A Wilderness Myth
Nick Ripatrazone’s book on wilderness faith makes a crucial connection between the human and the natural worlds, but sometimes hesitates to go far enough.
Review by Sally Hansen
In Wild Belief, Nick Ripatrazone advocates for a “wilderness” faith: an attunement to the sacred that emerges from inspiring, if uncomfortable, encounters with “the wild.” In its richest moments, the book illuminates the literary traces of profound human aliveness. Gathering prophets and artists in intergenerational strands, Ripatrazone documents their encounters with geographical and spiritual extremity. Each artist approaches an essential reality: a longing at the crux of mortality and transcendence, a self-estrangement that enables wonder, deep interconnectedness, or an alienation that seems built-in. Ripatrazone skillfully locates each in the relational ecosystems that fostered their work. He chronicles Gustav Flaubert swallowing St. Anthony’s desert asceticism, Wendell Berry’s fervent correspondence with Thomas Merton, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s linguistic “inscapes” flickering in generations of poets that follow. These, along with John the Baptist, Jesus, Terry Tempest Williams, Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane, William Everson, Mary Oliver, and W. S. Merwin feature in balanced biographical sketches. Ripatrazone’s extensive research foregrounds, for these artists, the contradictions of being alive. In his words, Wild Belief
looks at poets and prophets, saints and storytellers, who have shown that the natural wild of forests, wetlands, and the desert can bring spiritual transcendence—and that perhaps the tension between our understanding of the wilderness as both a fearful and sacred space makes it particularly apt for capturing the unknown and surprising elements of religious belief.
Ripatrazone aims to embrace the conflict and contradiction humans experience when encountering “wilderness.” In several important ways, though, the “wild belief” imagined here does not account for the depth of these conflicts. The book underestimates humanity’s destructive imposition on land, water, atmosphere, and the species they contain, and it occasionally romanticizes the lives of the artists, eliding their inspirations’ darker complications. While he commends an embodied faith embedded in the planet’s life, Ripatrazone sometimes reinstates damaging boundaries, gendering an idealized faith and using land as a metaphor for human spiritual drama. Despite Ripatrazone’s sensitivity to the complexity of his topic, the book sometimes recedes to the myth of an untouched, primal “wild,” instead of advancing climate reckoning and real, costly, revitalization. Though it doesn’t always realize its goals, Wild Belief foregrounds the sacredness of land and, most crucially, emphasizes the interdependence of imagination and humility. These are gifts I and any reader might take away from Ripatrazone’s work.
His project is an ambitious one—he sets out to redeem language of “wilderness” from its oversimplifying and exploitative history. As Ripatrazone describes in his preface, “our modern idea of wilderness rests on difference”: historically, an “other” constructed for an “us,” a land to be traversed, a body to subjugate, a commodity to consume. Interweaving insights from cultural theorists, historians, and theologians, Ripatrazone seeks to recuperate binary “wilderness” language by collaging diverse artistic testimonies. As a mythical concept, though, the “wilderness” intrinsically intoxicates, and the book sometimes slides into its eroticizing, gendered appeal. A “sentimental, trite, and domesticated” [read feminine] faith must recover its original tough, desert-proven vitality, according to the first chapter. In an implicitly sexual image: “[belief’s] roughness and even… strangeness risk becoming neutered in favor of a revised faith born not of desert gales but of gentle breezes that sneak into open windows.” While Ripatrazone foregrounds how land shapes story and belief, his appeal risks nostalgia for “authentic” origins, and slides into a gendered drama of recovery.
These chapters would benefit from closer attention to the artists’ less appealing contradictions, to more accurately inform our confrontations with the internal and external ecosystems we often blindly inhabit.
Meanwhile, when Ripatrazone discusses Jesus’s temptations in the desert, the actual desert serves as background: Jesus “rejects the temptations of power—with the mountainous and arid expanse of the wilderness as a dramatic backdrop, both exposing him to temptation and steeling him in faith.” I expected a different focus—what if the desert ecosystem actually constituted Jesus’s faith, that is, taught him the real dependency of being human? Suppose the desert exposed the devil’s tempting lies of autonomy? Bread has to come from somewhere, gravity governs us, political glory hollows, et cetera. Though the book seeks to disturb complacent, rote faith, the appealing metaphor of “the wild” periodically reinstates predictable, damaging binaries between domestic and wilderness, belief and context, human and land.
