Arnold Lunn and the Religiosity of “Modern” Mountain Athletes
Genealogies of Modenity contributors have raised several interesting points about mountains, modernity, and the relationship between the two. Given my personal and historical interest in alpine landscapes and experience, I wanted to share a few thoughts.
In “Petrarch, Nina Williams, and Mountain Modernity,” Michael Krom draws a distinction between the “modern” and the “classical” climber. The former, epitomized by Petrarch, “sees himself as being in continuity with a tradition…[or] out to glimpse past greatness and recommit to Truth,” whereas the latter, represented by Nina Williams, “is out to push the limits and set personal or communal records.”
Arnold Lunn, Eiger, 1924
I cannot comment on the specific character of Petrarch or Williams, but my recent research on British ski pioneer and Catholic apologist Arnold Lunn (1888–1974) has me thinking about the modern/classical binary in new ways. On the one hand, Lunn epitomized the summit and fame-hungry “modern” alpinist. Over the course of his life, he climbed up and skied down many peaks, going to lengths to popularize slalom skiing and establish it as an Olympic sport. Moreover, Lunn meticulously recorded his ascents and accomplishments, describing them to the public in terms of “conquest” and “superiority over what has come before.” For example, In Switzerland and the English (1944), Lunn praised skiing as “the finest motion known to man” and a performance “which excel[led] to an extraordinary degree those known in the past.” And, further establishing that he did not simply “follow but created precedents,” he juxtaposed his own “Golden Age of Skiing” with the direction the sport had taken by the end of his life. Through his ski career and beyond it, Lunn used the mountains to assert his “freedom from the past,” or what Peter Hansen might call his “position at the summit of history.”
If scholars were to stop here, though, they would miss an equally important part of Lunn’s story: his desire not only to be remembered but also to remember something greater than himself and the era in which he lived. The Englishman envisioned the Swiss Alps as timeless sites of memory and signposts to higher Truth, calling upon them in celebration of “tradition’s binding force.”Amidst a personal life and surrounding world marked by rupture––including two world wars and his conversion from agnosticism to Catholicism––he gave thanks for the mountains’ enduring presence. The Alps, after all, were not only the scene of some of Lunn’s best memories (see The Mountains of My Youth [1925]) but also the place he claimed to have first accepted the existence of God. For these reasons and others, the mountains feature heavily in Lunn’s conversion story, Now I See (1934), as both a stable rock on which to see, experience, and remember his immortal God and as a primordial site that pointed him in the direction of a Church that could trace its authority back to the time of Christ. Lunn, put simply, used the mountains as much to establish links with the past as he did to assert his distinctiveness from it.
Lunn’s story illustrates the reality that one need not choose between being a “modern” and “classical” mountain enthusiast or between being an inventor or follower of tradition. Figuratively writing his faith into the mountains’ history and literally setting new slalom courses on their slopes, he effectively communicated that one can be both: conservative and progressive, orthodox and original, obedient to God and liberated as an individual.
Lunn also reminds us of another point: as much as modern alpinists have claimed to master the mountains, they have also been changed by them. Paying attention to the religious experiences, anxieties, and beliefs of recreationists allows us to consider the ways mountains have functioned and continue to function as mediators between past and present, living and dead, and sacred Power and human beings.
It also forces us to remember the complexity of the human person––namely, that climbers climbed and skiers skied for many reasons and, like in their lives, often navigated conflicting desires. Lunn, for example, was self-conscious of his place in historical time and active in searching for the presence of a goodness too great for time to carry. He expressed a desire to lose himself in the mountains while self-fashioning a narrative that ensured he would be remembered as a modern pioneer. The mountains offered (and, I would argue, continue to offer) individuals the chance to reconcile these apparent contradictions and walk in and out of time––capitalizing on the opportunities for transformation in this life while lifting their hearts and minds beyond it.
Arnold Lunn, Mürren, 1922
The strangeness of mountain lovers is as telling as the strangeness of the mountains, though. Just as the “Matterhorn Accident” awoke controversy among Victorians in 1865, the daredevilish feats of Alex Honnold and Nina Williams, the near-vertical ski descents of Jimmy Chin and Cody Townsend, and the Herculean mountain runs of Courtney Dauwalter and Kilian Jornet continue to beg questions for those with the time and interest to ask. “What is it about the mountains?” people wonder. And “why,” to put it crudely, “would people take such irrational risks?”
For those who wish for certainty, I cannot provide answers––nor, I suggest, can the mountains. But therein lies the magic. Pyramids of rock like the Matterhorn and Grand Teton are beloved in large part because they defy understanding. They humble all who encounter them––whether poets or scientists, hikers or climbers––by reminding us of our unilateral smallness in space and time, of our dependence on forces beyond our control. Although I can neither go back in time and ask Lunn and Leslie Stephen, George Mallory, and Geoffrey Winthrop Young why they did what they did, nor rely on their myriad diaries and autobiographies to say with certainty just what the mountains meant to them, I feel confident in suggesting that the mountains were about more to them than power and domination, more than status and legacy. The writings they left behind and the complex longings embedded in them reveal that they also climbed in order to encounter the unknown, experience conversion, and reclaim hope in a reality beyond their earthly life. I wish I could go hiking with them and ask. Something tells me, though, that they would respond in the way I have experienced most who love the mountains do. Perhaps they, too, would smile and sheepishly look to their feet. “I can’t fully describe it,” they might say. “There’s just something else there.”
Margaret Sutton is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame. She specializes in environmental and religious history in the North Atlantic world.