Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Nature Worship

Holy the Firm is a metaphysical prose poem that doesn’t do what metaphysical poetry is usually meant to do, namely to suggest that which is beyond language. Religion is metaphysics ‘with intent.’ And Dillard certainly has intent. She wants us to be aware of her religion, which is neatly contained in her language.

Dillard’s book, like much of her other writing, is religious but with a difference. Religious poetry typically goes further than a statement of an abstract ‘beyondness’ by providing proper names, identities, like God, or Allah, or Jesus, or Vishnu or Zeus. All descriptions of such properly named entities are figurative, and, by definition, wrong because incomplete or misleading. Dillard’s poem does not do this. She doesn’t point elsewhere, beyond language; she points to the generic vocabulary which is within language already, things as they are experienced. This is a special kind of metaphysical poetry, and justifiably, I think, considered also as prose; and it says everything it needs to say. It points to Nature but only a collection of material beings, inanimate as well as living.

The use of proper names to ‘objectify’ the divine is what religious language, polytheistic as well as monotheistic, is traditionally about. Such objectification suggests an alternative world, perhaps material or perhaps spiritual, inhabited by creatures like us - only better, purer, stronger, and longer-lived. This is true for all religions except one: the religion of nature. For those who worship nature, the divine is not represented figuratively; it is simply what is already here and for which existing vocabulary is just fine for pointing to it directly. Animals, mountains, clouds, insects, whatever exists already within language itself is sacred. These are not called God, but gods or spirits or daemons, and they all exist as generic species not identities. For the nature worshipper, natural language conforms very nicely to the way the world is organised. There is nothing beyond language because language is natural and there is nothing beyond the natural world.

Nature worship has some intriguing properties. Because it is not dependent upon a fixed language, there can be no heresy. Because it can use any language, it is as culturally diverse as the world in which it is practiced. Because it evolves as the culture in which it occurs evolves, it is never out of date. And because it has no proper name for the divine, it is hated by other religions as a threat to their credibility. In one of the great religious ironies, proper name religions must single out language and deify it as something superior to all other things. Nature worshippers take language as it comes, equitably, along with everything else.

Annie Dillard is a nature worshipper. Her gods are everywhere - in the wren caught by her cat, in the cat itself, in the smells of the forest, in the presence of an infant, in the weather. There is no end to the detailed classifications of the deities that are there directly in front of us. She wants us to see these gods for what they are, manifestations of the divinely self-created World of Nature.

Nature-worshippers don’t pray; one can’t pray without an identity to which to direct one’s prayers. Nature-worshippers can only direct respect toward that which is - life, pain, death. “No gods have power to save.” Any proper name God who could save but didn’t could only be called a brutish monster. Nature doesn’t have monsters. Nature has materiality and it has forcefulness. “Matter and spirit are of a piece but distinguishable... ”

Dillard, of course, doesn’t call herself a nature-worshpper. That would be impolitic. She is an environmentalist, a Green, an advocate for the natural world, a rejector of the Anthropocene, or any of a dozen or so other euphemisms. Since nature-worship doesn’t rely on doctrine, her religion is probably unique. As far as religions go, there are many worse than hers.

View all my reviews