Moth, Aflame: A Review of Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm
By Molly Jenkins,
It is a common and well-known fault of nature enthusiasts that their vision of nature is too tame and saccharine: They feed deer out of their hands, marvel at the beauty of flowers, and anthropomorphize the lives of wild animals.
Annie Dillard puts that brand of environmentalism to rest.
Dillard’s praise of nature is at once marveling of its beauty and, in the same breath, its brutality and violence. Her metaphysics accommodate suffering as a fundamental tenet of life itself: a holy sacrifice. This is no surprise: For a time, Dillard had converted to Catholicism. She is well regarded for her ability to skirt the line between the ethereal and the limits of physical nature. As William Deresiewicz wrote in The Atlantic, “She knows that we are born with souls but die in bodies.”
This isn’t to say that Dillard’s writing is wholly unchallenging for Catholics. Her writing draws from esoteric perspectives. To the uncritical reader, she may come across as pantheistic—it is easy to write her off as just another hippie. However, Dillard explicitly refutes pantheism towards the end of Holy the Firm; she clearly articulates and affirms the divinity and manhood of Christ, and she emphatically loves the Christian God. Moreover, she quotes G.K. Chesterton and takes early-church theology and metaphysics seriously. How many environmental writers grapple intentionally with Aristotelian or Platonic ideas in a way accessible to someone who has never read a lick of Aristotle or Plato? Not many. For this reason alone, Dillard sets herself apart: Her theology and her metaphysics of nature do not ignore pre-modern sources.
The Beauty of God
Holy the Firm is structurally and thematically Catholic. The short novel is split into three parts: an opening, a reckoning, and a synthesis. In the final synthesis, she quite literally carries the corporeal components of the Eucharist on her back, up the slippery rocks of a mountain. She presents the reader with nothing less than the weight of that ascent: a chance encounter with the face of God in the wild. She writes of the urgency of the sacrifice, no matter how humble:
How can I buy the communion wine? Who am I to buy the communion wine? Are there holy grapes, is there holy ground, is anything here holy? There are no holy grapes, there is no holy ground, nor is there anyone but us...Everything, everything, is whole, and a parcel of everything else.
Dillard presents the reader with a conundrum: We are not worthy of communion. She also leans heavily into the notion that the corporeal components of the Eucharist are somehow important, tangible, and real, and not mere metaphor. Isn’t there some way to pre-ordain the raw materials for the sacrifice? Isn’t there somebody else who can source them? On Puget Sound in 1977, the answer is a resounding “no.” Christ is the only perfect mediator; no one and no thing is holy enough to be worthy of bearing God up a mountain of its own being. But the Church is a universal one, and everyone—indeed, everything—has been made whole and re-integrated through Christ’s sacrifice. By that sacrifice, we are made worthy of bearing Him into the present reality, and our ever-present need for Him is quenched.
Dillard awakens the reader with a sunrise, a mountain, and sublime prose. She calls us to marvel at God’s handiwork, how a mountain points to the Creator beyond our comprehension, how gazing at a mountain is like gazing at the Eucharist: We cannot grasp the fullness of what we are seeing because the magnitude of the thing is hiding in plain view. The mountain is a veil over our eyes; behind it exists the fullness of geologic time. Dillard is ecstatic: Her writing is poetic, abstract, romantic even. Far from sentimental, Dillard’s view of nature is deeply passionate, a vivid embodiment of God’s love for man. She is drawn to the beauty of God like a moth to a flame, and is utterly consumed by the fire of love.
The Terror of God
As Dillard writes in the second part of the book, this fiery passion is not merely beautiful: it is a demanding and utterly consuming love. Dillard recalls a vivid night out camping:
One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held...A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled, and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once the light contracted again and the moth’s wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke...When it was all over, her head was, so far as I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs…
Instead of fizzling out, the moth-shell begins to draw up molten wax. Where there was previously a head, a new flame emerges, and the body of the moth literally becomes a second wick to the candle. So, too, the love of God finds a new conduit, consuming us, and providing unfailing light to all else in the process. The transformation into a flame-faced wick of light is born of immense and indiscriminate suffering.
Within this novel, Dillard grapples with resentment, fear, and anger at a God who permits inhumane and degrading suffering, who permits the pain and destruction of immolating fire. She writes of a young girl whose face is burned off in a terrible plane crash. Dillard gives the girl the pseudonym of Julie Norwich, an unsubtle allusion to the holy mystic nun of 12th-century England. Norwich’s suffering is out of her own hands: She is helpless and does not have free will in choosing what external circumstances occur to her. God simply permits terrible things to happen. What Julie does have is the power to choose how to meet her suffering: Is she a modern consecrated virgin, a holy and living sacrifice? Dillard meditates on the existence of visceral horror in the world and how we may rise to meet it: She reflects on the Book of Job and on Norwich, she grapples with the natural reality of death and the ugliness that can occur in nature, and finally, the silence of God in permitting cruelty and violence.
Holy the Firm
Dillard brings the reader to consider an Aristotelian view of the created world: The substance of matter, in having substance at all, is touching God, touching the Absoluteness of being. The substance of matter is like a lower-class relic: It is transformed, having touched the sacred. All of nature is holy, because holy is the firmament that holds it, and holy is the mind of God that made it. Dillard goes on to say we are not merely dreams in the mind of God; we are real. We are not living in a pantheistic nature where all things are God and Christ is irrelevant, nor are we living in an unwound and unfurled vertical banner where Christ is our only connection to God and physical reality is irrelevant “chaff.”
Finally, she exalts the vocation of the artist as one who is consecrated to God and salted with His holy fire. She voluntarily takes Julie Norwich’s place, writing “Julie….I know. Surgeons will fix your face...So live. I’ll be the nun for you. I am now.” Dillard puts forth the duty of the artist as nothing less than living in the suffering and ecstasy of God’s love, of being a living candle for the world.
Are artists, as Dillard suggests, the modern contemplatives living in the world? I don’t know. I do know that Annie Dillard has contributed some important work in the boundary-land of environmental ethics, particularly where those ethics may have common foundation with Church doctrine. In the same breath, she has also contributed a beautiful meditation that reads like a poem. Her imagery is vivid, her sincerity laid bare. Notwithstanding its scholarly merit, Holy the Firm is a deeply romantic testament to God’s created world and why it matters. It was first published in 1977, but its relevance has only grown over the years. I highly recommend it.
