March 11, 2006
-
Holy the Firm
by Annie DillardEsoteric Christianity, I read, posits a
substance. It is a created substance, lower than metals and
minerals on a “spiritual scale” and lower than salts and earths,
occurring beneath salts and earths in the waxy deepness of planets, but
never on the surface of planets where men could discern it; and it is
in touch with the Absolute, at base. In touch with the
Absolute! At base. The name of this substance is Holy the
Firm.
Holy the Firm: and is Holy the Firm in touch with
metals and minerals? With salts and earths? Of course, and
straight on up, till “up” ends by curving back. Does something
that touched something that touched Holy the Firm in touch with the
Absolute at base seep into ground water, into grain; are islands rooted
in it, and trees? Of course.
Scholarship has long distinguished between two
strains of thought which proceed in the West from human knowledge of
God. In one, the ascetic’s metaphysic, the world is far from
God. Emanating from God, and linked to him by Christ, the world
is yet infinitely other than God, furled away from him like the end of
a long banner falling. This notion makes, to my mind, a vertical
line of the world, a great chain of burning. The more accessible
and universal view, held by Eckhart and by many peoples in various
forms, is scarcely different from pantheism: that the world is
immanation, that God is in the thing, and eternally present here, if
nowhere else. By these lights the world is flattened on a
horizontal plane, singular, all here, crammed with heaven, and
alone. But I know that it is not alone, nor singular, nor
all. The notion of immanence needs a handle, and the two ideas
themselves need a link, so that life can mean aught to the one, and
Christ to the other.
For to immanence, to the heart, Christ is redundant
and all things are one. To emanance, to the mind, Christ touches
only the top, skims off only the top, as it were, the souls of men, the
wheat grains whole, and lets the chaff fall where? To the world
flat and patently unredeemed; to the entire rest of the universe, which
is irrelevant and nonparticipant; to time and matter unreal, and so
unknowable, an illusory, absurd, accidental, and overelaborate stage.
But if Holy the Firm is “underneath salts,” if Holy the Firm is matter at its dullest, Aristotle’s materia prima,
absolute zero, and since Holy the Firm is in touch with the Absolute at
base, then the circle is unbroken. And it is. Thought
advances, and the world creates itself, by the gradual positing of, and
belief in, a series of bright ideas. Time and space are in touch
with the Absolute at base. Eternity sockets twice into time and
space curves, bound and bound by idea. Matter and spirit are of a
piece but distinguishable; God has a stake guaranteed in all the
world. And the universe is real and not a dream, not a
manufacture of the senses; subject may know object, knowedge may
proceed, and Holy the Firm is in short the philosopher’s stone.These are only ideas, by the single handful.
Lines, lines, and their infinite points! Hold hands and crack the
whip, and yank the Absolute out of there and into the light, God pale
and astounded, spraying a spiral of salts and earths, God footloose and
flung. And cry down the line to his passing white ear, “Old
Sir! Do you hold space from buckling by a finger in its
hole? O Old! Where is your other hand?” His right
hand is clenching, calm, round the exploding left hand of Holy the Firm.– Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm, Harper & Row 1977, reissued by Harper Perennial Library in 1988 as a paperback, pp. 68-71.