Ripatrazone intends for the artists’ conflicting and conflicted testimonies to unsettle a single definition of “the wild,” and in turn open space for a dynamic, imaginative faith. These portraits of disconcerting encounter, though, sometimes fail to disconcert. The chapter on Hopkins features a simplifying binary, a burnt-out academic who seeks “imaginative escape and renewal” in nature. Repressed desire for men, though, darkened Hopkins’s poetic ecstasies with self-punishment and prompted him to burn his manuscripts; erotic “temptation” (unmentioned in Ripatrazone’s account) plagued Hopkins’s relation to natural beauty. Meanwhile, his theories of “inscape” and “instress” not only capture a rapturous “spiritual communion of all beings,” but also channel the eroticized violence of Christ’s crucifixion. His masterpiece, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” effectively claims to transubstantiate Christ as the wounded “Word made flesh” in the “stressed” language of the poem, even as he spins into hyper-nationalism and triumphalist theodicy. Hopkins’s love of natural beauty constantly battled with and sometimes theologized violence.
A closer look at William Everson surfaces similar contradictions. Ripatrazone characterizes him as “a man driven and swayed by his passions… a religious seeker who never appeared satisfied unless he was stirred by uncomfortable faith.” The chapter foregrounds this “uncomfortable” faith without drawing out the troubling implications of Everson’s romantic life, which culminated in a third marriage at almost sixty to an undergraduate student. Dogmatic about little but Jungian psychology, Everson’s post-conversion poetry almost literally drips with gender essentialism. His erotic poems, while merging Christianity and sexuality, frequently align the feminine with passivity, original human shame, and quiescence. Meanwhile, Everson’s mid-career epic, River-Root: A Syzygy, allegorizes a river flowing to the sea as heterosexual human sex. But why should the nonhuman world signify the human? Even in the moments of deepest intimacy with a sexual partner or beloved land, even in lucid, lush poetry, Everson mingles eros and erasure. These chapters would benefit from closer attention to the artists’ less appealing contradictions, to more accurately inform our confrontations with the internal and external ecosystems we often blindly inhabit.
Ripatrazone builds from a crucial insight, that the sacredness of land must ground human self-understanding.
Ripatrazone brings a different, if abbreviated, flavor with Terry Tempest Williams. A writer influenced by Mormonism, Williams foregrounds the indifference of “nature” to human aspiration, maintaining, “Wilderness is a place of humility. Humility is a place of wilderness.” While her extended family made its wealth through resource extraction, Williams has spent a lifetime extricating herself from and challenging environmental exploitation. Her anti-corporate activism and work to protect Utah’s sensitive habitats ground her writing and yield a broad-sighted observation: “You could say this is a real paradox… to destroy the land, yet love it at the same time.” Her chapter of Wild Faith, however, characterizes her activism as “environmental realism” that makes peace with this paradox. As Ripatrazone interprets it, “if we are to unite the wild and the domestic, the wilderness with the human, then we must accept their inherent conflicts…” This risks suggesting that we “accept” a conflict in which our planet always loses. Williams, on the other hand, challenges readers to divest from institutions that exploit land and to discard mindsets of entitled consumption.
Language of “the wild” contains this book in the binaries it seeks to loosen. Still, Ripatrazone builds from a crucial insight, that the sacredness of land must ground human self-understanding. Faith in anything real, as he insists, must dance within contradictions. But many of us (myself included) all too comfortably inhabit Terry Tempest Williams’s paradox, cultivating a “wild” faith that might once in a while go to a neighborhood clean-up. Ripatrazone directs his readers toward “conservation” and “stewardship,” but often his appealing myth of the “wild” serves human spiritual needs at the planet’s expense. Climate crisis ultimately debunks divisions between human and ecosystem, domestic and “wild,” living rooms and deserts. It demands the difficult work of coalition. Ripatrazone emphasizes the necessary interdependence of imagination and humility—this vital insight must indeed propel the work that awaits us all.
Sally Hansen is pursuing a PhD in English literature at the University of Notre Dame. Her work investigates desire and erasure in the intersections of poetry, theology, and gender.
Wild Belief: Poets and Prophets in the Wilderness was published by Broadleaf Books on May 18, 2021. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy on their website here.
