the man's hubris meets indifferent cold, in "Love of Life," the starving wanderer persists not because of creed but because organismic will keeps moving one foot ahead of the other. Courage is grim clarity, the refusal to lie about the odds. Even in The Sea-Wolf, where Humphrey Van Weyden grows in resolve against Wolf Larsen's brutal will to power, the moral arena is largely humanistic, a contest of temperaments within a godless cosmos.

Cather's realism, by contrast, frames hardship inside community, memory, and vocation. Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers! endures droughts and grief through faithful stewardship, the Shimerdas and Ántonia embody homely courage that binds generations. In Death Comes for the Archbishop, Latour's patience, hospitality, and liturgical imagination transfigure the desert without denying its severity.

On redemption, London offers survival, not salvation. Endurance yields knowledge of limits, of nature's law, but no promised crown beyond the immediate reprieve of heat and food. If there is "grace," it is evolutionary adaptation rewarded by continuance. Cather allows a thicker hope. Alexandra's harvest is a moral yield that confirms a meaningful order. Latour's sanctuaries and Father Vaillant's missions enact charity as durable architecture in a harsh land. Here endurance opens onto gift, suggestive of grace moving through ordinary labor and sacrament. Thus, Cather resonates with James 1:2–4: trials, borne faithfully, mature character and "lack nothing." London can illustrate James by negation, when prudence fails and pride rules, testing destroys rather than perfects.

Romans 8:18–25 deepens the contrast. London hears creation groaning but cannot finally hear it hoping, his landscapes disclose futility without eschaton. Cather hears both the groan and the first fruits, the prairie's seasons, remembered hymns, and priestly gardens prefigure a redeemed creation. For American letters, their paired witness is salutary. London steels the conscience against self-deception, honoring resilience shorn of comforts. Cather teaches that courage ripens within loves, of place, neighbor, and God so that endurance becomes vocation. Together they map a moral frontier where perseverance is necessary.