Nature, Wonder, and Religion Theme Analysis

In Desert Solitaire, a memoir of Edward Abbey’s summer spent in the Utah’s desert, Abbey shows a real contempt for human institutions—government, industry, technology, and so on. Yet, in describing nature, he frequently uses religious language, especially relating to Christianity. However, he doesn’t mean to suggest that he himself is traditionally religious—far from it, in fact. Instead, Abbey advocates for a kind of spirituality grounded in nature, arguing that God can be found simply in the natural order of things, that the wonder of nature can be a religious experience, and that to immerse oneself in the wilderness is more valid than any traditional religious rite.

The vastness and wonder of the desert gives Abbey a sense that it’s a divine place. Delicate Arch, a natural desert feature, is so majestic and incomprehensible that it reminds him “that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours.” Inklings such as this awaken in Abbey an “awareness of the wonderful—that which is full of wonder.” Experiences of natural beauty and mystery convince Abbey that the desert itself contains a godlike element. The massive Escalante River becomes the “locus Dei” (the location of God) and the sublime Rainbow Bridge is “God’s window.” The awe and wonder that Abbey constantly feels in the presence of nature gives him proof that the place is divine.

By using commonly understood religious terms, Abbey then suggests that nature can inspire a devotion just like that of organized religion. He compares specific geological features to holy sites. Glen Canyon and Havasu, for instance, are both “Eden,” the garden where Adam and Eve (the the original humans in the Christian worldview) communed with God. Just as Eden disappeared as a result of Adam and Eve’s corruption, Abbey laments that Glenn Canyon has been dammed and destroyed since his journey there, thanks to human intervention. With his comparisons to Eden and with his anger over humanity’s ability to destroy what he deems paradise, Abbey suggests that the desert—if untouched by humans—is the place where humans can be closest to God’s presence. Further, when Abbey mentions the sky, he often invokes the cosmic order of Christianity: snow and sunrise are “blessings from heaven and earth,” he notes “the blue dome of heaven,” and distant lightening joins “heaven and earth.” The smoke of a burning juniper, in addition, is more holy than “Dante’s paradise,” the famous Italian Renaissance depiction of heaven. By invoking the Bible and the Christian concept of Heaven, Abbey gives a recognizable legitimacy to his devotion to nature.

More than being a holy site, nature becomes a place of worship for Abbey. When Glen Canyon floods beyond recognition, Abbey imagines “the Taj Mahal or Chartres Cathedral buried in mud.” By using these famous religious monuments—in India and France, respectively—Abbey suggests that nature is also a house of worship, a place where humans can devote themselves to the divine. And by including non-Christian imagery like the Taj Mahal, Abbey argues that the divinity of untouched nature is accessible to people of any religion or creed. Abbey reinforces this with his many campfires, which he describes as “a ritual,” a “liturgical requirement,” an “offering” to “intangible beings.” Just as Glen Canyon is “an” Eden—not the only Eden—the Escalante River contains “enough cathedrals and temples and altars here for a Hindu pantheon of divinities.” This means that, for Abbey, any part of nature—not just its most striking monuments—can be a temple to itself. Christians don’t go to church to worship the church; they go there to worship God. But, for Abbey, both things exist in one: the object and the place of worship. In making this point, Abbey hints at his argument that the apparatus of organized religion is distracting and wasteful.

Finally, Abbey complains that organized religion has removed people from the basic divinity that he has found in the earth. Abbey ridicules the “whimsical” rituals of religion: baptism for Baptists, prohibition for Mormons, circumcision for the Jewish, communion for Catholics, and the practice of Pranayama breath for Hindus. By laughing at these particular differences, Abbey suggests that all organized religion misses the obvious lesson that nature has taught him. In one example of this frustration, in the parable of Billy-Joe Husk (a boy who died in the desert), Abbey implies that Moses’s burning bush in the Old Testament was just a common hallucination—a misguided attempt to find the Christian God in nature. In another example, as Abbey admires Cassiopeia, he ridicules 16th-century Christians (whom he calls “the swine”) for seeing this constellation as an omen. Abbey, conversely, stands beneath a night sky with his binoculars, marveling at the “splendid sight” rather than trying to decode it. The difference Abbey wishes to draw is stark: Moses and Reformation-era Catholics obsessed over hidden meanings, pillaging the natural world for evidence of a Christian God. By contrast, Abbey’s simple state of wonder is his own method of “pray[er]—in my fashion.” While organized religion perverts nature for hidden meanings, Abbey argues, people ought to simply devote themselves to nature’s obvious divinity.