43 pages • 1 hour read
Annie DillardHoly the Firm
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1977A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Omnipresence of both God and Suffering
Dillard is hesitant to make any concrete claims about the nature of physical reality and at times goes so far as to dismiss the notion that the material world is real or even worth caring about (23). Despite these hesitations, Dillard continually depicts the physical world as infused with gods. From the idea that “Every day is a god, each day is a god” (11) to the idea that the world is only God’s “flimsiest dreams” (44), Dillard’s world is permeated by a god who seems at once to create and organize the world. Dillard’s world is so alive, in fact, that her depiction of it can slip into animism, or the belief that all objects and creatures possess a spiritual essence.
It is unclear whether Dillard consciously attempts to merge animism with Christian practice or whether the two are joined, as if by accident, by Dillard’s conclusion that “the world is immanation” of God’s mind (69). The world as a product of an active divine imagination is both completely illusory and completely suffused with God; as Dillard postulates earlier in the narrative, “God is spirit and worlds his flimsiest dreams: but the illusions are almost perfect” (44). The illusion’s imperfections are likely the various suggestions in the world that makes Dillard interpret things as “created” or “staged” rather than the moral imperfections that Dillard explores (25, 49). This is an especially important distinction considering that Dillard sees the suffering in the world as “undeniably, real” (44), suggesting that it is one of the few experiences in an otherwise illusory existence that transcends the illusion. It is through suffering’s ability to reach beyond the illusion that Dillard makes her connections between suffering, divine worship, and art—all of which rely on the theory that the world is God’s immanation.
God’s omnipresence also causes problems for Dillard, however. Before she reaches many of the more positive conclusions above, she wrestles with the idea of pain in a world that otherwise stands as proof of God’s power. “Bound by the mineral-made ropes of our scenes” (48), Dillard sees humans as unable to comprehend anything beyond the illusory, material realm that they exist in. The presence of pain, unless it provides the path to the real, could be understood as evidence of a cruel universe where “we are only its victims” (48). These ideas feed Dillard’s discussion of the problem of evil.
The Problem of Evil
Evil’s existence is the central problem that motivates Dillard in Holy the Firm. The problem of evil has a long tradition in Western thought and theology, where it refers to the question of reconciling the existence of evil with an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God. A basic formulation of the problem would state that if God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, he would not allow evil to exist, and since evil exists, God must not have both of those qualities.
Dillard explores this problem mostly through an investigation of human and nonhuman suffering, struggling to find a satisfactory solution to the problem that does not compromise God’s omnibenevolence, for she “know[s] it as given that God is all good” (47). “Had God a hand in this?” she wonders, “Then it is a good hand. But has he a hand at all? Or is he a holy fire burning self-contained for power’s sake alone […] and the rest of us can go hang” (48). Dillard conceives of God as omnibenevolent but is unsure whether he is capable of influencing human experience. While the world may be an illusion, the pain that humans experience is “undeniably, real” and often experienced over time (44), leading to the sense that God himself is “abandoned on the doorstep of time” (47). Her eventual solution to the problem of evil involves positing time as an element out of God’s control, thereby limiting his involvement with things that exist in time. God, as Dillard puts it, cannot “catch time in its free fall” or make sense of human days (61). This presumably does not conflict with God’s omnipotence because, as Dillard puts it, the limitation is a result of his own “creation”—perhaps, that God has made the experience of time inseparable from humanity itself.
Dillard, however, at first sees time as a “hurdy-gurdy, a lampoon” (50), and a “circus” that risks undoing all human meaning (46). In her frustration with the unsavory conclusions that her solution to the problem of evil leads to, she calls God “a brute and a traitor, abandoning us to time, to necessity and the engines of matter unhinged (46). Yet as Dillard considers the matter more, she comes to see time in a different light. The experience of time, Dillard argues, reminds people that “we are created, created, sojourners in a land we did not make, a land with no meaning of itself and no meaning we can make for it alone” (61-62). Dillard does not make the claim outright, but this revaluation of time as a positive element of human life—though still not without serious caveats—suggests a solution to the problem of evil that allows for God to be omnipotent and omnibenevolent: If time and suffering are net positives, the problem dissolves itself. Time—that is, the random succession of events–is also what cuts through the linear experience of time and orients humanity to the infinite and eternal.
Burning Energy and Passion’s Fire
One of the ways that Dillard frames pain and suffering as positive qualities of human existence is through their connection to the real (44). Though Dillard leaves many of the connections that underlie this argument implicit, her consistent use of certain symbols and motifs—particularly the image of fire—to represent both pain and religious devotion suggests that pain is a necessary part of the religious experience. Perhaps the most direct articulation of this idea comes when Dillard states that the artist’s face “is flame like a seraph’s, lighting the kingdom of God for the people to see: his life goes up in the works” (72).
This quote sits at the center of a web that Dillard threads across Julie’s burnt face, the burning face of the seraph, the moth’s self-immolation, and the burning flame of the aesthetic life. Dillard briefly summarizes the connection between these images on the last page of the book, where she states that Julie is “held fast by love in the world like the moth in wax, [her] life a wick, [her] head on fire with prayer” (76). The reference to a “wick” draws on Dillard’s earlier description of the moth’s head as one of “two wicks” of the candle she flew into (17), while the reference to a “head on fire with prayer” draws on Dillard’s description of seraphs as “aflame with love for God” (45). The symbol of a flaming head also resonates with Dillard’s depiction of “Rimbaud in Paris” who “burnt out his brains in a thousand poems” (17). This line establishes an early connection between divine devotion and creativity, and the fact that Dillard reads about Rimbaud in light created by the moth-wick works to solidify the connection. Light helps Dillard make sense of the world, because “the world without light is wasteland and chaos” (72). Dillard sees the moth’s self-immolation, like all acts of creation, as a sacrifice that reveals a greater truth. This is also true of Dillard’s own artistic practice; her room—“a skull, a fire tower, wooden, and empty” (22)—directly mirrors the wick-moth’s husk of a head.
Art serves to illuminate the world, but the fire through which it provides this light destroys, just as the seraph’s love results in its constant cycle of dissolution and rebirth (45). “[A]rtists [are] pyrotechnic fools” (50), and though not all of them are “salted with fire” like Julie (73), they nevertheless set their own life alight in order to illuminate something about the world. This is why Dillard describes the artist as having to “go at […] life with a broadax” in order to succeed (18). Their lives—even, as the recurring image of a burning face suggests, their identities and selves—are metaphorically turned to lumber for the flame they will create. The tragic truth of the artist is that they have nothing to “set on fire but [their] world” (72). The last move Dillard makes in the book is to tie the notion of artist and religious devotee together in a Christ-like sacrifice that reorients the world towards spiritual reality. She realizes that she, in doing the artist’s work, has already taken the role that she prescribes for Julie. “I’ll be the nun for you,” she states, “I am now” (76).
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